BEYOND THE COLLAPSE IV: TALKING ABOUT DIVING LESSONS
How good are you at asking questions? I’ll tell you why I ask. The average young child is a precocious interrogator, curious about all the things he or she doesn’t understand, and they understand very little. Well, we adults don’t either, but increasingly with age it’s all about assertions (like this one). This suggests a disconnect from what confounds us — and a child inside who’s been instructed to lay low.
There’s no genuine education without a lot of questions. This explains why innovative educators like Debbie Meier won’t teach above kindergarten, which may already be too late. Is education always too late? Or, are we who teach simply unversed in how to undo the damage that has already been done? A sign of the times is the new must read mystery novel or television series announced almost every day. People apparently can’t wait to find out who left the body in Uncle Dave’s trunk. My problem is that there is no Uncle Dave, no trunk, and therefore no body. So what are people so eager to find? Are they actually looking for anything?
Unlike children, whose questions come out like a garden spray, those who are older sense the power of questions to strip away, to challenge what is evident, to direct us to the bottom of what matters. What does it mean to get to the “bottom of things”? Reading an American novel from the mid-seventies, I was
startled to come upon the observation of a middle-aged European: it occurred to him, reflecting on a conversation with a young American, that her “obsession with getting to the bottom” of what’s right and wrong, true and illusory, valuable and trivial, is “a purely American phenomenon, as if they believed, with a kind of innocence that Europeans can no longer feel, that there must always be a bottom to things.”
My surprise stemmed in part from a flash of recognition — the statement captured an earlier time of discovery I recall with enthusiasm. In part it evoked sadness that Americans are no longer deep-sea divers, no longer likely to even identify what has been lost. The bottom now is parents insistent on finding where you hide the weed, figuring out who’s committing the media leaks, nailing down when the pension plan for the new job vests.
More probing than that is not on the agenda. A race to the surface defines everything we do today, not only the cult of brands and branding, social media, news cycles, celebrity, and fashion, to which we readily admit, but the turn from insight therapy to less demanding mood enhancers, from liberal arts complexities to answers derived by statistical correlations and probabilities, from the conundra that surround us to explanations provided by focus groups and “it’s the economy, stupid.”
We can now parry the hard questions about our lives like Olympic fencers in our continuing effort to make it through the day. The problem is there’s another day coming up, and yet another. And if those questions that can give us access to our own genuine experience are pushed aside, we’re going to find ourselves in a loop, that is, if we’re lucky.
Perhaps a better alternative is recognizing there are deeper things we need access to. It means you wake up in the morning with your life in your own
hands, in pursuit of things that no one will pay you for and for which no money is wanted, things that you won’t complete by day’s — or maybe month’s — end, and that’s just fine. Encountering the ways you can get closer to the person you want to be, locating recesses of dreams and powers that no one knew and you had forgotten you possessed — none of these are clear when you start out.
What value can be put, in the words of poet Oriah Mountain Dreamer, on discovering “what you ache for” and for what you will “risk,” on learning how to “dance with wildness” and shout to “the full moon, ‘Yes,’” how to “see Beauty even when it is not pretty every day” and “to be alone with yourself”? It’s hard to put a price on becoming grounded in one’s own story, and hard not to put a price on everything else when that is missing.
When did we stop asking these questions? When did the bottom fade from view, and meaning become another commodity to be displayed and tweeted? It’s not as if this retreat from big questions trailed off because we found the answers we wanted. Perhaps asking ourselves what is true and worthy was leading to changes we were unprepared to make.
Surface explanations are comforting. Manipulating data by definition excludes the self. That is, its depths and aspirations, its mental chains and possible futures, will undergo no scrutiny because, in this world of surfaces, these less accessible dimensions are vestigial organs.
But what if getting to the bottom matters? How do we proceed if we don’t know that questions exist? It sounds absurd, I know, and for me as well until I asked a freshman philosophy class to pose a question for conversation on the day’s assignment, the movie Groundhog Day. No one could, and so I asked again a couple of times, but overall we sat for well over an hour in silence. I finally asked for reflections on what was happening. Students volunteered that they had each answered roughly a thousand exams in their school careers, and no one had ever asked them for a question that wasn’t heat seeking for the right answer as in Jeopardy. The assignment for the next class? Groundhog Day, of course.
Asking questions has consequences. The students probably sensed that once
you open yourself up, anything can happen, that questions about our lives and our priorities (as with Phil in the movie) would come tumbling out like the brooms in Fantasia. Yet, if racing through our lives, submitting to cycles of compulsion and distraction, is the way we keep ourselves at bay, then we need to slow the treadmill down, to intercede on the march toward solutions.
What if we start by trying to pose a question that offers no immediate answer? A question which invites the individual to emerge if an answer is to be found? Which cannot be addressed in a sterile five paragraph essay, or through a response from which (according to ‘good’ college writing) “I-assertions” are excluded?
— How would you complete the thought if you began an essay (not yet a day or a life) with the word “I”?
— Where would you want to be if you weren’t here, and doing what?
— What’s the most recent significant thing you’ve bought without influence from advertising or social pressure (take your time)?
— What is one thing you have wanted to explain to those with power in your life but have found it difficult to express?
— Think of a fantasy you have had, perhaps recurring, that you don’t talk about — but which might excite people if you told them.
— Can you think of one situation in your life where your love might make a difference?
“Where is this heading?,” you inquire. Is it important for us to know the answer in advance? Perhaps solving a mystery that matters first involves identifying the right question? What question would you add to this list? And as we get closer to the bottom, maybe we can compare notes?
