Clara Park - Exiting Nirvana

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, when she began to reach out for more ways of understanding the world. Literal- minded like all autistic people, she began to pay close attention to these figurative expressions. «A stitch in time saves nine» made literal sense when she was mending her sweater; it was easy to stretch it to cover other household repairs. Other proverbs were more metaphorical, yet she wrestled them into meaning, recognizing in them the ordering power of language. Proverbs are reassuring for someone who worries obsessively whether the weather will be fair or where my glasses are. More for my satisfaction than hers, I quoted my grandmother to her: «Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof». I didn’t expect her to listen, but she heard it, all right: «Day is sufficient until evil come out». It had surpassed her verbal powers but not her comprehension, for she not only explained it as «Don’t worry too soon», but herself supplied the equivalent «Don’t borrow trouble» and «Don’t cross the bridge until you come to it». She had to work with that one: «Does it mean go over that bridge or go under?» But she got the meaning; when the cat was gone all day («Lost, oh lost!») and came back at midnight: «Unnecessary sadness! And there wasn’t any bridge!» Three months later, the weatherman predicted sunshine but clouds threatened. Jessy began to obsess, then checked herself. «It would be crossing the bridge too early — I would fall in the water».

They are useful, these idioms; they have become idioms because they speak to the human condition. No use crying over spilt milk. Getting off on the wrong foot. Getting up on the wrong side of the bed. So, of the dinner invitation I almost forgot: «If you forgot, then remembered in the middle of the night, then you would get out of the wrong side of the bed in the morning». Yet the application isn’t always easy. «Tracy got out of the wrong side of the bed because her father was in a bad accident». You don’t say that. Verbal patterns help, but they can’t cure.

Still, they help a lot. Waiting is very difficult for Jessy, whether it is for a month or a minute. Is it because predictability, the trustworthiness of the environment, is threatened? Is it because Jessy, so accurate with clocks and calendars, can’t gauge her experience of subjective time? I don’t know, but waiting, at work or at home, is a continual problem. All the more welcome, then, what Jessy’s made of my grandmother’s «All things come to him who waits». They mostly do, and Jessy crows exultantly her own version: «Things come to me when I wait!» It makes it, I think, and Jessy thinks, just a little easier to wait next time.

Jessy is not only reassured by these linguistic patterns, she enjoys them. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that it was in the same years she began to use proverbs that she made her first verbal jokes. She has grown up in a joking household; that, I think, has made her less solemn than most of the autistic adults I’ve met. I remember her father, long before she could talk, laying her down on the kitchen floor, saying «Night-night», covering her with a newspaper and giving her some kitchen object to hold as her talisman blanket, teaching her to enjoy the discrepancy between reality and pretend. We thought then that we were teaching the actual difference between the two, but I know now it was the enjoyment that mattered. Even as a tiny child, Jessy never confused the imaginary and the real. Like most autistic people, she operates in the realm of the visible, the tangible, the literally true. What we were teaching was that perceiving the difference between what was true and what wasn’t could be fun. I treasure the memory of her first joke, when she lugged over a snow toy, a «flying saucer» almost as big as she was, offered it to a guest as an ashtray, and laughed.