Monday, October 15, 2007

A questionable introduction

Questions are easy enough to classify. Much easier than answers, though people put them into correct and incorrect and hopelessly in between, as if everything wasn't supposed to be black and white anyway.

First, there are the WHY questions.
Absolutely IMPOSSIBLE to answer and most of which, dare I say ALL, don't make any sense at all. For example, WHY are there two rhyming 'all's in the previous sentence? Or WHY are we here? Or WHY is the fish blue. The fish is blue. It is simply blue. Pointless.
Now I shall stop putting some of my words in caps because i hate doing that and i dont know WHY im doing it either. There i go again.

The how.
Easy but ambiguous. The answer requires the following-up of a path of events. Guide books are the best use of these questions. How do i get to such and such and so and so? As if the guide book did not know.
How did the universe begin? By a miracle, so let us all sing. Again, the pointless and the answerless and the frequent and the bored.

The what.
My favourite kind. Pointless again, and impossible again, less so than the why but still there.
What is a marshmallow?
If sentences didn't have to have a subject, maybe what questions would have made some sense. But they do. And therefore what questions almost always, make that always, answer themselves.
A marshmallow is, of course, a marshmallow. I mean, whatever else could it possibly be?

The who.
Ah. The private eye's pet. Literature's laced handkerchief. Bloggers' mysterious unviewable profile that keeps cropping up in your comment box. Who is reading this now?
Obviously, no one, because i wrote this a long time ago. But, nevertheless, poignant.

The when.
The human race's answer to the relativity of time. Shut it up in a box and throw it into the Brahmaputra. Why the Brahmaputra? Pointless again. When? Now. Which could mean that impossible uncertain elusive illusion (elusive illusion??) "when" the past just becomes the future... or a forever. A year, two, 1000657490, or more. But am I talking about the answer? In this case, both go hand in hand.

The where.
Again, we have no idea. Is there a where? Is there a 'any of this'? Is there a 'does it matter anyway'? And yet we have the answers ready. Here, there, between, under, over, in, out, withal. No, sorry, the last preposition doesn't count.

Did I leave out the whence? Well, I meant to. So there.

The can you and the will you and the won't you and the may i. Intricacies of l'ettiquette. And pure laziness, of course.

And then there are those beautiful works of art - sorry? pardon me? huh? Or just ??? In a white speech bubble or fluffy thought bubble that's a permanent resident of the human brain. And maybe the reaction to the last sentence also, but that's just me.

I suppose that's it. Except that question you can't put into any of these categories... Romeo? Is that really you?
Which is not really a question at all.
I suppose i hate rhetorical questions. But i love them, too, in a weird sadistic sort of way.

So here's to curiosity...the inability to spell...long sentences...and untainted stupidity.
Here's to the question of all questions... and what's in a question? A question by any other name would smell etc, etc.
May the question live forever, and judging by the mental capacity of the human mind, take it in whatever way you please, it shall.

And it will. Which?