It’s an uncertain time, that’s for sure. If you’re a freelancer, a bit of uncertainty isn’t unusual. You’re probably used to the occasional empty calendar. But this isn’t run-of-the-mill uncertainty – this is new. We’ve completely lost our ability to predict what the rest of the year will look like, and the question has changed from, “What will my next job be?” to “What will the industry look like after this?”. We have nothing but speculation, which is often unsettling (and sometimes downright paralyzing).
Unfortunately, I can’t tell you when this will be over, or what the world will look like afterward. What I can offer is a perspective that’s been bringing me some solace over the last few months. It starts with the poet John Keats’s idea of Negative Capability.
Uncertainty is inherent to the artistic process, and Negative Capability is the name Keats gave to an artist’s ability to navigate that uncertainty. He described it as being “…when [an artist] is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason…” It’s an apt phrase, and though Keats himself never used it again, it’s stuck around.
We don’t often think of “reaching after fact and reason” as an irritable or unhelpful act, but if you’ve ever made art you know that sometimes too much of this can get in the way. Whether you write or paint, compose music or make films, you’ve probably gotten the sense that the whole process is one of exploration, during which you never quite know where your ideas are taking you. You may start with a structure as solid as concrete, but somewhere in the middle you’ll take a turn you didn’t expect and you’ll throw your whole outline out the window. Negative Capability is the ability of an artist to operate within that environment of mysteries and surprises. Keats believed this was the essential skill of the artist, because he knew that uncertainty is crucial to artistic creation.
Artists who possess Negative Capability are the ones who can work even when – and especially when – they don't know where they're going. To not know the future, and to not demand to know: it’s a kind of Zen that comes out of an honest understanding of the artistic process. As Annie Dillard says in her wonderful book The Writing Life:
“One of the things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now… Something more will arise for later, something better.”
She’s urging the reader to go with the flow, to put what they’ve got on the page without worrying whether they’ll have anything to write later on. Don’t save your ideas, she says; believe that more will come. Steven Pressfield expresses a similar sentiment in Do the Work (another of my favorite books on art-making). “Trust the soup,” he says, the soup being that murky primordial pond from which all your ideas come crawling. In other words, trust your instincts.
If you’re an artist, that trust is key. You have to trust what comes out even if it’s not what you expect; you have to trust that the twists and turns are leading you somewhere good; and above all you have to trust in the uncertainty, because if you don’t accept it you’ll soon find yourself struggling pointlessly against it. How can you expect to know what you’re making if you haven’t finished making it yet?
They say every film is written three times, and this is why. When you write the film you have a certain vision in your head, but later, on set, you find the performances aren’t what you imagined, or the lines don’t quite work, or perhaps a whole scene needs to be re-thought, and so you change things; you rewrite. And then in post you do it again. You move things around, reorganizing the story to make it better. What comes out at the end is never what you imagined when you went in. Making a film is like walking down a trail without a map, without a clue how much further the trail goes or if it goes anywhere at all. Negative Capability is the filmmaker’s ability to keep putting one foot in front of the other despite the uncertainty. Negative Capability is knowing that you don’t know, but trusting that you’ll figure it out as you go along.
And really, this is a lot like living life right now. We can never predict the future, but somehow we get it in our heads that we can. And then, from nowhere – a pandemic hits.
No one knows what lies ahead, and the current moment is a reminder of that; COVID has brought us face-to-face with the reality that our futures were never assured, that all our plans can be dashed overnight. Knowing this is frightening, because we want to be sure of things. We’d rather live in a world where we know our futures. But we don’t live in such a world, and pretending we do only sets us up for a harder time when the real future comes around to prove us wrong.
Besides discomfort and anxiety, what does an acceptance of uncertainty offer? It offers, I think, the freedom to move forward fearlessly, just as accepting uncertainty in the artistic process allows you to continue creating without fear that your delicate plan will fall apart. Trusting the creative process is the same as having hope in life. Having hope is acknowledging that the future might be bad, or it might be good, and then choosing to believe that it will be good. But hope isn’t passive. It isn’t empty optimism. Like making art, it requires action – it requires you to live your belief in a good future. If this seems like a hard thing to do right now, just think of all the moments you’ve lost hope in some project you’ve done.
I imagine a painter in her studio at night, staring in disgust at a half-finished portrait. “What comes next?” she asks. “Why did I ever begin? Is it terrible and I don’t know it?” But the painter, I imagine, doesn’t throw her painting in the trash bin, as much as she’d like to. Instead she reminds herself that she’s asking questions she can’t possibly answer. She reminds herself that her painting might well be terrible, but it just as well might be great, and that there’s only one way to find out. And so, she takes those unanswerable questions and she bundles them up and stands on the stool and stuffs them in the back of a high shelf and leaves them there. And then she gets back to work.
Our lives are unfinished portraits. Sometimes we can envision every stroke, but sometimes it’s not so easy. Sometimes life happens and we sit for hours in the studio in despair. The thing to do then is to bring your own Negative Capability out into your life, to put those unanswerable questions on the shelf and keep going. You don’t need to answer them ever, and certainly not now. The thing now is to remember that the future could be good – and then do your best to make it so.