By David Astle
“Red light and speed camera ahead.” The warning comes from Google Maps as you drive through the suburbs. But hang on – are there two cameras, one for speeding and one for lights? Or just one camera? Voiced messages lack the punctuation to eliminate the doubt. Either way, you’d be wise to slow down.
Last year, tackling a weekend quiz, I met a similar ambiguity via this question: “In which Olympic sport, summer or winter, has Sweden won the most gold medals?” Handball? Luge? I started grabbing sports, before wondering if the question meant which sport – in either season – is Sweden’s personal best? Or which sport has Sweden amassed more gold medals than any other nation? Turns out the answer was cross-country skiing, but I still can’t confirm if Sweden is the world’s best, or that’s the best for Sweden.
As a puzzle addict, I dwell in mystery, a state of unknowing.Credit: Jo Gay
Like it or not, ambiguity is part of life. Nancy Friedman, a US branding consultant at Wordworking, found a street poster depicting a parked car. The message: “Curb Theft – Take your valuables with you!” Was curb a noun or verb? Did it matter? Both perceptions can hold their own, just as a certain French film (spoiler coming) can present diametric arguments for how a man came to fall off a chalet’s balcony.
As a puzzle addict, I dwell in mystery, a state of unknowing. Of course, being human, I wish to track down the single answer, or pinpoint MH17, but we shouldn’t shy from bafflement. Neurally, I swear, the inner tension does our brains good. Like the Chinese proverb that whispers ambiguity: “The newborn calf is not afraid of the tiger.” Due to naivete, you first presume. But later you might infer how ignorance can breed an unlikely brand of courage.
Andre Gide, the French writer, said, “Please do not understand me too quickly.” A warning against seeing the world, and each other, in clear lines. Anton Chekhov built a career out of the mystery that humans remain to ourselves. William Carlos Williams, doctor by day, poetic enigmatist by night, once wrote: “Let be be the finale of seem.” A typo, you may imagine, but allow his riddle to settle for a moment.
Since the surface is all how things seeming, while the inner truth is there for us to find, assuming we have the time to wonder, the resolve to solve. Poetry in general offers that game, trafficking in metaphor and ambiguity. Sarah Holland-Batt, the recent Stella winner for Jaguar, compiled Fishing For Lightning (UQP, 2021) as her lockdown project, a suite of 50 local poets, with sampled work and mini-essays for each. It’s a psalm to life’s mysteries, where poems may be “full of phrases to muse over like a set of cryptic crossword clues”.
Leading us into my domain where nothing is black and white. Charade clues, say, make you see nowhere (the word) as being neither here nor there, as much as this juncture in time and space: now here. Opposites coexist in a world of mystery, as much as opposite views in a debate may hold equal substance, and surely that’s a healthier way to think, in terms of compassion, if not cognition.
“More and more,” wrote Samuel Beckett, “my own language appears to me like a veil that must be torn apart in order to get at things (or the Nothingness) behind it.” Typical Sam – Sam I Am Not. Yet that notion of unknowing is less scary than we think, as it keeps us thinking.
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