Questions in a World Without Answers Based on a 10/15/04 performance art show, live in Chicago Did you ever use a ouija board? I mean, you hear stories of people getting together, placing their fingers on a plastic piece with a glass window, asking a spirit to give them answers to questions... Now, I had a party once on a Friday, October 13th, I had what I called a “supernatural shindig” in my one-bedroom apartment, where I put pages from the Weekly World News all over my walls, with headlines saying things like “Ancient Egyptian Mummy Terrorizes Village”, or “How To Tell if your Prostitute is an Extra Terrestrial”, and “Aliens Branded Me Like A Steer!”. So I had this shindig in my little place, and I was wearing a mini-skirt dress, and Jay & Brian came over and went straight to the ouija board on the floor, put their hands on the glass, and one of them said loudly, “Is Janet wearing any underwear?” and they moved their hands straight to the word “no” and yelled, “no!” And yeah, some questions can be funny, like when this one time, I was sitting in the living room, and I walked to the kitchen sink to wash my hands. Mom was there, but didn’t mention the sink was half-full of raw squid for her dinner. I see them. I shriek. Mom laughs. “Are their beady little eyes looking up at you?” she asked. Or like when I was on the California streets, and we were walking along Santa Monica Boulevard. We passed a young homeless man, and he asked, “Could you spare a hundred thousand dollars?” And I thought, of course he won’t get it but of all the places in the world, this is the only place where he could get away with asking for it... So yeah, people can laugh at the ouija board at a party of adults, but there are so many questions in the world that we hear and want answers to... Like have you ever had that feeling before, you know, the one when someone is telling you something you don’t want to hear? Like if someone was about to tell you that someone died and you knew what they were going to say and you still didn’t want to hear it? Or if someone did something to you you didn’t like, like when you were little and the kids at the bus stop shot pebbles and spit balls at you every day because you were smart and you still had to go to the bus stop every morning and just try to ignore them? And when that happen it feels like a medium sized rock just fell into the bottom of your stomach, and you don’t want to move because you’re afraid that the rock will hurt the inside of your stomach, and so you just have to sit there and hope the rock goes away? Or else you get the feeling in your chest, right between your lungs, it feels like someone is pressing against the bone there, right there by your heart, and you’ve got to breathe, you’re not going to be able to take that pressure, that force any longer? And sometimes questions are battles over little details, like when we had our annual garage sale recently, and all these old couples came walking by. They were from the Russian neighborhood — they could barely speak english. They would pick up an iron. “How much?” “Four dollars.” “Fifty cents?” “No.” It was a warm indian summer day, we were all clad in shorts and sunglasses... They would point at the iron, a toaster, a blender. “All for a dollar?” “No.” And all the old couples wore raincoats, and scarves wrapped around their heads. They would pick up a wine glass. “How much?” “Twenty-five cents.” “How about ten?” But you know, it then occurred to me that the most questions off the tops of our heads are about relationships, and what we want, and what we hide, too... But when I looked, I began to see questions everywhere, like when I heard some theorists say that women need to look up to a man in order to feel complete. They’d say that a woman couldn’t be president... Think of it — here is a woman, the most important person on earth, and she would never know of anyone who had more power than her. How could she look up to any man? How could she admire or respect any man? And on some points I agree – how can you love someone you don’t respect? But all I could think in response is, why don’t men who are U. S. presidents find themselves unhappy with their boring, unequal, supportive wives? Why is it that men are content with inferior women, but women aren’t content with inferior men? So, I started thinking of these questions, and thinking of relationships gone awry, and I started to think of all the questions we have to those who do us wrong. Because it does seem that some men are content with inferior women and some men even like to downgrade and hurt women. I mean, I write when I can’t find answers to questions, when I see things that are unfair. What did you think I was doing when I was stuffing hand-written notes into my pockets, or typing long hours into the night? In my spare time, I was sitting in the university computer lab slamming my hands, my fingers against the keyboard — because there were too many atrocities in the world... Too many injustices that I had witnessed. Too many people who had wronged me. And I had a lot of work to do. There had to be a record of what you’ve done. Did you think your crimes would go unpunished? Well you see, that’s what I have my poems for, so there will always be a record of what you have done. I have defiled many pages in your honor, you who swung your battle ax high above your head and thought no one would remember in the end. Well, I made a point to remember. Yes, I have defiled many pages. And have you defiled many women? You, the man who rapes my friends? You, the man who rapes my sisters? You, the man who rapes me? Is this what makes you a strong man? You know, I was remembering an event that everyone was talking about years ago; you’d hear the reports on the news about the damage done during the riots, and you’d think that we were in a war zone and that all of this was done for religious purposes and people’s lives were at stake... And maybe they were and I just don’t know it. I don’t know. But there was a trial case where a black man was convicted of a police brutality crime, and the black community was outraged, saying that the white man was holding them down, and so a large group of people started a rally, and I heard the next day that in light of the trial 23 fires were started, mostly in libraries... Then I heard about one of my best friends, a white man, he was hit once by a black man in the street that night, and for six weeks his jaw was wired shut and he had to throw pizza or meat loaf in the blender to eat while he recovered. Slavery was abolished in 1865. The Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964. Because of the Rodney King trial in 1992, 23 fires were started in libraries. And I thought: Is all this violence getting anything done? Are we coming any closer to racial harmony? What are we learning from this? Thinking about questions we ask, especially when traveling somewhere we’ve never been, I thought about my love of travel. I’ve asked questions about different cultures — in China, 9 countries in Europe, evenin our own hemisphere, from Canada to Mexico... To even Puerto Rico. And I thought: what do I have to show for everything done... Is all of this travel like pins and military stripes of an admiral after goals have been accomplished? Or do you earn so many pins, military stripes, and medals of honor, that they just weigh you down? But then I thought about my love of travel, and outer space. I’ve had a star named after me, and my name is on a CD that went on the Deep Impact Spacecraft into Comet Tempel in 2005, and I talk about loving outer space so much, but I don’t think I’ll actually ever get there. And then it occurred to me: I have. What I mean is that all radio signals are shot out into space, and I’ve been on WEFT, WZRD, WLS, even Q101. I wonder how far my voice has traveled into outer space by now. And all television programs are shot into outer space, too — these signals get to the people on earth, but these signals continue to travel towards the ends of the universe. I’ve been on the news, I’ve had poetry videos published on television stations in Nashville and Chicago... I wonder what other stars have seen my poetry by now. I wonder if anything out there can decode our signals and understand what we’re trying to tell them. Expanded show coverage at http://www.janetkuypers.com and http://scars.tv, with images, video mp3s of live and studio tracks, and all of the original writings (included the expanded poetry listing).