Imagination and The Autistic Spectrum

My son has written a novel, and he's working on his second.

He's on the Autistic Spectrum, that strange catch-all for the strangers among us.

Nobody told him he can write.  He just read, and decided to do it.  

He liked books: The Lord of the Rings (having seen Peter Jackson's masterpiece); Harry Potter (having seen the films); Percy Jackson's story. 

He figured out that orphans are The Thing.  I didn't need to tell him that orphan-tales stretch all the way back to the first orphan (whose name was Xalstos, on the African plain 17,000 years ago [his parents were run over by an ancestor of the modern ibex]).

Imagination is the joker in the pack.  I remember being told once (I can't remember by whom or when) that autistic children have little imagination, but the truth is that they have a disconcerting habit of assuming there is no distance between their imagination and real life.  If that sometimes produces a highly literal sense of humor, it also ensures that they must be seeded with such fantasies as magic rings and orphans who find their way.  Those stories resonate with, say, some boys on the autistic spectrum, perhaps because they never would have thought of it on their own.  Their imaginations are busy appropriating things they see, things in the real world: stop signs, cars, blocks, their own hair, long walks over tortuous meandering but repetitive paths.

The effortless imaginative furniture of "normal" is learned in them, and sometimes I think there's something almost approaching a second-language issue in my son's writing, a sense that he feels more than he can quite say.

But there he goes, clattering away on the laptop, page after halting page of meandering dialogue, gradually growing sharper, gradually painting the world as he has been told it is.

It makes me think of how I write, and the many things that remain unsaid because we have not been taught adequately how to listen to ourselves.  And yet, he speaks on and on in his writing, and I have come to think that he buries in the borrowed imagery, the stolen phrases, the literal descriptions a dim ember of his own bright soul, the one that he doesn't give willingly to anyone.

Comments

[Michelle]

I have very little knowledge of Autism but I recently watched a video with a teenage girl who started communicating with the people around her through a laptop -finding her "voice" after a decade of being unable to express herself. It was insightful and inspiring. Some things she shared were guite profound and almost poetic.

[Otter]

Michellle, autism is a complex (I'm tempted to say "chaotic") area of human experience. High functioning autistic children with Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD) and Asperger's Syndrome have such a subtle creativity. Parents often find themselves frustrated and grief-stricken because the child can be hampered in expressions of love or affection as we judge that love and expression must be shown.

Looking back over my son's life, he's cost me a good bit of my faith.... but he's given me something much richer and more substantial. His love is a curious thing. Maybe one day I'll write that story.

[Sandra]

An online homeschooling friend of mine has an autistic son (and hubby with Aspergers). She was trying to get him to write a poem as part of their language program and she railed in our forum about how resistant he was to the whole idea, she couldn't get him to understand writing from a sensory experience, everything he wrote was strictly a flat progression of facts, yada, yada. After some days of this complaining, she finally posted the poem he'd composed--a paeon to the mathematical progression of some planetary rotation. It was stark, logical, humbling, and beautiful. And not a single sensory adjective in the umpteen verse thing. Mom needed to get out of her box as much or more than she wanted him to leave his.