So we keep pressing, not too much, but not too little either, in ways so simple that it seems ludicrous to record them. A few months after she is three she becomes interested in lights. She knows that light comes when one pulls a string or moves a switch. I have not taught her, nor could I; this is just the sort of thing it turns out she knows. When she wants light she moves my hand to the switch. But it is my hand that is her tool, not her own; she cannot move the switch herself. Teaching her to turn on a light is a process of choosing the easiest switch in the house. It cannot be the string, which must be pulled, nor the old- fashioned switches that require pressing, for the muscular effort required of this strong child must be imperceptible. I take her hand. With it I flick the switch down. Down first, lights out, for that is easier. It takes time — how long I don’t remember. At length she can do it for herself.
Though she is fascinated with water, activating a faucet is harder. Using, perhaps, her light-switch experience, she learns of herself to use the kitchen faucet, which requires only a simple push. But an ordinary faucet requires both pressure and twist. I put Elly’s hand to it; wrist and fingers go limp. My whole hand covers Elly’s; using hers as a tool, I turn on the faucet. This first time, and again, and again, all the force is mine. Elly likes water and she has no objection to repetition. Imperceptibly — I hope it is imperceptibly — I lighten my pressure. The small hand beneath mine is no longer quite limp. It seems that there are muscles there after all. I move my hand a quarter of an inch up hers as I turn the water on again. Another quarter inch. A half. Infinitely gradually I withdraw my hand, up her fingers, up her wrist. She goes on turning on the water. My hand moves up her arm. Finally all that is left is one finger on her shoulder, to enable her to maintain the fiction that it is I, not she, who is performing the action. We have been together over the basin a full hour. But the work is not yet over; next day we must go over the process again to re-establish the skill, but we can do it more rapidly. Then I remove my finger; my presence now is enough. The next day she does it alone, thrilled, delighted, over and over. She understands everything about the process, even things I thought too difficult to teach. She never lets the basin overflow, she never turns on the hot water. But the work is not quite done. For weeks she will require a brief retraining before every unfamiliar faucet. It is a long time before the new mastery can be fully accepted.
It is as if Elly were more comfortable with an image of herself that could not do things. Her inabilities seemed not only willed but jealously guarded. I remember her at four, after considerable progress of the kind described here, getting ready for her bath. She cannot yet undress herself, but for some weeks she has been taking off her shoes once I untied them. Today she refuses, laughing at me. (Learning to tease shows of course great progress in human contact, but that belongs in a later chapter.) I wait, resisting the temptation to assist her. The shoe is on so loosely that it falls off. Elly, who ‘cannot’ put on her shoes, sizes up the situation. Instantly and expertly she puts the shoe back on. She was not going to take it off and she didn’t!
Whatever it was that held Elly back from using her hands also inhibited her use of her body. The extreme physical caution that had made it possible for us to ignore the dangers of stairs and edges when she was small did not abate. We could only infer that she was capable of balancing and climbing like other children, as we had inferred that she could walk. For three years things on upper shelves were safe; if Elly could not reach them, she would not push over a chair and climb to get them. For more than four years she was lifted in and out of her crib. As time went on I kept the sides down and set a chair beside the bed. Elly would tentatively put her legs over the side on to the waiting chair and draw them back again. Yet we remembered a strange disturbed night a year before when the older children, left to baby-sit for an Elly who, because of guests, had been put to sleep in a playpen in an unfamiliar room, had had to call us home because Elly had got out three times. How had she done it? The playpen sides were higher than the crib’s. Nobody knew; she hadn’t, of course, performed in public. When I returned and put her back in the pen, she stayed there. Naturally; she couldn’t climb, could she?
It was the same with stairs. One day in November — she was almost two and a half — she gingerly descended the stairs of a local museum, erect on her two feet. The stairs were wide and shallow, easy to manage. It was April before she walked down the taller stairs at home. Years passed, her legs got longer, but still she descended like a two-year-old, both feet touching each step. She was six before she went down like a normal child, foot below foot.
Hesitation, caution, unwillingness to interact with the physical world. These sound like the shapes of fear, and perhaps they were. Yet she did not seem afraid. It was as if she had found a way to make fear unnecessary. She did not have to be afraid; she had found a way to protect herself from the challenges of her environment. Ignore them and you will not have to avoid them. If something is there to push, do not push it. Do not pull, twist, open, lift, balance, kick, climb, throw. Attempt nothing. Then there will be no failure and you can remain serene. This was not fear in any recognizable form. If it was fear, it lay so deep it never showed itself. There was visible only a tight, closed caution. We could work on it, gradually lead her through tiny steps, each unthreatening, each well within her ability, to the experience of small successes — and hope that she would begin to acquire the ordinary child’s taste for mastery of the forces of the physical world. But the process was inconceivably slow. We waited for the point when one success would generate another without our intervention, when Elly would move ahead on her own from skill to skill as other children do. But it did not come. For year upon year, the initiative remained with us.
5. Willed Blindness
A normal child develops almost automatically. It needs no officious overseers to assist it in the use of its senses. It is sufficient that it find itself in a world that can be touched, heard, seen. If babies had to be taught to reach, to focus, to listen, to interpret, the human race would never have survived. The most gifted pedagogue could hardly hope to programme the speech development that takes place spontaneously in a dull normal two-year-old.
But Elly was not a normal child. She was not spastic or paralytic, yet we could not take for granted that she would use her body. It was the same with the more abstract abilities — with hearing and with sight. We could not take them for granted either. Elly was not blind, but sight is more than images on the retina. The organism must record, but it must also interpret before it can be said to see. As eighteen-month-old Elly flipped the pages of her coloured picture books, what did she see? Did her mind integrate the reds and browns and blacks and blues and greys into a kitten or a car? I could not say. I could only observe that she flipped the pages rapidly, steadily, with never a pause. Once — once only — she had shown she recognized a picture, of a blue teddy bear like her own. That was at seventeen months. Months passed, one year, another, and never did Elly give another sign that she could see a picture.
Negative abilities are harder to spot in proportion as they are more abstract. With all the other things Elly did not do, it was only gradually that we began to think about how much she did not seem to see. We knew, of course, that she could look right through a person. She usually did. It was some time before we became conscious that she was blind to more than human beings. But when we began to think about it, it seemed that Elly saw little that was farther than three feet away.
I have said that she did not point. After a while, no more did we; it was impossible, by gesture and of course by speech, to get her to look at anything at a distance. The significance of this might be dubious; it was, after all, impossible without a Machiavellian strategy to get her to do anything at all. If she did not see a dog when we pointed at it there was no cause for surprise. Yet as impressions piled up, it was impossible not to be struck by her imperviousness to visual stimuli of all sorts.
A car would draw up within three feet of wher
e she was playing. She would not look at it. A dog ran past. She seemed to register nothing. She was over three before she looked up and saw a bird. Not until she was well past four did she respond in such a way that we could be sure she had seen a cow across a highway, twenty-five feet away.
I am myopic; mine is the simple but severe nearsightedness that closes in at age six to eight, when a child begins to read. Naturally it occurred to me that Elly might be suffering from an early onset of the same thing. Without my glasses, I cannot see a cow across a road either. Yet I could not think that Elly lived in the haze that envelops me when I take my glasses off — Elly who never fumbled, never fell. She was perfectly oriented to her environment. When we went for a walk she knew every turning. I could lag behind her and she would lead me home. Unless she enjoyed some sixth sense (and I have thought of that too), she must, I reasoned, have registered the positions of trees and buildings as she passed; she must, therefore, have seen them.
We felt, moreover, that any explanation must reach beyond a single symptom. We had learned it was no lack of strength or coordination that prevented Elly from using her hands. We could suspect that what limited her use of her eyes was no physical disability, but the same mysterious defect of will. As she did not reach out with her body, so she did not explore with her eyes. Those who attach no significance to what they see are in their own way blind. The task we had before us was not to improve Elly’s vision, but to extend the range of what she found worth looking at, to help her find meaning in what we were reasonably sure she saw.
For what Elly thought significant she seemed to see well enough. If she didn’t notice dogs or cows at a distance, she didn’t notice them up close either. She ignored our cat even more thoroughly than she ignored her siblings. But there were things she did not ignore — colours, abstract shapes. There was no question that she saw these.
One day — she was two years and eight months old — I was putting on her snowsuit. Ordinarily she was eager to go out, but today she acted oddly. Instead of submitting passively to being dressed, she tried to get away, and as soon as the suit was on she headed upstairs. I waited, and when she didn’t return, went up and found her absorbed in a set of parquet shapes I had put out on a bureau, in hopes of getting her interested. She had caught sight of them while I was carrying her downstairs and had clearly decided she wanted to play with them. Hence the resistance and the return.
The set is of a common type, composed of diamonds, right triangles, and squares of four different colours, which may be assembled in various ways. Elly, as I watched incredulous, selected four diamonds and combined them into a larger diamond, rejecting in the process a couple of right triangles that came to hand. She did this twice more, then began on the squares, working with a concentration that is difficult to describe. For twenty minutes her whole attention was focused on the task. The abstract, meaningless shapes seemed to have intrinsic importance for her. Discriminating between them was easy. Yet this was a child of whose intelligence we were in grave doubt, whom it seemed impossible to interest in the usual toys, whose ordinary play was little more than sifting sand through her fingers or arranging blocks in parallel lines.
I put the set away when she had finished. I did not want this play to degenerate into sterile perseveration any faster than it had to. I got it out two weeks later and she arranged the pieces by colour as well as by shape. A week later, on another toy, she discriminated stars, octagons, and hexagons as well. But the fine concentration was gone. This was too easy to be interesting. There seemed no place to go from here. Once she had mastered them, I could think of little to be done with shapes.
There were of course puzzles. These involved shape-discrimination, and might lead to the recognition of pictures, but so far I had only minor success with them. Six months before — she was only a little over two — I had got out the easiest of the children’s wooden puzzles. It represented Puss in Boots. There were seven wooden pieces, one for the head, one for the body, two arms, two booted legs, and a tail. Elly was able, unprompted, to put in the easier pieces, but others presented physical difficulties; to get them in she would have to adjust them slightly or exert a small physical pressure. This was too much to ask. She became frustrated and I put in the other pieces myself. She showed no sign she recognized the pieces as head or boots, or ultimately as cat.
I kept on with puzzles, off and on, but Elly rarely put in a piece herself. She would look on while I did one, without enthusiasm but with more attention than she showed most things. To involve her in the play and to test her knowledge of the puzzle I would place a piece wrong. Unerringly her hand would touch mine to indicate the correct position. By two and three-quarters, the age when she discovered the parquet blocks, she had, so to speak, a passive mastery of three puzzles at or above her age level. I suspected she could do more, but had not yet thought of a way to manage it.
It was not for some weeks that the breakthrough came. Elly was nearly three. Two weeks before, in Boston while she was hospitalized for testing, we had shopped for toys and found a very much simpler puzzle than those she was used to — only five pieces, each of which fitted unambiguously into a slot of its own. With this I hoped to tempt Elly to use those hands and eyes that could do so much more than they would — to complete a puzzle for herself.
It worked. Elly showed her usual unwillingness to pick up the pieces, but it was so easy that apparently she couldn’t resist. Problems like reversal of pieces that had frustrated her in harder puzzles she solved immediately. She liked the easy puzzle. In the next couple of weeks she did it often — often enough so that I knew she would soon lose interest in it, as she had already lost interest in the others.
I put the new puzzle away, and when I brought it out again the next week I brought out the three old ones with it. I put the pile in a new place in a different room to provide a new context, since she had ceased to be interested in them in the old one. The easy puzzle was on the top. For the first time in a week she rapidly assembled and disassembled it, but she did not stop there. The cat puzzle was on the bottom of the pile. Elly got it out on her own and started to do it. She put in the easy pieces with her own hand, without hesitation. The cat’s two boots, however, are similar but not interchangeable; it is easy even for an adult to confuse them. When they would not fit, Elly whimpered and took out all the pieces she had put in. I helped her with the boots, and we finished the puzzle together. When a piece resisted, I took her hand and made it pat the piece into place. The following day, while I looked on unknown to her, she found the cat puzzle and did it completely, boots and all, patting down the pieces exactly as I had shown her.
The easy puzzle was what had done the trick. Again the principle was illustrated: in teaching Elly a new skill, it was not enough to be sure it lay within her demonstrated capability. It must be well within; it must be so ridiculously simple that it could present no challenge, afford no threat, make no apparent demands on future performance. Only then would Elly dare to commit herself. I knew that. I had learned it with the spoon, the cup, the rings on a stick. But what seems clear now was groping then. I was not so different from Elly. Like her, with her, I had to learn the same things over and over again.
Now Elly could do puzzles. She could grasp a new puzzle in no time at all. Most children, doing puzzles, are guided by the picture, not by shape alone. But Elly saw the shapes so exactly that she needed nothing more to clue her. She could do a puzzle face down — picture invisible, shapes reversed. The pile grew call. The cat was joined by a fish, an elephant, a fire engine. Elly would amuse herself by dumping out all the pieces of all the puzzles It made a fine mess. But when we picked them up Elly could classify the pieces according to their puzzles of origin better than I. Her discrimination of shape and colour was astounding. But did she see the picture itself? In assembling the ca did she make the slightest use of the fact that the boots belonged at the bottom of the puzzle while the head belonged at the top?
Apparently she did not. Five
months afterwards she still could not master one piece of the simplest puzzle of all — another five-piecer we’d got after the success of the first. This piece represented a yellow sun, its shape and dimensions virtually identical in every direction. The only clue to its proper orientation was not its shape or colour, but its painted eyes, if the piece was placed so these appeared at the top, it would fit in easily. This simple cue Elly could not learn to recognize. Eyes — faces — were simply not within her scheme of relevance. That piece continued to frustrate her when ostensibly far more difficult puzzles did not.
There was something frightening about those bright eyes of Elly's that discriminated minutiae we could not see, yet were blind to everything that was obvious. How could we give Elly’s shapes a human meaning? Elly was three years old, and I was still trying to find out whether she recognized that a doll had a human shape. Sculpture, which reaches touch as well as sight is one degree less abstract then painting. We sit on the floor with a small doll girl. It belongs to Elly's sister; it has many outfits. I dress it. Elly pulls the clothes of, chooses another costume, we begin again. The game holds her interest over several weeks. Can I assume that it shows she knows the dolls represents the human body? Testing, testing. In the absence of other evidence I cannot be sure. I try to put the doll into interesting situations, but of course they are not interesting to Elly. One day, however, an idea floats into my mind, which most of the time is vacant — I play this little piggy’, which Elly knows, not on Elly’s toes but the doll’s. Elly shows no interest, but in her bath that night I surprise her counting over the doll’s toes, ending with the delighted squeal that for her signals the climax of a tickling game. It seems unmistakable that she is tickling the doll, that it is safe to conclude at last that she sees the doll has toes like her own.
The Siege Page 6
