Pharaoh's Fury

This morning the Lark was swinging his hand back and forth in a pendulum-like way. I asked, "What's that, Lark?" He looked at me, and instead of telling me, gave me a clue. He added a "whooosh, whooosh, whooosh," one whooosh with each swing of the hand. "Let me guess," I said, "Pharaoh's Fury?" And he told me I was right. (Pharaoh's Fury is a carnival ride that swings back and forth.)

I took this as a sign that our ACT-OUT program is helping. The goal of ACT-OUT is to help the Lark develop his capacity for mimesis. Mimesis is when we act something out with the intention of communicating or consciously externalizing a mental representation. This is a basic form of communication, more basic than spoken language. Children engage in mimesis when they make pretend. A wedding ceremony is a mimetic event--the bride and her father take a long, slow walk down the aisle, symbolizing the life they've had together; they separate, symbolizing the beginning of her new life; the ring symbolizes the bond of marriage; the kiss symbolizes the physical union. Mimesis exists along with spoken language. People who develop spoken language without mimesis (like many people with autism) miss the whole mimetic subtext of spoken language (i.e., body language).

For people with narrative comprehension deficit disorder, developing the mimetic capacity is important because it is during mimetic activity that young children begin to integrate the many dimensions of experience (setting, characters, actions, intentions, etc.) into a coherent narrative. That is, this is where mimesis ends up--in sophisticated pretend play. But it begins with the ability to externalize and share mental representations by means of physical actions. Which is (I think) what the Lark was doing when he added the "whooosh whooosh" to his hand gesture so that I would understand it.