|
|
The Canon Fires
Negative capability
at the front
The Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan
has just been published, and the second paragraph of Anthony DeCurtis'
contribution, "Bob Dylan as songwriter" begins with a point which will be
familiar to previous visitors to this website. A "remarkable aspect of Dylan's
songwriting is the 'negative capability' it embodies - that is, as Keats said
referring to a quality of Shakespeare's work, 'when a man is capable of being
in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact
and reason.'"
Michael Denning's earlier chapter, "Bob Dylan and Rolling Thunder" quotes
Wilfred Mellers, who "once suggested that Dylan's music is as much about
self-loss as self-discovery, about finding oneself in the group, in a
community." The nurturing of 'negative capability' - the countering of "any
irritable reaching after fact and reason" - can be clearly seen as helpful in
the project Mr. Mellers describes
The challenge for an intellect like Dylan's is always to be able to emerge
from one's own head; to understand completely that not everyone thinks like
you do, and, indeed, even thinks as much
as you do. The challenge is to learn how to listen, and nothing will destroy
the listening experience faster or more completely than "an irritable reaching
after facts and reason." Such reaching presupposes that the conversation is a
ritual of persuasion, which is almost never possible in the real world. In
that setting, listening is merely a technique required to assemble one's own
arguments -- to be volleyed back as soon an possible But to truly listen to
someone, to leave one's own thoughts behind if only for a moment, is to join a
community of two, and potentially even more than two. To truly listen is to
say to the speaker: "You are my moment. You are the music of this moment, and
I want nothing more than to hear that music" "Negative capability" is the
ability to do that genuinely..
This website is about a book entitled The Mighty Quinn: The Cultural Relevance
of Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes. The overarching theme of the book,
"purposefulness and a freedom from purpose", parallels Keats' "negative
capability". A further parallel phrase - "a pessimism of the intellect and an
optimism of the will" - is given substance through the work of Kurt Godel and
Otto Rank. This book provides intellectual firepower to the advocacy of
democracy.
This dispatch was written with the assistance of Brian Prioleau and Tim
Roberts
|
|
|
