Squiggles & Loops: A Different Way of Seeing

On the one hand advocacy for autism is about policy, and lobbying for changes in policy to provide necessary supports, services, and accommodations. And on the other hand, advocacy is on a much smaller level, and seemingly less grand. For me, advocating for my son isn't only about trying to change the world to accommodate his needs as an individual on the autism spectrum. It's also about my trying to change myself to understand things from his perspective and point of view.

For instance: Charlie--he's now more than 11 1/2 as I've been saying, as his birthday is in May---seems to have trouble identifying figures and objects when they're drawn. It's hit or miss what he'll call a drawing of any four-footed animal from cows to dogs to cats to horses. His teacher sends home worksheets with simple phrases; he's to circle the drawing that the phrase describes. He'll squint at the black and white drawings and I suspect he's seeing them as a bunch of black lines, of some indeterminate "what." (This difficulty identifying pictures was one reason that Charlie was never too inclined to use PECS.)

Or rather, I don't think that Charlie sees in a drawing what I'm seeing, or what he's "supposed" to see---a picture of a street scene is a mass of lines and colors and shapes, perhaps, to him. There's a review in yesterday's New York Times about an exhibition of drawings, "Raphael to Renoir: Drawings From the Collection of Jean Bonna," at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The review caught my eye because of its title, Where Lines Become a Language. Here's how some of the drawings were described:

The show has ..... memorable examples of drawing-as-writing. A faint, scratchy ink landscape by the Florentine painter Baccio della Porta, better known as Fra Bartolommeo, suggests a letter quickly written as a pen was running dry. Cézanne’s graphite-and-watercolor “Wooded Landscape” seems to be composed largely of punctuation marks indicating starts, stops, pauses and so on.

And what is Parmigianino’s “Holy Family With Shepherds and Angels” if not a devotional poem jotted down in a shorthand script made up entirely of abstract flourishes — squiggles and loops — that by some miracle cohere into recognizable shapes?

It's the "squiggles and loops" that Charlie seems (as far as I can tell, from numerous experiences watching him looking at pictures) to see, as if his mind---as noted in an article in the February Scientific American---tends to focus on what many would say is "irrelevant," to minute details, rather than on the "big picture." Or perhaps, it'd be more accurate to say that Charlie's got a very different way of seeing the world, a kind of hyper-focus somewhat similar to whatever enables the artist Stephen Wiltshire to draw his perfectly detailed panoramic landscapes of cities.

There's an interview with Wiltshire in today's Independent. He sums up in his life in seven words as "Keep doing what I do best, drawing" (and notes that he likes the movie Rain Man). Like Charlie, Wiltshire likes "to stroll through the city, working on new ideas"; he rides public transport and prefers the upper level of a double-decker bus "as the view is better from there." Charlie also has a fondness for public transportation, though it's usually underground, in the form of the subway and, so far, he's not been interested in drawing. Wiltshire's impeccably detailed art suggests to me how Charlie might be viewing the world, with an attention to details that I didn't know where there, to the squiggles and the loops and lines of things.