Every morning, so far, I’m alive. | On Synaptic Overgrowth and Mary Oliver's "Landscape"

MY MIND IS A FOREST: An Autistic Wandering through the Poems of Mary Oliver, Pt. II

CONTENTS || A Quick Note | “Landscape” by Mary Oliver | MY MIND IS A FOREST, Pt. II

---

A Quick Note

The following is Part II of my essay series, MY MIND IS A FOREST: An Autistic Wandering Through the Language of Silence and the Poems of Mary Oliver. For part one, an introduction to Autistic Poetics and my letter to Mary herself, click here.

LANDSCAPE

Mary Oliver

Isn’t it plain the sheets of moss, except that
they have no tongues, could lecture
all day if they wanted about

spiritual patience? Isn’t it clear
the black oaks along the path are standing
as though they were the most fragile of flowers?

Every morning I walk like this around
the pond, thinking: if the doors of my heart
ever close, I am as good as dead.

Every morning, so far, I’m alive. And now
the crows break off from the rest of the darkness
and burst up into the sky — as though

all night they had thought of what they would like
their lives to be, and imagined
their strong, thick wings.

---

MY MIND IS A FOREST

PT II: LANDSCAPE

My mind is a forest. At least that is one of the theories. Synaptic overgrowth. An insufficient pruning mechanism, a lazy gardener in my mindgarden. Perhaps autism means my brain branches are tangled, looped around each other, the jungle of my synapses dense and humming. Wild.

A few years ago my neighbor chopped down all the trees in her yard. One day I stepped outside and they were gone—about a dozen awesome yellow pines which had, for their century of life, been kinfolk with the yellow pines that grew behind our home.

I wept. I said, “How dare she, how dare she? She has lived here two weeks and those trees are older than her grandparents!” I wished curses upon her home. My roommate said wishing curses was “evil.”¹ I said to him, “Don’t talk to me!” I slammed doors. I grieved the loss of many lives and shelters, fledglings and kits. Wasps and bees. Ants, entire tribes of them. I scowled as our neighbor planted grass where a murmuring, animate understory used to be. I wished more curses and kept them to myself.

In the absence of the old pines, the sun fell heavy on our hill. What was once undergrowth tamed by an ample, coniferous canopy began to rumble. Then it erupted. Saplings and ragweed, staining beautyberries and sweet maypop. Wild plants grew into every sun-touched space, climbing hip-high, then neck-high, then towering over our back porch, leaning in imposingly, netted together by the work of giant, golden orb-weavers whose webs are strong enough to ensnare birds, whose appetites are large enough to eat them.

We called landscapers to help us mitigate some of the more intrusive overgrowth. Several arrived, looked around, mumbled something about incline or tools or poison ivy, and scurried home. Meanwhile the plants continued to compete for sunlight, growing, growing, crowding out the others. Crowding out our dogs, one of whom resorted to pooping on the deck. In the absence of a willing landscaper, the grass grew past our knees. Our neighbors called the city. The city sent us a letter that said Property Violation! They threatened to fine us if we didn’t bring our yard to code. My wife stood for hours in the side-yard with a weedwacker, hacking away at the ryegrass until her battery died.

In 2014, the New York Times published an article titled “Study Finds That Brains With Autism Fail to Trim Synapses as They Develop.”² Teams of neurobiologists poked around in the brains of dead autistics and found that autistic adults had, since toddlerhood, pruned only a fraction of the synapses than were pruned by their nonautistic peers.

“More is not better,” said one molecular biologist of synaptic growth. Pruning, a neuroscientist explained, prevents “different parts of the brain talking too much to each other… if all parts of the brain talk to all parts of the brain, all you get is noise.”

The article states the findings of the study could “help scientists in the search for treatments, if they can develop safe therapies to fix the system the brain uses to clear extra synapses,” emphasis mine. Though the drug used to clear these synapses in mice was “an immunosuppressant with potentially serious side effects,” they did “eliminate the abnormal social behaviors.”

“This drug has really horrible side effects,” said the molecular scientist, “and you don’t want to give it to everybody.” Nonetheless, the results were deemed “exciting” and gave researchers “hope.” Ah, it is possible our autistic mindgardens might be tidied, sheared, neatened, shaped. How lucky for everyone else that our “autism behaviors” could be improved by only a bit of brain topiary!

Isn’t it clear
the black oaks along the path are standing
as though they were the most fragile of flowers?³

My mind is a forest.

In the morning I rise and I am there, waking with my head on a pillow of peat moss to a place that is my own, under a sky of silence kissed at the hems by the silvery light of dawn.

My mind is a forest. Green and speckled with sun, woven blanket of canopy draped overhead. The trees that interpret sound have grown into the trees that interpret touch, and I feel birdchatter as marbles in my belly, a squirrel’s bark as a gust of air on my cheek. Music moves like electricity through my muscles. My most honest body is dancing. Swaying. Responding.

My mind is a forest, and the city sent me a letter that said Property Violation! Many do-gooders—their mindgardens clear and neat, their skies wide and blue—have passed through with conviction, looking around and shouting their advice.⁴ “Have you considered?” they asked me. “Have you tried?” I welcomed them in, listened closely to their wisdom on how to make this place more beautiful. I did what I could.

“May I?” they eventually asked. I suppose. I held perfectly still as they went about their work; a patient on their operating table. “Practice gratitude. Stop fixating. Don’t say that. Don’t wear that. Don’t think that. Cut away, cut away.” When the music played, I could not move for fear of incident. I could not sway. I could not dance. “That’s better,” they said in the end. “At least a bit.” Then they were gone.

My mind is a forest, and when I learned this, I suddenly saw nothing but the years of work I’d done to make it more accommodating, hospitable for my visitors. Benches wedged among bramble, tents pitched between the great maples. Trash cans and barbecues. Papers and cups blown about, caught in bushes and branches. Boots had trampled trilliums, sunk dens, kicked nests, left their prints in the soil. They came and they went. Evidence of them is everywhere.

Swiftly I began the labor, blunt and slow, of taking apart the pieces of this world that were not mine. No more benches, no more tents, no more trash, cups, boots. No more invitations extended to those who were not content to enter barefoot and reverent, to listen to the din of the forest, to sit with me in the earth where the heavy treads of people have begun to grow over with spongy, delicate moss.

Every morning, so far, I’m alive. And now
the crows break off from the rest of the darkness
and burst up into the sky — as though

all night they had thought of what they would like
their lives to be, and imagined
their strong, thick wings.⁵

If I could think a life and sprout it like feathers, I’d imagine myself a fjord. Forests of coldwater coral fill my glacial belly, my stony earth-shoulders stippled with conifer and birch. Magpies and cormorants watch the skies and the tides from their branches, filling the air with their natter. In the hollow of an old spruce I tuck each of my flights of worry; not to avoid or deny them, but to keep them safe as I care for them one by one, nursing injured wings, releasing them back to dance over the waters as a murmuration of starlings. Patience runs like a current through my middle, and my contentment touches everything, spreading quiet and persistent as lichen. I grow slow and old. See the long, white tresses of snow falling down my back.

If I cannot be made a fjord, let me not be changed at all.

Let me not be changed. Let my mindforest grow. So what if I am strange or silent? So what if my words get caught in my mouth sometimes?

Isn’t it plain the sheets of moss…

Language has constrained our imaginations, of this there can be little doubt. The tongueless sheets of moss do lecture. Patiently, ceaselessly. Who is listening?

Who is listening to the nonspeaking child, stacking his cups with brilliant precision? Who is listening to the autistic poet who can ramble and ramble until she cannot, until her words disappear? Do you assume she has nothing now to say? Who is listening to the lonely bear grieving? Who is listening to the jumping raven with the cut wing or the old, once-injured owl blinking slowly in her habitat? Who is listening to the flower garden overtaken with bindweed? To “the black oaks along the path… standing / as though they were the most fragile of flowers?”⁶ To the sheets of moss, the crows in flight, the pond opening heart-doors?

Who is listening to what cannot be heard in words? Who is intuiting the language the world nonetheless utters? How, from our cramped English lexicon, can we translate what we who listen hear?

If not a poem, how?

---

ENDNOTES

1. “That is evil. You don’t know what she’s been through. Maybe a tree fell on her dad!”

2. Pam Belluck, “Study Finds That Brains With Autism Fail to Trim Synapses as They Develop,” The New York Times (New York, NY), Aug. 21, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/22/health/brains-of-autistic-children-have-too-many-synapses-study-suggests.html.

3. Oliver, “Landscape,” 68, lines 4-6.

4. A reference once again to Mary’s “The Journey”

5. Oliver, “Landscape,” 68, lines 10-15.

6. Oliver, “Landscape,” 68, lines 5-6.