Kyle Seamus Brosnihan's "From One Stranger to Another"

Thoughts on asking questions.

From One Stranger to Another

Go find a stranger
ask them to imagine
what a billion looks like.

A billion of what?
the stranger asks.
A billion of anything.

Ok, the stranger says,
imagines
a billion apricots

a billion balloons
a billion stars
all crammed down

into the Grand Canyon.
It’s a mess, the stranger says,
eyes closed,

but they all fit.
Then ask the stranger
to imagine infinity.

Easily, the stranger imagines
going out into the world,
finding someone,

paying attention to them,
and asking them
about their life.


first published in Farside Review (Issue III)

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There’s a common interview question that’s tossed around — and attributed, I think, to the consulting company McKinsey, which is a corporation with little to no moral compass — that goes something like how many tennis balls can fit inside a limousine? The first time I heard this question I was, sadly, at school. It was years ago, and I was helping facilitate some mock interviews with our students, and one of my students came back from his mock interview and told me that this was one of the questions he had been asked. I learned later about the question’s prevalence — how it is tossed out with a kind of catch-you-off-guard strangeness, and how it is meant not to test an interviewee’s ability to come up with an answer, but rather to test their ability to think about a problem.

I think this all sounds well and good, until you realize that, though the question itself is not about finding an answer, the assumption is that — if you exhibit your thought process correctly, get hired for the job, and then are faced with a problem, any problem — you will be able to find answers to just about anything, no matter the strangeness of the question, no matter the implications of the search for certainty, no matter the fact that no one needs thousands of tennis balls packed inside a limo unless the limo is driving — as it should be, as any limo should be — to a giant field filled with golden retrievers.

And so, though the question is meant to value thinking, what it really seems to value is thinking in service of answering, which is to say certainty instead of uncertainty, which is to say rigidity instead of fragility, which is to say knowledge instead of wonder, which is to say so much else instead of mystery. Tell me, I’d rather ask someone, about your relationship with doubt. What do you do with what you do not know? Where does that live inside your body? And outside of it? In other words, how do you live, knowing so little, as is true of all of us, about the so much of life?

All of this reminds me of a moment in the recent film Conclave when Ralph Fiennes’s character, a cardinal tasked with managing the power and politics of the various other cardinals involved in a papal conclave, says:

Our faith is a living thing precisely because it walks hand in hand with doubt. If there was only certainty and no doubt, there would be no mystery and therefore no need for faith.

There’s a poem by David Ignatow, “Information,” that makes fun, I think, of our contemporary moment’s relentless desire for solvability, for answers, for certainty. It reads, in full:

This tree has two million and seventy-five thousand leaves. Perhaps I missed a leaf or two but I do feel triumphant at having persisted in counting by hand branch by branch and marked down on paper with pencil each total. Adding them up was a pleasure I could understand; I did something on my own that was not dependent on others, and to count leaves is not less meaningful than to count the stars, as astronomers are always doing. They want the facts to be sure they have them all. It would help them to know whether the world is finite. I discovered one tree that is finite. I must try counting the hairs on my head, and you too. We could swap information.

I love the little quips Ignatow makes in this poem:

I did something on my own that was not dependent on others

They want the facts to be sure they have them all.

Here, in these moments, I feel Ignatow as a poet exhibiting his awareness of how wildly impossible the tasks at the heart of the poem are — the task of counting leaves, the task of counting stars. And here, he ties such tasks to what he notices of society — how willing we are to do things that exhibit our independence rather than our dependence, how much we want answers as a kind of hoarding, grasping at everything we can possibly know to be sure we have as much certainty as we can.

And so, I found myself thinking of such things when I first read today’s poem by Kyle Seamus Brosnihan, whose work I first encountered when it was published by HAD, one of my favorite online magazines of poetry.

That poem, “Greenland,” which I loved, began:

            They say the way
you do anything is the way you do
everything. I often leave the peanut
butter lid only halfway screwed on. 

And ended:

When I love it is for forever
or a day. When I go on a walk,
I walk in big circles. When I go
for a run, I never come back.

I loved, here in this poem, the sublimity of the ordinary — how the poem plays with the idea of how so much is supposed to mean, well, so much. And then, how the poem and expands and expands and expands (“When I go on a walk, / I walk in big circles”) until it leaves room for the strangeness of emotion, how we are at once our most mundane and extraordinary selves. And so I read more of Brosnihan’s work, and stumbled across this poem today, which I loved because of the way it juxtaposes finitude with infinitude, certainty with uncertainty — the way it takes that question posed by the McKinsey consultants above and then throws the mystery of infinity at it.

Here’s that moment:

It’s a mess, the stranger says,
eyes closed,

but they all fit.
Then ask the stranger
to imagine infinity.

In this moment, it’s as if the tennis ball question above has reached a specific answer, something imaginable. But the answer itself is — as the stranger says — “a mess.” Why, in anyone’s life, would they encounter a billion apricots in the Grand Canyon, however many tennis balls in a limo? Here, I feel Brosnihan — like Ignatow — poking fun at both our ease with certainty and our desire for it. We want, as Ignatow wrote, “the facts to be sure [we] have them all.” It’s as if it is easier for us to imagine a world where we have everything, where every last thing is counter, than for us to imagine a world where we reckon with the fact that we will never have everything. Never ever. Never at all.

And yet, at the turn of this poem, notice how Brosnihan gestures the poem back toward the unknowable wonder of humans:

Easily, the stranger imagines
going out into the world,
finding someone,

paying attention to them,
and asking them
about their life.

Here, Brosnihan seems to be saying something powerfully astute (and imaginative, and permissive) about who we are. That, despite our desire for certainty, sometimes such certainty — a million apricots in the Grand Canyon — is useless. And not just useless. But violent, even. A little bit weird. And yet, though we can struggle with what to do with uncertainty (which is a kind of infinity, given how it is endless) — with how to hold it, and how to live with it — we are still surrounded by it, in ourselves and in each other, every day. That’s pretty awesome.

I found myself jarred at first by that word — Easily — in today’s poem. I thought, when I first read it, that it wasn’t easy at all, the possibility of such imagination, the encounter with infinity that comes with paying attention. But then, I thought back to those earlier lines, when the stranger is asked to imagine something more finite, and how they say it’s a mess…but they all fit. It is a mess to imagine a billion of anything. It’s a mess to have a billion of anything at all. And yet — we are taught too often to think in terms of billions, and to want in terms of billions. We are taught this all of the time, and we encounter the certainty of wanting such largeness, in such specific terms, with a frequency that confounds anyone trying to grapple with the fact that such largeness is a mess. And so I think that word easily is purposefully jarring because it feels, at first, like it goes against what we encounter in this world. But it’s true, isn’t it? It is easy to stop, pay attention, and ask the kinds of questions that keep prompting more questions. To talk. To learn. Ot, at least, it should be easy.

One great sadness of the world, of many, is the way in which we place limits, sometimes, on the wrong things, while espousing the idea of limitlessness in places where limits should exist. Our culture worships the near-limitlessness of power and money, while limiting the very personhood of others. Violence is enacted daily on a seemingly infinite scale (75,000 tons of bombs dropped on Gaza in the last year alone), while lives are restricted, policed, and ended at the same time. We believe in the possibility of infinity provided for by billions of dollars and not in the infinite, complex depth of a single person — a kind of infinity that costs nothing but our attention to access.

I think back to that question asked to my former student in that old mock interview. How many tennis balls can fit inside a limousine? It reminds me of a conversation I had recently with my friend George, who was lamenting, and also making me laugh, with a detailed explanation of all of the ways philosophy has taken the “trolley problem” — these hypotheticals that are supposed to make us think more deeply about the world but end up making us think in rather simplified and bifurcated ways, in these uncomplicated moralities that offer no real depth and, sometimes, a whole lot of nonsense.

And so, I think we are often asking the wrong questions, and conjuring up the wrong hypotheticals. I wonder what might happen if we asked each other more about our relationships with people and things and ideas. If we asked about how we handle what we don’t know. And how we handle what we do. How we love, in other words, which is an action that involves a little bit of certainty, yes, but a whole lot of uncertainty, too. I wonder what might happen if we talked more about what we’ve come to accept, and what we have a hard time accepting. If we talked more about that — the things we have a hard time with. And if we talked more about what we don’t have a hard time with at all. What brings us joy, in other words. Though sometimes joy can be hard, too. That’s a funny reality. We should talk about that, too. Why joy can be hard. Because it can be. Especially now. And always. And I wonder what might happen if all this talking wasn’t in service of jobs or opportunities or anything that might lead to someone putting a billion of anything inside a limousine, which, sadly, might be something someone is paid to do someday. Yeah. I wonder if all of this talking was in service of something else. Something that has more to do with paying attention, which is something you can do forever, without cost or violence, without jeopardizing the view from the top of the Grand Canyon, which is where you might find yourself one day, just wondering for the sake of wondering.

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Some ongoing notes:

1. I am really excited to be teaching an online class with the Adirondack Center for Writers (thank you, Tyler Barton) on getting away from a prescriptive language when it comes to reading and writing poetry. We’ll read a bunch; we’ll write a bunch; we’ll talk a bunch. It’ll start in February. If you’re interested, here’s the link to register. And here’s a class description: A poem is an offering. In this five-week class, poet and critic Devin Kelly will introduce students to a language of generosity for modern poetry. Instead of talking prescriptively about a poem’s quality (“good” or “bad”), students will take an expansive and holistic approach to engaging with poetry and crafting their own. Works by Larry Levis, Mary Oliver, Ross Gay, W.S. Merwin, and many others will serve as models for developing and practicing what Kelly calls “a vocabulary of grace”. Think of a poem as a window, a room, or a landscape—something that expands the more you pay attention to it. Students will discuss and write new poems weekly, and twice over the course of five weeks everyone will receive one-on-one feedback from Kelly on their work.

2. You can find a list of the work that Writers Against the War on Gaza is doing to build solidarity among writers in support of Palestinian and against their consistent oppression here.

3. Workshops 4 Gaza is an organization of writers putting together donation-based writing workshops and readings in support of Palestine and in awareness of a more just, informed, thoughtful, considerate world. You can follow them here and get more information about them here.

4. If you’ve read any of the recent newsletters, you’ve perhaps noticed that I am offering a subscription option. This is functioning as a kind of “tip jar.” If you would like to offer your monetary support as a form of generosity, please consider becoming a paid subscriber below. There is no difference in what you receive as a free or paid subscriber; to choose the latter is simply an option to exercise your generosity if you feel willing. I am grateful for you either way. Thanks for your readership.