Ask, and you shall…

Do you know anyone who answers a question with a question? I have been accused of that. It is not that I want to be testy or paranoid, but something very strange happens when an open-ended question is posed to me. I am raw nerve, edgy but edgeless.

I feel as if I myself become merely an open ending, a refrain in a room without walls or floor or ceiling.

An echo without origin, I become an incomplete stranger to myself.

Who, after all, is a pirate except the waves upon which is the riding? And then not even the waves, really, but merely the riding. Like an apocalyptic gerundive rider emerging out of the watery fog that turns out to be merely mirage that — aye — I roll about in my watery eye. And then the what I see is not the likes of me.

Knock, knock. Who's there? Despair.

Despair who?

Da spare parts, dissembled, unassembled, not resembled. Spare and sparse and elongated into spidery shadows that could belong to retinal tears or daydreams or wet dreams or an art film flawed by the broken bound for parts unknown.

Do you remember the story of the Sphinx? She lived outside of Thebes. And she asked all passing travelers a question. Those who failed to answer she would kill. And if she received a correct answer, the Sphinx would kill herself. She would ask: What goes on four legs in the morning, on two legs at noon, and on three legs in the evening?

I think that she, the recumbent lion with human head and womanly breasts, eagle wings and serpent tail, was like me in many ways. I believe that she was also unable to answer questions. I believe that she was a quilt of identities, doing her best to improvise her story.

She came from Old Kingdom Egypt, called there Shesepankh. The Greeks were the ones who reinvented her, calling her The Strangler. What did she know of strangling? She was really a guardian, carved out of living rock, that is, rock found on site at the pharaoh burial grounds. And as she appeared and reappeared, she was given, perforce, the faces of the pharaohs that she guarded. Lost in the quest of the others' search for immortality of their unworthiest parts, conscripted into service impossible and of no consequence, she had no answers, only questions.

In one version of the story, Oedipus solved her riddle. The human, he said, crawls as a baby, is bipedal in maturity and struggles with a cane in old age.

Did she upon the hearing die by her own hand?

In another version of the story, there is a second riddle: There are two sisters. One births the other, then she gives birth to the first.

Ah, now I am more at home, here in the liminal land, on the threshold, open, indeterminate. Here I can thrive in the ambiguous. (When is a door not a door? When it is ajar.)

Do you know people who immorally play 20 questions? Who change their object in midgame?

And act as if? (What is yours but your friend uses more? Your name.)

In the Poetic Edda, the great Odin in disguise visits the unconquerable giant Vafpronismal and proposes a wisdom contest. The loser loses his head. The questioner can only pose questions to which he knows the answer. When Odin asks what was whispered into his son's ear as he was placed on a funerary ship, the giant realizes he has lost. Only Odin can know this. The giant realizes he has been fooled by the master dissimulator. (What is brown and sounds like a bell? Dung.)

When there is no question at all, I find voice emerging many memories. The day sister births the night; and, the night returns the favor. It is an abundance of opening. It is a crepuscular miracle, coming and going.

Knock, knock. Who's there? Delight. Delight who? De light at the end of the tunnel.

— Rx is the FloridaW eekly muse who hopes to inspire profound mutiny in all those who care to read. Our Rx ma y be wearing a pir ate cloak of in visibility, but emanating fr om within this shado w is hope that readers will feel free to respond. Who kno ws: You may e ven inspir e the muse. Make contact if you dare.