And Then (Daily Planet email #1042)
By now you’ve probably looked around enough to know that not all the answers you’ve been given are correct. Even the brighter candidates, those wide-eyed postulates that are fully plausible or even amusingly possible are held as suspect, regarded at nose’s length with a skepticism on the wrong side of healthy. But you wouldn’t saw off all the pilings of your pier, would you? You’re too smart for that! …Splash!!!
Hold up: if we destroy all the answers what will happen to the questions? Will they become the givens of the void, something patently unknowable and foundationally absent? Who will then even bother to ask the questions anymore except the silly, the stubborn, or the foundationally futile? What if the questions were wrong — does that make us right in our reticence? Or have we thrown away the keys and the locks, the door seam erasing in a reverse laser red burn until we view a solid, cooling, non-bearing wall?
When the dreams no longer offer safe settlement, the wagon’s springs broken, the instruments without measure, the arrows no longer piercing in any direction, the amber light flashing in the all-night intersection of self, when the driver says “This is as far as I can take you” — you’re gonna need to find a different wing or an archer angel. You’ll want some salient aspect, a piece of string to worry. You’ll need a hand to let go of. Make no mistake: you will need. Then you can: mistake.
No one knows what the angels do when they’re not divinely intercessing. When they’re not coming to you in your hour of need, or two hours of need, or however many hours you need to need this time. No one knows when they’re not singing their siren song, or silent song, or strident wrong, what the heck they’re up to, except maybe bowling. They say “I’ll be right there,” but no, they laugh by the river and snicker near the swamp, tickling the lichen and rippling the algae. And when their tiny hands emerge from the elastic cuffs of their windbreakers at the moment of almost too late, they arrive just in time, never with a sorry but also with no expectation of thanks, kind of like a tree. It’s OK, enough.
I feel like Carrie Bradshaw without the shoes, the New York, or friends. Without a husband (either a living one or dead), a cosmo or a winning fecklessness, just Carrie staring into the questioning abyss of her MacBook, wondering the who knows what to nowhere for no one. Is sometimes the answer not to ask? How fecklessly facile. Them angels now: Maybe they are? Possibly they ain’t? You know what is? — Oh do you, now?
When a cask has been emptied, it is still a cask, but what is a bell if it makes no sound? A partner is still a partner even when they are far, and a question is still a question even when answered or unanswered, or obviated or? The question comes with its own special punctuation but the response, you know, can end with anything, even another question, God preserve us. Ellipses help… enough.
