Why ? Why Not ?

Live the Questions — If You Can

No Definitive Answers

painting by L.J. Kopf

Does life have meaning? What do you mean by “meaning”? Do we have free will? Do we have free won’t? Is it possible to reconcile our inner and outer lives? Are you an innie or an outie? Should you believe everything your mind tells you? Are you crazy?

drawing by L. J. Kopf

In Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart…Do not now seek the answers…Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

Rilke was counseling patience, in 1903. With our contemporary electronic instantaneous access to almost anything, can we even hear that advice?

painting by L. J. Kopf

In addition to the perennial questions of “Is there a God?”, “Who am I?”, and “What’s for dinner?”, I want to add “Would you like to be better off than you are?”

If you belong to my age demographic, you may remember a popular song whose refrain asked, “Would you like to swing on a star, carry moonbeams home in a jar, be better off than you are, or would you rather be a …?” Various animals and their attributes are then listed one at a time for comic effect. “Swinging on a Star” was written in 1944 (music by Jimmy Van Heusen with lyrics by Johnny Burke) for Bing Crosby who sang it in the film Going My Way. It won the Academy Award for best original song. As a young kid I learned the song from a 1955 hit single by Burl Ives, but the version I like most is by gruff-voiced Dave Van Ronk on the 1967 recording Sunday Street where it is listed as “Would You Like to Swing on a Star?”

In his early days in New York City, Bob Dylan crashed at Dave Van Ronk’s apartment. Dylan thanked Van Ronk by stealing some of his LPs and copying his arrangement of the old folk tune “House of the Rising Sun.” Van Ronk supposedly got some ironic satisfaction when The Animals had a hit by lifting Dylan’s version and pumping it up with Alan Price’s Vox Continental organ.

collage by L. J. Kopf

Should we consider people in our lives who are troublesome our “teachers”? Does this question fall into the category of: “If life gives you lemons, make lemonade”? What if you are in school and your teachers are seriously problematic? Does that make your teachers your “teachers”?

drawing by L. J. Kopf

When I was a teenager, my father asked if I thought the human race was improving. As I recall, he meant are we becoming better human beings or are we just coming up with more sophisticated ways to club each other to death. At the time, I was hopeful. Now?

He wasn’t asking if human existence was getting easier. For statistics about the increased longevity and general health of most people on the planet read Steven Pinker’s 2018 book Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. But are we wiser or more moral? Will we ever clean the idea of “the other” out of our consciousness?

cartoon by L. J. Kopf

A few rhetorical (?) questions. Is money the root of all evil? Are there only Seven Deadly Sins or do we need to expand the list? How many of the Ten Commandments can a man break and still get to be elected President of the United States? How do we deal with a power-mad oligarch?

cartoon by L. J. Kopf

The period from the mid-1940s to the early 1960s was dubbed The Age of Anxiety. What descriptor will historians/journalists use to name our present era? The Age of Over-the-Top Crazy Chaos and Dread doesn’t seem all that catchy.

cartoon by L. J. Kopf

In his 1939 poem “Motto,” that happy-go-lucky guy Bertolt Brecht asked and answered an important question: “In the dark times,/will there also be singing?/Yes, there will be singing about the dark times.”

Although he wrote the lyrics for “The Ballad of Mack the Knife,” Brecht never addressed the the question of “Who put the ram in the rama lama ding dong?”

collage by L. J. Kopf

Here in Vermont, our public radio station (VPR) has a podcast called But Why? that invites children to submit any question, no matter how strange, they would like to have answered. Why would you encourage children to be curious and inquisitive? They might grow up to question authority and not believe propaganda. Who knows what that could lead to?

collage by L. J. Kopf

I have a good friend who has a PhD in Philosophy from Harvard. For many years, she was our veterinarian — She didn’t make her living running a big-time philosophy consulting firm. She and her husband (also a wonderful friend) and my wife and I walk our dogs together. When I start pissing and moaning about the state of the world, asking some of the questions I’ve asked here, she usually says, “We are a flawed species.” Then we laugh because it’s true and explains a lot. Then we give our dogs some yummy treats.

cartoon by L. J. Kopf

Do we have past lives or is this life our only time around in the world? After we die, does our consciousness go into a cosmic gumbo and we come back as a piece of okra? If we do reincarnate, is there a system of advancement/regression working toward getting off the Wheel of Life? Hindu or Hindu not?

cartoon by L. J. Kopf

In the short story “Teddy” (in Nine Stories), J. D. Salinger has a ten-year-old boy discuss his previous incarnation. Teddy says he was spiritually advanced, but met a woman and stopped meditating, resulting in his getting demoted to reincarnating as an American.

drawing by L. J. Kopf

“If you don’t break your ropes while you’re alive,/ do you think/ ghosts will do it after?” — from The Time Before Death by Kabir (1398–1448)

collage by L. J. Kopf

“To be or not to be, that is the question.” Do I really need to give you the attribution for that quotation? Oh, okay. It is spoken by Shakespeare’s conflicted Dane.

cartoon by L. J. Kopf

At the end of my favorite film O Lucky Man!, the director Lindsay Anderson tells the character played by Malcolm McDowell to, “Smile.” When McDowell replies, “For what? There’s nothing to smile about.” Anderson hits him on the head with a script and says, “You don’t have to have a reason. Just do it.” O Lucky Man! has a soundtrack of brilliant songs by the aforementioned Alan Price.

drawing by L. J. Kopf

If we love the Earth, why are we so mean to it? Is Earth the only planet in the universe that has produced life? The more we learn about the universe, the less likely that seems. Assuming Homo Sapiens are still around, what will the implications for humans be when extraterrestrial life is discovered?

drawing by L. J. Kopf

On a mountaintop in Chile, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory has installed the world’s largest digital camera (about the size of a SUV and weighing around 6,000 lbs.). Connected to a telescope, the Legacy Survey of Space and Time Camera is expected to reveal 20 billion galaxies (as well as information about about dark energy and dark matter) in the next ten years. The Rubin website says it will produce “answers to questions we have yet to imagine.”

The Earth is a tiny speck in a galaxy out in the boondocks of the cosmos. Scientists and songwriters have told us we contain material from the stars. Each individual is a small part of existence on our dot in space.

Our miraculous little planet is covered by a six-mile deep ocean of atmosphere that gives us the air we breathe and the water we drink. Does life have meaning? Life is a gift. Asking if a gift has meaning seems a bit ungrateful.

painting by L. J. Kopf

Suggested listening: Barry Mann — “Who Put the Bomp” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aumW5e28xic

Alan Price — “O Lucky Man!” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oq3bLe6I_L4

Dave Van Ronk — “Would You Like to Swing on a Star?” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFrS8AB2a4c

Bob Dylan — “Blowing in the Wind” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMFj8uDubsE&list=RDMMFj8uDubsE&start_radio=1

book by L. J. Kopf