Earlier, we blogged about Dr. Temple Grandin, an astonishing woman with autism.

For many years, toddlers who, like Grandin, couldn’t speak and raged for no clear reason were usually institutionalized. Grandin, who is now in her late 50’s, was almost certainly the first such child to grow up to become a specialist in animal behavior.

When Thinking in Pictures, Grandin’s second book, appeared in 1995, experts had learned that autism was a spectrum disorder; in other words, its triad of difficulties — social problems, behavioral problems, obsessiveness — hobbled some people more than others. Grandin calls it neurodiversity.

Temple Grandin put the lie to many assumptions about autism. Of course, she wrote, autistic people have to learn social rules — in a methodical, structured way — but their obsessions may not be handicaps; they may even provide certain advantages. After all, Grandin herself had channeled her fixations and sensory differences into a successful career designing livestock equipment.

Her amazing new work, Animals in Translation, is crammed with facts and anecdotes about her favourite subject: the senses, brains, emotions and amazing talents of animals. Written with Catherine Johnson, who may have provided its colloquial, informal tone, Animals in Translation expands on an idea Grandin first sketched in Thinking in Pictures: that her autistic sensory perceptions (in particular, her intense focus on visual details) enable her to take in the world as animals do. In fact, she argues that autistic people and animals see, feel and think in remarkably similar ways.

Although startling, this observation serves mainly as a segue into Grandin’s larger point. Animals — not just chimps and dolphins, but dogs, crows, pigs and chickens — are, she contends, much smarter and more sensitive than we assume.

There seem to be no features of human thought that animals don’t share to some degree, except perhaps the ability to craft complex conceptual metaphors. Most of the hallmarks of so-called human uniqueness turn out not to be unique: mathematical skills, introspection, forming and executing plans, language and tool-making.

She writes of prairie dog communities that have developed highly complex communications with the characteristics of human language, including sophisticated use of nouns, verbs and adjectives. Prairie dogs are at the very bottom of the predator/prey pyramid; Grandin speculates that development of a complex language was essential to their survival.

She also cites the intelligence of birds, which remember complex migratory paths after the first one-way flight, and documents tool-creation by a crow who bent wire into various shapes to extract food.

When she describes the emerging relationship between early humans and wolves, she notices how much we learned from canid social relationships, to our benefit.

Grandin’s most startling assertion is that many animals are smarter than us in the ways that count for them. We’re simply not equipped to perceive their intelligence, any more than they are equipped to understand what we’re doing when we speak to one another. But Grandin sees it all the time. She literally sees things other humans don’t, and claims that animals do too.

Human beings have lived for aeons immersed in a vast congress of reasoning, perceptive, communicating beings. But overlaid, in parallel, on this planet are numerous strands of sentience that have to be judged not in comparison to us but according to their ultimate impact on the animals that use them.

Intelligence, language, consciousness and tool-making therefore have to be considered not as values in their own right, but as strategies; their value lies in how well they fit a particular species’ needs. They fit ours very well, as it turns out.

But Grandin’s new book implies that the landscape of neurodiversity and intelligence is considerably more complicated than we’ve thought. She demands greater respect for the beings we live with - especially those to whom we have adapted.

Image: Christine Marie Art

Canadian literature has largely centred on rural and wild spaces. Cities are often viewed as a blight on the landscape, encroaching on its imagined pristineness.

Toronto writer, Anne Michaels has documented the intersection of Canada’s largest city, and time, memory and imagination in her poem, “There is no city that does not dream.” This poem is the centerpiece of her third book of poetry, Skin Divers.

I first came across this poem one day on the subway, possibly as we were crossing Shaw Street. It was hidden among the subway car’s advertising, and it was part of the “Poetry on the Way” series which made my commute bearable. I had no notepad with me at the time, and I was afraid that I might not come across it again, so I memorized it and wrote it down as soon as I arrived home.

In the poem, the city unfolds, not in its brick and mortar sprawl this time, but as real and imagined remembrances over millions of years.

In a city so familiar that we hardly notice it, we read rumours of lost lakes such as glacial Lake Iroquois whose shores define the Niagara Escarpment; ravines which conceal lost rivers, long paved over, such as Taddle Creek, which still runs under Philosopher’s Walk; and dinosaur bones unearthed with the building of the subway – all part of our city’s geologic garden.

Our present day experience of the spring air and the ferry ride in the rain intertwines with this unread page of love charting where we came from, drifting away from us on the wind.

The line, “The lost lake/crumbling in the hands of brickmakers/the floor of the ravine where light lies broken/with the memory of rivers” transports me into a past where I no longer hear the quotidian hum of the city, but walk through the wild and secret marshes from another time.

Born in Kansas in 1868 while his parents were homesteading , Edgar Lee Masters, author of the Spoon River Anthology, spent his early childhood in Illinois.

The Anthology, was originally published as a serialized version in 1914-15. Original, provocative and influentual, it speaks of the dead in an Illinois graveyard, with haunting details from their lives. Masters wove a thread of partial reality throughout the Anthology. Many of the characters and their experiences can be identified with former residents of Lewistown and Petersburg, Illinois. The Anthology has been compared with Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.

Masters died in 1950, and was buried in Oakland Cemetery, Petersburg, Menard Co., Illinois.

I had no objection at all
To selling my household effects at auction
On the village square.
It gave my beloved flock the chance
To get something which had belonged to me
For a memorial.
But that trunk which was struck off
To Burchard, the grog-keeper!
Did you know it contained the manuscripts
Of a lifetime of sermons?
And he burned them as waste paper.

~~ Rev. Abner Peet

Spoon River Anthology

Toronto doesn’t have too many places where the dreamers, the world-weary and the pensive can find comfort and quiet contemplation. We do, however, have some of Canada’s finest cemeteries.

Our preference is for tall stately pines, overpowering oaks, green grass and plenty of open sky. Toronto’s cemeteries are botanical gems. Mount Pleasant has the best collection of indigenous trees and foliage found in any North American city. Toronto’s graveyards also offer anyone interested in Victorian, Gothic and Renaissance revivalist architecture a plethora of exceptional examples.

Mount Pleasant and the Necropolis, both non-sectarian cemeteries, are the offspring of Toronto’s first non-sectarian burial place, Potter’s Field, which was founded in 1832 to house the immigrants who succumbed to cholera and other illnesses, and who were excluded from the Anglican and Catholic burial grounds. They also house the prominent city founding families as well as more modern dynasties.

As you stand in the heart of Mount Pleasant, the city disappears. Giant maple trees obscure Toronto’s skyscrapers; the whirl of traffic is replaced by the rush of the wind through Babylonian willows. Leaves flutter to the ground like confetti. Shadows dance and caress across its velvet green grass canvas. It’s a chance to put life in perspective and remind yourself of the fleeting nature of our existence.

Potter’s Field and the Necropolis

Images: © Red Star Cafe

“Some people might think if I could snap my fingers I’d choose to be ‘normal.’ But, I wouldn’t want to give up my ability to see in beautiful, precise pictures.”

Dr. Temple Grandin, author of Thinking in Pictures was interviewed by NPR in August, 2006. Here is an excerpt.

Because I have autism, I live by concrete rules instead of abstract beliefs. And because I have autism, I think in pictures and sounds. I don’t have the ability to process abstract thought the way that you do.

Here’s how my brain works: It’s like the search engine Google for images. If you say the word “love” to me, I’ll surf the Internet inside my brain. Then, a series of images pops into my head. What I’ll see, for example, is a picture of a mother horse with a foal, or I think of “Herbie the Lovebug,” scenes from the movie Love Story or the Beatles song, “Love, love, love…”

When I was a child, my parents taught me the difference between good and bad behavior by showing me specific examples. My mother told me that you don’t hit other kids because you would not like it if they hit you. That makes sense. But if my mother told me to be “nice” to someone, it was too vague for me to comprehend. But if she said that being nice meant delivering daffodils to a next-door neighbor, that I could understand.

I built a library of experiences that I could refer to when I was in a new situation. That way, when I confronted something unfamiliar, I could draw on the information in my homemade library and come up with an appropriate way to behave in a new and strange situation.

When I was in my 20s, I thought a lot about the meaning of life. At the time, I was getting started in my career, designing more humane facilities for animals at ranches and slaughterhouses. Many people would think that to even work at a slaughterhouse would be inhumane, but they forget that every human and animal eventually dies. In my mind, I had a picture of a way to make that dying as peaceful as possible.

I believe that doing practical things can make the world a better place. And one of the features of being autistic is that I’m good at synthesizing lots of information and creating systems out of it.

When I was creating my first corral back in the 1970s, I went to 50 different feedlots and ranches in Arizona and Texas and helped them work cattle. In my mind, I cataloged the parts of each facility that worked effectively and assembled them into an ideal new system. I get great satisfaction when a rancher tells me that my corral design helps cattle move through it quietly and easily. When cattle stay calm, it means they are not scared. And that makes me feel I’ve accomplished something important.

Some people might think if I could snap my fingers I’d choose to be “normal.” But I wouldn’t want to give up my ability to see in beautiful, precise pictures. I believe in them.

Dr. Temple Grandin has traveled all over the world, designing livestock facilities in the United States, Canada, Europe, Mexico, Australia, and New Zealand. She has designed one-third of all livestock facilities in the United States with the goal of decreasing the fear and pain animals experience in the slaughter process.

As head of Grandin Livestock Systems and Associate Professor of Animal Science at Colorado State University, many may claim that Grandin has overcome the difficulties autism poses. However, Grandin’s achievements are not in spite of autism; autism, in fact, has played a complex and integral role in her life. She has slowly learned ways to live with autism and minimize its effect on daily activities.

“Like a phantom hunter I’ve attempted to capture the city between wakefulness and sleep, when the clear-obscure light mingles landscapes and silhouettes which blend in and become one with the trees, branches, corners of buildings, borders, drawing strange faces, disturbing and fantastic arabesques on which they want to linger. Trying to catch the passing time, always too late.

Poetry emerges with emotion in the curving of a street, in a wasteland, in an abandoned object, in people caught in their loneliness, mystery and the charm of their anonymity, in the worrisome strangeness of their appearance.

In the city there will always be something to surprise us and make us dream; a paper boat floating in a pool in the middle of a sidewalk in Paris can take us to a most amazing trip.

And then there’s another world made of glamour and loneliness.

I haunted the quays of the subway and captured a certain form of loneliness emanating from people sitting in front of the advertising boards, between invention and reality. Two worlds mixing, without having met.

The advertising image, representing the female nakedness with its luscious skin, with these perfect bodies dressed in light, transparent lace and silky underwear dominate the sad man sat on a colorful bench, dressed in grey or black, sadly waiting for the arrival of his train. On one side, above, the eternal youth and beauty, on the other side, down, faces and bodies overwhelmed by dead time. I wonder if these travellers would venture to one day taste “the Freshness of Hollywood chewing gum”.

But we smile or laugh when we see the object of their desire dancing behind them, teasing them in a certain way… “

Tatiana Bitir is a Canadian who is often on the move. Her extensive travels have taken her to the world’s great open spaces and major cities. She has had her works exhibited more than once in Paris and has been published in Le Monde 2.

Paris - Rencontres - Exhibit at Alliance Francaise de Toronto, October 2007

The Paris images

Tatiana Bitir

Paris is a city of boutiques and a city in love with visual design, so there is no shortage of beautiful windows to look at wherever you go, especially at Christmastime.

In the window of a toy store on the rue du Commerce, large pneumatic bears, in various shades of the rainbow, frolic amid a flurry of fake snow. At haute grocery store Fauchon, near the Madeleine, the window is filled with jewel-coloured Christmas pastries as brilliant as any stained-glass window.

Most dazzling are the Christmas windows of Les Grands Magasins — the connected but rival Galeries Lafayette and Au Printemps department stores — presenting onto boulevard Haussmann, directly behind the ornately sculpted Palais Garnier on the nearby Place de l’Opéra.

The opera house, with its Chagall ceiling and eight-ton crystal chandelier, is where one might pay dearly for a ticket to see a choreographed show. But there, outside these belle époque temples of commerce, the spectacle is free, but no less impressive.

The windows don’t showcase toy shops. No families eating plum puddings, either.

Beyond a scene showcasing a sultry-looking mannequin swathed in fur and a pack of ferocious animals, themselves brushed and styled, the windows depict a winter wonderland made up of globes, glitter, mirrors and simulated white stuff that carry out the Printemps’ Nordic Christmas theme with aplomb.

Designed by artists possessed with that distinctly Parisian flair for work that combines, in equal measure, the whimsical, the poetic and the absurd, the windows are light-years from anything that spoke to the ye-olde-yuletide windows of one’s youth.

In true Paris fashion, they are up-to-the-minute creations, propelled as much by technical know-how as by imagination. Anyone looking for a trip down memory lane would be disappointed — but also delighted by the sudden shift in point of view.

Globe and Mail: Parisian Christmas

Francis Peyrat photos

Houston Chronicle photos

Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall to the ground without your Father’s will. Fear not, therefore; you are of more value than many sparrows.

One might only hope that this self-important Christian anthropocentrism is only the result of a poor translation, but sadly that’s not the case. One can be reasonably assured that, each Sunday, the puppy millers are all singing hymns in church.

BBC on Christianity

Even Islam, where the spittle of dogs requires a seven-fold washing of the hands, appears to do more for the sparrow.

Whoever kills a sparrow or anything bigger than that without a just cause, Allah will hold him accountable on the Day of Judgment.

BBC on Islam

Sparrows, little monks, are a fixture in my backyard, along with chickadees, starlings, grosbeaks, crows, cardinals, robins and finches in season, but not blue-jays so much these days because of West Nile.

For the past few days, one of these petits moineaux has been fluttering close to the ground, her down puffed up through her brown feathers. Yesterday, she was huddled next to the patio door for warmth. The dogs were going nuts on the other side of the glass, since their ancestors were birders back in Japan.

I don’t know whether the little bird was just hungry or cold, or whether old age or illness was weighing her down. I debated whether to catch her, put her in a box with airholes, and take her to the Toronto Wildlife Centre. She could fly, and she had a hearty enough appetite at the brimming bird feeders in the yard, so I decided to let Nature take her course. I broke up the ice in the birdbath, and installed the heater to keep the water from freezing. Then I topped up the birdfeeders with pieces of apple, pear and birdseed.

She settled into the big birdfeeder at the back of the yard, amid the bounty.

This time, it appears that we may not need to make a trip to see the wonderful folks at Toronto Wildlife Centre. But if we did, where the sparrow is concerned, they are better than god.

Even in the weak winter light seeping into the room, his colors astonish me. Russet brown and tan, silver, black, white and gray. … His are the shades of subtle intimation, the perfection of understated tones.

One day, a baby sparrow plummeted 25 feet from a nest tucked in the eaves of a Southeast Portland home and landed in a clump of dying irises.

This would have been an entirely unremarkable event had the home’s owner, a man named Chris Chester, not discovered the baby bird in his flower beds, naked-winged and helpless - a limp, clammy thing not much bigger than Chris’ thumb.

At first he was hesitant to pick it up, his “compassion having been hobbled by childhood memories of failed bird rescues. … I remembered shoeboxes with plucked-up grass as padding, inappropriate offerings of bread and worms. The tiny, inevitable corpse come morning.”

But eventually, he took it in his hands and carried it into his home.

Maybe, in the end, we are drawn to vulnerable things because we recognize in them our own frailty - that deep down we are all somehow broken, flightless, naked in a heap. When he found this particular vulnerable thing, Chris was 41, and in his own words, as depressed as he had ever been, living “below sea level,” struggling to get things done.

Chris had always dreamed of writing a book. He would say that he just knew it was what he was meant to do, and he would try in fits and starts - he’d written poetry for years, even frequented open-mike nights around town many years ago - but he could never get far. “He just couldn’t focus,” his ex-wife, Rebecca Lester, says. He doubted. He fretted. He silenced himself with terrible writer’s block.

And then, down tumbled the sparrow.

When it became clear the bird would survive, Chris named him B. Just B. Just Be. One of Chris’ favorite things to do was to cradle B in his cupped hand, feel his warmth.

In the days following Chris’ death everyone agreed that this was one of the happiest times in Chris’ life. It was as if he had finally found the words for everything he ever wanted to say.

I offer B my right shoulder after I walk inside. He puffs and stretches, glances at the papers in my hand before hopping down. We’ve gone through this routine innumerable times, yet I ponder each repetition as the steps unfold, knowing that I’ll one day be desperate to recall all B-related things. Every day I vow and every day fail to take nothing for granted regarding those tricks time plays on complacency.

B pulled Chris outside of himself, and in doing so, he gave him something to write about: this crazy life he was living - living - with a bird flying around in the background, seed husks crunching underfoot.

But that was just the starting point.

Really, what B gave Chris was the chance to write about finding meaning and wonder in the smallest things. About the joy of finding something, anything, that can keep you focused on the moment and away from your more destructive forces: the doubts and worries and fears that keep us from being present in our own lives, that keep us from risking our feelings, even if that means experiencing the ache of loss.

One night, you accompany Rebecca as she goes to fetch Chris’ birds, and move them to her house.

Rebecca is pale and shaky, and she keeps repeating, alternately “I can’t believe he’s gone,” and “It’s so hard to be here.”

It’s clear by the state of his house that Chris had suffered both physically and existentially in his last year. That, as his nephew put it, it had become more and more like a birdhouse Chris was simply visiting. The pain of his last few years is almost palpable.

And yet, while Rebecca is upstairs preparing the birds, and you are wandering through the rooms downstairs, studying his collection of books and marveling at the mind they reflect, you spot a small rectangle of paper lying on one of the bookshelves.

Just a few minutes before, you had ventured upstairs to be introduced to the birds, and as the rest of the flock careened and spun around the room, one brave sparrow landed briefly on your open palm. And you imagined you could feel the weight of every tiny bone, every feather.

You are reminded of that moment as you pick up the piece of paper and realize that it is Chris’ name tag from the Oregon Book Awards, the dark fibers of his jacket still stuck to the back - and you know you are holding something incredibly fragile in your hands.

Sparrow Man

Babette’s Feast, a precise and elegant piece, is adapted from Isak Dinesen’s short story by director Gabriel Axel, a fellow Dane who, like Dinesen, found inspiration elsewhere. Axel is uniquely suited to this story of a culinary genius who spends 14 years in Jutland smoking cod. And then one day she stuns the taciturn Jutlanders by preparing a mighty feast.

The story is set in the second half of the 19th century on Denmark’s remote Jutland coast, in a small fishing village whose most notable inhabitants are a fervent Protestant pastor and his two beautiful, pious daughters, Martine and Filippa. Mindful of their responsibilities to their father and his reformist mission, each daughter turns down a beloved suitor. Martine’s is a young officer, Filippa’s a famous French opera star who has been vacationing on the Jutland coast.

After their father’s death, the two young women slip into unmarried middle age, carrying on the pastor’s work with saintly dedication. One night, in the middle of a terrible storm, Babette (Stephane Audran) turns up at their door, battered by weather and circumstances, and carrying a letter of introduction from Filippa’s opera singer, now old and retired. Having lost both her husband and son in the Paris Commune, Babette, he explains, needs political sanctuary. He begs the sisters to take her in. The sisters, who are nearly penniless, accept Babette’s offer to act as their unpaid housekeeper.

In time, Babette becomes an indispensable though ever enigmatic member of the household. Her Roman Catholicism is politely ignored. She brings order and efficiency to the sisters’ lives as defenders of their father’s aging flock, which, over the years, has become split by old grievances and jealousies. Babette cooks, cleans, washes and sews, always remaining aloof and proud, at a distance from her benefactors.

All of this is by way of being the prelude to the film’s extended, funny and moving final sequence, a spectacular feast, the preparation and execution of which reveal Babette’s secret and the nature of her sustaining glory.

It’s not telling too much to report that this glory is Art - in Babette’s case, a very special God-given talent. Babette’s Feast is an affirmation of Art as the force by which, in the words of the old pastor, ”righteousness and bliss,” otherwise known as the spirit and the flesh, shall be reconciled.

French actress Stephane Audran is perfection as the enigmatic Parisian Babette, who flees the Communard uprising in 1871 and is taken in by two sisters, Martina (Birgitte Federspiel) and Philippa (Bodil Kjer), the leaders of a small Danish sect. Her handsome face, her voice like a rich sauce and her strong, healthy stride are set against the prettiness and primness of the older but still angelically beautiful Martina. But like the gifted singer Philippa, Babette possesses a great talent denied.

On one plane, this is a story of waste, a quiet debate on the artist’s right to hoard her God-given talents, to give them freely or simply to sell them and so spend them for adoring crowds. A girl when we meet her, Philippa is discovered by a famous opera singer, Achille (Jean-Philippe Lafont), who is visiting Jutland. With the permission of her father the Vicar, Achille trains her voice, the better to praise God. She later rejects Achille’s underlying plan to make her the greatest diva in the world.

While practicing with him, Philippa surprises herself with her emotional reaction to their romantic duet from “Don Giovanni.” As the song goes, “I am afraid of my own joy.” Likewise her sister rejects a dashing cavalry officer, Lowenhielm (Gudmar Wivesson), to devote herself to her father’s congregation.

Thirty-five years pass, Babette arrives, and the endearing sisters are giving their special talents to their barren world. The sisters may be pious, but they are never cold. Though poor, they take the stranger in; though fasting, they risk the wrath of the Almighty by allowing her the feast. The sisters and the church members agree to eat the food, but not to enjoy or praise it. Only Lowenhielm, who returns a decorated general, tastes the transcendence of the seven-course meal. For the others, it is merely not-cod. And then the miracle occurs, when these stern old puritans are seduced by the baba au rhum and the champagne.

Babette is a maestro. The kitchen is her orchestra, the spoon her baton. Babette has cooked her masterwork, flavoring what once was only craftsmanship with sacrifice and love.

This deceptively modest story, with its quiet colors and contemplative characters, actually teems with contrasts and subtle dynamics. The eternal burn of the artist vies with the cold fire of the puritan’s denial. Serious as it all sounds, Axel and his fine cast interpret Dinesen’s ironic original with great charm and gentle comedy.