beginning to read and write. And what more significant to write than her own name? JESSIE, JESSY, JESS, JES, JESSE, JESSICA.
Here is what Jessy told me on October 21, 1973. It is no coincidence, I think, that it’s from the same year, even the same month, as the bacon dialogue; that was the year she began to respond to questions with more than yes and no. (It would be many years more before she could offer an explanation on her own.) Since the questions are obvious, I record only her answers:
JESSIE. Because of sunny. And sometimes I say — ICA with a sunny.
And cloudy is JESSY.
And JESS is bad.
And very bad with only one S — JES.
And — E is between good and bad — JESSE.
And with — ICA is a good day. If I in special day sposed to write this one — JESSICA.
What makes a day bad? I asked. «All because of cry and mumble and bump is a very bad».
Yes, it figures. It figures even better than I realized. Only now, as I write, do I discover the system within the system, how the number of letters decreases, a letter at a time, from six to three, from sunny goodness to very bad, then increases to the full affirmation of the seven-letter special day.
It all connects. It does more than connect, it correlates. (Jessy learned that difficult word instantly; as with «heptagon», she already had the concept.) Bacon, egg, toast, badness, goodness, sound, silence. The brilliance of the sun. More precisely, the number of its rays, twenty-four for a really good day, sixteen for good, twelve for average, grading down to one, even, alas, to zero. Jessy generated systems as naturally as she breathed. They proliferated spontaneously, without outside reinforcement; the bacon system had been going on for months before we noticed it. More than anything that happened at school, systems were what exercised her intellectual and emotional energy. Although her engagements with the world were so limited — because they were so limited — she could bestow on her systems a single mindedness unavailable to a normally diversified experience.
A mother is not the most graceful witness to her child’s intelligence. Fortunately there are others. Jessy was twenty-three, the bacon system long past, when two psychologists, Lola Bogyo and Ronald Ellis, became fascinated by the range of what Jessy could (and could not) do. They studied her for months. They gave her every kind of test. It isn’t easy to test an autistic person with limited speech and comprehension, particularly when she is intolerant of errors. With extraordinary sensitivity and imagination, Lola and Ron found ways to make the testing process fun, so that Jessy loved her weekly sessions. Here is how they describe her «fascination for the creation and elaboration of systems».
It became clear that at the root of these systems lay a remarkable ability to induce the rules and regularities that characterized any set of items — numbers, words, objects, or events, [Jessy] not only induced these rules, she system-atically and obsessively explored all of their possible applications. From numbers, colors, and common objects she created complex, intricately ordered systems, some of which she used, it seemed, to structure her world, and some of which she merely played with, endlessly delighted by their order.[18]
To explore the limits of Jessy’s «inferential skills», the investigators tried a test expressly designed «to measure an individual’s aptitude for abstraction and rule induction». They chose the Raven’s Progressive Matrices, a nonverbal test suited to her «agrammatical» speech and a comprehension «impaired for complex messages». I cannot better their description:
This test. contains a series of problems graded in difficulty. Each problem consists of a pattern or matrix from which a piece is missing; the subject is given a set of alternatives and must choose the piece that completes the whole. Simple problems consist of a homogeneous pattern (e.g., a grid of dots) from which a piece has been «cut out». More difficult problems present patterns consisting of disparate elements related by subtle and complex rules; simultaneous variations on several different dimensions (e.g., shape, size, orientation) must be attended to in order to induce the underlying regularities.[19]
Normal subjects start fast and slow way down; Jessy «quickly began to turn the pages, pausing only to glance briefly at the patterns and point immediately at the missing piece. We waited for her to slow down and falter. We waited in vain». She scored «well above the 95th percentile for ‘normal’ adult subjects». Her friends shifted to the Advanced Progressive Matrices. «Again we watched with amazement as [Jessy] turned the pages more quickly than we could consider the choices. Once again she scored above the 95th percentile, this time being compared to graduate technical and medical students».
Given [Jessy’s] limited language skills, we wondered whether she actually knew and could articulate governing patterns or whether she had somehow been able to guess which pieces would make the wholes «look right».. Despite her stilted broken sentences, she was unfailingly able to name the relevant dimensions and features, to articulate the rules governing their progressive alterations, and to describe how an extrapolation of those rules generated the correct pattern. It was clear that to [Jessy] these rules and regularities were obvious, self-evident in the designs themselves. She seemed puzzled that the solutions needed any explanations at all — as if we had asked her what shaped peg would fit best in a round hole.[20]
It was there. The vigorous intelligence her siblings were putting into exploring history, learning Tibetan, writing novels, and negotiating their lives, in Jessy was streaming into this one channel.
Jessy reached everywhere for systems in those days. Together we looked at a Tintin book; Tintin, lost in the desert, sends a message. But what she took from the story was not adventure but a system. Tintin sent us to the encyclopedia; days later I found a sheet on which she had, accurately and without book, written out the full Morse code. I started her on the piano; I was surprised, though I shouldn’t have been, at how fast she learned musical notation. But these experiences, meant to enrich, remained void of content. Jessy had no interest in tapping out a message, and though she had an excellent ear, she took no pleasure in making music. Systems were enjoyed for their formal qualities, not their use. Someone gave her a junior-high dictionary, each word briefly defined and illustrated by a simple sentence, perfect for a beginning reader. She spent hours poring over it, and we rejoiced. But what was she doing? Searching out regularities, discovering the few that English can offer. She thought about them, talked about them, wrote them down. Elf, elves; self, selves; shelf, shelves; half, halves; calf, calves; knife, knives; wife, wives; hoof, hooves; leaf, leaves; sheaf, sheaves… «How about ‘reef, reeves’?» she asked. «How about ‘roof, rooves’?» The dictionary was crammed with meanings, gateways to knowledge and communication. We watched as Jessy, surrounded by words, now at last hearing them, seeing them, even reading them, drained them of meaning, to be absorbed into her world of abstract formalisms.
Language, of course, resists abstraction; if it didn’t we’d all be speaking Esperanto. Jessy picked up a ski resort’s chart of weather conditions. Cold, Very Cold, Extreme Cold, Bitter Cold; a snowy universe reduced to four categories. Unfettered by meaning, Jessy could extrapolate, and did. Her chart read Good, Very Good, Extreme Good — and Bitter Good.
Maps, like charts, are formalisms. Jessy mapped her neighborhood, she mapped our journey route by route, all the way from western Massachusetts to Rhode Island. She diagrammed floor plans of familiar buildings. Systems ordered space; they ordered time as well. Jessy liked printed schedules, calendars, clocks. Telling time was so easy for her that we wondered the more at the effort it took to nudge her through familiar words about familiar subjects. Reading was hard; it demanded more than an ability — even a preternatural ability — to discriminate patterns of letters. It insisted on meaning, and meaning offered Jessy no rewards. But what joyous energy she poured into locating «sheaf» and «sheaves»!
Shortly after her fourteenth birthday, Jessy made a book. There was nothing remarkable about that;
