The Interrogative Mood

by Padgett Powell

  Would a catastrophic global war be required to restore us to simple living? Do you recall my asking you if you approved of the terrier mentality? And, in certain other words, why dogs don’t (as a rule) bite us but monkeys (as a rule) do? May I now ask you if you approve of terriers themselves? Did your mother teach you how to sew? How far out of your way—I mean: you’d go a long distance to an obscure shop and spend a lot of money for it; you’d spend not more than, say, $50 at a garage sale if you happened to see one; you’d accept it if someone brought it as a gift into your house and set it up completely, with little trees beside it and real smoke coming out of it—would you go to have a model railroad in your house? Do you like fire? If you were to hear the phrase “does harm” in isolation, what might first come to mind?

  Do you like feathers? Have you stood on an atoll? Are you familiar with horse tack and rigging? Are you barnyard oriented or is the barnyard a sea of trouble for you? When you wear white, do you insist it be spotless? Wasn’t the world better when the term “haberdasher” was current? For that matter, when butter churns were in use? How did we go so wrong? Wasn’t there a day on earth when not every soul was possessed of his or her own petty political and personal-identity agenda? Do you still do candles for your birthday?

  Did you not have an uncle who was an artillery engineer in a war? Are you interested in the nuances of grease? Are you for or against canals, in principle? Is it hard for you to credit that dinosaurs flew? Do you know the average career length of the top-flight runway model?

  Were you a thumb sucker? Would you rather argue with people or not? Can you think of a musical instrument useful in murder other than piano wire? Have you studied the soft toes of geckos? Do you comprehend with complete certainty how bonds work? Would you sail an ocean on a small boat? Do people who purport to know what a fractal is have a leg up on those who confess they don’t? If you came upon a party celebrating something or someone with a yellow sheet cake and white icing, would you partake happily? Do you remember the candies called jawbreakers and Fireballs? Do you have a cutting-edge TV? What dead person would you bring back to life? Do you favor protecting the little wilderness remaining, or do you concede that there is so little left it might as well be ceded to the tide? Would a small red balloon cheer you up? A dog?

  Are you fond of facial astringent? Have you ever heard the term, either in the area of philosophy or sex, “eggism”? Among these types of fences—picket, chain-link, and hogwire—which do you find most attractive? Have you ever worn a feather boa? Would you prefer to listen to a trumpet or a saxophone, both played equally well? Do you keep a personal bird count? Do you count calories? Whatever is meant by it, would you say you pad the nest or do not pad the nest? Do you have any formal familiarity with the architecture of arches? Can the slaughter of its own people, either directly (e.g., Byzantine Nike revolt) or indirectly (e.g., American “conflicts”), be regarded a legitimate tool of government? After what age do you think children are ruined by socialization? Given the choice, will you buy bread in a wrapper or not in a wrapper? What to your ear is the best-sounding language? Does the question of where all the garbage goes and how can it not soon not be able to go there bother you? Should I have put that a little more clearly? Will you wear a hat today?

  What do you think might happen if “one animal, one vote” were conceived in the animal kingdom? How is it that ancient civilizations become buried over time? Why is oil oily? If you were credited with making a trenchant, lugubrious argument, would you be upset? Do you think there is really that much danger in putting a bird feather in the mouth? Do you prefer calm weather to violent weather? Are you fond of any board games? Does the notion of heresy strike you as serious or laughable? If your neighbors were a brick mason, a cobbler, and a butcher, and you were on good terms with them, would you feel secure in the world and buoyant? Do you grasp the principles of the thermocouple?

  If you had a child, would you read to her every night? Do you own good silver? Do you regard yourself a connoisseur of anything? What is the most you have ever donated to a charitable cause, and what was the cause? Have you chosen the way you’d like to die? What profession to your mind most represents grown men being boys? Can you distinguish species of duck by their flight profiles? Is a red-checked tablecloth an agreeable unironic symbol to you or one that invites your cynicism?

  If I said to you, “The sky today is beautiful, the white clouds and gray clouds and the way they are arranged, and the tops of the pine trees with their green needles silky and not stirring at all, breathless, though it is better, and would be better, were they, the needles, whipping and lashing in the wind of the hurricane we had, and this halcyon sky makes me long for that troubled one, but still, look at it, it is beautiful even today”—how much of this would you listen to?

  Would you trust a vegetarian veterinarian? With your own dog? I mean, I can see how you might take the tofu-eating neighbors’ dog to a vegetarian veterinarian in a kind of what-they-sow-they-reap vengeance, but would you take your own dog to a vegetarian veterinarian? What if there you were asked to fill out a questionnaire that asked if the dog, and you, were vegetarian? At any point in your life do you anticipate having sex again? If I said to you, “I want to return to 1940 and have a big coupe with big running boards and drive it drunkenly and carefully along dirt roads never causing harm except for frightening chickens out of the road, and I want you standing out there on the running board saying Slow down, or Let me in, and laughing, but I don’t stop, because of course you don’t mean it, you think as I do that a big 1940s coupe and careful drunken driving and one party outside the car and one inside and both laughing and chickens spraying unhurt into the ditches is what life was then, is what life was before it became ruined by us and all our crap,” and if I said to you, “I have an actual goddamned time machine, I am not kidding, we can get in the coupe inside thirty seconds if we take off our clothes and push the red button underneath that computer over there, come on, strip, get ready”—would you get ready to go with me, and go? Would you ask a lot of questions? Or would you just say, “Shut up and push the button”?

  Will you believe me if I tell you that I am a little fragile, psychologically speaking, and that there is an eagle over the woods out my window, and every day that I see him gliding around, with his white head and his big white tail, even though I have come to appreciate that he is as much a bird of carrion as a buzzard, or more—will you believe me if I tell you that seeing him gives me a small but palpable lift, and not seeing him a small quickening of depression? Assuming you might have as a child, could you eat Chef Boyardee canned noodles today? Have you ever noticed that when the coffee purists insist that the coffee-brewing equipment be kept clean of even traces of built-up coffee oil because it makes the coffee bitter, they are not kidding?

  Are you lazy? Would you rather deal with fire or flood? Are you familiar with the creeping displacement of the American anole by the Cuban brown anole? Do you remember redeemable trading stamps—S&H Green Stamps I believe a major one was called? How did those stamps come to die out? Do you use a business card? Are you a sweater person? Do you suppose it’s the case that damming some rivers is not an ecological hazard but damming others is? Do you picture the days of the week on a calendar in your mind? Are you afraid of a lathe? If we were bombed back into the Stone Age, as whatshisname proposed in Vietnam, would you have any idea how to go about making electricity? Could you even start a fire? Do you have a lot of credit cards? Given a choice, would you wear purple and red or pink and black? Were you spanked as a child, and will you spank a child? What’s just about the worst thing you ever heard of? What’s just about the biggest thing that ever happened around you? What’s your name? What are your intentions with respect to me?

  IF YOU COULD HAVE feathers instead of hair, would you? Do you think shop courses in high school would have more takers were they not called “industrial arts”? Do the very terms “gingiva” and “dentin” not sound frightening? Do you thin
k “sugar water for the overweight” a good modern-day American equivalent for Marx’s “opiate of the masses”? Do you give greeting cards? Would you take a short-haired dog over a long-haired dog, or vice versa, or are you indifferent? Do you carry a big gob of keys or have you managed to pare down? What’s the fastest you have ever gone in an automobile? If you learned that you would expire tomorrow at 5:00 P.M., what would you seek to do until then? How often do you sit in a good straight chair and do nothing else at all? Have you ever seen an indigo snake?

  Do you regard living with routines as liberating or shackling? How much of a baseball game can you watch? Will you wear rain gear or do you prefer just getting wet? If your survival depended on it, do you think there are things you would not eat? What would these be? Do you sympathize with the outlaw? When you visit old folks’ homes and are mistaken by the senile for their own relatives, what do you do? Does this make any sense to you: “Pets at home. Glory. Man is but the percolator of his own retardation”? Do you know what exactly is meant by the term “a professional person”? Would you prefer to work for this kind of person or for the other kind of person? Are we in accord that whatever kind of person that is, he or she would not be called an “unprofessional person”? Do you recall, and did you ever try to use, all-metal roller skates that strapped on over your shoes? Are you big on nutrition, or is it something that happens or doesn’t? Have Schwinn bicycles disappeared yet?

  Could you wear a red clown’s nose all day without explaining it? Are you a physical coward? Are you bothered by your cowardice? What are the top three things in your life you wish you had not done, or done differently from the way you did them? How old is the oldest human body you have seen naked? Is there a difference between a bobcat and a lynx? Are you more troubled by a lie or by a theft, or are they the same thing metaphysically? Is metaphysically used correctly there? If you could have a famous writer, dead or alive, write an obituary for you and really puff you up to have been something you weren’t, perhaps, or otherwise take liberties with your memory, what writer would you choose? Are you good at jacks? Does it matter to you if the jacks are fancy with the little balls on the ends of the spikes or are just straight plain spikes? Must the ball be red?

  Have you read much philosophy? Do you wish you had comprehended that which you did not comprehend, in your philosophy reading? Do you wish you had comprehended that which you did not comprehend in all instances of your incomprehension in all areas and at all times of your life? Do you regard yourself a dangerous person? If not, under what circumstances might you have been, or might you yet be, a dangerous person? Are you made nervous by getting on buses whose routes you do not know? Will you get on a bus in a foreign country where you do not speak the language? If they came back in style and it was not a matter of kitsch, would you wear a fedora? Did anyone instruct you in the matter of shaking hands? Are you baffled that there are people who do not know about the importance of squeezing? In intercourse, do you prefer thrashing or more subtle motion? If your family had a cat, and the neighbor across the street had a cardinal in a cage, presumably because it could not live in the wild, and your family’s cat tormented the cardinal to death by leaping at and striking the cage, would you feel bad about it all your life? Is feeling bad about something all one’s life anything to particularly feel bad about? Are we redeemed by regret? Do you like going into very cold water? When was the last time you wielded a slingshot? Are you any good? Do you remember Buster Brown shoes? Are you afraid of geese with red carbuncular heads? Can you ski on water? On snow? Are you prepared for the end?

  No? Will you wear fur?

  ARE BLAND-FOOD EATERS to be trusted more or less than sophisticated eaters? Is it correct to suggest the eater of bland food is unsophisticated compared with the eater of spicy food? Are you aware that the European rock dove, commonly called a pigeon, represents one of the most successful global invasions in the history of animal adaptations? Do you think the incidence of human homosexuality is higher than 10 percent? Do you like to listen to weather broadcasts or do you just like to see, in uncoached anticipation, weather happen? Will you be saddened that your life has been minor if in fact it has been minor? Is there anything you might do today that would distinguish you from being just a vessel of consumption and pollution with a proper presence in the herd? Have you ever spent time in the house of a recently deceased old woman and seen her Siamese-cat needlepoints and her baking supplies and her shoes and her inspirational sayings on the wall? Do you realize that people move on steadily, even arguably bravely, unto the end, stunned and more stunned, and numbed and more numbed, by what has happened to them and not happened to them? Have you ever heard the saying, Life is a sandwich of activity between two periods of bed-wetting?

  Are there times when you are not motivated to do anything at all? Are you fond of pinball? Is good amateur theater oxymoronic? Have you ever been eye to eye with an owl that did not fly away? Had you the opportunity, would you become a worm farmer? Why is so little heard now of Tallulah Bankhead? What do you think the chances are that a man encouraging five-year-olds to wear their birthday-party hats as codpieces instead of on their heads would be reported to authorities by parents picking up these children from the party? Are you familiar with cultures that build their houses and heat their houses with bricks of manure? Have you ever seen a village idiot run from a dog? If your mind were in the gutter, would you pick it up or leave it there? Have you ever thought you saw a doll move? Do you know that part of the field examination for head injury is called the doll’s-eye test? Have you ever been injured badly enough that your clothes were cut off you with those offset blunt scissors? Why do you think the hole in 45 rpm records was so large and the hole in the much larger 33 rpm record was so small? Do you support any kind of restitution to American Indians? If you could emigrate to any country in the world and support yourself there, which country would it be? If family is coming over, is it in general a good thing or not a good thing?

  Are sports for you something to do, to watch, or to ignore altogether? Are you aware that there is a fine durable black wirelike filament inside the large gray soft strands of what is mistakenly called Spanish moss, and that this fiber was the principal material in automobile and other upholstery into the 1940s and perhaps beyond, and that moss was harvested from trees by poor laborers with long poles with nails in the end of them? Is there a particular odor or situation guaranteed to nauseate you? Did you have a grandmother who called the culmination of nausea “upchucking”? Among your relatives, is there one who is regarded as preternaturally sweet and one who is regarded as un-redeemably vicious? If you had the opportunity to have a two-headed pet, would you seize it? Will you wear pants with elastic waists? Do you have any experience with chemical indicators such as phenylthalein? If you see something on the horizon you cannot identify, do you wish to go see what it is or to stay right where you are? When was the last time you heard someone say, “Who licked the red off your candy?” Have you ever started a grass fire? Are you pro blue jay or anti blue jay? Are you familiar with the viscosities of the various common oils and greases? Have you ever used a torque wrench? Do you have any friends?

  How much will you spend for a haircut? Do you recall the last time you wept? Is there merit in carpet or is it pretty much a bad idea all around in your view? Do you grasp epoxy? Do you understand exactly who profits, and how, from the use of credit cards? Will you answer your phone without knowing who is calling? Will you invest in a fast car because it is fast? Doesn’t it seem as if the heyday of hemorrhoid-cream advertising is over? Do you prefer to watch a bad game show or a good documentary? Do you recall ever helping someone locate a lost puppy? Are you familiar with the phenomenon of children completely terrified by clowns? Faced with an inflatable mattress of large size, do you attempt to induce a partner to inflate it, look for a mechanical blower, or get right to huffing? Do you believe in justice? When, in geometry, it is said “Let X be a right angle,” are you okay with that or have you a frisson
of doubt regarding this having to be said, and then regarding the entire enterprise of geometry itself? For good furniture, what is your wood of choice? Can I sell you on walnut? For industrial hand cleaner, are you Gojo or Goop? Do you have the time?

  Are you aware that a chicken egg on its long axis will allegedly bear the weight of a person and that there are persons who can attest to this? Have you ever seen a commercial 1:24 scale slot-car track? Should the imminent extinction of a plant or animal be fought against or should it be regarded as an evolutionary punch that must be rolled with? Do you trade in commercial greeting cards? Would you rather receive a very good pair of shoes or a very good suitcase? Maybe I have asked you this already, but are you much disturbed by the prospect of putting a bird feather in your mouth? Do you think there is a constant percentage of people who are clinically insane, or is this a figure that changes over time according to immediate local conditions and according to larger historical forces? Is it surprising to you that more people do not lose it, or are you surprised at how many have already lost it?