On Negative Capability

John Keats (1817) paraphrased by Stephen Alexander (2024)

 

 

I. 

 

In a letter written to his brothers George and Thomas, in December 1817 [1], the English Romantic poet Keats briefly mentions a concept of Negative Capability - an idea by which he privileges uncertainty, indecision, and the refusal to rush to judgement. 

 

The great writer, he says, is one who is happy to have his doubts and to consider the complexity of a question from multiple perspectives, rather than quickly make up his mind. One retains one's freedom and affirms one's liberalism - and one avoids the mark of Cain - by refusing to know for sure.

 

For to know decisively and with precision is to kill; it is not simply to exercise choice between ideas, but to cut all other possibilities dead in order to arrive at a single fixed position.

 

 

II. 

 

Obviously, Keats being Keats, for him negative capability was esentially tied to the pursuit of beauty, even if that resulted from - or resulted in - ambiguity and irrationalism. But the idea has since been appropriated and developed by other writers, including the Zen philosopher Byung-Chul Han, for example, who has written:  

"Negative potentiality is the ability to do nothing. The latter is, however, not identical with the inability to do something. It is not a negation of positive potential but a potential of its own. It enables spirit to engage in still, contemplative lingering, that is, deep attentiveness." [2]

 

As sympathetic to all this as I am, I would still like to stop procrastinating and finish writing that fucking Sex Pistols essay ...! [3]

 

 

Notes

 

[1] This letter - with explanatory notes - can be found on the George Mason University website: click here.

 

[2] Byung Chul-Han, Non-things, trans. Daniel Steuer (Polity Press, 2022), p. 82. 

 

[3] See the post entitled 'Procrastination' (14 June 2024): click here. This post is written in response to the comment left by Simon Solomon.  

Continuous as the Stars That Shine ...

Osterglocken (SA/2023)

 

"When all at once I saw a crowd / A host, of golden daffodils ..." 

 

I. 

 

Often known by its Latin name - Narcissus [1] - the daffodil was as highly regarded in the ancient world as it is within the modern era: Greek philosopher and floraphile Theophrastus, for example, often mentioned them in his botanical writings; as did the Roman author and naturalist Pliny the Elder. 

 

However, it was left to the 18th-century Swedish botanist Linnaeus to formally identify them as a genus in his Species Plantarum (1753), at which time there were only six known species, whereas now there are over fifty (although the exact number remains disputed) [2].   

 

And it was left to the British Romantic poets to really establish the cultural and symbolic importance of the narcissus in the modern imagination. For with the exception of the rose and the lily, no flower blossoms more within the pages of English literature than the daffodil; Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats all wrote of the eternal joy that these flowers can bring.  

 

 

II. 

 

But surely everyone - not just William Wordsworth and the Welsh - loves to see daffodils flowering in the spring, don't they? 

 

At any rate, I love them: I love their bright golden colour and the manner in which a trumpet-shaped corona is surrounded by a six-pointed star formed by the tepals; and I love the fact they come up every year, regardless of external conditions, nodding in defiant affirmation of life.    

But my love of daffoldils is also a class thing; the common daffodil growing by the roadside and at the bottom of the garden has none of the ornamental superiority or cultivated pretension of the tulip (a bulb that is in my mind forever associated with the nouveaux riches in 17th-century Europe). 

 

 

III.

 

When I was a child - and neighbours still had front gardens, not driveways - I used to love stealing daffodils every Easter to give to my mother and I was touched that MLG should remember this and placed a single yellow flower in my mother's coffin prior to her funeral; she would have liked that [3]. 

 

And, of course, even without the personal context, such a gesture would have been entirely appropriate. For whilst daffodils often symbolise rebirth and resurrection, so too are they closely associated with death ...

 

The ancient Egyptians, for example, used to make decorative use of narcissi in their tombs, whilst the ancient Greeks considered these flowers sacred to both Persephone and Hades. Indeed, the former was said to be picking daffodils when she was abducted by the latter and taken to the Underworld.

 

The fact is, like many beautiful-looking things, daffodils are highly toxic, containing as they do the alkaloid poison lycorine - mostly in the bulb, but also in the stem and leaves - and if you ingest enough lycorine then death will follow a series of very unpleasant symptoms including acute abdominal pains, vomiting, diarrhea, trembling, convulsions and paralysis.  

 

So do make sure, dear reader, that you know your onions and never confuse these with daffodil bulbs ... 

    

 

Notes

 

[1] According to Greek myth, the beautiful-looking young man of this name - Νάρκισσος - rejected the romantic advances of others, preferring instead to gaze fixedly at his own reflection in a pool of water. After his death, it is said that a flower sprouted in the spot at which he spent his life sitting. 

      Interestingly, although the exact origin of the name is unknown, it is often linked etymologically to the Greek term from which we derive the English word narcotic (Narcissus was essentially intoxicated by his own beauty). 

      As for the word daffodil, this seems to be a corruption of asphodel, a flowering bulb to which the former is often compared.

 

[2] In 2006, the Royal Horticultural Society's International Daffodil Register and Classified List identified 87 species. But according to the World Checklist of Selected Plant Families produced in 2014, there are only 52 species (along with at least 60 hybrids). Whatever the correct figure might be, the fact is that many wild species have already become extinct and many others are increasingly under threat due to over-collection and the destruction of natural habitats.

 

[3] When my mother died last month, aged 96, she had been living with dementia for almost a decade and it might be noted in relation to our topic here that daffodils produce a number of alkaloids that have been used in traditional forms of healing and one of which - gelantamine - is exploited in the production of a modern medicinal drug used to treat cognitive decline in those with Alzheimer's.     

 

 

This post is for Maria.

 

 

Ben Lerner: The Hatred of Poetry (A Review)

Ben Lerner is a very clever man: a poet, a novelist, and a professor of English. And so it's no real surprise to discover he's written a very clever little book on the hatred of poetry, which, he argues, is essential to the practice of writing poetry; a practice that is also destined to failure, no matter how successful certain poems might appear. For whilst it aspires to be an art of transcendence, poetry is ultimately as mortal and as mundane as everything else. Thus, as Lerner points out, the poet is always a tragic figure.

Discovering this, however, is a bitter disappointment to many practitioners and readers and it makes them rather resentful. But hate, as Lawrence says, is more often than not only love on the recoil. And so as much as Lerner claims to dislike poetry and to read it, like Marianne Moore, with a perfect contempt, he remains of course devoted to it and his book is a defence of poetry (as a space of authenticity), not an assault upon it, nor another tedious and premature announcement of its death. 

Unlike those who feel in some manner betrayed by poetry's failure to deliver on its promise, Lerner seems to rejoice in the impossibility of writing a genuinely successful (or successfully genuine) poem, i.e. a virtual as opposed to an actual verse. He has - in part at least - reconciled himself to the fact that "There is no genuine poetry; there is only, after all, and at best, a place for it." [18]

And Lerner remains determined to defend this place; not merely as an individual writer struggling with his own unique demon, but as a member of a wider human community, despite the latter often being no more than a privileged white male political fantasy - the myth of universality - as he exposes and concedes.  

Following his introductory remarks, Lerner provides fresh and insightful readings of two great poets, Keats and Emily Dickinson, who, although very different writers, nevertheless "make a place for the genuine by producing a negative image of the ideal Poem we cannot write ... [and] express their contempt for merely actual poems by developing techniques for virtualizing their own compositions ..." [51-2]

More controversially perhaps, he also makes a case for reconsidering the work of William McGonagall - thought by many to be the world's worst poet. Lerner doesn't wish to challenge this critical consensus, but, more interestingly, argue that it's the abysmal nature of his verse that gives it value:

"The horrible and the great ... have more in common than the mediocre ... or even pretty good, because they rage against the merely actual ... in order to approach ... the imaginary work that could reconcile the finite and the infinite, the individual and the communal, which can make a new world out of the linguistic materials of this one." [51-2]

Lerner then discusses Whitman. And, to his credit, he does so with the same relaxed brilliance as he discussed the other poets mentioned, concluding that Walt's great utopian project has never been - and can never be - realised.

Whitman thought he could personally embody all differences and all contradictions, could speak for one and all. But he couldn't. And Lerner's discussion of the black female poet Claudia Rankine, whose work "reflects many of the contradictory political demands made of poetry while providing a contemporary example of how a poet might strategically explore the limits of the actual" [87], explicitly tells us why this is so.

Poems, Lerner concludes, "can fulfil any number of ambitions ... can actually be funny, or lovely, or offer solace, or courage, or inspiration to certain audiences at certain times; they can play a role in constituting a community" [101-02], no matter how restricted in scale and provisional the latter might be.

But they can't rise above time, express irreducible individuality, achieve universality, defeat the more powerful language games of society, or bring about a revaluation of all values. Thus we need, if you like, to curb our enthusiasm for poetry; if we stopped expecting too much of it and persisting in our idealism, then we may possibly learn how to stop hating it too.

Indeed, if we strive in a Nietzschean fashion to consummate our hatred and perfect our contempt, then, who knows, "it might come to resemble love" [114].  

Ben Lerner, The Hatred of Poetry, (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2016). Page numbers given in the text refer to this edition.

This post is gifted to my friend Simon Solomon as a slightly premature birthday present. 

And No Birds Sing

This could be heaven ...

Having moved back to my childhood home, it's forgivable to be feeling a little nostalgic for a time and a place - and even a people - now vanished. For although Harold Hill remains Harold Hill, it's not the Harold Hill I remember with such fondness. It's changed. And not for the better.

To be honest, it was never a pretty place. A large, post-War estate on the far fringes of Greater London, Harold Hill was developed on 850 acres of formerly private land to house ex-servicemen like my father and those cockneys (as my mother always called them rather disparagingly) looking to leave behind the bombed-out ruins of the East End and start a new suburban life in leafy Essex. 

Construction of over seven-and-a-half thousand new homes began in 1948 and was completed ten years later. The development, however, was fairly low density; mostly two or three bedroom houses built of brick with lots of open spaces, including woodland, parks, greens and, perhaps most crucially, gardens at both front and back that the original residents not only delighted in but prided themselves upon.  

Needless to say, most of the playing fields and wild areas have now been built on. But it's the loss of the front gardens which has, I think, dealt a mortal blow to any sense of community and reduced the estate to stony silence.

It's not simply a case of no birds singing - a prospect which has long troubled poets from John Keats to John Lydon - but also of no insects buzzing, no flowers blooming, no frogs spawning, no hedgehogs hiding, no lawnmowers gently humming, no neighbours chatting, and no children laughing ...

The idyllic world above has been buried alive under concrete and gravel in order that the nation's 35 million vehicles can have space to park.

Beneath the crazy-paving stones lies the past. And future hope lies with the weeds that defiantly grow between the cracks ...

Her Rich Attire Creeps Rustling to Her Knees

Image from phantomseduction.tumblr.com

Manufacturers of extremely beautiful and limited edition handmade silk knickers Strumpet and Pink make use of an intriguing tagline or company slogan in their advertising: Her rich attire creeps rustling to her knees. 

For those who don't know, this is taken from a famous verse by Keats entitled The Eve of St. Agnes, written in 1819 and published the following year. Considered by many to be amongst his finest poems, it gripped the literary and pornographic imagination of the 19th century telling the tale as it does of a pair of illicit lovers, Madeline and Porphyro.

Keats based his poem on the popular belief that a young girl could summon a future husband to her if she performed certain magical rites on the eve of the feast day of Christian martyr Agnes of Rome, patron saint of virgins. These rites include going to bed without supper, stripping naked and then lying flat on the bed with eyes wide shut facing the heavens, hands kept firmly under the pillow at all times. 

No matter what she experiences, Madeline is instructed by a wise woman to remain silent and supine; only then is the man she yearns for guaranteed to appear - in dream form if not actually in the flesh - and he would come with kindness, kisses and good things to eat for his bride-to-be. 

Originally, Keats played up the erotic aspect of this tale, but his publishers obliged him to tone it down fearing they would be at the centre of a public scandal. Even so, there remain plenty of controversial and kinky aspects: for having secretly stolen into Madeline's bedroom on this very night, Porphyro hides in the closet from where he spies on the girl as she says her prayers, lets down her hair, takes off her jewellery, and then removes her clothes: 

"Anon his heart revives: her vespers done, / Of all its wreathed pearls her hair she frees; / Unclasps her warmed jewels one by one; / Loosens her fragrant boddice; by degrees / Her rich attire creeps rustling to her knees."

Porphyro continues to play the peeping tom and to perv on Madeline as she lays on the bed in a semi-conscious state, gently trembling with the cold and anticipation. She has never looked more beautiful to him than at this moment, naked in the moonlight; he is entranced by her and the sound of her breathing. He also continues to be fetishistically fascinated by her discarded clothes and gazes long upon her empty dress. 

Finally, believing Madeline to be fast asleep at last, Porphyro creeps out from his hiding place and approaches the bed. His plan is for them to enjoy a midnight feast together of rare exotic delicacies that he has brought along with him, including candied fruit, quince jelly, and spiced syrup. Unfortunately however, he has trouble waking her and when Madeline does rouse she mistakenly thinks him to be part of a dream and pulls Porphyro onto the bed with her - the poem thus taking a sudden diversion into the problematic area of sexsomnia. 

Only after they have consummated their relationship does Madeline fully wake-up and, although feeling vulnerable and violated, she tells Porphyro that she cannot hate him for his actions, as her heart belongs to him. Concerned, however, that, having fucked her, he might now simply abandon her, Madeline seeks some reassurance: she tells him that if he leaves her now she'll be damaged goods; like a forlorn bird with a broken wing. Happily, Porphyro declares his love for her and the two of them elope into the night - like two phantoms.

I'm not sure really what to say about the poem; at 42 stanzas it's certainly lengthy and, at times, slow in pace and dull to read. Nevertheless, its combination of supernatural elements and illicit sexual activity qualify it as an interesting example of queer gothic verse. And although it might seem as if Madeline is both object and victim, it could be of course that the whole thing is just her spectro-masturbatory fantasy; that she simply imagines a fair knight who comes to carry her off to a far-away land and make her his wife against the wishes of her parents - doesn't every girl?