An Anthropologist on Mars (1995) (37 page)

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.

In July of 1993, Margaret phoned me, beside herself with excitement. “Stephen’s erupted musical powers”, she announced. “Huge powers! You must come and see him straightaway.” I was startled by her call; I had never known her so excited.

Stephen’s musical talents clearly went back to early childhood, like his artistic talents. Lorraine Cole writes that, even when he was scarcely verbal, he was a natural performer and mime: “His portrayal of an angry man in a restaurant was so spirited and so funny that it was only when we played back the video we had made that we realized he had used no actual words, only a wide range of angry noises. It was then that we understood his capacity for imitating sounds.” This was especially striking after a brief visit to Japan—the sound of the language fascinated him, and when Andrew picked him and Margaret up from Heathrow, Stephen babbled pseudo-Japanese, complete with “Japanese” gestures, to such effect that Andrew almost crashed the car laughing.

It had been clear to all of us, for years, that Stephen had an immense ability to reproduce instrumental sounds, voices, accents, intonations, melodies, rhythms, arias, songs—complete with words or lyrics when need be—an effortlessly large and accurate auditory memory. And, significantly, he liked music, too; it moved him with an almost physical pleasure, almost more, I think, than drawing did.

But Margaret, who knew all this better than I, was obviously referring to something more, to some quite new and unexpected breakthrough. The crucial factor, she had said, had been finding the right music teacher for Stephen (“She’s marvelous, darling!”), and they had struck up an instant rapport. I timed a visit to London to coincide with one of their weekly music lessons and took along my niece Liz Chase, a music teacher and pianist with a very acute ear, skilled in improvisation, analysis, and theory.

Liz and I had been chatting with Evie Preston, his music teacher, for a few minutes when Stephen came in, gustily, at the stroke of twelve. “Hullo, Evie, how are you I am fine”, he said, then, “Hullo Oliver Sacks, how are you?” and, when I introduced my niece, “Hullo Liz Chase, how are you?” He then rushed over to the piano and, under Evie’s bidding, started to play scales, then to sing chords, starting with major triads. He did all this very easily, and gleefully. The idea of thirds, fifths—this Pythagorean, numerical sense of musical intervals—seemed quite innate in Stephen. “I never had to teach him”, Evie remarked.

He seemed hungry for more. “Let’s do sevenths now”, Evie said, and Stephen nodded and chortled as if he had been promised a chocolate.

Next, Evie said, “Now we’ll do the blues—you take the top, I’ll do the bass.” Using only three fingers (it looked ungainly, but worked brilliantly), Stephen now improvised an upper voice, full of intriguing, delightful complications. At first he confined his improvisations to the lower half of one octave, but then became bolder, his improvisations steadily becoming wider ranging, more complex. He did six improvisations in all, rising to a climax in the last one. But, Liz said, “Improvisation is easy, you do it off the top of your head.” If one had the musical intelligence to catch the variational structure, she added, an ability to generate variations was almost automatic, a defining quality of intelligence itself. What she did find remarkable was how Stephen had infused his improvisations with feeling, with something of himself; how he had made them “creative, daring, and dramatically interesting.”

Evie asked Stephen if he would sing “What a Wonderful World.” His singing seemed to be full of genuine feeling, and his gestures while he sang were not his usual stilted, ticlike ones. As soon as the song was over, Evie asked Stephen to analyze it harmonically; to sing and number all the chords. He did so without a moment’s hesitation. “It is clear that he is possessed of quite extraordinary powers of harmonic identification, analysis, and reproduction”, Liz noted. Then Evie gave him an exercise in “interpretation”, as she does every week, playing a theme he had never heard before, Schumann’s “Träumerei.” Stephen listened intently and told us his “associations” as he listened: “It’s about—air in the field, daffodils in springtime—a stream—sunshine—(I love it)—rose gardens—light breezes, fresh—children come out to play with their friends.”

Was Stephen—so lacking in feeling or cut off from it, for the most part—actually feeling these affects and moods? Or had he learned, been taught somehow, to “decode” music, to learn that such-and-such forms were “pastoral” or “vernal”, and as such would have appropriate images? Was this a sort of trick, performed without any real feeling? I mentioned this thought to Evie later, and she told me that at first his associations to music were random or egocentric, strikingly irrelevant to the actual tone of the piece. She then explained what feelings or images “went with” different forms of music, and now he has learned these. But she thinks he also feels them.

Finally, it was time for Stephen to choose a song he wanted to perform. He wanted to do “It’s Not Unusual”, a song much to his liking—a piece on which he could really let himself go. He sang with great enthusiasm, swinging his hips, dancing, gesticulating, miming, clutching an imaginary microphone to his mouth, addressing himself in imagination to a vast arena. “It’s Not Unusual” has become the theme song of Tom Jones, and in his version, Stephen took on Jones’s flamboyant physicality, adding to it a flavor of Stevie Wonder. He seemed completely at one with the music, completely possessed—and at this point there was none of the skewed neck posture that is habitual with him, none of the stiltedness, the ticcing, the aversion of gaze. His entire autistic persona, it seemed, had totally vanished, replaced by movements that were free, graceful, with emotional appropriateness and range. Very startled at this transformation, I wrote in large capitals in my notebook, “AUTISM DISAPPEARS.” But as soon as the music stopped, Stephen looked autistic once again.

Until now, it had seemed to be part of Stephen’s nature, part of being autistic, to be defective precisely in that range of emotions and states of mind that defines a “self” for the rest of us. And yet in the music he seemed to have been “given” these, to have “borrowed” an identity—though these were lost the moment the music ended.