Speaking through Song

Last updated on: March 11, 2014 at 11:53 am by Leah Libresco

Speaking through Song 2014-03-11T11:53:38-04:00 Leah Libresco

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Like nearly everyone, I found the New York Times Magazine piece on the family that learned to communicate with their autistic son through his love of Disney really moving to read. I recommend the whole thing. Not to mention, as someone who had both “translation” and “trouble with EQ” turn up on that bingo board Christian made, I found this part particularly interesting:

But what draws kids like Owen to these movies is something even more elemental. Walt Disney told his early animators that the characters and the scenes should be so vivid and clear that they could be understood with the sound turned off. Inadvertently, this creates a dream portal for those who struggle with auditory processing, especially, in recent decades, when the films can be rewound and replayed many times.

The latest research that Cornelia and I came across seems to show that a feature of autism is a lack of traditional habituation, or the way we become used to things. Typically, people sort various inputs, keep or discard them and then store those they keep. Our brains thus become accustomed to the familiar. After the third viewing of a good movie, or a 10th viewing of a real favorite, you’ve had your fill. Many autistic people, though, can watch that favorite a hundred times and seemingly feel the same sensations as the first time. While they are soothed by the repetition, they may also be looking for new details and patterns in each viewing, so-called hypersystemizing, a theory that asserts that the repetitive urge underlies special abilities for some of those on the spectrum.

Disney provided raw material, publicly available and ubiquitous, that Owen, with our help, built into a language and a tool kit. I’m sure, with enough creativity and energy, this can be done with any number of interests and disciplines. For some kids, their affinity is for train schedules; for others, it’s maps. While our household may not be typical, with a pair of writerly parents and a fixation on stories — all of which may have accentuated and amplified Owen’s native inclinations — we have no doubt that he shares a basic neurological architecture with people on the autism spectrum everywhere.

I love musicals, particularly Sondheim’s, not just because they’re objectively excellent, but because, for me, it’s easier to feel immediate empathy for people in fiction (generally) and musicals (particularly). What’s more, I tend to use particular songs, scenes, or beats as my handles or pointers for the things I feel. I tend to do most of my thinking in analogies and categories anyway, and this is just one more example.

Thus, the movie nights I have with friends (Merrily We Roll Along, broadcast by Digital Theatre, is on the horizon) is not just a way of sharing something beautiful, but of establishing some reference points, that make it easier to communicate. For example, because I tend to have particular powers to compel romantic partners to go to shows with me, one time, when I was upset, I was able to convey to my former gentleman caller the exact kind of upset I was, and the reason for it, by referencing a specific song from Parade. He understood immediately a sentiment that normal language about feelings often feels too imprecise or manipulative to be useful to me. I was able to rely on songs and citations to convey positive feelings as well, again, more purely than I knew how to do without citations.

The arts are a wonderful lingua franca that let us express very complicated feelings by relying on a pre-existing story to add context and inflection to our present situation. This is part of why I love any widely consumed story, at least a bit, because, from Harry Potter to the Avengers, I can expect that any of those character or emotional beats are now in the vernacular, for me to reference, instead of having to come up with a way to indicate them from scratch.

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