“. . . at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement [sic], 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 . . .”
-- John Keats This blog is supposed to be about uncertainty and how the writer handles it (or not). Most North American writers, like most people in the global north, operate on the assumption that the world will be more or less recognizable 20 years from now (“Cli-fi” is a possible exception; but it’s fictional, after all). The rich may be richer and the poor, poorer; summers may be hotter; politicians may be more corrupt; crime may rise; but it will be basically the same as now, only moreso: there is still a middle class; there is still a university; books continue to be published and careers made. “It’s too bad about the Australian fruit bat; it’s too bad about all those people over there in Mozambique.” There’s a palpable sense that it can’t happen here – and definitely can’t happen to our species. I’m not convinced of any of that. The rich countries are like bubbles (esp. the US, where we have an especially rich fantasy life); we’re sheltered, and that shelter is about to pop. How many superstorms how close together – how low must the aquifer go – how many displaced persons must there be, before we stop acting like everything will be fine? How much will it take before governments cease to be able to provide basic services to people? But this vision of the world in less than a generation is an extrapolation based on what’s happening now and what has happened in the past. As such, it’s only a possibility. It is also possible that the climatologists have miscalculated and that hydrogen-fuel-cell cars, wind power, and carbon sequestration will be here soon to avert total collapse. And it’s also possible that there will be a total collapse. Caesar said that people willingly believe what they want to believe, and this may be a case in point. If you like the way things are going, or if you’re by disposition an optimist, you’ll probably assume it will be more of the same. If you are discontented with contemporary capitalist society, or if you’re by disposition a pessimist (or millenarian), you might go for the latter. There is cli-fi and there is fi: which do you prefer. Still, it seems to me that what Keats is talking about is a more appropriate attitude toward the present (his masculinist attitude to literature notwithstanding). We simply don’t know what’s going to happen. It may be something very dramatic. It may not. How to be Schrodinger’s writer, for whom both things are true at once? If we write with the object of publication, we’re assuming that there will be publication as we have known it. Both writer and reader will be affected by climate disruption – but we don’t know to what extent. The only thing that seems relatively certain is that the preconditions for human culture – including literature – are under threat (due to lack of water to make paper, for instance.) How to write in a way that does not ignore or dismiss that possibility at the same time that it does not take it for granted? Can we “be in” not-knowing without immediately trying to get out of it – esp. when “fact and reason” can only take us so far, given the billions of variables involved? If we dwell in the cloud of unknowing, if we possess Negative Capability, we will be able to see both possibilities at once. Then maybe we will have redefined what it means to be a writer in the era of climate disruption.
2 Comments
Don Byrd
6/5/2019 10:31:14 am
Olson quotes the negative capability passage several times. He took Keats, Melville, and Riemann (and the mathematicians) as figures bespeaking a profound intellectual upheaval. He got the lead on the radical import of the mathematicians in the chapter on "The Meaning of Numbers" in Spengler (Decline, V. I, ch. 2). Otherwise, from that period, he had some interest in Parkman, but that is about it. It was "sprawl" he objected to--sprawl equals roughly romanticism and Eliot. (Emerson & Whitman, Wordsworth, were sprawl)). He wanted to make use of Americam folk tales, but they had already been appropriated (by Dow chemical he says in a letter. Don't know what he was referring to). Interesting that it was Melville and Riemann that Pynchon also fixed on, and Deleuze. Zalamea (Synthetic Philosophy) follows this line of thought from uncertainty of the 1820s to certainty, of a kind at least. Keats was thinking about the uncertainty of the universal; statistical knowledge is inherently uncertain. All it takes to stop climate change is global economic collapse.
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Don Byrd
6/6/2019 08:18:43 am
That should have said, Maurice Kline, the historian of mathematics speaks of early 19th century as "a loss of reality" (in Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty, 1980).
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Kristin Prevallet Author/Editor
I'm a writer & teacher in Lawrence, Kansas who actually believes the scientists. I wrote a book of poems called Of Some Sky that seems to have something to do with all this. |