Wednesday, November 9, 2011

Poetic imagination

I’m reading-How Can I Talk If My Lips Don’t Move-subtitled- inside my autistic mind- by Tito Rajarshi Mukhopadhyay. The author is autistic, a “young man whose verbal expressive language is profoundly impaired but who communicates almost exclusively by independently writing or typing his thoughts and ideas on a computer.”

I am fascinated by his observations and experiences. “I believed that if you cared enough to listen, you could hear the sky and earth speaking to each other in the language of blue and brown.” He thinks in colors-voices of colors. Shadows caught his interest and he asked- “How would a shadow tell a story without having a color of its own?” He observed later on- “I could now imagine how a shadow could silence the interaction between other colors if those colors happened to fall within the territory of its silence.” He added many sentences later: “My boundary between imagining and experiencing something as a very delicate one.”

Life is a mystery. The mind is part of that mystery. Reading the author’s narration is like walking on one of the terraces of the mind. I find his observations beyond the ordinary, the familiar- with expressions uttered by a poetic imagination. And I’m only on page 22.

3 comments:

Bellezza said...

The autistic mind seems to be such a fascinating one. Many of the children I have taught, or in our elementary school, have been diagnosed with autism. I find them more soulfull, more in tune with their surroundings, than many other children. I think one of the difficulties is that they absorb too much, rather than being able to filter things out. They are brilliant and touching and interesting to teach. (Have you read The Curious Incident of the Dog in The Nighttime? That is an interesting book about an autistic boy as well, although not written by one per se.)

Staci said...

I read a book very similar to this one and was instantly intrigued...

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/74812.Born_on_a_Blue_Day

edgar said...

Dolce Bellezza-I enjoyed the Curious Incident...
I got a little bit os understanding of why the autistic children behaves.

Staci-I read Born on a Blue Day also. He was mentioned also in the book-Moon Walking with Einstein and Foer talks about the memory of the autistic boy.

There was another book I read before written by a female autistic who graduated with a PhD and has a particular insight about animals. She thinks in pictures and designs slaugther houses for cows.