The best thing about ambiguity

lsproule@thereview.ca
I hope you dance. I remember the year that was the theme song selected by the Pleasant Corners Public School graduating class. As I watched the young people leave the gymnasium I considered that their entire lives lay ahead with quite possibly not much time at all to dance. 
We all know that dance has many meanings: Dance like nobody’s watching. Dance till you drop. Dancing in the dark. I’m dancing as fast as I can. You’re trying to dance around a sensitive issue.
I always knew that poetry could sing and that song lyrics were poetry, but the book by Daniel Levitin called: “The World in Six Songs” puts it all in perspective. I cannot sum up the entire book here, because I just started reading it last night, but I did read the best-ever explanation of the musicality of words and why some poetry works and some doesn’t. Why do some lyrics stick with us and some have no meaning?
One of the key points is ambiguity and of course, that is all about the meaning. Another way of explaining that notion is: it means what you think it does. That is art: a connection that happens when you read a poem or hear a phrase in a song or look at a painting and it contains a meaning that you feel is directed at you and your life.
I hope you dance. To me, that says, live life.
If I could give you one piece of advice, an older person once said to me, “Get out there and dance while you can. I wish I had danced more.” I knew exactly what he meant.
And I bet those words speak to you, too.
I got my mind in a tangle last night thinking about the zumba class I have recently started attending. With a dynamic professional dancer leading us through a one-hour class that seems to pass in five minutes, I imagined her in the middle of a war zone, with speakers aimed at both sides as she started a routine and imagined the soldiers jumping up from their guns-aimed prone positions to shimmy to “I’m sexy and I know it.”
I played it in my office just now and everyone in this building started to laugh.
The influence of music, art and the magic of words is something we could all use. And yet, even as I pictured music transforming workplaces, schools, public places and institutions, I knew that it would be a fine dance (there is that word again) between ensuring that music was used for positive improvements and the possible corporate corruption of music to control and influence people for less-than-uplifting reasons.
Music is most certainly already being used to influence us in commercials and in other ways.
But perhaps it is up to us to fine-tune our senses and be on the alert for such manipulation.
That manipulation can come not just when we are relaxed and are vulnerable to on-air advertising but can come in the form of the printed word when we least expect it. Sometimes things are not clear and sometimes even we write things and inadvertently leave out important information or realize too late that we forgot to ask an important question.
We resolve to try harder for there are some things that should nailed down and not be open to interpretation.
When ambiguity is in the realm of art and individual interpretation, that is one thing. But meaningless political rhetoric is quite another tiresome thing -- entirely. Sometimes, there is more truth and more sentiment in a poem, a song or a painting than in a prime minister’s speech, these days.
Maybe that sounds like something an old codger would say. Well, maybe that’s what I am.
It doesn’t really matter. I can still dance. And so, I hope, can you.