Storytellersunplugged

by Justine Musk

This is not the essay I intended to write.

I write this in a lodge somewhere in Iceland where
I’ve been staying the past two days with my spouse,
assorted extremely-bright accomplished people, and a
famous actress. This gathering is meant to be a kind
of think tank retreat/salon concerning one issue in
particular. I won’t say what that issue is, because I
want to talk a bit about the famous actress without
giving away her identity, and, like any movie star,
which is why they become a movie star in the first
place, she has such a unique presence that it wouldn’t
take much to give her away.

It is going on Icelandic dawn. There is much drinking
of spirits and playing of music (electronic/dance
music, in case you’re thinking it’s something local,
which would strike me as rather humorous). Earlier I
was dancing with some of the others, and the actress
and I were comparing martial arts moves (I got my
black belt in taekwondo in my early twenties for no
real reason I can think of; she had to train for a
role).

Whenever you meet someone you already know through the
media, it is a strange feeling. It is strange because
you know stuff about this stranger you probably
shouldn’t know about any stranger; and they either
have to a) pretend they don’t know you know, even
though you know that they know that you know or b)
find some way of dealing with it gracefully. (Robert
Downey Jr, for example, throws out wry
self-deprecating comments about his past in a way that
is very charming, and takes a tense awkward thing and
puts it at ease).

There’s also the inevitable disconnect between your
sense of the person that’s come filtered through the
media, and the real person who turns out to be behind
all that. Who is usually shorter than you thought
(although not in the case of this actress) and not
quite as flawless-looking.

With this actress, though, the disconnect between the
media/public perception and the reality that I
experienced (and am experiencing right now, as she
sits on the floor four feet away from me and converses
with the others) is shocking to the point of seeming
downright unfair. Which is why I want to write about
it now, given the subject of my last Storytellers
essay (about working with the more subtle and unusual
angles of point-of-view).

Because when I mentioned that one of my
three-year-olds is a high-functioning autistic, she
said, “So am I.”

And I believe I said something like, “What?”

“I was diagnosed with that when I was a kid.” Thanks
to a loving determined supportive mother, she avoided
the fate of institutionalization, which would have
destroyed her. Of this she has no doubt.

I stared at her in a way I had managed not to do since
meeting her for the first time hours earlier in a
small private airport.

Because with this piece of information, and given what
I now know about mild autism, the rest of her suddenly
made sense. She is an elusive, quirky presence in the
media in a way actors and actresses are not supposed
to be, even as they complain about the burden of fame
(and then go for lunch at the Ivy and sit outside on
the patio while black-clad photographers gather along
the fence like crows along a telephone wire). She went
into acting because it seemed like a lovely way to be
in her own imaginary world. She was truly never in it
for the fame. That kind of attention came at her like
an attacking, invading thing. Because of the visual
way autistics acquire language — through linking it
with the visual images they collect in their mental
library — their first reaction to things is to take
them in a literal, concrete manner. Which is why,
when a well-known talk show host asked her, “So what
are you doing in New York?” and sat back and waited
for some entertaining banter, she could only look at
him blankly and say, “Press.”

“I don’t really care what people think of me,” she
told me, and I believe her. I believe her because
indifference to public opinion is one of the
characteristics of autism, part of the “being in their
own world” thing. It’s why someone with autistic
tendencies might neglect simple hygiene. It’s not like
they don’t understand how and why to take a shower,
wear clean clothes. They just need a better reason to
care — so what if someone doesn’t want to stand too
close to them?

I named another famous actor — someone I’ve been a
fan of for years — who demonstrates a lot of the same
traits that she does, and said, “Do you think he’s on
the spectrum?” (Autistic disorders fall along a
spectrum from very mild/high-functioning to Rain Man
severe).

“I’ve met him and I know people who know him,” she
said, “and you know, I’ve never thought of that
before, but given what my friends have told me about
him — I am one hundred percent certain that you’re
right.”

Here’s the thing. Talk to this actress, read an
interview with the actor I just mentioned, and it
becomes very clear that these are two intelligent,
interesting, articulate people who are better-informed
and better-read than most (her light plane reading was
a novella by Calvino, and she easily referenced a
short story by Gabriel Garcia Marquez). I won’t list
this actress’s accomplishments outside of acting,
because I don’t want to give her away — but they are
impressive, certainly more so than the average joe or
jill who dismisses her as some ditz.

Because they do. Because both this actor and actress
are regarded within pop culture as — well — as kind
of dumb, actually, and not all that talented. Who
just lucked into the kind of success and acclaim that
they surely don’t deserve, even if they do happen to
be extraordinarily hot.

High-functioning autism has nothing to do with IQ; it
has everything to do with a disordered sensory
perception. People like these actors — and my son –
process the world in ways that basically render them
aliens in a country that speaks a different language
than they do and is not set up to understand them.

One of these things has to do with the way they
acquire language. They think visually instead of
verbally, which means they learn to understand the
world through images and video clips they collect in
their memories, replaying whenever they need that
specific information — if a kid wants a cookie, for
example, he references the video clip that shows him
how to pull out the chair, stand on it, open the
cupboard door, etc. He doesn’t think of it in words.
Eventually they start linking language to those video
clips — literally laying down a soundtrack — and
over the years they assimilate those words in ways
that allow them to use language more spontaneously and
‘naturally’.

So they don’t speak with the same inflections that we
do (those of us not on the spectrum). My son, for
example, delivers much of his language in a sing-song
type of voice, or in a rather flat robot-like
monotone. He also has some words and phrases that he
delivers much more ‘naturally’ because he’s
assimilated their meanings and uses and is comfortable
with them. Because my son’s autism is mild, and
because he’s ‘quick’ in ways that indicate a good,
bright mind behind the autistic tendencies, I have no
doubt that one day he’ll use language as fluidly and
masterfully as, say, the famous actress who will soon
be flying back to LA with me.

But he’ll never sound quite ‘normal’; he won’t be
quite as expressive and animated with his spoken
language as we are.

And because of that, he might get taken for ‘dumb’ or
‘ditzy’, even if he’s anything but, even if he’s
actually smarter than most of the people he deals
with, even if the fact of everything he’s overcome in
order to be dealing with people at all as a ‘normal’
if quirky person, is, to put it mildly, a huge
accomplishment in and of itself.

He won’t care, of course. He honestly won’t care what
other people think.

But I probably will.

When I was an English major at university, it was one
thing to sit around in classrooms and discuss the
importance of literature, of reading. It illuminates
the human condition, shows you different ways of
living a life, enlarges human understanding, yadda
yadda yadda. I believed all of those things, but in a
vague and abstract kind of way.

This is changing for me. I am a proud writer of
popular, escapist fiction, and I want to be
entertaining and compelling and emotionally moving.

And I also want to do my bit to “enlarge human
understanding”. It’s not such an abstract thing to me
now. It’s not quite so vague. To take someone and put
them behind the eyes of someone like my son. To give
them empathy where before they had none — not because
they’re insensitive, they just didn’t know any better.
None of us did.

I once snapped at someone who put me in the stereotype
of a certain kind of Los Angeles woman and wife. It
wasn’t the stereotype itself that bothered me; I’m
used to it, and I take pleasure in dismantling it on a
regular basis through being my own quirky, atypical
self (scratch a high functioning autistic, find family
members who share some of their characteristics, if
not to the extent that actually lands them on the
spectrum). I snapped at this guy because he was a
writer — or an aspiring writer — and I expected more
and better from him. Something more closely observed
and original. Something that might actually show us
something new. Cliches and stereotypes certainly
don’t. Kneejerk reactions to people certainly don’t.
We all know this, of course; we know how this makes
for bad writing. But it makes for bad living as well.
We realize this, of course. We just tend not to
realize how much.

—- Justine Musk - Somewhere in Iceland