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7:33am March 15, 2013
This is a response to Twocentsormore about finding someone whose mind works opposite to one’s own. The picture and the following excerpt are by Eric Chen, an autistic man who had a very word-centered intellect and way of comprehending the world from an early age. I always considered him rather polar opposite to my way of understanding things. It’s one of many reasons I often see the exact opposite of one sort of an autistic person, is not a nonautistic person, but another autistic person, configured differently. ======= Word World Once there was a boy, who lived in the world of words Words were what matters, the only thing that matters Whereas other children lived in the world of experience Where experience is what matters, not words When the boy wanders around, he sees words Everything around him must have a word, or it would seem empty A vacuum, showing his removal from reality, is terrifying to him Just as nature abhors a vacuum, the boy tries his best to name all things Like a young God inspecting his creations, he feels a great urge To bring all he sees into his world, using the power of the word He declares “Let there be roses”, and there were roses His word made flesh within his world When I see a rose, it becomes r-o-s-e to me This rose word becomes part of me I know “rose” is “rose”, no matter what happens What rose means does not matter – only its name I can hold Clouds I cannot hold, the sun I cannot hold But “clouds” my mind can hold, and “sun” is even easier to hold Easily I can hold everything with the power of words All things become clear to me in words But on the 7th day, I do not rest There is no way I can rest with so many more things to name This I declare is a turvy-topsy, that I declare is a water-windy I can’t finish, so I keep making more words up What I hear is unreliable – sometimes it is there, sometimes not I cannot know if it is kept silent What I see is unreliable – everything changes all the time I cannot know if there is no light What I feel is unreliable – my body does not touch everything I cannot know it if I cannot touch it now What I smell is unreliable – few things give off a good smell I cannot know it when my nose is runny What I taste is unreliable – I have to put it in my mouth I cannot know it if the grown-ups don’t let me do it All the five senses are totally unreliable Only the mind is reliable, staying with me all the time, I rely solely on it “Is a rose by any other name a rose?” “Yes,” says the normal child. “The grownups call it funny-melons, but I know it is still the same. When I hold it, its thorns hurt my finger. I can smell this special rose smell. It is a rose.” “No,” says the autistic child (if he can talk). “Rose is rose. It has a nice wavy movement. I keep the word. Other things don’t matter. ‘Rose’ is.” Day breaks, and the sunshine-word prickles his hand-word. Words, everything is just words. When the boy sees a cupboard, he does not see the form. He sees the word “cupboard”. The form is merely incidental. The word is the essence of all things. A cat-word runs around playfully outside. This is a flurry-word. Sometimes this word moves around a lot, sometimes it does not. Sometimes it is orange with striped and sometimes it is black. It likes the mouse-word and the fish-word. It always goes around with the play-word. This word sometimes makes sneeze-word, so I have to pull a lot of tissue-words and make loud trumpet-words. It makes bite-words if I tickle it near its middle, somewhere between “ca” and “t”. CAT – a flurry-word I like. My word-hand picks up a Lego-brick-word. It contains green-word and some protruding small circle-words on top of it. Like a salad word, I can put it together. There is a wooden-block-word with the alphabet-word A on it. Boring-word. I cannot make it do stick-word with others like it. I move my word-body around the place with my word-legs. Teacher-word calls me Albert-word, but sometimes people-word calls me boy-word. People-word says that I like to look at sky-word and ask me what I see. What can I say? Sky-word has star-word, cloud-word, sun-word and moon-word, but there is no word when I look. I have no word to give them. This is the strange world of an autistic boy who lives only in words. So much like our normal world and yet so different. Word-world is like Alice in Wonderland, strange and exotic. When he sees a dog, he sees a dog-word showering him with moving-tail-words from its tail and growling-words from its mouth with sharp-teeth-word. When he falls into a puddle, he sees water-word dripping from his hair-word and face-word, and wet-shirt-word having the same word as the mud-word that body-word just fell into. He goes to word-class and sees word-teacher pointing characters-word on whiteboard-word. Teacher-word shows a new word - “happy”. What is happy-word? Happy-word does not seem to jump or move; it is not solid. Teacher-word explains happy-word is when you get what you want and feel happy. What is feel-word? Feel-word cannot be found in word world. Cannot hold feel-word in hand and eyes cannot see feel-word. There is no such word in my world, don’t know what it is. Teacher-word ask what is happy-word, my feel-word comes to answer question-word. Teacher-word says do join-word with friend-words to do happy-word with play-word. What is friend-word? Friend-word is not there. Friend-word is strange-moving-word that toss ball-word to me-word. Friend-words say me-word must do play-word. What is play-word? Play-word has no color at all. Play-word is not known like sky-word. Play-word has cannot be held with word-hand like mouse-word. I do not see what art-word is and religion-word means, but when people-word ask me, my dictionary-word gives them answer-words to stop them from making confusion-words. I like dictionary-word because it has many nice words teacher-word likes to hear. I do not hold what is intelligent-word and wisdom-word, but I can collect words from other word collections to tell people-word what word goes with what other words. People-word say I am smart-word. I do not know why but it seems like good-word, so I should continue wording this way. How I can be Mum-word, Sally-word, or other word? I am me-word, I cannot be more than one word and I cannot be another word. What kind of word can be two words when they do not belong to “two word” at all? I do not know weird words like this. I only know words that I can find in me. I do not know why word people cannot see my words. I dream of word world, where all words are living creatures who talk to me. The dictionary is a zoo I never get tired of visiting. It has many new species of words that I keep and share with other people. Sometimes I feed these words to make them bigger, sometimes I break them up. Sometimes I put them together to make a new word-baby. I even make my own words. Other people do not see word-world. They think word-people like us have a rigid obsession with words and categories. How blind of them not to see the beauty of words! ======= (from Mirror Mind by Eric Chen) This post is a response to Twocentsormore who describes finding someone whose way of viewing the world is the opposite of theirs. Unlike what they’ve found, the art and writing above is completely sincere, written by an autistic man to describe the way he saw things in childhood. This was the most extreme writing I ever found that depicted the opposite of how my brain works. It’s interesting to me that he depicts it as a nonautistic trait to see the world outside of words. It’s more like a trait outside of his variant of autism. While nonautistic children will (somewhat, anyway) see a rose as the same regardless of words, many autistic people will as well. And many autistic people will actually be less influenced by a renaming of a rose to “snotflower” or something else distasteful, than many nonautistic people will be. It also interests me that some autistic people who grow up to hang tightly onto words as the only thing they understand, had huge receptive language delays much as I did. Jim Sinclair and Sue Rubin are examples. However somehow others (like me, as well as Anne Corwin and Donna Williams), no matter how proficient we become at writing or speaking, still see words as totally alien to our way of understanding the world. To me, words are an unpleasant necessary evil. I have always seen the world in a deeply sensory and otherwise non-linguistic manner, as described in my article Plants Outside the Shade: http://autisticadvocacy.org/2012/04/plants-outside-the-shade/ “Autism means that my earliest memories are of floating in among the feel of things. Not how they looked or sounded, but how they felt. Words don’t exist for the hundreds if not thousands of variants on this. A way of perceiving the world that has remained dominant for me even after sensory input became stronger and, later, words and ideas. It’s the foundation that I always start from when I climb up the cliffs, day after day, that allow me to use words and ideas and move and understand what is around me. And no matter how high I climb, that underlying way of experiencing the world is still there.” So the way I best understand the world has remained some kind of combination of pre-rational experiences involving sensory aspects of the world and pre-sensory “feel” that I can barely describe at all. And the patterns (using the word in a non-logical way) formed between these experiences. While I’ve developed word and idea based thinking, the other way has always remained beneath it as the more solid and comprehensible way to think and perceive. Making me and those like me the direct opposite of people whose dominant way of thinking and experiencing is words – so dominant that the world outside words baffles them or is even totally invisible. The same is true for those who depend on ideas, which are much like words. Even Temple Grandin’s visual thinking, while not the word-based thinking I describe, is more abstract than my native mode of thinking. I can do words, ideas, abstractions, but I can’t live there. Jim Sinclair wasn’t always a person who was dominated by words in xyr understanding of the world. Xe spent twelve years even learning the purpose of language, and only after then switched into language as the place xe understands the world from. Sue Rubin’s receptive language delay was even more extreme. Perhaps that is why both of their writing feels familiar to me despite their later dependence on words. But Eric Chen depended on words from a very young age. Depended on them for his whole understanding of the world. And perhaps that is one reason that, while I find his writing interesting – I love to learn about minds so different from my own – I also find it incredibly difficult to read. He has had trouble processing others’ language, but has from a very young age used language exclusively to understand the world. And his writing cuts me like knives. He has no intent of violence that I’m aware of. It’s the effect of such a purely word-based intellect communicating with someone for whom words are only tools grudgingly used. To me the world is made up of things you can sense, and his writing gives me nothing to sense, not even between the lines, just the sharp corners of words and ideas used with so little direct experience added in. He has learned some things about direct experience, but only in the way I’ve learned about words – it hasn’t penetrated to his core, despite making large changes for him as learning the meaning of words has for me. We are still more where we came from than where we have gone, it seems, even if traveling away from home has enriched our lives, home is still home. And I’ve rarely seen writing that my mind tries so frantically to reject as his. This isn’t an insult to his writing. It’s an acknowledgement that some bridges between very different minds can’t be crossed easily. I find him interesting because of that difference but unfortunately I also find reading him rather painstaking. It’s funny too. It’s not what’s in the words. It’s not whether they reference sensory things regularly or not. Especially since many sensory things are hard to reference. It’s something that goes on in between the words. Something that shows where the person is coming from. I often find it easy to read things by someone like Anne Corwin, even if her language looks abstract at the surface sometimes. Because in between the words is the knowledge of where she comes from, the sensory place she calls home. And an entirely word based person can try to sound concrete and sensory, but still feel abstract and sharp like knives. People who’ve truly moved from one place to the other may retain aspects of both, or one or the other, depending. Anyway just typing this out has hurt my brain a bit and I wanted to go back to sleep. But I wanted to respond to Twocentsormore before I forgot.

This is a response to Twocentsormore about finding someone whose mind works opposite to one’s own. The picture and the following excerpt are by Eric Chen, an autistic man who had a very word-centered intellect and way of comprehending the world from an early age. I always considered him rather polar opposite to my way of understanding things. It’s one of many reasons I often see the exact opposite of one sort of an autistic person, is not a nonautistic person, but another autistic person, configured differently.

=======

Word World

Once there was a boy, who lived in the world of words
Words were what matters, the only thing that matters
Whereas other children lived in the world of experience
Where experience is what matters, not words

When the boy wanders around, he sees words
Everything around him must have a word, or it would seem empty
A vacuum, showing his removal from reality, is terrifying to him
Just as nature abhors a vacuum, the boy tries his best to name all things

Like a young God inspecting his creations, he feels a great urge
To bring all he sees into his world, using the power of the word
He declares “Let there be roses”, and there were roses
His word made flesh within his world

When I see a rose, it becomes r-o-s-e to me
This rose word becomes part of me
I know “rose” is “rose”, no matter what happens
What rose means does not matter – only its name I can hold

Clouds I cannot hold, the sun I cannot hold
But “clouds” my mind can hold, and “sun” is even easier to hold
Easily I can hold everything with the power of words
All things become clear to me in words

But on the 7th day, I do not rest
There is no way I can rest with so many more things to name
This I declare is a turvy-topsy, that I declare is a water-windy
I can’t finish, so I keep making more words up

What I hear is unreliable – sometimes it is there, sometimes not
I cannot know if it is kept silent
What I see is unreliable – everything changes all the time
I cannot know if there is no light

What I feel is unreliable – my body does not touch everything
I cannot know it if I cannot touch it now
What I smell is unreliable – few things give off a good smell
I cannot know it when my nose is runny

What I taste is unreliable – I have to put it in my mouth
I cannot know it if the grown-ups don’t let me do it
All the five senses are totally unreliable
Only the mind is reliable, staying with me all the time, I rely solely on it

“Is a rose by any other name a rose?”

“Yes,” says the normal child. “The grownups call it funny-melons, but I know it is still the same. When I hold it, its thorns hurt my finger. I can smell this special rose smell. It is a rose.”

“No,” says the autistic child (if he can talk). “Rose is rose. It has a nice wavy movement. I keep the word. Other things don’t matter. ‘Rose’ is.”

Day breaks, and the sunshine-word prickles his hand-word. Words, everything is just words. When the boy sees a cupboard, he does not see the form. He sees the word “cupboard”. The form is merely incidental. The word is the essence of all things.

A cat-word runs around playfully outside. This is a flurry-word. Sometimes this word moves around a lot, sometimes it does not. Sometimes it is orange with striped and sometimes it is black. It likes the mouse-word and the fish-word. It always goes around with the play-word.

This word sometimes makes sneeze-word, so I have to pull a lot of tissue-words and make loud trumpet-words. It makes bite-words if I tickle it near its middle, somewhere between “ca” and “t”. CAT – a flurry-word I like.

My word-hand picks up a Lego-brick-word. It contains green-word and some protruding small circle-words on top of it. Like a salad word, I can put it together. There is a wooden-block-word with the alphabet-word A on it. Boring-word. I cannot make it do stick-word with others like it.

I move my word-body around the place with my word-legs. Teacher-word calls me Albert-word, but sometimes people-word calls me boy-word.

People-word says that I like to look at sky-word and ask me what I see. What can I say? Sky-word has star-word, cloud-word, sun-word and moon-word, but there is no word when I look. I have no word to give them.

This is the strange world of an autistic boy who lives only in words. So much like our normal world and yet so different. Word-world is like Alice in Wonderland, strange and exotic.

When he sees a dog, he sees a dog-word showering him with moving-tail-words from its tail and growling-words from its mouth with sharp-teeth-word. When he falls into a puddle, he sees water-word dripping from his hair-word and face-word, and wet-shirt-word having the same word as the mud-word that body-word just fell into.

He goes to word-class and sees word-teacher pointing characters-word on whiteboard-word. Teacher-word shows a new word - “happy”. What is happy-word? Happy-word does not seem to jump or move; it is not solid.

Teacher-word explains happy-word is when you get what you want and feel happy. What is feel-word? Feel-word cannot be found in word world. Cannot hold feel-word in hand and eyes cannot see feel-word. There is no such word in my world, don’t know what it is. Teacher-word ask what is happy-word, my feel-word comes to answer question-word.

Teacher-word says do join-word with friend-words to do happy-word with play-word. What is friend-word? Friend-word is not there. Friend-word is strange-moving-word that toss ball-word to me-word.

Friend-words say me-word must do play-word. What is play-word? Play-word has no color at all. Play-word is not known like sky-word. Play-word has cannot be held with word-hand like mouse-word.

I do not see what art-word is and religion-word means, but when people-word ask me, my dictionary-word gives them answer-words to stop them from making confusion-words. I like dictionary-word because it has many nice words teacher-word likes to hear.

I do not hold what is intelligent-word and wisdom-word, but I can collect words from other word collections to tell people-word what word goes with what other words. People-word say I am smart-word. I do not know why but it seems like good-word, so I should continue wording this way.

How I can be Mum-word, Sally-word, or other word? I am me-word, I cannot be more than one word and I cannot be another word. What kind of word can be two words when they do not belong to “two word” at all? I do not know weird words like this. I only know words that I can find in me. I do not know why word people cannot see my words.

I dream of word world, where all words are living creatures who talk to me. The dictionary is a zoo I never get tired of visiting. It has many new species of words that I keep and share with other people. Sometimes I feed these words to make them bigger, sometimes I break them up. Sometimes I put them together to make a new word-baby. I even make my own words.

Other people do not see word-world. They think word-people like us have a rigid obsession with words and categories. How blind of them not to see the beauty of words!

=======

(from Mirror Mind by Eric Chen)

This post is a response to Twocentsormore who describes finding someone whose way of viewing the world is the opposite of theirs. Unlike what they’ve found, the art and writing above is completely sincere, written by an autistic man to describe the way he saw things in childhood. This was the most extreme writing I ever found that depicted the opposite of how my brain works.

It’s interesting to me that he depicts it as a nonautistic trait to see the world outside of words. It’s more like a trait outside of his variant of autism. While nonautistic children will (somewhat, anyway) see a rose as the same regardless of words, many autistic people will as well. And many autistic people will actually be less influenced by a renaming of a rose to “snotflower” or something else distasteful, than many nonautistic people will be.

It also interests me that some autistic people who grow up to hang tightly onto words as the only thing they understand, had huge receptive language delays much as I did. Jim Sinclair and Sue Rubin are examples. However somehow others (like me, as well as Anne Corwin and Donna Williams), no matter how proficient we become at writing or speaking, still see words as totally alien to our way of understanding the world.

To me, words are an unpleasant necessary evil. I have always seen the world in a deeply sensory and otherwise non-linguistic manner, as described in my article Plants Outside the Shade:

http://autisticadvocacy.org/2012/04/plants-outside-the-shade/

“Autism means that my earliest memories are of floating in among the feel of things. Not how they looked or sounded, but how they felt. Words don’t exist for the hundreds if not thousands of variants on this. A way of perceiving the world that has remained dominant for me even after sensory input became stronger and, later, words and ideas. It’s the foundation that I always start from when I climb up the cliffs, day after day, that allow me to use words and ideas and move and understand what is around me. And no matter how high I climb, that underlying way of experiencing the world is still there.”

So the way I best understand the world has remained some kind of combination of pre-rational experiences involving sensory aspects of the world and pre-sensory “feel” that I can barely describe at all. And the patterns (using the word in a non-logical way) formed between these experiences. While I’ve developed word and idea based thinking, the other way has always remained beneath it as the more solid and comprehensible way to think and perceive.

Making me and those like me the direct opposite of people whose dominant way of thinking and experiencing is words – so dominant that the world outside words baffles them or is even totally invisible. The same is true for those who depend on ideas, which are much like words. Even Temple Grandin’s visual thinking, while not the word-based thinking I describe, is more abstract than my native mode of thinking. I can do words, ideas, abstractions, but I can’t live there.

Jim Sinclair wasn’t always a person who was dominated by words in xyr understanding of the world. Xe spent twelve years even learning the purpose of language, and only after then switched into language as the place xe understands the world from. Sue Rubin’s receptive language delay was even more extreme. Perhaps that is why both of their writing feels familiar to me despite their later dependence on words.

But Eric Chen depended on words from a very young age. Depended on them for his whole understanding of the world. And perhaps that is one reason that, while I find his writing interesting – I love to learn about minds so different from my own – I also find it incredibly difficult to read. He has had trouble processing others’ language, but has from a very young age used language exclusively to understand the world.

And his writing cuts me like knives. He has no intent of violence that I’m aware of. It’s the effect of such a purely word-based intellect communicating with someone for whom words are only tools grudgingly used. To me the world is made up of things you can sense, and his writing gives me nothing to sense, not even between the lines, just the sharp corners of words and ideas used with so little direct experience added in. He has learned some things about direct experience, but only in the way I’ve learned about words – it hasn’t penetrated to his core, despite making large changes for him as learning the meaning of words has for me. We are still more where we came from than where we have gone, it seems, even if traveling away from home has enriched our lives, home is still home.

And I’ve rarely seen writing that my mind tries so frantically to reject as his. This isn’t an insult to his writing. It’s an acknowledgement that some bridges between very different minds can’t be crossed easily. I find him interesting because of that difference but unfortunately I also find reading him rather painstaking.

It’s funny too. It’s not what’s in the words. It’s not whether they reference sensory things regularly or not. Especially since many sensory things are hard to reference. It’s something that goes on in between the words. Something that shows where the person is coming from. I often find it easy to read things by someone like Anne Corwin, even if her language looks abstract at the surface sometimes. Because in between the words is the knowledge of where she comes from, the sensory place she calls home. And an entirely word based person can try to sound concrete and sensory, but still feel abstract and sharp like knives. People who’ve truly moved from one place to the other may retain aspects of both, or one or the other, depending.

Anyway just typing this out has hurt my brain a bit and I wanted to go back to sleep. But I wanted to respond to Twocentsormore before I forgot.

Notes:
  1. iamicecreamsbitch reblogged this from withasmoothroundstone and added:
    Wow
  2. bestfriendtabitha reblogged this from withasmoothroundstone
  3. trixibelle reblogged this from withasmoothroundstone and added:
    This is amazing
  4. withasmoothroundstone posted this