Keats’s Phrase

My father’s been dead for thirty years but when he appears behind my shoulder offering advice, or condemnation, or a quiet pride in something I’ve done that isn’t even thistledown or tiny shavings of balsa wood in the eyes of the world —“Albie, grip in the middle and turn with a steady pressure”—it’s measurable, if not the way the wind is in a sock, or ohms, or net-and-gross, it registers the way an absence sometimes does, and I listen to him with a care I never exhibited when he was a presence, alive, in his undershirt, chewing his tiny licorice pellets and radiating a rough-hewn love. “Negative capability”—the phrase of course is Keats’s, from his letters, but we make it ours a hundred times a day. A hundred times we do our own pedestrian version of early maritime cartography: the known world stops, and over its edge the fuddled mapmaker writes Here There Be Monsters and then illustrates their non-existing coiled lengths and hell-breath with a color-splotched vivacity he wouldn’t waste on inhabited shores. Or: “Don’t think of a polar bear!”...the game one plays with a child. But I say with adult certainty that when Eddie’s wife Fiona went back to stripping he couldn’t stand to be at the club and see, and yet those empty hours in his mind were populated just as unbearably—and indeed, yes, there were monsters in that void, and the vigilant bears of insecurity and jealousy padded hungrily behind his eyes each night until her return. For Keats, however, the force that emptiness makes kinetic is a positive one, the way that the invisible, unknowable “dark energy” is seminal, a kind of funding agency or sugar daddy powering the universe in all its spangled beauty and veiled mystery from behind the scenes. Last night, a woozy few of us were mourning the demise of The Dusty Bookshelf. “Well I tried to support it,” I said, “by stopping in from time to time.” And B, the king of local kleptobibliomania, with his nimble touch and expando-capacious overalls, said “I tried to support it by not going in.”