Padgett Powell - The Interrogative Mood

If the observation were made to you that “Strangers become intimate, and as intimacy grows they lower their guards and less mind their manners until errors are made, which decreases intimacy until estrangement exceeds that which existed before the strangers ever met,” would you be inclined to agree? Do you know that a Gaboon viper is stout enough to knock a cow down? Do you know what is meant by the term “blackwater river”? In what area does your want of learning concern or disappoint you most, botany or mathematics? If architecture is frozen music, do we not deserve the whole cookbook of such recipes? When you hear the expression “Those were the days,” or any equivalent allusion to the good old days, are you inclined to dismiss the speaker as a sentimentalist or do you credit that there indeed were better days? Do Darwinian accidents account for dogs and cats, and not, say, monkeys and possums, becoming domesticated, or does it owe to another kind of force, perhaps spiritual? Do you wonder, when you wonder things like who first got the gumption to eat an oyster, who first got the idea to weave —was not a moment like that really cutting-edge, as opposed to all the foofoo nano-refinements of today, which amount to the playing of checkers with the microchip?

Have I forgotten the question that goes here? Was it “Is it raining?” Do you regard rain as an anesthetic? Does pain purify? Are your nerves steady like those of the velvet ant, buzzing steadily across the lowly dull ground in its jacket of carmine velour and black satin? Do you know how to safely determine if the velvet ant stings? Have you seen the wall-sized bronze periodic table of the elements monument to Mendeleyev in St. Petersburg? Do you know that there is trash beneath it? Have you ever had antivenin? Why is it- venin and not- venom ?

Isn’t wool a marvel? Does it seem to you that ferries are involved in a disproportionate number of accidents? Can you think of any amusing confusions of the word contraption for the word contraction ? Are you a taker of vitamins? What about confusing confusion with contusion , or hypnosis with anhydrous ammonia or electrolysis ? If the blue royalty gets the red carpet, does not the common man turn green with envy and the revolutionary black with rage? Do you know what the actual song of a nightingale sounds like? Is the nightingale a real bird, and is it native to our shores? Whose death, recent or not, do you most lament? Have you ever watched high-rise construction? Would you like to drink cool clear water from a fat red hose? Have you eaten hot gritty radishes fresh from the ground? Do you appreciate that an oyster has, among its other organs, a heart ?

This business of the ears and nose allegedly continuing to grow throughout one’s life — can that be part of a great and benevolent creator’s design, part of a malevolent god’s design, or is it another inscrutable facet of natural selection? Is survival enhanced by a man’s looking more and more like an elephant as he nears his grave? What is your mother tongue? Do you like to party? Was there a period in your adolescence when you eschewed underwear? Do you eschew it now? Do you favor peanuts, cashews, or nuts more exotic? Will you have a pet before you die, if you do not have one now? Do you grasp Ohm’s Law? Do you regard cherries a fruit or a natural candy? Is intelligibility a function of the intelligence of the speaker, the listener, or both? Is it overrated? Is the human individual more important than the individual ant, and if so by a factor, what would you say, of what?

Do you like to carpool? Have you ever seen a large woman boil sugar watching the candy thermometer closely? Wouldn’t it be better to have lived in an era when we routinely wore “leggins”? Are boys meaner than girls, or vice versa? Isn’t acrylic paint essentially plastic of some sort? In what ways do you discharge your civic duties? If you could assign colors to the days of the week, what color would you assign Tuesday? Is the blue jay justly maligned? Did ball sports originate as rock sports, or heads-of-animals sports, or what, do you think? Do you take your bacon crisp or limber? Terrefly or terrederm —is there a word in this vicinity I can’t think of, or is there a word in this vicinity that needs to exist but doesn’t? How did the Chihuahua’s head and the apple get congruent like that? Did you see the pair of little blue pants by the road? Do you think you’d feel better had you a degree in some kind of engineering? What kind of engineering would that be?

Are you much on games of chance, or cards? Is there anything sadder than the demise of the elephant, among all the sad demise of the modern world? Are you comforted by good tile? Would you like to have a modern house on a golf course — kitchen island, breakfast counter — and live a golf lifestyle with golfing friends of like mind? Would your terrors pursue you into such a house and life? Do you like to pay bills? Do you still answer the phone? Are you fond of country wisdom such as “All the snow in the world won’t change the color of the pine needles”? Is the having of pets salubrious? Were you a bird, would you like more to soar or flap? Can you shoot well? Have you ever had, or do you have now, a soldering kit? Do you have a grasp of pH?

Is there enough time left? Does it matter that I do not specify for what? Was there ever enough time? Was there once too much? Does the notion of “enough time” actually make any sense? Does it suggest we had things to do and could not do them for reasons other than that we were incompetents? Did we have things to do? Things better done than not? Thus, important things? Are there important things? Are we as a species rolling together the great dungball of the importantly done into itself and making thereby a better world for the dungball rollers to follow us?

Would you like to have been a conquistador — perhaps a benign one? Perhaps I mean not a conquistador but merely a world-class explorer and discoverer — would you like to have been one of those? Or are you content to sit in a chair and fret small, or not fret at all? Is exploring not merely peripatetic dungball rolling up? What about inventing? What about doing anything at all — is it not just making the dungball larger? My question then is, Should we make the dungball larger? Haven’t we made the dungball large enough? Did you know that last Wednesday we were to have begun observing the Tertiary Protocols? Are you much disturbed by not knowing what they are, and that our failure to observe them will equal our doom?

Is a man sensing his oncoming death more likely to rid himself of his worldly possessions or cling to them? Does a woman behave, or is a woman expected to behave, any differently from a man in this regard? Do you quite credit that there are burrowing owls? Would you like to be a harbormaster? Which venereal diseases have you had? In your view, is a gesture of charity genuine or is it a kind of deep moral tax write-off?

Do you enjoy, as much as I, packing a few effects into a sturdy cowhide suitcase and taking a simple trip? Are you as handsome as you would have it? Would you prefer that the myth of the water skier skiing into a ball of water moccasins not be a myth? Do you approve of the terrier mentality? Is the sky the limit? Will there be green thoughts in the future? Are you given comfort or made nervous by ball bearings? I have a question for you involving “the velvet raiment of kings”—can you tell me what the question is? Is it late in the day or early in the evening, or is it the top of the morning or the bottom of the night? Is it fair to ask? Are you with me here?

IF A TORNADO IS a torrent of wind, is a hurricane a horrent of wind? Wouldn’t it be grand to wear a good wool jacket with brass snaps in chilly but not painfully cold weather? Have you ever had to be involved in arbitration? What about traction? Are you well disposed toward bats or are you given the willies? Is it true or is it received hogwash that a meat eater wants a target in his endeavors and a vegetarian eschews a target? Can you picture the excitement of the day that gunpowder was first induced to blow? For tablecloths, do you prefer an oilcloth or an absorbent fabric? On a high-art/low-art scale, where do you put Norman Rockwell?