This conversation has prompted me to consider whether Morrissey has ever contemplated the fascinating concept Keats described as
Negative Capability:
" When a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason " - as defined by Keats in a letter from 1817.
' Negative capability encourages us to keep an open mind and always consider the possibility that we may be wrong '
Associated article below for reference:
Certainty is reassuring; what we know can be better understood, managed, and controlled. But intellectual certainty can limit our creativity. Where lies a certain path, many alternative doors leading to innovative ideas are ignored. We follow a fixed roadmap, without giving ourselves the...
nesslabs.com
It's a radical, liberating and pioneering idea.
Negative capability supports ‘reflective inaction’, that is, the ability to resist dispersing into defensive routines.
Morrissey himself wrote many years ago about the '
cemented minds' presiding over Manchester schools....
Keats had presented negative capability as an antidote more than one hundred years prior.
When he came up with his definition, Keats was trying to capture in words the state of mind that underpins the creative genius of high achieving individuals, especially in literature. This was the culmination of a sequence of attempts to describe the ‘prime essential’ of a poet.
The quality that marks out the artist – Shakespeare especially, he says – is Negative Capability. He defines this as consisting of a passive openness to the full range of human experience (“uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts”) without any imposition of preconceived notions, preresolved ideas or language: “without any irritable reaching after fact & reason”. Once again, the best way to understand this is through Keats’ word “watchfulness”, an attentiveness to the true nature of experiences.
In yet another foray into these ideas, he experiments with the word “disinterestedness”. This again implies the absence of a forceful or dominating self, full of preconceived ideas, words, precepts. Writing to his brother George, Keats says “complete disinterestedness” is a difficult goal. He admits he is himself “far” from it, though personally and in social terms he believes it “ought to be carried to its highest pitch”
www.morrisseycentral.com
Artifacts lost to time....
