“How Many Questions Does a Cat Have



“How Many Questions Does a Cat Have?”—Pablo Neruda, The Book of Questions

Questions—without answers—can be a provocative means of exploring a subject. Questions can point up paradoxes, reveal tensions, explore mysteries; serving as reflective surfaces, questions can opens us to larger worlds. In this writing exercise, you will use selections from writing by Padgett Powell and Pablo Neruda to prompt questions and speculations about various subjects. Play!

Padgett Powell, from The Interrogative Mood: a Novel? (New York: HarperCollins, 2009: 1-4)

Are your emotions pure? Are your nerves adjustable? How do you stand in relation to the potato? Should it still be Constantinople? Does a nameless horse make you more nervous or less nervous than a named horse? In your view, do children smell good? If before you now would you eat animal crackers? Could you lie down and take a rest on a sidewalk? Did you love your mother and father, and do Psalms do it for you? If you are relegated to last place in every category, are you bothered enough to struggle up? Does your doorbell ever ring? Is there sand in your craw? Could Mendeleyev place you correctly in a square on a chart of periodic identities, or would you resonate all over the board? How many push-ups can you do?

Are you inclined to favor Windward Islands or the Leeward Islands? Does a man wearing hair tonic and chewing gum suggest criminality, or are you drawn to his happy-go-lucky charm? Are you familiar with the religious positions taken regarding the various hooves of animals? Under what circumstances or set of circumstances, might you noodle for a catfish? Will you spend more money for better terry cloth? Is sugar your thing? If a gentle specimen of livestock passed you by en route to its slaughter, would you palm its rump? Are you disturbed by over technical shoes? Are you much taken by jewelry? Do you recall the passion you had as an undergraduate for philosophy? Do you have a headache?

Why won’t the aliens step forth to help us? Did you know that Native American mothers suckled their children to age five, merely bending at the waist to feed them afield? Have you ever witnessed the playing of shuffleboard at a nudist colony? If tennis courts could be of but one surface, which surface should that be? In your economics, are you, generally, laissez-faire or socialist? If you could design the flag for a nation, what color or colors would predominate?

Should a tree be pruned? Are you perplexed by what to do with underwear whose elastic is spent but which is otherwise in good shape? Do you dance? Is having collected Coke bottles for deposit money part of the fond stuff of your childhood? Have you inadvertently hurt, or killed, animals? Would you eat carrion? When it comes to pillows, are you a down man or feather? Are you a man? Will you place two hundred dollars in the traditional red envelope and give it to me? Have you ever had to concern yourself with the imminence of freezing water pipes or deal with frozen water pipes? How is your health? If it might be fairly said that you have hopes and fears, would you say you have more hopes than fears, or more fears than hopes? Are all of your affairs in order? Would you have to slightest idea, if we somehow started over, how to reinvent the radio or even the telephone? Do you recall the particular manila rubber buttons in the garters that held up ladies’ hose before the invention of panty hose? Who would you say is the best quarterback of all time? Between an automobile mechanic and a psychologist, which is worth more to you per hour?

Are you happy? Are you given to wondering if others are happy? Do you know the distinctions, empirical or theoretical, between moss and lichen? Have you seen an animal lighter on its feet than the sporty red fox? Do you cut slack for the crime of passion as opposed to its premeditated cousin? Do you understand why the legal system would? Are you bothered by socks not matching up in subtler respects than color? Is it clear to you what I mean by that? Is it clear to you why I am asking all these questions? Is, in general, would you say, much clear to you at all, or very little, or are you somewhere in the murky sea of prescience? Should I say murky sea of presence of mind? Should I go away? Leave you alone? Should I bother but myself with the interrogative mood?

*This assignment came from Libby Falk Jones, who presented this prompt as part of a writing workshop at CCCC 2010.*

Pablo Neruda, from The Book of Questions

1

Why don’t the immense airplanes

fly around with their children?

Which yellow bird

fills its nest with lemons?

Why don’t they train helicopters

to suck honey from the sunlight?

Where did the full moon leave

its sack of flour tonight?

8

What is it that upsets the volcanoes

that spit fire, cold, and rage?

Why wasn’t Christopher Columbus

able to discover Spain?

How many questions does a cat have?

Do tears not yet spilled

wait in small lakes?

Or are they invisible rivers

that run toward sadness?

14

And what did the rubies say

standing before the juice of pomegranates?

Why doesn’t Thursday talk itself

into coming after Friday?

Who shouted with glee

when the color blue was born?

Why does the earth grieve

when the violets appear?

15

But is it true that the vests

are preparing to revolt?

Why does spring once again

offer its green clothes?

Why does agriculture laugh

at the pale tears of the sky?

How did the abandoned bicycle

win its freedom?

20

Is it true that amber contains

the tears of the sirens?

What do they call a flower

that flies from bird to bird?

Isn’t it better never than late?

And why did cheese decide

to perform heroic deeds in France?

21

And when light was forged

did it happen in Venezuela?

Where is the center of the sea?

Why do waves never go there?

Is it true that the meteor

was a dove of amethyst?

Am I allowed to ask my book

whether it’s true I wrote it?

22

Love, love, his and hers,

if they’ve gone, where did they go?

Yesterday, yesterday I asked my eyes

when will we see each other again?

And when you change the landscape

is it with bare hands or with gloves?

How does rumor of the sky smell

when the blue of water sings?

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