Well, yes and no. . .

Novelist E.M. Forster’s exhortation: “Only connect!” Literary critic Frederic Jameson’s exhortation: “Always historicize!”

Well, yes and no. . .The ethnographer and writer, Michel Leiris, writes about the need “to merge the yes and the no.” “Between yes and no” is the title of an early essay by Camus. The work of Elizabeth Bishop was “perhaps more a quiet no than a great big yes,” according to another poet. More severe, “Herman Melville praised Nathaniel Hawthorne: ‘He says NO! in thunder; but the Devil himself cannot make him say yes. For all men who say yes, lie’”, records the critic, Christopher Ricks, who then asks: “But what about saying, ‘Yes, but…?’”

Ricks is spot-on. In the same way as dark energy and dark matter are said to make up the vast portion of the universe, politics, policy and management are grasped only because of–not in spite of–the not-knowing, difficulty and inexperience, all around and in between. I wonder if this might be how best to read the famous last sentence in James Joyce’s Ulysses: “yes I said yes I will Yes.”

So what?

To govern, they say, is to choose. But choose between an irresistible-Yes and an unmovable-No? Better to say: No one governs innocently, yes?