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]
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