Open Society

Uniform adjustments: hard collars, ties, leather school shoes, formal skirts and trousers, these can all be difficult to manage for many autistic people. The use of more comfortable fabrics can allow us to concentrate more fully on our tasks. Many schools now encourage children to attend school with trainers and a school hoodie for comfort and practicality.

The data outputted by medical measurement loops back into itself as input, reinforcing a clinical consensus from which nothing follows.

Autism constitutes “a whole mode of being” and “touches on the deepest questions of ontology,” the neurologist Oliver Sacks wrote. The arrow of Sacks’s insight, earned by his rapport with patients outside of the exam room, bounces off the castles where the scientists of human development toil on schematics. Entrenched, they erect distinctions between facts and values, adopt postures of detachment and carve the gestalt into a set of discrete, interlocking functions. Sacks envisioned for persons like Misha a science of “radical ontology” that jettisons the etiolated metaphysics of the concept. Rather than itemizing deficits in function, radical ontology plumbs modes of being, honors the novel entities from which concrete realities are constructed, building and preserving identity. The richness and tenacity of human perception, Sacks contended, bear no necessary relationship to propositional thinking—or any other “intellectual differences.” In his patients he witnessed a testimony synonymous with poetry. To show how life reaches past science, he turned to the genre of the “strange tale,” distinguished by “a quality of the fabulous.”

Misha, so understood, stands not behind his developmental norms but apart from them.

How I relish the moments when I muster the wit and imagination to cross the threshold into his phenomenal reality, being instead of knowing.

His eloquence is magnificent.