Passive Plants
Stand in the park and you can’t miss it. The only red amid a splash of green, the vine curls itself delicately around the broad trunk, tendrils cradling the bark. Considered inactive, the vine does the least it can to reach the golden light, using rocks, trees, and plants for support. With roots in the soil and most of its leaves in the bright sunshine, it’s said to enjoy the best of both worlds. When I was little, red curls falling around my face, I rarely stood in the silver cart my adoptive mother pushed me in, but one day I got down and crept my way up and around her—first her legs, then her hips, and finally her neck. Up there, the sun danced on her earrings, and little old ladies stopped to coo at me. They say a vine is passive; I say it opens itself to others.
To express myself, I use a method called facilitated communication. With this method, a person physically supports the typing or writing of someone with autism who cannot speak. That support—in the form of resistance or a countermovement—can be provided at the hand, wrist, elbow, or shoulder, depending on the autist’s motor challenges and their familiarity with the support person. The hand of the autist is not being led to the keyboard; to the contrary, it is being gently thwarted. The resistance allows the autist to feel his arm in space and to focus his motoric will. The autistic painter Larry Bissonnette adopts the metaphor of clumsy cooking to explain the need for support: “Ladle of doing language meaningfully is lost in soup of disabled map of autism, so I need a potholder of touch to grab it.” My metaphor is the tree/vine relationship, where the tree resists the vine in the way that a dancer resists their partner and thereby allows them to twirl. Facilitated communication, to say the least, is controversial. “How can we be sure that the autist, and not the facilitator, is authoring his words?” critics ask. “How can someone who looks so retarded type such eloquent things?” they persist. Much anxiety attends to the issue of the competent, self-actualizing individual.
“Weeds are nature ungirded, beyond the germ and girth of the gardener’s yard—the negation of enclosure,” writes Jonathan Skinner. As a small child, I was certainly a weed: my autism was as unwanted at home