Echo was a nymph

The oldest name we have for one of the most stigmatised autistic behaviours is Greek, and it is a poem. Echolalia: the repetition of another’s speech. In the DSM it appears by name, an example filed under autism’s criterion B.1. In my family it appears as my grandmother, who repeated the ends of other people’s sentences her whole life the way other people nod, a soft antiphon that meant I am with you.

Behind the clinical term stands the nymph. Echo, in Ovid’s telling, is punished with a strange constraint: she cannot originate speech, only return the last words spoken to her. The story is usually read as tragedy, and it is. But look at what Echo does inside her constraint. She selects. When Narcissus calls out, she chooses which of his words to give back, and the returned fragments mean something new in her mouth. Repetition, in Echo, is not the absence of composition. It is composition under constraint, which is one workable definition of poetry itself.

I have taken her side in her own machinery. My poem ‘Echolalia (Ovid III)’ is built entirely of returning lines, tercets chained so that every line must be said twice before the poem can let it go, the curse adopted as the form, printed whole at the end of this essay, and it opens as a correction of the record: She was not failing. She was answering him. Ovid, in my version, is the one in a hurry. Echo is the one who keeps time:

"Come here," he said, and the trees took up the plea.
She gave him back the words he had given the breeze.
Come here came here came here, but never quite the same.
She learned to live inside the echo of the day.

The phrase was his. The keeping was hers. Narcissus barely moves in the poem; his voice stayed where it was and stayed, the fixed point, sameness without return, which the myth calls beauty and the pool calls drowning. Echo’s speech went out and came round, which is the bats’ art arriving early, knowing by return, when the plea comes back changed – come here to came here – the poem reaches the whole of stim poetics in five words: never quite the same. Repetition is not the absence of change. It is how change is measured, and where it can be lived.

Autistic people who use echolalia have been saying this for years: the repeated phrase is not empty. M. Remi Yergeau has made it scholarship, arguing that echoed speech is rhetoric, invention under way, not the absence of a speaker. The echoed phrase is a unit of meaning handled whole, the way I handle the small objects I collect, turning a thing in the hand until it becomes mine. Gestalt language processing, the clinicians now call it. Poets have always called it allusion, refrain, the found line. Christina Rossetti wrote the nymph’s poetics straight: her poem ‘Echo’ opens, “Come to me in the silence of the night” and then cannot stop summoning, the word come returning line after line until absence has a rhythm it can live in.

And there is a form that is echolalia outright, given a genre and a Latin name: the cento, the poem built entirely of other poets’ lines, speech that composes only by returning what has been said, Echo’s constraint adopted as a method. It is not an antiquarian curiosity; it is alive in these pages. In Cordite’s recent DIALOGUE issue, Catherine Johnstone’s ‘Bird Cento’ assembles a single flying voice from the kept lines of eight poets, Adrienne Rich to Ania Walwicz to Audre Lorde to Quinn Eades, and then does something the glossary definition does not predict: it repeats its own borrowings, sending the same borrowed breath around the poem twice, an echo of echoes, naming its method in one word as patchworking. That is echolalia on the page, and the page calls it craft. A child composing her speech the same way – entirely of other people’s kept sentences – was, until recently, a treatment goal. The border between them is administrative.

Stim poetics asks what happens if we stop sorting these into art and symptom, and read them as one practice.

The churn: Les Murray

Any Australian lineage of stim poetics runs through Les Murray, who was writing autist portraits long before he had public words for himself: ‘Portrait of the Autist as a New World Driver’ appeared in 1974, a quarter of a century before his open identification with the spectrum – a recognition that arrived, as it does for so many of us, through his child. His son Alexander is the subject of one of the tenderest poems in the language about an autistic life, and ‘It Allows a Portrait in Line Scan at Fifteen’ is stim poetics avant la lettre in both of its grammars. The first grammar is in the title’s pronoun: it allows. Autism is the poem’s co-author, the sovereign It that allows and does not allow, that withdrew the boy’s speech for years, that dislikes what the poem, in its one permitted pun, calls I-contact. The portrait is not painted over the condition. It is negotiated with it, line by line. The second grammar is the line scan itself: the poem has no narrative, only items, one self-contained observation per line – the boy assembled the way he assembles his own beloved catalogues, the stacked fruit worshipped at the greengrocers, the breeds of fowls, the counties of Ireland, the world’s fertile soils drawn freehand from memory. The form is the cognition: to hold the son, the poem borrows the son’s way of holding.

And inside the portrait, everywhere, is echo. The boy’s first conversation is a single word, offered, corrected, and returned, a whole exchange conducted in one repeated syllable. “Phrases spoken to him he would take as teaching, and repeat”, Murray writes, which is gestalt language processing described decades before the clinics took up the term, and described as pedagogy, not pathology: repetition as how a world is learned. And the poem ends by giving the boy the last word and letting him say it twice, the same urgent cry doubled around a terrified look into the years, so that the portrait’s final brushstroke is an echolalia: resolve repeating itself to outlast fear. Amanda Tink’s study of Murray and autism takes its title from inside this poem, from the deep fertile soil the boy loved. Even the scholarship keeps what it holds by repeating it.

But the case for Murray as a stim poet does not rest on the poems about autism. It rests on the poems’ motion. Murray at full stretch is a poet of the churn: the list that will not stop listing, the sentence that turns its object over and over to catch the light on every facet, the sound-play that runs ahead of sense because the mouth is enjoying itself. Critics reaching for his precursors keep arriving at Gerard Manley Hopkins, and no wonder: another list-maker of the creation, whose “Glory be to God for dappled things” opens a poem that is nothing but its own inventory, the catalogue as praise – praise as the highest register of the stim. Murray’s creature poems speak in dense sonic weather, language pushed toward pure patterned noise, which is to say toward the hum. ‘Bats’ Ultrasound’ ends in a stanza of nearly unpronounceable echo, the bats’ sonar transcribed as a churn of air-and-ear vowels, “ah, eyrie-ire, aero hour, eh?”, a whole passage generated from one small hoard of sounds turned over and over; the same one-word-lexicon principle Esther Ottaway will push to the letter in ‘Neurodiverse’. And it is not noise about nothing. Echolocation is the animal art of knowing by return: the bat says the world and listens for what comes back, composition and navigation in one act, an echolalia that maps. The passage flies above the peak of human hearing, and its last line lands the whole hum in a name for God assembled out of ear and air, which is Hopkins’s equation completed: the catalogue as praise, and the hum as prayer. Critics have called this fecundity, exuberance, sprawl, borrowing his own word for it. Read neuroaffectively, it is something more specific: a mind regulating through verbal repetition, and a reader invited to regulate along. Even the famous difficulty of Murray, the density that makes some readers feel shut out, might be reframed. The poem is not performing for you. It is stimming, and you are welcome to rock along or not.

I do not want to reduce Murray to diagnosis, and stim poetics must never become retrospective symptom-spotting, a checklist run over the canon. In Murray’s case the recovery work has in any event been done, and done properly: Amanda Tink’s scholarship, from her doctoral study of Murray, autism and Australian literature to her recent essay ‘Portrait of the Autist Erased’, whose title turns Murray’s own 1974 title back on his critics, documents how thoroughly criticism managed not to see what the poet kept saying about himself. Stim poetics stands on that recovery and asks a further, formal question. Not whether the autism is in the poems, which Tink has settled, but what the poems’ repetitions are doing: that when Murray builds a poem as a churn of lists and returning sounds, the form itself is doing autistic work, regulating as it goes, and that this work was in plain sight the whole time, filed under style.