Joe

by Michael Blastland

  Or think, perhaps most bizarrely of all, of the day we bought a cooker hood. Scan those words if you will for a clue as to why a cooker hood would incite Joe’s frenzy. It sat, this innocuous thing, fresh in its box with the manufacturer’s name and the words ‘cooker hood’ printed on each side. Joe saw it, his mouth dropped open, his expression intensified, he gazed hard at the box. Then he set about it, snatching at the corners, trying feverishly to find a way past packaging, tape and staples. Curious, I thought, that Joe should show much interest in a sealed box. There was a time when we could leave his Christmas present in an open paper bag on the kitchen table and he wouldn’t be tempted to peek. I assume that all he saw was a paper bag, unable to conceive that it had contents. But this box, what was it about this box?

  I began cutting through the tape, trying to calm him, hoping he’d relax once the thing inside proved unfamiliar and uninteresting. Joe pulled at loose pieces of cardboard, flinging out polystyrene packaging, driven by a disturbing sense of purpose, until it stood, revealed: a polished, aluminium cooker hood.

  ‘See, Joe, it’s a cooker hood. Nothing in it for you, I’m afraid.’

  Joe wasn’t satisfied. He went back to the discarded box to touch the words on its side, and at last it dawned on me: ‘Hood’. In Joe’s mind the word had an inseparable prefix: ‘Robin’. Not because of any fascination for historical myth, but because Walt Disney produced the video with a sly fox playing the lead. I should have realised, ‘Hood’ being the shorthand he’d sometimes type into his Lightwriter if, for whatever reason, this film was where his obsession had come to rest that day.

  ‘No, Joe, it’s not Hood, not Robin Hood. It’s for the cooker. For cooking, Joe.’

  Cooking is a word he half understands as a precursor to serving him pasta and involving – for what purpose he fails to appreciate – the gas hob. That is, he understands ‘cooking’ as part of a process, a sequence like A … B … C …, rather than having any particular utility. He fails to see that the essence of ‘cooking’ is that things should have time to cook, that ‘cooking’ actually cooks the food, and so he would turn off the hob the instant it had been turned on, if I didn’t stop him. Done that bit, now serve. So the word ‘cooking’ would make little sense in this context, having what meaning it does only in the other, pasta-specific one. He finds it extraordinarily hard to move thoughts between the two: ‘Cooking cannot possibly mean anything in relation to this big silver contraption, because cooking means what happens before I’m fed pasta.’ With time and more experience, ‘cooking’ also came to mean to Joe the routine that delivered his beans or chips. But for Joe, these ideas are reluctant to leave their particulars for the world of abstraction, and so the words are slow to acquire a general sense which can be used in diverse contexts. A recent account of autism describes a child who learnt laboriously to spread butter on bread and finally mastered the movement, but was helpless again when faced with jam. Because explanation, like definition, often requires such a mental transfer of ideas from one context to another, much goes misunderstood by Joe.

  A box, on the other hand, that has the word ‘Hood’ on the side, must strike him as akin to many other boxes with ‘Hood’ on the side. Such boxes in his experience have always meant only one thing. A useless effort at explanation, then, my attempt to locate this hood in the world of cooking: not much sense for Joe to take from that. How ludicrous that the distinction proves so tricky, though admittedly not one I’m accustomed to making, between the hood that hid our hero’s head from the Sheriff’s men and the hood that inhales kitchen odours.

  I knew with sinking heart that the struggle for enlightenment was already lost. No surprise then that he still wasn’t satisfied and now demanded that the cooker hood be turned upside down. That was easy. The next was not.

  ‘Oop,’ he said.

  ‘Open? I can’t open it, Joe, it’s a cooker hood. Cooker hood, not Robin Hood; cooker, not a video, Joe.’

  But I could open it, and we did, taking out the clear plastic panels to show him the light bulbs lying within, removing the grille to explore the ventilation channels inside, peering down the hole where the chimney flu was to fit.

  He was determined to pull it apart, no matter that the most limited spatial awareness would have told him there was no room for a video in the few cubic millimetres of confined darkness so far unexplored. Yet his hopefulness endured. It wasn’t until I’d fixed the blasted thing in position – I cursed it now for being careless of its name – wired it up and turned it on nearly an hour later that he began to lose faith … and exploded into a short-lived tantrum of heaving sobs and blows to his head, thwarted and miserable, hitherto devout in the belief that this pyramid-like lump of metal, with every crevice investigated, must hide some secret chamber where he’d find the intoxicating moving images promised by those four letters. For some weeks afterwards he’d call me into the kitchen and gesture towards it with a quizzical look.

  When Joe seizes every possibility of a video and holds fast until all hope is dead, and when false hope proves so hard to kill, surviving on misunderstandings that would take him a whole lifetime’s education to correct, when neither reason nor evidence can persuade, when so much conspires against calm, his obsession might endure on a bad day from the first minute of waking until his eyes close with the last. Perhaps that gives some measure of his single-mindedness. If you continue to doubt, note, finally, that Joe can spot the spine of Wallace and Gromit’s Grand Day Out, or any other favourite, at a hundred paces, then look into his crazed eyes as he scrambles out of his seat belt, heart pounding, whenever we even park on another driveway, and tell me all children are like that.

  And yet, Joe’s obsession is one of the most glaring but intellectually elusive quirks of his behaviour. The lessons from it are hard to draw since, to some extent, my friends are right when they say that many children want high degrees of familiarity and routine, and all can become fixated on the toy they can’t live without, the now dog-eared book they still prefer to all others, the blanket they must clasp to their cheek before they can sleep, on trains or tractors, on a jumper or on pink.

  The difference between this and the autistic child is one mainly of degree, but what a degree. At Joe’s first special-needs school, a local authority day school in south Watford for children with moderate learning difficulties, one boy would insist when shopping with his mother that she bought identical goods in exactly the same sequence every time. If she failed to keep to the routine – at any point – then, no, it was all wrong, it didn’t make sense – Mummy buys two pints of full-cream milk then strawberry yoghurt from the middle shelf, that’s Mummy, and we didn’t do that and so if that’s wrong then you’re wrong, and I’m in the wrong place, and you’re not really my mummy and I want my mummy and … whaaaaaa!

  His sense of security depended on a routine of rigid consistency. Here, in a supermarket he’d visited countless times, he found his life unravelling, found normal coordinates unreliable because one scuff of detail was wrong, became terrified, suspicious of a world in which lack of consistency meant lost identity. The school tried to teach him to tolerate change by using small picture cards to represent all his normal activities, placing them in the expected order and familiarising him with the correspondence between the picture strip and his daily routine. One day, with tenderness and patience, the staff began to show him that two cards could swap places, and then perhaps be returned to their original position. On another day, the cards might swap places and stay there for a while. But look, both were still there, swimming hadn’t gone, it was still on his activity strip, just relocated, and so the world was not changing identity, merely rearranging, slightly, its appearance. Once comfortable with the idea that the cards could move, the same variation was introduced to his routine, I believe with success.

  This difference of degree between, if I may call it, normal and abnormal obsession, is so wide as to hint at a more fundamental deficit. It’s clear that these children find comfo
rt, reassurance, security in their obsessions, as well as hypnotic fascination. Why should they need such extreme repetition, why return so magnetically again and again to the same movements, the same images, reluctant to move on? What is it about the way they see the world, compared with the way we see it, that makes it so slippery, so dangerously inconsistent?

  I think the first part of the answer is that, whereas most of us have little difficulty recognising continuity amid change, autistic children find their sense of the stability of things easily threatened. At the extremes, this sets their world spinning, but even in lesser cases the mental adjustment, the reclassification of things and their attributes, requires, I suspect, far more conscious reorientation for them than for us. We know Mummy is still Mummy through any number of innovations in shopping habit and we know it without hesitation. The problem for some of those with autism is that even small changes seem capable of jolting their sense of continuity to the point of vertiginous insecurity and it takes time to get back on a firm footing. Joe is not remotely so severe a case as his former schoolmate, but it’s clear that change holds little attraction for him. What, for example, are we to make of the fact that when taking him swimming I have to be careful to avoid wetting my hair? Not for vanity’s sake, as you would soon agree, but because it makes Joe palpably uneasy. Witnessing my mop turned sleek and dripping, his expression becomes uncertain bordering terrified. If I approach, he shies away. The sound of my voice seems to help, but as I speak to reassure him, though he might be coaxed to come nearer, he raises a hand as if to protect himself and tentatively reaches out to prod my hair, a sour grimace wrinkling his nose and curling his lip, before flinching away again and turning to play elsewhere.

  The child who put all his trust in me a few moments ago when I flung him, screeching, ecstatic, through the water by arms or legs, or held him, arm-bands cast aside, in the deep end of the pool, now reacted to my wet hair as if … as if what? Threatening, disgusting maybe? Neither, I think, given his consistent indifference to the wet heads swimming, playing, bobbing and diving all around him. So why did I unnerve him when others didn’t? Perhaps because they were strangers anyway. Could it be that the detail of wet hair turned me into a stranger too? Had I become unreliable, discontinuous with the daddy he thought he knew?

  A quick experiment one day would show if I could conquer Joe’s apparent perception of discontinuity, if that’s what it was: I stood in front of him, dry-headed, and then ducked down for a second, coming up wet in the same spot, obvious to anyone else that I was the same person if only because space and time conspired against any impostor. To Joe, that logical impossibility made no difference; still I could see the forehead frown, the eyes widen, the mouth sneer; still he doubted and shrank. Joe, it seemed, wasn’t entirely sure if I was still Daddy, or, if I was, whether my Daddy-ness was now dangerously compromised, and not until we’d begun to dry ourselves and my hair turned less slick, more recognisably dishevelled, did he regain full confidence in me.

  In an arresting passage in his novel The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen describes the shifting, deceptive sensory world of the mind of Alfred, a sufferer of Parkinson’s disease:

  In the manner of a wheat seedling thrusting itself up out of the earth, the world moved forward in time by adding cell after cell to its leading edge, piling moment on moment, and that to grasp the world even in its freshest, youngest moment provided no guarantee that you’d be able to grasp it again a moment later … no sooner had he reconfirmed [the present] than the leading edge of time added yet another layer of new cells, so that he again faced a new and ungrasped world; which was why, rather than exhaust himself playing catch-up, he preferred more and more to spend his days down among the unchanging historical roots of things.

  Could such a sense of the confounded slipperiness of things through time be one of the spurs to a love of routine, even to obsessive repetition; an attempt to grasp and hold still the otherwise giddying shiftiness and unreliability of things, to hold tight to what’s known and liked? I’m not sure. There are probably other things going on, but I suspect that something of this sort, to some degree, is at play in Joe and others like him.

  Most of us are plainly not so troubled. One capacity making us more comfortable sliding around amid change and impermanence, happier to cope with the torrent of flux, is our instinctive essentialism. Whereas Joe and other autistic children often insist on the same, we make do with, even welcome, the same sort. In the case of people we know, we believe that their essence continues independently of changes in their appearance or behaviour, whether as a result of ageing, wetting their hair, changing their shopping habits, or even losing limbs; we know that people’s bodies can appear differently but their essence remains. This knowledge applied to innumerable everyday experiences lessens the shock of the new by helping us identify elements of familiarity. Essence is problematical for autistic children because it is an abstraction, an idea, and Joe is a boy who lives in a world of physical particulars.

  Our essentialism is no small achievement. One corollary, for example, is that we are fantastically skilled at categorisation, recognising shared characteristics, believing that certain objects have a nature in common even though they look different. Psychologists now believe normal children at nine months understand that objects of the same category share hidden properties. By two years old they demonstrate an understanding of the difference between an internal core and external appearance. The American psychologist Paul Bloom says that young children have a sense that what matters is on the inside, and describes an experiment in which

  children were shown pictures of a series of transformations where animals were gradually modified in their appearance: a porcupine was surgically altered to resemble a cactus; a tiger was stuffed into a lion suit so that it looked like a lion; a real dog was modified to look like a toy. When the transformations were radical enough, the children … insisted that it was still a porcupine, a tiger, and a dog, regardless of what it looked like. In a child’s mind, to be a specific animal is to have more than just a certain appearance, it is to have a certain internal structure. It is only when the transformations are described as changing the innards of the animals – presumably, their essences – that children, like adults, take them as changing the type of animal itself.

  Essentialism has a long philosophical pedigree, from Aristotle’s notion of quiddity, or ‘whatness’, to John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding. In Book III of the Essay he writes:

  Essence may be taken for the very being of anything, whereby it is what it is. And thus the real internal, but generally (in substances) unknown constitution of things, whereon their discoverable qualities depend, may be called their essence. This is the proper original signification of the word, as is evident from the formation of it; essentia, in its primary notation, signifying properly, being. And in this sense it is still used, when we speak of the essence of particular things, without giving them any name.

  ‘The very being of anything’ ought to be able to cope with a bad hair day. Yet in some autistic children, though not quite in Joe, the normal ability to categorise according to some deep essence is apparently so deficient that they seem to take to heart a famous paradox coined by Kung-sun Lung in the third century to the effect that ‘a white horse is not a horse’, meaning that any single, particular horse by its very particularity ceases to be of the general category of horses – horses in abstract – which can have no particular colour. The rest of us are able to hold in mind the particular and its essence at the same time: the fluffy pink cow, the plastic cow, the picture of a cow, the vast lumbering pat-splattered real cow are all, we know, at some level the same thing.

  Perhaps repetition is Joe’s attempt to hold on to precisely one particular as a substitute for the familiarity the rest of us find in essence. Paul Bloom, writing of the normal way in which we order our perceptions, says: ‘Our minds have evolved to put things into categories and to ignore or downplay what makes these things d
istinct … what all categories share is that they capture a potential infinity of individuals under a single perspective. They lump.’ That is, ignoring differences can be as important as observing them. Maybe autistic children simply find it harder to put distinguishing details aside, paying too much heed to difference and failing to appreciate sufficiently those elements of similarity. To use Paul Bloom’s distinction, borrowed from Darwin, they split when they should lump. Why does the brain usually choose the latter, he asks. His answer is derived from Locke: ‘Without categories, everything is perfectly different from everything else, and nothing can be generalized and learned … Without concepts, we are helpless.’

  The conceptual is a dry form of education. We much prefer to take our lessons from the personal, the particular, but Bloom is surely right that without the conceptual we become lost amid innumerable, unconnected particulars with no relevance beyond themselves. Though we might find it uncongenial, we also depend on the conceptual for much of our understanding of the everyday world that would otherwise seem, as I suspect it seems to Joe and those like him, capable of terrifying volatility. The vivid and the particular engage our passions, but if we are not to be swarmed by them, we must classify.

  Joe finds some categories easier than others. When he was seven or eight we spent many hours asking him to place pictures of related objects into the same pile – clothes, food, vehicles. Progress was extraordinarily slow. He had immense difficulty understanding that some quality linked shoes and T-shirts, for example, or cars and trains. The category of ‘things to eat’ was easier, even if, as was usually the case, he didn’t eat them personally. Nevertheless, socks would sometimes finish up in the food pile. Dogs, though varying in size from rat to brown bear, are also somehow recognisably the same thing to him. He had no trouble working out that cars all have the potential to take him somewhere he wants to go, regardless of make, colour or model. He uses the word ‘book’ for anything that’s held in the hand and read – magazine, newspaper, book, leaflet, letter. ‘Wet’ applies to just about any liquid in any form. Coaxing him to taste sweets he’d not tasted before, even to play with a new toy, could be a labour of many months, and this seemed partly because he doubted their essential similarity to others of the same kind, didn’t perhaps see them as being of a kind that mattered to him. A corresponding difficulty is that when he does recognise something as of an ilk, he expects it to behave exactly as others he has known, so that any computer he sits at will surely, he thinks, be loaded with his favourite games. And any box with ‘Hood’ on it …