Notes on Pattison: Wordless in a Windy World_Thoughts on Being Unable to Communicate
I would have to agree with Bruno Bettelheim that the Wild Boy of Aveyron may indeed have been autistic in some measure. Of course, without any personal scientific basis or exposure to the facts of the case I can only rely on what is written and what is written is that part of wisdom that I and many others must assimilate. The scenarios of too many motion pictures form the outline of my picture of the Wild Boy. Is that an accepted different definition of literacy? I’m not sure I know. What I know is what I feel. What I feel is an extension and a permutation of what I have learned. How can fact be determined by an unspoken value or moral sense that gives us our personal sense direction? This is a circumstance of which I’m unsure. Pattison mentions the case of Helen Keller, but if the screenplay for "The Miracle Worker" is in some fashion a “true” story, based on fact (as they love to say in the closing credits), Ms. Keller had words (at least “water”) before she became deaf and blind. If, in the case of the Wild Boy in 1800, there had been devoted teachers with the skill and training in 1888 of Anne Sullivan, Helen Keller’s teacher, perhaps there might have been a different outcome for the Wild Boy. Strangely enough, Anne Sullivan used a medieval sign language alphabet system signed into Keller's palm that had been developed by Spanish monks. Anne Sullivan became a life-long companion of Helen Keller. That may have been too much devotion for the discoverers of the Wild Boy. My overall contention may be that with enough devotion and training of his “teachers” the Wild Boy may surely have been able to learn and perhaps become “literate.”