Negative capability

In an attempt to rewrite my 'Manifesto of the Unprimed', I am considering the ideas behind the term 'negative capability' coined by the poet John Keats in 1817.

"I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, on various subjects; several things dovetailed in my mind, & at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason."


Keats believed that great people (especially poets) have the ability to accept that not everything can be resolved. Keats was a Romantic and believed that the truths found in the imagination access holy authority. Such authority cannot otherwise be understood, and thus he writes of "uncertainties." This "being in uncertaint[y]" is a place between the mundane, ready reality and the multiple potentials of a more fully understood existence. - Wikipedia.

Reason and our unconditional love affair with it, despite our lack of understanding as to how best to use it, is my target. Reason and our need for accuracy and rational sustainability in all that we do today, needs to be continually challenged. The lives we lead and the complexities that underlie our existence seems to suggest the handling of Reason with gloved hands.

As an artist and one that has had mathematics as his main companion for the last 30 odd years, I question its solutions and unchallenged truths which has prescribed our lives. Our reaching after fact and reason hides the unimaginable complexities of our beings. This needs to be complemented by an artists different way of seeing things revealing new insignts onto the intangible - that which our sciences and mathematics are unable to account for.

The 'Manifesto of the Unprimed' ( see www.unprimed.com) is a description of my lifework as an artist.It unfortunately finds fault after harrowing fault against my beloved subject, mathematics, in the hope of discovering the in-betweens, the forgotten but fertile grounds of living and making do with ambiguity and uncertainty. What price though a negative capability?