Questions

People ask questions. That’s pretty much why we’re here. Some people like to tell us they have the answers, and they may truly believe it, and that’s nice. But I think the important thing is that we’re out there, asking questions, snooping around, trying to gather up all the scattered pieces of truth and take them home, assemble them in our garage in secret into something unique and useful to us and to our lives. I know I’ve spent a lot of time doing that. And whatever I’ve built, however nice-looking it may be, I realize at the end of the day that it’s been dedication to the act of questioning that has really been what’s changed me. When you stop questioning, you shut off certain circuits in your mind, I think. You pretty much decide that everything’s all settled and it’s all gonna just all run on the existing traffic grid. Which maybe works for some people. Hasn’t for me though. I tried really hard to freeze things into particular shapes at particular points in my life. But they always managed to bust free of the constraints I put them under. And then I’m left there to pick up the pieces. Sitting there in my garage with a dustpan and broom, and my creations in shambles. And then you’re thrown back onto questioning. You ask what’s left. You ask what could have been if this other thing hadn’t been smashed. And then before you know it, you’re back out there climbing trees, turning over rocks, questioning strange fishes and animals. Have they seen what you’re looking for? Do they know where it went? Do they at least know a place that I can stop and rest a while? Questioning, like all the great kinds of quests, tends to wear you out, I think. At times anyway. Sometimes it’s so invigorating, when you’re down in the blackness, crawling on your knees in some tunnel, and then all of a sudden, the floor falls from under you. You land in the middle of some temple noone’s seen in a thousand years, and in the middle, on a dais is an idol covered in jewels and runes. Moments like that are awesome. Breaking through to something. Finding something to show for your efforts. Stories you can tell later on at parties or the bar. Maybe that’s what it’s all about. Anyway, that’s what it’s about for me pretty much. Maybe I just watched too many Indiana Jones movies as a kid though. I know they imprinted on my pretty heavily. And fantasy novels where they go and seek some treasure or lost city. But this idea of the quest has always just felt so appropriate to me. Like I was born for it. I wonder about the people in my village, those who haven’t been called, who haven’t run off to join the Fellowship. Those who’ve never left the Shire. Tolkien talked about how the other hobbits always looked on the Bagginses with mixed awe and contempt. I’ve never been a people pleaser, so I guess that works for me. I wonder about the people though whose lives aren’t focused around questioning, around questing. What do they spend their time on? What are their pursuits? When the white hart bounds into their hall at Candlemas, how come they don’t jump up with the knights and run after them? I guess somebody has to stay home and manage the affairs of Camelot while all the knights are off playing the fool or playing the hero, depending on when you talk to them. Somebody’s gotta till the fields and smith the swords. But they must wonder too. They must ask themselves all kinds of weird questions that I can’t fathom. Maybe it’s the same questions as me. Or maybe not. It’s hard to escape the quest once you’ve started though, I think. It’s hard to think and feel yourself outside of it once you’ve entered into the slipstream. After a while you’re just getting pulled along by the suction. You become the questions. And it’s then when you start to wonder if maybe what you have isn’t just a trumped up version of doubt. Fear wearing fancy clothes. I don’t know. But I guess you have to go by what works, whatever makes your life more interesting and exciting. It’s weird how happiness and uncertainty can come so close together. Or maybe that’s just what it feels like when you’re used to riding on the edge, expecting at any moment to be thrown off. I guess I can’t say anything for fact. It’s all just a matter of my experience and the philosophy that I’ve cultivated in the fields of my experience. The same fields I spend my time running back and forth across. Stopping here and there, digging, looking, wondering. And then off into the forest again after the Questyng Beaste. Don’t the knights always fall asleep in the enchanted forests, though? At some point? Or at least they run across other ones who have. Everybody needs a rest though. I can understand that. Usually, it seems like the ones who do fall asleep like that wind up locked in somebody or other’s dungeon. Or spun up in spider webs, about to be eaten by ogres. Shit like that. Nobody wants it to end like that though. Luckily, it never does. At least not in the quests we read about. Maybe the other ones aren’t worth telling though. The ones where the hero just gives up and accepts fate, and stays in prison forever. Fuck that, man. I refuse to recognize that as an option. Once you’ve tasted the outside world, you can’t just go back down to the Black Iron Prison because it’s safe there. And maybe that’s really the secret though. That the prison is safe. And easy. Three square meals a day. What do you need beside that? I’m not talking about gang-rape-in-the-shower type prison, obviously. I’m talking about like the metaphorical one. The one that’s much more subtle but still perceivable. Maybe that’s what the quest really is. The escape. You need a reason to escape it. You need a purpose in the wide world outside. Something to chase after. And maybe that’s how you do it, define a role for yourself, and then build around that role, whatever it is. Your quest. Whatever your questions are. I think questions are how we overcome duality. They are the warhammer we use to smash simple answers and alleged paradoxes. It’s an opening to possibility, to believe everything at once. To be everywhere at once. Smiling down over everything. I wonder if that’s what God is: the absolutely perfect question.


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This entry was written by Tim Boucher, posted on January 19, 2005 at 9:26 pm.

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