The Ambiguity of it All

As stated as a last comment for my previous post (the fact that I couldn't ever study a subject such as Indian effigy mounds for my career due to an indefinite lack of definitive answers), made me think back to the actual, unknown meaning of the effigy mounds to the people that built them. Religious value? Cultural value? Artistic value? Though there are assumptions that are far more likely than others, the possibilities for such questions to our past are ridiculious in quantity.

This attempt at interpretation for the effigy mounds reminded me of other things that I've studied. With some solid help from my friend Wiki wiki on the definition of ambiguous, it states: "...where a word, term, notation, sign, symbol, phrase, sentence, or any other form used for communication, is called ambiguous if it can be interpreted in more than one way." I don't know if anybody else caught that, but that is a lot of possibilities that are just up in the air for interpretation. I've studied works of music, and in attempts to analyze it can drive me crazy if a composer had some intricate metaphor described by the notes or if they just thought that particular pattern sounded beautiful. This sense of "up-for-interpretation" was obviously with us in class every day for Freshmen Studies and sparked an argument or two regarding oponions. Take Kafka, perfect example: he himself stated that he found his story on The Transformation to be quite humorous - a lot of me thought he wrote it because it was entertaining. What's this deep focus on motif's about?

The ambiguity of our cultural areas of study include music, art, architecture, literature, and of course, religion. It is intensely frusturating me as to if we are overanalyzing something intended to be simple or underanalyzing something with complex meaning. This is so true of religion, especially of those of the past, in which there is no other source for explanation other than it being "up-for-interpretation", which makes me think a few more arguments will be had over the course of the class.

Undoubtedly, it is with the aspect of ambiguity that our very intellectual world exists, and I am an active particpant.


That doesn't mean its not frusturating.