The Autists by Clara Törnvall

Author:Clara Törnvall
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO022000, PSY022020, BIO017000, SOC028000, BIO033000, BIO002000, HIS054000, MED056000
Publisher: Scribe Publications Pty Ltd
Published: 2023-05-30T00:00:00+00:00

The American poet Emily Dickinson lived in the 19th century, during a time when autism did not exist as a diagnosis. Yet she knew that she was different. Several of her nearly 1,800 poems are about her brain. In them, she describes it as splintered, swaying and swerving, a mind abandoning well-trodden routes for new paths, following its own currents, flooding and trampling down.

In poem 867, she writes that it feels as though her brain has been cleft in two. She tries to stitch it back together but fails. Her consciousness is in pieces, and the pieces don’t fit together. She tries to link up her thoughts, join the past to the present, but sounds and language come undone, and the sentences elude her like balls she has dropped — or perhaps like balls of yarn, rolling away across the floor.

The psychiatrist Lorna Wing has described this experience of fragmentation as the autistic consciousness struggling with central coherence — that is, piecing together information from the past and the present, making sense of experiences and learning from them, understanding what will happen in the future, and making plans. The autist struggles to find her place in time and space and to create a totality out of details.

In poem 340, Emily Dickinson describes a funeral in her brain as well as dark thoughts where she is repeatedly tormented by drumbeats, treading boots, and bells tolling. A breakdown has taken place.

But Dickinson is also stubbornly proud of her peculiar mind. In poem 598, she writes that her brain is wider than the sky and deeper than the sea. And in poem 620, she insists that ‘Much Madness is divinest Sense’.

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