Archive for August, 2010
Missing the point again
by Jane Coutts on Aug.20, 2010, under Jane's Blog Posts
There was once a boy who was diagnosed with Asberger’s and he was glad, because he did not know what else to do. He had reached the end of his wild gestures for help, and this was the best everyone could do. In fact, everyone did their best, because they did not want to to hurt him, or for him to be hurt, or to hurt anyone else.
His family listened to him with care, but they were worn out, because they could not give him what he wanted, otherwise anything might happen, and everyone was telling them what to do.
He could not be useful, because this meant he would have to be of use, and society could not find much of a use for all his wild wanderings. So he was introduced into a programme which kept him at bay, and tried to tie all the disparate knots in his head into one big knot, so that it was easier to manage.
They damage-limited his wanderings by whatever means they could find, except the right one, because they wanted to show the world that boys like this could make a useful contribution to society, even if it was only minimal.
So for years, the boy cut wood and made things and went along with their attempts to focus his mind on all the wrong-shaped holes. When the assessments came around, they had his name on them, but only showed what a good job the psychologists had done in making him useful in a contained sort of way.
They had missed something, however. In an old home, in a corner of the room where he had lived a long time ago, was a fiddle. When he was a younger boy, he had picked it up, and played, and all the knots in his head, the thick ones and the narrow ones and the tight ones and the sloppy ones, had fallen away, and all the wires straightened out and produced a long, low endless music, which carried people – including him – away. Maybe this had been the problem. It carried him away.
Then again, everyone knew he was talented, they just couldn’t think what to do with it, because it always came out so disparately, and could not be trusted. Sometimes he played and all was well, and sometimes he would say no, he wasn’t feeling like playing. So he would never make anything of the music, because he could not be relied upon to hold it down. Once again, they had all missed the point.