An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales

by Oliver Sacks

  [If] there exists—only a composite of individual capabilities which are so independent from each other—L. should have theoretically been able to become a proficient musician and mathematician—Since this contradicts the facts of the case, we have to explain [why he did not]—despite his “interests” and “training.”

  He did not, they conclude, because, for all his impressive and real talents, there was something else, something global, irremediably missing:

  L. suffers from an impairment of abstract attitude affecting his total behaviour throughout. This expresses itself in the linguistic sphere by his “inability” to understand or to use language in its symbolic or conceptual meaning; to grasp or formulate properties of objects in the abstract—to raise the question “why” regarding real happenings, to deal with fictitious situations, to comprehend their rationale—The same impairment underlies his lack of social awareness and of curiosity in people, his limited values; his inability to register or absorb anything of the socio-cultural and interhuman matrix around him—The same impairment to abstract is evidenced in his [savant] performance—[which] cannot be lifted out of its concrete context for reflection and verbalization—Owing to his impaired abstract attitude, L. cannot develop his endowment, actively and creatively—[It remains] abnormally concrete, specific and sterile; it cannot become integrated with a broader meaning of the subject, nor with social insight—[It] approaches rather a caricature of a normal talent.

  If Goldstein’s formulations about idiot savants and autism are generally valid, and if Stephen is indeed lacking, or relatively lacking, in abstract attitude, how much of an identity, or a self, might he be able to acquire? What power of reflective consciousness might be possible for him? To what extent can he learn or be influenced by personal or cultural contact? To what extent can he make such contact? How much can he develop a genuine sensibility or style? How much is any personal (as opposed to technical) development possible for him? What might be the resonances of all this for his art? These and many other questions, which one encounters with the paradox of an immense talent attached to a relatively rudimentary mind and identity, become sharper in the light of Goldstein’s considerations.

  In October 1991, I met Stephen in San Francisco. I was struck by how much he had changed since I last saw him—now seventeen, he was taller, handsomer, and his voice deeper. He was excited to be in San Francisco and kept describing the scenes he had seen on television of the 1989 earthquake, in short, haiku-like phrases: “Bridges snapped. Cars crushed. Gas bursting. Hydrants flowing. Gaps opening. People flying.”

  On the first day, we climbed to the top of Pacific Heights. Stephen started drawing Broderick Street, which snakes up to the top of the hill. He looked around vaguely while he was drawing, but was mostly engrossed in listening to his Walkman. We had asked him earlier why Broderick snaked, instead of going straight up. He could not say, or see, that it was because of its steepness, and when Margaret said “steep” to him, he just repeated it, echolalically. He still seemed clearly retarded or cognitively defective.

  As we walked, we came upon a sudden enchanting revelation of the bay, dotted with ships, and with Alcatraz set like a gem in the middle. But, for a moment, I did not “see” this, I did not see a scene at all, just an intricate pattern of many colors, a highly abstract, uncategorized mass of sensations. Was this how Stephen saw it?

  Stephen’s favorite building in San Francisco was the Transamerica Pyramid. When I asked him why, he said, “Its shape”, and then, with an uncertain air, “It’s a triangle, an isosceles triangle—I like that!” I was struck by the fact that Stephen, with his often primitive language, should use the word “isosceles”—though it is typical of autistic people, sometimes in early childhood, that they may acquire geometrical concepts and terms to a far greater degree than personal or social ones. 101

  101. Freeman Dyson, who has known Jessy Park since she was a child, remarks:

  I’ve always felt she was the closest I would ever come to an alien intelligence. Autistic children are so strange and so different from us—and yet you can communicate; there are many things you can talk with her about—[But] she has no concept of her own identity, she doesn’t understand the difference between “you” and “I”—she uses pronouns almost indiscriminately. And so her universe is radically different from mine. Concrete social relations are for her very, very difficult to comprehend. On the other hand, with anything abstract, she has no trouble. So mathematics, of course, is no problem for her, and we can talk very easily about mathematics—I think autism comes about as close as possible to the central problem of exploring the neurological basis of personality. Because these are people whose intelligence is intact, but something at the center is missing.

  He has very little explicit understanding of autism—this came out in an unlikely incident on Polk Street. We had, by a million-to-one chance, got behind a car with a license plate that spelled “autism.” I pointed it out to Stephen. “What does that say?” I asked. He spelled it out, laboriously, “A-U-T-I-S-M-2.”

  “Yes”, I said, “and that reads?”

  “U—U—Utism”, he stuttered.

  “Almost, not quite. Not utism—autism. What is autism?”

  “It’s what’s on that license plate”, he answered, and I could get no further.

  Clearly, he recognizes that he is different, that he is special. He has a veritable passion for Rain Man and, one must suspect, identifies with the Dustin Hoffman character, perhaps the only autistic hero ever widely portrayed. He has the entire soundtrack of the film on tape and plays it continually on his Walkman. Indeed, he can recite large portions of the dialogue, taking every part, with perfect intonation. (His preoccupation with the film and his constant playing of the cassette have not distracted him at all from his art—he can draw wonderfully even though his attention seems to be elsewhere—but it has made him far less accessible to conversation and social contact.)

  Going along with Stephen’s obsession with Rain Man is his fervent desire to visit Las Vegas. He wanted, when we got there, to spend time in a casino, as Rain Man had, and not, in his usual way, to see the buildings in town. So we spent a single night there and then, in a 1991 Lincoln Continental, set out across the desert, for Arizona. “He would have preferred a 1972 Chevrolet Impala”, Margaret told me, but this, to Stephen’s disappointment, was not available.

  We pulled up to a parking lot near the Grand Canyon—part of the canyon was visible from here, but Stephen’s attention was immediately distracted by the other cars in the lot. When I asked what he thought of the canyon, he said, “It’s very, very nice, a very nice scene.”

  “What does it remind you of?”

  “Like buildings, architecture”, Stephen answered.

  We found a spot for Stephen to draw the North Rim of the canyon. He started to draw, less fluently and assuredly, perhaps, than he would draw a building; but he seemed to extract the basic architecture of the rocks nonetheless. “You’re a genius, Stephen”, Margaret remarked.

  Stephen nodded, smiled. “Ya, ya.”

  Knowing Stephen’s love of aerial views, we decided to fly over the Grand Canyon in a helicopter. Stephen was excited and kept craning his head in all directions as we flew low through the canyon, skimming the North Rim, and then higher and higher to get a bird’s-eye view of the whole. Our pilot kept talking about the geology and history of the canyon, but Stephen ignored him, and, I think, saw only shapes—lines, boundaries, shadows, shadings, colors, perspectives. And I, sitting next to him, following his gaze, started, I imagined, to see it through his eyes, relinquishing my own intellectual knowledge of the rock strata below, and seeing them in purely visual terms. Stephen had no scientific knowledge or interest, could not, I suspect, have grasped any of the concepts of geology, and yet such was the force of his perceptual power, his visual sympathy, that he would be able to get, and later draw, the canyon’s geological features with absolute precision, and with a selectivity not to be obtained
in any photograph. He would get the canyon’s feel, its essence, as he had got the essence of the Matisse.

  We set out across the desert once again, and as we climbed toward Flagstaff, the saguaros grew rarer—the last one, a bold loner, stood out at twenty-eight hundred feet. The bleak Bradshaw Range, where silver and gold were found in the eighties, rose to our left. We entered a flat plain covered with prickly pear, with occasional cattle roaming. Horses and burros, and occasionally pronghorn antelope, still roam these plains. The San Francisco Peaks floated high, like vast ships, on the horizon.

  “Very nice landscape to put motorcars into”, Stephen remarked. (He had earlier drawn a big green Buick against a backdrop of Monument Valley.) I was amused—and outraged: faced with the sublimest, grandest vista on the planet, Stephen could only think to put motorcars into it!

  While I scribbled, Stephen drew cacti; he had seized on them as an emblem of the West, as he had seized on gondolas for Venice, skyscrapers for New York. An animal, probably a rabbit, darted across the road in front of us. Something got into me, and impulsively I cried, “Coypu!” Stephen was taken by the word, its acoustic contours, and repeated it with obvious pleasure a number of times.

  The Arizona trip showed us that Stephen could get desert, canyons, cacti, natural scenes, in the same uncanny way as he could get buildings and cities. Most startling of all, perhaps, was an afternoon at the Canyon de Chelly, which Stephen descended with a Navajo artist, who showed him a special, sacred vantage point from which to draw and plied him with the myths and history of his people, how they had lived in the canyon centuries before. Stephen was indifferent to all this but went ahead in his nonchalant way—looking around, muttering and humming to himself—while the Navajo artist sat, hardly moving, consecrated to the act of drawing. And yet, despite their so different attitudes, Stephen’s drawing was manifestly the better and seemed (even to the Navajo artist) to communicate the strange mystery and sacredness of the place. Stephen himself seems almost devoid of any spiritual feeling; nonetheless he had caught, with his infallible eye and hand, the physical expression of what we, the rest of us, call the “sacred.”

  Did Stephen somehow imbibe a sense of the sacred and project this into his drawing, or do we, looking at his drawing, project this ourselves? There was often disagreement between Margaret and myself as to what Stephen actually felt, as with the wedding music at the monastery in Leningrad. But here, in the Canyon de Chelly, our roles were reversed: Margaret felt that Stephen had indeed been awed by the sacredness of the place, while I was skeptical. This deep uncertainty about what Stephen actually thinks and feels comes up constantly, with everyone who knows him.

  I sometimes wondered whether “emotion” or “emotional response” might be radically different in Stephen: no less intense, but somehow more localized than in the rest of us—object-bound, scene-bound, event-bound, without ever coalescing or extending into anything more general, without becoming a part of him. I sometimes felt that he picked up the mood or the atmosphere of places, people, scenes, by a sort of instant sympathy or mimicry, rather than through what would usually be called a sensibility. Thus he might echo, or reproduce, or reflect, the world’s beauties, yet not have any “aesthetic sense.” He might resonate to the “holy” atmosphere in the Canyon de Chelly, or in the monastery, and yet not have any “religious” sense of his own.

  Dack in our hotel, in Phoenix, I heard sounds of wind instruments coming from Stephen’s room, next door. I knocked at his door and entered—Stephen was alone, his hands cupped around his mouth. “What was that?” I asked.

  “A clarinet”, he said, and then did a tuba, a saxophone, a trumpet, and a nose-flute, all with uncanny accuracy.

  I returned to my room, thinking about Stephen’s disposition and power to reproduce, its many levels, and how it dominated his life. As a child he had shown echolalia when spoken to, echoing the last word or two of whatever other people said, and this still occurred, typically when he was tired or regressed. Echolalia carries no emotion, no intentionality, no “tone” whatever—it is purely automatic and may even occur during sleep. Stephen’s “coypu” the day before was more complex than this, for he had savored the sound, the peculiar emphasis I gave it, but did it in his own way, an imitation, with variations. Then, at a still higher level, there was his reproduction of Rain Man, in which he reproduced or represented entire characters, their interactions, conversations, and voices. He often seemed nourished and stimulated by these, but at other times taken over, possessed and dispossessed, by them.

  Such a “possession” may occur at many levels and may also be seen in people with postencephalitic syndromes or Tourette’s syndrome. An automatic mimicry can occur in these, a reflection of a low-level physiological force overriding a normal mind and personality. Such a force may determine the more automatic aspects of autistic mimicry, too. But there may also be, at higher levels, a sort of identity hunger—a need to take off, take on, take in, other personas. Mira Rothenberg has sometimes compared autistic people, in this sense, to sieves, constantly sucking in other identities but unable to retain and assimilate them. Yet, she points out, after thirty-five years of experience, she still feels there is always a real self that she can connect to in the autistic.

  Our last morning in Phoenix, I was up at seven-thirty, watching the sunrise from my hotel-room balcony. I heard a cheery “Hullo, Oliver!” and there was Stephen on an adjacent balcony.

  “Wonderful day”, he said, and then, holding his yellow camera, snapped me as I smiled back from my balcony. This seemed such a friendly, personal act—it would stay in my mind as our farewell to Arizona. As we walked outside, he went over to the cacti: “Bye, Saguaro! Bye, Barrel! Bye, Prickly Pear, see you next time!”

  The paradox of Stephen’s art was sharpened for me, but without resolution, by this trip. Margaret was constantly delighted by his work and would hug him and say, “Stephen! You give such delight! You have no idea how much pleasure you give!” Stephen would give his goofy smile and chortle—but Margaret was right. He did, through his drawings, bring others great pleasure, and yet it was not clear that they were associated in him with any emotion whatever, other than the pleasure of a faculty being exercised and used.

  At one point on our Arizona trip, stopping at a Dairy Queen, Stephen ogled two girls sitting at a table and was so fascinated by them, indeed, that he forgot to go to the rest room. In some ways, he is a normal adolescent boy; neither his autism nor his savantism precludes this. Later, he went up to the girls—he is not unpersonable on first impression. But he spoke to them in a manner so inappropriate and childlike that they looked at each other, giggled, and then ignored him. Adolescence, both physical and psychological, perhaps slightly belated, now seems to be rushing ahead with great speed. Suddenly, Stephen has developed a strong interest in his appearance, his clothes, rock music, and girls. He never seemed to notice mirrors when he was younger, Margaret said, but now he is always checking himself, preening before them. He has developed very decided tastes in clothing: “I like western-style jeans, light blue, garment washed, and shirts—and black western boots.”

  “What do you think of Oliver’s shoes?” Margaret asked archly on one occasion.

  “Boring”, he said, throwing a glance at them. Very little social life, as yet, is possible for Stephen. He meets people, superficially, but does not know how to talk with them and has few friends or real relationships outside his own family or the Hewsons. He is very close to his sister, Annette, and can be affectionate to her. He feels himself the man of the house, a protector of his mother; and he feels that Margaret is very much a protector of himself. But for the most part he is thrown back on his drawings, and on increasingly charged and detailed daydreams.

  The world that really excites Stephen at this point is that of “Beverly Hills, 90210”, a television show he adores. Last year, I asked him about it: “I love Jennie Garth”, he said. “She’s the coolest girl in L.A. She’s got red lipstick—She’s twenty-
one years old. She’s from Illinois. She’s in ‘Beverly Hills, 90210.’ I fell in love with Jennie Garth. It started in 1991, I think. She plays Kelley Taylor. She always wears jeans and western-style shirts and bodysuits.” It is not just Jennie Garth but the entire cast of the show that Stephen is in love with, and whom he now incorporates in more and more elaborate fantasies. “I collect their pictures”, he said. “I sent them several drawings.” Now he wants to design a penthouse for them on Park Avenue. They will all live together, and he will live with them, as “artist-in-residence.” He will decide who may visit them and who may not. In the evening, after they have worked all day, they will all eat out together or have a picnic in the penthouse. He has drawings of all this.

  He has also been making fantasy sexy drawings of girls; Margaret discovered this by accident one day, while they were traveling, when she wandered into his hotel room and found a drawing by his bed. His other drawings—even the grandest ones, which he has spent days making—he is almost indifferent to; they can get lost or damaged, and he scarcely cares. But the sexy drawings are manifestly different; he seems to feel these as his own and keeps them in the privacy of his room—he would not think of showing them to anyone. They are wholly different from his other drawings, his commissioned work, for they are an expression of his inner life and dreams and needs, of his emotional and personal identity; whereas the architectural drawings, however dazzlingly accomplished, are not intended as anything more than likenesses, reproductions.

  Stephen’s interest in girls, his fantasies of them, all seem very normal, very adolescent in a way, and yet they are marked by a childishness, a naïveté that reflects his deep lack of human and social knowledge. It is difficult to imagine him dating, much less enjoying a deep personal or sexual relationship. These things, one suspects, may never be possible for him. I wonder whether he feels this, or feels sad about it sometimes.