Unanswerable questions

(and some answers)

I am filled with undefined nostalgia, mixed with the pure joy of light in autumn colors, first chilly winds, winter to come, summer gone, all so fast this year! Filled with shifting questions about all my questions, and, in serendipity, I also find an old box of writings:

with a printed booklet of Unanswerable Questions, and their answers, compiled and published by Carol Peck¹, a marvelous master teacher and poet, at a writers workshop, in the fall of 2005. We were working with the poetic musings of what is sometimes called the right brain mode… in a gathering of women writers in Saratoga Springs, where we held our summer week long retreats, at Skidmore College. We were an international women writers guild, IWWG.² Magic times, when about five hundred women could gather, write, exchange views and feelings, be heard without fear of the usual frown or open opposition…

We were asked to write a bunch of questions we thought had no answers. We then exchanged papers with a colleague, a stranger, at random. She answered my questions, while I attempted to answer hers. Astounding results, delightful, as I had not seen this in print, and had forgotten much about those words. The questioning poetic themes, though, reappear, like sparkly lifelines, fugues, daily lines of dream flight and binding threads of incipient poetry.

Here I chose some of my questions, with answers by Heidi Schultz, a classmate.

1. Who counts the coins inside the pot of gold, at the end of the rainbow?

   Only the person who has a finger of each different color can touch the gold, because the rainbow is a slide and the pot a catch basin for coins arriving from the Prismatic World.

2. Who is the man behind the curtain?

   I think he is you and me, but I cannot be sure, because he doesn’t have a face.

3. Does God have a daughter?

   Of course - I see her in front of me, and I see her wherever I go, even if I go alone.

4. Can water run uphill?

5. Do dragons dance?

   Once I entered a forest. In the deepest, darkest center there was a clearing. All the trees around the clearing had been scorched, from root to canopy. The ground was scattered with jewels shaped like scales, yet there wasn’t a single footprint, and not a single pine needle was broken. ³

6. Can we stop the wars?

7. Do angels walk?

   Yes, but they never leave footprints.

Here some of my answers to her questions:

4. Can you still feel when you have open heart surgery?

   You feel your vein of thoughts.

5. What do dreams see when they are awake?

   The invisible dreams - they see the invisible threads

   they see the possibilities in the impossible dreams.

13. If I looked into a mirror and didn’t see myself, would that mean I was invisible? Like a cat, it is said we can walk behind the mirror, and enter the realm of the invisible souls. Those who fly from rooftops at midnight, dance in the fountain plaza at 2 a.m., and return home at twilight.

And now, in practice for answers to new questions:

Why is this heron standing in one leg only?

first cold of autumn
a solitary blue heron preens
standing on one leg.

To close, a statement that shook me up and balanced me, all at the same time, begging for more questions:

“love does not rest on reciprocity"⁴

Does beauty rest on reciprocity?

Do herons ask questions?

1. Carol Peck, (1935-2022), https://www.pressconnects.com/obituaries/bps126186.

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Women%27s_Writing_Guild

3. I love this answer, as the scales, like petals, renew in dance, what was broken and scorched.

4. Line found on Emanuele Coccia’s recent Instagram post about art, attributed to writer C.S.Lewis by AI, the barfing mouth.