Indeterminacy

Reader, take a look at this picture:

What's happening in this picture?

Of course, a multitude of things are happening in this picture, and it could serve as an illustration for any number of things.

The focus of the picture could be the church in the centre. Or it could be the pedestrianized street. Or it could simply be a picture of Dublin. Or a picture of Ireland. Or it could be a picture of a generic city street.

Or the focus of the picture could be the many hanging signs and banners.

Or it could be the fashions the women in the centre ground are wearing.

Or it could be the phonebooth to the right.

Or, if someone was looking at this photo fifty years from now, it might be a picture of life in Dublin in the 2010's-- or whenever it was taken.

Ironically (and the irony just struck me now), I'm using it as a photograph to illustrate the idea of indeterminacy.

I think about indeterminacy a lot, and I feel like writing about it.

Everything in the world, and most of all the world itself, can be viewed from an indefinite amount of perspectives. It's quite dizzying when you think about it.

I can remember when this indeterminacy caused me a lot of anguish. It made me feel, not just dizzy, but rather nauseous.

I spent a lot of time in my early twenties wandering the streets of Dublin, feeling that everything was constantly receding from me, that nothing in life connected with anything else, that nobody was ever quite on the same wavelength.

Here's an example from literature. I spent a lot of time thinking about the canon of poetry. I wanted there to be a canon of English poetry and I wanted it to be a fairly orderly thing.

It upset me when people wanted to open the canon of poetry to include pop music lyrics, purple prose, poetry by novelists and dramatists whose poetry really didn't merit reading in its own right, and so on.

I can remember this attitude lingered even into my early years in UCD, when I was indeed still in my early twenties. The poems of Ernest Hemingway were borrowed quite frequently, and this irritated me. Hemingway was no poet. It galled me to think of all the volumes by proper poets being neglected in favour of this non-poet.

Another thing that bothered me-- and I remember writing about it in a now-lost diary-- was the disconnect between the public sector and the private sector. It upset me that the public sector existed for the public good and the private sector existed for private profit; that one was obliged only to think of the public good and the other, as long as it followed the laws, was not expected to think of the public good at all. I felt a sense of disorientation in going from one to the other, in the lack of continuity between the two.

I still sometimes feel this sense of unpleasant disorientation, regularly enough. But these days I mostly feel delight in the "indeterminacy" of life, the "drunkenness of things being various".