Who will answer?

From the canyons of the mind

We wander on and stumble blindly

Through the often tangled maze

Of starless nights and sunless days

While asking for some kind of clue

Or road to lead us to the truth

But who will answer?*

Might we in this fortress nation finally be feeling a twinge of the pain our peers suffer all across our little blue marble spaceship? All the Plagues of Job and Ramses, dripping with the red harvest of the Seven Deadly Sins, indeed seem simultaneously upon us.

Artists, scientists, priests, poets and occasional pols have long composed various verses of the same song.

The great Thornton Wilder tried his best to pose the great question, winning his first of three Pulitzers for his 1927 novel “The Bridge of San Luis Rey.” Set in 1714 Peru, five seemingly unrelated lives come together and to conclusion on a failed rope bridge high over an Andean canyon. A priest investigates their lives looking for commonality and is burned at the stake for questioning God’s will.

The Judeo-Christian tradition tells us that our God is all-powerful and all-knowing. So if the master of the universe sees and knows all, why does She allow Her own creations to wallow in suffering? The greatest poet writing in English, Emily Dickinson, asked “was it not He (Jesus) who suffered?” So why should I, she implicitly implored.

MAS*H writer Larry Gelbart’s 1977 film “Oh, God!” directed by Carl Reiner poses the great questions with instructively incisive humor. John Denver’s character dares to ask God (George Burns) why He permits so much sorrow.

“I don’t control what happens. What happens happens,” says the Big Guy, leaving Denver and the audience aghast.

“I gave you great seeds and everything still works,” God concludes, adding that His gift of our once-balanced world comes with great responsibility.

“Try making a mackerel from scratch.”

Nobel Prize-winning writer Isaac Bashevis Singer was once asked another version of the great conundrum while lecturing to students.

“Do you believe in predestination or free will?” queried some brash freshman.

Wizened Isaac did not miss a beat. “You must believe in free will. You have no choice.” Like Gelbart’s magnum opus, a great moral lesson cloaked in comedy.

Do we choose to live the lives we will live before we live them? Do we preview the consequences of the free will we shall exercise? What’s the reward for choosing the difficult?

Scientists have recently wondered if perhaps our seemingly massive universe might just be one big computer simulation in a bell jar on a shelf in that “helluva good universe next door” which poet e.e. cummings suggested we visit.

The dividing line between genius and insanity is thin. Van Gogh killed only himself. Theodore Kaczynski, aka The Unabomber, was a documented off-the-charts genius who turned his monomaniacal talents to hand-making perfect and perfectly untraceable letter bombs to smite his imagined enemies.

In the rooms of dark and shades

The scent of sandalwood pervades

The colored thoughts in muddled heads

Reclining in the rumpled beds

Of unmade dreams that can’t come true

When we ask what we should do

Who, who will answer?*

And so we come to that twisted soul who took six lives at the loss of her own in Nashville this week. Authorities said she left a…manifesto.

It may not help us understand the troubled mind of a citizen of one of our most disfavored classes, the lowest of the lowly, the transgendered.

Is our hope in walnut shells

Worn ‘round the neck with temple bells

Or deep within some cloistered walls

Where hooded figures pray in halls?

Or crumbled books on dusty shelves

Or in our stars, or in ourselves

Who will answer?

The Unabomber’s manifesto, “Industrial Society and Its Future”, was reluctantly published by The New York Times and Washington Post as law enforcement’s final attempt to locate a madman who lived so far off the grid that he even hand-made the wooden screws that held his devices together. His family recognized some of the scribblings.

Can the meanderings of the young Tennessee murderess provide any surcease from sorrow for all afflicted, including an increasingly desensitized nation?

The great moralist George Carlin perfectly described our defenses. World War One’s “shell shock” mellowed to become “combat fatigue,” then “traumatic stress syndrome” and finally “post-traumatic stress disorder,” a bloodless euphemism for hot wet fear in the air. How numb can we become?

Analyzing Kaczynski’s life provides clues about how he morphed from mathematical genius to mad bomber. And what of victims of bombs and guns? Were they all — and are we all — just confused fellow travelers on that frail bridge at San Luis Rey?

The great folk singer Pete Seeger answered the great question with yet another: “When will they ever learn?”

George Carlin often closed his shows admonishing us to “take care of each other.”

Simple as that.

If the soul is darkened

By a fear it cannot name

If the mind is baffled

When the rules don’t fit the game

Who will answer? Who will answer?

Who will answer?

Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia!

“WHO WILL ANSWER” by mellow baritone Ed Ames was a monster hit on the major charts in 1967.

Mr. Ames was a regular headliner at the Sparks Nugget. I had the honor of sitting with him and singer/actress Connie Stevens at the Multiple Sclerosis Society Governor’s Barbecue back in the 1970s. He stunned the crowd on the lawn of Carson City’s executive mansion with an a capella performance of “Try to Remember.”

Wikipedia reports that “Billboard magazine named ‘Who Will Answer’ its ‘Record of the Week’, praised the topical lyrics and the unusual musical combination of “Gregorian-like chant … Johann Sebastian Bach and …hard rock.”

The printed word cannot do justice to a work of art that should be sung by a man alone in a cathedral. Get it, listen, share.

Stay safe, get vaxxed and pray for the children Palestine Ohio, Nashville Tenn., Ukraine and 63 other war-torn lands.

Be well. Raise hell. / Esté bien. Haga infierno.

*These stanzas were spoken by Ames with echo effects as though questioning God in an empty church.

Andrew Quarantino Barbano is a 54-year Nevadan and editor of NevadaLabor.com/ Barbwire by Barbano has originated in the Tribune since 1988. E-mail barbano@frontpage.reno.nv.us