Senses and Lilies

I heard a fascinating piece of gossip the other day. I heard that Helen Vendler doesn’t believe good poems are ambiguous!
I call it gossip because I heard it secondhand from someone who had heard her say this at some talk or other. At any rate, it led to lively speculations about what separated good old High-Modernist Ambiguity from bad Postmodernist Indeterminacy.* And it dovetailed with this Monet show I was mulling over, which in turn spoke to issues of ambiguity that I’ve been in love with since I first read a poem I couldn’t understand.
For Monet’s Waterlilies series crystallizes the question haunting all art: What is real?

That is, what is reflection? What if the painting can’t tell you what the difference is between a water lily and its reflection in a still blue pond? No matter, the art-viewing public seems to say: it’s easy on the eye. Similarly, I always found this Charles North poem easy on the ear:

TYPING AND TYPING IN THE WANDERING COUNTRYSIDE
including the pond bitten down to its cuticles,
whatever you were doing pursuant to flatness
it doesn’t mean we exist as writing.
What is flat is on trial for its flatness.
Whatever you were doing pursuant to flatness
is a particular: it is its own witness.
While air billows and closes around the petal of evening
(whatever you were doing pursuant to flatness)
it doesn’t mean we exist as writing
—fringed in charcoal and umber fields, loosestrife utterly mismanaged.

Obviously, the world is rife with poems of many shades of ambiguity (of which I am highly tolerant), but I chose this one because the ambiguity doesn’t lie in the language, which is precise and clear and hews to the rules of “good prose;” the ambiguity lies in what North is describing. Is he describing a mental landscape, or a real one? Is that loosestrife in his ken or is it a trope (looseleaf; life’s strife)? Is the pond in a landscape or a “landscape” (on a wall)? I like poems that play with description (I like description in general). At any rate, this is an ambiguous poem, and it is good. It is about the confusion of art and life, and it jests about that confusion. It is cousin to Monet’s waterlilies.
About the time I was contemplating these things, I was reading the novel Ravel by Jean Echenoz:

Technique Number 2: While spending hours tossing and turning in bed, seek the best position, the ideal accommodation of the organism called Ravel to the piece of furniture called Ravel’s bed, the most even breathing, the perfect placement of the head upon the pillow, that state in which the body becomes confused with then fused with its couch, a fusion capable of opening one of the doors of sleep.

This droll passage on the artist’s insomnia also speaks to the confusion of states—here, sleeper and couch, animate with inanimate. While we wouldn’t want to say that successful art is a kind of robotic somnambulism, what Monet, North, and Echenoz’s Ravel seem to agree on is that the liminal experiences of the senses are dear to art. Therefore we’re interested in the place where the senses become synaesthetic—where waking and sleeping are confused, or seeing and touching, or life and art, because we also want to believe there is a place where animate and inanimate meet, and life and death, and therefore that there is no real non-animate, no real death; that in fact what we know is provisional, and ambiguity provides the escape-hatch to an unbearable realism that also may be quite false. We don’t know. We’ll pretend not to know. As long as it’s beautiful.
Echnenoz: “It’s just that one can’t do everything at once, right?—always the same old story: it’s impossible to fall asleep while keeping a sharp eye on sleep.”
And so we soften the eye (I), like an Impressionist.