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If the doors of perception were cleansed then
everything would appear to man as it is: Infinite.
For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things
thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.
—William Blake
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While autism was described almost simultaneously by Leo Kanner and
Hans Asperger in the 1940s, Kanner seemed to see it as an unmitigated
disaster, where Asperger felt that it might have certain positive or
compensating features—a “particular originality of thought and experience,
which may well lead to exceptional achievements in later life.
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Uta Frith has written, in her book Autism: Explaining the Enigma, “Autism—does not go away—Nevertheless, autistic people can, and often do, compensate for their handicap to a remarkable degree. [But] there remains a persistent deficit—something that cannot be corrected or substituted.” She also implies, in a speculative mood, that there may be a reverse side to this “something”, a sort of moral or intellectual intensity or purity, so far removed from the normal as to seem noble, ridiculous, or fearful to the rest of us. She wonders, in this regard, about the blessed fools of old Russia, about the ingenuous Brother Juniper, an early follower of Saint Francis, and, interestingly, about Sherlock Holmes, with his oddness, his peculiar fixations—his “little monograph on the ashes of 140 different varieties of pipe, cigar and cigarette tobacco”, his “clear powers of observation and deduction, unclouded by the everyday emotions of ordinary people”, and the extreme unconventionality that often allows him to solve a case that the police, with their more conventional minds, are unable to solve. Asperger himself wrote of “autistic intelligence” and saw it as a sort of intelligence scarcely touched by tradition and culture—unconventional, unorthodox, strangely “pure” and original, akin to the intelligence of true creativity.
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