It is not the words: art, (dis)ability, thinking in pictures and speaking with the body

Judith Scott was an artist (she died in 2005). She made large, intricate, colourful pieces by wrapping with yarn and strips of cloth. Inside these womb-like, containing spaces, x-rays reveal concealed objects: forks, rings – small daily items from her immediate environment. Judith also had Downs Syndrome; she was deaf and non-speaking and spent her life up to the age of 43 in institutions. Here, when she was a child, crayons were taken away from her because she was considered too ‘retarded’ to be able to use them – even though she clearly was using them, perhaps not in the way the staff expected, but artists do the unexpected with their materials. Judith’s medical notes record that after the crayons were taken away, she cried for hours.

The introduction to a video about Judith on Karmatube (1) poses the question, ‘Can something can be called art if it is made by someone who does not consider herself an artist?’ I wonder why it’s assumed that Judith didn’t consider herself an artist. Because she didn’t speak, write or sign? Because she didn’t articulate artist as a word? Is the word required to make what’s happening real? Folded into the assumption that Judith did not consider herself an artist is a second one that because she didn’t speak, write or sign, she didn’t reflect. But as soon as she got the opportunity, Judith spent every day, all day, making art, continuing sometimes until her fingers bled. It seems to me that her work is a body of non-verbal reflection and that she communicated her identity loud and clear.

Like many (but not all) autistic people, I think in images and translate into words. My thought-pictures are evocative, textured and intensely compelling. I also experience emotion as image and similarly have to slowly deduce – or maybe it’s more like seduce – the terminology for the feeling from the colours, lines, tone and content. It’s a kind of internal pathetic fallacy. For some visual thinkers, see-thinking is realistic. Temple Grandin, for instance, explains that her visual memories are like computer files stored in her brain. They are accurate and precise and make her a highly skilled structural designer. This way of thinking enabled her to note design faults in the Fukushima nuclear plant and predict the disaster that occurred there as a result of the tsunami in 2011. For me, though, see-thinking is mythopoeic. It’s an arthouse movie, an expanding, interconnecting sequence of images that carry meanings on multiple levels, psychological, emotional, somatic.

It was only very recently that I realised most other people’s mental processes don’t happen this way, and I’m still puzzled by how it’s possible to think without seeing it. It turns out to be equally difficult to convey to non-see-thinkers what it’s like to see-think and how the translation process works. For a start – in my mind anyway – there are always many layers of interpenetrating images going on at the same time. ‘Going on’ because they’re not static like paintings; they shift and change, and I can move between, into and through them. I can also alter them, though where this ‘I’ is located, what is volitional and what arises organically beyond ‘my’ control, is not entirely clear to me. I suppose it’s really a dialogue of unconscious and conscious mind. Once I start to transpose image into word, the words themselves arise as image – sometimes typed in Courier on a strip of paper – and then generate more images, so meaning is rich and multi-dimensional – often overwhelmingly so

In the process of paring and refining into language, much of the expansiveness, beauty and subtlety of the original vision gets lost frustratingly in the gaps between the words. And there are experiences and feelings that simply have no words in the English language, or for which language fails to provide fine enough distinctions. It’s like a fishing net: the holes are always bigger than the string.

When the phone stopped ringing she perceived a peculiar silence. One of many. Which one? There is a silence of perception. It wasn’t that. Thoughtless silence? Forced silence? Chosen silence? Silence because you’re listening. Fearful silence. Because the radio’s broken. Hesitation. When you don’t say it because you don’t want to hurt the other person. Enraged silence. When you don’t say it because it’s not going to do any good. Waiting. Thinking. Not wanting to be misunderstood. Refusing to participate. Self-absorption. When a loud sound is over. Shame. (4)

I wouldn’t be surprised  if someone like Judith Scott found verbal language just too much of a dispersal of creative energy. I’m not D/deaf and I find it very exhausting. I’m hyperlexic, meaning that I have a significantly higher than average ability to understand the written word, coupled with a lower than average ability to understand spoken language. My intuitive sense is that I read body language and facial expression preferentially; I definitely find speech harder to process when these are not available, and I detest the phone. My hyperlexia seems to me a paradox. I feel that it arises out of the secondariness for me of word as a mental process and a sense of the urgency of translation if I am to swim in the shoal. Because no one wants to be eaten by a shark. Yet I write seldom. It’s too arduous; the sense of the breadth of the of the gulf to be bridged too daunting. While in a sort of way words allow me to feel connected, they also fix me in isolation – because words are cyphers, and the actual experience always floats silently between them just out of reach. As Hamlet says, ‘My words fly up, my thoughts remain below.’ (5)

It’s said that 70 per cent of interpersonal communication actually occurs not through the clipping of words but through the body, so perhaps hyperlexics are actually more tuned in than the average person to the full range of human expression and are in fact listening where it really counts. And it cuts both ways. My hands are very articulate. I speak with them a lot. They often carry meanings from inside that I haven’t yet been able to understand intellectually or that words lack the subtlety and finesse to encode. When I began to investigate the possibility that I might be on the autistic spectrum, I learnt that body-speaking is a defining ability of autistic people. There’s a term for it. The term is ‘flapping’. Yes, ‘flapping’ … as in penguin. Many autistic people who have been in special education aimed at training them to pass – to appear as seamlessly neurotypical as possible – recall the instruction, ‘Quiet hands!’, meaning that they should sit on it and shut up. God forbid you should get the crayons if you don’t know how to use them!

It’s no news to anyone, I think, that in our culture the mind is prioritised and privileged, while the body and its productions are denigrated. Whereas in earlier times the suppression of the body took the form of a kind of moral demonisation – even furniture had to be clad in tablecloths and antimacassars in case it got too exciting – today the body is commodified on an industrial scale. Even loci of somatic enquiry and embodiment, the holy asylums of the speaking body, have been infiltrated and commercialised. Who would have thought we could be brainwashed into buying ‘improved’ versions of our own bodies? No wonder so much energy goes into silencing the autistic body. A body that speaks irrepressibly its own meaning has the potential for very exciting subversion.

I found out about Judith Scott from Emma Roberts. Emma is a 5Rhythms dance teacher and a fellow explorer in the badlands of the moving body. As a child, Emma was told she had ‘ants in her pants and poor concentration’. But what if she was concentrating on the ants in her pants? After all, she went on to train in classical dance, which requires a great deal of focus – and a lot of ants. What if the ants in her pants were the way she was communicating? What if she was just speaking her primary language?

As someone on the autistic spectrum, I’m likely to give you the wrong change and the wrong date, my short-term memory would shame a goldfish, and I don’t know left from right or the difficult bits of the times tables, but I do have a first-class degree and a doctorate (in Pictures and Words, of course). As someone with Ehlers-Danlos, I can’t stand or sit with my back unsupported for more than a minute or two, and I really need a seat on public transport, but in my late fifties I have an ashtanga practice that would be beyond many people in their twenties. Both autism and hypermobility involve binaries of deficit and hyper-ability. It feels dishonest to describe myself as disabled, and dishonest to describe myself as not disabled. I live in a floating space of both / and, neither / nor. Judith Scott’s deficits  appear far more evident, and yet they bleed so seamlessly into her genius as an artist. It seems incontravertible to me really only that Judith Scott was Judith Scott.

1. ‘Outsider Artist Judith Scott’: https://www.karmatube.org/videos.php?id=%203563.

2. Temple Grandin and Richard Panek, The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston and New York, 2013.

3. ‘Temple Grandin on the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant, 24 March 2011, Youtube: https://youtu.be/y8ABZ-qsEu8.

4. Sarah Schulman, Empathy, Penguin Books, 1992.

5. III, iii, 100–103. I don’t think this is Shakespeare’s intended meaning. It’s probably more about hypocrisy. However, I prefer to understand it differently.

6. Loud Hands: Autistic People Speaking, The Autistic Self Advocacy Network, 2012.

Image: Patrick Tomasso.