Adding to myself: at least about that.
Monday, May 20
Radenau: Day three
I’m sitting here yawning and yawning, waiting for my jaw to crack. Not from sleepiness but from nervousness. Six o’clock, nearly time to go.
Fr. Lulfre has received his daily fax in continued silence. I’ve performed routine maintenance chores—sleeping, showering, shaving, eating, and so on—and have brought this diary up to the minute. I’ve also acquired a very sophisticated (and very expensive) tape recorder that, set at a slow tape speed, will put two full hours of sound on each side of a single cassette without my having to fool with it.
6:07—I feel strongly that I shouldn’t go on till I’ve found the source of this terrible nervousness. Is it just the fact of playing this double role? I’m like a lawyer trying to represent both sides in a dispute—and struggling to persuade each side that he’s trustworthy. Struggling to persuade himself that he’s trustworthy. I’m wallowing in a sea of lies while trying to look like someone standing on a solid ground of integrity.
True as all that is, however, I know that’s not quite it. What I’m nervous about is something else. What I’m nervous about is B’s program for me. It’s one thing to check out someone who might just be the most dangerous man alive—and quite another thing to become his disciple.
Setting this down in visible words doesn’t make the nervousness go away, but it does make further stalling seem pointless.
Down there again
B was alone in the subterranean greenroom of the Schauspielhaus Wahnfried, and as I wound my way through the jumbled acres of theatrical antiques, he watched me with a rather sad smile. He was seated as before, in his wonderful Regency bergere in gilt and ebony. I seated myself as before, in my wonderful old Biedermeier fauteuil with cushions of faded pale green velvet.
“A couple of times,” he said after we’d exchanged polite greetings, “in Munich and in my talk last night, you heard me refer to a colleague, Ishmael—another teacher but quite a different kind of teacher from me. He was a maieutic teacher, and I’m not.”
“Maieutic?”
“From the Greek word for—”
“I think I know it,” I told him. “From the root maia, meaning midwife.”
“That’s right. A maieutic teacher is one who acts as a midwife to pupils, gently guiding to the light ideas that have long been growing inside of them.”
I thought about this for a moment, then asked him if one can choose to be a maieutic teacher or if this is dictated by one’s subject matter.
“Not every teaching objective lends itself to the maieutic approach. For example, it would have been inane for Isaac Newton to try to draw his discoveries in optics from his pupils’ heads—inane because they weren’t in his pupils’ heads. On the other hand, he might have used the maieutic approach to show pupils why his alchemical studies seemed worthwhile to him. Socrates was of course famous for his use of the maieutic method. Jesus only dabbled in it, usually as a means of helping people understand their own questions, as when he said, ‘If it is by Beelzebub that I cast out devils, then by whom do your children cast them out?’”
Again I gave this some thought before saying, “I assume this means that what you have to teach me is not something that can be drawn from my head.”
“This is largely the case, yes.”
I showed him the tape recorder I’d bought and asked if he minded my taping our conversations.
“It’d be pointless to mind,” he replied. “The purpose of our conversation is to make a record for your Fr. Lulfre.”
A mosaic
“At this point, I have nothing like a curriculum for you,” B said. “You know what a curriculum is, I suppose.”
“I’d say it was a sequence of teaching objectives.”
“A sequence that proceeds on what basis? Presumably it’s not an arbitrary sequence.”
“I suppose ideally it proceeds from the familiar to the unfamiliar or from the simple to the complex. A curriculum is structured like a pyramid, building from the ground up. You have to know A to learn B, you have to know A and B to learn C, you have to know A, B, and C to learn D, and so on.”
“Exactly. But as I say, I have no such curriculum. Rather than a pyramid, I’m constructing a mosaic. The pieces can be added in any order. In the early stages, there’s nothing like an image, but as pieces are added, an image begins to emerge. As still more pieces are added, the image becomes more distinct, more definite, so that eventually you feel sure that the basic picture is before you. From this point on, the picture can only gain in sharpness and detail as pieces continue to be added. At last it seems that there are no ‘missing pieces’ at all, and only the cracks between contiguous pieces remain to be filled—with ever tinier pieces. As the cracks between pieces are filled, the picture begins to look more and more like a painting—a continuous whole rather than an assembly of fragments—and in the end it no longer resembles a mosaic at all.”
“I understand.”
“You’ll have to transmit what I’m saying in pieces, I think. We’ll just have to see what happens. I’ve had many pupils, but they’ve always learned simply by hanging around. Circumstances compel us to adopt an untried method.”
I told him I was willing to try the untried.