the blindfold supper: training blindness into the body on purpose

Convinced by Thorp, Arslanian sets about deliberately unmaking one of his own senses to build another: "volunteer blindness," a blindfold worn in live play to force the ear to learn intensities. The regimen's logic — that a body is an instrument you retool — is taken to the point of self-imposed handicap. The retooling mostly fails, comically — he faces the wrong way, chases the sound of other courts' balls into other courts' matches — but the failure only underscores the premise: the sense is a trainable instrument, and Arslanian is early in a "process of time."