Monday, June 30, 2014

27 Questions Intended to Evoke a State of Wonder

  1. Can any creature hear the fall of a snowflake? What could that sound like?
  2. Concerning King Tut: was there, on the occasion of his funeral and interment, any music? Did anyone play a wrong note?
  3. If, long long ago, there were dinosaurs at the south pole, and if, when the darker solstice came, they migrated northward to a place where the vegetation didn't die off (for lack of light), what was that like, a dinosaur migration? Could you feel it from a distance, in your feet? Those enormous creatures on the move? 
  4. Considering the poet Sappho: when was the last copy of her poems lost? Or maybe does a copy of them still survive, somewhere in a remote desert cave--an ancient scroll waiting to be found and deciphered? Who will find it? When?
  5. Was there really a Helen of Troy? To get a glimpse of her face, how many days would I walk?
  6. Consider all the fine painters who died young: can we imagine a museum containing all the works they WOULD have produced, if they had been given another five years to create? A Louvre of what might have been! 
  7. If I could come into possession of any lost  relic of the past--Marlowe's last quill, a butterfly specimen from the Jurassic, a bottle of Nefertiti's perfume, capped with an ivory plug...what would I want to have?
  8. If the sum of human pain, over the full course of history, could be expressed as an alien planetary landscape, what would that planet look like?
  9. Now what about a planet expressive of the sum of human joy?  
  10. Now can we imagine a trumpeter who dreamed nightly that he was an astronaut on both these planets, and every morning picked up his horn to express them both?
  11. Is wonder an emotion necessarily tied to melancholy? To what is no longer here? To what was never born? To what we know for certain cannot last?
  12. Do spiders ever take joyrides on clock-pendulums?
  13. If all mammals dream, what about prairie dogs? What do prairie dogs dream of?  Hawks, kestrels? Prairie dog love? Building new tunnels? Reinforcing old tunnels? Taking wrong turns in tunnels? Tasty roots?
  14. What is the composite musical pitch of the buzz of a honey bee hive? Does that pitch differ from species to species and from hive to hive? Who sets the pitch? The queen? Or is this something the drones have a say in?
  15. If robins can hear earthworms crawling beneath the ground, can earthworms hear robins walking above the ground?
  16. What makes a soap bubble beautiful? Its perfect roundness, never obese? The floating nature of its existence? It's multi-colored swirlish nature? The shortness of its life? The eye of the beholder, itself a mortal sphere?
  17. How did these questions get from me to you, really? Where did they come from originally? Where will they eventually go? Are they common property, or do they already belong to their ultimate destination? 
  18. What is the ultimate destination of all our questions?
  19. Consider: there are bonsai plants in Japan that have been handed down in families for generations. Presumably, some of these plants, if left un-watered even for a week or two, would die. Now, what is the most delicate plant handed down for the longest time?
  20. Can the bonsai in constant need of care, be compared to human love, which must consistently be expressed, or else will die?
  21. If yesterday I learned that an apple is really a kind of rose (in the same way that French is a kind of Latin) how can I live today not hungering for some other beautiful fact I do not know?
  22. If emotions possessed texture, so that you could identify them by feel (like a pot of lemongrass or a swatch of corduroy) how, I wonder, would wonder feel? Smooth as polished gold? Somehow electric?
  23. If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, why only one eye? What's in the other eye?
  24. Consider an old LP recording, featuring a string quartet, all four members of which are long since dead. This is recording of a late quartet of Beethoven. Now play it on an old turn table, and listen, and what exactly is happening here? Isn't this a kind of five-fold resurrection? A springing back to life of four people's passion and intelligence for the music of one who came even before them
  25. Doesn't the needle, as it digs and scrapes the groove, amount to a sort of miraculous grave digger, undoing and transforming the effects of death, one of which is certainly silence?
  26. How long can we keep listening like this?
  27. Or is this deep attention to the music of the moment, the very meaning of forever?

      ?HB?


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