Questions

There are such things as stupid questions. We say there aren't, so that we don't frighten the good questions away, and can't stop the dumb ones anyway. But the wrong questions can lead us a merry dance, more even than the wrong answers.


"Oh? Why?"
"That's the wrong kind of question."

When I was a senior in high school, I wanted a good camera, more than an instamatic, something I could play with for different results. I didn't even know what the possibilities were, but I wanted to explore them. My brother asked me what I wanted to take pictures of. It's harder to answer such a wrong question, because it takes addressing the question, discarding it, and finding one's way to a new question that honors the person asking in good faith. I answered that I didn't want a particular subject, but I wanted to take better photos of what I could see.

"That is a very graphic analogy with aids understanding wonderfully while being, strictly speaking, wrong in every possible way."

Being poor of income, a film camera, a reasonable SLR, proved to be too expensive to experiment with much. The delay between click and result meant I never really learned what all the knobs and buttons meant. It served me well enough, though. I did make some lovely images. My brother's question stuck in my head, his question still wrong, but so, in a way, was my answer.

"Aha! The right type of question!"
"I bet you don't know the answer, though."
"You are correct. But you must admit it's an interesting question not to know the answer to."

What the digital camera has done for me is what I imagined for myself then, though I could not form the idea coherently. Like the small cassette tape recorder that taught me how I sounded, a camera taught me how I see. Or a different way of seeing. Or a different way of understanding. Or that putting it in words makes it all wrong, somehow.

Like asking an author what the book is about. Or where an artist gets their ideas from. It confuses, never elicits the right kind of answer, and makes it harder to ask good questions, because bad questions tend to stick, annoyingly.

Quotations from Making Money, Terry Pratchett.