Kalman's Approach to Life

    Maira Kalman, through her use of words and images together plays with many seemingly paradoxical notions in her book, The Principles of Uncertainty. On some pages, Kalman creates images which are unrelated to the words she writes on that page. For example, she writes, “The realization that we are ALL (you, me) going to die and the attending disbelief isn’t that the central premise of everything? It stops me DEAD in my tracks a dozen times a day. Do you think I remain frozen? No. I spring into action. I find meaningful distraction” (Kalman 26). Paired with this writing on the page, Kalman has a seemingly random painting of a blue bunny with socks and shoes on frowning. These deep words paired with this lighthearted, random painting of a bunny is incongruous and humorous because it is unexpected. Her use of words and images here directly corresponds with Kant’s Incongruity Theory of Humor. 

 

    Most paintings in the book are directly related to the text, but when the reader comes upon one like this Kalman is asking him/her to stop and rethink. She is asking the reader to rethink the “rational” connection there “should be” between words and images because she is arguing there is not any. Not that the relation between words and images is meaningless, but the meaning is in the uncertainty. Kalman is calling on the reader to make their own meaning of her words and images. Yet, with her words she is pointing out the ultimate irony that people dwell on the one certainty which is death, the thing humans fear the most. We fear both uncertainty and certainty. But there is no reason why someone should be dwelling on certainties. That is why she is saying she does not dwell on it, and the reader should not either. Humans dwell on both the certain, such as death and the uncertain, and she is showing how there is beauty in both. 

 

    Kalman uses the certain things in life to slow down time, which is why her seemingly strange obsession with objects, such as her sponge collections and content in viewing sinks, hairdos, hats make sense. She uses certainties to ground herself in life. And she finds humor in the uncertainties in life because that is how she is able to process them instead of being frustrated by them. She also is constantly reminding herself of big picture and scary ideas, for example she says, “The sun will explode five billion years from now. Set your watches. That really changes everything. Doesn’t it?” (216). She jumps between the small and large certainties of life to show that the uncertainty really is not that scary. It’s actually quite funny and ironic, while we can’t control the uncertainties of life, we can control our response to them.