Unleashing Our "Unlimited Power"

In Sarah Perry's picture book classic If . . ., she surprises us with illustrated responses to prompts like, "If butterflies wore clothes," "If caterpillars were toothpaste," and "If toes were teeth." Whenever we read that book I suggest that the kids might want to try their hand at their own "If . . ." illustrations.

Once a boy sat down to illustrate "If 1 were 2 . . ." Isak was one of those preschoolers who was teaching himself to read. He had recently discovered the concept of the "silent H." He liked the idea so much that he began writing his own name as H-i-s-a-k, "with a silent H." When he learned that my proper name was Thomas, also with a silent H, we became "silent H brothers."

In other words, he was intellectually creative, the kind of kid destined for "gifted" programs, but this illustration stumped him. He sat in front of a blank page with his pencil poised for a good half hour, often muttering to himself. At one point he seemed frustrated, so I suggested he come up with a different "If . . ." statement to illustrate, but he wanted to draw this one. I joked that he could draw a person with two heads and four arms, but he informed me that this was about numbers, not people. So there he sat, alone in a crowded room, considering what this idea might look like. But try as he might, he couldn't get his head around it. When he finally walked away, all he had managed was a faint, aimless line of graphite.

Imagine a square circle.

Imagine a new color not based on any color you've ever seen before.

Imagine a realty in which the past, present, and future exist both simultaneously and infinitely. The math tells us that this is indeed reality, but even our genius physicists break their brains trying to imagine it.

A person who has been blind since birth cannot imagine the color red, no matter how creatively we try to explain it to them. A person who has never smelt cannot imagine the scent of a rose. A person who has never heard cannot imagine a mockingbird's song.

"Nothing is more free than the imagination of man," writes philosopher David Hume, "and though it cannot exceed that original stock of ideas furnished by the internal and external sense, it has unlimited power of mixing, compounding, separating, and dividing these ideas, in all the varieties of fiction and vision."

"What if pencils had arms"

In other words, it seems that everything that's in our heads must first come to us through our senses, and try as we might, we cannot easily think outside the box of our senses, our sensory unwelt, as biologists call it. Some, like Hume, say it's literally impossible. I hope he's wrong, but I suspect he's right. I might think I can imagine what it's like to "see" through echolocation like a bat does. Indeed, in his book An Immense World, journalist Ed Yong, tells the story of a blind human who seems to have figured it out, but no matter how skilled he becomes, he'll likely never actually "see" the way a bat does and the color red will remain out of his reach. 

Hisak found himself confronted by this limitation of the human perspective.

Meanwhile, the other children were producing silly pictures based on their own "If . . ." statements.

"What if a cow was also a chicken?" resulted in a crazy mash-up of cow and chicken parts.

"What if slides were hats?" resulted in a silly picture of a person wearing a slide as a hat.

"What if clouds were body parts?" resulted in a human made of puffy clouds.

"What if hearts had butts."

These children were creating and imagining from that "original stock of ideas" furnished by their senses. They had experienced cows and hats and clouds which allowed those concepts to be playthings for their minds. 

Hisak disliked mud and mess. He was motivated by abstractions like letters and numbers, while his classmates embraced the mud and mess. It's irrelevant, especially as preschoolers, where they focus their senses. The greater their stock of ideas, the more raw material they have to mix, compound, separate, and divide. This is our "unlimited power" and it's why a proper education must be driven by curiosity and lead by the senses, all the senses.

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