Joe

by Michael Blastland

  But not for Joe. When we arrive at the school, according to the rules of Joe’s mind-blind world the routine continues, as it must, for want of any other guide. Abba’s ‘Dancing Queen’ is cut off mid-jive. In this last act of the journey, familiar scenes uncoil, tense and irresistible. As I fish bags from the car parked in the road outside the school, gathering thoughts cling to every move. We let ourselves through the gates into the drive, Joe running ahead to ring the bell, habit getting the better of foreboding, and then stepping back a pace or two to watch the tall Victorian door swing open. The welcome is always cheerful.

  ‘Hello, Joe!’

  ‘A good weekend?’

  ‘How are you Joe?’

  We enter to a chorus of encouragement, climbing the steps as Joe peers ahead to see who greets us. Inside the brightly lit hallway there’s a small bustle of staff, all smiles. Joe sits obediently to have his shoes removed, stretching out each leg in turn. As soon as they’re off, before I’ve put them in their cubby hole by the door, he scuttles away for the next scene, which takes place on a large shapeless sofa by the window in the playroom, where, as I follow, he pats a space beside him for me to sit down, climbs on top of me and flops into a sad, languid, hug.

  He remembers something. Looking round, he finds my hands and leads them around his waist so that I’m holding him. If they stray, he brings them back. We sit like this for perhaps twenty minutes. Sometimes as I chat with his carers about how he’s getting on, he lifts his head, examines my lips and eyes, trying hard to see if these are the words that signal departure, and then, when I stay seated, he slumps into me again. Sometimes he rouses himself and we look at a book or sing a song, before he remembers why we’re here and puts my hands back in place. The minutes pass. Dinner time isn’t far away. After a while, I say:

  ‘OK, Joe, time for me to go now. You be a good boy. Sleeps first and then Mummy and Daddy again.’

  He recognises his cue. Unhappy, quiet and with such open-mouthed vulnerability that I forget every testing moment, but still purposeful even in sadness, he dashes ahead, into the hall and rattles up the stairs without looking back. His carer manages a quick goodbye and we smile knowingly, then she skips after him. Joe is already galumphing to the playroom on the first floor which looks to the front of the house.

  I key in the door code and let myself out, walk down the drive, through the always-to-be-closed-after-you iron gates with the 5 mph sign. On the pavement, where the view to the window is clearer, I turn and look up through the trees, under the street-lamp. Silhouetted against the light on the first floor is a small boy I know to be Joe, standing on the cushions in the window seat as only he stands, one arm raised above his head, resting against the pane, a tilted look, from the side of his eyes, quite still.

  I wave. I say, ‘Bye, Joe.’ He doesn’t move, though he’ll be saying ‘Bye’ quietly. His carer standing nearby waves to encourage him. Joe stands and looks. He’ll peer after the car until it disappears from view; he always does. I wave a little longer. Joe, in silhouette, gazes, cheek pressed to the glass. I turn and climb into the car. One more wave. Haunted by his silhouette, I drive into the street-lit winter afternoon. As the car starts, so does the tape. I decide that Abba is pop genius after all, and turn it off.

  6

  Self-consciousness

  Avon Country Park is not slick; the signs are more likely to be painted plywood than neon. To find it, you turn from the A4 Bath road over a humpback bridge, pass the municipal rubbish dump and jolt through potholes alongside fields of cabbages and sweetcorn.

  But it is charming. Up from the banks of the coiled river where the ducks shuffle and sit, shuffle and sit, past the flapping tents and hay bales, the miniature railway, the tractor and rusting trailer offering rides, not far from the burgers and peas, you amble from the car park through this patchwork of modest ambition to the top of a gentle hill and the one proud new building.

  It was to this oddly pristine industrial barn that I brought Joe shortly after he’d started school, at the end of a day out. He’d already played on the fraying, bouncy slides, then on the long silver slides outside; he’d climbed a bit, he’d lathered himself in ice creams, and of what he’d done he’d tired. There was one place left to try to keep him entertained.

  We stepped inside and the doors opened on a cacophony of children, the steel rafters surely ringing, loud enough ordinarily to terrify Joe, whose apprehension held him back, until, that is, he clocked another slide.

  Joe likes slides, and here he met the divine archetype of all he’d ever seen: fifty metres of swift, undulating colour, four tracks in a row. We flipped off his shoes, collected a sack to sit in, clambered up the metal stairs, positioned sack on slide, sat down … nearly. Then stood up. Joe retreated. He didn’t want to go. He’d changed his mind and pulled me away towards the stairs. Not too steep, but perhaps too long or too fast, the slide had abruptly lost its appeal.

  At the bottom, he watched the children whooping down and changed his mind again; we returned to the top.

  And then to the bottom, running against the herd. I didn’t mind at first, thinking Joe was drumming up courage. Yes, no, yes, no; desire competing with fear, the idea tussling with his senses. Sometimes we’d get a little closer to launching ourselves before his resistance flared and he scrambled away. Each time his reaction was categorical: no, emphatically no; half a minute later, yes, insistently, yes.

  I had a hunch he’d like it, but didn’t want to force him, so we persisted, another ten minutes, up and down, and then another, less tolerant, until, with all encouragement failing, something in me snapped and I spun from patience to irritation:

  ‘Joe! Up and down, up and down. Will you make up your mind?’

  ‘Sss,’ he says. Yes.

  So we head to the top.

  ‘Naghh,’ he says.

  And we thread our way back to the bottom.

  ‘Ssss.’

  ‘Joe!’ I look him square in the face and try to keep the lid on something Neanderthal. ‘If we go up and down those bloody steps. One. More. Time …’

  ‘Ssss.’

  ‘Right. Last chance.’

  And I stomped him to the top where he wriggled and wrestled, plonked in front of me, held tight and clawing; but too late now, we hurtled forward. It was fast all right, airborne in places, and we rasped to a halt on matting at the end.

  ‘Genn!’ he shouted, with a rapturous look.

  ‘Genn!’ the word losing itself in excited squeak.

  So I spent the next hour feeding Joe’s exuberance as he squealed and flapped through slide after gleeful slide, charging up stairs and flying down until the time came to leave and I could scarcely prise him away.

  All of us feel indecision, unsure of our desires; few can dither quite like Joe, who’d have vacillated all day, and can be resolute in one contradictory desire hard on the next. Much as he loves swimming, demands it every day, even incessantly, there are occasions he’ll pester all morning and, when the time comes, refuse to go. We set off regardless and he’s in rebellion every step, into the car, across the car park, past reception, then with the first sight of water, transformed: happy, revelling, and finally refusing to leave, seeming to forget every ounce of earlier antithetical resistance.

  Games adored and obsessed over take a handbrake-turn and are shouted down, as if he forgets the pleasure he took in them. Such a pickle of impulses is he on occasion that you might say, with the trivial use of a pregnant phrase, that he doesn’t know, or seems to forget, his own mind. There may be more truth in this than we realise.

  Like the face of a Picasso, Joe shows us many aspects at once. One is the Joe who seems to conceive people as functionaries, machines essentially, or at least often treats them as such, suggesting no sense of their inner consciousness. Another is the Joe cleaving to me in frightened need, whose unblinking, open-mouthed, agitated stare meets mine in heartfelt, human vulnerability, who seizes my hands and wraps them about him.

  �
��Oh dear,’ he might say with quiet, sing-song understatement, when one of us leaves him.

  ‘Oh dear,’ pronounced more clearly than any other phrase he knows.

  ‘Oh dear,’ several times over.

  Is this Joe reaching between the bars of the cell? When he is sad, and trying to express it, are we justified in counting him evidence of one human grasping for another? If so, how can these moments be consistent with Joe’s human isolation, his mind-blindness?

  It feels as though I rap his grasping fingers to say so, but his emotions might arise without any sense of my humanity, as we see all too easily by imagining the fondness people feel for inanimate things: some for their car, others for the sofa, their books, a guitar, ornaments or their tweezers. Joe’s feelings for me, given extra twist by his compulsiveness, might be no more than this.

  Is that fair to him, to debase his anxiety like this? I honestly don’t know; I fear it often might be, so that his attachment to me is in consequence of my unique degree of convenience: ‘What a useful accessory my Dee is; how lost I am without it.’ This is certainly possible, but also deeply uncertain, and not knowing beckons me towards insanity. Nor need the answer, whichever way it falls, be absolute; there might be degrees of understanding, occasional glimmers of recognition in Joe that I have an inner life and feelings for him which, once recognised, he urgently wants to touch and hold. They might equally be glimmers in a prevailing darkness. That much I do believe is possible, but little more.

  And the riddle deepens: hard as it is to know what Joe thinks about other people who are close to him, it’s harder still to know what, if anything, he thinks about himself.

  This is unsettling territory. Self-consciousness, for that’s what we’re dealing with here, is one of the triumphant distinctions of human kind, and there are reasons – terrible, unhinging reasons – for wondering how much, if any, Joe has, whether his difficulty knowing his own mind on slides and elsewhere is in part because he’s not well acquainted with it.

  The first reason for doubt is the strong association between self-consciousness and the remarkable capacity for folk psychology that was the subject of the last chapter. These skills seem in some cases related, suggesting that lack of one might imply lack of the other. Indeed, Nicholas Humphrey argues that the two are tightly bound together, and that self-consciousness exists only because it helps us to mind-read.

  ‘My thesis,’ says Humphrey, ‘is that Nature’s solution to the problem of doing psychology has been to give to every member of the human species both the power and the inclination to use a privileged picture of his own self as a model for what it is like to be another person.’

  In other words, Humphrey suggests, knowing what others are thinking came with an inseparable companion in being better aware of what we ourselves are thinking, that is, in self-awareness. The key to mind-reading is introspection, for therein lies a model of consciousness that we take to be universal. But Humphrey goes further, suggesting that such self-awareness arose precisely because of the advantage it gave us in knowing what others are up to. It’s a bold argument, that thoughts about our own thoughts – the glorious pinnacle of human sophistication – are simply a by-product. If he is right, that learning to guess what goes on in others’ heads equips us with a faculty to examine the meanderings in our own, then the conclusion is inescapable: the value of everyday mind-reading, says Humphrey, lies in the fact that it is the precursor to self-consciousness itself.

  You might want to insist that causality was the other way round: self-consciousness came first, was selected for other reasons, and thus made empathy accidentally possible. You might want to insist that self-consciousness was a divine spark and not an evolutionary adaptation at all, a spark subsequently enabling us to relate with sophistication to other humans. Most Darwinians would say it was a mistake to see self-consciousness as the strategy of nature to do anything with purpose; that that’s not how nature works. Self-consciousness, they’d say, was a mutation, a fluke, with all manner of favourable consequences. None of these differences is critical here; whatever the chain of causality that brought self-consciousness about, the argument remains powerfully suggestive: that self-understanding and social understanding have a remarkable intimacy; the way we perceive others is the mirror image of the way we interrogate ourselves.

  Were it true that the mirror image – one self-consciousness reflecting another – couldn’t be relied on, that your beetle, to use Wittgenstein’s analogy, differed significantly from mine, I would have trouble describing my motivations and passions in terms that made sense to you. But I don’t. I say ‘love’ and you know what I mean; your beetle has been there, I see, even if by a different route. Humphrey says we seem to have no practical difficulties communicating these feelings:

  The fact is that, whatever may be the logical problems of describing inner experience, human beings everywhere attempt it … Indeed, far from being something which baffles human understanding, the open discussion of one’s inner experience is literally child’s play to a human being, something which children begin to learn before they are more than two or three years old. And the fact that this common sense vocabulary is acquired so easily suggests that this form of description is natural to human beings precisely because it maps directly onto an inner reality which each individual, of himself, innately knows.

  This is known as the argument from analogy and, as philosophers point out, it is utterly unverifiable. As we’re beginning to see, that doesn’t seem to stop us deploying it with abandon.

  Most of us, that is, for in Joe’s case I have no such easy emotional rapport, child’s play or not, and this points to a troubling question: if it’s true that mind-reading and introspection go together, that we’re capable of the former as a result of the latter, and if it’s true that Joe can’t do the former, can’t mind-read, does it imply that he also lacks the latter, lacks rich self-consciousness?

  In an experiment which would be beyond Joe but might tell us something of what he understands, very young children are given a tube of Smarties and asked what’s inside. ‘Smarties,’ they say. The tube is opened and they discover a pencil. They’re then asked what they thought was in the tube before they opened it. ‘A pencil,’ they say. Furthermore, if they are asked what they think another person will say who hasn’t yet looked inside, when asked the same question, they now answer ‘a pencil’.

  Normal children quickly grow out of this, autistic children often don’t. Researchers speculate that these results imply limited self-consciousness, since those who answer ‘a pencil’ seem unable to examine their own former mental states, seem not to be able to reflect that they once thought ‘Smarties’. The age at which they become capable of thinking about their prior, mistaken thoughts is the age at which they also realise others can make the same mistake. Can that timing be coincidence? If it’s true, as the experimental evidence suggests, that introspection matures in tandem with awareness of other people’s minds, it might, once again, hint at interdependence.

  But not always; for there’s also evidence that self-consciousness can survive in those with mind-blindness. Many people with Asperger’s and one or two other more peculiar and extremely rare conditions are keenly aware of their own states of mind yet curiously blinkered to other people’s. It seems they can feel the sting of tears and reflect deeply on the misery that pricked them, but yet see another crying and be utterly lacking any instinctive understanding of the emotional state inside. In such people, mind-blindness must have a cause other than impaired self-consciousness.

  Through a website for people with Asperger’s, I came across a thirty-three-year-old American whose username is Magic. In answer to some prying questions, Magic frankly described his own sense of awareness of others and of himself.

  ‘I am also not used to thinking about thoughts of other people,’ he says, ‘and find the notion of others’ sentience counterintuitive … At the age of twenty-six I abandoned the theory positing that I was the only sentie
nt being in existence, and accepted the notion that other people had independent minds. I remember thinking how preposterous that notion seemed.’

  And does that difficulty correlate with a lack of self-consciousness?

  ‘In my opinion I have a rather well developed introspection, but I must admit that this development happened gradually only in the last ten years. For a couple of years prior to that, I had rather strange theories about myself and others.’ He later added in a note to me that these memories now seemed ‘speculative’, all of which suggests to me that lack of self-consciousness and lack of awareness of others can indeed run together.

  Perhaps Joe will develop as Magic has, but for the time being this doubt about Joe’s capacity for one of the core attributes of humanity rattles me to the bones. I cannot write about it without seeing again his blue-grey eyes looking into mine with a gaze that seems to scour my soul. And yet I’ve wondered if he isn’t just bewitched by the reflecting light, perhaps the light of his own image on their surface, so that even what appears deep is shallow. Is he self-conscious or not? If he has some self-consciousness, how much?