GC Myers- The Questioning
Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question
–E.E. CUMMINGS, 1938, Introduction to Collected Poems
I had a conversation yesterday about the nature of questions. Things like: Why do we ask questions? Can we expect answers? And is the answer– if there is one— ultimately as important as the question itself? Or does simply asking a question create the possibility for an answer? Or more questions?
I often ask questions without having any answers so this line of questioning intrigued me greatly.
Predictably, I had no concrete answers. In fact, it spurned more questions in me. I went seeking early this morning for something that might help organize that conversation in my mind and came across the line above from the late poet E.E. Cummings. It felt like a bit of an epiphany:
Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question
Could it be that perhaps we ourselves are the answer to our questions?
My stock response to that is: I don’t know.
And I’m okay with that. The fact that I am asking questions means that I still care enough to live and seek. And in the end, that is all that matters, the engine that drives us.
That line was the final line in an introduction that Cummings wrote for his 1938 Collected Works. I read the rest of the essay and found it as equally compelling as that final line, though that line was the perfect bow to put on the package.
So much of it spoke to that conversation yesterday as well as to my own personal seeking. There was a short paragraph that felt as though it was written for me about those things that concern me:
Miracles are to come. With you I leave a remembrance of miracles: they are somebody who can love and who shall be continually reborn, a human being; somebody who said to those near him, when his fingers would not hold a brush “tie it to my hand”
I have shared Cummings’ introduction below. I found it a fascinating read. It might not be so for mostpeople but for ourselves, we understand, don’t we?
How could I not end on a question?
I N T R O D U C T I O N
The poems to come are for you and for me and are not for mostpeople– it’s no use trying to pretend that mostpeople and ourselves are alike. Mostpeople have less in common with ourselves than the squarerootofminusone. You and I are human beings; mostpeople are snobs. Take the matter of being born. What does being born mean to mostpeople? Catastrophe unmitigated. Socialrevolution. The cultured aristocrat yanked out of his hyperexclusively ultravoluptuous superpalazzo,and dumped into an incredibly vulgar detentioncamp swarming with every conceivable species of undesirable organism. Mostpeople fancy a guaranteed birthproof safetysuit of nondestructible selflessness. If mostpeople were to be born twice they’d improbably call it dying–
you and I are not snobs. We can never be born enough. We are human beings;for whom birth is a supremely welcome mystery, the mystery of growing: which happens only and whenever we are faithful to ourselves. You and I wear the dangerous looseness of doom and find it becoming. Life, for eternal us, is now’and now is much too busy being a little more than everything to seem anything, catastrophic included.
Life, for mostpeople, simply isn’t. Take the socalled standardofliving. What do mostpeople mean by “living”? They don’t mean living. They mean the latest and closest plural approximation to singular prenatal passivity which science, in its finite but unbounded wisdom, has succeeded in selling their wives. If science could fail, a mountain’s a mammal. Mostpeople’s wives could spot a genuine delusion of embryonic omnipotence immediately and will accept no substitutes.
-luckily for us,a mountain is a mammal. The plusorminus movie to end moving, the strictly scientific parlourgame of real unreality,the tyranny conceived in misconception and dedicated to the proposition that every man is a woman and any woman is a king, hasn’t a wheel to stand on. What their synthetic not to mention transparent majesty, mrsandmr collective foetus, would improbably call a ghost is walking. He isn’t a undream of anaesthetized impersons, or a cosmic comfortstation,or a transcedentally sterilized lookiesoundiefeelietastiesmellie. He is a healthily complex, a naturally homogenous,citizen of immorality. The now of his each pitying free imperfect gesture, his any birth of breathing, insults perfected inframortally milleniums of slavishness. He is a little more than everything, he is democracy; he is alive: he is ourselves.
Miracles are to come. With you I leave a remembrance of miracles: they are somebody who can love and who shall be continually reborn, a human being; somebody who said to those near him, when his fingers would not hold a brush “tie it to my hand”–
nothing proving or sick or partial. Nothing false, nothing difficult or easy or small or colossal. Nothing ordinary or extraordinary, nothing emptied or filled, real or unreal; nothing feeble and known or clumsy and guessed. Everywhere tints childrening, innocent spontaneaous, true. Nowhere possibly what flesh and impossibly such a garden, but actually flowers which breasts are among the very mouths of light. Nothing believed or doubted; brain over heart, surface: nowhere hating or to fear; shadow, mind without soul. Only how measureless cool flames of making; only each other building always distinct selves of mutual entirely opening; only alive. Never the murdered finalities of wherewhen and yesno, impotent nongames of wrongright and rightwrong; never to gain or pause, never the soft adventure of undoom, greedy anguishes and cringing ecstasies of inexistence; never to rest and never to have; only to grow.
Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question
E.E. CUMMINGS, 1938, Collected Poems
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