An Anthropologist on Mars (1995) (45 page)

Temple’s own formulations and explanations generally correspond with the range of existing scientific ones, except that her emphasis on the necessity of early hugging and deep pressure is very much her own—and, of course, has been a mainspring in directing her thoughts and actions from the age of five. But she thinks that there has been too much emphasis on the negative aspects of autism and insufficient attention, or respect, paid to the positive ones. She believes that, if some parts of the brain are faulty or defective, others are very highly developed—spectacularly so in those who have savant syndromes, but to some degree, in different ways, in all individuals with autism. She thinks that she and other autistic people, though they unquestionably have great problems in some areas, may have extraordinary, and socially valuable, powers in others—provided that they are allowed to be themselves, autistic.

Moved by her own perception of what she possesses so abundantly and lacks so conspicuously, Temple inclines to a modular view of the brain, the sense that it has a multiplicity of separate, autonomous computational powers or “intelligences”—much as the psychologist Howard Gardner proposes in his book Frames of Mind. He feels that while the visual and musical and logical intelligences, for instance, may be highly developed in autism, the “personal intelligences”, as he calls them—the ability to perceive one’s own and others’ states of mind—lag grossly behind.

Temple is impelled by two drives: a theorizing part of herself, which makes her want to find some general explanation of autism, some key that will be applicable to all of its phenomena and to every case,—and a practical, empirical part of herself, which constantly faces the range and irreducible complexity and unpredictability of her own disorder, and the great range of phenomena in other autistic people, too. She is fascinated by the cognitive and existential aspects of autism and their possible biological basis, even though she is intensely aware that they are only part of the syndrome. She herself faces, almost every day, extreme variations, from overresponse to nonresponse, in her own sensory system, which cannot be explained, she feels, in terms of “theory of mind.” She herself was already asocial at the age of six months and stiffened in her mother’s arms at this time, and such reactions, common in autism, she also finds inexplicable in terms of theory of mind. (No one supposes that even normal children develop a theory of mind much before the age of three or four.) And yet, given these reservations, she is strongly attracted by Frith and other cognitive theorists; by Hobson and others who see autism as foremost a disorder of affect, of empathy; and by Gardner and his theory of multiple intelligences. Perhaps, indeed, all these theories, despite their different emphases, hover about the same point.

Temple has dipped into the chemical and physiological and brain-imaging researches on autism and emerged with the sense that they are still, at this point, fragmentary and inconclusive. But she holds to her notion of impaired “emotion circuits” in the brain, and she imagines these serve to link the phylogenetically ancient, emotional parts of the brain—the amygdala and the limbic system—with the most recently evolved, specifically human parts of the prefrontal cortex. Such circuits, she accepts, may be necessary to allow a new, “higher” form of consciousness, an explicit concept of one’s self, one’s own mind, and of other people’s—precisely what is deficient in autism.

At a recent lecture, Temple ended by saying, “If I could snap my fingers and be non-autistic, I would not—because then I wouldn’t be me. Autism is part of who I am.” And because she believes that autism may also be associated with something of value, she is alarmed at thoughts of “eradicating” it. In a 1990 article she wrote:

Aware adults with autism and their parents are often angry about autism. They may ask why nature or God created such horrible conditions as autism, manic depression, and schizophrenia. However, if the genes that caused these conditions were eliminated there might be a terrible price to pay. It is possible that persons with bits of these traits are more creative, or possibly even geniuses—If science eliminated these genes, maybe the whole world would be taken over by accountants.

Temple arrived to pick me up at the hotel at exactly eight o’clock on Sunday morning, bringing along some additional articles of hers. I had the feeling that she was incessantly at work, that she used every available moment, “wasted” very little time, that virtually her entire waking life consisted of work. She seemed to have no recreations, no leisure. Even the weekend she had “scheduled” for me was by no means regarded as a social one but as forty-eight hours allocated for a special purpose, forty-eight hours set aside to allow a brief, intensive investigation of an autistic life, her own. If she sometimes saw herself as an anthropologist on Mars, she could see me as a sort of anthropologist, too, an anthropologist of autism, of her. She saw that I needed to observe her in all possible contexts and situations, amass a sufficient database to make correlations, to arrive at some general conclusions. That I might see with a sympathetic or friendly eye as well as an anthropological one did not at first occur to her. So our visit was seen as work, and work to be carried through with the same conscientiousness and scrupulousness as all her work. Though in the normal course of events she invites people to her house, she would ordinarily never have shown her bedroom to a visitor; much less displayed, and illustrated the use of, the squeeze machine by her bedside—but this, she realized, was part of the work.

And though normally in the course of her own life she never went to the beautiful mountains of Rocky Mountain National Park, a two-hour drive southwest of Fort Collins, having no time or impulse for leisure or recreation, she thought that I might like to go, and that this would also allow me to observe her in a quite different context—one in which we could perhaps feel unprogrammed, free.

We piled our stuff into Temple’s car—with its four-wheel drive, it was the thing for mountain terrain, especially if we wandered off-road—and took off around nine for the national park. It was a spectacular route: we climbed to higher and higher altitudes on a hairpin road, with terrifying bends, and saw towering cliffs with banded rock strata, foaming gorges far below, and a marvelous range of evergreens, mosses, and ferns. I had the binoculars out constantly and exclaimed at the wonders at every turn.

As we drove on into the park, the landscape opened out into an immense mountain plateau, with limitless views in every direction. We pulled off the road and gazed toward the Rockies—snowcapped, outlined against the horizon, luminously clear even though they were nearly a hundred miles away. I asked Temple if she did not feel a sense of their sublimity. “They’re pretty, yes. Sublime, I don’t know.” When I pressed her, she said that she was puzzled by such words and had spent much time with a dictionary, trying to understand them. She had looked up “sublime”, “mysterious”, “numinous”, and “awe”, but they all seemed to be defined in terms of one another.

“The mountains are pretty”, she repeated, “but they don’t give me a special feeling, the feeling you seem to enjoy.” After living for three and a half years in Fort Collins, she said, this was only the second time she had been to them.

What Temple said here seemed to me to have an element of sadness or wistfulness, even of poignancy. She had said similar things on the way up to the park (“You look at the brook, at the flowers, I see what great pleasure you get out of it. I’m denied that”), and, indeed, throughout the weekend. There had been a spectacular sunset the evening before (the sunsets have been particularly fine since Mount Pinatubo erupted), and this, too, she found “pretty” but nothing more. “You get such joy out of the sunset”, she said. “I wish I did, too. I know it’s beautiful, but I don’t ‘get’ it.” Her father, she added, often expressed similar sentiments.

I thought about what Temple had said on Friday night as we walked under the stars. “When I look up at the stars at night, I know I should get a ‘numinous’ feeling, but I don’t. I would like to get it. I can understand it intellectually. I think about the Big Bang, and the origin of the universe, and why we are here: Is it finite, or does it go on forever?”

“But do you get a feeling of its grandeur?” I asked. “I intellectually understand its grandeur”, she replied, and continued, “Who are we? Is death the end? There must be reordering forces in the universe. Is it just a Black Hole?”

These were grand words, grand thoughts, and I found myself looking at Temple with a heightened sense of her mental spaciousness, her courage. Or were they, for her, just words, just concepts? Were they purely mental, purely cognitive or intellectual, or did they correspond to any real experience, any passion or feeling?

Now we drove on, higher and higher, the air becoming thinner, the trees smaller, as we moved toward the summit. There was a lake near the park, Grand Lake, which I especially wanted to swim in (I am always excited by the prospect of swimming in exotic, remote lakes: I dream of Lake Baikal and Lake Titicaca), but, sadly, since I had a plane to catch, we did not have time.

On the way back down the mountain, we stopped the car for a brief plant—and bird-spotting geological walk—Temple knew all the plants, all the birds, the geological formations, even though, she said, she had “no special feeling” for them—and then we started the long descent. At one point, just outside the park, seeing a huge, inviting flat sheet of water, I asked Temple to pull over, and impetuously scrambled down toward it: I would have my swim, even though we had not made it to the lake.

It was only when Temple yelled “Stop!” and pointed that I paused in my headlong descent and looked up, and saw that my flat sheet of water, my “lake”, so still just in front of me, was accelerating at a terrifying rate a few yards to the left, prior to rushing over a hydroelectric dam a quarter of a mile away. There would have been a fair chance of my being swept along, out of control, right over the dam. There was a look of relief on Temple’s face when I stopped and climbed back. Later, she phoned a friend, Rosalie, and said she had saved my life.

We talked of many things on the way back to Fort Collins. Temple mentioned an autistic composer she knew (“He would take bits and pieces of music he had heard, and rearrange them”), and I spoke of Stephen Wiltshire, the autistic artist. We wondered about autistic novelists, poets, scientists, philosophers. Hermelin, who has studied (low-functioning) autistic savants for many years, feels that though they may have enormous talents, they are so lacking in subjectivity and inwardness that major artistic creativity is beyond them. Christopher Gillberg, one of the finest clinical observers of autism, feels that autistic people of the Asperger type, in contrast, may be capable of major creativity and wonders whether indeed Bartok and Wittgenstein may have been autistic. (Many autistic people now like to think of Einstein as one of themselves.)

Temple had spoken earlier of being mischievous, or naughty, saying she enjoyed this at times, and she had been pleased at having smuggled me successfully into the slaughterhouse. She likes to commit small infractions on occasion—“I sometimes walk two feet outside the line at the airport, a little act of defiance”—but all this is in a totally different category from “real badness.” That could have terrifying, instantly lethal consequences. “I have a feeling that if I do anything really bad, God will punish me, the steering linkage will go out on the way to the airport”, she said as we were driving back. I was startled by the association of divine retribution with a broken steering linkage; I had never thought about how an autistic person, with a wholly causal or scientific view of the universe and a deficient sense of agency or intention, might formulate such matters as divine judgment or will.

Temple is an intensely moral creature. She has a passionate sense of right and wrong, for example, in regard to the treatment of animals; and law, for her, is clearly not just the law of the land but, in some far deeper sense, a divine or cosmic law, whose violation can have disastrous effects—seeming breakdowns in the course of nature itself. “You’ve read about action at a distance, or quantum theory”, she said. “I’ve always had the feeling that when I go to a meat plant I must be very careful, because God’s watching. Quantum theory will get me.”

Temple started to become excited. “I want to get this out before you get to the airport”, she said, with a sort of urgency.

She had been brought up an Episcopalian, she told me, but had rather early “given up orthodox belief”—belief in any personal deity or intention—in favor of a more “scientific” notion of God. “I believe there is some ultimate ordering force for good in the universe—not a personal thing, not Buddha or Jesus, maybe something like order out of disorder. I like to hope that even if there’s no personal afterlife, some energy impression is left in the universe—Most people can pass on genes—I can pass on thoughts or what I write.”

“This is what I get very upset at—” Temple, who was driving, suddenly faltered and wept. “I’ve read that libraries are where immortality lies—I don’t want my thoughts to die with me—I want to have done something—I’m not interested in power, or piles of money. I want to leave something behind. I want to make a positive contribution—know that my life has meaning. Right now, I’m talking about things at the very core of my existence.”

I was stunned. As I stepped out of the car to say goodbye, I said, “I’m going to hug you. I hope you don’t mind.” I hugged her—and (I think) she hugged me back.

C
hoice is always personal and idiosyncratic, and what follows is a selection of sources which I have found enjoyable and intriguing, as well as informative, and which I would encourage the reader to sample. A full reference list follows this section. I have, in addition, listed some favorite or important books to the general reference list, even when no reference has been made to them in the text.

L.S. Vygotsky’s early papers, lost for many years, have been recovered and translated into English recently as The Fundamentals of Defectology.