“Then what are we fighting for?”

There has been a furor over recent cuts in humanities education at the university level in America. Most of the counter-arguments for keeping the humanities alive play out the “transferable skills” angle. My wife, a piano teacher, knows these arguments all too well–that learning to play an instrument accelerates childhood brain development, and that music actually teaches certain kinds of mathematical reasoning (such as fractions).  Likewise, with literature, English departments often underscore the importance of “soft skills” like communication.

But in the end, this line of thinking only lends strength to the argument to, for example, replace courses in Shakespeare with more practical courses in business and technical writing. It is also not difficult to imagine games designed by psychologists to more effectively deliver specific, developmental results than learning to playing Bach partitas ever will. Clearly, the argument that the humanities can deliver practical, bottom-line results is problematic. Why, then, are they so critical in difficult times?

When I transferred out of the computer engineering department at a top university during the height of the dot-com era to study poetry instead, many thought I was crazy. Several years later, after the death of our infant son, poetry became the only language that made sense. It kept me sane when nothing seemed sane anymore. I credit my being here to write this now in large part to all the Shakespeare, Dante, and Milton I read back then–which opened the door to Seamus Heaney, Robert Hass, and Li-Young Lee. I found a means to embrace some of the greatest paradoxes of living, and transcend human suffering, through their words.

It is the centuries-old tradition of humanities education that passes down the words of Socrates to us, that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” Humanities examine what it means to be alive, and human. And now more than ever, after market crashes, environmental disasters, and seemingly endless and intractable wars, we must ask ourselves: do we really have an excess of humanity? Is our ability to embrace the complexity of living with dignity and compassion at such a surplus nowadays that it should be the first thing to go?

Any text can teach you to read, and any topic can teach you to write. Only literature can teach you why to read, and why to write. Science can measure how well you hear and see. But visual and performing arts teach us why these senses matter. Do not support the humanities because they will give you the means to an easier life. Support them because they will quite simply make life worth living, no matter how difficult it gets.

Do not sign your child up for piano lessons because you want to give them an edge over other kids. Do it because they may wake up one day somewhere in suburbia, surrounded by all the symbols of material prosperity, with a deep and gnawing hollowness that negates every grade or promotion they ever won. And if, in that moment, a bar of Bach or a line from Shakespeare returns to them, they might just have a reason to go on being human, and alive.

“To fully understand poetry, we must first be fluent with its meter, rhyme and figures of speech, then ask two questions: 1) How artfully has the objective of the poem been rendered and 2) How important is that objective? Question one rates the poem’s perfection; question two rates its importance. And once these questions have been answered, determining the poem’s greatness becomes a relatively simple matter.”

A recent comment by a fellow poet on my post about negative capability got me thinking about the dance between the known and the unknown in the creative act. Alejandro Escude points out that some poets seem to “have something to say and say it” rather than adopting a “neither here nor there approach.” He mentions poets in either camp that share certain stylistic qualities with their comrades in the same camp. And while I agree that William Stafford writes a very different kind of poetry than Sharon Olds, I still believe that it is actually negative capability that makes both of them first-rate poets.

In an early scene of the film version of Dead Poets Society, Robin Williams encourages his students to rip out the introduction to their set-text poetry anthology written by the fictitious J. Evans Pritchard, PhD. Dr. Pritchard’s essay is a striking, if hyperbolic, example of how literary criticism can stray so far from the creative act as to reduce the experience of a poem to an exercise in mathematical graphs. The repeated use of the word “objective” in relation to poetry–its “importance,” and how “artfully” it is “rendered”–makes me laugh every time.

Yet poets do set out with, if not a concrete objective, often a burning image or idée fixe.  I think of this as the gnostic aspect of writing–the light splashed on the wall of the cave that entices us forward. It also includes everything along the way that the artist brings by way of knowledge, and the cognitive-intellectual elements that manifest in the poem.

By way of analogy with theology, gnosis also means “a special knowledge of spiritual mysteries.” (OED) I contrast this with nescience, which literally means lack of knowledge but, again in an ontological vein, can also mean, “agnostic; asserting man’s necessary ignorance of the ultimate constitution of the universe.” (OED) If we take “the universe” and its “spiritual mysteries” to be represented in miniature by the poem itself, then the dance between gnosis and nescience can be thought of as the act of creation itself.

It is nescience, though, above all, that allows this little universe to find its shape. As much as a poem can sometimes seem to write itself, through a white-hot moment of inspiration, still the act of writing is a process of unfolding–the poem revealing itself, line by self-aware line, first to the author, then to the world. As Robert Frost is often quoted as saying, “no surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.” Surprise can only happen when one is willing to not know.

And so, far from just milquetoast dithering, negative capability is what actually makes poetry poetry–letting in the strange, unforeseen resonances, the “precious nonsense” that makes even the most mundane or straightforward subject transcend its existence in words. For all the sense of rightness, fierceness, and concrete meaning a poem can convey, in the messy act of its making, I believe authors of every stripe trip lightly between “special knowledge” and “necessary ignorance.”

“I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart’s affections, and the truth of imagination.”

In my life, my writing, and my appreciation of literature, I strive for awareness and understanding. I have done so in my life through the disciplines of theology and philosophy, in my writing through the tutelage of other writers, and in my appreciation of literature through the study of literary criticism. I have engaged each discipline, formally and informally, throughout my life. And so, I am myself one common denominator among these fields.

That said, I also recognize a dynamic interrelationship: my life influences my writing, and my writing influences my appreciation of the written word; conversely, my appreciation of the written word influences my writing, and my writing influences my life. With this interconnection in mind, I am also beginning to discover, and attempt to articulate, an important principle held in common among the three.

It stems from a phrase coined by an eighteenth-century English poet named John Keats, who said:

…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.

Keats was referring to the act of writing. I have found that my own ability to remain in the uncomfortable company of “uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts” while writing poems puts me in contact with the creative power of the unconscious mind. Poets have been practicing this art of creative contact, and explaining the process, in various ways for quite some time.

A recent modern example is the American poet William Stafford, who said:

…receptive, careless of failure, I spin out things on the page. And a wonderful freedom comes. If something occurs to me, it is all right to accept it. It has one justification: it occurs to me. No one else can guide me. I must follow my own weak, wandering, diffident impulses.

He goes on, in the brief essay “A Way of Writing” from his collection of essays Writing the Australian Crawl, to describe in simple, colloquial terms, his own cultivation of Negative Capability in the writing process.

I discovered, too, that resisting “irritable reaching after fact & reason” also opened up a deeper understanding of literature to me. On the first day of my junior seminar in poetry with Stephen Booth, we read William Blake’s “The Tiger”. Professor Booth asked if there were any questions. I raised my hand timidly, and said that while the lines, “When the stars threw down their spears,/ And watered heaven with their tears” were my favorite part of the poem, I did not feel that I fully understood their literal meaning.

He proceeded, rather than chastening me for my lack of knowledge, to expand upon the significance of my statement–that one can find profound aesthetic enjoyment in something one does not totally literally understand. He then asked me if I understood why I did not understand. When I said no, he proceeded to demonstrate his theory of “precious nonsense” using these lines–showing that often what attract us aesthetically to a literary work are the ways in which its elements simultaneously do and do not make sense.

The highest aim of a literary critic, he pointed out, is to simply explain why a poem affects us as it does. In this way he taught me to become a participant-observer in the process of reading, basing my criticism on experience rather than simply layering on abstract theories. There is a particular quality of attention, that requires both abiding and actively observing the “uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts” within oneself as prompted by the piece, that I have found essential to my relationship to literature on both sides of the pen.

But it is applying the principles of “negative capability” and embracing the “precious nonsense” of everyday living that has proved my greatest challenge. And here the stakes are not a term-paper grade or poetry prize, but my very happiness. In a world fraught with contradiction, my mind wants to compartmentalize its elements, to avoid the cognitive dissonance that comes from, for example, perceiving so-called “good” people doing so-called “bad” things (and the other way around). Yet it is by cultivating an ability to abide uncertainty, to admit, as I did to Prof. Booth, that I so often simply do not know–that I have been able to free myself, moment-to-moment, from the intellectual anguish of trying to parse the world, like a chess board, into squares of black and white.

This fundamental capability–to embrace seeming paradox, cultivate subtlety, and dwell more comfortably in the vast unknown–seems to me one of the greatest gifts art can bestow. Because for me art makes life liveable, I have often referred to poetry as a survival skill. Now I am beginning to understand that it is a transferable skill in that it cultivates negative capability. It has helped me to come to terms with, and even synthesize, seemingly disparate elements in business, relationships, and life. Perhaps most counter-intuitively, this power begins in the humble act of embracing that I do not know.

Predictable Success outlines the life cycle of any organization, and especially businesses, just as surely as a developmental psychologist can tell you, in broad terms, that you are going to be going through certain stages in your individual growth. And as just much as it can help to be told that you are not alone in the tumult of adolescence (or really any stage of life), this book is likewise a balm.

But Les goes further in explaining how businesses at any stage of growth can progress to a state where success becomes predictable. This remarkable set of practices strikes me as equally applicable to the development of an artist. Even as a business learns to create necessary structure, in such a way that it still fosters collaboration and innovation, so, too, does any artist dance between discipline and creative abandon in learning to create and sustain a life steeped in art.

One of the key aspects Les mentioned in our workshop is a critical “fourth element” viewpoint, able to take the viewpoints of visionaries, doers, and procedural types and synthesize them into something greater. This is apparently going to be detailed in his soon-to-be-much-anticipated second book. Les is brimming with good ideas. But the importance of the synthesis he described on Friday has resonated with me deeply since, as both an executive and a poet.

A few weeks prior, a colleague passed around an article in CLO Magazine entitled “The Power of Paradox.” It lays out, rather eloquently, the importance of embracing an “and” mentality, instead of assuming a business must settle for this or that. That is, it points out how healthy businesses eschew polarization, and strive for synthesis. I couldn’t help myself. I had to reply to my work colleagues as a poet, to point out that we poets also strive to embrace paradox in making art–a quality John Keats termed “negative capability” nearly two centuries ago.

Poetry is a medium capable of tackling the complex and contradictory nature of human consciousness. A business–and really any group–is composed of complex beings all striving under a purpose that they (hopefully, and by degrees) all hold in common. Therefore it makes sense that those organizations prone to excel are those most able to embrace the complex nature of achieving sustainable success–marrying intuition with great data; risk-taking with process; a supportive, fun culture with a solid bottom line.

As I am finding my way in art, in business, in life, these moments where the world seems to conspire around me to push through a revelation such as this are precious indeed. Many thanks to Les and my sharp-as-tacks colleagues for helping me to glimpse the bigger game that lies ahead.

I heard a poet say to me, ‘Oh, I hate sincerity.’ And I thought, oh, what do you like? Insincerity? I don’t get it.

I didn’t get it either. Perhaps partly because the title is so iconoclastic, Glück begins by defining terms, equating her use of the word sincerity with “telling the truth.”

Clearly, the truth is not always interesting. Nor can a poet force a reader to like a poem simply because “it really happened.” This seems to be the single greatest mistake of poets engaged with the personal lyric in our time.

Glück points out that a greater kind of “truth” can be had through a suspension of didactic conclusion, through exercising negative capability. She points out:

Keats’s theory of negative capability is an articulation of a habit of mind more commonly ascribed to the scientist, in whose thought the absence of bias is actively cultivated. It is the absence of bias that convinces, that encourages confidence, the premise being that certain materials arranged in certain ways will always yield the same result. Which is to say, something inherent in the combination has been perceived.

This is another angle on my own understanding that great poetry, in some sense, “executes” in the psyche much like software code runs in the context of computer hardware.

Interesting, also, is that Glück uses two sonnets to illustrate this capability, one from Milton, the other from Keats. This would seem to confirm Phillis Levin’s instinct in including one of Glück’s poems in her collection of Sonnets, and my own recognition of the sonnet’s influence on Glück’s ability to turn a line.

Above all, it was illuminating to read Glück espousing the greater “truth” that can be had through casting off any dogmatic adherence to fact or grasping after homily-like conclusion. What I sensed in a book like The Wild Iris was this kind of greater truth played out through the personae of plants. In a sense, Glück conceivably gives us, in some ways, a more accurate and intimate access to her inner life through this device. Though it is not in any way a factual autobiography, and though the speaker can never be said to necessarily equate to the author, this book of persona poems feels like a kind of “psychic autobiography.”

Glück confirms this as a possibility later in the collection when she writes about Eliot. Clearly, the character Prufrock is not the author Eliot–but Glück points out that Prufrock embodies many of Eliot’s concerns and that many of his later poems take the same kind of tone or voice as Prufrock. It is in this sense that exploring through negative capability helps a poet to arrive in truly unique and interesting territory–the questions that remain in the reader’s mind as perpetually more interesting than any statement of fact or any stroke, as it were, of “sincerity.”

Here are some excerpts arranged by theme:

Solitude & Introspection

… ultimately, and precisely in the deepest and most important matters, we are unspeakably alone.

What is necessary, after all, is only this: solitude, vast inner solitude. To walk inside yourself and meet no one for hours–that is what you must be able to attain.

There is only one thing you should do. Go into yourself. … Then, as if no one had ever tried before, try to say what you see and feel and love and lose. … If your everyday life seems poor, don’t blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches; because for the creator there is not poverty and no poor, indifferent place. … And if out of this turning-within, out of this immersion in your own world, poems come, then you will not think of asking anyone whether they are good or not. … A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity.

… one can only wish that you are trustingly and patiently letting the magnificent solitude work upon you, this solitude which can no longer be erased from your life; which, in everything that is in store for you to experience and to do, will act as an anonymous influence, continuously and gently decisive, rather as the blood of our ancestors incessantly moves in us and combines with our own to form the unique, unrepeatable being that we are at every turning of our life.

Negative Capability

We must accept our reality as vastly as we possibly can; everything, even the unprecedented, must be possible within it. This is in the end the only kind of courage that is required of us: the courage to face the strangest, most unusual, most inexplicable experiences that can meet us. … only someone who is ready for everything, who doesn’t exclude any experience, even the most incomprehensible, will live the relationship with another person as something alive and will himself sound the depths of his own being.

Don’t observe yourself too closely. Don’t be too quick to draw conclusions from what happens to you; simply let it happen. Otherwise it will be too easy for you to look with blame (that is: morally) at your past …

… have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

Irony and Doubt

Irony: Don’t let yourself be controlled by it, especially during uncreative moments. … Search into the depths of Things: there, irony never descends … For under the influence of serious Things it will either fall away from you (if it is something accidental), or else (if it is really innate and belongs to you) it will grow strong, and become a serious tool and take its place among the instruments which you can form your art with.

And your doubt can become a good quality if you train it. It must become knowing, it must become criticism. Ask it, whenever it wants to spoil something for you, why something is ugly, demand proofs from it, test it, and you will find it perhaps bewildered and embarrassed, perhaps also protesting. But don’t give in, insist on arguments, and act in this way, attentive and persistent, every single time, and the day will come when instead of being a destroyer, it will become one of your best workers–perhaps the most intelligent of all the ones that are building your life.

Literary Criticism

Nothing touches a work of art so little as words of criticism : they always result in more or less fortunate misunderstandings. Things aren’t all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered, and more unsayable than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life.

Read as little as possible of literary criticism–such things are either partisan opinions, which have become petrified and meaningless, hardened and empty of life, or else they are just clever word-games, in which one view wins today, and tomorrow the opposite view. Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism. Only love can touch and hold them and be fair to them.–Always trust yourself and your own feeling, as opposed to argumentations, discussions, or introductions of that sort … Allow your judgments their own silent, undisturbed development, which, like all progress, must come from deep within and cannot be forced or hastened.

Livelihood & Professions

Art too is just a way of living, and however one lives, one can, without knowing, prepare for it; in everything real one is closer to it, more its neighbor, than in the unreal half-artistic professions, which, while they pretend to be close to art, in practice deny and attack the existence of all art–as, for example, all of journalism does and almost all criticism and three quarters of what is called (and wants to be called) literature. I am glad, in a word, that you have overcome the danger of landing in one of those professions, and are solitary and courageous, somewhere in a rugged reality.

Patience

I learn it every day of my life, learn it with pain I am grateful for: patience is everything!

To let each impression and each embryo of a feeling come to completion, entirely in itself, in the dark, in the unsayable, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one’s own understanding, and with deep humility and patience to wait for the hour when a new clarity is born: this alone is what it means to live as an artist: in understanding as in creating.

… we must trust in what is difficult; everything alive trusts in it, everything in Nature grows and defends itself any way it can and is spontaneously itself, tries to be itself at all costs and against all opposition. … It is also good to love: because love is difficult.

… that you may find in yourself enough patience to endure and enough simplicity to have faith; that you may gain more and more confidence in what is difficult and in your solitude among other people. And as for the rest, let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.

Sadness & Transformation

You have had many sadnesses, large ones, which passed. And you say that even this passing was difficult and upsetting for you. But please, ask yourself whether these large sadnesses haven’t rather gone right through you. Perhaps many things inside you have been transformed; perhaps somewhere, deep inside your being, you have undergone important changes while you were sad. The only sadnesses that are dangerous and unhealthy are the ones that we carry around in public in order to drown them out with the noise; like diseases that are treated superficially and foolishly, they just withdraw and after a short interval break out again all the more terribly; and gather inside us and are life, are life that is unlived, rejected, lost, life that we can die of. If only it were possible for us to see farther than our knowledge reaches, and even a little beyond the outworks of our presentiment, perhaps we would bear our sadnesses with greater trust than we have in our joys. For they are the moments when something new has entered us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy embarrassment, everything in us withdraws, a silence arises, and the new experience, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it all and says nothing.

Faith

We have no reason to harbor any mistrust against our world, for it is not against us. If it has terrors, they are our terrors; if it has abysses, these abysses belong to us; if there are dangers, we must try to love them. … Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.

Related Posts:

• What’s It All About, Ralph?

• 32 Points From Bell On Poetry

“…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”

What struck me most about both The City In Which I Love You and Rose was Lee’s tenderness. It is not softness per se or looking only on the gentler side of things–far from it, his poetry encompasses, contains and holds moments of profound suffering and injustice sharply in its lens. Yet there is a quality of seeking to understand the human side of everything this poetry looks upon. This is a compelling kind of tenderness–not the tidy, maudlin tenderness of Hallmark greeting cards, but a profound ability to look lovingly and longingly at the deeper themes of life, which are necessarily complex and unresolved.

I find satisfaction in Lee’s poetry through its sensitive details. He seems to let me in unflinchingly to his most intimate moments. Yet despite such vulnerability, he never steers the experience toward any overt manipulation of what I should feel or think–the dignity of that burden is left solely with me. By focusing on detail in a spare and careful way, and resisting any urge to tie things up too neatly, Lee’s poems ring with an incredible veracity, and leave me feeling as though I have experienced, briefly, another’s life.

For example, this is part of the final section of “My Sleeping Loved Ones” from Rose:

More than the cheekbones I inherited from my mother,
more than my left hand, the spear,
or my right hand, the hammer, more
than humility, like my father’s heavy hand
on the back of my neck,
it is my love
for the sleeping ones
which recommends me.

Here multiple complex layers of experience are compressed and held together by this unifying maternal instinct of tenderness toward sleeping loved ones. Lee describes the hammer and spear of his hands, a motif of Tae Kwon Do and a nod to the warlike elements of his ancestry. Then the hand motif shifts to this incredible moment of describing humility as his father’s heavy hand on the back of his neck–a perfect symbol of a kind of enforced humility from a father who we know, from other poems, suffered so greatly as to overshadow Lee’s experience oppressively. So mother, father, culture–and loved ones present and past–collide in a few short lines of plainspoken verse.

Such deceptively simple lines rarely come from calculation. Instead, Lee’s work has a feeling of deep contemplation, and whether these poems were written in one sitting or many, it seems clear he has been meditating upon these themes as specifically related to his experience for quite some time. This is the kind of poetry you just can’t fake. I am sure there are flaws aplenty, and that my eyes simply do not see them–because they are clouded with respect for the unbridled sincerity, capacious negative capability and compelling, forceful tenderness of these poems.