Poetry and Truth 3: Smart People

I.

On our drive to Lynn Canyon Park in North Vancouver some weeks ago, my grand­son Caleb, who is seven, told me about some smart peo­ple, both adults and chil­dren, that he knew. After lis­ten­ing for a while (I’ve for­got­ten the names of the smart peo­ple) I asked him what “smart” meant, and he said it meant you know stuff. 

I asked then (because I had been read­ing American philoso­pher Richard Rorty on the sub­ject of pure ver­sus instru­men­tal rea­son) whether know­ing stuff meant you knew some­thing, or you just knew how to do some­thing. Caleb said, Both: you knew stuff and you knew how to do stuff.

I asked if you could be smart if you only had one of the two: for exam­ple, you knew how to do some­thing but you didn’t know how or why that some­thing worked; or you knew how and why some­thing worked, but you didn’t know what to do with it or why you would do any­thing with it. He paused for a moment and then said, Can you give me an example? 

I was going to say some­thing about the com­puter (I know how to do some things with it but I don’t know how or why it works) but before I could get started on this Caleb said, Well, for exam­ple, my leg: I know how to move it, but I don’t have to think about how to move it. It just moves.

I said, Well, do you know how your leg works? He said, Sure: my brain sends a sig­nal to my leg and my leg moves. 

I asked, How does this sig­nal get from your brain to your leg? He said, Well, lit­tle elec­tri­cal things or prod­ucts or some­thing, lit­tle balls, move down some pas­sage­ways, they’re like, they’re nerves, and they go from your brain to your leg and make your leg move. But you don’t have to think about it; it just moves by itself. 

Norbert: So do these elec­tri­cal balls or prod­ucts talk to your leg and tell your leg to move? How do they com­mu­ni­cate with your leg when they get to it? Caleb: They send a sig­nal. Norbert: I guess it’s pretty smart, then, that leg. Caleb: Yeah. The signal’s smart, too. 

Norbert: Where did you learn all this? Caleb: From Brain Pop, on the computer. 

Later we hiked along Lynn Creek and a sign attached to a fence read, Danger. Steep Bank. Keep Back. Caleb sounded it out aloud and repeated it just as Caius, his brother, who is four, and who had been walk­ing and singing along some dis­tance behind us, caught up. 

 Caius said, No, the sign doesn’t say that. It says No Cows Allowed.

II.

I had no idea where Caius’ quip about the cows came from. I put it down to his often-commented-upon abil­ity to come up with side-splitting non­se­quiters, out­landish puns and other vocal brain-defeaters. 

I sent the story (above) to a few fam­ily mem­bers and friends, and my youngest sis­ter Gisela wrote back that Caius’ words made pre­fect sense to her. Here’s part of her email:

I see the dif­fer­ence between the two boys (at least as fil­tered through the story) as rep­re­sent­ing the dif­fer­ence between gath­ered knowl­edge on the one hand, and instan­ta­neous aware­ness that comes from the imag­i­na­tion or intu­itive side, on the other. Both have lim­i­ta­tions and ben­e­fits. For Caius, given the con­text, what might the sign say? It’s a fence, so no cows allowed on the wrong side of the fence. Cows on one side, humans on the other.  Cows have four legs but maybe those legs are dumber than our human ones so the cows need more guid­ance, hence the sign.

Made total sense. But I hadn’t seen the sign. I had (like Caleb) read a sign. But not a loca­tion. A wooden fence, for Caius, means farm, and a farm means cows, and yes, on a pro­found Paleolithic, not to men­tion semi­o­log­i­cal level, humans and — domes­ti­cated — ani­mals must be sep­a­rated. Otherwise you get a mad dis­ease, or a flu that’s spread by pigs with wings.  

Everything, I told my media stud­ies stu­dents two days later, is con­text. Otherwise there’s no text (mean­ing). I wrote Gisela back and won­dered if her rev­e­la­tion might have some­thing to do with her being the younger child (I’m the old­est, as is Caleb) the one that finds niches in the larger world of texts being seam­lessly com­posed by the adults and wannabe adults, i.e. older children. 

They get right with the pic­ture. I thanked Gisela for the exegesis.