Negative Capability and Synchronicity

This morning, I read an analysis of President Obama's Nobel Peace Prize speech by Hendrik Hertzberg of the New Yorker. Hertzberg loved Obama's speech for it's echoes of the thought of American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, "with its consciousness of contingency, its tragic sense of history, and its awareness of radical human imperfection."

But Hertzberg truly loves Obama (and his Nobel speech) for the same reason that his colleague George Packer does:

Working out apparent contradictions, reconciling irreconcilables, finding balances, living with paradox—these are the intellectual bread and butter of Obama’s politics. “We can acknowledge that oppression will always be with us, and still strive for justice,” Obama concluded. “We can understand that there will be war, and still strive for peace.” He is the negative-capability President.

"Negative capability" is a great term that I had never heard of before today. It was coined by the poet John Keats to describe "when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason." I don't know anything about the Romantic poets, but I think that both Romanticism and negative capability seem like some sort of response to the limitations of rationality when confronted with people's actual lived experience.

I was thinking about negative capability and the limits of reason later in the day while walking to Indigo to search for the Library of America's Collected Works of Raymond Carver. I found the Library of America section (why does Indigo put them in their own separate section instead of mixed into the regular shelves by author?). There was no Raymond Carver there - only a shelf full of writers I didn't want to read.

Disappointed, I picked up a book of stories by Alexander Pushkin.  I opened the book randomly to the middle of the introduction and read that "negative capability" was the source of Pushkin's great genius.

It seems odd to run into that phrase twice in one day after never seeing it before in my life. Is that pure coincidence?  I suppose that it was, but it felt significant. That weird feeling of significance was either just apophenia (the perception of patterns in random, unrelated data) or it was an example of Carl Jung's synchronicity (multiple, casually unrelated events happening together in a meaningful way).

I think that a lot of Jung's work has really been discredited now, but I like that idea of meaningful coincidences. It seems like a good companion to Keats' negative capability. Concepts for those at war with strict rationality.

So if it was synchronicity, a meaningful coincidence, then what does it mean that I read the phrase "negative capability" twice in one day? Is this like dream interpretation? I'll have to give it more thought.

More importantly, why did Sting write a song about synchronicity but not about negative capability?