Complicated Answers Tend to Follow Complicating Questions

[Image: “don’t ask for permission,” by Alexandre du Launoy. (Found it over on Flickr (of course), and use it here under (of course) a Creative Commons license — thank you!) The complete text of this stenciled poster says in English, more or less: “If you want to be great, stop asking for permission.” I love that the hipshot, masked human figure depicted holds (a) a can of spray paint and (b) a stencil for one of the words spray-painted on the poster — apparently caught in the act of creating the very poster on which she’s shown.]

From whiskey river:

A Contemporary Fable: Upstream/Downstream

It was many years ago that the villagers of Downstream recall spotting the first body in the river. Some old-timers remember how spartan were the facilities and procedures for managing that sort of thing. Sometimes, they say, it would take hours to pull 10 people from the river, and even then only a few would survive.

Though the number of victims in the river has increased greatly in recent years, the good folks of Downstream have responded admirably to the challenge. Their rescue system is clearly second to none: most people discovered in the swirling waters are reached within 20 minutes—many less than 10. Only a small number drown each day before help arrives—a big improvement from the way it used to be.

Talk to the people of Downstream and they’ll speak with pride about the new hospital by the edge of the water, the flotilla of rescue boats ready for service at a moments notice, the comprehensive health plans for coordinating all the manpower involved, and the large numbers of highly trained and dedicated swimmers always ready to risk their lives to save victims from the raging currents. Sure it costs a lot but, say the Downstreamers, what else can decent people do except to provide whatever is necessary when human lives are at stake.

Oh, a few people in Downstream have raised the question now and again, but most folks show little interest in what’s happening Upstream. It seems there’s so much to do to help those in the river that nobody’s got time to check how all those bodies are getting there in the first place. That’s the way things are, sometimes.

(Donald Ardell [source, apparently, but I was able to confirm much of the full text here])

…and:

I wanted to ask you about your vision of perfection in an imperfect world, or what side of the earth calls out to you when you touch a physical globe, or maybe about your greatest heartache and how you still go on as your world continues turning, or what you do with a memory once lodged inside your bones that’s still breathing, and burning.

But you’re still a stranger, and I’m overly polite, so I’ll ask all about your day when I’d rather know about your life.

(Victoria Erickson [source])

Not from whiskey river:

Like Gods
(excerpt)

The philosopher David Lewis spun a fantasy of two omniscient gods who know about one world, which might as well be ours. Each knows precisely all there is to know, the grand “totality of facts, not things.” Each knows the pattern of the light on each neglected leaf millennia ago. Each knows the number of the stars, their ages, all the distances between them, all the “things too tiny to be remembered in recorded history—the backfiring of a bus/In a Paris street in 1932,” as well as all the things that history distorts or just can’t see, like the thought that must have flashed across Patroklos’s mind (if he’d existed and had had a mind—the middle knowledge of the schoolmen) when Hektor split his stomach with a spear (if he’d existed too). Each one looks on, as though through ordinary eyes, as “Mme Swann’s enormous coachman, supervised by a groom no bigger than his fist and as infantile as St George in the picture, endeavored to curb the ardour of the quivering steel-tipped pinions with which they thundered over the ground,” and sees “the gray ‘toppers’ of old” the gentlemen strolling with her wore, the little “woolen cap from which stuck out two blade-like partridge feathers” that she wore (or would have worn if they and she’d been real). Each monitors the photons through the slits, the slow decay of radium, and knows the ratio of vermouth to gin in someone’s first martini at Larre’s. Each knows what Darragh, Geoff and Willy knew before the bullet or the pavement killed their worlds, and where the shots came from in Dallas. Each knows precisely what the other knows, in all the senses of those words, and if a question has a factual answer, each can answer it. Yet there’s a question neither can resolve: which god am I?

(John Koethe [source])

…and:

Autumn Psalm
(excerpt)

…why shouldn’t a person have a little fun,
some utterly unnecessary extravagance?
Which was—at least I think it was—God’s plan

when He set up (such things are never left to chance)
that one split-second assignation
with genuine, no-kidding-around omnipotence—

what, for lack of better words, I’m calling vision.
You breathe in, and, for once, there’s something there.
Just when you thought you’d learned some resignation,

there’s real resistance in the nearby air
until the entire universe is swayed.
Even that desert of yours isn’t quite so bare

and God’s not nonexistent; He’s just been waylaid
by a host of what no one could’ve foreseen.
He’s got plans for you: this red-gold-green parade

is actually a fairly detailed outline.
David never needed one, but he’s long dead
and God could use a little recognition.

He promises. It won’t go to His head
and if you praise Him properly (an autumn psalm!
Why didn’t I think of that?) you’ll have it made.

But while it’s true that my Virginia creeper praises Him,
its palms and fingers crimson with applause,
that the local breeze is weaving Him a diadem,

inspecting my tree’s uncut gold for flaws,
I came to talk about the way that violet-blue
sprang the greens and reds and yellows

into action: actual motion. I swear it’s true
though I’m not sure I ever took it in.
Now I’d be prepared, if some magician flew

into my field of vision, to realign
that dazzle out my window yet again.
It’s not likely, but I’m keeping my eyes open

though I still wouldn’t be able to explain
precisely what happened to these vines, these trees.
It isn’t available in my tradition.

(Jacqueline Osherow [source])