Exiting Nirvana Read online

  Even KNOW and KYESW impinged on meaning; Jessy, perforce, had long understood NO, and (though it took more teaching) YES. She was using letters more and more. Even three years earlier she had written MAMA, and formed — logically — the plural MEME on the model of MAN and MEN. I was delighted with KNOW and KYESW, as I was delighted with every sign of intelligence, but I didn’t think much about it at the time. Later I recognized it for what it was: a written record, one of the first, of the systematic quality of Jessy’s mind.

  To systematize is to discover regularities and organize them. Like MAMA/MEME, this system was still very simple. Jessy’s interests then were focused on numbers, systematizable in so many more ways. A few years later, however, numbers were receding in favor of words. She was fifteen. She talked more, and more clearly. She was 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 singlemindedness 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 systematically 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. 1

  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. 2

  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. 3

  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; following on our early work with picture communication, Jessy had been making picture books for years — rapid scrawls, uncolored, reflecting TV cartoons, children’s stories, and the rituals of her own daily life. This, however, was not a picture book. It contained neither drawings nor sequential narrative. Rather, it was a celebration of the transformations of a word.

  The book was a thing of beauty, a theme and variations, four words in three colors: SING, SANG, SUNG, and SONG (see page 63). It was also a finely organized system. It was not, however, as remote from daily life as it appeared. Jessy had an additional source of inspiration — a bag of cookies. How she must have scrutinized it, alone in her room, to note the possibilities of its three shades of coral, its corresponding greens, its contrasting white! Never mind crayons; here, in this bag, were her materials. Patiently she snipped the colors into bits, 208 in all. Each word had its own page, the three-inch letters formed of the snips, SING and SANG in coral, a different shade for each letter, SUNG and SONG in green to correspond. Except for the four final G’s; for these she had reserved the white snips, backing them with coral and green cutouts so they would show up on the white pages. Nor had she forgotten the cookies; they were part of the pleasure. Neatly she cut out their labels, Assorted, Cashew, Almond Crescent, Chocolate Chip; these too became part of the ensemble. Still she was not done. Logic propelled her forward; to the fifth page she taped swatches of her base colors; to the sixth, finely balanced collages in all six shades of coral and green. The seventh page she had reserved for a larger, climactic collage in — what else? — white on white.

  The whole was strangely modern, even postmodern, except that Jessy had no idea of what such terms might mean. When I asked her, on a hunch, “What is the name of that art?” she didn’t say “Collage,” as I thought she might. Her answer was both specific and accurate: “Those are the cookie art.”

  . . .

  I can describe the cookie art, as I can describe much else that we did together or that Jessy later told me about. But the system of systems, the supersystem that in those days eclipsed every other, reflected and conditioned the whole of her emotional experience, encompassed everything she most cared about — that is not mine to describe. I learned about it second-hand. It is time to pay tribute, however inadequately, to the many others who shared devotedly, year after year, the enterprise of helping Jessy grow. I long ago lost count of them; besides the members of her own family there have been more than fifty. It wasn’t I who taught her to tie her shoes. It wasn’t I who taught her to ride a bicycle, to knit, to weave, to draw. And it wasn’t I who worked out the organizing principles of Jessy’s supreme, her most complex, creation. An eighteen-year-old mathematics student at Williams College figured it out, helped in the write-up by Jessy’s father, and it is right that work I did not and could not do should be told in their voices. So I quote, and at length, from David Park and Philip Youderian’s article “Light and Number: Ordering Principles in the World of an Autistic Child.” Imagine, then, Jessy as she was at thirteen:

  [Jessy] listens to hard rock with an expression of the purest joy, rocking in her rocking chair, putting her hands over her ears when it is too much to bear, for this is the music of 0 clouds and 4 doors…. No clouds at all, the sky the radiant image of a pleasure so intense that to bring it down to a really bearable level would, she shows us, require 4 closed doors between her and the phonograph. It is, she explains, “too good,” but she can bear it for a while. The music changes; the rapture abates by one degree: 1 cloud, 3 doors. The classics, most of them, rate 2 clouds and 2 doors; andante espressivo brings protests, 3 clouds and 1 door; and worst of all is a spoken record, 4 and 0. The sum of clouds and doors is always 4, and… even the sun loses some of its rays when the music is not of the best.

  [Jessy] always watches the phases of the moon and knows where it is in its cycle. On the nights following a full moon, it rises outside [her] window and stays for several hours partly visible behind a large tree. Behind [her] door there is intense excitement, the sound of running feet and little cries of joy. [Jessy] is looking at it — she will not say its name but refers to “something behind the tree” — running from window to window to see the light travel behind the branches and the shadows creep across the grass. The shadow cast by a house standing in the light of the full moon is the most exciting and beautiful sight in the world, and in these long evenings everything depends on there being no clouds to spoil the pleasure. If the moon is obscured, [Jessy] lies in bed and cries her tearless autistic cry. The moon is the number 7, and so is the sun, and so, apparently, is a cloudless sky.

  Jessy’s clouds-and-doors system, spring 1970.

  … When [Jessy] sets the table for dinner, she puts a tall glass by her plate. It is green, her preferred color, and it is divided into 8 equal levels by decorative ridges. Into this she pours her juice. It too is green. On most days she will fill the glass exactly to the sixth or seventh level. Sometimes it will be filled to the top; occasionally it will be lower. Ordinarily, the exact level is determined by the type of day with respect to weather and the phase of the moon. “All different kind of days,” depending on sun and moon and weather, are the heart of her system.

  The system contains 29 kinds of days…. The two most important factors that govern the category of day are the position of the sun in the sky and the presence or absence of clouds…. [A day with zero clouds is what Jessy calls dayhigh (in summer when the sun is high) or day-nothing (in fall, winter, and spring). These] are the best of all, celebrated by a full glass of juice. The level of juice is twice the number of doors, down to the disastrous day-bump, when [Jessy] has been a bad girl….

  [Jessy’s] mood depends on the sky. During dayhigh, and even more during daynothing, she is cheerful, joking, and cooperative. Clouds, especially if they come to spoil daynothing, bring despondency… , and clouds covering a full moon are the worst of all.

  Most daythings [Jessy’s word] have numbers, in which the digits 1, 3, and 7 predominate. Most of the numbers are primes: 7 is good, 3 is bad, but almost always 3 is associated with 7. The numbers 73 and 137 are… magic, and the concept of days in general belongs to their product 73 × 137 = 10001. 4

  And so on, for ten pages, two tables of correlated phenomena, and a page and a half of intricate calculations. The splendors of the system defy summary; even the investigators didn’t understand them all. Those who share a fascination with numbers can explore them further in what they wrote.

  But whether or not we could follow the numbers, we all had to live with the system. It was a rich and inclusive we. No one person, or family, could provide all that Jessy needed to grow. There was always someone else working with her in those days. Most of these Jessy-friends lived with us, some for a summer, some for a year or more, Jessy’s therapists, teachers, and good companions. They were college students, most of them, though two of the best were still in high school. None had any training in special education or developmental psychology, but I claim for them the word “therapist” without hesitation. They worked with Jessy, played with her, sang with her, joked with her, comforted her, understood her secret words, int
erpreted her to strangers, devotedly taught her whatever they could. Endlessly inventive, endlessly generous, without them hers would be a different and sadder story.

  Some, like the young mathematician, recorded their observations. Most did not. But one, it seemed, kept a journal, and after more than twenty-five years, knowing I was again writing about Jessy, she sent it to me. Its entries remind me of what I had gladly forgotten; they bring back how very hard it was, for Jessy and for the inclusive us, in the days when the system ruled. Fran came to us when Phil had moved on. It is her turn to speak. 5

  Pure blue sky.While walking the long hill, a little cloud appeared and covered the sun briefly — oh, what sadness and anger — mumble mumble, looking down at the ground, dragging the feet, stopping, answering no more questions about school. “What is the matter, Jessy?” “The cloud over the sun.”I told her, after the cloud was no longer over the sun and was now just in the sky, that she only needed to be a tiny bit sad, because the cloud was small and the blue sky was big. No help, mumble mumble. Finally the cloud went behind the mountain and trees. “Jessy, the cloud has gone away.” Jessy was happy again immediately.

  The cloud, it turned out, was “full of numbers,” multiples and powers of 37 and 73, with two bad 3’s. Jessy drew it in a picture, with herself and Fran, when the cloud was gone and it was all over. But the weather was not always so obliging. “Some days are almost all bad,” Fran wrote a month later. “Full Moon. Low, heavy clouds. What a horrendous day.” Jessy came home crying; someone had taken her special seat on the school bus. (There was a system there too, but we never understood it.) She refused to sing with Fran (“I will cry again”) or answer her questions. She mumbled because the radiator hissed. She cried when she made a mistake in sewing, stopped, cried some more. When Fran tried to comfort her she went in her room and told Fran to go away.