Hope All The While (intermisunderstanding)

every person, place and thing in the chaosmos of Alle anyway connected with the gobblydumped turkery was moving and changing every part of the time: the travelling inkhorn (possibly pot), the hare and turtle pen and paper, the continually more and less intermisunderstanding minds of the anticollaborators, the as time went on as it will variously inflected, differently pronounced, otherwise spelled, changeably meaning vocable scriptsigns. No, so holp me Petault, it is not a miseffectual whyacinthinous riot of blots and blurs and bars and balls and hoops and wriggles and juxtaposed jottings linked by spurts of speed: it only looks as like it as damn it; and, sure, we ought really to rest thankful that at this deleteful hour of dungflies dawning we have even a written on with dried ink scrap of paper at all to show for ourselves, tare it or leaf it, (and we are lufted to ourselves as the soulfisher when he led the cat out of the bout) after all that we lost and plundered of it even to the hidmost coignings of the earth and all it has gone through and by all means, after a good ground kiss to Terracussa and for wars luck our lefftoff's flung over our home homoplate, cling to it as with drowning hands, hoping against hope all the while that, by the light of philophosy, (and may she never folsage us!) things will begin to clear up a bit one way or another within the next quarrel of an hour and be hanged to them as ten to one they will too, please the pigs, as they ought to categorically, as, strictly between ourselves, there is a limit to all things so this will never do.

--James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 118-119

Thinking of this passage, and others like it in FW, since I am living in the Czech Republic, it would make sense that I would be reminded of Milan Kundera's notion of the wisdom of uncertainty, or the idea that we shouldn't allow ourselves to believe we completely understand anything. This only makes sense since things change, as hinted in the above quote. Take science. Please. (drumfill) Science doesn't claim to understand the mechanics of our universe. This is a fact no scientist would dispute; otherwise, he'd lose his research grants. However, in a way, science lacks Kundera's wisdom since it's ultimate aim is in fact to understand everything. That's the point of the scientific project. Built into the wisdom of uncertainty is the idea that we will never completely understand everything, so the moment we allow ourselves to believe that we have, or even can have, the final handle on whatever is the moment we enter delusion.

Fine. Simple as pi.

But deeper than that, I think, is Keats' idea of negative capability. Keats formulated it centuries before Kundera, and still his thought went deeper. Keats understood that our knowledge is incomplete, and he not only accepted it, as does Kundera, but Keats actually encourages us to embrace the uncertainty. Do not become irritated by that which you cannot understand. Learn to move within it--turn it into a dance, and if you cannot understand this step (who, what, where, when, why), let it go and slide into the next, for the next beat is always coming: it's already here.

Joyce, I think, was the first writer who managed to teach negative capability through his fiction. He had to destroy the traditional techniques of realism to do so. Subsequent writers--I think of Pynchon & PKD--found new ways to accomplish the same thing, but Joyce did it first and with greater art.

What I love about the quote above is how I sense I could almost understand it while knowing, or, better, feeling that understanding is not--I hope I can at least suggest such a thing--the point.

Poetry:

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor

fleshless;

Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance

is,

But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,

Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement

from nor towards,

Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still

point,

There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

--T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets: Burnt Norton, 62-67