Padgett Powell - The Interrogative Mood

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?

What if what others say suddenly makes not less sense than what you yourself say? If someone came into your home and said that for no charge he would run a Lionel model train of whatever gauge the big ones are all around the inside perimeter of your house, a quiet train that makes a gentle choo-choo cooing here and there and that might blow little puffs of smoke and that would run all the time (as demonstrators do in model train shops, perhaps you’ve seen these), would you tell him no or would you tell him to knock himself out and lay that Lionel down? Is there one thing in your life you regret having done (or not having done) more than anything else?

If we were walking down a pleasant street and we came to a nice old-fashioned pharmacy, perhaps with a soda fountain intact, is there anything we should go in and get? Would we be happier if we had something we do not have, or if we were told something we’ve not been told, or if we said something we’ve not said, or if we did something we’ve not done, or if we did not have something that we do have? Have you ever watched bats come out of a wall? How the soft, friendly things keep pouring silently out of the brick? How they have focus, and mission, and you do not? How they will not ever need a colonoscopy, and you will? How they won’t pay taxes? How they can fly without feathers; can, by will, as it were, lift themselves into the air?

Is it easier in life to admit you are alone or should one seek to make a camouflage of that fact? If you got one today, what might you name a dog? Have you ever been bitten by a blue jay? Do breasts not attract you as much as they once did? Would you make regular visits to a slaughterhouse if you could? Do you regard fondly or not fondly the theater of homosexuality?

What would we prepare if told that Einstein was coming to dinner? Would we set the dishes more carefully in the light? Would we, I mean, adjust the lighting? Would we microwave for him? If we were told that Einstein secretly carries a very small pet in his pocket, would we seek to discover what it is? Do you feel all right? Would you be embarrassed or rather thrilled by yourself if you were caught by Einstein with your hand in his coat pocket? Would you prefer to explain yourself in such a moment to Einstein, to Freud, or to Picasso? Are you not past the point of explaining yourself in earnest? Would you like to go to the big new grocery store and marvel at packaging? How have we gotten so stoned, on nothing? Can what we have come to be explained merely by fatigue? Are we possibly now not too far gone to wreak even the meager vengeance of snapping Juicy Fruit at the world?

Will our lips properly moisten for insouciance? Will our lips do what we want them to? Have our lips ever done what we wanted them to? Do you subscribe to the tumble-down theory of economics? What is the ratio of canaries to parakeets? Do you think that an animal that appears to mourn its dead, such as elephants, is capable of imagining its own death? Does fighting to preserve oneself intimate an imagining of one’s death?

Are you leaving now? Would you? Would you mind?