Having now written thousands of pages of Sea of Intimacy — I’m trying to make it shorter, I really am — I have to come clean about something. There’s a kind of posing expertise that rubs me the wrong way. The outsider comes in having studied a bit, makes some sententious pronouncements, and then leaves the premises. It’s more than distasteful. It’s an asshole move. I won’t mention any specific instances, as that’s another asshole move.
I had a very good dissertation advisor, who told me not to worry about oral exams. She said, you write the written part to show off what you know. During the oral, the committee pushes you to the limits of what you know, until you have to say, “I don’t know.” When you get to the actual dissertation, it’s entirely possible that you know more than those who are posing the questions. That doesn’t really change anything. They can and should still ask you questions until you reach your limit, the edge, the border. Done well, it’s the opposite of an asshole move — they’re your teachers, after all. There’s a lesson in it.
One of the epigraphs I’m considering for Sea of Intimacy (before Part Three, Liquid Borders) comes from David Burch’s Inland and Coastal Navigation. It’s a book I’ve studied for practical reasons. The line in question, however, strikes me as not only appropriate but almost metaphysical in its appropriateness:
There are two distinct aspects to navigation: knowing where you are and choosing the best route to where you want to go.
There are actually three things here — knowing where you are, deciding where you want to go, and choosing a route. He sort of skips the middle one, which, in metaphysical terms, is rather important.
I think the book might be about all three. And once you add in all the relevant factors — the historical, geological, temporal, bodily, cultural, familial, spiritual, practical, and more — is it any wonder that I’ve often found myself at the limit of my knowledge, at the border, a liquid border of sorts, where I often find myself saying, I don’t know, I really don’t?
But from a teacher’s wisdom, I recall that saying “I don’t know” is not a failure. It’s a location.
Russell Scott Valentino 