NEGATIVE CAPABILITY
We don't know everything, neither do we need to.
I interviewed Dad for a newspaper about his strong opinions on PSA tests and screening for prostate cancer, which he is also dying of and recently crippled by. He has a disease progression extremely similar to Joe Biden (who is just six months his senior, both are 82).
On trend!
The newspaper piece is truncated, neat and avoids criticism of celebrity voices in healthcare and omits Dad’s more frank reflections on things like losing genitourinary function.
This is pretty much the conversation in full, just tidied up between midnight and 2.30am on Sunday (tidying up still takes time, writing still takes time, editing takes time.
Am I biased in thinking Dad’s dealing with it all rather elegantly?
Does the morphine help, I haven’t asked that yet but in my experience the drugs do work. But my Dad’s best friend at medical school became an eminent psychiatrist. Her daughter tells me she rejected pain relief in her last months and was apparently angry, distressed, bitter (but still clever and funny). I would struggle to see that. I get the impression it was hard for her daughters.
His attitude to death is refreshingly cool for me especially.
I have been stuck down a professional hole of deeply neurotic, nay totally mental, science-sounding but largely not, longevity medicine for a few years. Longevity medicine and its science is somewhat dubious, the promises the field makes are questionable because there is still a great deal we don’t know about why, how and what drives the ageing process, and certainly a lot we don’t know about treatments to slow it. But longevity docs are reluctant to admit that, supplement companies are completely incapable of it. So the field is full of half-arsed extrapolations posing as knowns. What’s known is lifestyle impacts massively on your longevity, as well as genetics and environmental factors. Supplements, not so much. If at all. Not that you’d know it.
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My brother recorded some audio one hot day last week at a hospital on the edge of the Savernake Forest.
It’s Dad talking about Keats’ and his concept of Negative Capability, and the need to accept that we don’t know everything and to allow - and enjoy - some mystery in life. The picture above is Dad leafing through The Letters of John Keats trying to find the page reference where Keats describes negative capability in a letter to his brothers.
Spicer family members in the room fail to quote any Shakespeare, but Dad manages to recite the St Crispin’s Day speech “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers…” etc, from Henry Vth.
My 14 year old nephew’s only line of Shakespeare is, “To be or not to be, that is the question,” which we all know from Hamlet. Its 1600, Hamlet, is contemplating the big existential question that also plagued the groovy French Existentialists Camus, Sartre, et al, in mid 20th Century Paris. Should we suffer life’s trials, or end it all.
To live is a gift, but it is also suffering, uncertainty and the unknown. The Existentialists knew it. William Shakespeare knew it. Marianne Faithful knew it. (Longevity medicine, not a lot of negative capability in sight.) Noble Rot’s Dan Keeling, is a big fan of negative capability when it comes to tasting wine, a practice plagued by pompous ideas about what is right and learned and correct and that ruins the experience of tasting wine sometimes. Dan says, do it, and enjoy the fact you don’t know, the mystery is the marvel in wine.
Death is the ultimate example of this radical unknown, and Keats’ was not alone in seeing death as the essential light in which beauty appears.
I think Dad was thinking about this a lot in his early days in hospital. Live and suffer the horror of pain and paralysis or design your early Sortie. And while he has quite horrendous days sometimes, he also, finds pleasure and beauty in things, and that’s the counterpoint, the polar opposite, to the suffering and uncertainty. That is life. And it goes on. Until it doesn’t.
Here’s the screening conversation, below, free to read.
