When Opposites Detract

Aug 122008

For children ambiguity is always an irritation. To speak to a child in a way that holds their attention, ambiguity needs to be scrubbed out of the text. But for adults, ambiguity is delicious – scintillating – seductive. The warm rush of the intentionally imprecise has set many a heart racing.

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She dressed as if there was something delicious to hide – never exposing much – or encasing herself in a dump of denim, burlap and bulk – but as if there was something strongly feminine – mysterious and sensual –that might be exposed if the right rhythms kidnapped her heart’s beating. And that made her incredibly dangerous.

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A man pays no compliment to a woman when he tells her she’s beautiful. Either she is, and knows it – in which case he has stated the obvious and is boring – or she is not and knows it – in which case he is deluded and inconvenient. What she really wants is to hear is that she makes him nervous – better yet, that he’s afraid of her. As well he should be. Perhaps he is a man to her woman. At least then something would be possible.

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Ambiguity is not the lack of intentionality – it is far more intentional that the unambiguous. The opposite of ambiguity is not clarity it is adolescence – faux clarity. The antidote for faux clarity is maturity – a richer and cumulative life experience and a more subtle understanding of life and the other.

Multiplication

As life’s experience advances, what was binary becomes increasingly complex. The two (clarity and ambiguity) become four (clarity, non-clarity, ambiguity, non-ambiguity) in an attempt to maintain the model. Then the four become eight (clarity, non-clarity, precision, indolence, ambiguity, non-ambiguity, adolescence, maturity) plus one (bilateral symmetry) which makes nine. The sensibility of it all becomes strained and the interloper looks increasingly dog-eared.

In a moment that is often forever life changing, the linear becomes something else altogether. The strip of paper is twisted half a turn and attached back to itself. A Möbius strip is formed dissolving the once over-arching principal of bilateral-symmetry into meaninglessness.[1] Once freed from this straightjacket, the eight dissolve into fluidity – unpaired and with two new organizing principles (asymmetric relationalism and multi-dimensional intentionality) washing over them.

Opposites Detract

The world of human experience is neither bilateral nor symmetrical. To insist that it is indicates a preference for faux experience – that the world wears a mask and hides its true face. But, more insidiously, it constitutes a determined preference for the artificial over authentic experience. Synthetic judgments a priori that are useful within most professional disciplines are corrosive of the living human experience. They may make a better chemist or mechanic but they will proscribe experiencing the richness and diversity that life has to offer.

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[1] A model of a Möbius strip can be constructed by joining the ends of a strip of paper with a single half-twist. A line drawn starting from the seam down the middle will meet back at the seam but at the “other side”. If continued the line will meet the starting point and will be double the length of the original strip of paper. This single contiguous curve demonstrates that the Möbius strip has only one boundary.

If the strip is cut along the above line, instead of getting two separate strips, it becomes one long strip with two full twists in it, which is not a Möbius strip. This happens because the original strip only has one edge which is twice as long as the original strip of paper. Cutting creates a second independent edge, half of which was on each side of the knife or scissors. Cutting this new, longer, strip down the middle creates two strips wound around each other.

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