Following this, Keats does a remarkable thing—he sums up something he has not even elaborated on. He says, “This pursued through Volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.” What does this mean? For where was there ever any mention of Beauty in the original definition? And do you see how this last bit could be used as a defense by the most archly formal poet or by his worst nemesis? And if I presume to understand negative capability, am I then incapable of it, since it is the capability of being in the presence of an uncertainty without reaching to understand it? And finally, we always intimately connect John Keats with negative capability as if he possessed it himself, as if he were speaking of himself, when he was not thinking or speaking of himself at all but of Shakespeare—and who among us amounts to squat compared to Him—of whom we can be as uncertain as we like without reaching after facts, because there are none? Shakespeare’s reputation as a god is enhanced tenfold by the mysterious circumstances of his being. As is always the case, the unknown raises the stakes and the stature and the flag of the formidable before which we bow and do worship in unaccountable dread.

But... beauty is engaged, encountered, experienced rather than understood.

Even in Keats' day consideration was increasingly analytical; today we neglect nearly every other tool.  Analysis has become a hammer that we apply to all our needs.

But to break apart the beautiful is usually to destroy its beauty.  As Ruefle sees with Shakespeare, mystery is a candle's glow revealing the beautiful.

Hera closing with Herakles, Jess (Collins), 1960

The passage is a bit like the US Constitution. By that I mean that it may be interpreted to suit the purposes of a great many people who are at odds with one another. For instance, nothing prevents someone from saying that the essential definition means: once depressed, stay depressed. Of the passage relating to Coleridge there is no doubt: all you have to know is that Coleridge was the great intellectual among the Romantics, the great thinker. But an interesting and further complicating key is provided by the phrase “isolated verisimilitude.” Verisimilitude means “having the appearance of a truth; probable,” so that Keats is saying something like this: “Coleridge would pass over a probability that someone else would accept as the truth because Coleridge is not content with appearance or probability.” If we add to this the idea of isolating, which implies distinction or differentiation, we can’t help but think that Keats has searched the penetralium of mystery at least long enough to isolate a probable truth that is, unto him, sufficient. And this is a far cry from the non-isolating attitude that most of us associate with negative capability.

I do not associate a non-isolating attitude with negative capability, so I may fundamentally misunderstand Ruefle's concern.

Distinction and differentiation can be helpful, especially when accurate. To isolate one thought from another thought, to separate assumption from conclusion, to perceive pieces of the whole can enhance our understanding of the whole

Aristotle argued that what separates a journeyman from an artist is a keen awareness of each element of the poetic process and an ability to explain - and therefore influence - how each element contributes to the final result.

Most of human progress is a struggle against the current day's orthodoxy.  For the last half-century high culture has worshiped at the altar of relativism, uncertainty, and doubt.  This orthodoxy condemns fine distinctions as innately hypocritical or self-interested or stupid.

For any thesis there are many antitheses.

Although the letter in its entirety is too long to quote here, you’ll have to trust me when I say that only the last quarter of it puts his definition of negative capability into context. Here is that context:

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—Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued through Volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.

The last few months I have engaged a new poetic. I am composing miniature intimations - inferences? - of abstract expressionism.

I find my best opportunities in rusting metal, greasy alleys, and aging walls.  Where the intentional begins to descend into entropy, I find a beauty much more compelling than the original intent.

Where most see decay - and they are not wrong - I choose to see beauty.  As intention is pierced, an inner sanctum is opened and a paradox of perception is exposed.

“Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact reason”: the letter was written by John Keats on a Sunday, late in December of 1817, from Hampstead, and addressed to his brothers George and Tom. The year 1817 is, relatively speaking, quite early in Keats’s career, though only four years before his death; the letter was written before George left for America, before Tom died, before John met Fanny Brawne, before he was sick, and before he had written what are considered his finest poems. One of the things you have to remember about Keats is that his development as a poet was telescoped into an intensely short period of time in which he passed through as many stages as another poet may experience in a life three times as long.

There is no certainty, many mysteries, abundant doubt.

Because this is the persistent character of our context we are compelled to be poetic: to be makers, choosers, creators, and risk-takers.

We may be poor poets.  We may allow ourselves to be distracted from our making.  In our making we may be vulgar, impatient, angry or cautious, predictable, and boring.

But we can choose to be open, exploring, and ready to be transformed.  The English-speaking world would be less-lively if Keats had chosen to compress into his 26 years less living.

"Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced."

John Keats, Death Mask

What an odd thing to say; what a terrible thing to say. Surely someone is saying to himself, “Gee whiz, hasn’t she ever heard of negative capability?” As a matter of fact, I have; those words have become like a sickness unto death for me. As often as I have used them myself, I wish there were a moratorium on them for a decade, so overused are they, so bandied about that they have come to mean just about anything one wants them to, especially a bebop version of Be Here Now, or a diffusive religious awe in which the poet wanders, forever in a stupor. As with most famous sayings, we are given only a fragment of the paragraph from which it comes.

Keats believed in Beauty and mistrusted grand theories or final conclusions... even about Beauty.

“The only means of strengthening one's intellect is to make up one's mind about nothing - to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts.”

Apophatic - ἀπόφασις - theology insists we cannot know God.  The infinite nature of God is beyond our understanding, far beyond our knowing.

But we can, with significant effort, find and describe what God is not.  We have a negative capability, so to speak, when it comes to engaging ultimate reality.

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its lovliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing
A flowery band to bind us to the earth,
Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth
Of noble natures, of the gloomy days,
Of all the unhealthy and o'er-darkn'd ways
Made for our searching: yes, in spite of all,
Some shape of beauty moves away the pall
From our dark spirits. Such the sun, the moon,
Trees old and young, sprouting a shady boon
For simple sheep; and such are daffodils
With the green world they live in; and clear rills
That for themselves a cooling covert make
'Gainst the hot season; the mid-forest brake,
Rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms:
And such too is the grandeur of the dooms
We have imagined for the mighty dead;
An endless fountain of immortal drink,
Pouring unto us from the heaven's brink.

And I want to say the poet is never afraid because he is unceasingly afraid, and therefore cannot become that which he already is, though of course, Mr. Kierkegaard reminds us, he must; you might say fear is the poet’s procedure, that which he has been trained to concentrate on.

I know a young poet for whom, so far, this seems to be true.

He is very cautious sharing his work, in part from fear.  .

As Ruefle suggests, he is still mastering his procedure.

But I wonder if it is fear on which he must concentrate more, or is it concentration itself that is being developed and fear is only a temporary tool for that purpose.

Fear belongs to man, not to the world. The world feels no fear, at any time, in any place. We are “an unhappy people in a happy world”—Wallace Stevens’s last stance. Feelings of fear—personal, cognitive fear—allow us to feel anguish while lying in a hammock on a beautiful day, allow us to feel as if our life were threatened when the sky is blue and the meadow at peace. Raymond Queneau:

The poet is never “inspired, if by inspiration we mean...a function of the poet’s mood, the temperature, the political situation, subjective accidents, or the subconscious. The poet is never inspired because he is the master of what others assume to be inspiration.... He’s never inspired because he’s always inspired, because the powers of poetry are always at his disposal, obedient to his will, receptive to his guidance.

Fear is but is too often false.

It is false in its origins, its perceptions, and its fruits.

"...the only thing we have to fear is fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance."

Last evening I was talking with my father who fears whoever is elected will be unable to positively engage the profound problems at hand.

I agree it will be a difficult decade or more.  But I reminded my dad he had been born in the worst year of the Great Depression, his older brother was sent to battle the Nazi threat, most of his adult life had been shadowed by the threat of communism and nuclear warfare.

There is cause for concern, for needed effort, for courage. In confronting our shared challenges fear is unnecessary and unhelpful.

Simone Weil, eternally 34

And he is quite provocative at the end of his essay “The Sand in the Hourglass”:

If in our moments of happiness, mastery, ecstasy, we say Yes to heaven and to earth, and all we need is misfortune, sickness, the decline of physical powers to start screaming No, this means that all our judgments can be refuted tomorrow and that it is easy to mistake our life for the world. It is not obvious, however, why weakness—whether of a particular person or of an entire historical era—should be privileged and why the old nihilist from Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape should be closer to the truth than he himself was when he was twenty years old. 

 Miłosz closes his essay with an astonishing and succinct remark of Simone Weil’s: “‘I am suffering.’ It is better to say this than to say, ‘This landscape is ugly.’”

We make our reality.  This is true whether God is dead, or not.

Externals have influence.  The landscape can help or hurt.  But I choose my response.

Simone Weil also wrote, "I can, therefore I am."

I am not ready for nihilist wisdom.  Since I am choosing, I choose life and love and beauty.

Even as I decline, I would prefer to sing than scream.

Like Kierkegaard: “As far as I am concerned, I am able to describe most excellently the movements of faith; but I cannot make them myself.” The Danish philosopher’s famous essay Fear and Trembling is a rumination on the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac. God asked Abraham to kill Isaac, Abraham’s long-awaited and cherished son, and in the essay Kierkegaard grapples with how an act of murder can become a pleasing, good, and holy act in the eyes of God. It takes faith, a faith Kierkegaard minutely examines and describes, but one that he cannot in the end claim for himself, as devout as he is. He remains what he dubs a knight of resignation, a state that, for all it is worth, is still a state of sin. To be sure, I am “using” Miłosz here for my own purposes. He knows perfectly well he is not a saint. In an interview he has stated—and proved—that he is a man of contradiction. In other words, an ordinary man. But I admire his insistence on an objective reality, his faith in a world and an order that does not exist exclusively in the mind.

Milosz might explain that he had the advantage -- not given to Kierkagaard and Ruefle -- of living under Marxist-Leninist oppression.  He wrote, "It is impossible to communicate to people who have not experienced it the undefinable menace of total rationalism."

In my time and place the diminished reach of rationalism seems the greater threat. But I can imagine, based on the limits of my own rationality, the deadening effect of a wholly rational experience: even if only as disciplined effort and aspiration.

How is it then that life under the Communists produced such life-affirming artists, writers, and poets, while a quarter-century of "freedom" and prosperity has produced mostly nihilism?

Much as I am sympathetic to the theory of écriture, I find it—confusing. For why is it meaningless to write with no other function than to assuage fear? Doesn’t that function in itself have a meaning? And why fear the dismantling of language’s semantic function, its being representational of meaning, when that is but one more fear that will drive those in opposition to écriture to write? And certainly this “theory” is no theory at all but a centuries-old practice: “He seemed to be depressed, for he went on writing” reads a twelfth-century Japanese text. Or take Rilke: “I have taken action against fear. I sat up the whole night and wrote; and now I am as thoroughly tired as after a long walk in the fields at Ulsgaard.” Even a bitter poem is a small act of affirmation, and I wonder if we can’t say the same thing about a meaningless poem (if such a thing exists). But Miłosz, who would most certainly disagree, is, to his immortal credit, a knight of faith, and I am but a knight of resignation.

I write for pleasure.  I am not aware of fear playing a part.

This morning I lay in a warm bed in a cool room.  Comfortable I dawdled between sleeping and waking, but was drawn out of a pleasant sleep by the prospect of even more pleasant writing.

I walked beneath the stars, up the hill to where I write.

I read a meditation on Saint Matthew (today is his feast day) and from the book of Job: "'Truly, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom; and to depart from evil is understanding."  I drink my coffee.

I thank God, I praise the Lord, I do not fear.  Perhaps I should.  Surely I would if suddenly He descended in  a flaming chariot.  But this morning God seems more forgiving mother than frightening father.

Wislawa Szymborska

There are poets who are resigned to not being able to save the world, who barely have enough time to catch up with themselves and the attendant mystery of their fear and being. I suppose Szymborska was one of them. Here is her compatriot Miłosz describing her: 

In Szymborska we are divided not into the flesh and a surviving oeuvre...but into “the flesh and a broken whisper”; poetry is no more than a broken whisper, quickly dying laughter.... When it is not the perfection of a work that is important but expression itself, “a broken whisper,” everything becomes, as it has been called, écriture.... To talk about anything, just to talk, becomes an operation in itself, a means of assuaging fear.

I did not know Szymborska or her work until she died in February.  But what I have read since suggests she caught up with herself, found herself, made herself, educated herself into a full existence.

Here's a piece of evidence translated by Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak:

Nothing can ever happen twice.
In consequence, the sorry fact is
that we arrive here improvised
and leave without the chance to practice.

Even if there is no one dumber,
if you're the planet's biggest dunce,
you can't repeat the class in summer:
this course is only offered once.

No day copies yesterday,
no two nights will teach what bliss is
in precisely the same way,
with precisely the same kisses.

One day, perhaps some idle tongue
mentions your name by accident:
I feel as if a rose were flung
into the room, all hue and scent.

The next day, though you're here with me,
I can't help looking at the clock:
A rose? A rose? What could that be?
Is it a flower or a rock?

Why do we treat the fleeting day
with so much needless fear and sorrow?
It's in its nature not to stay:
Today is always gone tomorrow.

With smiles and kisses, we prefer
to seek accord beneath our star,
although we're different (we concur)
just as two drops of water are.

One of the fears a young writer has is not being able to write as well as he or she wants to, the fear of not being able to sound like X or Y, a favorite author. But out of fear, hopefully, is born a young writer’s voice: “But now,” says Kierkegaard,

to strive to become what one already is: who would take the pains to waste his time on such a task, involving the greatest imaginable degree of resignation?...But for this very reason alone it is a very difficult task...precisely because every human being has a strong natural bent and passion to become something more and different.

It is very easy to read those words, and very hard to enact them. Elsewhere Kierkegaard says, “What is education? I should suppose that education was the curriculum one had to run through in order to catch up with oneself.”

Nietzsche admonished, "Become who you are." Kierkagaard wrote, "Be that self which one truly is.'

Kierkagaard and Nietzsche were preoccupied by many of the same problems.  They applied the same tool -- the dialectic -- to solving the problems.  Each reached existentialist conclusions.

Nietzsche was sure God is dead and  that belief in God dilutes and distracts from making meaning and creating value.  His alternative is the Will to Power.

God was very alive for Kierkagaard and he wrote, "Love is all, it gives all, and it takes all."

Each found their particular voice. Each resolved their particular fears.  I much prefer Kierkagaard both as biography and in terms of his intellectual descendants.

We fail. And so desire to progress, to become better poets, to eradicate a disease, to become better people, to perfect that which is perpetually imperfect. The biblical “fall” is just such an anti-constraint. The apple was fear. (And remember, fear is knowledge, according to Nietzsche.) The apple set the world in motion by forcing Adam and Eve to migrate out of the Perfect. “Fear is to recognize ourselves,” said the philosopher. 

This is not the only outcome. I wonder if it is the most common outcome.

Many fail and seek to avoid future failure. I am sorry to say this is sometimes my choice.

Fear famously spurs fighting or fleeing. Many of us choose flight.

To fight or flee are emotional responses.  We can also engage fear with feeling.

In applying cognition to emotion we may still fail, but respond with a courage and creativity where we neither fight nor flee.

After the Flood  by Paul Klee

Think of the simplest caricature of a poet, the kind that might be used as a generic figure in a cartoon. Which comes to mind, the forlorn, melancholy, sadly loitering one, suicidal in blue breeches, or the happy eater and drinker, the smeller of roses, the carouser, the gusto-bearing, sun-loving one? In Epicurean atomic theory, “the world functions because from the outset there is a lack of balance.” The French novelist Georges Perec, devoted to mathematical literary forms—he wrote a novel without the letter e in it—speaks of anti-constraints within a system of restraints. He quotes the painter Paul Klee: “Genius is ‘an error in the system.’” (Those of you who have heard lectures on the sonnet may recall that this is often, precisely, the point.) The world functions because of fear, because of the error, the anti-constraint, the anti-perfect, the anti-balance. We stumble. We fall.

The world that we know has been shaped by our fear and failure.

But it would continue to function without either: probably much better.

We respond - especially our artistic impulse responds - to the ongoing tension between fear and non-fear, error and non-error, ugly and non-ugly. The perpetual presence and immediate proximity of these seeming contradictions compel us to respond, to create, and (too) often to choose sides.

Paul Klee also wrote, "Art does not reproduce what we see; rather, it makes us see."

We respond - artists, bankers, carpenters, designers, electricians, farmers, and most of us respond - to the obvious: the beautiful cliche, the awful decay, dichotomies of desire.  Before we respond, can we see more?

But has it ever been any different? Races everywhere have always been at the mercy of collective desire and collective fear, sometimes their own, sometimes others’. The impulse toward order is born of fear and desire, and the impulse toward chaos is born of the same. The British psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott believed artists were people driven by the tension between the desire to communicate and the desire to hide.

Winnicott wrote, "It is a joy to be hidden and a disaster not to be found."

Much depends on timing.  With very few exceptions, art is not produced on demand.  Art emerges from trial and error, exploration and dead-ends, mucky clay finally formed to match the artist's vision.

Chaos is profound, persistent, and Good. To presume to create order out of chaos is courageously delusional, temporary in effect, and outcomes vary widely.

Collective actions are not exempt from these double powers; consider this succinct and frightening sentence written by John Berger: 

Everywhere these days more and more people knock their heads against the fact that the future of our planet and what it will offer or deny to its inhabitants, is being decided by boards of men who control more money than all the governments in the world, who never stand for election, and whose sole criterion for every decision they take is whether or not it increases or is prone to increase Profit.

It is a frightening sentence. Is it true?

In my own experience profit is not the sole criterion for most decisions. Though, I am sure examples can be found where it is the sole intention.

In my experience decisions are most often confused, delayed, half-made, not made, and badly executed.

In my experience those who take up decisions begin with a sense-of-self they seek to advance.

What is the source of that sense?  What are its parts?  How does it thrive? Why does the sense-of-self change over time and how?

Fear is the greatest motivator of all time. Conflict born of fear is behind our every action, driving us forward like the cogs of a clock. Fear is desire’s dark dress, its doppelgänger. “Love and dread are brothers,” says Julian of Norwich. As desire is wanting and fear is not-wanting, they become inexorably linked; just as desire can be destructive (the desire for power), fear can be constructive (fear of hurting another); fear of poverty becomes desire for wealth.

Love of God is sometimes expressed as fear of those who do not believe in my god.

Love of my country can unfold into fear of those who claim another country.

Love of self may become fear of others.

But if fear is the outcome, can love truly be the cause?

Perhaps it is a lover's doubt regarding the beloved that prompts such fierce defense.

Or you can perhaps remember having read The Wind in the Willows as a child, or to a child, and encountering that magnificent, odd, and out-of-place chapter entitled “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn” where Mole and Rat go in search of Otter’s lost son and find, on the very edge of dawn, Nature personified in the august presence of a terrifying and benevolent satyr, half man, half animal: 

“Rat!” he found breath to whisper, shaking. “Are you afraid?” “Afraid?” murmured the Rat, his eyes shining with unutterable love. “Afraid! Of Him? O, never, never! And yet—and yet—O, Mole, I am afraid!” Then the two animals, crouching to the earth, bowed their heads and did worship.

In the wildness of reality - and of ourselves - we know an aspect of the divine.

To depart the narrow paths of daily life for far pastures, deep woods, and steep cliffs is to choose vulnerability and discovery over supposed security.

In the domain of Pan - both animal and man - we experience full feeling: emotion and cognition, neither in command but each sharing equally this unfolding moment, the great I AM.

Lopez goes on to chastise those who think hunting peoples such as the Eskimos are living in perfect harmony with nature. Nervous awe and apprehension are born out of proximity and attention. The greater the intimacy between these cultures and nature, the greater the tension. The industrial world destroys nature not because it doesn’t love it but because it is not afraid of it. You can in your own minds recall the long Judeo-Christian tradition of fearing God.

In the Hebrew Bible there are twenty-six different words translated as fear. (As some Eskimo languages provide for many varieties of snow?)

The word most often used for fear of God is יָרֵא or yare', as in Deuteronomy 5:29 where it is written, "Oh that they had such a heart in them, that they would fear Me and keep all My commandments always, that it may be well with them and with their sons forever!"

This is the same fear used in regard to Egyptians, wild animals, and unknown wilderness. Reverence, awe, and such can also be read into the usage.  But it would be wrong to read-out being profoundly afraid.

The psychological abstraction of fear emerges from a more ancient usage of yare' meaning to shoot an arrow.  As the tension of bow-and-string are transferred to the arrow, so fear can release the tensions we experience.

How do I practically use fear?

Barry Lopez, in his study of the Arctic called Arctic Dreams, makes this interesting observation:

Eskimos do not maintain this intimacy with nature without paying a certain price. When I have thought about the ways in which they differ from people in my own culture, I have realized that they are more afraid than we are. On a day-to-day basis, they have more fear. Not of being dumped into cold water from an umiak, not a debilitating fear. They are afraid because they accept fully what is violent and tragic in nature. It is a fear tied to their knowledge that sudden, cataclysmic events are as much a part of life, of really living, as are the moments when one pauses to look at something beautiful. A Central Eskimo shaman named Aua, queried by Knud Rasmussen about Eskimo beliefs, answered, “We do not believe. We fear.”

Given the Eskimo context this is reasonable.

Is my context less dangerous? The risk is less obvious.

Or perhaps the Eskimo is more observant.

"They are afraid because they accept fully what is violent and tragic in nature."

Too often this is a reality I seek to deny.

I think it is time to list some concrete fears:

fear of death
of illness
of pain
of suffering
of despair
of not understanding
of disturbance or reversal of powers
of being unloved
of the unknown or strange
of destruction
of humiliation
of degradation
of poverty
of hunger
of aging
of unworthiness
of transgression
of punishment
of making a mistake
of loss of dignity
of failure
of oblivion
of outliving the mind
of eating an anchovy

These are not simian fears. These are human fears.

In this particular moment I am not fearful.  At worst I am vaguely anxious regarding distant possibilities.

But of Ruefle's list there are three (in bold) which I expect an MRI would display as small fireworks.

For each there is precedent and there is a presenting cause.  In each case, I am proactive in preventing and mitigating.

But much - most - is beyond my influence.

I like anchovies.

And George Oppen, who said, “Great artists are those, in the end, who do not have a failure of nerve.” Afraid, yes, but there they are, having locked themselves alone in a room with fear. Or as someone else might put it: “Blank pages—shoot-out at the O.K. Corral.” 

George Oppen's mother committed suicide when he was four. His step-mother was a stereotype.

As a teenager he lost control of a car and a friend was killed in the crash.

He was expelled from high school and college.

He began a publishing house at the dawn of the depression. It failed.

In his thirties Oppen stopped writing poetry, joined the communist party, rejected the communist party, joined the US Army, was seriously wounded fighting Nazis and awarded the Purple Heart.

After the war he was hounded by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. He moved to Mexico, became a carpenter, and began writing poetry again.

In 1968 Oppen's Of Being Numerous was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.

Oppen wrote:

A small room, the varnished floor Making an L around the bed,  

What is or is true as Happiness 

Windows opening on the sea, The green painted railings of the balcony 

Against the rock, the bushes and the sea running.

Or Milton’s “equal poise of hope and fear”? Or Blake’s “fearful symmetry”? 

Which is more inexpressible, the beautiful or the terrifying? Gerard Manley Hopkins, in his last, troubled sonnets, cries out, “O which one? is it each one?” Lorca says, 

The poet who embarks on the creation of the poem (as I know by experience), begins with the aimless sensation of a hunter about to embark on a night hunt through the remotest of forests. Unaccountable dread stirs in his heart. 

And Edmond Jabès, in The Book of Questions: “If you bend over your page...and do not suddenly tremble with fear, throw away your pen. Your writing would have little value.”

"The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom." (Proverbs 1:7)

A translation of the original Hebrew could also be rendered as: "Being astonished by what exists is the best part of perception."

Writing has particular worth when it helps the writer or reader more fully notice (perhaps discern, but at least notice) the wealth of reality.

“Thank you,” I said, before hanging up, and then I heard my friend Reinhard say, “Faulkner, however, said that for a writer, the basest of all things is to be afraid.” My mind quickly came to the conclusion Faulkner was drunk at the time. But perhaps he was thinking about writer’s block, the inability of a writer to do that which is most natural to him: to encounter fear, to face fear; a fear of being alone with fear... 

Roethke: “Fear was my father, Father Fear./His look drained the stones.” 

Auden: “Fear gave his watch no look.” 

Neruda: “When I was a young poet I was full of fear like a real rat in a corner.” 

 And what are we to make of Wordsworth, “Fostered alike by beauty and by fear”?

When denied or indulged fear will never stop feeding, eating away each opportunity..

But if we can embrace it, name it, and discipline what we fear, it is a source of strength.

The Greek origin of fear, πειράζω or peirazo, suggests a trial, test, or temptation.  It is to see if something unprecedented can be done.

One Greek dictionary offers, "It is to try, make trial of, test: for the purpose of ascertaining his quality, or what he thinks, or how he will behave himself."

In the Gospel of Matthew we read that Jesus was led into the wilderness for peirazo: To confront his fears, to know his fears, to decide what he thinks and what he will do.

And then he quoted Nietzsche: “The degree of fearfulness is one measure of intelligence.” It was better than I had hoped. Cut the throttle and punch the dive brakes. “Fear is to recognize ourselves.” As far back as I could remember, every minute of my life had been an emergency in which I was paralyzed with fear. Feelings of fear, being at least in part cognitive, and therefore thoughts, often constitute knowledge. For instance, the knowledge that one is going to die. This is a fear one can have while lying in a hammock on a beautiful day. And it can lead to an emergency of feeling that often results in a poem.

Henry Nouwen writes, "Our own experience with loneliness, depression, and fear can become a gift for others, especially when we have received good care. As long as our wounds are open and bleeding, we scare others away. But after someone has carefully tended to our wounds, they no longer frighten us or others."

Writing a poem is one of many creative responses by which we care for our own wounds and share the gifts of care with others.  In the poetics of bread making or gardening or chopping wood, fear becomes as yeast, moist soil, or the sun of summer on a freezing cold night. Fear is energy.

The cognitive transformation of fear-as-emotion into fear-as-feeling is to domesticate what is threatening into a friend, a helper, even that which may save my life.

I was a fool on a fool’s errand. Out of the fear of being a fool, I wanted to tell them that the fear they were trained to overcome was an emotion and not a feeling; after all, these were both life-threatening situations and their reactions were pure instinct, albeit professional ones. But I have professional instincts as well, professional instincts I employ while writing a poem. I was hopelessly confused and felt my sense of self-worth losing altitude; in situations like this I pick up the phone and call my friend, the German philosopher. “Reinhard,” I shouted into the phone, “What do you think about fear?” “Yikes!” he shouted back, “I am afraid of dogs.” At last, a friend.

We can each be informed by fear.

What we do with the information depends on the fear, our options, and particular personality.

Suppressing both the source of our fear and our own sense of fear is common.

Avoiding dogs is an option.

Avoidance, suppression, and separation have their costs.

Then the doctor and the pilot, who were in the same room with me, looked at me and said, “So, have you ever had any poetry emergencies?”

Several threats emerge each day. They can spoil verse, prose, and equipoise. Several opportunities emerge each day. They can be as disruptive.

Creation is complicated whether we create with words or hands or otherwise. Whatever else is involved, the mind is our principal creative tool.

The surgeon and the pilot were, as far as I can tell, not being creative They were being procedural, instrumental, managing rather than creating.  For them fear emerges suddenly, unexpectedly and is always something to suppress.

For the creator fear is a constant companion, because failure is more likely than success. The new perception, conception, construction-of-reality - progeny of a promiscuous imagination - is unlikely to survive the day.  We know this in the morning as we begin.  There are evenings we give thanks for what has not survived, for we have seen it was not good.

In each failed creation we experience our own mortality, we anticipate our own demise, we see our own final failure. Knowing this is more likely than not, each morning we awake and take up fear with our coffee, our hammer or broom or brush, our keys or keyboard, our welding torch and flux, whatever the tools of our creative craft: fear is part of the mix.

I asked a pilot about fear. The pilot said, “The only way to overcome fear is to do what you are trained to do. Fear is overcome by procedure. For example, I was flying a test jet alone at thirty thousand feet and there was a leak in my oxygen mask I didn’t know about. I temporarily lost consciousness, and when I came to I was at fifteen thousand feet heading straight for the ground, nose down, completely out of control—and I was still groggy, still fighting for consciousness. Cut the throttle and punch the dive brakes. Cut the throttle and punch the dive brakes. Cut the throttle and punch the dive brakes. Those were the only thoughts I had, and I continued to have them until I leveled out at five thousand feet.”

What if overcoming is the wrong goal?

Are there fears to be embraced?

Are there fears that unfold to fulfillment?

Can the emotion of fear be shaped into feelings of appreciation... reverence... love...?

What can consciousness do with fear?

How might fear inform intelligence?

What can intelligence make better because of fear?

And that is where I want to take up our fear again. I asked a doctor about fear. The doctor said, “The only way to overcome fear is to do what you are trained to do. Fear is overcome by procedure. For example, if I don’t successfully insert an emergency trach—a hole in the throat—someone will die from lack of oxygen. So I mechanically do what I have been trained to do. Someone is there, periodically calling out the oxygen saturation—95, 90, 88, 83, 79—and the lower it gets the more of an emergency it becomes. And the funny thing is, I ask for the count. It is part of the procedure, but I work as if I am not listening—procedural concentration is all.”

What if your procedure is to listen?

Perhaps you listen with even greater focus, more actively.

What is causing the fear? Why am I afraid of this?

What does my fear say about me? About the situation?

How might the situation be changed -- how might I change -- to lessen the fear?

At this juncture it might be instructive of me to look up at you and say, “Try putting less emotion, and more feeling, into your poems.” The fact that neurobiologists have publicly announced the separation of emotion from feeling should be heartening news to poets everywhere, for it implies that to have feelings is on par with highly sophisticated cognitive systems. Feelings are not subpar. On the other hand, lest we forget, let me repeat: to be more emotional and less cognitive is to be less evolved than the species is able to be. It is to be like a four-year-old child. Feelings seem to represent a place where emotions combine with intelligence and experience to create a highly personal thought process that results in an individual’s worldview.

From the Phaedrus, beginning at 246:

We will liken the soul to the composite nature of a pair of winged horses and a charioteer. Now the horses and charioteers of the gods are all good and of good descent, but those of other races are mixed; and first the charioteer of the human soul drives a pair, and secondly one of the horses is noble and of noble breed, but the other quite the opposite in breed and character. Therefore in our case the driving is necessarily difficult and troublesome.

Continuing at 248:

... that which is best follows after God and is most like him, raises the head of the charioteer up into the outer region and is carried round in the revolution, troubled by the horses and hardly beholding the realities; and another sometimes rises and sometimes sinks, and, because its horses are unruly, it sees some things and fails to see others. The other souls follow after, all yearning for the upper region but unable to reach it, and are carried round beneath, trampling upon and colliding with one another, each striving to pass its neighbor. So there is the greatest confusion and sweat of rivalry, wherein many are lamed, and many wings are broken through the incompetence of the drivers; and after much toil they all go away without gaining a view of reality, and when they have gone away they feed upon opinion. But the reason of the great eagerness to see where the plain of truth is, lies in the fact that the fitting pasturage for the best part of the soul is in the meadow there, and the wing on which the soul is raised up is nourished by this. And this is a law of Destiny, that the soul which follows after God and obtains a view of any of the truths is free from harm until the next period, and if it can always attain this, is always unharmed; but when, through inability to follow, it fails to see, and through some mischance is filled with forgetfulness and evil and grows heavy, and when it has grown heavy, loses its wings and falls to the earth...

Translation by Henry N. Fowler