John Keats was a Romantic poet. He died young but in a short life penned unforgettable poems. In a letter to a friend he presented a theory about art (and life) by offering the insight of ‘Negative Capability’: When a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. Keats felt having that capability was the key to creative work. That’s a mouthful, but if you can digest his words, they’re more nourishing than you might think.
In the arctic, Solo canoeing is an exercise in negative capability. I live in uncertainty. I have a lot of doubts, and I’ve engaged one of the largest mysteries there is: solitude in nature, weeks at a time, if not months. Which is the larger wilderness? What’s going on inside me? Or what’s going on around me? Combine those ingredients and it’s a recipe for negative capability. On early trips, with no tracking devices, or satelite phones, before leaving, the pilot and I would pick an island, or a point on the river, and he’d say: “you’d better be there.” I made sure I was. I was lucky. A search would be worse than looking for the proverbial needle.
I love maps. They are fact and reason. Don’t argue with your map. When I argue it’s usually me that’s wrong, not the map. I don’t take them out much anymore, but I carry them. The pleasure is to invert ‘my map’, and have mystery, uncertainty, and doubt be my guides. Often, they are joined by one other: fear. She’s always around, or not far away. I feel alive, even emboldened, when I embrace them. If I go by the map, I don’t look around. I’m less curious. I’m just passing through, less a part of the river. I use 250s, or four miles to the inch, and that’s enough information. On trips, in the top third of the Back river, I’d run into canoeists, not many, but some, always in a group, always eager to make miles. I’d extoll the beauties of the thinner, upper river, its intimacy, and say it’s the best part, don’t go so fast. I could see them mentally consult their map. They’d explain they had limited time. They had a lot of miles to cover, and no extra time. I sympathized. On my first trips, I traveled like a bullet. I reveled in it, and felt like little Jack Horner, saying, “Oh, what a good boy am I…!”
Now?
I feel lucky. Lucky to be here. I’m savoring. Yesterday, I saw something new, something I’d never seen, although I’d always looked at it. We’re trained to notice movement in the landscape. In the north, it’s the caribou, the river, or bear, wolf, ground squirrel, fox, or the weather. The landscape is a backdrop, a stage. Like staring at a rock, it’s static. Yesterday, in the morning, I looked up from my coffee and saw the landscape, really saw it, as dynamic and alive. It could have been an animal. There was nothing backdrop about it. The difference was between looking at a guitar and hearing someone play it. I was stunned.
