Living with ambivalence

Ashfaq Ahmad’s Heera Mann and Shakespeare’s King Lear teach us to embrace life's contradictions and ambivalence.

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During the heydays of PTV, Ashfaq Ahmad's cryptic and symbolic plays were a real cerebral treat for the viewers. One such play parturient with philosophy is Heera Mann, in which Saba Hameed plays the role of a widowed housemaid, Taj Bibi. She admires and decries her dead husband simultaneously.

She agrees to work anywhere but only on one condition that she needs ten days' leave in a particular ominous month because she is bitten by a snake regularly annually. She falls sick after every bite, yet she waits for the snake anxiously.

At her new stint of job, she has to stay at her owners' house during that ominous month due to an emergency. The snake appears there too and bites her. The owners, young educated lads, instead of sending for the doctor, search the snake and kill it.

When she comes to the senses, she wails on seeing the dead snake. In her keens, she addresses the snake by her dead husband's name. A few moments later, she dies, leaving the boys stunned. One of the boys says: "She has died not by a snake bite, rather because of the snake's death." The snake and his bite stand for ambivalence - the simultaneous existence of opposite feelings. When this ambivalence ends, life ends.

Instead of being perplexed at the existence of conflicting feelings, we will have to adapt ourselves to them to get along well in life. Basically, instead of looking for predominance, either of good or bad traits in others, we should appreciate the simultaneous existence of both good and bad characteristics in man.

Our impatience for ambivalent attitudes, whether in ourselves or others, is our own frailty. Though capitalistic interests have made inroads in human relationships, humans must not be treated as pawns in one's own game, rather be respected as ends in and of themselves. When we talk to people and think about what we want from them, we are angling for self-interest. This avarice of self-interest makes us behave ambivalently towards people. Our behaviour fluctuates between two ambivalent extremes proportionate to self-interest.

The atomistic view of humans magnifies the weaker side of others, and we reject them as flotsam and jetsam. Want of proper allowance for human weakness negates otherness in human beings. It ends up on misanthropy, which man is not made for.

Ambivalent thoughts and feelings can make it hard to decide what to do, so indecision can be a corollary of cognitive ambivalence. People like to stay neutral to avoid the crossroads of ambivalence.

In King Lear, Shakespeare uses the Fool to remind us that wisdom often comes wrapped in contradictions. As Lear spirals into madness, struggling with his own ambivalent feelings about power, family and love, the Fool keeps pointing out uncomfortable truths in roundabout ways. The Fool's wisdom is all about accepting that life isn't straightforward, that it's full of paradoxes.

In a way, the Fool is the ultimate symbol of ambivalence. He shows us that sometimes the wisest thing we can do is to accept life's contradictions rather than trying to make sense of them all. By embracing ambivalence, we can find a more realistic, grounded way of moving through the world: one that doesn't force us to choose between extremes.

Ambivalence isn't always about external choices. Sometimes, it's about reconciling different parts of ourselves. Take Dr. Jekyll from Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Dr. Jekyll is a revered scientist who has a dark side he can't ignore, so he creates a way to split himself into two people: the respectable Dr. Jekyll and the twisted Mr. Hyde.

By bifurcating these parts of himself, he ultimately ruins them both. This story shows that living with ambivalence means learning to accept the oxymoronic whole of who we are, not trying to split ourselves into Manichaean 'good' and 'bad' sides.

The fanatic abhorrence of the downside of human attitude ends up on losing meaning in life. Acceptance of human darkness lends life the meaning that transforms despair into hope. The poetic neurologist Oliver Sacks says: "I envy those who are able to find meanings - above all, ultimate meanings - from cultural and religious structures. And, in this sense, to 'believe' and 'belong'."