Padgett Powell - The Interrogative Mood

Is there any hope? Do we need galoshes? Are bluebirds perfect? Is there charity? Can there be reason? Does a kitten settle your nerves? Would you like to play a board game? If you would, do you know which one you’d like to play? In all of human history, would you say mothers or fathers are the more loved?

If you could see a large-animal trainer mauled in the middle of his or her show, perhaps even killed, would you prefer to see the mauling done by a lion, a tiger, or a bear? If it were a bear, would the pleasure or horror you took from the moment be mitigated or heightened in any way by the presence of bicycle-riding in the show? Is semaphore still used at sea or has it been displaced by the digital age? Would you take final pleasure if acquitted of a serious charge or would you always feel tainted? Do you see the exact humor in “That’s so funny I forgot to laugh”? Does it change things a bit for you to perceive that these questions want you bad? And that they are perhaps independent of me, to some degree? That they are somewhat akin to, say, zombies of the interrogative mood?

DO YOU EVER THINK you hear someone saying “Liftoff!”? What would it mean if you dreamed you found two baby squirrels and asked two women if they knew a good baby-squirrel formula and when you fetched the squirrels you found they had drowned because you had inexplicably iced them down, and the ice had melted, and now the baby squirrels were sodden gray puppy-looking short-haired turds in a foul juice, and you broke down crying in front of the women, asking, “Why would I have iced them?” Do you try to listen to classical music but feel you don’t ever really advance past knowing it’s better than it sounds? Would any particular failing on your part today be more painful than all other failings?

Would it require more energy than you have in order for you to really lose it, or do you think really losing it can be a function of having too little energy to prevent losing it? Do the people you do not wish to talk to far exceed the number you do wish to talk to? Do you have much to say to even those to whom you do wish to speak? Do you know where it went wrong with you? Do you own any good copper? Are you favorably disposed to American Indian causes but less so if you must say Native American causes? Are you more at ease in a veneer of civilization or in a true hardwood of barbary? What is your favorite piece of equipment on a playground? Do you know by sight and sound an oboe from a bassoon? When you hear someone say “There’ll be hell to pay,” do you assume generally that there will be or won’t be hell to pay?

Don’t you think it a fairly prudent plan if in the halcyon early days of a relationship, before they’ve become the good old days of a relationship, one were to periodically say, “I’m sorry,” and, to the reasonable response of the other party, who asks, “For what?” because one has ostensibly done nothing wrong, to say, “For everything,” meaning of course everything that will accrue, as surely as the tides bring barnacles, to convert the early halcyon days into the good old days of the relationship? Do you see any value, I mean to say, in the preemptive-strike apology when times are good before they are bad? Would it delay the accumulation of the barnacles by a second or a minute or two, an hour, a day, a week, a year? Or might it be better to say right in the flush of new-intimate ecstasy, “Look, this is bound to rotten up, probably at my hand, good-bye”?

Have you read as much Samuel Johnson as you should have? Can you always immediately recall that Darwin’s first name is Charles? Do you take pills you are not precisely sure you can identify? Do you feel no better, better, or inordinately better after you polish something? Are you aware that up to a third of the tongue can be removed and it, the tongue, can regenerate itself more or less completely? What is the color you most enjoy in lipstick? If you are presented a nipple with a ring through it in a sexual situation, is your first move to bite the ring itself, or to take the ring in whole, or to do something else altogether, like run?

Would you say “pine-needle green” or “green as pine needles”? If you were to be put into a primitive situation without power in a more or less temperate climate and were offered a lifetime supply of ice or fire, not to say that you could not by natural circumstance periodically gather one or the other as you found it, would you accept the ice or the fire? Doesn’t it seem as if the board game called Chinese checkers was once popular and has now disappeared? What would be your best-case scenario for your being forced, or able, to say, “I accept the lash!” If you wear eyeglasses, how many times a day do you wash them? Have you lived in more houses than you’ve had dogs and cats? Would you like to be on a submarine? Do you have a position on pantyhose?

Do you love buffalo as much as I? May I tell you that I love buffalo and do not think you could love them as much as I love them? Have you ever seen finches or sparrows on a tree that suggest fleas or lice on a large animal? Under what circumstances would you kill yourself, and what means might you use? What do you think about a small candy factory in Desoto, Georgia, called the Desoto Nut House that once allowed tours of its kitchen while large black women handled great slabs of peanut brittle and other confections on marble tables, all of this in a sweet open warm friendly air of business and pleasure, and you emerge and buy a bag or two of nuts or candy more out of good feeling and cheer than out of any affection for the stuff, so fun was the kitchen and watching the women turn the dangerous boluses of hot sugar, and now when one goes to the Desoto Nut House one is not allowed in the kitchen because tours are no longer allowed for reasons relating to insurance? What I mean to ask is, is it not the kernel of the demise of the world as we knew it that you can no longer watch candy be made “for insurance reasons”? Does not someone need to stand up and say, “If I cannot have people watch my candy be made, as I have done for forty years without incident, because of insurance, I will not have insurance”?

Have you been to India and seen lingam coming out of the ground, and if you have, do you recall if they are only in holy places or are they also in secular places? Have you ever witnessed elephant foot maintenance? Do you know any apparently very healthy people to have died suddenly from stroke? Will you maneuver to procure very good coffee, or for you is coffee coffee? Whom do you regard as a bona fide intellectual, and have you known personally anyone you regard as a bona fide intellectual? Do you suppose that once a bird knows how to fly he pretty much can expect to fly without incident, more or less as, say, we walk about, or would you think bird flying to be fraught with aeronautical accident? How accurately can you shoot a rubber band? Have you ever been bitten by a horse? When you buy clothes, do you assiduously check the way they fit you, or do you just decide they fit or they don’t and be done with it?

Do you ever hold hands with anyone? If you do not, are there circumstances in which you might hold hands with anyone? If there were a gun case full of guns, yours or someone else’s, and one of the guns was dirty and fouled from use while the others were meticulously clean, would you want to see that the one gun got cleaned? If you were at a landfill and saw a large pile of girly magazines, which you do not customarily look at, beside a large pile of unopened tins of Skoal, which you have never used, would you go over there and take a pinch of snuff and have a look at a magazine? Do buzzards give you the creeps? Have you ever constructed a sandbox? If you once owned a slide rule and do not have it now, do you know what happened to it?