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In Praise of Uncertainty
Joel Savishinsky

If a poem meant only one thing,
how poor would language be.
If a look flashed just one meaning,
how dull would be the course
of our relationships. Attribute
clarity to the oracles, and
there would be no need
to consult the priestess.
If the message of the text
were beyond dispute, the silence
of professors would be total.
And what if the phrasing
of a sonata were prescribed:
would there be any point in
going to yet another performance,
to hearing it played again?

Assume the morals of the tales
were no longer singular, would
we still be tempted to find
the best one and suppress the rest?
We would then be at risk of losing
the implications of the implicit.
Opening a book, I trust there is
more than one way to read it.
A volume I go through slowly
at fifty is not the same one
I sucked up with speed at
age fifteen. There is more than
one way to speak an actor’s line,
make a move, conjure a vision,
ask a question. Under the shelter
of the gate at Rashomon, do we trust
the samurai, the bandit, the monk,
or the seer? Why choose?
Pace Hamlet—that is the question.

And why look again…and again?
Monet does not need to tell us
the reasons he made, from exactly
the same viewing point, over thirty
distinct portraits of Rouen Cathedral:
the canvases explain themselves.
Listen carefully with your eye, and
see if it can guess the season of the work,
the time of day, the light of its creation.
When Edward Hicks, self-taught, hungry
itinerant Quaker-artist-preacher went
in search of his inner light, he created
at least sixty-two versions of his vision
of The Peaceable Kingdom, inviting all
his viewers to consider whether the
Kingdom of the lion, the lamb, and
the little child lay in their hearts,
or the canvas, or in the ongoing
dialogue of these figures with Isaiah.

Those of us who listen, look, speak,
who paint, read, write, dance, sculpt,
and critique—who marvel at
the created and creative worlds—may
sometimes be at a loss for words, yet
rarely lack for something to say or
disagree on. The self-anointed patrons
of certainty among us may simply have failed
to study the terms of their social contract
upon entering the fields of invention. Despite
their residence in a self-righteous century,
their misplaced confidence, dead-stop
judgments, and conceit of assurance can
all be argued with, even when it seems that
the hardest confession for them to make,
after “I don’t know,” is “I’m not sure.”

—
Joel Savishinsky is an anthropologist and gerontologist. HIs books include The Trail of the Hare: Environment and Stress in an Sub-Artic Community and Breaking the Watch: The Meanings of Retirement in America, which won the Gerontological Society’s Kalish Award for Innovative Publishing. His poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Atlanta Review, Beyond Words, Cirque, Metafore, The New York Times, Poetry Quarterly, SLANT, Windfall, and Xanadu. He lives in Seattle, helping to raise five grandchildren, and he identifies as a recovering academic and unrepentant activist.

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