Another Good Question
A good question never satisfies the way one might expect. It’s not like a conviction. There’s no warm glow of satisfaction. Everyone tells you, That’s a good question! But they don’t know how it torments you in secret with its indifference and its perplexing transformations. Living with the questions is like living with a house full of cats. Wouldn’t you rather have an uninterrupted sleep? Wouldn’t you rather be numb? Sure you would. But getting there involves a brief and jarring realignment of molecules, a hot iron fry pan going into the water, that squeal no real voice can begin to answer.
What makes a good question “good”? Why doesn’t it ever satisfy, the way a conviction does? Why doesn’t it impart an incandescent glow & draw lost moths to its semblance of a moon?
Why do people say “That’s a good question” instead of simply admitting “I don’t know”? Why does one good question turn into so many others the closer you get? Why can’t it stay round & whole?
When a theologian advocates living with the questions, should we presume he has a house full of cats? And is it wrong to prefer an uninterrupted sleep? What if all the best questions led only to despair?
But how can we rid ourselves of them without a jarring realignment of molecules, like a hot iron fry pan going into the water? And how do you answer that brief, inhuman squeal?
My impetus to re-do it was simply the feeling that the audio quality could be improved, now that I have better audio-editing skills and software (Adobe Audition). When I went to look for the text, I discovered that I had apparently never saved it — a very rare oversight, but perhaps indicative of the extent to which I saw it as component rather than end product. I had to transcribe it from the video: If anything, I think the text is actually less suitable now as a stand-alone poem, but it might be a better match for the film images. The image of the moon/(implied) bulb, for example, as well as the “round and whole” bit, were influenced by the snowball imagery in the video. The idea of questions breeding more questions would help prepare the listener for that house full of cats, I thought. Despair entered on its own during the writing, but stayed because it seemed to form an additional feedback loop with the video imagery.