Dispatches from the underground: deep-sea fishing and shots in the dark
Jon Lenkowski
I would like to begin with two prefaces. I have taken this invitation as an opportunity to put to paper something that has been nagging at me for some time, something which is an aspect of thinking and—who knows?—may turn out to be at the heart of thinking; and along with this bold claim, a cluster of experiences that I think are familiar to all of us here. This talk is not polished. I will try to describe what's on my mind about as well as I can, though I will probably have to resort to some imagery. I will leave some questions simply stated, but unanswered. The whimsical-sounding title is in truth the closest I've been able to get to an accurate indicator of what the talk is about. We will have to see whether this is correct. The second preface starts with an anecdote. Please bear with me.
When I came to the College in 1979 its social life was still largely guided by Mrs. Else Klein, known as Dodo. The widow of Jacob Klein, she was quite interesting in her own right: she grew up in academic circles in Goettingen, knew the likes of Rainer Maria Rilke and the writer Lou-Andreas Salome, and had once been married to Gerhardt Husserl. She was an excellent cook and gave wonderful dinner parties for faculty and spouses, neighborhood friends, and often mixed with some students. Her house would be alive with conversation and she herself was a gifted and riveting story-teller. Tutors, of course, tended to do what they always do—talk shop: comparing seminars, discussing thorny points in, or interpretations of, this or that part of the Program. If students were present this latter sort of discussion was even more likely. As she made her rounds among the groups, she would fasten on this or that conversation and you would hear "Ach! More deep-sea fishing!" and see her rolling her eyes and then passing on among the guests, a slight smile on her face. This—one learned—was a sort of standard rebuke, a gentle rebuke, since it was not really intended to produce contrition or change on the spot. She knew all too well that tutors are incorrigible in this respect, and tutors together with students doubly so. This locution "Ach! More deep-sea fishing!" (or sometimes "deep-sea diving") I heard a number of times in those early years and it always stayed with me. I suppose at first I was just drawn to the witty barb, but as I thought more about it I came to appreciate its seriousness, as well as a depth equal to the conversations it interrupted. I think the rebuke was as if to say that such topics are too private for a dinner party—but I think she also appreciated their intrinsic importantce as well as the precariousness of where they must inevitably lead if given free rein to go their own natural way.
Fishing in general, like hunting, is fraught with uncertainty. There are many ways to increase your odds but the uncertainty remains. There's no guarantee you will bring up anything for your efforts. Also there's no sure way of knowing just what you'll catch. These uncertainties just multiply with deep-sea fishing. There is also the murkiness of the medium, which increases with the depth. If you do get a bite, you usually have to wait til the fish is at the surface to see if it is what you wanted of if you have to release it and send it back to the murk. So: you enter a dark murky medium blind and hope for the best. You might call it a shot in the dark. Though you search blindly, you do have a very specific quarry in mind.
Something like this seems to go on as well when I am searching for something in thought— eg the name of a character in a book I am fond of but cannot remember at the moment, or some detail of one of Kant's Antinomies. I concentrate, eyes narrow and I look.... Where? Down? Inwardly? Here I know what I am looking for and I look somewhere, but it's murky and I can't find it or see it. Or: you put me on the spot and ask me: "What do I believe?" or: "Do I believe in God?" Here again I have to concentrate and actually have to scramble a bit to try to bring up something, although I really don't know what will be brought up even as I am searching for it. This is a much harder case than the first one, and it seems that, over time, the very same question will fish up specifically different answers. So it seems that there will always be some trouble articulating this. And it is worth asking why this should be so.
About the second case again: If you really press yourself to answer the question you find yourself going to some murky region where nothing stands out clearly. You reach for something and may get a bit of a glimmer of this or that, but are mostly confounded by the murkiness. Can we ever penetrate this region as to domisticate it and feel at home in it?
I think the first thing that got me really thinking about this image of deep-sea fishing was the Senior Essay. A student comes to me and says "I think I want to write on Book X." My immediate response is: "Can you say why?" Most often the answer is "I really like this book but I'm not sure why." Occasionally, a student has worked out the "why" already as well as plans for where to go next. But the other case is more typical and leades to many conferences, and eventually the "why" gets some kind of answer, and the essay is written. It may even be a good essay though something may still be missing. This shows up also for me in the Oral: Even reading the essay carefully and making notes for the Oral usually fails to reveal the underlying animus that has pointed the student to just this book and topic in the first place, the secret animating spirit that—unbeknownst to the student—has guided him or her all along.
The Oral may be perfunctory, but it also might turn out to be first-rate. The very best Orals begin where the Essay leaves off and where the student him- or herself, instead of just summarizing the Essay, begins by suggesting the next step, or what the Essay is pointing to or aspiring to, and what gives it such significance. Much goes on in the Oral. Tutors come with different slants on the Essay. But there may come a point where the different strands of conversation come together and everybody is on the same page. A new possibility opens up and someone, following the pointing of this new possibility, risks going beyond where we are, uncovering a new depth that brings the whole together, and suddenly, as with a kaleidoscope, something clicks into focus — a revelation for both student and tutors that no one really expected, as though from a sort of underground that has been present all along; something that no one at the table had seen, but also something that casts an entirely new light on the Essay and on the book, and often changes the direction of the Oral. Everyone at the table is now elevated by this insight, for it illuminates a depth that had not been seen before.
How could it be — one wants to know — that something so important and fundamental to the book, the Essay and the conversation has eluded us through all of this and has never come to the surface until now? In choosing such an openingn statement instead of a summary, the student already seems to show an inkling of this, though of course not in any explicit way; it's still invisible, still in the dark. Remember: this student has gone through a series of conferences with an advisor, is pretty comfortable with it and is about to introduce the Oral but is still in a deep sense "not sure why". Why is it so hard to get hold of this? Why is it so hard to bring it to the surface?
Something like this happens in my earlier example of trying to find something specific, like a name, or where I am put on the spot to try to say what I believe. So if I narrow my eyes and look down, or inward, there does not seem to be anything to see: it's not as though there's a depository of thoughts or answers, or any other such things. If I am trying to remember a name it's not as though a list of names appears to choose from. If I am put on the spot, there's no book of creeds that opens up for me to choose from. Rather, it's as though my own efforts of concentration manage to bring something to the surface, where that had appeared nothing just a few seconds ago. The oddest feature of this is that, put on the spot, I can pretty easily get something up in a second or two that, while it may be merely fragmentary, will never be completely off-base. Again, it seems worth asking why this should be so, and how it could be so. What is this "place" or "region" that I find such easy access to? There are no maps, no markers or sign-posts, no topography or geography that I can make out. So even to call it a "place" or "region" at all are probably just stabs in the dark to try and hold it fast while I try to think about it and talk about it. I am not sure where I am when I do this and I don't really know what categories apply where I am now. But what I can say is that this is where my thinking, and my persistence at pushing this thinking, have led me.
This phenomenon of reaching for something without seeing it, of pushing our thinking so as to make it visible so that we can examine it, seems to pervade all of what we do here at the College. Everything we read, everything we study here is essentially incomplete. We cannot finish a book and say we're done. Why? Because the end of the book is the beginning for us. All our books have depth, explicit and implicit, and their authors seem to assume of us, their readers, that we are enthusiastic divers and will simply plunge into the murk as soon as it presents itself.
I'll give three quick examples. First, there are the inconclusive endings to the Platonic Dialogues. Surely this is an invitation to take up the challenge to begin the investigation anew — but how exactly? The second example is Conrad's Heart of Darkness: What has allowed Marlow to have "peeped over the edge myself" without succumbing to the dehumanization that Kurtz suffered? Thirdly, Bach's St. Matthew Passion in the very last measure of the final Chorale. On the phrase "Sanfte Ruh" (English: gentle rest) there is a C major chord, marred by a B natural on top of the chord. Though the B natural quickly resolves to a C, the dissonance occurs on the first beat which is the strong beat. Surely we're being told something, but exactly what?
Probably anything we read and study here could serve as an example, and there are various degrees of subtlety among our authors. But these examples show us that our authors leave the enigma for us! And this seems to mean that — without pushing the claim too far — we the readers complete the book, and are intended to do so. So here we seem left to our own resources. How do we acquire these abilities? To follow Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics, we acquire them by exercising them, and this what we do for the four years. We have the authors as supreme examples for us, and our classes are ongoing opportunities to learn and practice this activity.
I said a few minutes ago that everything we read and study here is essentially incomplete. Let me conclude by giving two examples of this. First, none of our classes wrap up at the end of the year with a period; they all point beyong themselves, because they are a part of something larger. There is hardly any discussion about this, or where we'll go after this year, but everyone has some notion that there will be some kind of continuation to come. Interestingly, everybody seems to be comfortable being in the dark about this.
Secondly, our classes always do two things at once. They always focus on particulars, but at the same time they are framed by or underpinned by big questions, though these usually remain unstated and are almost never discussed in class. But, again, everyone seems comfortable being in the dark about this.
All of these bear a certain resemblance to the student who doesn't yet see the "why" that is hidden behind or underneath his interest in a certain book. What we learn here is that there is always a demand that is at first foisted on us, (though very little, if anything is ever said about it) that, if things go as they should — we finally turn into a demand that we impose on ourselves: to push and risk ourselves and un-moor ourselves to try to bring up to the surface and make visible to us the as-yet unseen and unknown.
Jon Lenkowski (1943-2025) was Tutor at St. John’s College from 1979 til his retirement in 2010. This talk was given to the Liberal Education Seminar in Annapolis on November 15, 2017. The editor thanks Marie Lenkowski and Louis Petrich for their assistance in finding the manuscript.
