John Keats and Negative Capability

Paraty, Brazil 2019

Desk Notes explores writing, travel, and literature—with a new issue every Friday.

Seeing the language stretch always grabs my curiosity. A phrase, an unexpected remark, even a new slogan. But there’s an elusive quality to what I appreciate, and there’s no formula that guarantees success. Tomorrow’s slang may fly or flop. What makes the difference? That’s the flair that separates the gallery walls from the backyard bin, the catwalk from the passé, the joke that hits from the off-beat crack. For each, can you spot the boundary? A few hints: the line is imprecise, movable, and the largest rewards come when it’s pinpointed.

At its best, language has a swagger, an artfulness, an impossible combination of pizzazz and elegance. Ambiguity is another critical component. Not ambiguity without purpose, not a mere desire to confuse or fluster, but, instead, ambiguity that is expansive—where the mystery, rather than its solution, becomes the revelation.

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A useful phrase comes from a 1817 letter by John Keats, which describes “negative capability,” a trait required for good writing. The artist, the storyteller, the writer, with this framing, embraces ambiguity.

I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.

Here is where the most artful language confronts much of contemporary life, where precision, clarity, and efficiency dominate; here is where the literal and the figurative battle. And literature has an important role in this struggle, one of adding complexity to a world obsessed with simplicity.

Regardless of your native tongue, spend some time with a few common verbs, or a few commonplace descriptions, and notice how a word that appears concrete in your hands is much closer to sand. To clip is to fasten, but it also means to cut; to overlook means to forget or miss, or it means to watch from above; an oversight is an error or omission, yet it also means to examine closely; to sanction is both to approve and to reprimand. Before you consider these linguistic flaws, or strange exceptions, take a moment to consider them as typical. These aren’t exceptions—these are the undercurrents of the language. Merging and melding, assimilation and amalgamation, the results aren’t accidents; here is the language divulging the more complex truths that simplicity attempts to hide.

Good metaphors further reveal the hidden dichotomies in the language. Consider the anchor—a common metaphor for restriction, for holding back, to show confinement. A steel anchor gives a thunderous crash when it hits the water, grips the ocean floor, and limits any ability to free the sails. Although that’s evocative, it’s only half the metaphor, which is why writers return to the description again and again, as an anchor also provides a ballast against wind and wave. In unsteady and uncertain times, an anchor is the description of support, it’s what keeps you afloat. Here we have the metaphor for constraint working overtime as the metaphor for stability. But we might pause and look a bit closer to recognize how those descriptions are themselves intertwined, a conclusion only available to those picking the right side when the literal and figurative battle.

Anchors