Negative Capability

I came across the expression "negative capability" in a book by Celia Hunt, called Transformative Learning through Creative Life Writing. This concept originated with the poet John Keats. According to Keats, negative capability refers to a state in which one "is capable of being in uncertainty, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason" (quoted in Hunt, p.124). This book actually explores the role that writing can play in allowing a space for uncertainty. As Hunt articulates in her book, Keats apparently was referring to the process of writing in particular.

 I certainly begin to feel that there are parallels between writing and the meditative process, as I read Natalie Goldberg and Celia Hunt, as well as Keats' account of negative capability. What I observe is that writing can be a way of 'putting down' thoughts. By literally putting things down on paper, I am often freed from the necessity of having to engage those thoughts again, or in greater detail. I also find that when I can boil a few wandering thoughts to a written paragraph, it turns out to be not as significant as I once thought. Writing has a way of anchoring one's thoughts. At the very least, writing down what I think I understand tends to distill a lot of circular thinking into very specific situations or principles. And I tend to understand the meditative process in an almost parallel way of  finding a place where those thoughts are no longer leading me. They are driven downward into a solid space of the paper, just as one rediscovers the sense of gravity when sitting on a cushion.

The hardest thing, however, is that writing also has a tendency to do the exact opposite of letting go. Writing constructs and builds sometimes fixated identities. For example, reading my diaries as a high school student, I begin to see the way writing can lock people into identities and fixations with specific things or narratives. If I take words to seriously, I can get very attached to them very quickly. Goldberg in particular is urging her students to just keep their hands moving, rather than actively trying to appraise or identify with any of the writing with oneself.  She seems to have a keen insight into how the identification with words that can lead to rigid patterns of thinking. It's useful to observe the difference between simply letting all thoughts or stream of consciousness 'onto the paper' (or screen) and trying to cling to one of those which I like. I think this parallels Keats' account of "irritable reaching" or trying to grab some truth that I can call permanent and forever.

I think an inevitable question that might arise here is, if thoughts are meant to be 'let go' onto the paper, why bother to write at all? And why writing, as opposed to simply yelling off a mountaintop? Is it contradictory to advocate "letting go" of thoughts on a medium that does preserve itself fairly well over time? Speaking from my own experience, I think writing can heal a person of the sense that the self is permanent and fixed. But the act of writing is paradoxically a way of honoring the reality of those impermanent moments. Writing becomes a practice in loving. By reflecting the fleeing moment, writing can point to a state where I can see that none of the thoughts stay with me. I am not those thoughts, even though they stayed with me for a while and kept company with mind.

Hunt Celia (2013), Transformative Learning Through Creative Life Writing: Exploring the self in the learning process. New York: Routledge