(Without) Negative Capability

For the past several years I’ve thought of December as Negative Capability Month. This is partly my cranky introvert response to the over-commercialized “Holiday Spirit” and partly because the poet Keats first coined the term Negative Capability on December 21, 1818. For me, it’s a helpful reminder to be patient and attentive as I write and revise—especially if I am writing in response to current events. It reminds me that there is a difference between tuning into creative intuition and slamming down a hot take.

Keats (in a letter to his brothers) described Negative Capability as “being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason”. My own understanding of it keeps evolving over time. I first encountered Negative Capability as a teenager reading Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy (if you are a fan of the series, Negative Capability is the mindset Lyra uses to read the Golden Compass). At the time, the most important word seemed to me to be “Mysteries” and I thought it sounded cool, but I wasn’t sure how one actually accessed Negative Capability or what one used it for (certainly not for passing standardized tests!).

Only later, when I read Keats in college and grad school, did I start to recognize Negative Capability as the frame of mind I needed to write a poem, or to revise one. At that time, “doubts” was the part that resonated most for me. I had so many doubts about whether I’d be able to finish projects I started, about how my work would turn out, whether any of it would ever be published. But I kept writing through/into/out of my doubts.

In 2020, I latched onto the “uncertainties” part. Every day was full of Covid-related uncertainties and political uncertainties. Creative work felt like my best way of navigating those uncertainties.

And in 2021, for me, the most important word was “irritable”.

My Negative Capability word for 2022 was “being”.

Late 2024 was my season of big doubts.

This year I want to think about “without”—that quiet word that makes a window of Keats’ sentence, putting fact & reason (& irritable reaching!) on the other side of the glass. Sometimes (especially in a world of easily Googled answers) to be “in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts” is to be without (outside, beyond). I am most myself without my phone (and least reachable). The dormant plants around my desk are stark and quiet without their leaves. ‘Without’ seems to turn the mouth inside-out, it calls absence into being.

A good minute of writing: one without disruption, without hesitation.

I’ve made do without (interesting phrase—isn’t it?) some things this year in order to find more space for writing and thinking. I quit Spotify. I deleted almost all the apps from my phone. The most interesting absence has been the weather app; without it, it turns out I am full of premonitions and instincts (reasonably accurate ones too) about snow and rain, less fixated on trying to predict (or worse, optimize) the future, more aware of the ways that mood and weather tug together at the edges of the mind.

There’s negative capability in this—letting myself experience a less mediated world, letting myself be shaped by it.