When I signed up for my first self-designed conference course at Sarah Lawrence, my proposal was at first rejected — I’d titled the class something like “Poetry Conference Class,” and the rejection form stated that the title wasn’t descriptive enough.  Too boring.  I then began to plow the fields of my brain for a more exciting title, thinking all the while that such a process was ridiculous.  It became a bit of a joke, as I took more conference classes and began to challenge myself to think of the most ridiculous title possible — something which, to this day, makes me a little squeamish when I order my transcripts.  I think that the title I finally chose that first semester was something like “Unconscious Associations: Poetry and the Mind.”  Though the title may have been a joke, the study I undertook that semester, with the amazing and brilliant Kate Knapp Johnson, was far from a joke, and what I read of poetry, philosophy, and psychology (Jung especially) was, in fact, the basis of what I do and believe as a writer to this day.

I’ve been thinking a great deal about how living as a writer has as much to do with what one does know as it does with what one doesn’t know.  It seems to me that in order to be a good writer, one has to be comfortable working in the dark, with ideas that are not yet clear, with the faith that there will be light, there will be clarity.  These thoughts relate to Keats‘ idea of negative capability, something which I admit not understanding for years — I probably still don’t totally understand the concept, but it does shed some light on the dark field which we as writers wander.  In a letter to his brothers written on the 21rst of December, 1817, Keats describes a conversation he had with a friend after he saw Richard III; in the letter, Keats describes an idea which occurred to him:

…at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously – I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason-Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration. . . .

In one of those grand moments of synchronicity, I happened to pick up Alice Fulton’s Feeling as a Foreign Language yesterday, and began re-reading “Screens: An Alchemical Scrapbook” (ah!  And there is my good man Jung again — a coincidence?).  In this essay, Fulton describes the moment of writing in a way that seems to dovetail Keats’ idea: “When I’m lost in the Thou-art-That of composition, the membranes dividing each from each dissolve; the separate self vanishes into an undifferentiated state.”  What all of this means, for me, at least, is that in the moment of writing, of creation, the self in some sense dissolves, or must dissolve, so that the creature can become the creator, so that we can put our “irritable reaching[s] after fact and reason” to the side and dwell, for a moment, in what Dickinson spoke of as “possibility” — unknowing, unseeing, uncertainty.

What this means in the real world is this: I worked for nearly a year and a half on my manuscript about the witch trials, drafting and doodling and furiously reading and researching, without knowing that I was working on a manuscript about the witch trials.  I’ve been writing essays for nearly a year and a half now, but it was only a few weeks ago, in conversation with a dear friend, that I realized what the essays are really about: the undefinable moments of human experience which are beyond our control, experiences which, I must now say, seem quite like the very process of writing itself.  We do, but we do not know what we are doing; we move, but we do not know where we are heading.  It’s at these times that I think back to that first conference course at Sarah Lawrence, and how, upon reading in Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections his idea that the subconscious itself is a process, that I was greatly moved, though I didn’t know why.

I’ve been part of a number of conversations about how poetry classes don’t impart skills that can pass on to classes in other areas, and I’ve fought passionately against this idea, using language as my weapon and claiming that poetry teaches concision, rhythm, composition, attention to detail — that poetry is an argument unto itself.  I’ve never argued what I feel most deeply, which is that it is exactly the mystery that makes poetry seem devoid of skill that is most instructive.  The dark field in which the poet wanders is really the field in which we all wander: the world, the body, the self — all are, in the end, unknowable.  The heart goes on with its work, and then one day quits.  The mind churns like a happy machine, and then suddenly breaks down.  We marry or don’t marry.  We are hired or laid off.  We find ourselves in station and locations, and don’t understand the process that lead us there.  We love the person who can’t love us back, or we can’t love the person we should love, and we don’t know why.  We wake and say to ourselves, without knowing how we’ve come to the conclusion, that this is not what we want.  The soul and the self and the world move, and we do not put these things into movement, nor do we understand how or why they move.  It seems that the greatest skill one could ever learn is to navigate this darkness — or, rather, to learn that the darkness is not navigable, not understandable, and to learn how to live in it nonetheless — and, moreover, to learn how to love it.

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