Thanks to Google, the kids discovered that it is John Venn’s 180th birthday today. And they were pretty excited about it. Beangirl worked with Venn diagrams in math class this past year and they proved to be a happy holiday from arithmetic for her. So today’s Google doodle provided some fun sibling screen time. In case you missed it, the doodle let you play with a fun Venn diagram generator. Take a look.
The one we liked best was when Vegetation combined with Can Fly. Of course, you get dandelion seeds. Lovely.
There’s something both very playful and beautiful about this concept of overlapping circles. Something like poetry. As the kids played with the doodle, I started wondering about that flash of rightness as two dissimilar things find common ground. Like a good metaphor. Like an unexpected familiarity. There is a line in Malcolm Guite’s transfiguration sonnet which resounds here for me:
“And to that light the light in us leaped up.”
Of course, he writes about the moment of revelation and glory glimpsed on a mountain top. But the experience of glimpsing of rightness is common and, in its commonness, worth describing. It is the glimpsing of rightness that makes us want to share beauty. Or hold onto a playful, joyful moment. Or capture anything worth capturing.
It was my birthday yesterday, and the kids were patient enough to let me nose around a local bookshop for a while, my birthday money burning a little hole in my pocket. I picked up Field Notes from a Hidden City, by Esther Woolfson. It’s a close, personal reflection on the wilderness in a city, and it opens most with a quotation from American natural science writer Loren Eiseley.
…we would assume that what it is we meant
would have been listed in some book set down
beyond the sky’s far reaches, if at all
there was some purpose here. But now I think
the purpose lives in us all and that we fall
into an error is we do not keep our own true notebook of the way we came,
how the sleet stung, or how a wandering bird
cried at the window…
It’s beautifully right that logician John Venn makes me turn to the poets, isn’t it? Helping me see the strange overlap between revelation and our need to record experience, between the play of my kids and the fleeting moment. Here’s one more fitting poems for your Monday.
The Bright Field R.S. Thomas
I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the pearl of great price, the one field that had
treasure in it. I realise now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it.Life is not hurrying on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.From Laboratories of the Spirit, published by MacMillan
