On Reverie & 'Negative Capability' In The Internet Age
On places in my life where wandering is allowed, and not knowing is encouraged.
The turquoise fabric I hold in my hands is covered in beading over mesh, pink and white flowers covering the sleeves and bodice. I am in the middle of ripping apart seams, one stitch pulled at a time, to re-sew the entirety together. It is 7 pm on a cold night in February, and while I tug and pull at the fabric, my mind wanders. I pull a full sleeve off, the momentary satisfaction of one more piece separated, and as I do so, the usual topics come up.
What should I have for dinner—maybe the clam pasta leftovers? What did it mean when my patient said that thing about last year today? I need to sign up for that yoga class, oh wait, nope, too soon. That piece from the readings on mindfulness still is confusing...Is that what they meant? Maybe that would help my patient. I should call Mom.
Repetitive, mundane tasks are usually things I do with something else. I fold my laundry with a podcast playing in my headphones. I walk to work while talking to my friend on the phone. I exercise and listen to a playlist. I wash my face, brush my teeth while a TikTok plays. But with my hands busy, and my phone somewhere in the next room, my mind wanders as my eyes follow the path of the threads I am removing, and I let it.
As I traveled through the third week of low phone February, I noticed again something I’ve fiddled with before, which is the lack of time in my life where my mind is not being worked, busy, or tense. There is not much time when I let my mind wander and be up to, functionally, not much.
As a psychotherapy trainee, I was reading and thinking last week for lectures about the idea of reverie, and the concept of “negative capability” was brought up during our group discussion. While now part of the psychoanalytic consideration of the world, negative capability was a phrase popularized first by John Keats, writing in a letter about his work as a poet.
“I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” John Keats
In the world of psychoanalysis, this phrase was picked up by Wilfred Bion in the 1960s, to speak of the ability of a psychotherapist doing psychoanalytic work to actively “not know.” From my understanding, as a therapist this amounts to being able to hold questions or the mystery of the other without insisting about absolutely, predictions, or collapsing mystery into facts. Negative capability is the expansive interior terrain to slow down into questions, and reverie is its friend.
Reverie might be thought of as the ability to hold another’s experience within your own, and to let the two mix together in the unconscious, only to find bits of it surprise you in its appearance in random thoughts or insights in your daily life. This concept, in the original view by Bion, had more to do with the ability of the mother of an infant to help “metabolize" and give back an infants experiences to it, in a way that an adult can do, but a 6 month old cannot. As theory further developed into the 80s, 90s, and through to today, it has also come to mean the ability for the therapist to hold the experience of the patient and help re-narrate or make sense of their lives.
I have long loved this challenge to hold mystery without reducing it, and have long found it to be a real challenge the more and more we get into our phones and the quick, consuming, collapsing world of the internet. First in studying theology, then in reading Rilke, the ability to hold mystery seems tied, in the end, to the ability to hold boredom. As Rilke wrote,
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
Places Where Reverie/Negative Capacity Lives in My Life
During the 20 minutes of my walk from the bus stop home, after my phone has died, and I think about the asparagus I’ll wash when I get home, and notice the birds sound like they are back for spring.
During exploratory reading or writing, where I don’t yet know where I want to go, and I have the time to putter about until something strikes, and I have enough gentle attention to let my mind hover without knowing what will come.
During the minutes between pan frying two sides of a pancake, with no other inputs other than the bubbling sound from the butter on the pan, and where I think about how my patient from 6 months earlier also loves chocolate chip pancakes.
Where does negative capacity live in your life? Where or when in the day are you allowed to gently consider, and not yet know? How might turning your phone off allow more of this creative, gentle, puttering practice to enter your days?
Take care, and thanks for your time.
xo, Margaret of Bad Art Every Day