The Democratic presidential campaign, viewed at ground level in Iowa, is awash in uncertainties.
Atmosphere is the state of disembeddedness, or what Keats called Negative Capability: "being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts".
Keats called the creative process "negative capability... when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason".
There is little of that quality Keats admired, "when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact".
As with all of Beckett's work, it trades in uncertainties and ambiguities, as memory collapses, the present is illegible and the future is plunged into obscurity.
Budget planners always deal in uncertainties like whether tax revenues will rebound or how much it will really cost to provide services.
The Five Orchestral Pieces are informed by the mystery and terror of expressionism, and their shifting colours and rejection of thematic repetition or development usher in a new world rooted in uncertainties.
Far better to learn from Keats the merits of "negative capability" - being willing to remain in uncertainties without "irritable reaching after fact and reason" - and stay imaginatively receptive to pointers as they emerge.
This is why Keats's negative capability – "when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason" – is so challenging to rational animals like us.
His thoughts about creative genius certainly are philosophical — like his idea of "Negative Capability," the poet's capacity, as Keats puts it, to live in "uncertainties, mysteries, doubts," without trying to resolve them.
