Questclamation

"Searching for answers in life presumes that we even know the questions."

Wayne Visser

Don’t look for answers in our Ingenarium.

Creatively speaking, answers are the end of the line, the period concluding the thought.  Once you have an answer to something, you can move on to something else, which is just fine for multiple choice exams and bad dates.  Not so good for the imaginative enterprise.

Creativity, after all, is about the choices, the endlessly recurring possibilities.  Options and opportunities.  And in that sense it makes more sense to question answers than to answer questions.  In fact, most creative people tend to be the ones who will not take yes or no for an answer because they refuse to take an answer for an answer. 

They are stubborn about their flexibility.

Knowers, true believers, experts, and egotists revel in truths, essences, and answers.  That is all very important when decisions have to be made, when deals are sealed, and things must be wrapped up.  But the creative process is different and here it is more useful to approach all answers as relative, temporary, and limited.

A famous bumper sticker said…an answer is a tombstone for an inquiry.  In other words, a conclusion was the place where you got tired of thinking.  The physicist Niels Bohr put this more profoundly but, of course, he was inventing Quantum Theory not writing bumper stickers.  He said that while the opposite of a true statement was a false statement, the opposite of a profound truth was another profound truth.  This is a necessary attitude in the quantum world with all of its contradictions, strangeness, and paradoxes.  Particles can be in two places at the same instant, can travel backwards in time, and certain measurements are unmeasurable because the act of measuring changes them.  Weird stuff that requires a weird quirk within the answering mind.

Bohr’s own creative work in quantum physics relied in part on his ability to be flexible in his thinking, to accept paradoxes, to question categories and answers.  After all, the truth of pat answers is almost always a momentary truth, shallow in scope.  The bigger truths are ones of contradiction in the roiling universe in which we live.  Einstein’s famous “imagination is more important than knowledge,” hints at the same thing.

Questioning answers often relies on not accepting the premise you are given in the first place.  This is the Gordian Knot approach to problem solving.  If you are not up on your knot lore, The Gordian Knot was a complex knot made of rope that tied the chariot of the king in ancient Greece.  It was said that whoever could undo this knot would become ruler of all Asia.  Everyone who tried failed because the knot was intricate and cleverly designed; when you pulled on it, it just tightened up.  Then this kid from Macedonia came up, studied it for a few moments, took out his sword and sliced the whole damn thing in half.  Problem solved…no more knot.

Everyone else was trying to answer the question of how to unravel the knot.  But this guy refused to find that answer because he refused to accept the question in the first place.  Instead he challenged the whole premise and went on to become Alexander the Great.

Challenging the whole “question and answer” mentality is so critical and important that there ought to be a punctuation mark to express it.  I propose combining the question mark and the exclamation point and calling it the Questclamation Point.  It is a combination of an exclamation (That’s it! Aha! The end!) and a question (Oh yeah? Huh? You sure?).  It suggests that all answers can be questioned and all questions too.  It should be on every keyboard, at the end of every answer, and concluding every statement of absolute certainty.

Therefore a big Questclamation Point goes into the Ingenarium.