'A State of Vagary, Doubt and Indecision'

There’s a tidy part of me that wants things resolved, whether a lawsuit or a differential equation. No sloppy inconsistencies, no denouements hanging by a thread. I used to love IRS Form 1040EZ: subtract one number from another, sign your name and wait for the refund. I had a logic professor who told us, “Don’t confuse philosophy with real life.” Adam Zagajewski concludes his poem “An Ode to Plurality” with these words: “a poem grows / on contradiction but it can’t cover it.” That may be true for poems, but humans are infinitely more complicated. Some of us can thrive on the tension; others are paralyzed or broken. 

A reader asks for my thoughts on Keats’ notion of “negativity capability.” I’ve often thought his renowned letter to his brothers on December 21, 1817 expresses less a literary theory than a reflection on his sensibility and perhaps ours:

 

“[I]t struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously — I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

 

The passage is customarily read as embracing poetic openness and rejecting closed systems of thought. The writer, in a sense, is all potential, at least while writing. He projects himself into the sensibilities of others. His imagination is sympathetic. He is not theory-driven. Not for him the “egotistic sublime.”

 

Keats suggests we keep our minds elastic and limber. Don’t assume the first thought or the twenty-seventh is best, though it may be. In his 1978 essay “Spare Time,” V.S. Pritchett refers in passing to negative capability. For a writer, any thought or experience, any book read, may come in handy, even those we’ve forgotten. “A writer,” says Pritchett, “must have the capacity to become passive and lost in doubt in order to be open to new suggestions. He must alternate between clocking in and clocking out.” In his final paragraph, Pritchett writes:

 

“I find that reading Russian novelists, mainly of the nineteenth century, is good for my ‘negative capability’ – a state, incidentally, that means a state of vagary, doubt and indecision as well as self-annulment.”

 

I think of Louise MacNeice’s “Snow,” its reminder that “World is crazier and more of it than we think, / Incorrigibly plural.” The poem suggests we accept “The drunkenness of things being various.”