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.
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.