The following writing remarks are two of my favourites:
Literature is the question minus the answer.
-- Roland Barthes
And
One writes not because one knows the answer but because one wants to explore the question.
-- J.M. Coetzee
Literature serves many purposes, and one of its most important ones is to explore the life issues in a fresh manner, discover new perspectives, and even better find out "possible answers," which are often new questions in answer’s clothing.
Here are three Q and A tanka for your reflection:
Relationship:
her husband mutters,
just a few rolls in the hay
with an old flame ...
her inner voice asks, it isn't
a hot embrace with a new love?
Poverty:
why do you eat bread
with garlic rubbed on it?
the lingering smell
will give me dreams
that I've recently been fed
War:
oh, to safe one life
is to save the whole world
(this distance
in the rabbi's voice)
why this silence about bombings?
To conclude today's post, I would like to share with you W. S. Merwin's poem below that provides a thought-provoking and visually and emotionally effective reflection on the poetry of the Q&A model:
Old Man At Home Alone in the Morning
There are questions that I no longer ask
and others that I have not asked for a long time
that I return to and dust off and discover
that I’m smiling and the question
has always been me and that it is
no question at all but that it means
different things at the same time
yes I am old now and I am the child
I remember what are called the old days and there is
no one to ask how they became the old days
and if I ask myself there is no answer
so this is old and what I have become
and the answer is something I would come to
later when I was old but this morning
is not old and I am the morning
in which the autumn leaves have no question
as the breeze passes through them and is gone
And my reply to the "concluding" lines:
before a petal
falls on this breezy day
ask me
no more questions
of why and what if
hedgerow, 120, 2017
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