The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [27]
And, without thinking, I said, “That can’t be.” Suddenly, I was sure that two plus two could not possibly always be four. And, of course, it isn’t. In Boolean algebra, two plus two can be zero, in base three, two plus two is eleven. I had stumbled onto set theory, a truth about numbers that I had no language for. As this was the early 1950s, my teacher had no language for it either, and she and the class had a good laugh over my ridiculous remark. I staggered away from my epiphany and went back to my seat, feeling certain of the truth of what I’d seen but also terribly confused. Briefly, numbers had seemed much more exciting than I had been led to believe. But if two plus two was always four, then numbers were too literal, too boring, to be worth much attention. I wrote math off right then and there, and, of course, ended up with a classic case of math anxiety.
In a way, though, this experience had a positive side, as the beginning of my formation as a poet. Whenever definitions were given as absolutes, as always, I would have that familiar tingle—that can’t be—and soon learned that I could focus on the fuzzy boundaries, where definitions give way to metaphor. Even though “negative capability,” like set theory, was a term I wasn’t to hear for years, I had stumbled onto it as a way of being, a way of thinking, a way of intelligence that largely defined me. It was there in that ambiguous world that I resolved to dwell.
I have since met visual artists who as children were so intent on playing with the shapes of numbers and letters that they fell behind in both English and math, to the despair of their teachers, who recognized that these were intelligent children. Yet visual intelligence, even more than poetic intelligence, can be a handicap in this culture. Years ago, when I was a kindergarten aide at a Quaker school, one little girl demonstrated a capacity for attention unusual at the age of five; every afternoon, she would paint huge blocks of color onto newsprint, working for nearly an hour. Then she would ask me to hang the painting to dry so that she could work on it again the next day. The teacher and I were fascinated but soon found that we had to protect her from the other children, who, once they noticed that her paintings didn’t “look like anything,” made fun of them. The girl, remarkably, was undeterred, already adept at exile.
And once, when I was visiting a second-grade classroom and the children were showing me drawings they’d done in celebration of fall, a restless, untidy little boy reluctantly retrieved his from the bottom of a pile of papers. The drawing depicted a man throwing a football, with the ball shown in every stage of the arc. It was the way an engineer might depict a football pass, but the boy (and I suspect, his teacher) was convinced that he had done the drawing “wrong.” I wondered if his exile had begun, and where it would lead him.
Working with children on the writing of poetry has led me to ponder the ways that most of us become exiled from the certainties of childhood; how it is that the things we most treasure when we’re young are exactly those things we come to spurn as teenagers and young adults. Very small children are often conscious of God, for example, in ways that adults seldom are. They sing to God, they talk to God, they recognize divine presence in the world around them: they can see the Virgin Mary dancing among the clouds, they know that God made a deep ravine by their house “because he was angry when people would not love him,” they believe that an overnight snowfall is “just like Jesus glowing on the mountaintop.” Yet these budding theologians often despise church by the time they’re in eighth grade.
In a similar way, the children who un-selfconsciously make up songs and poems when they’re young—I once observed a three-year-old singing a passionate ode to the colorful vegetables in a supermarket—quickly come