Ambiguity is tricky. It's all around us. It's in everything we say, everything we read and everything we do. We can't live without it. It's like oxygen, or chocolate, or something. I have decided that in order to gain a PhD honourably on the subject of ambiguity I need to do more than just write about it, I need to LIVE IT! Here are listed some of the things that I am doing in order to achieve this goal (remember, though, that you can't believe everything you read):
Never ever letting on what you really mean is a good way to be ambiguous. Careless words cost lives, they say, but by being ambiguous and "covering your ass" you can go some way to ensuring that yours is not one of them and that you are never blamed for anything. One way you can avoid giving your true opinion is to ascribe any opinion or statement that you make to somebody else. This is reverse plagiarism and is therefore perfectly legal in an academic context. Another way is to drop your voice to a low murmur and look into the middle-distance. This will make people think that what you're saying is very meaningful but probably allegorical and so should not be taken at face value. You will leave them impressed and confused.
Now, talk is one thing, but as a student of the art of movement I know full well that you can't disguise your body language. No siree Bob. Repression of your bodily functions only leads to neurosis and sexual dysfunction, as, errr, a friend once told me. For instance, tell the village idiot to pull himself together and he doesn't suddenly become capable of sitting quietly at a computer terminal performing complex calculations for 8 hours a day. Nevertheless, I thought I'd give it a go. I have recently been adopting the hand gestures of an enthusiastic scientific research student, the posture of an upright member of the community, and the genteel mannerisms of a man in early middle-age. I have spent the remainder of the time lying in bed hyperventilating.
In an attempt to explore the sexual ambiguity that is latent in all of us, I have been spending evenings down at my local gay and lesbian venue, Pink Punters, which happens to be in the village where I live (it's true, it is!). I have been welcomed into the community with open arms, amongst other things, and am now known locally as Rosemary. You can generally find me at the bar during "happy hour" in a nice little off-the-shoulder Gucci number, with my elbow in a puddle of pina colada and smoking a Rothmans in a long black cigarette holder, bitching about Kylie, Posh Spice etc with Big Barbara and the other lads.
The universe is totally ambiguous. I'm afraid it is; and until I've completed my Nobel Prize winning research you'll just have to accept it. For instance, there's Einstein's theories about relativity and then there's stuff like quantum physics. Both things are supposed to be valid and yet they CANNOT COEXIST. Bastards. People have been trying to come up with a "Theory of Everything" (or "Grand Unification Theory", if you're interested) to account for this ambiguity. "String Theory" is the latest approach being used to solve this conundrum, and I am applying it in my research to deal with ambiguities. It works! String enough words together and you can make any number of possible meanings coexist at the same time!
Philosophically speaking, life itself is of course ambiguous. Do any of us really know who we really are? More importantly, perhaps, are we actually here at all? Is the next page of the book printed or is it blank before we have turned it over? Do the bedroom walls cease to exist when we close our eyes to go to sleep? In an attempt to live out this conundrum on a personal level, I have been allowing my mind to drift off when people are talking to me. (It wasn't that hard actually.) This has been quite pleasant, and I have been able to clear a lot of names out of my address book as a consequence.
.....more to come, watch this space!.....
Add your own insights about ambiguity!