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
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 slowly 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
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
