I can make explicit, now, the principle that I then perceived so dimly that I made use of it only by accident: in reaching the eyes and ears of such children, and later on their minds, one must begin with sensations their bodies can recognize. From Elly’s toes to the doll’s. It is not for three full months that it occurs to me, as mechanically we turn the pages of A Treasury of Art Masterpieces (so much more interesting for mother than Little Golden Books), to play ‘this little piggy’ on the bare toes of those Renaissance Christ-babies. Which I do. And Elly laughs. This is the first evidence I have had since that single time two years before, which already seems a lifetime past, that colour and shape have taken on significance and that Elly can see a picture.
From her own body to the abstract representation. Later in the same month Elly becomes interested in her brother’s kindergarten workbook. She turns the pages as always, looking with attention but without recognition. But now I have an inkling of how to proceed. As we pass a large, realistic picture of an ice cream cone, I take her hand and make her pat it. Next time she looks at the book there is a pause in the mechanical turning; that picture, at any rate, she sees.
This book was full of usable sights; for the picture of a school playground I made her fingers walk up and slide and go ‘whee’ down, I made them ride the seesaw and the swings. I no longer wondered about her comprehension; her delight left no doubt of it. When we came to that picture, if I omitted to move her hand Elly herself put my hand on hers, silently requesting me to make her fingers walk up the slide. She would not go so far as to move that hand herself. But there was no doubt that she was happy at this new extension of her world.
Yet that did not mean she was ready to pursue it on her own. She continued to look at the bulk of her picture books exactly as before. It seemed that each new picture, like each new switch and faucet, must be a separate conquest. One day, two weeks later as we looked at a picture of a small girl, Elly took my hand in the peremptory way that meant ‘Do something.’ I assumed she meant, as often, ‘It’s time to turn the page,’ but that did not satisfy her. Instead she made my hand take hers and pat the picture. She was asking me to do for her what she could not yet do for herself. She wanted me to make her see. Progress indeed. But I could not help noticing that she did not seem to care whether she touched the girl, or the blank space around her.
I did not do at this time what it seems obvious I should have done — plan out a programme. I am not good at that, and besides, I had only the vaguest notion of where we were headed. I had no idea how powerful the tool we were working on would turn out to be, that within a year I would be communicating with Elly through pictures in ways I could not yet do in words. Perhaps it was as well — a glimpsed goal might have imparted a sense of urgency that would have done no good to either of us. At any rate, I kept on almost at random, using the materials the household threw into my hands. I took from women’s magazines bright pictures of familiar food, cut them out, and to bridge the gap between representation and experience conveyed them to Elly’s mouth and my own. One day I found a picture of a diminutive Ritz cracker, no more than a quarter-inch in diameter, so small I doubted she could recognize it. I cut it out and gave it to her. She knew what it was, all right. She put it in her mouth and ate it.
But the forward movement was slow, with setbacks. The cutting play, which began as a way of drawing her attention to pictures, degenerated, like other hopeful starts, into sterile repetition. Though Elly would bring me the scissors, she would not cut herself. Her fingers went all floppy when introduced into the implement. But if I said, ‘Put your hand on mine,’ she would take part in the cutting to that extent (and understand the command even though in her bath she could not distinguish between a request for a hand or a foot. However, she now paid no attention to the pictures I cut out. What she wanted was the magazine cut into strips — letterpress, pictures, it made no difference. It seemed a deliberate retreat from the meaning she had seemed to welcome three months before. Yet she did see more than she had, if one could find ways of getting her to admit it.
She liked pictures of cars and did not mind me cutting them out. She had little interest in food pictures now, and she did not ordinarily respond to human figures or faces. One day, however — who knows why? — she took some interest in the large, coloured face of an adolescent on the cover of a magazine, and allowed me to cut it out. She then wanted the next page and seemed pleased when I cut out the face of a little girl. A car came next, and after that she became set on the repetitive strip cutting. I acquiesced, but after several pages, encouraged by the unusual tolerance she had shown already that day, I attempted to guide the scissors round a human figure. Elly resisted, became angry. She made that inarticulate noise like a creaky door, the protest of the dumb, that to this day exposes my nerves as on an operating table. When I continued (for one can cut in silence whatever the state of one’s nerves), she crumpled the picture and threw it away. I went back to strips, then tried another figure with the same result. I then found a handsome car, and tried cutting it in strips. She resisted; she was as unwilling to have the car treated as invisible as she had been to have me pay attention to human forms.
I treated the next cars respectfully and passed over several faces. I cut the requisite strips, but only from the edge of the page, deliberately avoiding the picture. At length came a very large and blurry black-and-white photo of a child’s face. Elly asked for a strip from this page; she may well not have recognized it for what it was. The face extended almost to the margin; a strip of the requisite width would have cut it. I made a compromise strip, slightly curved around cheek and hair. Elly accepted it, though without interest.
Then more strips and more. Both of us are reacting mechanically now. My mind is elsewhere; who knows where hers is?
There comes a photo of a man. I say, ‘It’s a daddy with glasses,’ not with any hope of comprehension, idly. It’s best to say something every now and then. You never can tell… I begin to cut-not a strip but the outline. She does not object.
Suddenly (did she understand me?) she notices the glasses, which are like mine, laughs, brings her face close to mine, hugs me. I laugh and squeeze her and continue cutting out the face, she laughing as I work. Laughing again, she picks up the picture and brings it to her face as if to kiss (she has never kissed). The triumphs are as mysterious as the failures. Laughing, we take the face upstairs when she goes for her nap.
The next month I thought of something else that I could do. I began to cut out pictures I drew myself. This gave me considerably more flexibility. I had no longer to depend on what magazines offered me. I could make pictures that would embody my guesses, uncertain though they were, of what would be significant to Elly. I made a cardboard baby with movable arms and legs attached with paper fasteners. Elly watched passively but absorbedly as the baby took shape — as I worked my incredulous ears even heard her say ‘bay-bay’. But she soon lost interest; when I tried to clothe it with paper clothes she threw them away, casually but definitely. I drew our house and cut a door she could open and shut. She liked that, although she had never before responded to a picture of a house. I made an Elly figure dressed in Elly-clothes, and she seemed unusually interested, by which I mean that she held it and stared at it a while before putting it down. She dropped a father-figure on the floor. She did not even let me get beyond the outline of the head of what was to have been a mother-figure. Slow down, slow down, don’t push, always allow the one step back for the two steps forward. ‘Learn to labour and to wait.’
I had not thought of it, but as I drew more I began to realize that part of the power of this technique lay in the fact that drawing is a process and takes place in time. A completed picture is seen all at once. A picture that someone is drawing forcuses the attention by the very gradualness with which it takes form. The process is dramatic, it involves suspense. The head first, then arms, body, eyes, nose, mouth — not always in the same order. Each is an event. What is coming next? I drew slow
ly but without pause. Initially I drew careful, realistic outlines; I didn’t expect that Elly would recognize a representation that was merely schematic. When I cut pictures, Elly had merely looked. She watched when I drew. Her attention was a strange thing and a precious one — long for her own concerns, for other peoples’ evanescent or nonexistent. A dropped pencil might forfeit it. Sometimes, when I knew she was watching and the paper lay between us so that the figure I drew right side up would be upside down for her, I would try to draw upside down rather than change my position and risk losing her. It was June. Elly was almost four. More than half a year had passed since she had first seen the babies’ toes in the Treasury of Art Masterpieces. Yet she had no word for any part of the body. How much did she really know, I wondered, about this most basic factor in her experience? One day I was drawing with her, idly, nothing new in mind. As I often did now, I started the figure of a child, beginning with the feet. I drew toes, feet, legs, underpants. But this time it occurred to me that I might make use of the drawing process itself; I could find out what Elly would do if I did not complete the figure. If I stopped drawing now, perhaps I could enveigle Elly into replacing her passive attention with active collaboration.
I relaxed my hand. It lay limp on the paper, pencil in still fingers. I waited. A moment passed, and Elly pushed my hand to keep on drawing. I completed the trunk and stopped. Elly started me on an arm; I stopped when it was done. Elly touched my hand and I was beginning the second arm when I felt her correct me. She was no longer passively accepting, she had her own idea. She wanted the head next. I drew it, stopped at the neck, and prompted by Elly drew the second arm. The figure was complete, and I had determined that Elly, who had only recently learned to see a picture, knew as much as any child her age about how the human body should be visually represented.
But all this time it was I who was drawing, who was active, at work. Surely it would be better if Elly drew herself? That was very difficult to accomplish. Drawing meant pressure, meant holding pencil, crayon, brush, and Elly had no strength in her hands for that. I have told in Chapter i of the circles she crayoned when she was two and a half, and how she abandoned them. She abandoned crayons altogether — if one was successfully put into her fingers, the line she made was almost too faint to see. After those first miraculous circles and crosses there were no more drawings of any kind for almost a year, until Elly was a little over three.
An unusually active and imaginative baby-sitter had kept her while I was out, and instead of standing by while Elly did nothing, she had tried to engage her attention. I had told her that Elly recognized shapes, and Jill had taken paper and crayons and drawn her a sheet of triangles. She drew thirty of them before Elly herself made a faint, wavering, but unmistakable triangle. How did it happen? I was not there to see. But it was a doubly remarkable occurrence. Those circles and x’s of the past had been made, not in immediate imitation of a model someone had just drawn, but after a long delay. They appeared unexpectedly the next day or the next week, affording evidence, to the hopefully inclined, of intelligence, but also of that strange remoteness, the denial of interpersonal contact. The child would draw a circle, but it must not be an imitation of someone else’s circle; it must come out of nowhere. These frail triangles were different. They acknowledged not only hidden capabilities of eye and hand and brain, but a personal contact as well. The intensity and interest of this young girl had got through to Elly, who usually looked right through a stranger.
Perhaps she was reacting as normal children so often react — they are able to do for a stranger what they will not do for a parent, knowing it need not commit them. I acted as if that were the explanation, whether it was or not. I let it rest. Not until two days later did I get out paper and paint. Paint and brush might be harder to control than crayon, but Elly had no difficulty with control. The advantage of paint was that it required no pressure. Elly could be as weak as she liked and still make a mark.
This time Elly reproduced a triangle as soon as I made the model. (There are normal three-year-old children who cannot copy a triangle, but I did not know that then. ) During the next three months it was possible to get her to draw, at intervals. Always it was drawing; fastidious Elly never used paint as paint, never splashed, spread, or mixed it on the paper. She who could match colours spontaneously showed no interest in using them. Her drawings were monochrome — whatever colour she started with she stuck to. Magic marker came on the market that year and Elly soon preferred that, which requires no more pressure than paint and is easy to manipulate. For the weakness was still extremely prominent — it was about this time, after all, that I was working with her on flicking switches.
Elly drew rapidly and uninterruptedly, working for about twenty minutes at a time. (I noticed that, of course; attention- span is one sign of intelligence. ) She drew x’s, dots, lines, circles, triangles. She never scribbled at random, or even freely. Each line seemed weirdly deliberate, the product of a decision. I learned to take away one sheet as soon as she had drawn on it and substitute another; if I left a sheet in front of her, circles and triangles would disappear, carefully obliterated beneath a cloud of dots applied in close pointillism. Again, always, it was as if she did not want to commit herself — to assume the responsibility that admitting her new skill would imply.
Little of what Elly drew was spontaneous. They were copies of figures we had made. We made figures rather than pictures, since Elly at this time (about three and a quarter) had not yet recognized a picture. Seen without the significance we give them, letters are only figures. Somebody — I perhaps, perhaps one of the children — wrote Elly’s name in block capitals with the paints. The next time Elly drew, she made a rickety E. As of old, the act was delayed. She still retained her extraordinary ability to register impressions and bring them out, unpractised and unchanged, after an indefinite interval. About a week later she added an L — this three-year-old child who could neither speak nor comprehend.
It was very encouraging while it lasted. But by the time two and a half months had passed, with perhaps ten drawing sessions in that time, Elly’s interest was waning. It was harder to get her to draw herself, although I have a sheet of rectangles that she drew using my inert hand as a tool. Three months after her first triangles I made another set and tried to get her to draw some. She wouldn’t. When I tried the old trick of leaving one incomplete, the line she provided to finish it was more frail and wavering than the first ones had been. I took her hand and made it draw a pattern of cross-bars. This was new and interesting, and after two or three sheets of it her own will took over and she drew some of her own. The last two times she drew, it was she, not I, who decided on a drawing session; she astonished and delighted me by getting out marker and paper her-self. Then too, she put each sheet aside as she finished it, instead of going on to blot out the figures with marking. It was a fitting valedictory. Not for six months would she voluntarily take up brush, marker, crayon, or pencil. Once only, in that period, I got marks on paper out of Elly. I spent five minutes slowly painting bars and circles before she took my hand and, using it as her tool, made two parallel lines, an E, and two L’s. I gave her the brush. She made a final E alone and would make no more.
I let it go. It didn't seem worth it. There were other things we could do together, more than there had been — puzzles, pictures, even a little music. Accept the retreat which qualifies each advance. Hope that instead of denying the advance it somehow secures it. Put the paints and markers away — for a long time, this time, so that when they appear again they will seem interesting and quite new. But even so, when Elly, nearly four, did at length employ her hand to make a mark again, it was with neither paint nor marker, but in a totally new situation and one that bears thinking about. Taken to her father’s office, Elly used chalk and blackboard for the first time. She found it a uniquely satisfying medium. Anything she drew could be immediately erased, denied, cancelled, made as if it had never been.
Elly could deny her abilitie
s to herself. But we knew now at least a little of what she could do. She could use her body and her hands. She could draw. More important, she could see — not only shapes and objects, but people, and not only these themselves but pictured representations of them. It was that much more than we had known two years before. We would have to be content with it.
6. Willed Deafness
Elly’s inabilities, physical and visual, were evident to us. But once she had learned to walk they were not conspicuous to others. Only those who observed carefully would notice the behind the apparent alertness, the passivity behind the deftness and apparent vigour. As Elly grew beyond two, to most people who knew her the significant thing was not that she did not push or reach or climb, not that she did not look at things, but that she did not talk. When a child reaches two and a half, and three, and four, mouthing no more than a few unintelligible syllables, it is this that tends to seem primary — especially if the child appears alert and attractive. It is natural to wonder if there has been some specific damage to the speech centres of the brain.
To us who knew her well, however, tis was only the visible part of the iceberg. A speech disorder? Anyone who had lived with her must have felt it was much more far-reaching than that. Even if one did focus solely on the failure of speech, what seemed significant was not so much that she didn’t talk as that she didn’t understand, and not so much that she didn’t understand as that she didn’t seem to hear you at all.
The Siege Page 7
