Stephen Dobyns' Idea

There's this idea in Stephen Dobyns' very odd and delightful book The Porcupine's Kisses in which he compares two men, one who carries a question mark as a burden, and another as a gift. In my notes, I had somehow translated this into a lifelong obligation, a question as a burden or a gift.

I'm not sure how I shifted the question mark to a question, or the object to a metaphor of a life journey, or a quest, but it makes sense that way.

It seems to typify two kinds of minds--those that are tortured by inquiry, those who seem menaced by a propensity for internalized, brooding storm clouds, vortices, maelstroms of dark matter... and those whose thoughts are freed up by questions, as if they can float their ideas on the winds like kites, uncluttered, like dolphins sporting up the coast.

Both kinds of thinking are necessary, of course, in one mind. You can't have Van Gogh without Kandinsky or Klee.

I keep thinking that I don't want a question as a burden. No! Never! Perish the thought!

But haven't I been delightfully haunted all my life by questions? Thoughts? Themes? Ideas? Sure they get to be too much sometimes. Some times you just want to jettison all of that mentalistic baggage and free float. But so much of the life of the mind and the life of the soul is like a Russian novel--an irrestistible cluster of contradictions, a Shostakovich tension, an uneasinesss, a restlessness that can never be resolved.