The thoughts in the link below about John Keats stand out to me in light of our class conversations. I am imagining Mallarme's ability within himself to walk through the extreme misery of his up-endedness, his unknown, that place without meaning where even the ego cannot comfort us. Rather than create meaning, it seems at least from the author's perspective below that Keats received into being, what was. The Taoists see receptivity as the complement to creativity--that when heaven moves into the earth, when creative force meets receptive devotion, the 10,000 things come into being. "To let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thought" causes me to think of Alex's shaking invisible dice on Friday and winding up in Virgil, then Walser, then Seurat, then Goethe... Arriving unintendedly (yes I meant that word) where one means to be.
"In recent years critical attention has focused on Keats's
philosophy,which involves not abstract thought
but rather absolute receptivity to experience.
This attitude is indicated in his celebrated term
"negative capability"—"to let the mind be a
thoroughfare for all thought.""
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