Negative Capability

Trying to be more like Keats

Late Saturday night, in an older building in North Beach, the bass was bumping. Lasers shot out from around the stage as different DJs took the stage to twist knobs and buttons unknown and somehow shape a crowd like clay into a pulsing animal. “My friends are so beautiful,” was all I could really think — the ones standing at the back nodding to music they wouldn’t typically listen to, the ones on stage spinning, the ones dancing and screaming in the crowd. 

I was exhausted that night, brought down by a combination of relentless rain, many days of poor sleep, an overbooked Saturday. Yet, even with the tiredness, I was committed to showing up. It was one friend’s birthday and another would be playing as well. Until they went on, I stood quietly, watching the crowd and tracing the lights across the ceiling with my eyes, observing the way the shadows coated the crowd, fog creeping in the spaces between shoulders. I couldn’t stop staring at the drink menu, shown on TVs. It had a stock photo of a random bartender and was labeled “Name of Bar Here.”

I didn’t really have it in me to talk to people or meet new faces, but I knew what I could do. No matter what, I could wear a t-shirt with my friend’s face on it and I could dance and scream to the music, and even if the earth started to shake or the sun suddenly extinguished, I would dance to the music they played. I would jump around, wave my arms, pump my fists. I would be yelling “let’s go!” as long as I could. I would be a part of the crowd, moving rhythmically and moving together.

---

I’ve been thinking about John Keats’s idea of “negative capability,” the ability of someone to comfortably live in ambiguity and not knowing without a desire for an explanation based on fact or reason, and letting the power of beauty “obliterate” every other form of consideration. To achieve this sort of capability, one had to open themself to the sublimity of the world, which he described in a letter to JH Reynolds:

“Now it is more noble to sit like Jove than to fly like Mercury—let us not therefore go hurrying about and collecting honey, bee-like buzzing here and there impatiently from a knowledge of what is to be aimed at; but let us open our leaves like a flower and be passive and receptive—budding patiently under the eye of Apollo and taking hints from every noble insect that favours us with a visit.”

John Keats studied to be a surgeon for many years before leaving it all behind to be a poet full-time. After spending years seeking to understand the body, cutting up corpses and seeing what we were made of, he still arrived at the conclusion that there was something beyond what he was capable of understanding through study. He may have understood blood vessels and organs, but such study never uncovered the soul or what lets a body be a being, what lets a body sing into the dimming of day into night.

In my work life, I’m a designer, which looks like moving rectangles around a digital canvas but actually focuses on trying to make it easier for people to accomplish their tasks in software. It’s about softening the edges of a complicated system and creating a more legible interaction out of what is mostly incomprehensible: complex combinations of software functions that can accomplish things beyond human capability. It’s no wonder that I’ve always thought about writing in terms of comprehensibility and legibility. What’s the point of writing if it can’t be read? What’s the point of words rendered illegibly?

In a conversation about writing once, I was exploring how my essays provided a combination of memoir, style/poetry, and some sort of argument. I was questioning whether my rhetorical skills were good enough to create solid arguments, wondering whether someone would be able to poke holes through anything I was saying with a sharp enough blade of reason or logic; my writing would be rendered useless. 

But what if every essay didn’t need to be met with a battle with reason? What if there was virtue, as Keats suggests, in not exploring ideas to the end of reason, instead attempting to reflect beauty instead? Wasn’t this what visual artists started to do as they let verisimilitude slide away in favor of impressionism and many other artistic movements? Couldn’t I simply attempt to linger in the beauty in my own work as well?

And what if negative capability extended beyond simply an artistic context?

---

In the past, I spent countless hours trying to understand why people in my life acted in the way that they did. I thought that reason could guide me to see people more clearly, allow me to feel more connected with them and generate closer relationships. Yet, one of the best things I did for my own happiness was to stop reading too much into what people said or did, or didn’t say or didn’t do. 

I knew that this made sense, but I didn’t really start to do it until Heather Havrilevsky explained this idea in her advice column Ask Polly before responding to someone who decries their inability to maintain close friendships by describing someone who didn’t struggle with the issue:

That guy gushing about his best man doesn’t go on trips with his friends and notice when two friends go out for coffee without him. He don’t take notes on how other people are failing him or backing away. He doesn’t take people’s temperature constantly to see if there’s enough love there. He doesn’t slowly and meticulously document other people’s was inside his mind. He shows up for fun and maybe he even asks good questions and listens to the answers. Maybe he’s full enough to let the world in, to let people in, and to love them consistently, and that makes him a model of HOW TO BE.

Nearly all of my friends are older than me, nearly all of my friends have known each other longer than they’ve known me. Sometimes I feel like I watch them from the sidelines, but other times I’m just another member of the group. This may have bothered me once, but sometimes the sky is blue and sometimes the sky is pink, and I love the sky in both cases, I love it in every case. 

I wonder what I would lose if I sought to put a reason to everything that occurs, whether the light of these people I love would dim when seen through the lens of some type of analysis. Would this scrutiny just only close me off from the world more? Would I lose my will to dance my heart out for these people?

I wish to let reason’s hold on me loosen. At times it can help, but when it comes to seeing the resplendence of the world — in the people that I love, in the miracles of life, in the smallness and the bigness that makes up each of my days, let me be receptive to the glory of the world. Let the shine from the world be enough.

---

We must do what we can to push back against the genocide in Gaza. Consider calling your US representatives to support de-escalation and a ceasefire, donating to Care for Gaza, a grassroots organization delivering food to Palestinians, or buying e-SIMs to keep folks connected to their families.

---

💧 Drops of the Week 💧

• PLAYLIST - MERENGUE BAILABLE CLÁSICO: 80’s 90’s - SOLO HITS : Lo Mejor del Merengue - had a sudden urge to listen to merengue this week

• POEM - “The Tiny Economies of Restraint” by Jennifer Robertson - I like not knowing your coldness / or the length of your shadow

---