self-recognition

begging does something
to a man — so many kinds
of desperation
in this world and none of them
mine, none of them ever mine

Hardly a week goes by in London without my having to encounter someone named John Wetherell begging on the street. I can’t give him money every time. Financially I could (so long as I gave small amounts). But I owe it to capitalism to play by the rules. Appropriate hardheartedness must be worn. Funny how I talk sometimes about grieving the person I used to be. But when I encounter him on the street, each time I somehow manage to avoid recognising myself. Even if I do give him money, emotionally I ignore this reminder of the person I used to be. Last night I dreamed I was approached in Hampstead by Howard Jacobson begging for spare change. I was just at that moment doing a google search on my iPhone for the line of poetry ‘Go catch a falling star, get with child a mandrake root’ which in the dream I felt convinced was John Keats (in fact it’s John Donne). In my previous life of homelessness in the early nineties, it was only very rarely indeed that I begged for money. Often for food though, or for the first line of a poem. I hated selling the Big Issue almost as much as begging for money. And always fell back upon rummaging in black bin liners outside restaurants for leftovers.

negative capability

there’s something absurd
in how the unknown never
rests just as it is —
but will pose like some fashion
model, for any label

As someone once said (Voltaire, according to Wikiquote): Si Dieu n’existait pas, il faudrait l’inventer. If God didn’t exist, it would be necessary to invent him. God and schizophrenia have a lot in common. I believe in them both. But not really at the literal level. We invented them, to cover a multitude of sins. Whatever the thing itself is, that they refer to, it’s so far away from our understanding, we might as well at least concentrate instead on respecting the dignity of those who believe in them literally. These thoughts triggered by dreaming that I was gazing out of the window thinking of a pair of sisters, convinced that the mysteries of sisterhood are so closed to me (as a man), it’s equivalent to ‘the unconscious’. Another label of course. And in fact the label I felt impatient with, in order to write the poem. God and schizophrenia were afterthoughts. ‘Negative capability’ fits perfectly as a title. It really is every bit as brilliant a formulation as its currency within the world of psychotherapy implies. Keats was quite a lad.

[Since writing the above, I’ve checked the Wikipedia entry on ‘negative capability’ which is truly appalling. It’s unnecessarily complex and overworked, over-thought, over-reliant on ‘fact and reason’ in exactly the way referred to by Keats in the following extract from his letters: I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, upon various subjects; several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it 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 – 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]