peggy d.

negative capability

this is something i’ve been vaguely thinking about for a very long time, without realizing it was a real thing… actually a combination of two things i’ve been thinking but didn’t know how to put into words or really understand at all, especially in combination. those two things are: the idea that poetry/metaphor/philosophy are things that already exist in the world and just have to be found and consolidated, and that artmaking or writing (at least the way i go about it) is more collection than creation AND that it’s not necessary to analyze or come to conclusions about moments/ideas/feelings, that it’s okay to simply explore them and celebrate the feeling of being suspended in something you don’t understand. those things are hard to explain, so i hope that made sense…. 

anyway, negative capability (from the wikipedia page):

John Keats used the term negative capability to describe the artist as one who is receptive to the world and its natural phenomena, and to reject those who tried to formulate theories or categorize knowledge. In a letter to his brothers on December 21, 1817 he employed negative capability to criticize Coleridge, who he thought sought knowledge over beauty:

I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, on various subjects; several things dovetailed in my mind, & at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & 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.^[1]

The origin of the term is unknown, but some scholars have hypothesized that Keats was influenced in his studies of medicine and chemistry, and that it refers to the negative pole of an electric current which is passive and receptive. In the same way that the negative pole receives the current from the positive pole, the poet receives impulses from a world that is full of mystery and doubt, which cannot be explained but which the poet can translate into art.^[2]

this is a huge discovery. as in, this is what my art capstone is going to be about.