on metaphor

 

It is often said that autistic people can’t recognise metaphors. But that isn’t true. Some autistic people struggle to grasp metaphor, just as some allistic people (that is, people who aren’t autistic) struggle to grasp metaphor. Moreover, autistic struggle to grasp metaphor might be quite different from allistic difficulty.

An example. I am perfectly aware that, when the scientific community speaks of the cloud creating a platform that enables researchers located in different parts of the world to collaborate, ‘cloud' and ‘platform’ are metaphors.

But the reason we turn to metaphors is, surely, that they convey a superfluity of meaning. And whereas other people might be able to recognise the metaphor and filter out most of the meaning, as an autistic person I need to acknowledge all the possible meanings.

Cloud coverage varies dramatically from day to day. When we speak of ‘the cloud,’ do we mean that some days the information available to us is overwhelming, or that sometimes access is unreliable? Probably not—though both these things are true, and so, if this is not what we consciously intend by the metaphor then it is an unintended benefit. Or are we drawing on a biblical image, ‘the great cloud of witnesses,’ to convey the idea that the cloud connects us to the experience of generations who have gone before us, on whose work our work builds (a platform, if you will)? Again, this might be unlikely (biblical literacy is not as high as I would like) but it fits. Or perhaps we mean that digital information surrounds us, but is invisible. This would be an imprecise metaphor, as clouds are not invisible. And yet I suspect that this self-evidently imprecise use might come closer to the choice of metaphor. Here, each piece of data might be considered a water droplet, which coalesces with others; but if so, the clouds would make more sense than the cloud.

As an autistic person, metaphor doesn’t work, for me, as a shorthand; it works as a door (metaphor alert) into a bigger world, a world I have to stop to explore, each time I come across it. The issue isn’t that I can’t recognise a metaphor, but that I can’t skim read. As it is, when I read, my brain uses measurable time and energy recalling the meaning of each and every word (to use a metaphor, I don’t have a mental dictionary that stores words in alphabetical order [itself something that escapes me] and with their meaning; let alone a ‘frequently-used words’ filing cabinet at the front of my brain) and metaphor slows things down even further. Because I love language, and precision that ‘literal’ language cannot always get to without the help of ‘poetic’ language, I am perfectly happy to move slowly and appreciate the scenery (metaphor alert).

But, no, metaphor does not elude me.

What about you?