Joe

by Michael Blastland

  On another occasion, Joe, Cait and I were sitting in the house when Joe, playing with a wooden brick, flung it at his sister, catching her smartly on the shoulder. At once there was swirl of emotional reaction. Cait cried. I was first anxious for her then angry with him. Joe laughed.

  I was cross and wanted him to see it, wanted him to understand that his action was wrong, but his giggles rose to hysteria with my temper. How funny the man looks, he must have said to himself. True, Joe had no understanding of the content of my words, but he had no understanding of my very visible mood either. If I summoned more ferocity, he laughed the louder and chucked another wooden brick at his sister to make Daddy do it again. I was at such a loss to know how to put a stop to this that I hit him hard on the hand.

  How do you convey disapproval when anger is taken for encouragement? More volume from me seemed to make no difference either. I assume he took it for more excited acclamation. ‘Crikey, the audience is lapping this one up.’ All I could think of at the time, if I was thinking at all, was that I had to associate his actions with something that stopped him repeating them, some quick consequence he didn’t like. Poor Joe. It must have been baffling: ‘the man makes funny faces whenever I do this happy thing, so I do it again and out of the blue he hits me’. I’m not sure if even that made much difference, since he would have struggled to work out what the smack had in common with the throwing. Given that throwing often wins approval (throwing stones into the sea, for example, which he enjoys), how can I distinguish exactly the character of his offence? The smack must feel cruelly impulsive and arbitrary.

  He stopped after one more brick some short while later, but who knows whether with any sense that it was wrong, despite Cait’s tears. My anger only registered with him when it came with some physical consequence, but might still have seemed to be entirely without context. Emotional chastisement didn’t work because Joe had such a weak sense of my emotional state, even though I was visibly angry – for anger, reduced to facial expression alone, becomes comic, as we see when children laugh if we merely pretend to be angry with them.

  According to child development psychologists, babies are more fascinated by human faces than by anything else. They can distinguish happy faces from sad ones. They can imitate faces. If you stick out your tongue to a very young baby, it will copy you. Paul Bloom, psychology professor at Yale, is impressed: ‘These babies have never looked in a mirror, so they have to know instinctively that the tongue they are looking at corresponds to that thing in their mouths that they have never seen before.’ He says that before reaching twelve months babies can attend to the emotions of others: ‘if babies are crawling toward an area that might be dangerous and an adult makes a horrified or disgusted face, babies know enough to stay away … by their first birthday babies are social beings’.

  Joe, of course, does nothing of the kind even now unless I can communicate to him some cognitive understanding that harm will result. When he wanders from the kitchen with a carving knife in hand, I try to persuade him it’s a bad idea not with a shriek or any other sign of alarm, but with a quietly spoken: ‘Knife, ouch, Joe. Knife ouch,’ and gently take it from him with the silent prayer that he doesn’t try in that moment to snatch it away and send the blade windmilling between us. Of course, that doesn’t work either, since he struggles to imagine without direct experience how the knife could cause pain. My hopeful calculation is that I stand a marginally better chance with an appeal to logic than to his emotional understanding of facial expressions or tones of voice. If he was inclined to touch something revolting – the poo he occasionally trailed through the house because for some odd reason he felt more comfortable going in his pants that day, for example – I had to restrain him physically; a pained expression, disgusted attitude or tone of voice wouldn’t do.

  ‘Poo, Joe. Don’t touch. Urgh! Dirty. In toilet, Joe, not pants.’ As I hold back his hand.

  ‘Poooo,’ he says.

  ‘Yes, Joe. Horrid. Leave poo. Poo in toilet, Joe.’

  ‘Poooo.’

  The words of disgust are probably meaningless to him, and yet disgust is one of the most powerful of human emotions. Much as I might feel it, and express it, Joe wouldn’t care. And I think of those childcare experts who would have me lavish praise on Joe for his creativity, and wonder how exactly I’d manage the distinction in logic in a way Joe could understand, between creativity and hygiene. Naturally, I don’t try.

  The human skill for looking at one another and working out what’s going on behind the eyes as a swift shortcut to understanding what motivates our words or actions is one of the earliest we develop. One writer and researcher on autism, Uta Frith, calls it ‘mentalising’. Simon Baron-Cohen, a psychopathologist at Cambridge who has done so much to open up our understanding of autism, calls the absence of this skill ‘mindblindness’, an inability to see that others have minds of their own or work out what’s going on inside them (more recently, he’s adopted the more familiar term ‘empathy’). The rest of us have a yearning to attribute intention to almost everything, animate and inanimate alike. If we compare ‘mind-blind’ Joe – who seems to attribute intention so erroneously, if at all – with other children’s innate capacity for this kind of low-grade mind-reading, we begin to see how critical for normally functioning humanity is our emotional sociability, and we begin to understand how debilitating it is when that sense is impaired.

  Alison Gopnik, a psychologist, has imagined how ordinary human behaviour might appear to someone with autism.

  This is what it’s like to sit at the dinner table. At the top of my field of vision is a blurry edge of nose, in front are waving hands. Around me bags of skin are draped over chairs and stuffed into pieces of cloth, they shift and protrude in different ways. Two dark spots near the top of them swivel relentlessly back and forth. A hole beneath the spots fills with food and from it come a stream of noises. Imagine that the noisy skin bags suddenly move towards you and their noises grew loud, and you have no idea why, no way of explaining them or predicting what they would do next.

  That’s an extreme state that I think Joe has been lucky to avoid; he’s not so severely detached, and over time I think he has also acquired a cognitive understanding of some facial expressions and tones of voice, as opposed to an intuitive one; this capacity grows, but only through the slow growth of association, only when facial expressions come accompanied over and over again by the kind of immediate practical consequences that help him interpret what he sees and hears. Helped by such supplementary evidence, he can establish a correlation: smiles lead to fun, frowns to noisy reprimand. I suspect there’s a severe limit to the range of subtler shades of mood and intention he can learn to recognise this way.

  In an account in The New York Times, neurologist Oliver Sacks describes the remarkable Temple Grandin, a highly intelligent woman who was diagnosed autistic in childhood and now has a Ph.D. in agricultural science. She has also written her own compelling autobiography.

  Grandin, says Sacks, had built up a library of experiences which she replayed in her mind like videos: ‘She would … learn, by degrees, to correlate what she saw, so that she could then predict how people in similar circumstances might act. She had complemented her experience by constant reading, including reading of trade journals and the Wall Street Journal – all of which enlarged her knowledge of the species. “It’s a strictly logical process,” she explained.’

  For most of us, these are clearly skills we are born to acquire, blessed with an astonishing facility to learn them and requiring none of the laborious analysis that Grandin still finds necessary.

  In another experiment described by Paul Bloom, a small remote-controlled robot is sent towards a three-year-old. The child’s parent stands to one side pretending to be terrified, making fearful expressions and sounds. Normally developing children take the hint and keep away; autistic children show no fear.

  Joe’s smarting hand, Cait’s tears and my guilt illustrate that this absence of a sens
e of tone and intention in language is a costly, exhausting, frustrating shame, consistent with Joe’s general inability to read and understand emotional expression with a full sense of what it implies.

  It’s unquestionably true that dogs often do better. In Not Even Wrong, a book on his son’s autism, Paul Collins describes a guide-dog training centre based in an open prison in the United States. Inmates on the Liberty Dog Training Program – yes, seriously – prepare dogs to work with, among others, autistic children. The dogs’ main function is to offer companionship to people with autism who find animals easier to get on with than people. They also warn of danger – from traffic, for example. Next, they interpret tone of voice and intention. Their great advantage, says Collins, is that dogs know when someone is trying to be friendly or threatening and people with autism often don’t.

  If it’s true that communication makes sense only when we impute a state of mind to the speaker or imagine an emotion behind the expression, and if it’s true that dogs are quite good at understanding human communication, does that mean dogs have a sense of our consciousness? According to the developmental psychologist Paul Bloom recent studies suggest that dogs outperform chimps on many tasks involving social reasoning, presumably, he speculates, because they hunt in packs.

  We all have moments of doubt, we all get it wrong sometimes – ‘are you laughing with me or at me?’ – but I’m struck by how spectacularly wrong Joe can be, not wrong by degrees, but diametrically wrong: how he’ll respond to sadness with violence and can treat distress so lightly that if a thump or two frees him from inconvenience, he’ll dish them out liberally; how he can greet a smile with menace, and recoil fearfully from a gesture of surprise or gentle solicitation. Watching fear flood his face when nothing threatening is said or implied is itself terrifying.

  In the swimming pool, at the top of the slide that day, I picked him up, mumbled an explanation to the poor woman who’d just seen her compassion end with a wailing child thumping himself, feeling for some reason that it is she who is owed the apology (a sincere ‘sorry’ this time), and we worked our way back down the narrow steps. Behind us, the normal bustle of normal children’s normal behaviour resumed as soon as we were out of the way.

  I carried him for a while before he wriggled down to the floor and I followed as he made his way over to a bench at one end of the pool, piled with other swimmers’ fluffy towels. He sat beneath the clock with the double-ended second-hand, inclined to help himself to a towel, but making do with the warmth from me instead.

  We behave as if Joe’s emotional register is like ours. We expect to reach into it with casual ease, the way we reach into the minds of everyone else. We deploy a kind of anthropomorphism. Strange to call it that, I know, when Joe looks like one of us already. Surely his instincts will be broadly like ours, his preferences and thought processes too. When his actions resemble ours, we assume he acts for the same reasons. If he hits, we guess that it is antagonism or aggression. We barely stop to wonder whether that action has the same significance for him as it would for us.

  Why does he do it? What possible attraction is there sitting, dripping, cold, expressly not doing the thing you came to do, the thing all others desire? But if we feel the least bit mystified, think of the purposeless chaos, the bottomless mystery seen through his eyes, as people talk, grimace, move about, often apparently without agency, often without much fathomable intention. For Joe, the insane, the unpredictable world exists outside.

  After the incident on the slide, he’s not interested in the pool any more and sits on the bench for a minute or two longer. No, he doesn’t want to go back in the water; no, he doesn’t want any more slide; no, but quietly and with touching gentleness, he doesn’t want to watch the other children. We walk back to the door at the top of the stairs to the changing rooms, Joe with his hands up by his chin and arms pressed to his chest, torn between seeking a hand to steady himself over the wet tiles and the reflex to hug himself to keep warm, and we go home.

  Within a couple more weeks at school, Joe’s head-banging began to decline. Just once more he seems to have tapped his brow unconvincingly against a soft covering on the wall and then largely given up a strategy that hurt perhaps too much with too little pay-off. Or perhaps he just felt he was beginning to be understood.

  The staff at school worked hard to interpret him, his sounds and his moods. With all their human sophistication they learnt to decipher his strange emotional vocabulary and maybe he learnt a little of theirs. Even if he remained at a loss as to how to interpret their tone, he began to know and cease to fear their routine. Here was the first sign of progress, and as the weeks passed I began at last to fear less for the consequences at school of simple questions. At school, as at home, he still says no, often. I still admire, sort of, the conviction. Above all, I hope that, somehow, love can be heard even by a tin ear.

  5

  Intention

  Here was the new regime: every other weekend Joe came home, collected on Friday at 11am, returned on Sunday at 4pm. Before he went to Bristol, no child had been capable of a more insistently, perpetually in-your-face presence than Joe. Miss him though we did, his presence now was no more than part of life’s punctuation, often intermittent: the intermittence of a klaxon, true enough, and still the same old commanding presence the minute he was with us, but with eerie and silent interludes.

  How would he react, I wondered, when I collected him from his mother’s house. He was waiting at the living-room window, saw me walk up the path, zipped round to stand in the hall and was ready as the door swung open:

  ‘Pak!’ (pasta), he said.

  ‘Hello, Joe!’

  ‘Pak!’

  His weekends at home soon found a new rhythm, much like the old. We settled into it and with the slickness that comes of familiarity slid quickly through the days into Sunday afternoon, and the journey back to school. He was mostly well behaved at this time, late October darkening into November, subdued but good, passing the time with an unusual tranquillity that incited in me a fidget of second thoughts about whether he couldn’t stay at home after all, thoughts I dismiss for the time being and set off for school anyway. That’s what we do now, we get on with it.

  That is, we move with syrupy slovenliness into the journey, through two zombie hours or more on the motorway, taking in our now ritual stop for a ritual seat by the window of the same service station and the same ritually vile chips, coated and fried in that customary chemical broth. Joe devours them. In the car next to me, he also steadily devours his standard four tangerines, a packet of the usual crisps and the plate of peanut butter sandwiches he often brings for company, if not always to eat.

  We play the tape of Abba’s Greatest Hits that Joe had clasped in both hands when we left the house. I’ve been warned that it has become mandatory listening. We play it continuously and would play only the track ‘SOS’ if Joe had his way, which, I find myself idly calculating at just under four minutes (rewinding included) would entertain us approximately thirty-three times before Bristol.

  … When you’re near me darling,

  Can’t you hear me,

  SOS!

  And the love you gave me …

  I can’t decide whether the song is audible sponge cake, the softest ever, or a work of pop genius. As we drum along the M4 to relentless Abba, I’m struck again by the arbitrariness of this turn in Joe’s life amid so much clockwork; the day we first brought him to Bristol his hour must have struck thirteen.

  At these moments, routine helps avoid uncomfortable questions: ignore the elephant on the back seat of the mind and just drive; that way argument can be put aside. For Joe, by contrast, quite brutally, there never was argument. What I daren’t do – sink into contemplation of ifs and buts – I suspect Joe cannot do, and so while I seek the absent mindedness of routine as a way of negotiating this moment, Joe cannot but depend on it for his normal compass.

  … I don’t know how but I suddenly lose control

  T
here’s a fire within my soul

  Just one look and I can hear a bell ring

  One more look and I forget everything, o-o-o-oh

  Mama Mia …

  And yet, as I drive, concentrate though I might on getting on with it, one glance at him is all it takes to unstop the speculative thoughts about his thoughts. It comes unbidden to us, this prying into the mental life of others, and my head aches to conceive Joe’s existence, as I imagine it, in an intellectual nutshell, lacking even the knowledge that depth, argument and understanding exist, largely unaware that others have a mental life at all. Like the futile effort to imagine the state of death, I sense the impossibility of sharing such an unearthly perspective. How do you ponder deeply the absence of reflective thought? I think of the hours the rest of us spend every day in calculation, consideration, understanding the normal motivations of life lived amid others, and picture such thoughts whistling past Joe’s lonesome consciousness. So much, in my case, for the bulwark of routine, which is nagged to pieces by instinctive questions.

  For we need to stare deeper into the sink that is Joe’s mind-blindness. It involves a failure fully to understand not just speech – the speech of well-meaning ladies in swimming pools, to take one example – but another failure already hinted at, the failure to understand a great deal of behaviour too, the behaviour of adults who take him from a familiar place and plant him in an alien one, to take another.

  The bitter consequence for Joe is this: in the world he observes, much human action has had meaning rinsed out. The quality that makes other people’s behaviour intelligible, the fact that it is done for a reason – imperfect, irrational, selfish, self-defeating, nasty, hasty though reason and action may sometimes be – the fact that what we do is in our own minds at least the servant of some intention, has been substantially washed from his conception of life. He fully grasps what we intend neither from what we say, nor from what we do. Let’s be clear, this need not be due to lack of intelligence; it is quite specifically a lack of ability to work out what other people think they are up to – in this present case, the reasons for bundling him into the car and returning him to school. I believe that Joe exists within the veneer of thought, rarely penetrating, not strictly through any incapacity for thought or reason, rather from his inability to see that I have a thinking, reasoning consciousness of my own.