Mushing & Poetry: Negative Capability

Often my thinking falls back on old paths, desire lines roughing the circuitry of thought, like as not imbued with the auratic glow of corresponding sensation. The room for Frege to have expounded on the limitless possibility in the “sense” of the thing shadowing its “referent” comes to mind, but that is neither here nor there. I was thinking, as I do so often, of this from Keats: 

“I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, on various subjects; several things dovetailed in my mind, & at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason—Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half knowledge. This pursued through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.”

& I was thinking about it specifically in the context of adventure or discovery or quest. This errant year of ours trying to wear the ill-shaped clothes of a more normal life has been instructive for a number of reasons. Life in America seems to crave ease at the expense of everything I’ve come to value, & the thing is, ease draws you in, beckons you, sits you down & gives you a beer & permits you to think that it’s quite alright, just this once, to fade from the flame of your heart. But then the next night comes, & the next, & you are rudderless, comfortably adrift in an ocean that knows no bounds, & behind you your birth & before you your death, & all the water calm & silvered & placid. 

Look, life doesn’t have any inherent meaning in any case, I don’t think, & if this particular breed of living that I find myself doing is of any merit to you, embrace it, clutch it tight, & pull from it every bliss you can. There is no scale of relative worth, nothing to judge, no particular merit to anything we do, unless it is worthy & meritorious to our own thinking. I have no delusions about that. 

I do have a conviction though that if we are fortunate enough to discover the thrumming filament at the heart of our life, then we ought to pursue its realization with all of our available energies. But again, I said we, & I meant I. & what I miss pursuing are accomplishments that sever me from the contexts of comfort & replace them with the contingencies of awe. It is always wonder, what I want, & the kind that cannot tell its own tale, nor materialize on a page, nor fall into melody. It is encounter, laid bare & without translation. That is what I miss, & that is what I found time & again hundreds of miles down trail, camped out under the auroras, a dog’s breath pluming with mine & feathering into shapeless air. 

That, to me, is the texture of the Penetralium of Mystery. I notice, tellingly, that Keats takes issue with contentment with half-knowledge without an endorsement for seeking more or relenting all at once. That strikes me as particularly curious. I will get some day to why I think his Ode to Autumn is his strongest poem, which puts it well in the running for me for best anyone has written. In the meantime, I will point out that his attentions in that particular ode enact & make manifest all of the work his prior odes achieved. I think of the poem’s vision as resembling the shape of an hourglass-- the expansive reduces ultimately to the particulars of natural observation in hopes of finding something particularly true of the agent; instead, through that aperture of witness & world, agency collapses, the sky expands again over the stubble-fields, & there is again only the report of the ordinary dailiness in universality. The blurring reduction to nothing &, thereby, everything. 

That particular trajectory of examination is one close & kindred to me. On larger expeditions, like the Quest, there is an inherent expectation of personal revelation. I looked for it around every bend, in every checkpoint, in the glaring wash of northern stars. I looked for it in the fine fur of the dogs, the ice fog over the valleys. In the howling gales on the summit & in the crevices of black water spilling inches away on the thinning ice of the Yukon. But where I looked, how I looked, I never saw my self in flicker, steeping in sudden shifts. I saw instead that bright, broad world, that country opening out & ever out. & that limitlessness foregrounded by my own insignificance was the point. I was fulcrum, aperture. I was a pebble the world ran over, when I went looking for the world. 

I embrace the notion of Negative Capability with the understanding that it is in fact a precondition for being, a sort of erstwhile preface read over our starting out. We would rearrange the words & hang them on particulars & call them delimited, call them known, but that is a feeble architecture indeed. However ornate & intricate our house of cards, the wind still blows, the snow still falls, & the river winds its way over its own desire line, carved out in deep time, an effort beyond all reckoning. The Yukon used to flow in the opposite direction. This is true. We do not travel the same time, but in traveling over its ice, you feel the glowing maw of ages untold.

I like that Keats tries to hold up the banner of Beauty before conceding the obliteration of all consideration. I would look back from the runners at the tailing lines they left in the snow time to time. The snow would fall around me still. The wind would blow. Deep time would shrug imperceptibly, & I would feel the grace in its oblivions.