The Interrogative Mood (13 page)

Now that we near the end, do you find yourself swelling with misgiving? Did you say enough smart things and few enough harebrained, and did you stand up and fight at least once? Did you live rooted or were you off your pins all the livelong day? Do you blame your
failures on yourself, on someone else, or on no one at all? Is it jelly you like, smooth and easy, or is it preserves with that tincture of grit? Is you stupid, do you think?

ARE YOU SURE OF
yourself? Do you use the word
coordinates
? Does a snifter of brandy—swirling, amber, bright, piquant—strike you as a handsome thing? Is there trouble in Paradise? Do wheels have fun? Can there be surcease in the pursuit of charity? Would the number of snake teeth there have been in time exceed or equal or be less than the number of human teeth, do you think? Will you ride a pony? Can a man’s or a woman’s becoming a hero be an accident? Can you imagine doing something in your life that will be fully satisfying and redeeming for your having tried to do it, whether you succeeded in it or failed, and that, correspondingly, would be fully shameful had you not tried to do it? If a boy is robbed and shot delivering a pizza, has his life been a waste? Are you more likely to have occasion, do you think, to say “billets-doux” or “pietà”?

Would you rather be regular army or army reserve? If you were, or are, a woman, would you rather have trouble or women’s trouble, medically speaking?
Do you know the principles of pruning? Are you wary of botulism? Would you rather see a cancan show or a turtle race? Could you be intimate with a blind person? Do you like a waiter who doesn’t write orders or are you irritated by the affectation of it? Is your mind bubbling pablum or snails commingling? Would you be disturbed to hear a child say, “The best thing about Granny is where she is”? Would you be more disturbed or less disturbed, provided you were disturbed at all, were the child who said this your own? Would you comb a mule? Would you wear a prosthetic testicle or breast? Would you run for public office? Would you sit outside the Sorbonne on a bench wearing a beret? Do you eat beetroot? Were you a bird and could choose, would you be white or black? Is bacon for you nasty or sublime? Would you have trouble killing in combat, do you think? Does the prospect of hernia bother you more than might other more severe and more likely medical disorders? If you learned that you were vying within a love triangle with a Navy SEAL, would you be concerned? Could you be depended upon, in a love triangle with a SEAL, to down a goodly quaff of schnapps and say, “He might outkill me but he shan’t outlove me!”?

Are you fond of a tree’s turning red? If you had a child who was mad for a go-cart, and pestering you to buy her one, would you spring for it? Do you believe that what is now called snail mail will disappear and be replaced entirely by electronic mail? If a person applied to you for a job, eminently qualified, and you learned in the interview that he had surrounded himself with fifty thousand images of monkeys by his own count, to include the monkey-print shirt and pants he was wearing that you could see and the monkey-print briefs he told you he was wearing, would you be less inclined to hire him than if revelation of his monkey obsession had not obtained? Do you have any idea how the name “Jujube” came about or what it might mean, if anything, apart from the eponymous candy? If you were fairly well laid up and immobile in a hospital, would you accept sexual favor from a nurse? If you accepted sexual favor from a nurse, would you be concerned about the long-term romantic complications you might not want—specifically, that the nurse might not be a purely practical professional in this respect but an impractical person getting involved with you in ways you deemed yourself not likely to reciprocate? If you accepted sexual favor from a nurse, would you
be concerned about securing the door to the room and otherwise ensuring privacy, or would that be the nurse’s business entirely? Do you prefer to live in a country where eating well is important or are you just as happy in a country where people are indifferent to eating well or perhaps even embrace eating badly?

Do you know how to house-train a dog? Have you ever had surgery on your tongue? Would you like more ballroom-dance skills than you now have? Are the Dry Tortugas dry? Is it Dry Tortuga? Are you afraid of country people? Do you think that an inclination to talk a lot is a sign of weakness? When a woman wears a pair of men’s pajamas and removes the top, retaining the pants, do you find this a sexually stimulating outfit? Are you much good at Ping-Pong? Does having to call Ping-Pong “table tennis” strike you as an abomination not unrelated to a whole fabric of other abomination in the world that is sometimes difficult to codify and identify but which might fit loosely under the heading of global correctification? Is it the case that anyone has been forced to say table tennis rather than Ping-Pong, or am I deluded here? Are children allowed to play cowboys and Indians today? Are rubber army men still marketed? Do you recall
my asking you this earlier? Does it gall you that it might be the case that rubber army men are not sold today for reasons of political marketing contraindications during a time when the production of real army men is on the increase? Would you rather operate in a headwind or a tailwind? Do you think you could make a dish to eat from pinecones? Does the noise a bullwhip makes involve breaking the sound barrier? Are there more problems in the world because of historical, linguistic, or mathematical ignorance?

What is your favorite spice? Do you enjoy bundling up in cold weather? Does it interest you that in trying to ask you if you enjoy bundling up I first wrote bumbling and bungling? Do any of my failures, or successes, large and small as they are, both, matter to you at all? What does matter to you? Could you give me, say, a three-zone general answer, and a ten-point specific list of those areas and those exact things, respectively, that you consider of importance to you? Are you disturbed by, amused by, or indifferent to the emergence in the United States of the fancy retail coffee-shop industry? Are you disturbed by, amused by, or indifferent to foul language on T-shirts and bumper stickers? Have you seen in your
time good old playground equipment be removed and not be replaced or, worse, be replaced by inferior new stuff? Do you hope that airlines go out of business? Would you put your hand in the mouth of a lion or a pony first? What would you do if the doorbell rang and there stood a woman wearing a set of peach-colored underwear holding a peach-colored poodle on a leash? Would it be appropriate for either party, in the case of the woman in peach with a peach dog and your greeting this pair, to apologize for anything? Do you distinguish between the fox-trot and the waltz when you see them?

If you were told “The photographs she is preparing are designed to scare the populace” what word or phrase would most secure your interest? Similarly, what about “The Scottish horses, heavy on the ground” most piques your curiosity? If you were told you could move to a cabin in the Andes, yours for the taking and with some servants on the grounds ready to work for you and that the farm was self-sufficient with their labor, would you go? Do you recall the last time you made mud pies or took a bite of dirt? Would you anticipate that a given day of the week might have more suicides committed on it
than the others? Would you anticipate that a given day of the week might have more murders committed on it than the others? If there is a day of the week higher in suicide than the other days, and a day higher in murder, would you anticipate that they might be the same day?

Do you know the Druids? Do you understand violence or are you alien to it and frightened and appalled? Do you believe in getting out the vote? Is your underwear in top condition or not top condition? What is the most you have paid for a painting? Do you get satisfaction from new tires or more satisfaction from stretching the use out of bald and “dangerous” tires? Is it correct that the New World had the cocoa but that only the Old could make chocolate? Does the number of things you are not interested in exceed the number of things you are interested in? Do you find the overcast day somewhat anesthetic and cheering and the bright day assaultive and depressing? Do you know what is meant by the term “pipe dope”?

Is light rain falling straight down more pleasing to you than a heavier rain going a bit sideways? Can you abide the poodle haircut? What would you make of finding a large dildo fitted with an ejaculatory
bulb-and-tube mechanism in an oil drum serving as a trash can in the parking lot of a liquor store? Does one’s having “old stomping grounds” suggest that one once stomped on them? If, properly speaking, one did not stomp but just got by, would it not be more correct to speak of a return to one’s old getting-by grounds? Is it fair to say that the world comprises those who are politicians, those who are movie stars, those who get by, and criminals? If you are walking along and see a really good stick, can you pass it up?

CAN’T YOU BE THERE
when the stars explode? How daft are we? More daft, less daft, or just as daft as people were before? Would all the snow in the world truly not change the color of the pine needles? Isn’t it moot to point out that someone is not a political person when we can rightfully argue that he is not even a person? If you are having troubles, can they not always be held at bay by exercising until you are tired and putting on a pair of good shoes? Can’t one just snap back at the world with a little Juicy Fruit? Is your hair not what it once was? Do you find that it cannot rain enough for you, or snow enough, or
blow enough? Do you find that interventionists are on the rise or in the ascendant—people, I mean, with
plans,
and by plans I mean plans they deem superior to yours? Does it occur to you more often than it once might have that you are a nebbish? Can you explain the sudden necessity should you receive, say, a prospectus and annual shareholders’ report from, say, the Coca-Cola Company that you read the entire thing? Are you still living in such a way that suggests you are waiting for the real living to start at some later and unspecified date? Do you think this sense of delay or stalling would be wiped away were you told you had, say, twenty-two months to live, rock-solid certain you’ll be gone in twenty-two months from, say, esophageal cancer—would you set about the
actual living
you have in theory been not yet doing? Would you go to Italy and eat well and get softer and die? Would you fly to Islamabad and enter the street and buffet along in the crowded market indifferent to what became of you? Would you fly to Australia and sit in the airport bar and drink beer? Would you call enemies and provoke them, or assuage them? Would you call old loves? Would you tend to your shoes? Would you commit crimes? Do you know
the alleged benefit conferred by cucumber slices over the eyes?

Isn’t it true that there is a rare kind of person who perceives, as does a good dog, that life is doing something meaningful, and who discovers what it is and goes about doing it with a spirit of moderate hustle, and there is a not rare kind of person who perceives none of this and who goes about doing what is necessary in a spirit of aggrievedness?

Have you ever noticed that pine trees bloom—whether to say they flower or not I cannot say, but they do something that looks seed-poddy and it’s probably those wormlike things, I guess in clusters, like starfish or anemones somewhat, I have…well, just put it this way: have you ever noticed what look like flowers on pine trees? How about this: “That bird came through the forest like the shadow of a bullet”? What kind of condition are you in if what you think would improve your disposition is a thousand push-ups and a barbershop haircut with cologne and hair tonic making you reek up the place? Is it reasonable, productive, and legitimate if, within the current climate that apotheosizes goal setting as the summum bonum for proper living, one sets the goal of no goal setting?

Are you peculiar about your socks these days, or at this point are socks socks? Is it really tenable that a person has a soul, whether he has a cell phone or not, and a grasshopper does not? Do you know what it means to swage metal? Are your shoes untied more often than it seems they should be? Do you have a dour cast about you? Is your cheer false and blustery? Is it a strain to smile? Does only convention and habit and cowardice keep you from being violent?

If Jimi Hendrix walked in your room and said, “Sit tight there, popo, I shall play you one” and affected to get out his guitar, what would you do? Would you say, “Wait, Jimi. You’re dead lo these forty years,” or “Wait, Jimi, let me call up a friend or two—not a big party, mind you, but this is a special thing for me and I want to share it with others if it’s okay with you—is that all right?” or “God, no, Mr. Hendrix, that shit would split my head open now,” or “Lay some weed on me before you rip it, bro,” or “Okay, Jimi, but if the police come, do not call them goofballs please”? Or “Dude! Do you realize that the counterculture for which you were such a superb herald has become so mainstream now that your prodigy is invoked to sell Pepsi-Cola?” Or “Not now. Maybe later”? Or “I was
going to make a BLT, you want one?” Or “Jimi! Man, I saw a thing you could dig, on the ceiling of a gym in Montana, some graffiti that said ‘There’s only two things in life that makes it worth living: firm feelin women and guitars tuned good’ and it did not make me think of you when I read it, but now that you are here you make me think of it. Someone had Xed over the
wo
- so it could also read ‘firm feelin men.’ We’ve opened up a bit since you were here”? Or would you say nothing to Jimi Hendrix at all? What if you said, “Play me some of that dang cock-stiffening guitar, James,” realizing you did not know what his formal name was, and Jimi said, “Aw, now don’t go talkin all nasty on me”? What if you suggested that you and Jimi Hendrix go outside and work on your bird count? What if you asked him if he’d ever collected baseball cards? What if his ordeal wherever he’s been these forty years had made him a demon and he leaps on you and tears out one of your eyeteeth to use for a pick on this tune he purports to play for you? And you sit there holding your bloody mouth and smiling when he plays it? What if the state of having lost your mind is exactly congruent to the state of your not having lost your mind?