There had been an accident on the highway, and it took me forty-five minutes to get to work. Once I was there I stuck the “Testing in Progress” sign on my door and closed it again. It was risky to repeat this trick. If people saw the note too often, they usually started to ignore it, assuming that I’d probably just forgotten to take it down. Then you run the risk of people completely ignoring it for weeks to come.
But it had been a few days since I last put it up, so I chanced it. I had to finish my conference paper. The organizers had already sent out several reminders. They also wrote, “Based on the information already provided, your paper on ‘Tehom’ will be part of the Postmodern Feminist Theology panel.” Several words in that sentence concerned me. Postmodern, for example. Even though the word had been in circulation for several decades, no one really knew what it meant, and conversations about it generally ended up in belligerent bickering. Plus nine times out of ten, academics who used that word in their own writing were obfuscators, filled with hot air.
The other word that made me nervous was theology. Although there were several areas in literary-studies circles that utilized theological concepts, theologians were blissfully unaware of this, to the extent that they became indignant every time we used a word they believed they had a monopoly on. The term amateur had been lobbed at me several times as a result of just this type of cross-disciplinary terminological misunderstanding.
And then there was the whole feminist thing. Nothing in this whole world frightened me as much as feminists. Even though I was a feminist. And not just in theory, either. For example, I’d been buying my girls clothes from the boys’ department for ages in order to avoid the overly tight jeans with all the glitter and bows. Plus, I was concerned about semantics and was always careful to use gender-neutral terms like letter carrier and firefighter. And I tried not to immediately picture a man when I heard a title like professor or doctor. Plus, I rarely shaved my armpits or legs. And besides, I had devoted large tracts of my dissertation to examining the inherently gendered nature of epistemology and deconstructing and reconceptualizing the materiality of sexual difference.
So I was definitely a feminist.
But it was like that wasn’t enough.
Maybe I just wasn’t angry enough.
Or political enough.
Or concrete enough.
Anyway, I got the impression they didn’t like me. They usually regarded me coolly and then misunderstood everything I said:
What do you mean ‘post-Tehomic’?
Why did you refer to Butler, when Braidotti would have been a more natural choice?
Can you elaborate on why you refer to water as being associated with femininity? That seems to be a relatively essentialist statement.
Associate Professor Winter, are you perhaps an amateur? (Again.)
To be completely honest, all this was nothing compared to the main thrust of my paper, the subject I had spent countless years writing my dissertation on: Tehom.
“The Great Deep,” which can also mean “abyss, sea” or “to agitate, destroy, confuse.” It comes up right at the beginning of the Bible, as early as verse two. When the earth is a wasteland and a void, and darkness lies over the deep, over Tehom.
Because the Spirit of God may have moved over the formless earth, a void. But there was something that wasn’t empty. Something that was already there.
Something that either comes ex nihilo or that is ex nihilo per se.
Which rests there as itself, in complete darkness.
Which has always rested there, and which is resting there still.
Which slumbers.
Waiting.
Waiting for chaos or nothingness to take over again.
There is no time in Tehom.
No order.
No sense of good or evil.
There is only Tehom.
And it is the scariest thing in the whole world.
I had no idea why I wrote my dissertation about it. Maybe it was an attempt to gain control. Maybe it was an attempt to tackle my worst fear head-on.
The result, though, was that I never got away from Tehom, away from my awareness that it was there waiting for me, the presence of an absence. Or, an absent presence.
The first time there was a knock on the door, I ignored it. But the knocker, who clearly couldn’t read, didn’t give up.
“Yes?” I said, irritated, to a pimply face.
“Sorry I’m late,” the face said, “but I didn’t quite understand where it was.”
I peered at the unfamiliar face and was trying to send him back out into the hallway when I realized who he was. A persistent high school student who was writing a term paper on The Hobbit and who had told me over the phone that he needed “considerable help.”
“You can stop by at ten thirty,” I had heard myself say, “but I have a phone conference at eleven, so I’m afraid you’ll have to leave then.”
And now, here we were, trapped in a conversation I understood less and less the longer it went on.
“As you know, Tolkien has written a lot of other famous books,” he informed me, “but I want to focus on The Hobbit since it’s so short. Well, that and I like dragons.”
“OK,” I said.
“So, I was wondering if you could help me.”
“With what?”
“With my assignment.”
“But help you with what? Finding secondary literature? Understanding the symbolism?”
“What’s secondary literature?”
I sighed.
“Someone said you had written something about The Hobbit,” he said.
“Have you read my article?”
“No.”
“Have you read The Hobbit?”
“No. I thought it was a little slow. But I did watch the movie.”
At 11:05, Bj?rnar called.
“Oh!” I said, relieved. “That’s my phone conference.”
He showed no sign of getting up, so I held my hand over the receiver and gestured with my head that he had to get going.
“Good luck with your assignment,” I said.
“I’ll definitely stop by again,” he said. “So you can help me jot down a few things. I’ll call you.”
“Hi,” I said tiredly to Bj?rnar.
“This is your own fault,” he said. “You have to man up and say no to this kind of thing.”
I sighed.
“Couldn’t we just fake another phone conference?”
“No, I’m done conducting fake business meetings with you. There’s nothing in it for me.”