A World Without Editors, Filters, Brakes, and Boundaries
I’ve been reading a number of books on autism, researching what I already know, agreeing, disagreeing, taking notes, and structuring materials for future work of my own. One of the books is the remarkable The Reason I Jump: The Inner Voice of a Thirteen-Year-Old Boy with Autism by Naoki Higashida. I like this book on account of its economy of style, quick questions and answers which invite deeper thought on your part.
The book opens with a little thought experiment by David Mitchell. Mitchell’s words here sum up autism more precisely and more concisely than any other description I have seen:
‘Imagine that after you lose your ability to communicate, the editor-in-residence who orders your thoughts walks out without notice. The chances are that you never knew this mind-editor existed but, now that he or she has gone, you realize too late how they allowed your mind to function for all those years. A dam-burst of ideas, memories, impulses and thoughts is cascading over you, unstoppably. Your editor controlled this flow, diverting the vast majority away, and recommending just a tiny number for your conscious consideration. But now you’re on your own.
Now your mind is a room where twenty radios, all tuned to different stations, are blaring out voices and music. The radios have no off-switches or volume controls, the room you’re in has no door or window, and relief will come only when you’re too exhausted to stay awake. To make matters worse, another hitherto unrecognized editor has just quit without notice – your editor of the senses. Suddenly sensory input from your environment is flooding in too, unfiltered in quality and overwhelming in quantity. Colours and patterns swim and clamour for your attention. The fabric conditioner in your sweater smells as strong as air-freshener fired up your nostrils. Your comfy jeans are now as scratchy as steel wool. Your vestibular and proprioceptive senses are also out of kilter, so the floor keeps tilting like a ferry in heavy seas, and you’re no longer sure where your hands and feet are in relation to the rest of you. You can feel the plates of your skull, plus your facial muscles and your jaw: your head feels trapped inside a motorbike helmet three sizes too small which may or may not explain why the air-conditioner is as deafening as an electric drill, but your father – who’s right here in front of you – sounds as if he’s speaking to you from a cell-phone, on a train going through lots of tunnels, in fluent Cantonese. You are no longer able to comprehend your mother-tongue, or any tongue: from now on all languages will be foreign languages. Even your sense of time has gone, rendering you unable to distinguish between a minute and an hour, as if you’re entombed in an Emily Dickinson poem about eternity, or locked into a time-bending SF film. Poems and films, however, come to an end, whereas this is your new ongoing reality.
Autism is a lifelong condition…
For those people born onto the autistic spectrum, this unedited, unfiltered and scary-as-all-hell reality is home. The functions which genetics bestow on the rest of us – the ‘editors’ – as a birth right, autistic people must spend their lives learning how to simulate. It is an intellectual and emotional task of Herculean, Sisyphean, and Titanic proportions, and if the people with autism who undertake it aren’t heroes, then I don’t know what heroism is, never mind that the heroes have no choice.
Sentience itself is not so much a fact to be taken for granted, but a brick-by-brick, self-built construct requiring constant maintenance. As if this wasn’t a tall enough order, autistic people must survive in an outside world where ‘special needs’ is playground slang for ‘retarded,’ where meltdowns and panic attacks are viewed as tantrums, where disability allowance claimants are assumed by many to be welfare scroungers, and where British foreign policy can be described as “autistic”…
Autism is no cakewalk for the child’s parentsor carers either, and raising an autistic son or daughter is no job for the fainthearted …’
This is as good a description of ASC as I have found. All there is for me to do is to qualify and clarify here and there and add further descriptions of the condition from my own experience. But the description certainly rings true of autism as I experience it. To the absence of editors and filters I would add the lack of brakes and boundaries. All information is present to me immediately, so much so that I have to rely on external constraints, keeping doors and windows closed to shut the world out, wearing headphones and earplugs to shut ‘noise’ out. If I transgress boundaries naturally, external forces transgress my limits too. The absence of brakes means that I have a tendency not merely to inflation but to infinity as an exponential growth. One piece of information presented to my senses very quickly multiplies and expands outwards, like a firework explosion.
My only limits here are exhaustion.
It’s no wonder that Ciaran Carson’s criticism of Barbara Reynolds’ excellent, but ‘just so,’ biography of Dante struck so deep a chord with me:
‘Rarely do we get a glimpse of the Dante envisioned by the great Russian poet Osip Mandelstam: "If the halls of the Hermitage were suddenly to go mad, if all the paintings of all the schools and the great masters were suddenly to break loose from their hooks, and merge with one another, intermingle and fill the rooms with a Futurist roar and an agitated frenzy of colour, we would then have something resembling Dante's Commedia."’
I am a lover of the work of both Dante and Mandelstam, and see this passage as true of neither poet, with their concern for order and symmetry but it is true of the chaos of their contents. My own work, as it is written, is a riot of sound and colour, and a search for order and symmetry via reconnection and restoration. I write in one continuous flow. I have learned to make myself comprehensible as I write. But it took a long time.
Ciaran Carson, The Man who goes to Hell
As for the book's title, The Reason I Jump:
Question 25:What's the reason you jump?
Naoki Higashida answers:
"When I'm jumping, it's as if my feelings are going upwards to the sky. Really, my urge to be swallowed up by the sky is enough to make my heart quiver. When I'm jumping I can feel my body parts really well, too - my bounding legs and my clapping hands - and that makes me feel so, so good...
So by jumping up and down, it's as if I'm shaking loose the ropes that are tying up my body. When I jump, I feel lighter, and I think the reason my body is drawn skywards is that the motion makes me want to change into a bird and fly off to some faraway place.
But constrained both by ourselves and by the people around us, all we can do is tweet-tweet, flap our wings, and hop around in a cage. Ah, if only I could just flap my wings and soar away, into the big blue yonder, over the hills and far away!'
- Naoki Higashida, The Reason I Jump
That strikes me as a sensuous transcendence. Rather than draw transcendent standards down to Earth, putting them in the hands of human beings, my philosophical work urges human beings to look up in contemplation of the divine transcendent.
Q45 Why doyou enjoy going out for walks so much?
'The reason is that when we look at nature, we receive a sort of permission to be alive in this world, and our entire bodies get recharged. However often we're ignored and pushed away by other people, nature will always give us a good big hug, here inside our hearts.'
The greenness of nature is the lives of plants and trees. Green is life. And that's the reason we love to go for walks.'
I’m a walker, too. I ramble, I hike. There is a rhythm to walking as there is to writing. Walking and writing set a natural pace for my thinking.
Q47 Would you give us an example of something autistic people really enjoy?
'Nature calms me down when I'm furious, and laughs with me when I'm happy. You might think that it's not possible that nature could be a friend ... But human beings are part of the animal kingdom, too, and perhaps us autistic people still have some left-over awareness of thus, buried somewhere deep down.'
We are ancients among the moderns, natives among the citizens, innocents amongst the fallen.
The conditionis a nightmare when it comes to social interaction. In a recent job, I was subject to all kinds of information coming at me from all directions at once. There was lots of rush, with no time to process and order information, with different problems being shouted at once by different people. It was impossible for me to screen out the irrelevant so as to be able to focus on the essential information. I would describe the condition as like having ears that are microphones that pick up all sounds and all voices with equal - and increasing - intensity. This sensory mixing happens in most social situations, with sound, vision, and other senses merging together to overwhelm you with ‘white noise.’ When this happens, you really can come to appear to others as the 'village idiot.' Dealing with this overload can make you seem slow, with people who are waiting for an
appropriate and immediate response looking at you as if you are stupid. It’s a huge frustration, not least when people who are not even close to you intellectually are treating you as if you are a borderline moron. The truth is that I'm processing a mass of information without the aid of editors and filters. I would compare it to switching a light on as you enter a building and finding every light in the building coming on immediately, leaving you having to choose the right room to enter. Of course, that puts you off the pace in a social situation, meaning that people will be inclined to think you a bit slow. The fact is that my brain is working at a fast pace in the attempt to process a mass of information without the helpful mediation of editors and filters.
The biggest qualification that I would make to Mitchell’s description is that, in order to make the incomprehensible comprehensible, it makes the autistic experience seem much more ordered than it is. Mitchell presents it all in stages so that people can begin to understand. The hardest part is the surge and the rush that comes at once. I would describe the condition in terms of an insurgency and inflation that runs beyond infinity. It's like having a heavy weight fall on you from above just as the ground beneath you is giving way as you start to slide in all directions. Social interaction and communication is difficult to say the least, the contexts of social intercourse are simply so overwhelming as to bring about complete sensory overload. This is why I amexhausted by most social situations, and take a long time out to recover. With two or three people engaged in just the one conversation going, I can just about hang on, but struggle to keep up with the way people know how to overlap one another as they speak. I can’t follow the rhythm and tend to wait for complete silence before speaking, a silence which never comes. I am out of the flow. I feel as though I am being bombarded with a noise so pointless and meaningless that it hurts to listen.
Lack of editors and filters leads to all manner of mixing and immediacy in everyday life which can be chaotic, exhausting, and, in social situations, particularly overwhelming. I put my own ‘Irreducibly Polynomial’ website in order to give people some indication of what a strange world autism can be, with all manner of anxiety, pain, and deficiency, but also the occasional, and no less profound, joy.
Temple Grandin’s Thinking in Pictures is an ‘interesting’ book. I wasn’t quite as knocked out by it as other people have been. The book is packed with all kinds of insights, some of them unwitting. She has long sections on cattle – her area of expertise – and speculations on science and religion which are more revealing of a particular autistic mind at work than they are in their actual contents. I found the former interminably boring and the latter incredibly naïve and simplistic. But I loved that she had such deep passions and interests and I loved that, although a scientist, she would search for God. It is fascinating to read the book and compare notes with her. I so understood her explanations as to why she wears the same clothes until they fall off her, that love of the familiarity of feel. I do it too. And I do more, as I suspect she does.
I've been reading my own notes from a couple of years ago, where I write of seeing words as pictures. I am very much a creative visualist in the way I see the world. Temple defines her way of thinking slightly differently, "I think in pictures,” she says. “Words are like a second language to me.” Words are like pictures to me. When I see words or write words, I see images. It’s possibly why, I find it difficult to stop whenever I start to write. I don’t deal with single discrete thoughts, with a precise beginning and ending, but with a whole image of reality.
I ponder what Grandin writes about the three basic categories of specialized brains. “Some individuals may be combinations of these categories,” she writes:
1.Visual thinkers, like me, think in photographically specific images. There are degrees of specificity of visual thinking. I can test run a machine in my head with full motion… Many children who are visual thinkers like maps, flags, and photographs.
2.Music and math thinkers think in patterns. These people often excel at math, chess, and computer programming. Some of these individuals have explained to me that they see patterns and relationships between patterns and numbers instead of photographic images. Computer programming, stats, engineering, music.
3.Verbal logic thinkers think in word details. They often love history, foreign
languages, weather statistics and stock market reports. They often have a vast knowledge of sports scores.
I seem to be a combination of 1 & 3, but also see patterns and make connections all over the place. I have a fascination for numbers but struggle to count.
It all makes for an "interesting" life.
Possibly the hardest part of all is not understanding why things are out of kilter with “society” and spending a lifetime trying to be something and someone you are not. I finally got discovered by discussing a lifetime of "psycho-social anxiety" with my doctor. These issues really need to be picked up early, because they can be lethal, as well as subjecting people to a lifetime of frustration
