Contradiction, negative capability, and equipoise ⚖️
To prepare for this week’s session, the cloud cohort is reading Ross Gay’s Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude — a collection of poems that hold together contradicting or challenging emotions. There’s loss and growth. There is fear and hope. Ross Gay demonstrates a skill every poet would benefit from cultivating: negative capability.
Negative capability is the ability to accept uncertainty, doubt, and mystery without seeking immediate answers or explanations.
I saw negative capability as a skill one could (should) cultivate, and a skill I wanted to develop in myself. I understood through my hypnotherapy / subconscious mind coaching training led by
Jenna Knapp that the subconscious mind takes personally each judgment made. For example, if I am judging my cohort’s inability to hold opposing ideas without “irritably reaching after fact and reason” or decision, then it was clear that parts of me, too, had difficulty with this.
In poetry, negative capability looks like holding together all the tangles and elements of what you’re writing about — and not deciding on the result or message or lesson of what you write. It’s writing through and with the doubt, of not knowing if you are morally correct though you know what you’re feeling and sensing is true to you. With negative capability, a poet can place their consciousness inside of anyone of anything. A poet exercises the state of unknowing as much as possible.
It is in the gap of contradicting ideas where poetry bursts forth.
In the real world, negative capability looks like indecision, no? This looks like a person without clarity or reasonability. If you were on a team of poets with the goal of launching a marketable product, a successful result may be hard to come by. Or…. the team of poets would have an incredible sense of the user’s experience. I don’t know. I was going to argue that negative capability is not incentivized “in the real world” but I truly believe this skill leads to more intuitive, more loving, and wise decision making, even if making a decision is not the skill being developed here.
Okay, but I argue with myself again: practicing negative capability would look like a room full of people discussing an issue or a solution for hours… for days… for…
But negative capability is the humane task.
I am inspired by Victoria Bee’s post Libra I: Libra and Bisexuality and the 2 of Swords through The Astrologers’ Co-Op, wherein she writes about equanimity. And while reading this, I am reminded of the word equipoise (a word that is as Libran as they come, no?).
Writing poetry is my personal practice in cultivating equipoise.
With writing, I develop more capacity in my heart for other people. I challenge myself to swing between the extremes of experiences — not to decide on the middle or the exact balance, but to build my ability to hold and behold many different consciousnesses.