An Anthropologist on Mars (1995) (41 page)

Finally, without diffidence or embarrassment (emotions unknown to her), Temple showed me her bedroom, an austere room with whitewashed walls and a single bed and, next to the bed, a very large, strange-looking object. “What is that?” I asked.

“That’s my squeeze machine”, Temple replied. “Some people call it my hug machine.”

The device had two heavy, slanting wooden sides, perhaps four by three feet each, pleasantly upholstered with a thick, soft padding. They were joined by hinges to a long, narrow bottom board to create a V-shaped, body-sized trough. There was a complex control box at one end, with heavy-duty tubes leading off to another device, in a closet. Temple showed me this as well. “It’s an industrial compressor”, she said, “the kind they use for filling tires.”

“And what does this do?”

“It exerts a firm but comfortable pressure on the body, from the shoulders to the knees”, Temple said. “Either a steady pressure or a variable one or a pulsating one, as you wish, ” she added. “You crawl into it—I’ll show you—and turn the compressor on, and you have all the controls in your hand, here, right in front of you.”

When I asked her why one should seek to submit oneself to such pressure, she told me. When she was a little girl, she said, she had longed to be hugged but had at the same time been terrified of all contact. When she was hugged, especially by a favorite (but vast) aunt, she felt overwhelmed, overcome by sensation; she had a sense of peacefulness and pleasure, but also of terror and engulfment. She started to have daydreams—she was just five at the time—of a magic machine that could squeeze her powerfully but gently, in a huglike way, and in a way entirely commanded and controlled by her. Years later, as an adolescent, she had seen a picture of a squeeze chute designed to hold or restrain calves and realized that that was it: a little modification to make it suitable for human use, and it could be her magic machine. She had considered other devices—inflatable suits, which could exert an even pressure all over the body—but the squeeze chute, in its simplicity, was quite irresistible.

Being of a practical turn of mind, she soon made her fantasy come true. The early models were crude, with some snags and glitches, but she eventually evolved a totally comfortable, predictable system, capable of administering a “hug” with whatever parameters she desired. Her squeeze machine had worked exactly as she hoped, yielding the very sense of calmness and pleasure she had dreamed of since childhood. She could not have gone through the stormy days of college without her squeeze machine, she said. She could not turn to human beings for solace and comfort, but she could always turn to it. The machine, which she neither exhibited nor concealed but kept openly in her room at college, excited derision and suspicion and was seen by psychiatrists as a “regression” or “fixation”—something that needed to be psychoanalyzed and resolved. With her characteristic stubbornness, tenacity, single-mindedness, and bravery—along with a complete absence of inhibition or hesitation—Temple ignored all these comments and reactions and determined to find a scientific “validation” of her feelings.

Both before and after writing her doctoral thesis, she made a systematic investigation of the effects of deep pressure in autistic people, college students, and animals, and recently a paper of hers on this was published in the Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychopharmacology. Today, her squeeze machine, variously modified, is receiving extensive clinical trials. She has also become the world’s foremost designer of squeeze chutes for cattle and has published, in the meat-industry and veterinary literature, many articles on the theory and practice of humane restraint and gentle holding.

While telling me this, Temple knelt down, then eased herself, facedown and at full length, into the “V”, turned on the compressor (it took a minute for the master cylinder to fill), and twisted the controls. The sides converged, clasping her firmly, and then, as she made a small adjustment, relaxed their grip slightly. It was the most bizarre thing I had ever seen, and yet, for all its oddness, it was moving and simple. Certainly there was no doubt of its effect. Temple’s voice, often loud and hard, became softer and gentler as she lay in her machine. “I concentrate on how gently I can do it”, she said, and then spoke of the necessity of “totally giving in to it—I’m getting real relaxed now”, she added quietly. “I guess others get this through relation with other people.”

It is not just pleasure or relaxation that Temple gets from the machine but, she maintains, a feeling for others. As she lies in her machine, she says, her thoughts often turn to her mother, her favorite aunt, her teachers. She feels their love for her, and hers for them. She feels that the machine opens a door into an otherwise closed emotional world and allows her, almost teaches her, to feel empathy for others.

After twenty minutes or so, she emerged, visibly calmer, emotionally less rigid (she says that a cat can easily sense the difference in her at these times), and asked me if I would care to try the machine.

Indeed, I was curious and scrambled into it, feeling a little foolish and self-conscious—but less so than I might have been, because Temple herself was so wholly lacking in self-consciousness. She turned the compressor on again and filled the master cylinder, and I experimented gingerly with the controls. It was indeed a sweet, calming feeling—one that reminded me of my deep-diving days long ago, when I felt the pressure of the water on my diving suit as a whole-body embrace.

After my own trial in the squeeze machine, and with both of us suitably relaxed, we drove out to the university’s experimental farm, where Temple does much of her basic fieldwork. I had earlier thought there might be a separation, even a gulf, between the personal—and, so to speak, private—realm of her autism and the public realm of her professional expertise. But it was becoming increasingly clear to me that they were hardly separated at all; for her, the personal and the professional, the inward and the outward, were completely fused.

“Cattle are disturbed by the same sorts of sounds as autistic people—high-pitched sounds, air hissing, or sudden loud noises; they cannot adapt to these”, Temple told me. “But they are not bothered by low-pitched, rumbling noises. They are disturbed by high visual contrasts, shadows or sudden movements. A light touch will make them pull away, a firm touch calms them. The way I would pull away from being touched is the way a wild cow will pull away—getting me used to being touched is very similar to taming a wild cow.” It was precisely her sense of the common ground (in terms of basic sensations and feelings) between animals and people that allowed her to show such sensitivity to animals, and to insist so forcefully on their humane management.

She had been primed to this knowledge, she felt, partly through the experience of her own autism and partly because she came from a long line of farmers and, as a child, had spent much of her time on farms. And her own mode of thinking allowed her no escape from these realities. “If you’re a visual thinker, it’s easier to identify with animals”, she said as we drove to the farm. “If all your thought processes are in language, how could you imagine that cattle think? But if you think in pictures—”

Temple has always been a powerful visualizer. She was astonished when she discovered that her own near-hallucinatory power of visual imagery was not universal—that there were others who, apparently, had other ways to think. She is still very puzzled by this. “How do you think?” she kept asking me. But she had no sense that she could draw, make blueprints, until she was twenty-eight, when she met a draftsman and watched him drawing plans. “I saw how he did it”, she told me. “I went and got exactly the same instruments and pencils as he used—a point-five-millimeter HB pencel—and then I started pretending I was him. The drawing did itself, and when it was all done I couldn’t believe I’d done it. I didn’t have to learn how to draw or design, I pretended I was David—I appropriated him, drawing and all.”
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108. At first it seemed, from what Temple told me, that the “appropriated” David, and his skill, had been swallowed whole, existed only as a sort of implant or foreign body within her and was only slowly integrated to become part of her. Another gifted (and poetic) autistic woman has compared herself, in this regard, to a boa constrictor, swallowing entire animals whole, but only very slowly being able to assimilate them. Sometimes the swallowed role or skill seems not to be properly assimilated or integrated and may be lost or expelled as suddenly as it was acquired—thus the tendency (especially marked in younger autistic savants) to engulf complex skills or personas or masses of information wholesale, to juggle with these for a while, and then suddenly to relinquish or forget them with such completeness that they seem to pass through without leaving any residue whatever (such unincorporated behaviors and convulsive mimeses are sometimes seen in people with severe Tourette’s syndrome).

Much more complex are the situations where behaviors, and indeed entire personas, are retained as a sort of pseudopersonality. The taking on of exaggerated, stereotypic, almost cartoonlike sexual demeanors (mimicked or caricatured from comic strips or soap operas on TV) is sometimes seen in adolescents with autism. Donna Williams, in her fascinating personal narratives (Nobody Nowhere and Somebody Somewhere) describes how she “adopted” two personas, Carol and Willie, and thought and spoke through them, in the many years when she had only a rudimentary identity herself.

Temple constantly runs “simulations”, as she calls them, in her head: “I visualize the animal entering the chute, from different angles, different distances, zooming in or wide angle, even from a helicopter view—or I turn myself into an animal, and feel what it would feel entering the chute.”

But if one thinks only in pictures, I could not help reflecting, one might not understand what nonvisual thinking was like, and one would miss the richness and ambiguity, the cultural presuppositions, the depth, of language. All autistics, Temple had said earlier, were intensely visual thinkers, like her. If this was true, was it, I wondered, more than a coincidence? Was Temple’s intense visuality a vital clue to her autism?

A cattle farm, even a large one, is often a quiet place, but when we arrived we could hear a great tumult of bellowing. “They must have separated the calves from the cows this morning”, Temple said, and, indeed, this was what had happened. We saw one cow outside the stockade, roaming, looking for her calf, and bellowing. “That’s not a happy cow”, Temple said. “That’s one sad, unhappy, upset cow. She wants her baby. Bellowing for it, hunting for it. She’ll forget for a while, then start again. It’s like grieving, mourning—not much written about it. People don’t like to allow them thoughts or feelings. Skinner wouldn’t allow them.”

As an undergraduate in New Hampshire, she had written to B.F. Skinner, the great behaviorist, and finally she had visited him. “It was like having an audience with God”, she said. “It was a letdown. He was just a regular human being. He said, ‘We don’t have to know how the brain works—it’s just a matter of conditioned reflexes.’ No way I could believe it was just stimulus-response.” The Skinner era, Temple concluded, was one that denied feelings to animals and rationalized regarding them as automata; it was an era of exceptional cruelty, both in animal experimentation and in the management of farms and slaughterhouses. She had read somewhere that behaviorism was an uncaring science, and this was exactly how she herself felt about it. Her own aspiration was to bring a vivid sense of animals’ feelings back into husbandry.

Seeing the grieving cow and hearing the bereft bellows angered Temple and turned her mind toward inhumanities in slaughter. She had nothing to do with chickens, she said, but the killing of chickens was particularly loathsome. “When it’s time for chickens to go to McNuggetland, they pick ‘em up, hang ‘em upside down, cut their throats.” A similar shackling of cattle, and hanging them upside down so that the blood rushes to their heads before their throats are cut, is a common sight in old kosher slaughterhouses, she said. “Sometimes their legs get broken, they scream in pain and terror.” Mercifully, such practices are now starting to change. Properly performed, “slaughter is more humane than nature”, she went on. “Eight seconds after the throat’s cut, endorphins are released; the animal dies without pain. It is similar in nature, after sheep have been ripped up by coyotes. Nature has done this to ease the pain of a dying animal.” What is terrible, the more so because it is avoidable, she feels, is pain and cruelty, the introduction of fear and stress before the lethal cutting; and it is this that she is most concerned to prevent. “I want to reform the meat industry. The activists want to shut it down”, she said, and added, “I don’t like radical anything, left or right. I have a radical dislike of radicals.”

Away from the bellowing of the separated calves and mothers, whose distress Temple seemed to feel in her bones, we found a calm, quiet area of the farm, where cattle were browsing placidly. Temple knelt and held out some hay, and a cow came over to her and took the hay, nudging her hand with its soft muzzle. A soft, happy look came over Temple’s face. “Now I’m at home”, she said. “When I’m with cattle, it’s not at all cognitive. I know what the cow’s feeling.”

The cattle seemed to sense this, sensed her calm, her confidence, and came up to her hand. They did not come up to me, sensing, perhaps, the unease of the city dweller, who, living mostly in a world of cultural conventions and signals, is unsure how to behave with huge, nonverbal animals.

“It’s different with people”, she went on, repeating her earlier remark about feeling like an anthropologist on Mars. “Studying the people there, trying to figure out the natives. But I don’t feel like that with animals.”

I was struck by the enormous difference, the gulf, between Temple’s immediate, intuitive recognition of animal moods and signs and her extraordinary difficulties understanding human beings, their codes and signals, the way they conduct themselves. One cannot say that she is devoid of feeling or has a fundamental lack of sympathy. On the contrary, her sense of animals’ moods and feelings is so strong that these almost take possession of her, overwhelm her at times. She feels she can have sympathy for what is physical or physiological—for an animal’s pain or terror—but lacks empathy for people’s states of mind and perspectives.
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