On Ambivalence: To Be, but to Be How?

For years, I associated ambivalence with indecision or spinelessness, a kind of character weakness. So did Sylvia Plath, who wrote “suspense/on the quicksands of ambivalence/is our life’s whole nemesis.” Ambivalence can be quicksand, slowly swallowing us whole. But some ambivalence, as lyric poetry taught me, is essential to a life. The poetic line, open at both ends, afloat on the page, instructs us in how to live uncertainty—to live a line 
(a life) so open that it can break. Meaning in a poem is usually a matter of continual fluctuation or contradictory attitudes: “I hate, and I love” (Catullus). The lyric poem, exquisitely sensitive to shades of language and feeling, shows us, line by line, that we self-revise; of all the literary arts, only verse is so versatile. John Ashbery dramatizes this reality in “Street Musicians”:

One died, and the soul was wrenched out 
Of the other in life, who, walking the streets 
Wrapped in an identity like a coat, sees on and on.

Maybe, Ashbery seems to suggest, ambivalence can help us see the multivalent forces we encounter as we move through time and space alongside others. (Alongside: another ambivalent word, evocative of our simultaneous togetherness and solitude.) Ashbery’s stanza ends on a deadpan note: “So they grew to hate and forget each other.” No poet better captures the total instability of the lyric self.

Ambivalence is, like so much poetry, paratactic. Consider Frost’s renowned sentence, broken across three lines: 

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

“The Road Not Taken” is often read as a tidy parable of the importance of going your own way. But the poem’s line breaks, in their relation to one another, enact ambivalence about these two roads. For every road taken, and every life lived, another path goes unwalked. These final rousing lines enact a kind of ambivalent epistemic stutter (“and I—/I”) that often goes unremarked. But that line break embodies the poem’s core, with its proposal that two roads, two lives, might lie side by side and depart utterly from one another (or not at all)—and yet we will never be able to say anything more specific about that unled existence than that our choice has “made all the difference.” That line is trickily ambivalent: is the difference good or bad? 

I admire other people’s decisiveness. At times I turn on my own ambivalence and try to self-improve it out of me. At other times, I feel protective of my ambivalence and how it compels me to weigh the options, to inhabit the contradictions of my own existence; the only way to live in a ravaged world might be to interrogate, continually, the very nature of one’s being. Our quest, echoing Shakespeare: to be, but to be how? Not like that; like this, a mirror effaced at the wind’s hand, as Plath put it. We change; we crystallize in time only to come to the line break, where meaning unspools and reconstitutes itself. 

Two experiences have made this fact clear to me: first, becoming inexplicably ill fifteen years ago, and then searching relentlessly but vainly for answers from doctors. (I did eventually get a diagnosis, and with it both treatment and some clarity—but in that time, it was hard to know how to think about the future without ambivalence.) And secondly, motherhood, a state of simultaneous and sometimes opposing wants. I have no ambivalence about my children, but I am ambivalent about what parenthood did to my experience of time: I long to spend all my hours with the children and 
without them, simultaneously, forever. I safeguard this feeling because it encompasses my love for them and the pleasure of preserving an important part of myself, the adult who wants to read, make art, and continue to play rather than pack lunches and plan that week’s carpool. Perhaps my experience of ambivalence was always leading here, to the charged reality of being an intertwined double self: a mother and a writer, at once sick and well.

Ambivalence is at the heart of Keats’s idea that great artists demonstrate what he calls “negative capability,” a term he uses in a letter to his brother while trying to describe what made Shakespeare distinctive, a letter I turned to when I was at my sickest:

I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason—

For Keats, who had witnessed much loss, it is failed artists who are 
“incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge.” Great artists allow for uncertainty and ambivalence—an idea that helped me adjust to living in a body that would always be in a state of uncertainty, a body about which I felt, well, ambivalent. Shakespeare was  Shakespeare, Keats argues, because of the way his plays staged, and enacted, a variety of irreconcilable points of view. This, rather than poetry that has “a palpable design upon us,” is what true art is.

Ambivalence has its quicksand; we know that intuitively, hence our ambivalence about ambivalence. But ambivalence also speaks for the many selves we could be, if only. It is the voice of both our lives and our unled lives. Consider Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Carrion Comfort,” a poem that evokes spiritual despair even as it consoles in its accuracy and musicality:

Not, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;
Not untwist—slack they may be—these last strands of man
In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can;
Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.

Hopkins answers Shakespeare: the quest is to “not choose not to be.” Ambivalence and assertion live alongside each other in that heap of negation. I read this poem for the first time in my early thirties; it buzzed me like an electric shock and made me feel—well, not ambivalent. The poem would have none of its power had Hopkins written simply that one can hope “to choose to be.” Instead, standing in the quicksand of its nots, the poem powerfully enacts nihilistic despair even as it evokes the power of hope, two simultaneous and contradictory feelings. 

“To be or not to be, that is the question,” Shakespeare wrote in what may be the most famous, and famously ambivalent, line of iambic pentameter. What could be more important to know, what quicksand more existential? It is the work of lyric poetry to dredge insight from such murk and answer chaos with approximate grace.