Keats as Planner

The last couple of days have been weirdly filled with John Keats, from a mishearing of "Keynesian" as "Keatsian" to me and my girlfriend being kind of braindead last night and watching Bright Star on Netflix. He came up, also, in a sort of week-recap discussion some of us had on Thursday evening in studio. One part of the discussion centered on the messy relationship between theory and practice, and the messiness of practice in general, and Keats's concept of negative capability came up (okay, I'm the poet here, so yeah, I'm the one who mentioned it). The concept, which he doesn't really expand upon elsewhere, is described in a letter to his brother, in which he writes that

...several things dovetailed in my mind, & at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason...

Obviously, a big [sic] throughout whenever "man" appears. But in any case, this concept by Mr. Romantic Poet tends to be re-articulated now and then as paradigms shift within poetic generations--that "without any irritable reaching after fact & reason" tends to get dropped (the "postmodern condition" or whatever feels like it's 100% irritable reaching sometimes), and "uncertainties" moves forward into "contradiction," "hybridity," and all that business. In poetry that means we move from something like "Ode on a Grecian Urn" to Bruce Andrews's "Species Means Guilt," which reads in part:

Species means guilt. Slave ship somatism grease their wings wrencher little pat miss dominatrix papal bull
is particularly unseemly for the FBI, negligibly robust video druids. That's the thing about your poems, nothing but sex -- sex sex sex reach for wall same vista ugh trash lockout cloning derby. My structuralist easter egg, prostrate angels -- machines owl
Stalin invented crisco. Argue better

on onward like that. This seems pretty far from " 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,' – that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know," and you could say that this does indeed resemble, as Juliana Spahr writes, "successful attempts to channel all the language that might run through the head of an angry and confused seventeen-year-old boy." But there's still some connection to negative capability in there--here's a lot of fragmented, contradictory language, hybridity on the level of the sentence, on the level of "is this poetry or prose," with an okayness in the lack of resolution of its uncertainties of meaning or form.

But enough with the poems. It seems like these questions around "being in uncertainties" or contradictions or unknowns, questions in the same category of contemporary updates of negative capability as Andrews's work might fall into, have a lot of resonance with what was discussed in our small groups on Thursday. There's been so much discussion of ideas, which is great and important, and in those discussions there has been a lot about the uncertainties and unknowns involved in planning, but it seemed like a lot of us were now asking how to actually exist in the field as people, how to handle the immensity of problems that really can't be solved in a once-and-for-all kind of way, without sinking into paralysis, inaction, or existential dread. Problems like "how do we fix traffic in Los Angeles," but also process problems like those raised in the NIMBYism article that Maria links to below--how do we balance the expertise of experts and the expertise of communities in a way that's both effective and democratic? What are some strategies for addressing these problems, and what are some strategies for living with ourselves when the "solutions" we propose are far from perfect?

I guess this is what I'd put to everyone on the panel on Monday. Ultimately the solutions for how to live are personal ones, but I, for one, would love to know how those in the profession have tackled this.