The truest statement of what it means to be an artist I ever encountered comes from John Keats, describing the chief characteristic of the great poets as "negative capability" --
"...the ability to be in uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason."
When I first encountered this notion, in a letter of Keats to I forget who, back in an undergrad English Lit course, I copied it down on an index card and taped it to my bathroom mirror. At the time I was struggling to become sufficiently certain of whatever was necessary to obtain a bachelor's degree, but I knew that what really nourished me depended on my capacity for negative capability -- and it wasn't something I could tap into at the time very readily. It took the pursuit of an altered state of consciousness, mostly. I had many regrets in those days, but what I regretted most was the loss of easiness with mysteries that I remembered from my wonderfully idle childhood. Responsibilities and rebellions and regrets piled up over the years, till I thought I'd lost all contact with negative capability -- now and then a lovely phrase, an apt description, a concrete insight into an intangible imagining would visit me, and I might be able to capture it -- but by the time I did, it was dead -- a beautiful but lifeless specimen. After a time I stopped regretting, and just lived the life I seemed to have been given, forgetting the life I had expected.
And then I got fed up. I decided to live the life I wanted. I set myself the task of writing a novel. I had a pivotal idea, I had a setting (mostly it was a place I wished I could escape to), I had a handful of characters, and soon enough I had the bones of a simple plot. I began at what seemed to be the beginning, and wrote, one sentence after another.
And then the mystery took over. The characters began to converse with one another, form ideas of their own, embark on activities that I had never imagined -- the initial conflict I had envisioned remained, but the world and the people in it that I had begun describing came to life and followed their own course. All I had to do was keep up, stay true to them, give them a chance to communicate their experience.
Of course the beginning was no longer exactly the beginning anymore; as motivations and actions tendrilled in and out of one another the story grew into both the past and the future. The original novel finally spun itself out to its "conclusion" but all the lives in it (past, present, future) continue, and I'm still recording them.
I know that I invented all of this -- but at the same time it really does have an independent existence, and I have to understand its rules and follow them if I'm to be a satisfactory chronicler. But I don't do that by willfully manipulating characters or events -- I do it by listening and perceiving and believing -- the most analytical I ever get about it is to interpret and, occasionally, explain -- mostly to myself, off-stage, as it were. Notebooks fill with backstory, sidestory, snatches of conversation, and as I become more familiar with my rediscovered capability I learn better how to select just what is necessary to convey the essential experience and how to convey it.
God, it's fun.
