Thor's Day: Cultivate your negative capability

Richard Foreman in 2009

From "Negative Capability Is a Profound Therapy"

By Richard Foreman

[Published in John Brockman's 2012 book, This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking, p. 225]

Mistakes, errors, false starts—accept them all. The basis of creativity.

John Keats (1795-1821)

    My reference point (as a playwright, not a scientist) was Keats's notion of negative capability (from his letters). Being able to exist with lucidity and calm amid uncertainty, mystery, and doubt, without "irritable [and always premature] reaching after fact and reason."
    This toolkit notion of negative capability is a profound therapy for all manner of ills—intellectual, psychological, spiritual, and political. I reflect it (amplify it) with Emerson's notion that "Art [any intellectual activity?] is [best thought of as but] the path of the creator to his work."
    Bumpy, twisting roads. (New York City is about to repave my cobblestoned street with smooth asphalt. Evil bureaucrats and tunnel-visioned "scientists"—fast cars and more tacky upscale stores in SoHo.)

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Commentary

By Morris Dean

Ralph Waldo Emerson
(1803-1882)

I didn't take Brockman's book to Southport last week (I took Sams Teach Yourself Wikipedia in 10 Minutes, by Michael Miller), but I read Foreman's short essay the day after I returned home, when I was reflecting on my experience of writing the anniversary sestina and already working on another sestina inspired by that one. Foreman's extension of Keats's concept, by way of Emerson, to the creative act of writing seemed a perfectly apt description from my own experience. The "lucidity and calm" I experience in my sense of confidence that something good (or good enough) will emerge from the activity nullifies the realistic uncertainty and doubt about what might emerge. The mystery will reveal itself.
    Or not. Sometimes the activity seems to reach a dead end and I simply accept that and set the work aside, usually not to return to it. The path will have become overgrown with bramble and vanished. Sometimes the "conditions" that Emerson goes on to describe in the paragraph Foreman quotes dry up or fail to materialize. Emerson had written in his essay "The Poet" in 1844 that the artist finds or puts him or herself

in certain conditions, as, the painter and sculptor before some impressive human figures; the orator, into the assembly of the people; and the others, in such scenes as each has found exciting to his intellect; and each presently feels the new desire. He hears a voice, he sees a beckoning. Then he is apprised, with wonder, what herds of daemons hem him in. He can no more rest; he says, with the old painter, “By God, it is in me, and must go forth of me.” He pursues a beauty, half seen, which flies before him. The poet pours out verses in every solitude. Most of the things he says are conventional, no doubt; but by and by he says something which is original and beautiful. That charms him. He would say nothing else but such things. In our way of talking, we say, “That is yours, this is mine;” but the poet knows well that it is not his; that it is as strange and beautiful to him as to you; he would fain hear the like eloquence at length. Once having tasted this immortal ichor, he cannot have enough of it, and, as an admirable creative power exists in these intellections, it is of the last importance that these things get spoken. What a little of all we know is said! What drops of all the sea of our science are baled up! and by what accident it is that these are exposed, when so many secrets sleep in nature! Hence the necessity of speech and song; hence these throbs and heart-beatings in the orator, at the door of the assembly, to the end, namely, that thought may be ejaculated as Logos, or Word.

    But usually the conditions do materialize, and I credit my own negative capability for plowing ahead and finding the power. The capability has been stored up and rehearsed many times in my life.

When I started to write this, I was thinking of negative capability only in the context of creating something written. My experience during an hour before dawn one day this week made me realize that it has a larger application—to one's very day. Each new day we live is a work in progress—what it will be for us is largely our creation: what we will do, how we will feel, what we will create....
    The experience I had during that dark, vulnerable hour this week was enduring a torrent of negative thoughts and feelings, the awareness that my life is almost over, the reality that millions of acts of violence occur every day, animals suffer and are slaughtered, the fact that my body was stiff and hurting...and other thoughts, feelings, and images so disagreeable I have forgotten them. At the time, in their presence, I was awash in "uncertainty and doubt," and the only way through them was to have faith that I could nevertheless get out of bed and eventually find my familiar "lucidity and calm." I could think that maybe this "mistaken, error-filled, false start" of my day could somehow lead to creativity.

Discover your own negative capability...and the possibility of building it through repeated rehearsals. Engaging it can be your daily spiritual act, as my engagements are my spiritual acts.
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Copyright © 2013 by Morris Dean

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