Taoweblog

the true nature of the world

Something in us is drawn toward what we are ashamed of being drawn toward.

Ambiguity comes from the Latin ambiguus, an adjective derived from the verb ambigere, meaning to wander about, to waver, to dispute. That word was a combination of an older verb, agere, meaning to drive, to lead, to act, to do, and the prepositional ambi, which added a severalness to the driving direction. When the word got Englished, that confusion of direction became the essence of doubt, the flip-flopping of cosmic possibility. Ambiguity is about running, but which way? The doubt clings not only to the thinker but also to the object thought about. Is it clown or is it painted monster? Such doubt threatens to tear us apart. Certainty is what we like. Guarantees are what we need. Give us lead-pipe cinches and clear maps drawn in the light of heaven.

The problem is that living in the world is highly productive of ambiguity, so we run into danger as much as we run out of it. And what we dread also fills us with exhilaration, and vice versa. But even with our great need for a comforting stability, the entertainments we devise have constantly shaken uns with unthinkable possibilities. We often deliberately induce ambiguity on TV, in the movies, in the press, in stories and in pictures. We unbalance ourselves with horror. But because the object of our fears is on stage and in public, we can distance ourselves as a safe audience. We can dismiss our collective and private doubts even while experiencing them, feel a revolution of perception without running the risk of change.

The ancient Greeks (by which we commonly mean the men who wrote the codicils and regulated the religion for which the temples were built) agreed that the true nature of the world was order, harmony, and logic. Antiorder was unthinkable. Unfortunately, there were several inexhaustible sources of it. The Persians, for one. Women, for another. Mountains, for a third. All three seemed beyond mere logic and offered challenges to control. Mountains, especially, were the opposites of temples. No „reasonable“ – that is, right-thinking – man went there, unless he was making a sacrifice of himself or of someone else.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=395J4-evOVA