and their transformations, with the indefinite and definite article, with pronouns of all sorts, with prepositions, with indirect discourse.
And simple, familiar words may come out even more oddly than ex post fracto. Jessy was in her thirties when, in a thank- you letter for a birthday gift of sheets, she wrote, «I will wear them on my bed next week». Preoccupied with questions like «What’s next?» and «Who’s next?» (she doesn’t like them), one day she asked, «Is there such a thing as ‘How’s next’?» Another day: «You can say ‘What are you looking for’ and ‘Who are you looking for.’ Can you say ‘Where are you looking for’?» When Hans Asperger spoke of the «original and delightful» language of his child patients, he was thinking of locutions like these. Jessy’s speech difficulties may be intensified by aphasia. But I doubt that a person struggling with aphasia would ask such questions.
It is not only in such bizarre «originality» that autism and aphasia differ. The communication handicap in autism goes far beyond the production and interpretation of actual speech. Communication is a richly interactive process. Human beings communicate not only by words but by gesture, by posture, by facial expression, by «speaking looks» — by what we rightly call body language. Aphasia does not affect this kind of understanding; if an aphasic child is thirsty it will use hand and mouth to mime drinking from a cup. The autistic child will not do this. Nor will she look at you or make an interrogative sound. Rather, she will take your wrist and lead you to the refrigerator. Unable to read the silent indicators with which human beings communicate as surely and significantly as they do in words, Jessy was adrift in a far deeper sea. The following chapter will tell some of the linguistic instruments that have helped her navigate.
Chapter 3
«When the time comes»
January 1989. More than a decade ago. We’re going away for a few days; a friend will be looking in on the cat. Jessy tells him, «I will teach you to feed Daisy when the time comes». I compliment her; I have long ago internalized the principles of reinforcement. «How nicely you said that».
«I learned that from you», she says. Then, «What does that mean, ‘when the time comes’?»
I try explaining, give up, tell her she really knows because she said it right. And she does know, because right away she supplies her own paraphrase. «In the future», she says. With that to go on, I can elaborate: the time is indefinite, yet it will come. Five minutes later (she’s been worrying that we’ll run out of garlic, though we have several cloves) she remarks, «I will buy garlic when the time comes». Of such small triumphs is progress made. And seeing me writing down our exchange she notes: «You will file that under Verbal» — as of course I will.
What would we do without these conventional phrases? We’d do fine, we’re told; the studied avoidance of such convenient formulas cliches — has become a hallmark of good writing, speaking, thinking. But for her they are not merely what they are for us, easy shortcuts to familiar meanings. Spend time with Jessy — years and years, say — and you can see how they serve not only to ease speech but to organize experience, to identify it, to articulate its recurrent patterns; how they enable her to cope with it, even, to some degree, to understand it. I learned that from you.
Jessy returns to these cliches again and again. She likes them, she uses them. So anxious over uncertainty, indefiniteness, anything that escapes strict predictability, she welcomes, needs, this prefabricated language. It helps her pattern the inevitable fluidity of being in the world. Once it was patterns of action that steadied her, routines that she tried to keep as invariant as possible. She still has these, but now there are also patterns of words. We can’t be sure when we will go shopping, when we will leave for the summer, when a friend will arrive. I will hang loose. A kitchen knife is missing. „Things come and go“. It doesn’t erase the anxiety, but it can assuage it. And to someone obsessively concerned about small mistakes, it’s comforting to hear that there’s such a thing as a „margin of error“. If naming perfectionism can’t control it, it can at least bring it to consciousness, where it can be worked on. „No big deal“. „Nobody’s perfect“. She can repeat the words, though she’s still far from accepting the fact.
Perfectionists do not make mistakes. They do not forget things. Jessy will wail, „Oh, I forgot to — add the salt, empty the trash — though her „forgetting“ has lasted less than a minute. Eventually I thought of a mollifying trick of language. „Don’t say you forgot, say you almost forgot“. And today, after the usual I forgot, she herself, her voice now audibly relaxed, supplies the paraphrase that is the guarantee of understanding. She even puts a positive spin on it: „I just remembered“.
Phrases can express her relief: something happened „in the nick of time“. They can modify her impatience: „one step at a time“. They can structure the weather, though like so much else, the weather may resist; Jessy complained that the „January thaw“ was late this year. Language has power, not only to grasp but to order. This year Jessy picked up „downside“, applying it to overtime at work, distressing because it tends to be unexpected. It’s become second nature to reinforce a new idea. „Yes“, I say without thinking, „everything has a downside“. But Jessy is thinking. „And a compensation?“ I know how she got there; she’s generalized from our previous discussions (oh, so many!) of overtime, its compensation, of course, a bigger paycheck. Downside, compensation. How right, how proper that there should be this pair, maintaining the world in benign and orderly balance.
When her bird was mopey, her parakeet book supplied the needed reassurance, a chart of symptoms, serious and not so serious. Jessy loves charts; they too reduce an untidy world to order. The parakeet’s condition became identifiable, placed under a heading I wouldn’t have thought of; it was, it seemed, a Passing Indisposition. This has become an invaluable household concept, especially in the cold season.
Do these phrases also help her cope with the frustration of being unable to communicate? That’s plausible. But it’s surprising how little we see of such frustration. Jessy’s frustrated when she tries unsuccessfully to do things. But in talking? She seems unconscious of the effort her speaking costs her. Nor does she seem aware of any inadequacy in her language. She knows she took a long time to learn to talk; we’ve told her that. She has even suggested some ‘good reasons for not talking», among them «being a baby» and «being a dog». But being able to talk, or talk better, is not one of her concerns. Although she dislikes intensely the gentlest suggestion regarding her behavior — she’ll respond with a furious «Why do you correct me?» — she doesn’t mind, she may even laugh, when we correct a tense or suggest she rethink her choice of pronoun. Her cliches help her express herself, but their real advantage is far more fundamental. They help her give structure to chaos.
Does that sound a bit too existential? Perhaps it wouldn’t if we could remember what it was to live amid unintelligibility. But though we were all babies once, it wasn't for long. For Jessy that unintelligibility has lasted and lasted. How much even now does she understand? She needs the reassurance of words that can order her world. For years she could do no more than scream at its stubborn deviations. Screams might, though in the absence of language they mostly did not, reestablish the routines that structured the surrounding flux. Kanner’s primary marker of autism was an overwhelming desire for the preservation of sameness. That was Jessy’s desire — that Nirvana should remain inviolate, an island safe from change. She knows now that this is impossible. But words are available now, preassembled, replicable, reliable. Like maps, like charts, like calendars, like schedules, all of which she read easily before she could read texts, they allow her to lay hold of her experience, bring it under the mind’s control.
But they can do more than that. By their very conventionality they can enable her to relate her experience to the experience of others. «That the way it goes», she’ll say. Be reassured: there are patterns in experience. There are word patterns to correspond. By them Jessy begins to navigate, not only in space and time («Things out of place bother me», she says), but in the mysterious world of human beings.
«When I work late I say to myself, ‘An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.’» It comes from Jessy so naturally it startles me. Certainly she’s heard me say it. Though I don’t much like cliches, I do like proverbs — reservoirs of social experience, rich encapsulations of generations of social wisdom, too easily forgotten these days, wisdom and words together. But in this case the applicability of this proverb isn’t obvious. Testing her, I ask: «What’s the prevention? What’s the cure?» And she answers that working late prevents the backup of work in the mailroom. She has not only understood the proverb, she has generalized it to a new situation. Better yet, she is consciously using it to control her overtime anxiety. Of course I write it down. But should it go under Social or Verbal?
Social behavior and speech are linked inextricably. Jessy got interested in proverbs in her midtwenties,
