Question! — The Calm I Found in Not Knowing

Last year I had a very bad migraine. I remember it not only because of the pain, but because my sense of where I was seemed to loosen a little. My body was obviously still there, but the sensation was strange: I felt as if I was floating, sometimes almost flying. Right beside that feeling was another thought that I could not completely dismiss—what if I am dying? It was not a grand philosophical moment. It was much more ordinary than that. I was unwell, I was frightened, my body felt unfamiliar, and I did not know exactly what was happening.

That was when I started playing System of a Down's Question! on loop. One line kept attaching itself to the sensation: Do we know when we fly, when we go? I had heard the song before. I already knew the line. But sometimes a song does not need to change for you to hear it differently; your life only needs to move a few inches. The same words then arrive in a different place. During that migraine, the line stopped feeling like an abstract lyric about death or whatever may come after it. It became almost physical. I felt like I was flying, and at the same time I was thinking about dying, so the question suddenly seemed to be happening inside my own body.

We all know about death in the intellectual sense. People die. I will die. You will die. This is perhaps the oldest fact we carry around while doing everything possible not to think about it for most of the day. But there is a difference between knowing that fact and having your body suddenly do something unfamiliar enough that the word someday briefly becomes now? The distance collapses. An idea that normally lives safely in philosophy, religion, literature or late-night conversation becomes a very immediate question. What I like about Question! is that it does not rush in to solve that question.

Usually when we are scared, we want an answer. We want someone to say that everything is fine. We want a diagnosis, an explanation, a map: this is what is happening, this is where it ends, this is the way back to normal. But the song gave me none of that. It stayed uncertain. It asked where we go without pretending that it knew. And somehow that lack of certainty did not make me more frightened. It made me oddly calm. Looking back, that is probably the deepest connection I have with this song. It did not comfort me by answering the question. It comforted me by allowing the question to remain unanswered.

The music itself behaves in a similar way. Question! never feels completely settled. It begins in one place, turns heavy, opens again, shifts its balance and then moves before you have fully adjusted. There is a constant feeling that the floor has moved slightly underneath the song. Normally instability and calm sound like opposites, but I do not think they always are. During that migraine I did not feel stable, but after a while I was not panicking either. I was simply inside a strange physical state, listening to a song that also refused to stay in one shape for very long.

Flying and dying also become strangely close ideas in this context. We usually connect flying with freedom, with leaving the ground, with escaping the normal limits of the body. Human beings have also spent thousands of years describing death with the language of departure: going away, crossing over, being released, moving somewhere else. I did not reach any religious conclusion that night, and I do not want to force one into the memory now. What mattered was simpler. My body was giving me a sensation that felt almost like floating, and a song about not knowing where we go suddenly stopped sounding metaphorical.

I have started to think that comfort does not always come from certainty. Sometimes the demand for certainty is exactly what makes a frightening moment harder. There are questions for which there is no immediate answer, and being told too confidently that everything is fine can feel less convincing than somebody simply admitting that the uncertainty exists. In that moment, Question! felt more like the second kind of company. It did not give me a philosophy of death or a theory of what comes next. It simply stayed with the uncertainty for a few minutes, and then I played it again.

That is also why the heaviness of the song feels different to me now. It is not only heavy because the guitars become heavy. There is weight in the song, but there is also a floating quality to it. Serj can sound close and physical in one moment and almost suspended above the arrangement in another, and then the band pulls everything back toward the ground. That movement between weight and suspension mirrors the contradiction I remember from that night better than any technical description of the song could. I felt ungrounded, but the song gave that feeling a shape.

I do not want to make the experience more dramatic than it was. I had a bad migraine. I was scared. I felt like I was floating and, for a while, I wondered whether I was dying. I played one song repeatedly. That is the whole event. But I think this is often where our real relationship with music begins. An artist makes a song in one context, then years later another person hears it in a completely different room, in a different body, carrying a different fear, and something attaches itself to the recording. That personal meaning does not replace whatever the song originally meant. It simply becomes another layer that was not there before.

Question! became that kind of song for me. I did not find an answer inside it. During a moment when I felt as if I was flying and maybe disappearing, the song seemed to be asking the same thing I was asking. And strangely, that was enough. Maybe not every question is supposed to resolve itself immediately. Some questions only need to give us enough room to remain still for a moment inside the fact that we do not know.