Eight Ways to Be Negative
Have a bad attitude.
To be negative is to express doubt, disapproval, or despair. Even caution can be perceived as negativity. So can sadness. People often say to sad people, or people who are afraid and uncertain, don’t be so negative. Frank Sinatra sang, “Accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative, don’t mess with Mr. In-Between.” Of course, Sinatra was singing to himself, having attempted suicide three times by then. My sister, in the most acute stages of schizophrenia, talks about rape, murder, the gassing of people, and being what she calls afeared.
Be the opposite.
A negative can be an opposite, a twin in reverse. In photography, a negative is an image made on film or glass in which light and shade switch places.
Sometimes my sister refers to two versions of each of our long-dead parents and calls them by different names.
Draw.
Art teachers tell students to draw negative space. This means to draw the space between and around things, to understand those things by what they are not. The poet Howard Lemerov said if you want to see something, look at something else. In Moby-Dick, Melville observes that to enjoy bodily warmth, some part of you must remain cold.
Members of a family often define themselves by how they are unalike. Sometimes, that feels like a distinction without a difference. My sister’s schizophrenia is really our schizophrenia although it affects us differently. The negative space between us is what connects us.
Veto something.
To negative someone is to refuse to accept them. One way to negative a person is to label them as evil. People with schizophrenia sometimes do things that cause other people to see them as evil.
Be less than zero.
But what is less than zero?
Have planets in Virgo, Taurus, Capricorn, Scorpio, Cancer, or Pisces.
In astrology, water and earth signs are negative. That means that people with a preponderance of planets in those signs focus their energy inward while people with more planets in fire and air signs are more social and self-expressive. Most people’s charts have a mix of negative and positive planets. My sister’s sun and moon are in Scorpio and all her planets are in the Western hemisphere. Astrologically speaking, this means she is extremely negative, which is to say inward. She has not left the property of our childhood home in over forty years.
Don’t smile.
In schizophrenia, the term negative symptoms means the absence of normal behaviors. An example is anhedonia, the inability to feel pleasure. Woody Allen wanted to title “Annie Hall” Anhedonia but was advised not to. Allen has since been accused of child sexual abuse, the experience of which is believed by some to trigger schizophrenia in children who already have biological tendencies to that disease, although no one can point to its exact cause. People with schizophrenia also exhibit positive symptoms, which have a negative effect. They hear voices that threaten and shame them, and sometimes react in ways that cause other people to make snap judgments about their dangerousness, i.e. negative them, thus getting them shot and creating a negative space, which is to say a hole, in their bodies.
Postpone judgment.
John Keats coined the term negative capability to describe the state of being comfortable in uncertainty, mystery, and doubt. This state acknowledges realms of truth beyond our comprehension and enables a person to not jump to conclusions, to shuck off assumptions. Keats thought this state of mind made a person receptive to beauty and truth in a way that active pursuit of those qualities did not. This trait is annoying to those who value speed.
I once worked at a place where we were taught business slogans. One was “Speed is life.” I thought that was funny, but my boss didn’t. Hence, my natural propensity toward negative capability caused me to be perceived as having a bad attitude, making me negative-times-two. In this case, two negatives did not make a positive.
Negative capability is the opposite of snap judgement. F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose wife Zelda was diagnosed with schizophrenia and whose journals he plundered for material, said the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time. Others would say that opposites, like negative and positive numbers of the same value, cancel each other, adding up to or rounding down to zero. But what is zero if not the roundest number of all, a circle both empty and endlessly full, floating between realms of assigned value, bloated with negative space?
My sister lives in a constant state of negative capability. Many things are possible at once, in her mind. Once, when asked her age, she said, “47 or 100.” And why is this not also true?
Margaret Hawkins writes essays, stories, novels, and unclassifiable stuff about art and ideas. Also a memoir. Her short fiction has appeared in The Missouri Review and Minerva Rising Press. Her third novel was published by Penguin. Her essays have run in the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Sun-Times, Brevity, The Perch (Yale) and elsewhere. Currently she writes for The Democracy Chain and teaches writing at Loyola University and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She lives north of Chicago with her husband and her dog.
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