keeps the child’s attention as the adults debate around him. He brings his eyes into focus where the carpet meets the wall, and then returns to its center, aware of its existence by virtue of finding where it doesn’t exist.
He closes his eyes and gray surrounds him, annihilating the distance between him and his perception,xii between sensation and sensed, but something about the gray feels impure, though he wouldn’t know to describe it as that; he just knows it doesn’t feel like seeing nothing or being nothing, but it doesn’t not either. He cups his hands like a telescope about his left eye and zooms in on a small portion of the carpet, and what was undifferentiated color blurs with woolly texture, with shadows cast by furnishings, with shadows cast by small threads, with one thread in front of another, one behind that, so on. Against a new backdrop the child can try to conceive this color that his mother has referred to as “red” and which he refers to as “there.”
“To know sense experience, it’s not enough to have seen a red or to have heard an A,” he hears the therapist telling his mother.xiii
“I dunno, recalling the qualities of a thing isn’t the same as sensing it?” she upspeaks uncertainly back.
“Sure, true, but with your son, well, normally it’s the perceived that makes perception but—” The child again closes his eyes and smooshes shut his ears and he can’t feel his skin, almost can’t hear the grownups, can feel the carpet, not as if against him, no, doesn’t feel it, has become it, threads, woven, not yet pulled apart.
