{"id":19681,"date":"2017-10-19T17:32:30","date_gmt":"2017-10-19T21:32:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/?p=19681"},"modified":"2017-10-20T10:52:52","modified_gmt":"2017-10-20T14:52:52","slug":"the-necessity-of-tough-questions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2017\/10\/the-necessity-of-tough-questions\/","title":{"rendered":"The Necessity of Tough Questions"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Image:<\/a><\/p>\n

[Image: “i drag my feet like anyone else,” by andrea joseph. (Found of course on Flickr<\/a>, and used here under a Creative Commons license — thank you!) The photographer asks, “why is a broken bench so moving?” (the operative word is “touching” in the image’s text); she asked the question on her blog<\/a>, too, and got some good answers.]<\/em><\/p>\n

From whiskey river<\/em><\/a>:<\/p>\n

Phone Survey<\/strong><\/p>\n

We’re doing a phone survey, asking
\naverage people like yourself, attractive, cynical, smart, etc.,
\npeople who cook with garlic, who, if married,
\nit’s not the first time. People who have had
\ntwo or more jobs in the last three years.
\nWe want to know what your preferred response is
\nwhen you hear,
\nif in fact you\u00a0do<\/em>\u00a0hear,
\nthe voices. Shall I clarify?
\nVoices that converse
\non the great unhappiness and failure
\nthat is yours. How often
\nwould you swear you’re not drunk, no,
\nbut the trees are swaying. We’re calling to ask
\nif you ever get confused and mistake
\nthe swaying of trees for the lapping of water,
\nuntil you can’t get your bearing. Is that when
\nthe voices advise you, smooth
\nas a nail going in? Are there certain words that,
\ncan I say, sneak in from behind, know all
\nthe back entrances? Would you agree
\nthe secret of their strength
\nis that they will not let you give in
\nto your hunger? How often
\nall you’ve said and all you’ve done, torn
\nlike meat from a bone. Is that when you go out, walk
\npast lighted windows? Go to a movie? Have a coke?
\nOr do you hang around,\u00a0drift off<\/span>
\ntill the voices wake you with a jolt or slap: “Payback time.”
\nLike a street person in front of a diner, begging for change,
\nwho will not let you go in and get your lousy cup of coffee
\nthough the sign on the diner flashes: OPEN ALL NIGHT.
\nAre the voices familiar with, say,
\nstreets you walked as a kid,
\ntorn signs, dead trees?
\nWe’re asking if the voices, now or in the past,
\nhave ever told you that you have to go back
\nto the path by the precipice. Because\u00a0that<\/em>\u00a0is your path.
\nWould you mind answering? Or am I interrupting something?
\nShall I call back later? What time would be best?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Carole Glasser Langille [source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Not from whiskey river<\/em>:<\/p>\n

Like Gods<\/b>
\n
\n(excerpt)<\/i><\/p>\n

I<\/i> and here<\/i> and now<\/i> are ever present, yet they vanish in the act of apprehension, as a poem turns into language as you write it down. Dimensionless, atemporal, imprisoned in the present—even as I say them to myself the words fall short of what I thought I started out to say, like the conclusion of an argument too close to me to share, or like an empty thought balloon that hangs above me in the air. It’s not the question of what makes me who I am through time—of how a figure in a photograph from 1985, a couple sitting in the garden of the small H\u00f4tel des Marronniers just off the rue Jacob, could be the person who remembers her and thinks of him today—but of what constitutes me now, and of what made me then. If giving it a name won’t help, then neither will pretending it’s divine. If I should be supplanted by a bright recording angel knowing everything about me in the way the gods know all about their world, I wouldn’t have survived. She takes the whole thing in—the house on Maxim Street, the bike rides down the hill on Wabash Street, my high school friends, their friends, the friends of friends of friends—with eyes that monitor my back, my face, the traces in my brain projected on a screen, the n<\/em> degrees of separation linking me to nearly everyone who’s ever lived, a thing within a wilderness of things, with each one locked inside a universe with no outside, of which there’s nothing she can see. How could it be an afterlife? It’s just a different life, another life, complete or incomplete as anyone’s, consumed by questions that elude it, not because she can’t remember, but because the words that make them up are undefined: which one of them was I? which world was mine?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(John Koethe [source<\/i><\/a>])<\/p>\n

…and:<\/p>\n

Sentimental<\/b><\/p>\n

The light has traveled unthinkable thousands of miles to be
\ncondensed, recharged, and poured off the white white pages
\nof an open Bible the country parson holds in front of this couple
\nin a field, in July, in the sap and the flyswirl of July
\nin upper Wisconsin, where their vows buzz in a ring in the air
\nlike the flies, and are as sweet as the sap, in these rich and ritual minutes.
\nIs it sentimental? Oops. And out of that Bible the light continues
\nto rush as if from a faucet. There will be a piecrust cooling
\nout of its own few x’ed-out cuts. And will it make us run
\nfor the picklier taste of irony rolled around protectively on our tongues
\nlike a grab of Greek olives? My students and I discuss this
\nslippery phenomenon. Does “context” matter? Does
\n“earned” count? If a balled-up fidget of snakes
\nin the underbrush dies in a freeze is it sentimental? No,
\nyes, maybe. What if a litter of cocker spaniels? What
\nif we called them “puppydogs” in the same poem in that same hard,
\nhammering winter? When my father was buried,
\nthe gray snow in the cemetery was sheet tin. If I said
\nthat? Yes, no, what does “tone” or “history” do
\nto the Hollywood hack violinists who patiently wait to play
\nthe taut nerves of the closest human body until from that
\nlush cue alone, the eyes swell moistly, and the griefs
\nwe warehouse daily take advantage of this thinning
\nof our systems, then the first sloppy gushes begin . . .
\nIs that “wrong”? Did I tell you the breaths
\nof the gravediggers puffed out like factorysmoke
\nas they bent and straightened, bent and straightened,
\nmechanically? Are wise old (toothless) Black blues singers
\nsentimental?—“gran’ma”? “country cookin'”? But
\nthey have their validity, don’t they, yes? their
\nsweat-in-the-creases, picking up the lighting
\nin a fine-lined mesh of what it means to have gone through time
\nalive a little bit on this planet. Hands shoot up . . . opinions . . .
\nquestions . . . What if the sun wept? the moon? Why, in the face
\nof those open faces, are we so squeamish? Call out
\nthe crippled girl and her only friend the up-for-sale foal,
\nand let her tootle her woeful pennywhistle musics.
\nWhat if some chichi streetwise junkass from the demimonde
\ngave forth with the story of orphans forced through howling storm
\nto the workhouse, letting it swing between the icy-blue
\nquotation marks of cynicism—then<\/em>? What if
\nI wept? What if I simply put the page down,
\nrocked my head in my own folded elbows, forgot
\nthe rest of it all, and wept? What if I stepped into
\nthe light of that page, a burnished and uncompromising
\nlight, and walked back up to his stone a final time,
\njust that, no drama, and it was so cold,
\nand the air was so brittle, metal buckled
\nout song like a bandsaw, and there, from inside me,
\nwhere they’d been lost in shame and sophistry
\nall these years now, every last one of my childhood’s
\nheartwormed puppydogs found its natural voice.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Albert Goldbarth [source<\/i><\/a>])<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[Image: “i drag my feet like anyone else,” by andrea joseph. (Found of course on Flickr, and used here under a Creative Commons license — thank you!) The photographer asks, “why is a broken bench so moving?” (the operative word is “touching” in the image’s text); she asked the question on her blog, too, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":19690,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","h5ap_radio_sources":[],"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"'No, yes, maybe': The Necessity of Tough Questions","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[247,1393,250,5,251,4159],"tags":[2763,3438,4621,4622,4623,4624],"class_list":{"0":"post-19681","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ruminations","8":"category-whiskey-river-runningaftermyhat","9":"category-art","10":"category-06_writing","11":"category-poetry-writing_cat","12":"category-essays","13":"tag-albert-goldbarth","14":"tag-john-koethe","15":"tag-carole-glasser-langille","16":"tag-questions","17":"tag-answers","18":"tag-unanswerable-questions","19":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/10\/idragmyfeetlikeanyoneelse_andreajoseph_thumb.jpg?fit=480%2C620&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6kZSG-57r","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19681","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19681"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19681\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19692,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19681\/revisions\/19692"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19690"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19681"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19681"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19681"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}