Intercultural Geopoetics in Kenneth White's Open World [1 ed.] 9781527500761, 9781443893534

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Intercultural Geopoetics in Kenneth White’s Open World

Intercultural Geopoetics in Kenneth White’s Open World By

Mohammed Hashas

Intercultural Geopoetics in Kenneth White’s Open World By Mohammed Hashas This book first published 2017 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2017 by Mohammed Hashas All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-9353-6 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-9353-4

To the memory of my grandfather Ali, who chose Mestegmer village as our family dwelling; To the seekers of plural thinking in the age of global injustice and fear.

All day I think about it, then at night I say it. Where did I come from, and what am I supposed to be doing? I have no idea. My soul is from elsewhere, and I’m sure of that, and I intend to end up there. Why do you stay in prison when the door is so wide open? Move outside the tangle of fear-thinking. Live in silence. Notice how each particle moves. Notice how everyone has just arrived here from a journey. Be melting snow. Wash yourself of yourself. —Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi (1207–1273), in The Essential Rumi, trans. Coleman Barks, et al. (1997). The cosmos speaks to man and all of its phenomena contain meaning. —Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Man and Nature: The Spiritual Crisis in Modern Man (1968). Man is inherently not a discontinuous whole […]. Our relationship with the world is no longer one where we seek to take away all the secrets of the world in order to exploit it, but to discover them in order to people and develop the earth; nor is this relationship one of detachment from the universe’s phenomena but of harmony with them because they are the only key to its innermost secrets. —Taha Abderrahmane, The Spirit of Modernity [Rnj‫ۊ‬u l-‫ۊ‬adƗ‫ܔ‬a] (2006). [T]he ecological crisis […], in my view, is the result not of scientific deficiencies, but of a faulty relation between modern (chiefly Western) humanity and nature or the cosmos. If this is so, then the basic relationship between nature and humanity needs to be recast, in the direction of replacing the model of human mastery over nature with the model of mutual dependence and ecological responsibility. To a considerable extent, this change requires a dramatic new learning process: where the modern West is willing to learn both from countercurrents in Western thought and from older ethical and cosmological traditions of the non-West. —Fred Dallmayr, Return to Nature? An Ecological Counterhistory (2011).

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements .................................................................................... ix Foreword .................................................................................................... xi The Geopoet: Agent of Intercultural Exchange Khalid Hajji Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Part I .......................................................................................................... 11 Geopoetics: Transdisciplinary Beginnings, Open Perspectives 1. Culture, Place, World ....................................................................... 11 2. Poetry, Philosophy, Science ............................................................. 17 3. Intellectual Nomadism ..................................................................... 25 Part II ......................................................................................................... 29 Territories and Trajectories: With the Companions of the Road 1. Europe: Leaving the Discontent of Civilization ............................... 31 2. America: Accompanying the ‘Gang of Kosmos’ ............................. 42 3. Asia: Void, Whiteness, and the Possibilities of Reinvigoration....... 61 Part III........................................................................................................ 83 Kenneth White: From Intellectual Nomadism to the Open World 1. Nomadizing: Listening to Land and Mind ....................................... 84 2. Dwelling: Into the White World ...................................................... 95 3. Writing: From Landscape-Mindscape to Wordscape..................... 112 Conclusion ............................................................................................... 125 Afterword ................................................................................................ 131 The Importance of Being a Geopoet Francesca M. Corrao

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Bibliography ............................................................................................ 135 Appendix ................................................................................................. 139 Kenneth White: Titles and Distinctions, Biographical Notes, and Further Index ........................................................................................................ 151

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work owes much to special names. First, I am very thankful to Professor Khalid Hajji from whom I first heard about geopoetics in 2004– 2005 at Mohammed I University in Oujda, Morocco, and who later encouraged me to opt for writing about it when I consulted him about that. Later I came to know that Hajji was one of the students of Kenneth White at La Sorbonne, a founding member of the International Institute of Geopoetics in 1989 in Paris, and the one who introduced geopoetics to the Arab readership through an interview he had with White in the then widely circulated cultural magazine al-munұataf in 1995. I am also very thankful to Professor Omar Bsaithi, who provided the first material that opened my mind to geopoetics texts. This book is a revised and updated version of my first MA monograph, originally entitled ‘Kenneth White’s Geopoetics: A New World Opening’. I also warmly thank Professor Mohamed Dellal, head of the English Department and MA Programme in Humanities and Area Studies at the time, who offered valuable remarks, as well as having encouraged the development of this new research field. I am equally grateful to Kenneth White for the material he sent me and for the email exchanges I had with him while reading and writing on geopoetics, unfailingly stamped with his ‘geopoetic salutations’. Abdelhak Hashas, my cousin in Paris, offered me a valuable service by sending me a list of books which I could not easily access. I should also thank Dr Nesrin Eruysal in Turkey, Dr Simone Sibilio in Italy, Mr Norman Bissell in Scotland, and Dr Michèle Duclos in France for their geopoetic accompagnement from a distance, and their encouraging feedback. Warm thanks go also to Elizabeth Rimmer and Luke Finley for their meticulous proofreading of the manuscript. Two articles were previously published out of this work, the first on ‘The American Proto-Geopoetician: Henry David Thoreau’, in the Online Journal of the Scottish Centre for Geopoetics, directed and edited by Norman Bissell (February 2015), and the second, ‘Geopoetics Call’, by the Muslim Institute in London in its special issue of Critical Muslim on Nature, directed and edited by Ziauddin Sardar (July 2016). Principally to these and to my parents, brother, and sisters, I extend my gratitude and thanks.

FOREWORD THE GEOPOET: AGENT OF INTERCULTURAL EXCHANGE KHALID HAJJI PRESIDENT, BRUSSELS FORUM OF WISDOM AND WORLD PEACE

Almost every time you mention the word ‘geopoetics’ someone will jump up to correct you: ‘Did you mean geopolitics?’ Indeed, it is not clear what it means to be a geopoet, especially in today’s troubled world, where focusing on the private, poetic quest of the world, instead of politics, might be perceived as a stratagem to dodge the thorny issues of colonization, of culture and imperialism, or of unjust economic globalization. At best, the geopoetic quest for meaning and geography, or for a new mindscape, can be judged to be too radical to be of any practical relevance. However, while thinking about what to write in this foreword, I came to realize that geopoetics has already become a tradition that binds one to both master and student. For Kenneth White is my ex-teacher; Mohammed Hashas is my ex-student. My impression is that beyond media brouhaha, which comments on the atrocities happening under our gaze, something fundamental is in the process of being anchored in our ways of thinking about the world. There is a palpable, growing need among scholars and students to call upon poetics to provide our experience of a shattered world with some cohesion and coherence. What I retain from the precious, unforgettable seminars given by Kenneth White in La Sorbonne is the deep conviction that poetry matters when it comes to leaving what he terms ‘the motorway of Western civilization’. With the passing of time and after years of teaching experience, this conviction has crystallized into a firm belief that poetry matters when it comes to leaving the motorways of all civilizations and cultures. In fact, one of the key elements of geopoetics is ‘intellectual nomadism’, or wandering in uncharted territories in search of signs that hint at unsuspected harmonious wholes.

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Foreword

Intellectual nomads, endowed with genuine geopoetic sensibility, can transcend cultural boundaries to listen to the ‘melodious character of Earth’, to use Walt Whitman’s expression. By placing Earth at the centre of human experience, geopoetics equips us today to rethink the relationship between language and being, as it alerts our minds to hidden dimensions that are common to human existence, independently from cultural belonging. No doubt, the space opened by geopoetics furthers the merging of networks of energies into a new intellectual force, capable of federating efforts, of undertaking common action in order to ensure a better future for the planet. By grounding multiple forms of artistic expression in Earth, geopoetics contributes to blurring cultural borders, empowering hence the geopoet as an agent of intercultural exchange. In the Arab context, geopoetics is felt as an attempt at resuscitating the original meaning of shi’r (poetry) which confounds both poetic and ontological heroism. Etymologically, the shƗ’ir, or poet, is capable of ‘feeling existence to the extent of having goosebumps’, is capable of finding the adequate words and word order to express this feeling of existence. Only men and women of such ilk could extract us today from the banality and mediocrity of our so-called wars of cultures, renew our sense of being in the World, and find a new approach to thinking how to inhabit the Earth. Mohammed Hashas’ words about geopoetics are laden with significance. Beyond the ambitious goal Hashas has set for himself – to open an interdisciplinary space where geopoetics and interculturalism draw on each other – his passionate endeavour to give geopoetic awareness a foothold in Arabic culture and history of ideas is evidence enough to corroborate the claim that geopoetics is not a culture-bound phenomenon, but rather a fundamental quest of meaning likely to appeal to young, dynamic talents throughout the world. In depth, Hashas’ reading of Kenneth White’s project is a worthwhile contribution to laying the foundation for a better understanding between cultures, namely Arabo-Islamic culture and Western culture. I take his succumbing to the charm of geopoetics as an unmistakable sign that Kenneth White’s hard efforts and intense activity are yielding the expected results outside Western culture. Hashas’ words comforted me in my first impressions, during my first encounter with Kenneth White, that geopoetics is a basic centrifugal activity, likely to untie the human mind from closed systems of thought, and spur it on to retrieve Earth and Language, our fields of being, from oblivion.

INTRODUCTION

My affinity with geopoetics was immediate, following my first encounter with it at the university in 2004–2005, for two main reasons, which I could outline as follows. The first reason is that it treats of human contact with nature, and my own story with nature must have played a major role in building this affinity. I grew up in a village, Mestegmer, in the east of Morocco, till the age of eight, and memories of natural scenery and direct contact with nature, animals, plants, and simple human life came back to me intensely when I started reading more about geopoetics. I found myself in it. It echoes parts of my past and my endeavours to keep that past alive though in different contexts, cities, and continents. Being a village kid gives you the chance to see, for example, the different stages of the growth of some domestic animals, and the different stages of the growth and death of certain trees and flowers; it also gives you the chance to befriend closely dogs, cats, cows, sheep, chickens, turkeys, pigeons, donkeys, and horses; it gives you the chance to plant tomatoes, potatoes, beans, melon, peach or olive trees, which, after months or years you go back and see are either gone or still there; they become part of your past and memory. That is a real natural life, which busy lifestyles and high-tech means of communication steal from us, if we do not pay attention to that natural memory and mundane contact with living entities around us. The value of life and our own individual life stem so much from that simple life and what it teaches about our being on earth, and our ability to situate ourselves in the natural world, with other animate and inanimate entities around us; it is about being, and not mere having. ‘Geopoetics is the antidote to world-poisoning, concerned, fundamentally, with a relationship to the earth and with the opening of a world.’1 The second reason why geopoetics attracted me is that intellectually it echoes a lot with the tradition I grew up in and with: the Arab-Islamic tradition, mixed with local traditions like those of the Amazighs, or Berbers, in Morocco. Maturity of wo-man is measured, among other things, by the ability to know the land, and how to live with it, in different seasons, for survival, and communion. It is the primary source of meaning 1

Kenneth White, The Wanderer and His Charts – Exploring the Fields of Vagrant Thought and Vagabond Beauty (Edinburgh: Polygon, 2004), 243–4.

2

Introduction

because it is the axis of contact with the self, society, and the cosmos. I had already read the philosophical narrative Hay Ibn Yagzan (known in the Latin world at the time as Philosophus Autodidactus) by the Andalusian philosopher Ibn Tufayl (1105–1185).2 This work, which is considered to have influenced Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and similar narratives, is the written existential call that the tradition I grew up with, or rather which I pursued, broadly teaches. When I read my first geopoetic texts – an excerpt from A Walk along the Shore (1980) and the full texts of Le Plateau de l’albatros: introducion à la géopoétique (1994) and The Wanderer and His Charts (2004), – and came across the concept of ‘intellectual nomadism’, I had the work of Ibn Tufayl thoroughly ingrained in my mind as an example of the individual’s quest for meaning through contact with earth and the cosmos. When I read the biography of the founder of geopoetics, the contemporary Kenneth White (b. 1936, Scotland), and his world travels later on, I also brought to mind the Moroccan world traveller Ibn Battuta (1304–1369) and his Ri‫ۊ‬la (Journey) narrative which narrates some thirty years of travels worldwide.3 I found more intertwining territories later when I found a way to, for example, Ibn Bajja’s (d. 1138) TadbƯr al-Mutawa‫ۊۊ‬id (Rule of the Solitary),4 Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854),5 and Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883).6 This to say that geographies and cultures are rich with figures that share open spirits that travel and enrich the self through contact with earth and the different other, and this is a shared value that the open and interconnected world of geopoetics calls for. The personal cannot be easily distanced from the intellectual and social. This makes the third additional point that makes geopoetics a radical contribution to modern debates on the management of diversity, theorized in various projects of multiculturalism and interculturalism – despite the claims of big political state figures of the death of (political) 2

Abu Bakr Ibn Tufayl, The History of Hay Ibn Yagzan, transl. Simon Ockley, intr. A.S. Fulton (New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company, n.d.); Samar Attar, The Vital Roots of European Enlightenment: Ibn Tufayl’s Influence on Modern Western Thought (Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2007). 3 Ross E. Dunn, The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the 14th Century (1986; Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 2012). 4 Ibn Bajja, TadbƯr al-Mutawa‫ۊۊ‬id [Rule of the Solitary] (Tunis: Cérès Editions, 1964). 5 Henry David Thoreau, Walden, ed. Owen Thomas (New York: Norton and Company, 1966). 6 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, ed. Adrian del Caro and Robert Pippin (1883; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

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multiculturalism: Angela Merkel, Germany’s Chancellor, in 2010, David Cameron, Prime Minister of Great Britain, and Nicolas Sarkozy, President of France, in 2011. In Beyond Good and Evil (1886), Nietzsche says that great philosophy is but a reflection of the philosopher’s confessions and memoirs, be s/he aware of that or not.7 He also says that ‘future philosophers’ are not dogmatic; they make a ‘new order’ that is ‘appearing’, and they are endowed with a ‘free spirit’. Kenneth White and his project of geopoetics may be read in this line of thought in this period of modern history. This makes geopoetics a political statement, a critique of exclusive policies, though its founder avoids labelling it or imprisoning it for now in one field; he defends its interdisciplinarity, as will be shown; still, my intention here is to point to one possible reading of the project, in the age of political and sociocultural malaise, fear, phobias, exclusive nationalisms and populisms. Geopoetics is an optimistic project for the future, despite the anguish that was behind its emanation – i.e. the malaise of the ‘Western tradition’ of especially the 1950s and 1960s post-world war period, during which the poet-philosopher Kenneth White started his project. Despite the hardships that surround its realization collectively, the geopoetic open world is not utopic. White says: Today, for the first time in the history of humanity, winds blow from all regions of the globe at once, and each and everyone of us has access to all the cultures of the world. That can give rise to cacophony, to disarray, lassitude in front of so much accumulated richness, but it can also give rise, with analytical work and synthesis […] to a new way of thinking, a great world poem, liveable by everyone.8

Though White appears so critical of Eurocentrism and its cultural malaise in the beginning, one can see that this step is overcome by opening up to world cultures, their richness, and by a return to a more accommodative, reinvigorated, and multicultural Europe. His intellectual anger and thirst reflects post-war Europe, and the productive intellectual period of the 1950s and 1960s. Since then a lot has happened inside Europe itself. A lot of world cultures have migrated to the same Europe that White left for reasons of intellectual nomadism. Migration flows from the rest of the world have reinvigorated the debate in Europe on various levels. For example, theories on postcolonialism, multiculturalism, interculturalism, 7

Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, ed. Rolf-Peter Horstmann and Judith Norman, transl. Judith Norman (1886; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 8 In Tony McManus, The Radical Field: Kenneth White and Geopoetics (Dingwall: Sandstone Press, 2007), 196.

4

Introduction

recognition, secularism, liberalism, religion and religiosity, the public sphere, and the identity of Europe have developed since then, and the geopoetic project is part of this development and an interdisciplinary contribution to it. It is by bearing this context in mind that geopoetics can be read as a radical call for more critique, and more opening up, against various exclusive dogmatic, ideological, philosophical, or religious discourses, and for a better future for wo-man and nature. With geopoetics, no one is only one thing; there are no independent and self-sufficient cultures or entities. Earth which embraces and nurtures diversity is at the centre of geopoetics; it is a force of cosmic unity and particularly complementarity that both individuals and societies should reflect upon when dealing with internal diversity so as to see the other dimensions of life that political and functional concepts such as ‘being a citizen’ in a ‘modern state’ do not grasp fully. Modernity requires the constant refreshing of the conception of man and land, and geopoetics is an intercultural project in that direction, in the sense that it not only recognizes linguistic, cultural, poetic, philosophic, and scientific diversity but demands a genuine interaction among its various components. Intercultural geopoetics, which is multiculturally dialogical, requires genuine interaction of different worldviews, cultures, philosophies, sciences, geographies, and modes of being, for the enlargement of human understanding of the de facto diversity the cosmos offers. While it appears to be predominantly a personal and existential quest, it cannot be only so, nor does it aim to be only so. Intercultural geopoetics is concerned with the future of man, human relations, and the world. The geopoetic self is Whitmanian (Walt Whitman, 1819–1892); it contradicts itself; it is large and contains multitudes.9 It is also Rumian (Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi, 1207–1273); it washes itself of itself through self-critique and transformative dialogue with the different self.10 It recognizes itself through the other, be the latter a person, a culture, or a geography; each has its own energies that can enrich the geopoetic feel of multiple being. Intercultural geopoetics can be one of the ‘gods’ of ‘thinking’ (in the sense of being a new idea that merges theory and practice) that the German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) spoke of to overcome what he referred to as ‘the age of technicity’ that is transforming human relations

9

Edwin Haviland Miller, Walt Whitman’s ‘Song of Myself’ (Iowa: Iowa University Press, 1991), Section 51. 10 Coleman Barks et al., transl., The Essential Rumi (Edison, NJ: Castle Books, 1997), 23.

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and human contact with Earth.11 In his defence of genuine human relations, against excessive technologization of man and nature, the renowned contemporary Syrian poet Adonis (b. 1930) says that it is only poetry as an ‘innate quality’ that can grasp the infinite character of the ‘sublime creature’ of man in relation with nature.12 Not to put too fine a point on it here, intercultural geopoetics is about recognizing difference and appropriating it as part of one’s growth in a shared public space, and this becomes clearer in the political and philosophical debate in modern plural societies. Contemporary theorists of multiculturalism, such as the Canadians Charles Taylor (b. 1931) and Will Kymlicka (b. 1962), the Indian-British Bhikhu Parekh (b. 1935), the Pakistani-British Tariq Modood (b. 1952), and the Malaysian-born Australian Chandran Kukathas (b. 1957), to name only a few, have for the last few decades either clarified and enlarged the scope of multiculturalism, critiqued it, or moved beyond it – or preferably moved with it – to interculturalism as a new paradigm of interaction in the global society as well as national-plural societies.13 In a nearby geographical mindscape, the Moroccan philosopher Taha Abderrahmane (b. 1944) proposes ‘trusteeship’ as an episteme of renewal of human relations and being in the world, based on the mutual horizontal trust among people and the vertical connexion with the transcendent that inspire the ethics of this trust (The Question of Ethics, 2000; The Spirit of Modernity, 2011).14 11

Martin Heidegger, ‘Only a God Can Save Us’, 1966 Der Spiegel interview, published in Richard Wollin, ed., The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader (1976; Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 1993), 91–116. 12 Adonis, An Introduction to Arab Poetics, transl. Catherine Cobham (London: Saqi Books, 1990), 96–7. 13 Charles Taylor et al., Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. and intr. Amy Gutmann (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Odysseys: Navigating the New International Politics of Diversity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Bhikhu Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism: Cultural Diversity and Political Theory (London: Macmillan Press Ltd, 2000); Tariq Modood, Multiculturalism: A Civic Idea, 2nd ed. (2007; Cambridge and Malden: Polity, 2013); Chandran Kukathas, The Liberal Archipelago: A Theory of Diversity and Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). 14 Taha Abderrahmane, suҴƗl al-a‫ې‬lƗq: musƗhamah fƯ l-naqd al-a‫ې‬lƗqƯ li-l-‫ۊ‬adƗ‫ܔ‬ah al-ƥarbiyya [The Question of Ethics: A Contribution to Ethical Criticism of Western Modernity] (Beirut and Casablanca, al-Markaz al-৮aqƗfƯ al-‫ޏ‬arabƯ, 2000), and rnj‫ ۊ‬al-‫ۊ‬adƗ‫ܔ‬a: na‫ۊ‬wa al-taҴsƯs li-‫ۊ‬adƗ‫ܔ‬a islƗmiyya [The Spirit of Modernity: An Introduction to Founding an Islamic Modernity] (Beirut and Casablanca, almarkaz al-৮aqƗfƯ al-‫ޏ‬arabƯ, 2006).

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Introduction

This said, then, the polemics of whether interculturalism is more inclusive and more dialogically open compared with multiculturalism, which only celebrates difference with little interaction, is of little relevance here. Geopoetics has been developing since the 1970s, which means a bit longer than both multicultural and intercultural political theories. Now that geopoetics has outlined its broad interdisciplinary premises, and can be considered a reinvigorating postmodern project, it is not only possible but also necessary to read it according to societal needs, without demurring its bigger – global and existential – aspirations. Intercultural geopoetics can, then, be a potential contribution to political theory for the accommodation of diversity and difference; it may be considered a modern equivalent for the classical concept of ‘wisdom’. It is no surprise that White himself calls geopoetics ‘an intercultural and transcultural movement’.15 Other disciplines can find in geopoetics similar potential, and one that is gaining more and more attention, and is of paramount relevance and importance to geopoetics, is what is known as ‘ecophilosophy’, the equivalent of classical ‘philosophy of nature’, which deals with questions of climate change, nature, ethics, and human future. Geopoetics is also in this regard intercultural, since it strives to rebuild genuine contact with nature as part of human flourishing in a harmonious way, based on different traditions outside the so-called ‘Western tradition’. Included in this are marginal or marginalized voices from within the same tradition. As early as the 1960s, before the question of climate change started to become alarming gradually from the 1990s, the Iranian-American philosopher Seyyed Hossein Nasr (b. 1933) warned against growing deforestation, overindustrialization, and ‘the condition of prostituted nature’, in the sense of exploiting nature without taking care of it ethically and responsibly.16 As a philosophical engagement with this ecological crisis, the contemporary German-American philosopher Fred Dallmayr (b. 1928) reads some major modern Western figures, such as Spinoza, Dewy, and Merleau-Ponty, as well as the Eastern traditions of India and China, as arguing for the plural need of returning to nature to amend the excessive damage the environment, human consciousness, and being are experiencing; Dallmayr admits that it is ‘Western’ modernity that has to be revisited, and enriched by non-Western traditions, to examine the modern ‘faulty relationship’

15

White, Une Stratégie paradoxale, essais de résistance culturelle (Bordeaux: Presses universitaires de Bordeaux, 1998), 210. 16 Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Man and Nature: The Spiritual Crisis in Modern Man (1968; London and Boston: Unwin Paperbacks, 1990).

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with the cosmos.17 I go back to some of these critical reflections on ethics in the conclusion of this work. Now, who is Kenneth White? And what does geopoetics really mean? That is what this work is about. Since my intention here is mainly to trace the beginnings of White’s ‘project’, as he calls it, I provide the main concepts he uses while developing this project. White rethinks space, culture, earth, language, and philosophy. Each is looked at from an interdisciplinary angle so as to lend it a new dimensional aura, a new sense of being in the cosmos. White’s geopoetics comes as a sort of diagnosis of the crisis and pitfalls of Western civilization, which ‘has been for centuries carried by various powers: myths, religion, metaphysics’, and is today ‘carried by nothing’.18 In analysing the limitations of Western thought, White divides its evolution into seven main stages, which make up what he terms the ‘Motorway of Western Civilization’. This ‘motorway’ is ‘laid down’ by Platonic idealism and Aristotelian classification (the first stage), Christianity (the second stage), Renaissance humanism (the third stage), Cartesian rationalism (the fourth stage), Romantic sentimentality (the fifth stage), Hegelian historicism (the sixth stage), and the hollow and noisy Current Situation (the seventh stage)’.19 It is in opposition to the stages of this ‘motorway’ that White has conceived of geopoetics and has started to speak about it and use it as a term since 1978. White does not like to stamp his project with any label (literary, philosophic, or scientific). His focal elements are man, culture, work, world, and how they could be united harmoniously to give living a genuine sensation. It is about grounding human existence; the ‘geopoetics project is neither a cultural “variety” nor a literary school, nor even a poetry considered as a proper art. It is a major movement that concerns the foundations of human existence on earth.’20 Geopoetics is the culmination of White’s strenuous readings and wanderings which make up what he calls ‘intellectual nomadism’, another key term in the project. This makes 17

Fred Dallmayr, Return to Nature? An Ecological Counterhistory (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2011). 18 The Wanderer and His Charts, 229. 19 Kenneth White, Geopoetics: Place, Culture, World (Edinburgh: Alba Editions, 2003), 7–9. 20 Kenneth White’s inaugural speech for the International Institute for Geopoetics in Paris, 26 April 1989, available at http://geopoetique.net/archipel_fr/institut/texte_inaugural/index.html. The original text is in French. The translation is mine: all citations from French texts are my translation except where stated.

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Introduction

it liable to contain a wide scope of disciplines. It is transdisciplinary. The poetic, the philosophical, the scientific, the psychological, the cultural, and the political are all present within its orbit. One may pause here and pose this question: will this change the world? Does it not look like a new mode of thinking and living? Yes, it is a way of life. As to whether it will change the world, White wrote the answer some ten years ago in the ‘Carnet de Bord’ for the International Institute of Geopoetics: ‘We will not undoubtedly change the world (but who knows?). What we could achieve with geopoetics is giving density to our lives.’21 What White means is that geopoetics is an ongoing project, open to future development, and aims at no coup d’état to change the world’s political map, yet there is a possibility of change (‘but who knows?’), when and only when minds and lands cohabitate, when mindscapes correspond to landscapes, and vice versa. When this happens, it will contribute to changing the way of living and being on earth. This is the quest for White. More about White and his project is probed in this work following this outline: first, root concepts such as culture, place, world, eros, logos, poetry, philosophy, and intellectual nomadism are introduced in the first part, besides the general context within which White sees his project. Most, if not all, of these concepts are encountered in all of the books that make the bases of this work, speaking here about his five major books that started to appear from the 1980s onwards: La Figure du dehors (Outdoors Figure) (1982), Une Apocalypse tranquille (Tranquil Apocalyse) (1985), L’Esprit nomade (Nomadic Spirit) (1987), Le Plateau de l’albatros: introduction à la géopoétique (Albatross View: Introduction to Geopoetics) (1994), and The Wanderer and His Charts – Exploring the Fields of Vagrant Thought and Vagabond Beauty (2004). The second part discusses a selection of influential intellectual nomads, poets, historians, and philosophers that White numbers among his ‘companions’ in thought, for they all preach and praise the world and contact with nature as the source of elevation and true existence. The start is from Europe, with names such as Rimbaud, Nietzsche, Van Gogh, Hölderlin, Heidegger, Artaud, Humboldt, and MacDiarmid. The American land is another space where new trajectories are charted by Emerson, Whitman, Thoreau, Melville, London, and Kerouac, the lovers of nature and earth. From the land of the Indians in America, White pursues the waves of the ocean to the ancient and far Orient, the land of yoga and haiku, the Orient that White sees as fundamental in order for the Occident 21 Kenneth White, editorial to ‘Carnet de Bord’, International Institute for Geopoetics, Issue 3, Spring 2005, 3. My italics.

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to resuscitate its authentic contact with the cosmos. Mainly in Japan, China, and Tibet, White does not tire of citing Tchouang-tzeu, Wei, Bashǀ, Sesshnj, and their inspiring poetry towards a wise mode of being and doing. In these territories many names appear, yet the ones seen as most suitable to the argument are invoked, including the those just cited above. Finally, the third and last part is devoted to White as a ‘practitioner of geopoetics’ and inhabitant of the new, open white-world geopoetic targets. This point is elaborated on by working on three of his ‘staybooks’, i.e., Les Limbes incandescentes (Incandescent Limbo) (1976), Lettres de Gourgounel (Letters from Gourgounel) (1979), House of Tides (2000), and two ‘waybooks’, La Route bleue (The Blue Road) (1983) and Across the Territories (2004). In these he narrates how he spends his time when at home, at Gwenved, Trébeurden, in Brittany on the western coast of France, or when nomadizing around the globe, thus applying his earlier companions’ habits. Open World – The Collected Poems 1960–2000 (2002) is also frequently quoted from. It should be noted that seven of the ten major books of White worked on in this work are written in French, as the titles show, and the translation of the passages I cite is mine. This issue of bilingualism (French and English), will be briefly pointed out in the part that revolves around White. It should also be noted that the book does not opt for a chronological reading of White’s writings, nor does it discuss each book on its own; rather, it discusses concepts and themes.

PART I GEOPOETICS: TRANSDISCIPLINARY BEGINNINGS, OPEN PERSPECTIVES

I have spoken of something ‘going on’ along that high ridge, something that doesn’t fit easily into the categories, something that goes on above all the quarrelsome dialectics, the localist squabblings, and the fantasies of less developed minds. This ‘going on’ is not simply a series of works, the marks of a career. It is a life-path, a wayfaring, and it comprises projections and conceptions as well as artefacts. —Kenneth White, The Wanderer and His Charts, 29.

The emergence of Kenneth White’s geopoetics as a new movement of thought goes back to the 1960s, but the use of the term did not start till the end of the 1970s, ‘when he was walking along the north bank of the St Lawrence River into Labrador [Canada]’.1 Geopoetics is the culmination of ideas White nurtured early in his life, especially due to his openness to a variety of academic disciplines such as geology, geography, literature, and philosophy, as well as his mastery of a good number of languages, starting with the Latin which he studied at university, and including French and German. This part of the book is mainly about how geopoetics surfaced to take place in academia, and about the key words that go along with it, i.e. culture, place, world, cosmos, earth, geography, poetry, philosophy, science, and intellectual nomadism. These terms intertwine in so many ways because they all contribute to the formation of geopoetics.

1. Culture, Place, World Geopoetics has appeared in an age when the European modern man’s discontent and cynicism have reached an intense degree, and when contact 1

Kenneth White, Le Plateau de l’albatros: introduction à la géopoétique (Paris: Grasset, 1994), 13.

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Part I

with the earth and nature has become an odd and rare activity. Rare are those who stop by a natural phenomenon or scene and ponder over it. Equally rare are those who question the use of science and its unprecedented advancement, and rarer still are those who can re-read their past, their culture, and their contact with their space through walking and meditation. Geopoetics is a movement which raises such issues and pushes them to ‘indefinite’ extremes. White re-reads mainly Western thought through geopoetic-multicultural lenses. White believes that Western thought, and the whole world with it, has been the victim of what he calls the ‘Motorway of Western Civilization’. This ‘motorway’ is illustrated both in an essay entitled ‘An Outline of Geopoetics’ in The Wanderer and His Charts (2004) and in Geopoetics: Place, Culture, World (2003), which will be referred to ‘so as to see where exactly we now stand’.2 The first stage in the ‘Western motorway’ is the Classical Age that is summarized and dominated by Plato and Aristotle. The first is known by his metaphysics and idealism (the ideal world), away from the real world. To White, this philosopher is ‘a person interested in something beyond “mundane” concerns: the Good, the True, the Beautiful’, which implies that he should not build ivory towers and forget to ‘get his feet on the ground, and get back to “the real world”’.3 The second, Aristotle, is known by his classification, which ‘most of our knowledge is based on’. White does not oppose this system in its entirety, but only when it is used to divide studied things/phenomena into separate parts, and the study of each alone leads to distortions or unsatisfactory scrutiny of the parts as a whole; the problem for White is when parts are studied while conclusions about the whole are forgotten, a phenomenon which ‘narrows’ the mind, and makes it ‘flow’ over the study of real, living life.4 Stage two in the ‘motorway’ is characterized by Christianity which would build vertical towers in preparation for a transcendental life in heaven. The ‘obsession’ with the Original Sin and the Second Coming of the crucified Christ is another main hindrance that has made the Christian world ‘agonizedly demoralized’.5 With the Renaissance, which constitutes 2

Geopoetics, 7. Ibid., 7. 4 Ibid., 8. 5 The Wanderer and His Charts, 232. This work does not dwell much on the question of religion in geopoetics. But one could infer from White’s words that geopoetics does not limit itself to any religious discourse. In La Figure du dehors he says, ‘note well that there is nothing “religious” in all this’. Kenneth White, La Figure du dehors (Paris: Grasset, 1982), 166. 3

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the third stage, the Classical Age heritage reappears after its disappearance during the dark Middle Ages of Christianity. Such a rebirth of a tradition was embodied in mythological creatures (gods, goddesses, naiads, dryads) that took the forests and mountains as spaces of interest, which would in turn raise the importance of science and nature. However, such a rebirth of interest in science and nature was, according to White, influenced by Aristotelian classifications and the New World, and turned out to be ‘a blow-up caricature of some parts of the Old’.6 For example, when a new island was discovered, it took the name of its discoverer or the name of a king, when it should have been given the name that best suited its geography. With Cartesianism, we enter the fourth stage, Modernity, in which ‘nature becomes more and more objectified’, and ‘considered exclusively as raw matter to be exploited’. That is, nature became an object, while man the master, the subject, was soon to be either ‘robotized’ and ‘wrapped up in some clinical, scientific, astronautic, military uniform’ – if he did not turn into a frustrated object in psychoanalysis clinics.7 As a reaction against the abuse of nature and science came the Romantics, who make up stage five in this ‘motorway’. With Romanticism, the call for a return to nature became the focal point. The aim was to arrive at some ‘wholeness of thinking and being’ that went beyond classification and ‘compartmentalization of thought’, though in so many cases it did so sentimentally.8 The Historicism of Hegel constitutes the sixth stage in White’s chronology. Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel advanced the idea that history has an orientation, and that this orientation is Weltgeist, ‘the spirit of the world’. Put differently, for Hegel, history ‘has a purpose’, and it leads ‘somewhere’, a theory which marks the birth of ‘the ideology of progress’.9 The endeavours of different Western communities to keep up with the idea of progress through differing economic and political ideologies could be summed up in the idea of markets as the source of development and progress where values are measured by how beneficial they are, and not by how far they push man to a better presence in the world. Such a presence is far from being achieved in the Contemporary Situation, stage seven. Hollowness, helter-skelter, discontent, and mediocracy (instead of democracy) are the traits that characterize the Contemporary Situation. The literature and art of this era/stage are a good

6

The Wanderer and His Charts, 233. Ibid., 233. 8 Ibid., 234. 9 Geopoetics, 11. 7

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Part I

illustration of the situation. They are shallow and have no value imbedded in them.10 After having enumerated the various stages of the Western motorway, White finds himself at a point where this question raises itself: ‘Where to, then?’ One of the answers could be either ‘towards geopoetics’ or ‘towards somewhere better via geopoetics’. Le Figaro littéraire comments that ‘Kenneth White lifts the mind from so much stale discourse and raises intelligence to a rare level’;11 ‘it seems we are looking for a new prophet. It could be that White is the very man.’12 For the magazine Belles-Lettres, in Geneva, geopoetics seems the remedy to the modern-age malaise and ‘cultural illness’:13 White’s movement, both deeply sensitive and highly intelligent, may well be heralding a new world-epoch. At a time when a certain mediocrity is reaching planetary proportions, one of us has stood up, turned his back and, possessed of real knowledge, moved off. Coming back, he reveals a method of thought and a way of being in the world which announces an art of life.14

The definitions White gives to geopoetics make of it ‘an art of life’, as will be seen below. White’s geopoetics envisions a world in which the human being comes to good terms with the universe. White started using the term after long years of intellectual nomadism. At first he used the term ‘biocosmopoetis’, which stands for the energy of life (bios) that poetry should be rekindled with, as well as the movement that gives this energy a form, weight, and coherence (cosmos).15 In Le Plateau de L’albatros: introduction à la géopoétique (1994), he says: The project of geopoetics is neither a cultural variety, nor a literary school, nor a poetry considered like a personal art; it is a movement that concerns 10

Kenneth White, ‘Pathways to an Open World’, in Islam and the West – For a Better World, ed. Khalid Hajji (Beirut: Arab Scientific Publishers, 2007), 34–8. The article was delivered as a talk at the first international forum of the Aljazeera Center for Studies Forum, ‫ދ‬Islam and the West – For a Better World’, Doha, 2006. 11 Blurb to House of Tides, by Le Figaro littéraire, Paris. Kenneth White, House of Tides (Edinburgh: Polygon, 2000). 12 Blurb to House of Tides, by The Sunday Times. 13 La Figure du dehors, 99. 14 Blurb to Geopoetics, in Revues des Belles-Lettres, Geneva. 15 In Emmanuel Dall’Aglio, Kenneth White: du nomadisme à la géopoétique (Évreux: Centre Départemental de Documentation Pédagogique de l’EURE: 1997), 13. In a letter from Kenneth White, 05/10/2007. The translation is mine.

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itself with how man founds his existence on earth; it is not a question of building a system, but of accomplishing, step by step, an exploration, an investigation, by being situated as a start somewhere between poetry, philosophy, and science.16

The intention is not to establish a literary or philosophic school. The quest is beyond that. Geopoetics ‘is concerned, fundamentally, with a relationship to the earth and with the opening of a world’.17 However, a deconstruction of the word into – at least – its two components may clarify the picture better: geo-poetics. Because geopoetics is not intended for a particular culture but for world cultures, it takes the earth as the basis, the ‘central motif’ that all cultures (North, South, East, West), could share, thus the implementation of the ‘geo’ in geopoetics. Regarding poetics, this does not mean a particular use of language; rather, it is a language that stands on its own: ‘I tend to use the word poetics the way others use the word mathematics. That is, as a language.’18 With geopoetics, ‘the fundamental question is cultural’.19 For White, culture could be understood from two points of view: first, in the context of the individual, it stands for ‘the way human beings conceive of, work at, and direct themselves. Culture implies some conception of the human being.’ Within this scope of culture, White suggests that man should be a ‘poetic inhabitant of the Earth’,20 which comes through work embodied in cultivation, for ‘there is no culture without work’. Here, cultivation of the individual is analogous with the cultivation of land; without cultivation, no crop grows, and thus no man’s mind flourishes.21 Culture within the second collective scope is defined according to what is essential to this collective group. And since ‘this [geopoetics] great cultural work-field’22 concerns itself with a world culture, it seeks to find what could be the central motif, the ‘central concern’ for this culture that is ‘able to be shared by all, North, South, East and West’. The same point is expressed in La Figure du dehors, where the aim ‘is to search for an archipelago of 16

Le Plateau de l’albatross, 11–12. The Wanderer and His Charts, 243. 18 Geopoetics, 20. 19 Geopoetics, 12. 20 White usually capitalizes the e in earth to show its value, and its unique characteristics which fuel movement in life. We sometimes do the same. 21 Geopoetics, 4–5. Later on we see how land and mind intertwine in White’s project for a better sensation and expression of the world: landscape, mindscape, and wordscape. 22 The Wanderer and His Charts, 242. 17

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Part I

thought which trespasses the opposition of East and West, and which could be shared by all’.23 This makes what White calls in Une Stratégie paradoxale – essais de résistance culturelle (1998), ‘an intercultural and transcultural movement’.24 The mutual ground (space, geography), that could embrace different cultures around a central motif is ‘the very Earth on which we try to live’, hence the presence of ‘geo’ in geopoetics.25 With this geopoetic conception of culture in mind, the culture(s), spoken about in newspapers, TV, and markets is/are in miniature and in fact a distortion of the real meaning of culture. While real culture means cultivation and work, the commonly known culture now stands more for consumerism, ‘infantilism’, and ‘intellectual platitude’ than any more open work. What White wants is a ‘cosmosculture’ instead of a ‘show culture’.26 The world White proposes ‘emerges from the contact between the human being and cosmos, represented by the Earth’, which implies that the cosmos is larger than Earth, and that the sensation of Earth is what makes being in the cosmos sound and interesting. The contact White speaks about is intelligent, sensitive, subtle, you have a world in the full and positive sense: a satisfying context, an interesting and life-enhancing place. When the contact is unintelligent, insensitive, heavy-handed and clumsy, what you have instead of a world is a diminished context, if not a precinct of horror.27

Differently put, contact with Earth enlightens man’s existence, and instinctively teaches him sane ways of living. However, when such contact is absent, changing society cannot occur as prophesied or desired. A world where this sought-for contact is missing is no longer a world, ‘un monde’, an open and vast space for genuine being, but is an ‘immonde’, originally ‘meaning disgusting and repulsive’ in French, or mundus, related to ‘mundane’ in English, ‘meaning platitudinous and uninteresting’.28 White thinks that it is time man returned to the aesthetic connotation of the word ‘cosmos’, which etymologically means ‘a beautiful, harmonious totality’

23

La Figure du dehors, 15. Une Stratégie paradoxale, 210. For more on the sociocultural background of White’s project, see Christophe Roncato’s Kenneth White, une oeuvre-monde, preface Régis Poulet (Rennes: Rennes University Press, 2014). 25 The Wanderer and His Charts, 243. 26 Une Stratégie paradoxale, 164-5. 27 The Wanderer and His Charts, 245. 28 Ibid., 244. 24

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(Kosmos in Greek).29 To be able to lead change towards this ‘beautiful and harmonious’ world, one needs to be cultivated, and it is here that culture intervenes: ‘a world is a place, a space that one cultivates. And in order to be up to that world-cultivation one has to cultivate oneself […]. There is no real culture without work.’30 By work, what is meant is the sharpening of man’s senses for a better recognition of space, and for a better presence in the world, a process which behoves an intellectual energy. This knowledge of space is also investigated by geography, geology, and ecology. But White’s geopoetics is all-encompassing. More than that, White’s ‘open world’ is not oriented commercially, politically, ideologically, locally, provincially, nationally, or secularly. Rather, it is universally oriented; it takes world culture as its quest, which the intellectual nomad is supposed to figure out. Such work is both mental and linguistic, hence the importance of poetry in White’s geopoetics.

2. Poetry, Philosophy, Science Poetry, philosophy, and science undergo a denotative metamorphosis in geopoetics. Poetry is most of the time linked to melodious and highly polished language written in a rhythmic form that pleases the ear, especially if sung. This kind of poetry is now rampant; very many poems are written to be published in newspapers or to be sung in video clips. Nonetheless, it remains a fake poetry for the reason that it is not the fruit of an intellectual effort, nor is it the fruit of a true sensation of the world. White believes that poetry in general has succumbed to ‘personal and socio-personal ideas’, far from being ‘grounded’ on a ‘larger space’. That is why it is void of the poetics White thinks of. It is ‘a poetry without world, without poetics’, ‘verbose rhetoric’, in contradistinction to poetry that ‘has a world’,31 – ‘the poem of earth’ which ‘is still to be written’, as Wallace Stevens writes.32 White’s cry is clear: ‘We are badly in need of poetry that “has a world”.’33 Poetry, accordingly, does not mean carefully chosen words; it is, however, a reflection of ‘a poetic listening to nature’, in the phrase of the Belgian Nobel Laureate in Physical Chemistry Ilya Prigogine (d. 2003).34 29

Ibid., 244. Ibid., 245. 31 La Figure du dehors, 153. 32 Geopoetics, 33. 33 Kenneth White, On Scottish Ground – Selected Essays (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1998), 67. 34 Kenneth White, Une Apocalypse tranquille (Paris: Grasset, 1985), 31. 30

Part I

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In the foreword to Open World (2002), White writes that what he is interested in is ‘world poetry’: In the poem, without going back to myth, metaphysics or religion, I tried to get out beyond personal poetry and social poetry and linguistic poetry, into what I called ‘world poetry’, poetry concerned with world, that is, what emerges from the contact between the human mind and the matterenergy of the universe.35

With this definition White moves on to his own ‘image’ of poetry after having tried ‘institutions’ and ‘doors’ of poetry and finding none which satisfied him. To his new image of poetry he invites the poets of the world, as ‘Autobiography’ pictures: Autobiography I’ve been in and out of institutions banged a few doors in and out of lives and loves come away with a few scars I’ve gone deeper into poetry the space where the mind clears – now I’m walking in my own image follow me who dares.36

Poetry is a solace for White; it is his own ‘world’ when the outside world exasperates him: ‘the world is a provocation to me. Over against it, I evoke my own world, which is a more real world. Poetry is affirmation of reality. No more, no less.’ These are White’s words when he was still only twenty-seven years old, expressed in En Toute candour (1964).37 This ‘world poetry’ harbingers what is called in La Figure du dehors a ‘new poeticity’,38 by means of which thought becomes poetry.39 Here we enter the realm of mind.

35

Kenneth White, Open World – The Collected Poems 1960–2000 (Edinburgh: Polygon, 2003), xxvi. 36 Kenneth White, Terre de diamond (Paris: Grasset, 1985), 56, in Pierre Jamet, Le Local et le global dans l’œuvre de Kenneth White (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2002), 185. 37 McManus, The Radical Field, 40. 38 La Figure du dehors, 12. 39 Ibid., 215.

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True poetry is that which involves thinking, though it may be written in very simple words. In L’Esprit nomade White writes that ‘poetry should thus be open to thinking; but so as not to be an insane puzzle, thinking must be founded on poetry’.40 In other words, poetry without thinking is nonsense, and vice versa. This reciprocal tendency is what geopoetics traces. White is working out the possibility of bringing the three major disciplines together: science (represented by geography, ecology, geology, and the exact sciences), poetry (represented by language), and philosophy (represented by thought and meditation). For the world culture project, classification should be trespassed, and the presence of the three elements/disciplines seems a requisite. Early in 1982 White quoted John Dryden, England’s first Poet Laureate (1631–1700), to stress this idea of the overlapping between these sciences: ‘man should be versed in various sciences, and should possess a reasonable, philosophic, and to some extent a mathematical mind so as to be an excellent and accomplished poet’.41 With openness to other sciences the poet is also supposed to be a lover of the world, ‘a mondomaniac who pursues his desire for the world’,42 because it is owing to the poet’s school that ‘we learn the courage of intelligence and the audacity of being oneself’, as White believes – quoting the Romanian philosopher Emil Michel Cioran (1911–1995).43 The point here is that geopoetics tries to go beyond the ordinary definition of poetry as a literary genre. Poetry targets the poetics of existence.44 Poetry can be seen, then, as a way of life, a mode of thinking that helps the poet and man in general to establish himself on Earth as a wise being, as a ‘poet-thinker’, and when this happens poetry takes on more importance than philosophy. From the Whitian perspective, ‘poetic thought’ is more open than the logic of philosophy. White starts this argument from where his European companions stopped, namely, Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Rimbaud, Vincent Van Gogh, and Martin Heidegger. More details on these are left for the second part of this work. The intention at the moment is just to pass over their evaluation of Western philosophy, ‘which has been through a radical crisis, with questions being raised as to its limits and perspectives since the end of the nineteenth century’. Heidegger was among the first to raise the issue so as ‘to find ways into regions philosophy has never heard

40

Kenneth White, L’Esprit nomade (Paris: Grasset, 1987), 244. La Figure du dehors, 10. 42 Une Apocalypse tranquille, 34. 43 Ibid., 108. 44 Ibid., 109. 41

Part I

20

of’.45 As to the three other philosophers, ‘they all live in solitude, and two of them [Nietzsche and Rimbaud] go mad’.46 They felt alienated in a moribund civilization. White, then, takes these ‘companions’ to help him form the ‘quicker procedure’ that is ‘required’, leaving behind the many ‘criticist discourse[s]’ that one finds here, there, and everywhere when reading about culture and civilization. At a time when ‘a quicker procedure is required’, White confirms that good criticism should open up a new world: That criticism is necessary in this context is something I go with. But criticist discourse tends to become a process in itself, integrated into the system [of thought]. The result is a vast accumulation of studies and statistics that give the impression of being valid and to-date, but get nobody anywhere and tend to simply clutter up the space of manoeuvring.47

One way of opening up this new road is through the distinction White makes between poetry and philosophy, basing his choice of words on Nietzsche’s. To leave the classical motorways of philosophy, Nietzsche proposed a particular type of philosopher, i.e. ‘the artist philosopher’, or what White names the ‘poet-thinker’ or ‘thinker-poet’. The link White makes between philosophy, thought, and poetry emanates from his belief that ‘poetic thought is more dynamic than philosophy’. By implication this means that the poetics White aspires to live mixes thought, reason, and language – a language open to spaces that ‘have largely been left out when official philosophy began’.48 What White aims at here is to transgress Greek thought, Plato’s and Aristotle’s, which divides reality into two: the world of being, and the world of becoming. The former is the ‘realm of ideas, of all that is immutable and eternal’, and is also ‘the region of philosophy’, ‘a logic of identity, and science’, whereas the latter is seen as ‘the world of multiplicity, of all that is unstable, erratic, ephemeral’. The second type of thinking is far from being philosophic or scientific; it ‘is in fact cunning rather than knowledge’.49 Like the poet and philosopher Eratosthenes (276–194 BC), ‘who made fun of the Greeks’ for having divided the world into the civilized Greeks and the uncivilized Barbarians, White too disagrees with their conception of reality, and thinks of the ‘traveller-poet’, or ‘the poet-thinker’, as best suited to combine the two 45

Ibid., 14. Ibid., 9. 47 Ibid., 15. 48 Ibid., preface, vi–vii. 49 Ibid., 132–6. 46

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realities they esteem as very separate. Accordingly, the poet recovers his position as an intellectual being, able to think and come into positive contact with his society and space. He is no longer the poet the Greeks expelled from the city for fear of his imaginative powers and his possible influence on weak parts of the mind. The imaginative capacities the poet is endowed with are, according to René Daumal, whom White quotes, either black or white, and they produce black or white poetry, and they both try to communicate what is essential, though differently. The former utilizes much imagination, lives a world of fantasies, prestige, pleasures, and chivalrous achievements, and opens many worlds lighted by an unreal sun. The latter, on the contrary, prefers living a bitter reality instead of imaginative and prestigious lives. White’s poetry opens just one world and satiates it with the real, nonprestigious sun. It is a kind of work that requires yoga exercises, with much mental concentration.50 White is looking for white poetry – ‘whiteness’ will be explained in Part Three, Section Two. On Scottish Ground (1998), contains a dense essay on poetry and its import to geopoetics. It is entitled ‘Into the White World’.51 From the first lines of the article White puts forwards his argument that ‘poetry speaks ultimately of the white world, […] poetry signifies the transcendence of the individual conscience and the introduction to a world (a cosmos, a beautiful whole in movement)’.52 This means that neither poetry nor the white world still exist. They are the project of geopoetics. In simple terms, ‘white-world poetry’ is ‘real poetry’ that is yet to be reached: Real poetry, and the life it implies, begins a few thousand miles, as the gull flies, as the wind blows, away from this ‘civilized’ compound. Nietzsche, at Sils-Maria [in Switzerland], lived ‘6,000 feet above men and time’. The Chinese say (or used to say), that to know what real poetry is you have to meet a man distant from you by 3,000 miles.53

The aspirations towards the ‘real poetry’, the ‘world poetry’, that White wants to write and the new and open world he tries to reach are motivated by the eros, the ‘desire’ that ‘pushes the self to purification’ and that ‘tends towards the liberation of the mind’ and finally ‘drives you towards your real self’.54 The eros heads, with the self, towards the ‘summit’, the 50

La Figure du dehors, 131–3. Part III, Section 2, of this work dwells on the same point in some detail. 52 On Scottish Ground, 58. 53 Ibid., 59. 54 Ibid., 173. 51

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‘difficult area’, where it joins the logos, ‘the cosmic unity’ that ‘governs all’.55 The longing of the eros to fuse the self with the whole, with the unity of the logos, stands for the fusion of desire and reason. This fusion occasions the power of the real poets who know what a white world means and how poetry should sound. This is why their poetic ideas ‘start with a rejection of the [civilized] world’.56 Such poets appear as mad men among the ordinary men who cannot understand or feel what it is like on the ‘summit’, where the eros and logos fuse(d); ‘the poet is a “madman” (marked first by extravagant energy, then with a large logic), in this sense’.57 Since the poet is on a quest for the objective world, which does not (yet), exist, he lives in a ‘pseudo-world’, an unobtainable space, or what White calls ‘chaos-cosmos’, ‘chaosmos’.58 It is also in this sense that real poets are said to be more than mere philosophers, since their energy is not simply what is commonly known as logic but the logos which transcends it: hence the power of ‘the poet-philosopher’ or ‘poet-thinker’ over the philosopher or even the scientist, as we are going to see. Though the poet is an uncivilized being whose intelligence develops according to primordial norms,59 he does not deny science because of ‘scientific’ exactitudes. If he stands against science, it is because he knows that where it leads is not that ‘difficult area’ that looks upon the white world. The poet rejects the sciences that shut the ears and close the eyes to the sounds of the earth and the cosmos. The sciences that dumb the senses are not within the orbit of the poet, nor that of geopoetics, despite the fact that the latter has much in common with science. Throughout his essaybooks, White showers his reader with a variety of figures and books belonging to a wide range of sciences: archaeology, geography, geology, botany, biology, ecology, ornithology, sociology, psychoanalysis, physics, mathematics, architecture, etc.60 White quotes Heidegger’s famous statement that ‘science does not think’ to talk about the modern, more systematic, applied, and exact sciences, without disavowing the achievements of, for example, the methodical works of Descartes and Newton, whose theories still influence

55

Ibid., 173, 63. La Figure du dehors, 47. 57 On Scottish Ground, 61. 58 La Figure du dehors, 48. 59 Ibid., 46. 60 See, for example, ‘La vision unitaire’ in Une Apocalypse tranquille, and ‘Elements of a New Cartography’ in The Wanderer and His Charts. 56

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modern scientific developments.61 He also brings to the fore, in L’Esprit nomade, Jean-Francois Lyotard’s declaration that ‘scientific knowledge is not all knowledge’,62 to come up with his own conclusion: thinking, at its limits, ends in poetry.63 So, since science is a way of thinking, it is very likely to turn into poetry: that is, it can share a lot with poetic thinking. White’s project is to build links and establish an alliance between the two (as he does with culture, geography, poetry, and philosophy), so as to arrive at that image of, say, a poet-scientist, who does his work in the laboratory but is at the same time open to nature, the universe, the source of any sane/poetic thinking. He expresses the idea in Le Monde d’Antonin Artaud (1989): ‘an encounter between science and poetry seems again possible, a new culture seems under formation which will be the concern of poets and artists as much as it will be that of scientists’.64 This is also poetically signed in ‘Walking the Coast’ in Open World, with two lines that we interpret to have the same significance: ‘the way of true science / which is poetry’s commencement’.65 White presents poetry, and not science, as the key to ‘order’ and ‘harmony’ in the world and to any study of the elements of nature; this is how first lines of A Walk Along the Shore (1980) speak to us: for the question is always how out of all the chances and changes to select the features of real significance so as to make of the welter a world that will last and how to order the signs and the symbols so they will continue to form new patterns developing into new harmonic wholes so to keep life alive in complexity and complicity 61

Olivier Delbard, Les Lieux de Kenneth White: paysage, pensée, poétique (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1999), 26. 62 L’Esprit nomade, 61. 63 Ibid., 219. 64 In Delbard, Les Lieux de Kenneth White, 26. 65 Open World, 170.

Part I

24 with all of being – there is only poetry.66

In ‘An Outline of Geopoetics’, the last essay in The Wanderer and His Charts, White goes through some names in different scientific fields to explain how in the last few decades scientists have realized that science alone is not everything the world needs. He says that the term ‘poetics’ is most often included in recent scientific publications. He refers to Albert Einstein (1879–1955) in physics, to the Chilean Humberto Maturana (b. 1928) and his student Francisco Varela (1046–2001), who together introduced autopoiesis to biology, to the French Gustave Guillaume (1883–1960) in linguistics, and especially to one of ‘the first ancestors of geopoetics’, the German naturalist Alexandre von Humboldt (1769–1859), who says that ‘science, poetry and philosophy are not fundamentally separate’, and that ‘they can come together in the mind of one who has achieved a state of unity’.67 Part of ‘Walking the Coast’ gives the example of the ‘alliance’ that could take place between the poet and the scientist through similar perceptions of the same natural phenomena (contrasts, order, disorder, change) of the world they share: […] when a physicist far out in his field says the starting-point for the realm of unknowns is a ‘universe of contrasts grouped into complexes of relations with aspects of order and disorder including change and tendency’ I say that’s it that’s my territory that’s the world I’m living through and trying to work out.68

The openness of geopoetics to the multitudinous aspects of science, be they social or exact sciences, makes of it an interdisciplinary/transdisciplinary 66

Kenneth White, A Walk Along the Shore (Paris: Le Nouveau Commerce, 1980); the extract is found in Open World, 127. 67 The Wanderer and His Charts, 236–8. 68 Open World, 156. My italics.

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complex field of work from which its perspectives can take other pathways. The variety of essays in Une Stratégie paradoxale – Essais de résistance culturelle (1998) shows how open the project is. The work touches upon fields including politics, education, culture, arts, sociology, and biology. In ‘Art, Music, Poetry’, in Geopoetics: Place, Culture, World (2002), White widens the arena of the ‘poetics’ in geopoetics to reach the sciences and arts: While including poetry, it [poetics] also has a larger application. It applies not only to poetry as literary form, but also to art and music, and can be extended beyond these domains into science and even social practice.69

When invited in 1994 by Transdisciplinary Encounters magazine and its director the physician Basarab Nicolesco, the founder of The International Center for Transdisciplinary Research (CIRET), located in Paris and founded in 1987, White had the occasion to voice the transdisciplinarity of his project: ‘geopoetics is naturally (basically) transdisciplinary’, and ‘is ready to associate itself assiduously, while always maintaining its geopoetic specific preoccupations, with any movement and manifestation going in this sense: internationalism, transnationalism, transdisciplinarity’.70 The scope of geopoetics, to reiterate the idea, is large and requires genuine work and an open mind, with gigantic capacities that can grasp what it really means. In describing the ‘White Seminar’ Kenneth White gave at the Sorbonne in the early 1990s, George Amar says that the students in attendance did not have a particular curriculum to study: ‘we roam: we learn that it is the best way to start to explore a territory’. He delineates the process as a kind of intellectual navigation whose captain is White and his ‘intellectual judo’ practices.71 This shows the interdisciplinary aura that envelops (and develops) the project. This intellectual talk clears the path to intellectual nomadism.

3. Intellectual Nomadism The term ‘intellectual nomadism’ appeared early in White’s writings, starting with La Figure de dehors (1982). It is when speaking about Segalen, the French nomad par excellence, that White invokes the term 69

Geopoetics, 31. Michèle Duclos, ‘Chemins transdisciplinaire de la géopoetique’, in Kenneth White et la géopoetique, ed. Laurent Margantin (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2006), 193. 71 George Amar, ‘White Seminar,’ in Le Monde ouvert de Kenneth White, ed. Michèle Duclos (Bordeaux: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 1995), 242. 70

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under focus. Among the definitions of nomadism White provides/borrows, there is Jacques Ménétrier’s, in Origines de l’Occident: nomades et sédentaires (1972): ‘nomadism brings with it the refusal of domestication […]; that is, the opening to the world and to curiosity’.72 What is at issue here is not merely the actual being in the outside world, nor is it to show how good it is to be a nomad and how bad it is to be sedentary. One could be a sedentary nomad, for nomadism could be intellectual, which is what White prefers. Regarding this point, White quotes Georges Roditi (1906– 1999), who says in L’Esprit de perfection (1975): ‘the nomads create nothing and the sedentary are excessively wise. For a great work, there is a need for an adventurer who stays at home.’ However, intellectual nomadism achieved through the help of wandering is what White aspires to see in a poet, thinker, philosopher, or more accurately a ‘poet-thinker’ or ‘poet-scholar-traveller’, as Arthur Schopenhauer does when he invites the philosopher in particular to leave his office and go out to explore the world around him – the world, nature, and life. Gradually, White moves from geography and its supposed influence on the poet to thought and intellectualism. It is here that his other two root concepts surface: landscape and mindscape. The first was originally termed ‘physical geography’ and the second ‘mental geography’, as one notes in La Figure du dehors.73 A genuine poet-thinker is one who is able to make correspondences between what he sees through his wanderings and walks on land and what this brings into play in his mind. It is about how meditation over the world is attained by the force of concrete presence on Earth, and how Earth and place contribute to the sharpening of this sensation for a better presence in the world. The intellectual nomad is a necessary pillar in White’s project. He is the by-product of (Western) civilizational crisis; he is the one who could forge a new space where cultural boundaries count for less. White expresses it as follows: Now it’s at the crises of civilization that the voice of the nomad is once more heard in the land. The figure I call the intellectual nomad has not only gone critically through all this context, he is the bearer of at least the beginnings of new language and new space. He has broken his way out of the labyrinth and moves in what may at first seem a void, but which is perhaps the high-energy field in which could emerge a (new), world. […] The intellectual nomad who quits the monolinear, monocultural, monomaniac Motorway will pass through as many cultures as possible,

72 73

La Figure du dehors, 191. Ibid., 203.

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but will go beyond the relativistic (‘You in your own small corner and I in mine’), to the pluralistic (‘The more, the merrier’), vision of things.74

The enterprise which the intellectual nomad is to undertake in the project of geopoetics does not seem easy. He should be endowed with the spirit of ‘outgoerism’ or ‘outgoingness’,75 the ability to merge landscapes and mindscapes together, with a language that should be neither culturally biased nor superficial. Such a language should reflect a profound closeness to space, to earth, to world, moving from cosmos, pushed by eros, and reaching the original logos. This new and open world is still under construction. It can be started whenever and wherever. Actually, it has already been started by earlier poets and philosophers in different lands and continents, as White proves in his essay-books. It is to some of these territories, intellectual nomads, and poet-thinkers that we turn in Part II.

74 75

The Wanderer and His Charts, 15, 246. The italics are mine. Geopoetics, 15.

PART II TERRITORIES AND TRAJECTORIES: WITH THE COMPANIONS OF THE ROAD

I started off by growing up like everybody else. Then I took a bend to the south an inclination east a prolongation north and a sharp turn west. —Kenneth White, Open World, 213.

Having sketched out the main concepts White uses in talking about his project of geopoetics in Part I of this work, it is now time for some more fieldwork. It was noted earlier how difficult it is to define and demarcate each concept in isolation from the other(s), because of the borderline(s) they share in the new and open world geopoetics reconstructs. Here again a similar note is still valid when we speak about the spaces White either has aspired to visit or has already visited, as his waybooks1 demonstrate. But first we must say a few words about the role of the work in relation to the theme of ‘territories and trajectories’. Since geopoetics aims at a more universal grounding of a world culture, away from the historic-cultural and sociopolitical differences, ideologies, revolutions, and religions that have created more gaps between man and man, and more distance between man and the world he lives in, White has opened the scope of his project to world spaces, geographies, and cultures. Starting from Europe, mainly from his native land, Scotland, and later on from his host country, France, White moves on earth, walks 1

‘Waybook’ in White’s diction partially stands for the commonly used term for travel narratives, travel literature, or travelogues. The point is illustrated in Part III, Section3, on ‘Writing’.

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the world, sees nature, and seizes, or rather ‘sucks the marrow of life’, as his companion Henry Thoreau says, the breezes of the wind, the shine of the sun, the light of the moon, and most importantly the vastness and openness of the world. From Scotland, France, Germany, White journeys to other European places first as a wanderer, an intellectual nomad, and then as a lecturer – in Holland, Poland, Sweden, Portugal, Spain, Corsica, and Italy, to name but a few. In these ‘trans-European trips’2 he always has some companions to share his moments of meditation, thinking, and cultural (re-), grounding, companions like Rimbaud, Nietzsche, Van Gogh, Hölderlin, Heidegger, Artaud, and Segalen. With the same verve he heads to America, mainly to where he can still see and live with the Indians and Eskimos in Labrador in Canada, one of his most loved geographies. He also passes by the lands that some of his American friends Walt Whitman and Henry Thoreau lodged in, in addition to his many trips (eleven up till 2004) to the Isles of America (Martinique and the Virgins). From America one heads with White to the East, the Orient, another inspiring world space where Buddhism, Zen, and Taoism dominate, and where haiku and yoga are practised, physically and mentally. In the Orient, new companions are encountered, such as Wei, Hakuin, and especially Bashǀ and Sesshnj. Focusing on the three geographies (Europe, America, Asia) does not mean that the other geographies of the world are looked down on in comparison with these major ones. What they represent for White is a field or fields of energy, and these fields could be either human, as the names/companions associated with them illustrate, or mere inspiring spaces that retain the charm of the primitive life – the First World, as it were, the world White is trying to re-open. White is open to world cultures; his ‘preference’ for some over others is unbiased. The proof is that he also journeys to Africa, to Morocco and the Atlas, to the Indian Ocean, La Réunion, and Mauritius.3 The project is about ‘rediscovering the world’, ‘giving sensation to the world’.4 For his ‘openness to the cultures of the world’, White received the Édouard Glissant Prize awarded by the University of Paris VIII for World Culture, in March–April 2004.5

2

Gavin Bowd, Charles Forsdick, and Norman Bissell, eds., Grounding a World: Essays on the Work of Kenneth White (Glasgow: Alba Editions, 2005), 217. 3 This is discussed in Across the Territories, discussed in in Part III, Section 2, of this work. 4 Michèle Duclos, ed. Le Poète cosmographe: vers un nouvel espace culturel – interviews (Bordeaux: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 1987), 201–202. 5 Bowd et al., Grounding, 220.

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2. Europe: Leaving the Discontent of Civilization Europe forms the starting point of White’s geopoetics. Studying French, German, and philosophy in Glasgow, Paris, and Munich enabled White to expand the scope of his readings and his insight into the Western tradition. In this section, light is shed on some of the most influential European figures that White acknowledges as ‘fields of energy’, ‘companions’, and ‘old fools’ of modernity (les ‘vieux fous’ in French). To list all the names he refers to in the vast collection of books cited in this work is not possible, since they are many. Reference will hence be made to a few selected names seen most often in the various works of White: Who are the ‘old fools’ [les vieux fous] of modernity, who go beyond, far beyond, the art called modernity, and who exist because they are existent, in a space very far from ‘the contemporary cultural scene’? With no intention of providing an exhaustive list, we could name some: Nietzsche, of course, but also Dostoevsky, Van Gogh, Ezra Pound, Gauguin, Rilke, James Joyce, John Cowper Powys, Hugh MacDiarmid, D.H. Lawrence, Joseph Delteil, Henry Miller […] much madness, sure, much aberrations, but large existential and intellectual landscapes where it is good to venture.6

The start is with the triad of Rimbaud, Van Gogh, and Nietzsche. In La Figure du dehors White writes that Europe knew three major ‘radical’ attempts to overcome the malaise its civilization has found itself immersed in: The end of the 19th century in Europe saw three radical attempts […] to get out of the dull and constrictive state-of-things, three focal points of incandescent energy: Rimbaud, the comet; Van Gogh, the crazy sun; Nietzsche, the aurora borealis.7

Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891) Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud, ‘the star of the north’,8 was a man of peregrinations and void, vacuity, who was constantly on the march: ‘I am a pedestrian’;9 ‘Me. I walk the roads, that is all’.10 To White, he represents an unprecedented aspect in poetry and life, but of course he was far from 6

Une Apocalypse tranquille, 20. La Figure du dehors, 56. 8 Ibid., 40. 9 Le Plateau de l’albatros, 109. 10 The Wanderer and His Charts, 17. 7

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being the only one in doing this.11 Disgusted by the mess of civilization, Rimbaud went out in a search of the Self; he found it nowhere, and arrived at the void, the state of nothingness, or the state of the First World, the primitive life of the son of sun he always aspired to live. His moments of ecstasy were those he spent on the Ardennes, with its blue streams,12 and his time of elation is the time he spent trying to live the life of a ‘barbare’ on the road of the North, his new road,13 which sounds nightmarish for him – ‘my life is a nightmare’ – yet he still retains an optimistic note: ‘hoping for the best’.14 What Rimbaud was after is what White is after too: the ‘archaic roots’, the ‘fundamental scenery’, the ‘essential, the princip(i)al life (la vie principielle)’.15 Such a quest is surrealist, and what is meant by “surrealism” is that return to the primordial, and not the involvement in sheer metaphysics.16 The aim of surrealism is to change the world.17 The peregrinations of Rimbaud testify to his belief that ‘the true life is absent […], is somewhere else’,18 and that wandering is the ultimate way of approaching it. As to living it, that does not seem the point, for it is absent, it is void (like the void of the Zen philosophy, as will be seen in the section devoted to Asia). With his poetry and way of life Rimbaud did win the admiration of many writers and scholars, such as the American poet Hart Crane (1899–1932), who believed that Rimbaud was the last great poet the Western civilization would ever know.19

Vincent Willem van Gogh (1853–1890) The Dutch painter Vincent Willem van Gogh makes part of the triad White talks about repeatedly in most of his works. White made his acquaintance with Van Gogh in his adolescent years when still in Glasgow, during a tour of one of its museums. The luminous colours Van Gogh used in his paintings reflect the spirit of nostalgia for the first, 11

La Figure du dehors, 57. Ibid., 39. 13 Ibid., 55. 14 Ibid., 62. 15 Ibid., 40–1. 16 Duclos, Le Poète cosmographe, 23, 56. 17 Le Plateau de l’albatros, 58. This is better put in the original words in French: ‘le but du surréalisme était de changer le monde, ou, disons peut-être mieux, de changer de monde’. 18 La Figure du dehors, 74. 19 Ibid., 64. 12

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primitive world, paintings that sounded new for his contemporaries in Europe. But White appreciates the work of this now renowned painter, since there is poetry/poetics in the use of colours and in what is painted, which builds a link between White’s geopoetic writings and Van Gogh’s gleaming colours. As a tribute, White wrote Van Gogh et Kenneth White (1994), in which he imagines Vincent paying a visit to his Gwenved in Brittany.20 In Une Apocalypse tranquille, White writes that the painting he hankers after is the one that helps him feel intensely the real world, without any divine inspiration, because what is most important is not art in itself, but the sensation of the world. In Asia he finds genuine painters of the world. Van Gogh in Europe recognizes the Asian art. He exclaimed ‘that is the real religion!’ when he saw some Japanese landscape paintings.21 For Van Gogh, then, art without the world is sterile, and this world cannot be sensed unless there is communion between man, the artist, and nature, as Clause Lévi-Strauss argues.22 ‘Painting’, for White, is ‘like poetry’, it ‘is cosmic writing’,23 it paints, or writes, the world, and ‘any reading of poetry, any contemplation of painting that doesn’t envisage that dimension is beside the point’.24 The Japanese poet Su Tungp’o (1036–1101) says that ‘poetry and painting aim at one and at the same thing: an effortless skill and an unmixed freshness’.25

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844–1900) For White, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, the ‘poet-thinker’, ‘radical poet-philosopher’,26 and ‘shaman philosopher’,27 ‘appeared at an era when creativity and energy seemed hard to meet with’, and [he] seemed ‘to carry’ with him a diagnosis that ‘remains till now the most radical […] ever seen’. Nietzsche was very aware of the dead point that European civilization had reached: ‘our culture is undoubtedly something 20

Delbard, Les Lieux de Kenneth White, 178. Une Apocalypse tranquille, 41. 22 Le Plateau de l’albatros, 103-4. 23 Op. cit., 43. 24 The Wanderer and His Charts, 64. 25 A note in Open World, 606. 26 Op. cit., 24. 27 La Figure du dehors, 38. For White, the shaman is that ‘outgoer’, the ‘great outsider’, who ‘keeps the contact open with the socio-human context and the world, the universe at large’; 73. See a section entitled ‘Universal Ancestor: the Shaman’ in McManus, The Radical Field, 68–79. 21

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lamentable’.28 Like White now, he would say ‘I do not know where to go, nor from where I come’. He had a labyrinthine spirit and his best moments were those he spent in Engadine (a valley in Graubünden, Switzerland), where he found himself away from his age and humanity by about two thousand metres.29 White likes Nietzsche to the extent that he says he is ‘so Nietzschean’, though he originally does not like being positioned somewhere so specific.30 He read him when he was 18 years old. Nietzsche seems the closest to him of all his ‘companions’, as this poem in Open World may illustrate: Reading Nietzsche on the River Clyde A room in a poor district at the top of a staircase a hundred steps high in a steep and narrow street ‘Sono contento’ he would say Genoa: energy and clarity a gay hard-living people the mountains and the sea ‘There are many dawns’ he had read in the Vedas ‘that have not yet shed their light’.31

To these dawns Nietzsche walked and about them he wrote. He wanted to go beyond the ordinary poetry and philosophy, but without roaming into metaphysics. His ‘meta-metaphysics’, borrowing White’s words about his own project, takes earth as the locus of his world.32 Nietzsche wanted to remain faithful to the earth33 away from the ‘absurd Europe’.34 Among his frequently quoted words is this sentence from Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883): ‘Brothers, remain true to the earth’.35 For White, he is a ‘poet at the limits of the word’. The fact that he was misunderstood in his age was possibly due to the fact that he had his mind on the future, and saw far into 28

Ibid., 99, 157. Ibid., 39. 30 Ibid., 11. 31 Open World, 11. My italics. 32 The Wanderer and His Charts, 27–9. 33 L’Esprit nomad, 165. 34 Ibid., 111. 35 Op. cit., 24. 29

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Asia. Nietzsche’s mind, says White, worked at the breath-taking speed of the Ganges River in India.36

The German Field The introduction of White’s triad should not be taken to indicate that his list of the ‘vieux fous’ is not long. In Europe, German literature is also of weight and appeals to White. In his analysis of the landscapes and mindscapes of interest to White, Olivier Delbard confirms that ‘German literature is according to [White] the first in Europe by which new ways that express the malaise of civilization appeared’.37 This German literature came into sight in the nineteenth century as though it were the culmination of the early German Romanticism of the eighteenth century. Romanticism in this sense denotes that movement of research into the lost dimensions of ‘knowledge, open, multiple, fragmentary, but fecund knowledge’ of the world.38 In a section entitled ‘Writing the Road’ in The Wanderer and His Charts, White defines Romanticism as follows: What Romanticism meant was a radical crisis in the Western conception of the world, a criticism of its systems, values and ambitions, an encyclopaedic search for knowledge in all directions and groundwork for a new epistemology, as well as a tremendous outburst of creativity.39

Rainer Maria Rilke, Friedrich von Hardenberg (known as Novalis), Friedrich Schlegel, Friedrich von Schiller, Siegfried Lenz, and Expressionists such as Gottfried Benn, Edvard Munch, and Oskar Kokoschka are some of the individuals that pushed the movement further.40 Below, discussion is limited to Friedrich Hölderlin and Martin Heidegger, who take a noticeable space in White’s project.

Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843) Friedrich Hölderlin is a German ‘figure du dehors’. He is referred to in La Figure de dehors, and is compared to Nietzsche. The latter is more daring in the sense that he puts aside any religious background, while the former is in continuous, though nostalgic, pursuit of religious traces and 36

L’Esprit nomad, 238. Delbard, Les Lieux de Kenneth White, 180. 38 Ibid., 181. 39 The Wanderer and His Charts, 96. 40 Op. cit., 180–3. 37

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divinity.41 Like Rimbaud and Nietzsche, the desire of the poet, of the ‘perfect man’,42 according to Hölderlin, is to ‘live poetically on earth’.43 What a genuine and ‘mondomaniac’ poet looks for is a world.44 His perception of the world, his poetry, and his peregrinations are what White appreciates in him. He devotes a poem to him in Atlantica (1986): Hölderlin in Bordeau not overgiven to conversation when opinions began trotting off the tongues he tended to go away for a walk along the river […] walking the streets of Bordeaux in the red days of September watching how the shadows moved slowly with the sun seeing at some high window a beautiful face that was there, then gone he would have to learn how to travel alone.45

Like his European ‘mondomaniac’ travellers and poets, Hölderlin finds himself outdoors. More of Hölderlin’s thoughts are reflected in those of Heidegger.

Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) For Martin Heidegger, ‘another philosophical affluent to geopoetics’,46 ‘it is long, the road most necessary for our thought’.47 Heidegger was after

41

La Figure du dehors, 70. Ibid., 69. 43 Ibid., 53. 44 The Wanderer and His Charts, 146. 45 Kenneth White, Atlantica, bilingual edition, transl. Marie-Claude White (Paris: Grasset, 1986), 108–12. My italics. In a note to the poem in Open World he adds: ‘The thoughts I attribute to him are authentic, I maybe just radicalize them a bit, put my own edge to them’; 614. The poem is cited here the way it is written. 46 The Wanderer and His Charts, 239. 47 Ibid., 94. 42

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a ‘region philosophy has never heard of’,48 and he would soon become what White calls ‘the walker of roads that lead nowhere’.49 With Heidegger, it was not philosophy but rather an emerging way of thinking, a starting thought,50 that took wandering as its source of fulfilment; as he says, ‘he who wants to think immensely must wander immensely’.51 Wandering is of primordial importance since, according to Heidegger, the essence of man is poetic, and this poetic aspect cannot be reached unless man becomes a poet and ‘creates a world’ where he can feel the complete energy he and the world are endowed with.52 White says this about him: Heidegger’s starting point is the observation that the world, the world as phenomenon, the world as life-space, has been reduced to a universe of utensils, a stock of furnishings (a forest seen as so much timber, a mountain as a potential stone-quarry), and to a social context in which human beings have been left with no sense of world at all, no sense of deep being, no sense of presence-on-earth. So much has been lost sight of, lost sense of, that in some linguistic contexts there is no vocabulary available even to talk about such a condition (hence a multiplicity of confused debates), and in some ideological contexts not enough mental distance and perspective to see it for what it is, far less conceive of any worthwhile change.53

Like his contemporaries, then, Heidegger was aware of the lost dimensions that relate man to his mind and his surroundings. There has always been a relationship, but of a different kind: it is the relationship of use and abuse, exploration and exploitation. The modern man hardly contemplates the mountain; when he does, it is to measure how beneficial it is. That is why Heidegger gives more attention to being54 than to doing or becoming. The (Western) world Heidegger seeks is ‘more ancient, closer to the dawn and therefore of greater promise than the platonic or Christian West’.55 The endeavours of the German philosopher are profound and resolute, and target ‘a new (poetic) thought, a thinking which would […] be simpler than philosophy, but precisely because of its simplicity, harder to 48

Ibid., 14. L’Esprit nomade, 55. The words in French are ‘Heidegger […], le promeneur des Chemins qui ne mènent nulle part’. 50 La Figure du dehors, 49. 51 Op. cit., 231. 52 La Figure du dehors, 44-5. 53 The Wanderer and His Charts, 239-40. 54 ‘To “being” we can add correlated words like “essence” and “identity”.’ (White’s clarification). Ibid., 115. 55 Ibid., 142. 49

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achieve’.56 This world to be first understood and then created should take earth as its source. Heidegger puts the link poetically: Earth protect the beginnings world be awake to the soundings world be awake to the earth earth salute the world.57

The philosophy of Heidegger, which he calls ‘beginning thinking’, stands on new grounds and paths that are very close to earth, ‘the physical paths’ (landscapes) as well as the ‘mental paths’ (mindscapes),58 and inexorably also linguistic paths (wordscapes).59 When these paths are followed, the ‘negative’ aspect of the roads that lead nowhere will disappear, since it is possible to spot this ‘nowhere’ in territories which can be entered by dint of ‘meditative thinking’. It is all about a ‘philologic’ and ‘philosophic’ work;60 as White states in an interview with Tony McManus in 1994, ‘geopoetics is concerned with “worlding” and “wording” is contained in “worlding”.’61 In the German context, Hölderlin, Nietzsche, and Heidegger are not the only influential figures. Reading White, they seem the most prominent to him, especially when it comes to the last two. Yet, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Alexander von Humboldt, Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), and Friedrich Hegel also occur, and their thoughts are also recognized by White. Regarding the first of these, his ‘world literature’ (weltliteratur), prophesied around 1827, would characterize the postmodern world.62 Such literature would later be known as ‘comparative literature’ and ‘general

56

Ibid., 146. Quoted in Geopoetics, 30. 58 The Wanderer and His Charts, 240. 59 The word ‘wordscape’ is first used in brackets in The Wanderer and His Charts, 82. 60 L’Esprit nomade, 241–2. 61 Tony McManus, ‘Kenneth White: A Transcendental Scot’, in Bowd, et al., eds, Grounding, 17, 9, 23. The ‘road that leads nowhere’ is explored in more detail in the section dealing with Asia, Part II, Section 2. 62 For what ‘postmodern’ means in White’s perspective, see ‘Pathways to an Open World’. 57

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literature’,63 with which national boundaries would vanish. In connection with geography, Humboldt comes to mind. For Humboldt, there is a lack of descriptions of the environment and landscapes,64 which means that there is a lack of contact with and understanding of these elemental natural aspects. Humboldt seems to say that such contact is very possible and even innate. It is there, ahead on the road, and one needs to move towards it. White quotes him in an essay entitled ‘Elements of a New Cartography’ in The Wanderer and His Charts: As intelligence and language, thought and the signs of thought, are united by secret and indissoluble links, so in like manner, and almost without our being conscious of it, the external world and our ideas and feelings.65

The idea here is that through ‘deconditionement, ouverture, decouverte’, man is united to the world, although he is most often unaware of it. To reach that stage of understanding and description of the world, Novalis, another great early German Romantic poet, suggested understanding the self first: ‘we will understand the world when we understand ourselves, because we both are integrant halves’.66 White laconically words this communion between man, mind, and nature in these poetic lines: The branches of my brain are alive to sun and rain my forest mind is in tune with the wind.67

This close association spoken about here triggers power – the power to see and be in the world: ‘Learn of the pine from the pine’ […] (seeing and saying then is power).68

63

Le Plateau de l’albatros, 81–2. Ibid., 131. 65 The Wanderer and His Charts, 159. 66 Frédérik Dufourg, ‘De l’homme unidimentionnel au cosmo-érotisme’, in Duclos, Le Monde ouvert, 139. 67 L’Esprit nomade, 293–4. 68 Atlantica, 38. 64

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The power of seeing the world and conveying what is seen implies the ability to listen and speak to the world in order to melt, or break, what Hegel, ‘the last [European] mind to have a global view of things’,69 calls ‘the frozen thoughts’.70 White quotes above the Japanese Matsuo Bashǀ (1644–1694) – ‘Learn of the pine / from the pine’ – to evidence that knowing about the cosmos comes from the cosmos itself. However, this ability is soon turned into silence when there is not enough knowledge to feed it: Winter Letter from the Mountain In this world always harder and more acrid more and more white you ask me for news? the ice breaks in blue characters who can read them? I talk grotesquely to myself and the silence answers.71

In addition to these major figures and their thoughts that have a bearing on White’s geopoetics, mention is now to be briefly made to other influential names. André Breton, for example, concludes on the basis of his own mental peregrinations that there is no separation between the real and surreal, between the natural and supernatural, and by implication between the physical and metaphysical. What is there is a ‘continuum’.72 This continuum seems to correspond with the essential life, ‘la vie principielle’,73 that Antonin Artaud was after in the Tarahamura mountains in Mexico. By ‘la vie principielle’ he meant the principles by which nature was made and is lived. His quest was that life should be relived metaphysically by returning to its principles.74 Artaud in Europe resembles Herman Melville (1819–1891), who chased the primordial in America,75 or Saint-John Perse (1887–1975), whose ‘autre vie’ could be sensed after long meditations on 69

The Wanderer and His Charts, 145. La Figure du dehors, 49. The italics are mine. 71 Open World, 110. 72 La Figure du dehors, 40. 73 Ibid., 40. 74 Ibid., 149. 75 Ibid., 92. 70

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a bird, since such meditations refresh experiences in the world.76 For White and his companions, it is all about the world and how to come into communion with it. Here is Blaise Cendrars (1887–1961) enforcing the idea and pushing it further: ‘my situation is very special and difficult to bear to the end. I am independent. I belong to no country, to no nation, to no milieu. I love the entire world, and despise the world.’77 Does Cendrars mean that his love of the natural world dissociates him from the ‘madding’ crowd (i.e. the cohabitants of this world)? That is very possible if one agrees with George Bataille (1897–1962) in his argument that the ‘ignorance of nature’ is rampant and the latter’s ‘incandescent’ richness is barely taken care of.78 What can be inferred from the contributions of White’s ‘companions de route’ is that thought is a requisite, and ‘contemplation is not enough’, as he writes in ‘Valley of Birches’.79 The thinking process of D.H. Lawrence (1885–1930) surfaces at this point: Thought, I love thought […] thought […] It is to look at the face of life and to read what could be read, It is not an act, nor an exercise, Thought, is the entire man entirely attentive.80

What D.H. Lawrence cares for is analogous to the philosophical poetry of Ezra Pound (1885–1972), which aimed at bridging gaps between touchable realities and perceptions and a world of radiant fields of energy,81 a new world for him: ‘simply, I want a new civilization’.82 The objective was ‘to make cosmos’, ‘faire cosmos’,83 and maybe that is what encouraged him to think of setting up the Arts College in London, as a way of escaping the suffocating civilized world. Pound’s search for an outlet resembles in some way that of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951). The latter was a professor at Cambridge but from time to time he felt the call of nature tempting him to Norway, where he would spend some time in isolation in a cabin,84 or to a room upon Ireland’s western coast.85 This 76

Ibid., 110. Ibid., 121. 78 Ibid., 148. 79 Atlantica, 10. 80 L’Esprit nomade, 234. 81 La Figure du dehors, 106. 82 Ibid., 97. 83 Ibid., 106 84 Une Apocalypse tranquille, 43. 77

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scholar wanted to see what the world does beyond the university walls, thus applying Nietzsche’s advice to the scholar/poet to go out: ‘a university scholar can never be a philosopher’,86 unless he is a ‘wild professor, poet professor’, meaning open to the world.87 This appears to be the concern of Ludwig Wittgenstein: My impression is that if all possible scientific questions received an answer, we wouldn’t even begin to touch on the problem of life […]. The mystery is not the how, it’s the very fact that it is there.88

Wittgenstein’s questioning mind reflects reason’s inability to fully comprehend how the world is, and what it does, notwithstanding the unprecedented scientific explanations. Europe seems weak before the ‘mysteries’ of the world. Ideologies and religious attempts to undo them are not enough. By way of coming safely out of this European vicious circle, many companions of White tried other spaces, especially Asia, to which Victor Segalen, Joseph Delteil, and Hugh MacDiarmid, to name but a few, turned.89 But before turning to Asia the passage through America should be considered, because man, ‘prisoner of the “occidental exile”, may find the Orient through the passage of the North’, as White writes in the preface to La Route bleue (1983), in which he narrates his journey to the geographic and ‘meta-geographic’ North, ‘le plateau de Labrador’.

2. America: Accompanying the ‘Gang of Kosmos’ White is interested in America, and some aspects of its heritage nourish his geopoetics. He is a ‘Euramerasian’: ‘I am a Eurasm’, he says in an interview with Fréderic de Towarnicki.90 His interest in the American land does not, however, mean that he is ‘Americanist’, unless this word is understood in its original sense – that is, he is interested in the American civilization and not in the US civilization.91 In the same 85

L’Esprit nomade, 239. The Wanderer and His Charts, 26. 87 ‘Wild professor’ and ‘poet professor’ are White’s terms. They describe the way he thinks a professor should be. Duclos, Le Poète cosmographe, 73–4. 88 The Wanderer and His Charts, 64–5. 89 These three figures are left until the end because their words explicitly allude to Asia. Moreover, reference to Victor Segalen remains brief. White worked on him and Celtitude more than this work can illustrate. The point at the moment is to refer to his interest in the Asian territory. 90 Duclos, Le Poète cosmographe, 79, 196. 91 McManus, The Radical Field, 104. 86

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interview, White says that the America that haunts him is limited in time; it did not last long; it is the America of 1810–1960, the age of the triad: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, and Henry David Thoreau – the most influential and the closest to White in thought. Apart from that, there are other writers who emerged on the scene some time later, and their weight is due to the fact that their contribution is contextualized within ‘world concern’,92 or ‘world literature’ as Goethe calls it: Herman Melville, Hart Crane, Jack Kerouac, and Charles Olson, to limit the list to these. Besides these American companions, White is keen on the Amerindian and Eskimo life, ‘the Amerindian culture, one of the most powerful in what concerns contact with earth’,93 an admiration he developed when still young and which he came to realize later in his life, as La Route bleue recounts: .

From your childhood, images will burn in your mind (you could say how glad you are that such images are like these), and, thirty years later, you still pursue them, after you have meanwhile achieved various excursions, more or less hazardous, more or less fertile, in fields of life and knowledge. This is how I ventured on this blue road.94

One wonders: why is this road blue? White himself says he is not sure of what this means, but he is sure of this: it means something ‘profound’: But what is a blue road? You ask me. I do not know too myself. There is the great blue sky, of course, there is the blue of the river, the majestic St. Lawrence and, further, there is the blue ice. But all these notions, and a few others that come to mind, if they speak to my senses and my imagination, are far from exhausting the depth of this ‘blue’. The blue road is perhaps simply the way, possible way. In any case, I wanted to go out, go up there and see.95

Going there to see is what he really does: from Montreal, passing by the St Lawrence northern bank, arriving at Labrador, and ending in Ungara Bay. The North is associated with the blue colour in White’s project, as is white with Asia. But a pause at these associations between colours and directions may be of use at this stage before construing their significance as the work 92

Op. cit., 196. L’Esprit nomade, 259. 94 Kenneth White, La Route bleue, transl. Marie-Claude White (Paris: Grasset, 1983), 11. 95 Ibid., 11–12. 93

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progresses: ‘it’s good to meditate on colours, the colours of the five directions: blue (north), red (south), white (east), black (west), and yellow (center)’.96 The North road White takes had already been tried by such ‘ancestors’ as Nietzsche, Rimbaud, and Artaud.97 It is the western passage to the east where his white world seems to linger and develop. He takes the ‘A Train’98 to arrive at such stations, ‘fields of energy’. The letter ‘A’ in ‘A Train’ and ‘A’ in America is not a coincidence: America Atopic Anarchic Anachronic Anomic Au-delà des limites [Beyond limits]. This is neither history, nor poetry, nor philosophy. None of these old words. Something else more. Autre chose [Something else]. Ailleurs [Elsewhere]. The road A. Absolutely.99

The journey of White to America is fuelled by ‘nostalgia’ for the Indian way of life: ‘what is an Indian to us now? Nostalgia. The souvenir of one of the best cultures of the world.’100 This desire for a past way of life is not aimless. The malaise of civilization felt first in Europe needed a new space, a remedy, a primitive, primordial outlook, which the Amerindians and Eskimos still live, and which also finds echoes in Thoreau’s motto ‘simplicity, simplicity, simplicity’, along with Whitman’s meditations, as the poem below chants: I Sit and Look Out I SIT and look out upon all the sorrows of the world, and upon all oppression and shame, I hear secret convulsive sobs from young men at anguish with themselves, remorseful after deeds done, I see in low life the mother misused by her children, dying, neglected, gaunt, desperate, I see the wife misused by her husband, I see the treacherous seducer of 96

The Wanderer and His Charts, 60. La Route bleue, 44. 98 Ibid., 21. 99 Ibid., 31–2. 100 Ibid., 61. 97

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young women, I mark the ranklings of jealousy and unrequited love attempted to be hid, I see these sights on the earth, I see the workings of battle, pestilence, tyranny, I see martyrs and prisoners, I observe a famine at sea, I observe the sailors casting lots who shall be kill’d to preserve the lives of the rest, I observe the slights and degradations cast by arrogant persons upon laborers, the poor, and upon negroes, and the like; All these-all the meanness and agony without end I sitting look out upon, See, hear, and am silent.101

Seeing, hearing, and still being silent are the pillars of meditation which White practises too: ‘what have I come to do here? I find it difficult to respond. Let us say: geomental meditations,102 or clues to the first world where the senses are active’: to hear the songs is to hear the sea battering against an ancient cliff it is to understand the first intelligence of time in the universe.103

Some such calls of earth, ‘songs, sea, cliff’, are explored through the American land and its first ‘poet-philosophers’ – Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman – with minor references at the end of this section to the Beat Generation (Jack Kerouac) and some other American ‘extravagants’ such as Jack London, Charles Olson, and Herman Melville.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) White started reading Emerson when he was only thirteen years old, which influenced in some ways his later readings and collection of sources related to one of the basic concepts in his project, namely intellectual

101 Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, in The Norton Anthology of American Literature, vol. 1, 3rd ed., ed. Nina Baym et al. (New York: Norton and Company, 1979), 2044. 102 La Route bleue, 163 103 Kenneth White, Les Rives du silence, bilingual edition, transl. Marie-Claude White (Paris: Mercure de France, 1997) in Michèle Duclos, Kenneth White: nomade intellectuel, poète du monde (Grenoble: ELLUG, 2006), 157–8.

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nomadism.104 In ‘The Nomadic Intellect’, in The Wanderer and His Charts, White writes the following about the images Emerson left in his mind: Whatever the long-term antecedents may have been, intellectual nomadism began for me in a precise kind of way when, around the age of thirteen, I was reading the essays of Emerson that, by some chance or other (I think my father had picked them up from a second-hand bookbarrow in Glasgow), formed part of the family library. In a short paragraph, which he doesn’t develop, Emerson describes intellectual nomadism as the faculty of seeing far in all directions, going on to say that the house of the intellectual nomad is a chariot in which, like a Kalmuk [a member of a Buddhist Mongol people], he will traverse all latitudes, never forgetting his ‘inner law’. The image stuck in my mind, which is perhaps why texts from Mongolia and adjacent territories were later to constitute a significant section of my own pretty extensive library.105

With Emerson, the pioneer transcendentalist romantic, literature and thought in the New World began to take shape, particularly after his call in the renowned essay ‘The Poet’, published in 1844, for the reconsideration of the role of the poet and his relation to the world and nature, ‘which has a higher end’, i.e. ‘the production of new individuals’, and in the ‘ascension, or the passage of the soul into higher forms’.106 For Emerson, ‘new passages are opened for us into nature, the mind flows into and through things hardest and highest, and the metamorphosis is possible’.107 Like White, he takes it that nature is part of the universe, the cosmos. Commonly, it refers to ‘essences unchanged by man: space, the air, the river, the leaf’. Philosophically, it is ‘all that is separate from us […] the NOT ME, that is, both nature and art, all other men and my own body’.108 The power of nature, according to Emerson, resides in its inspirational effects on man, who always expects superhuman senses, ideas, and world: ‘there is no man who does not anticipate a supersensual utility in the sun, and stars, earth, and water’. However, not every ordinary man is able to perceive these senses. The poet, rather, is up to the job: ‘the poet is the person in whom these powers are in balance, the man without impediment, 104

I refer to Emerson and quote directly from one of his famous essays, ‘The Poet’, because of his importance in White’s American geopoetic space and thought. I do the same with Whitman and Thoreau, since they make a special gang of three. 105 The Wanderer and His Charts, 8. The italics are mine. 106 Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘The Poet’, in Baym et al., Norton Anthology, 992. 107 Ibid., 993. 108 Emerson, ‘Nature’, in Baym et al., Norton Anthology, 904.

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who sees and handles that which others dream of, traverses the whole scale of experience, and its representative of man, in virtue of being the largest power to receive and impart’.109 The poet stands at the centre of the world, for he distances himself from society’s business and from politics. ‘The ‘secret of the world is profound’ and the poet is the ‘interpret[er]’, and as a result the poet is loved: ‘therefore we love the poet, the inventor, who in any form, whether in an ode, or in an action, or in looks and behaviour, has yielded us a new thought. He unlocks our chains, and admits us to a new scene’,110 a ‘new road’, as we are going to see with Whitman. The Emersonian poet is the sayer, the namer [and elsewhere he is described as ‘emperor’], and represents beauty. He is a sovereign, and stands on the center. For the world is not painted or adorned, but is from the beginning beautiful […]. Beauty is the creator of the universe.111

As to his capabilities, Emerson says: The sign and credentials of the poet are, that he announces that which no man foretold. He is the true and only doctor [that is, ‘teacher’]; he knows and tells; he is the only teller of news, for he was present and privy to the appearance which he describes. He is a beholder of ideas, and an utterer of the necessary and causal. […] The poet has a new thought.112

What Emerson wants to say is that in the New World ‘there are new lands, new men, new thoughts’113 which the ‘true poet’ attempts to explore and express through poetic language, and it is at this stage that the poet, and man in general, comes to the full realization of his second self: for the first is himself, as he pens in ‘The Poet’, ‘The man is only half himself, [and] the other half is his expression’, or as he says in the chapter ‘Prospects’, ‘Man is one world, and hath / Another to attend him’.114 In other words, man is, or is supposed to be, always in pursuit of the full self, the transcendental self. This is reflected in Emerson’s Journal (1837), in which he appears satisfied with his individual life and aspires ‘to become

109

Ibid., 985–6. Ibid., 987. 111 Ibid., 968. 112 Ibid., 986–7 113 Emerson, ‘Nature’, 903. 114 Emerson, ‘The Poet’, 985; ‘Nature’, 928. 110

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Universal’,115 which is analogous with the poet’s portrait as ‘the complete man’.116 The self-realization and self-expression Emerson is obsessed with are fathomed by means of solitary meditations and ambulation: To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. The rays that come from those heavenly worlds will separate between him and vulgar things.117

Solitude for Emerson is didactic in the sense that it enlarges the scope of thinking of man and pleases the soul, and consequently placates him over his worries and dissatisfaction with civilization: ‘we are never tired, so long as we can see far enough […] Nature satisfies the soul purely by its loveliness’.118 Physical solitude generates mental energy that becomes conspicuous via words: ‘I am sure of this, that by going much alone a man will get more of a noble courage in thought and word than from all the wisdom that is in books.’119 If solitude and openness to the universe through nature are what Emerson mainly calls for, his ‘disciple’ Henry David Thoreau, and Whitman after him, chart the same line of thought and push it a little further with their focus on travel and walking, as if giving new life to their ancestral inhabitants and their habits, the Hopis, and their ancient worlds: the Tokpela, the Topka, the Kuskurza, and the Tuwagashi.120 The Hopis, who originated from Asia, argues White, wandered from place to place till they settled in America in the paleolithic era around 40,000 BC121 in their search for (a) home in the world: ‘we seek a return home’.122 This preColumbian world would later be emphasized by Christopher Columbus, who is labelled by some as a ‘poet’.123 Travel in the American tradition is, then, associated with being in the world, with vision, and with poetics. Michel Leguenne affirms in a recent 115

Emerson, Journal, in The Norton Reader, 9th ed., ed. Linda H. Peterson (1965; New York: Norton and Company, 1996), 102. 116 La Figure du dehors, 70. 117 Emerson, ‘Nature’, 904. 118 Ibid., 907. 119 Emerson, Journal, 101. 120 Le Plateau de l’albatros, 257–8. 121 Une Apocalypse tranquille, 159. 122 Op. cit., 259. 123 Une Apocalypse tranquille, 160.

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Journal de bord on Columbus that ‘voyage’ (‘travelling’), which is a poem according to White,124 ‘requires “hardiness so as to plunge in the void”, with the possibility of finding “an unknown” universe’.125 Such a finding cannot be realized unless it is accompanied and supported by both thought and vision, for ‘“voyage-voyance” (travel and vision) go together, none can go without the other’.126 The travel, voyage, should be both mental and physical so that the mindscape will correspond to the landscape, and vice versa, which will in turn be expressed in a particular wordscape that is fraught with whiteness and desire for the white world, as Hart Crane would say about the ‘American (new) psychosis’.127 In the briefest terms, voyage, for White, should be accompanied with voyance, i.e. the knowhow, ‘savoir voir’, in movement, hence the term ‘voyage-voyance’128 – a term approximately synonymous with ‘intellectual nomadism’. This is probed further with Thoreau and Whitman.

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) Henry Thoreau, ‘the intellectual nomad of Walden’,129 the ‘American proto-geopoetician’130 of his time, and ‘the poet of the world’,131 is another significant contributor to the American transcendental poetics, and to the project of geopoetics, like his mentor and friend Emerson. White delivered a series of talks on Thoreau’s essays, excursions, poetry, and Walden, at La Sorbonne University in 1991–1992.132 In these paragraphs devoted to Thoreau, reference is principally made to his masterpiece Walden, or Life in the Woods, published in 1854, his Journal, and his essay ‘Walking’, published in 1862 in the Atlantic Monthly, after his death. It is with Walden that White first introduces his readers to Thoreau in La Figure du dehors, a book in which the writer tries to go beyond the

124

Ibid., 161. Ibid., 160. 126 Le Plateau de l’albatros, 262. 127 La Figure du dehors, 146. 128 Duclos, Le Poète cosmographe, 53. 129 The Wanderer and His Charts, 16. 130 Ibid., 241; Mohammed Hashas, ‘The American Proto-Geopoetician: Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) and Kenneth White: The Euramerasian’, Online Journal of the Scottish Centre for Geopoetics, 1, 2015, available at www.geopoetics.org.uk/?s=Mohammed+Hashas. 131 Le Plateau de l’albatros, 210. 132 Carnet de bord, 10–11. 125

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frontiers, and speaks to people who are beyond these frontiers.133 Walden recounts his sojourn in a cabin near Walden Pond, amid woodland owned by his friend and ‘teacher’ Emerson, near Concord, Massachusetts. Thoreau lived at Walden for two years, two months, and two days, to give more time to the study of the self, in solitude, and also to relive his mythic childhood days and his dreams as a child. White says that what Thoreau wanted was a return to his mythical boyhood, as he narrates it in his Journal (9 June 1850), and simultaneously to the ‘childhood of the world’.134 Thoreau went to Walden to ‘mythicize’ a natural life he never encountered in literary books. So, he resorted to a mythology that surpasses any socio-personal portrayal of Nature.135 Life in the Woods is part of that mythical world he built in his mind; it details his daily life activities, his aspirations, and his meditations over what he does, and what the world around him does; he touches upon the human aspects of life, as the titles of the sections of the essay-book illustrate: Economy, Where I Lived, and What I Lived For, Reading, Solitude, The Village, Visitors, Higher Laws, etc. Thoreau went to the woods to ‘suck the marrow of life’ and to ‘live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach’. With his ‘extra-vagance’, his unusual way of life, he tried to explore the self, ‘Explore Thyself’, and to look inside it, thus putting the words of William Habbington, whom he quotes, into practice: Direct your eye right inward, and You’ll find A thousand regions in your mind Yet undiscovered. Travel them, And be Expert in home-cosmology.136

The call for undertaking the primordial ‘home-cosmology’ and mental travelling originates from the poet’s belief that those who practise this exercise are not numerous. The self, for Thoreau, is a continent that behoves exploration and intellectual nomadism: ‘be a Columbus to whole 133

La Figure du dehors, 18. Le Plateau de l’albatros, 199 135 Ibid., 198–9. 136 Henry David Thoreau, Walden, ed. Owen Thomas (New York: Norton and Company, 1966), 211. The poem is a quote from William Habbington (1605– 1664). Thoreau modernized the spelling and changed ‘eye-sight’ to ‘eye-right’. See the note to the same page. 134

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new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought’.137 White says that Thoreau went, in his thought, so far as to delve into the farthest and most silent corners of the mind, corners that appear to have been beyond Chinese and Sanskrit depths.138 Thoreau seems sure of where his world leads, a path that is not yet charted by any daring nomad or reader: ‘there is not one of my readers who has yet lived a whole human life’.139 Thoreau’s world is not yet explored, and his road resembles Heidegger’s, the nulle part, the nowhere: this is why it receives applause from White. Nonetheless, Thoreau does not say that his world is impossible to reach. By the end of his Walden experience, he gives clues of the world he likes: I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.140

The simplicity Thoreau had always praised came to realization in Walden. He had a ‘dream’ and he walked out for it to ‘put foundations’ under it. His Journal is also part of that dream, the dream of an original life and ‘real world’: ‘So think of our life in nature – the daily show of the substance, the contact with it – the rocks, the trees, the wind on our cheek! […] The real world! The common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? Where are we?’141 Until the desired contact is carried out, man is still unable to locate or to identify himself on earth. It is contact with the earth that develops the common sense in man and leads him to recognize himself. If the Chinese Lin Yutang (1885–1976) called Thoreau ‘the American most Chinese’,142 White steps further to say that the inhabitant 137

Ibid., 212. Le Plateau de l’albatros, 203. 139 Thoreau, Walden, 218. 140 Ibid., 214. The italics are mine. 141 Le Plateau de l’albatros, 210. 142 Ibid., 182. 138

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of Walden ventures towards a world that is neither Puritan, nor Indian, nor even Chinese. His target is a world beyond that: Under the American Puritan of the 19th century there was an Indian, under the Indian a Chinese, under the Chinese a being that had no name. It is the latter that Thoreau, in his extravagant walk, wanted to realize.143

That world is the ‘real’, ‘new’,144 and ‘savage’ world145 to which Thoreau likes to travel, especially at night: ‘those who travel at night interest me’, he writes in his Journal (2 July 1851).146 The turn is to this idiosyncrasy. Travelling and walking are primordial aspects of the ‘real’ world. They are what make of Thoreau an ‘extravagant’ wanderer, extravagant in its original sense, stresses White, which comes from the Latin extra vagare, i.e. ‘to wander out’.147 The outdoors tempts him. He is ‘the man of outdoors par excellence’. Against the habits of his society, he would, for example, wander out on Sundays with Walden Pond Association members Ralph Waldo Emerson, Bronson Alcott, Frank Sanborn, and Ellery Channing, instead of going to church.148 His walks were ‘intelligent’, ‘mythological’: ‘he practiced the intelligent walking’, ‘the ambulatory yoga’, to ‘live the original life’ – la vie originelle, la vie principielle.149 Below is a visit to the original text of Thoreau, ‘Walking’. Walking for Thoreau ‘is an art’, and the walkers are the vagabonds who inhabit the earth without possessing it, a fact which gives them more freedom, more sensation, and more trajectories along which to space out. Thoreau equates it with sauntering, which ‘is beautifully derived from “idle people who roved about the country, in the middle ages, and asked charity, under pretence of going à la Sainte Terre” – to the holy land’. The practitioner of sauntering is called ‘a saunterer – a holy-lander’.150 Thoreau takes the word seriously; he does not mean it is for idlers; the saunterers, for him, are those who really walked to the Holy Land. Such an enterprise is akin to ‘a crusade’: ‘every walk is a crusade’, waged against the ‘infidels’ (to the earth), an enterprise to recover the lost dimensions of space and being on the earth which ‘we hug’. 143

La Figure du dehors, 83. Op. cit., 209. 145 La Figure du dehors, 78. 146 L’Esprit nomade, 25. 147 The Wanderer and His Charts, 241. 148 La Figure du dehors, 78. 149 Ibid., 80–1. 150 Henry David Thoreau, ‘Walking’, in Bradford Torrey, The Writings of Henry David Thoreau (New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1906), 205. 144

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One of the conditions of being involved in the enterprise of walking is to dissociate the self from the humdrum of society: If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again; if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man; then you are ready for a walk.151

This condition is followed by physical hardiness, like that which Rimbaud had, so as to saunter with pleasure and ease of mind, for the time devoted to this is not short: I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits unless I spend four hours a day at least – and it is commonly more than that – sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields absolutely free from all worldly engagements.152

Once outdoors, Thoreau hardly thinks of a destination, since his ‘heavenly’ intuition guides his steps ‘into a nature such as the old prophets and poets Menu, Moses, Homer, Chaucer, walked in’. He trusts where nature, with its wilderness and wildness, leads: ‘I believe in the forest.’ Nature leads to goodness – ‘how near to good is what is wild!’ – and to the preservation of the genuine traits of life: ‘In Wildness is the preservation of the world.’ The wildness Thoreau is haunted by is (in) Nature, and more precisely (in) the West, where ‘the future’ and ‘a right way’ lie. As to the West, its presence in Thoreau’s peregrinations refers to the Wild – ‘the West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild’153– but also alludes to his gaze over the East, Asia, from America, as would do his compatriot Walt Whitman in his poem ‘Facing West from California’s Shores’.

Walt Whitman (1819–1892) Francois René Chateaubriand left France and Europe in 1791 to search for the North American Hyperborean region and to find a ‘north-west passage’. But soon he left the project behind to concentrate on the American space. There he noted that there was neither culture nor literature developing. Half a century later, the intellectual life would have 151

Ibid., 206. Ibid., 207. 153 Ibid., 214–24. Note: the use of the indefinite article ‘a’ in ‘There is a way’ shows that Thoreau is open to other possible ways. 152

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been amazing to Chateaubriand if he had time for another trip, and he would have been more amazed if he were alive to read the letter Whitman sent to Emerson in 1856 in which he vigorously sings the birth of a generation of poets in the United States of America, a generation that would set up the weight of American literature and its influence on earth: ‘The United States too are founding a literature […]. In poems, the young men of The States shall be represented, for they out-rival the best of the rest of the earth.’154 Whitman was aware of the ‘fields of energy’ the American space was hiding: ‘The Americans of all nations at any time upon the earth have probably the fullest poetical nature’,155 a poetical nature which bursts out clearly in his collection of poems Leaves of Grass, published in 1855. His poetry sings and celebrates America and the Americans, as in his ‘I Hear America Singing’ and ‘Salut au Monde’: What do you hear Walt Whitman? I hear the workman singing and the farmer's wife singing

He sings himself as well: I celebrate myself, and sing myself,156 […] (I am large, I contain multitudes.), […] I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.157 […] Within me latitude widens, longitude lengthens, Asia, Africa, Europe, are to the east – America is provided for in the west, […] Within me zones, seas, cataracts, forests, volcanoes, groups, Malaysia, Polynesia, and the great West Indian islands.158

The largeness of spirit Whitman delights in emanates from the vastness of the barbaric hills and mountains of the American space not yet fully explored and industrialized at his time. The ‘multitude’ he contains grew up through his travels and being in the wildness Thoreau was fond of, 154

Walt Whitman, ‘Letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1856’, in Baym et al., Norton Anthology, 2018. 155 Ibid., 1959. 156 Whitman, ‘Song of Myself’, in Baym et al., Norton Anthology, 1974. 157 Ibid., 2016. 158 Whitman, ‘Salut au Monde’, in James R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings, eds., Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998), 112.

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which justify the presence of ‘Asia, Africa, Europe, America, Malaysia, Polynesia, and the great West Indian islands’ in his poetry. These travels are both physical and mental. The places he did not see, he just flew to by his intellect. He could be described as an ‘American bard’, a poet of the ‘kosmos’, thus applying his own words written about poetry and the growing American states in his preface to Leaves of Grass: ‘American bards’, ‘gangs of kosmos’.159 Whitman, like Thoreau, is an admirer of night meanders, for they open one up to the world he is after, ‘the public road’ to which he invites companions, the ‘gangs of kosmos’: I am he that walks with the tender and growing night, I call to the earth and sea half-held by the night.160 […] But each man and each woman of you I lead upon a knoll, My left hand hooking you round the wait, My right hand pointing to landscapes of continents and the public road.161

This ‘public road’ is for the self, and cannot be travelled by another self, as it is a march towards its personal realization; this is why each individual should take it by himself: Not I, not any one else can travel that road for you, You must travel it for yourself. […] Yourself! Yourself! Yourself forever and ever!162

It is this same road that White invokes when discussing Whitman.163 More precisely, it is with ‘Song of the Open Road’ that the Thoreauean, 159

Whitman, Leaves of Grass, preface, in Baym, Norton Anthology, 1966, 1972. The freshness of Whitman’s poetry reverberates in White’s as well: Somewhere in New England East-West afternoon: leaves of grass reflected in my bowel of tea.

In Open World, 397. My italics. Whitman, ‘Song of Myself’, 1988. 161 Ibid., 2012. My italics. 162 Ibid., 2012. 163 L’Esprit nomade, 255. 160

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Whitmanian, and Whitian roads seem to converge. First, the poet, Whitman, tells his reader that he rides the ‘brown paths’ by foot, like Thoreau sauntering, with amplified energy and ignited muscles: Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road, Healthy, free, the world before me, The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose. Strong and content, I travel the open road. Allons! Yet take warning! He traveling with me needs the best blood, thews, endurance.164

The poet also converses sometimes with the road to show that it is as wide and large as he is: You road I enter upon and look around! I believe you are not all that is here; I believe that much unseen is also here.

Sometimes he talks to air, light, paths, and objects: You air that serves me with breath to speak! You objects that call from diffusion my meanings, and give them shape! You light that wraps me and all things in delicate equable showers! You paths worn in the irregular hollows by the roadsides! I think you are latent with unseen existences – you are so dear to me.165

The poet converses with the elements of nature to express his admiration for the unexplored and the ‘unseen’, and to dig out fields of energy within his body: ‘I am larger, better than I thought; / I did not know I held so much goodness’. He does this through ‘pausing, searching, receiving, contemplation’ and through wisdom that he tests: ‘here is the test of wisdom / which / is not finally tested in schools’. He does the same with religion and philosophy, which prove less than what they appear to be when re-examined on the open road: Now I re-examine philosophies and religions, They may prove well in lecture-rooms, yet not prove at all under the spacious clouds, and along the landscape and flowing currents.166

164

Whitma, ‘Song of Myself’, 1988–90. Ibid. 166 Ibid., 1989. 165

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It is ‘the efflux of the Soul’, ‘freedom’, ‘happiness’, and ‘wisdom’ that contribute to this ‘realization’ which earth confers on the travelling souls: The earth never tires; The earth is rude, silent, incomprehensible at first – Nature is rude and incomprehensible at first; Be not discouraged – keep on – there are divine things, well envelop’d; I swear to you there are divine things more beautiful than words can tell.167

When both soul and body travel, and ‘the body does not travel as much as the soul’, ‘they go toward the best – toward something great’, towards the open road in Whitman’s diction, and towards the open world in White’s diction. It is not important where this road is because for the travelling poet all the world is his, and Whitman sings that too: ‘The east and the west are mine, and the north and the south are mine’. In simpler terms, the Whitmanian road ‘is before us!’ and everybody is invited to take it, leaving behind society and civilization: Allons! be not detain’d! Let the paper remain on the desk unwritten, and the book on the shelf unopen’d! Let the tools remain in the workshop! let the money remain unearn’d! Let the school stand! mind not the cry of the teacher! Let the preacher preach in his pulpit! let the lawyer plead in the court, and the judge expound the law.168

Whitman’s road is so far ‘not far’. He has taken it and is aware of its existence. This solidifies Thoreau’s words when he says that ‘there is a way, a right way’, as seen above. Here is Whitman echoing him: It is not far, it is within reach, Perhaps you have been on it since you were born and did not know, Perhaps it is everywhere on water and on land,169

and perhaps it is in the West, in Asia, in India, beyond India, as he sings in his poem ‘Passage to India’: Passage to India! […] Passage to more than India! 167

Ibid., 1974–7. Ibid., 1978. 169 Ibid., 2012. My italics. 168

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58 O secret of the earth and sky!170

‘Passage to India’ was written nearly a decade after ‘Facing West from California's Shores’, in which his quest was still in the process of development even though it was obvious where he had arrived and what he still wanted: his peregrinations in America, ‘Inquiring, tireless, seeking what is yet unfound’, led just to the oceanic breezes of California, and opened his lungs to the air of Hindustan and Kashmere, where might have resided his real home and where his ‘open road’ could have flourished and charted new mental and physical geographies: Facing west from California's shores, Inquiring, tireless, seeking what is yet unfound, I, a child, very old, over waves, towards the house of maternity, the land of migrations, look afar, Look off the shores of my Western sea, the circle almost circled; For starting westward from Hindustan, from the vales of Kashmere, From Asia, from the north, from the God, the sage, and the hero, From the south, from the flowery peninsulas and the spice islands, Long having wander’d since, round the earth having wander’d, Now I face home again, very pleas’d and joyous, (But where is what I started for so long ago? And why is it yet unfound?)171

The idea is that Whitman’s wanderings on the ancestral space never tire him, since his attachment to earth can always fuel his zeal and ‘gather up what might have been lost during the previous expedition’.172 The Whitmanian cause, then, can be summarized in his movement towards what he calls ‘les principes premiers’173 – notwithstanding his at times indecisive tone over where his road is leading him, as the last parenthesized line of the poem above elucidates.174 Yet, in the main, he remains an Oriental in spirit, as Thoreau describes him,175 who has travelled but still leaves more to be travelled to; he leaves the ‘essential for you’,176 for future ‘gangs of the kosmos’, to do: ‘I myself but write one or 170

Whitman, ‘Passage to India’, in Baym et al., Norton Anthology, 2062, 2068. My italics. 171 Ibid., 2027. 172 Khalid Hajji, ‘Geography between Politics and Poetics’, in Discourse Analysis: A Cognitive and Educational Tool or a Metalinguistic Gimmick? (Oujda: Faculty of Letters Publications, 1997), 191. 173 La Figure du dehors, 157. 174 L’Esprit nomade, 255. 175 Op. cit., 57. 176 La Route bleue, 72.

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two indicative words for the future’.177 Maybe the ‘you’ stands for the Beat Movement, and maybe all the air he has inhaled in his life in the woods, upon hills, and on the shores he has frequented caught the name of Jack Kerouac (1922–1969), the spokesman of the Beat Generation,178 the outdoors gang. For White, Jack Kerouac ‘is the Whitmaniac “open road” figure one hundred years later’. He is the singer of the ‘homelessness’ and ‘lostness theme[s]’ his compatriot Thomas Wolfe dealt with before him: ‘I know that we are lost here in America – but I believe we shall be found again.’ Such homelessness Kerouac also sings in his autobiography On the Road (1957), by means of hoboing and solitude in a search for a meditative life: I was searching for a peaceful kind of life dedicated to contemplation […] to see the world from the view point of solitude and to meditate upon the world without being imbroglio’d in its actions. […] I wanted to be a man of Tao, who watches the clouds and lets history rage beneath.179

Again, it is Asia that is present in the mind of this ‘vanishing American hobo’ – vanishing because the habit of hoboing is now being misunderstood, misinterpreted, a fact which would convince Kerouac to practice his Taoism at home: I myself was a hobo but I had to give it up around 1956 because of increasing television stories about the abominableness of strangers with packs passing through by themselves independently […]. There’s something strange going on, you can’t be alone anymore in the primitive wilderness (‘primitive areas’ so called), there is always a helicopter comes […] and snoops around […]. As far as I am concerned, the only thing to do is sit in a room and get drunk. […] I am simply going to another world.180

The ‘another world’ of Kerouac is the Tao world he referred to earlier, the world of Whitman’s open road, and the worlds of Melville (1819–1891), Jack London (1876–1916), and Charles Olson (1910–1970), the worlds of Buddhism and Taoism. Melville’s Moby Dick, and its white whale swimming towards the white world, is a work which does not belong to ordinary literature, according to White. It belongs to ‘non-literary literature’ since what it

177

The Wanderer and His Charts, 100. Ibid., 101. 179 Ibid., 102. My italics. 180 Ibid., 102. My italics. 178

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contains is different, and most importantly more interesting.181 White’s admiration for the work leads him to use Ishmail’s words in La Route bleue: ‘Call me Ishmail, the intellectual nomad…’.182 Still, in a poem entitled ‘Melville at Arrowhead’, in Open World, White thinks that Melville’s whale did not go much further: ‘The White Whale hadn’t made much headway’.183 What is also of interest in Melville is his view about the poet of the new world who should open being, his own being first, to the universe,184 an aspect White insists on as the characteristic of the poet of the world. As to Olson,185 ‘his project was to restore man to his first field, and henceforth give him an orientation, a direction and the possibility of sharpening his perception, and to give a “face” to his life’.186 He likes being in unknown spaces in a search for a ground for his project.187 Nonetheless, such a project is not easy to materialize, and Olson reveals this to the universe around him, the sea that is close to him: It is about the things unachieved 181

Le Plateau de l’albatros, 312. La Route bleue, 36. 183 Open World, 544. 184 Une Apocalypse tranquille, 166. 185 Olson is present in White’s mind. He dedicates ‘Old Man in Dogtown’ to him: 182

Old Man in Dogtown (In memoriam Charles Olson) ‘A teeny weeny one for the road,’ he said and went out again into the grey wind white clapboard houses fish bones, weather vanes salty memories this place, another place old man in baggy pants bald, gasping, lumbering still pressing forward with an eye to the open. In Open World, 396 Le Plateau de l’albatros, 299. 187 La Figure du dehors, 85. 186

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That I speak this morning In front of the sea That spreads out by my feet.188

Jack London, the ‘adventurer-writer’, also feels that the world is too much for him. His outlet is to go and see for himself how much of it there is. His curiosity to see what is there beyond the Golden Gate that hinders his sight of the world stimulated him to sail as much as he could towards the Pacific, China, Japan, and India: What do I want? Do not you sometimes feel that you could die if you do not know what is beyond these hills? Ah! The Golden Gate! Beyond, it is the Pacific Ocean, and China and Japan and India […]. I am leaving… leaving…189

With London, White leaves America for Asia, following the American’s quest for a new space which accompanies him in his explorations in and with the ‘A Train’. In ‘The House at the Head of the [Asian?] Tide’ in Open World, White wonders: ‘where are we? / where are we going?’190 To Asia, now.

3. Asia: Void, Whiteness, and the Possibilities of Reinvigoration The ‘A Train’ that White takes to America is different from the one he takes to Asia, yet the ‘A’ label may still be applicable to both. It seems to be a mere coincidence, but significant at this stage. The ‘A[sian] Train’ tries to push the American and European quest for ‘la vie principielle’ much further. According to Nietzsche, the ‘“solution of the enigma of the world” will come from the alliance of the agitation of the Occident and the contemplation of the Orient’: I imagine future thinkers in whom the perpetual agitation of Europe and America will join the Asian contemplation, a legacy of hundreds of generations: such a combination would solve the enigma of the world. Meanwhile, the free contemplative spirits have their mission: they abolish all barriers that impede an interpretation of men: religions, States,

188

Une Apocalypse tranquille, 167. Ibid., 171. 190 Open World, 506. 189

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monarchic instincts, illusions of wealth and poverty, prejudices of origin and race, etc.191

Asia is seen as the third space, between Europe and America, that could reinvigorate cultural and philosophic life in the world. In White’s terms, it is the ‘vagina of nations’, and travelling towards it renews the view over the Occident. It affects thinking: Once we pass through the Orient, we have a fresh look at the Occident […]. The result of the Orient journey is that the geography of being and thinking change. Asia […] is the vagina of nations.192

White’s orientation towards the Orient has its historical background, as both passages above illustrate. Like the Americans, the Europeans also felt the power of Asia. In addition to Nietzsche, the Scottish Hugh MacDiarmid (1892–1978) and the French Victor Segalen (1878–1919) and Gerard Delteil (b. 1939) also expressed their desire for the exoticism (in its positive sense) of the Orient before White. Hugh MacDiarmid, one of the leading figures of the Scottish twentieth-century Renaissance, rejoices in singing the enchantment of the Chinese space: […] I am more concerned With the East than with the West and the poetry I seek Must be the work of one who has always known That the Tarim Valley is of more importance Than Jordan or the Rhine in world history.193

191

Pierre Jamet, ‘La pensée planaiteaire selon Kenneth White’, in Kenneth White et la Géopoétique, ed. Laurent Margantin, 163. 192 In Duclos, Le Poète cosmographe, 19. 193 On Scottish Ground, 176. White recognizes the encouragements of MacDiarmid when still in his beginnings; he also appreciates his poetic talent and the work he has done for the Scottish Renaissance, as he notes in Open World. He devotes ‘For MacDiarmid’ to him: For MacDiarmid Scotland in winter Wind whooming round the white peaks I have been walking along the river Druie By the golden pine and the silver birch Thinking of your poetry

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MacDiarmid’s words take one back to the divergence that has always existed when dichotomies between East and West, Orient and Occident, are brought to the fore. MacDiarmid suggests that there are fields that are worth valuing in the East. That is, the latter has more to give than the exhausted West, simply revising the European-Christian heritage is no longer enough in this age, and the future of the world is not limited to the European and American horizons. The point is that the era of disregarding and denigrating the Eastern part of the world is in its demise, and a better, more harmonious look over the world is the ultimate aspiration for a more multiculturally open world. The contact between the East and the West has historically been marked by ambivalence, suspicion, and enmity as well as mutual enrichment. It is against any reductive binary opposition that White develops his project and perception of the world in which dogmatic-ideological discourses are put aside. This is why he avoids the term ‘Orient’ and prefers, instead, ‘Asia’, for the first brings to the mind its opposite, the Occident. In an interview with Jean Marie le Sinader, White says: ‘Asia, Orient… I prefer to speak about Asia now. Asia is a space; the Orient is a term of opposition’.194 However, this does not mean that the terms are totally rejected; they are simply avoided – a question of preference. White does not object to their use; his interviewees use them repeatedly and he responds without protest. More than that, the Orient of White generally refers to India, China, Japan, Tibet, Hong Kong, Thailand, and Taiwan195 – the territories he has either visited or read about. The first three take the lion’s share in White’s focus. MacDiarmid’s obsession with the Orient busies him over the world he really lives in, the Occident, and nurtures in him an envisaged poetry that Now in the Lairig Ghru At the heart of the ontological landscape Alone with the diamond body. In Open World, 67. The note also reads: ‘The reference in the last line is to his long poem “Diamond Body,” but also, beyond it, to the whole “diamond body” context’; 605. 194 Duclos, Le Poète cosmographe, 79. 195 Tibet, Hong Kong, Thailand, and Taiwan are not discussed in this work. The focus is on the triad of India, China, and Japan. For Tibet, however, see the chapter in which White deals with Victor Segalen and the Tibetan charm, ‘Un Celte en Asie’, in La Figure du Dehors. For Hong Kong, Thailand, and Taiwan, see: Scènes d’un monde flottant (1983), Terre de diamond (1983), Le Visage du vent d’est (1980).

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only someone who has known the Tarim Valley could come up with. White tries to be this person: ‘I try undoubtedly, among other things, to be this “one”.’196 Segalen, White’s ‘brother in spirit’,197 tried to do a similar job before him. In pursuing ‘his road’, he journeys to China, the mandala, the cosmic space, which is a passage, a ‘geographic metaphor’,198 and to Tibet, the land of witness, towards the ‘essential being’, ‘le moi essentiel’, without having the intention of settling there.199 In other words, his peregrinations in the Orient have an aim; he wants to be energized to return afterwards to his ‘old’ world to revise it, as is the case with White, and no doubt that is why he calls him ‘a brother in spirit’. Here are Segalen’s words: ‘I do not want to stay in China […]. I do not want to come back without having sucked what I want’.200 Delteil’s argument about the Orient is not far from MacDiarmid’s and Segalen’s. He esteems Asia and considers it a complementary part to Europe. He asserts its possession of what the latter misses, namely principles and profound forces that could give the notion of man a renewed freshness: Asia was without doubt, and is anyway now complementary to Europe. It possesses the principles that we lack, the sense of eternity, the cult of the soul, the love of mildness that the brutal civilization of Europe did not recognize or condemns […]. There are in Asia profound forces which we deprive ourselves of, and which, when their age is due, will give to the notion of man a considerable enlargement.201

The ‘enlargement’, ‘l’accroissement’, of Delteil is close to the objective of White: to enlarge the circle, the centre, the starting point, i.e. Europe, by opening it up to America and Asia, without ‘asiatizing’ or ‘americanizing’ it. It is a step beyond Whitman’s ‘Passage to India’; it is a step towards a Euramerasiatic (Euramerasian) world,202 an archipelago of thoughts that transcends both Orient and Occident.203 Two thirds of this world (Euramerasia) have been visited till now; now it is the turn of the remaining third, Asia.

196

La Figure du dehors, 130. Duclos, Le Poète cosmographe, 55. 198 Op. cit., 195–6. 199 Ibid., 197–8. 200 Ibid., 196–7. 201 Ibid., 121. 202 Ibid., 120, 130. 203 Ibid., 18. 197

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Following Nietzsche and Whitman The presence of Asia in White’s movement is, then, the culmination of his readings of the European and American traditions. In each continent there are influences, or voices, that all aspire to go to the old(est) space, Asia. Two figures remain very remarkable in White’s mind: Nietzsche, ‘the Bouddha of Europe’, and Whitman, ‘who resembles the Orientals’, to use Thoreau’s words.204 White aims at bringing these thoughts together, a sort of ‘constellation’, as he names it.205 Asia is also present in the movement through the early readings of White – as a child – of texts from the Orient, precisely India, and through his ‘original territory’ that covers five kilometres in the west of Scotland, a space that is open to the North, America, Asia, Euramerasia.206 Asia, the land of the triad ‘yoga-tao-zen’, as Michèle Duclos puts it in Kenneth White: nomade intellectuel, poète du monde (Kenneth White: Intellectual Nomad, Poet of the World) (2006),207 was much referred to in White’s early narratives such as Les Limbes incandescentes (1976) and Lettres de Gourgounel (1986). With his waybooks and poetry that followed his travels to Asia from 1975 on (at the age of thirty-nine), Asian lands gained more focus and much of his ink of his ink was expended on them.208 The essay-books dealt with here are more illustrative.

India Though the Orient is referred to from the middle of La Figure du dehors onwards, it is not until the last four essays that it is elaborated upon. India, the land that begets wise men, as the Greek philosopher of the

204

Duclos, Le Poète cosmographe, 84. Ibid., 84. 206 Ibid., 79. 207 Duclos, Le Monde ouvert, 172. 208 White’s first three visits to Asia came at an invitation from cineastes to produce films. At the same time, White felt the writing obligation and wrote Le Visage du vent d’est (1980), which shocked many for the reason that it narrates the mythic, the mystic, and the Buddhist, as well as the modern and cosmopolitan aspects of the Orient. In an interview he says this about it: ‘That the book goes from vulgarity to vision, from meditation to reportage, mixes brute experience and contemplation. This has shocked many. They did not know from which end to tackle it.’ Duclos, Le Poète cosmographe, 150. After the same visits he also wrote Scènes d’un monde flottant (poetry, 1983) and during his 1985 visit to Japan he wrote The Wild Swans. Duclos, Le Monde ouvert, 177–9. 205

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first century Cappadocian Appollonius de Tyane described it,209 is the first Asian territory one comes across. It is the original space of Buddhism and Sanskrit, the concern of Nietzsche, and the eighteenth-century German Romantics.210 Still, in opposition to the ‘sentimental’ and religious way the Romantics, the Beat Generation, and the hippies of the 1960s considered India and Buddhism, White digs deeper, to go beyond the religious and sentimental aspects. His thirst is for the ‘India of spirit’.211 He shows his attitude in Les Limbes incandescentes: ‘India, India […]. The big dream of going to India, the big stock of wisdom that is India, the secrets and beauty of India – all the sentimental crap about India.’212 The Orient White is interested in is that which confirms what is already present, that which builds on what is there, to reinvigorate the human being and help him live a life that is ‘impossible to conceive’.213 It is the venture that one embarks on via what he calls ‘The Indian Trip’ in Une Apocalypse tranquille.214 With this argument he moves on to say that the way to such a life is not through passing by each corner of India or through extroversion into a monastery for Zen contemplation. What he suggests is contemplating some paintings of the Japanese Tǀyǀ Sesshnj or reading some poems of Matsuo Bashǀ – towards which he walks.215

China After India, White heads towards China, with joy: ‘Then I quit India for China […]. I am really in China, I am really in China.’216 His steps towards it resemble Segalen’s; the difference between the two is that White holds a project in mind, and consequently knows what he wants to ‘suck’ from the land of his companions of the road: Lao Tzu (d. 531 BC), Tchouang-tzeu (d. 278 BC), Hsi (d. AD 1090), and Wang Wei (d. AD 761). In China, White is able to sense the profound world better (like Thoreau, the American most Chinese!). In Scènes d’un monde flottant (1983), White puts it this way: ‘The Chinese civilization presents the irresistible charm of 209

La Figure du dehors, 156. Ibid., 156–7. 211 Delbard, Les Lieux de Kenneth White, 80. 212 Kenneth White, Les Limbes incandescentes, trans. Patrick Mayoux (Paris: Denoël, 1976), 156. 213 La Figure du dehors, 151–2. 214 Une Apocalypse tranquille, 191. 215 Op. cit., 152. 216 Kenneth White, Le Visage du vent d’est (1980), in Duclos, Kenneth White: nomade intellectuel, 193. 210

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what is totally other, and only what is other inspires love of the most profound, with the most gripping desire to know it.’217 The charm of China hardly leaves White’s mind during night peregrinations. In Lettres de Gourgounel, a Chinese scene is pictured in a section he entitles ‘Cette petite chine’ (‘This Little China’): after describing the foggy and rainy night, his mind goes back to delight in the yellow colour of the moon. With this yellow colour, China is brought to the fore. In l’Esprit nomad he refers to it as ‘the yellow land’, ‘la terre jaune’.218 What about Chinese Taoism? Is it part of the charm of this territory? Taoism for White is not a philosophy. It is thought, thinking. Philosophy is systematic, as is the case with mainstream modern European tradition. Taoism is thought that gains power through its openness to the world, through having the world as its basis. It is an oceanic thought whereby ideas are ‘exposed’ to the world, and ‘not imposed’ on it.219 Taoism is not a philosophy or a religion, or even a science, but a ‘constellation’ (White’s term) of them all. ‘Taoism is something else’, and to describe it necessitates a new poetic term that is not linked to any particular domain. This assignment is what White’s movement is after. He proposes an old Taoist term, ‘The Academy of the Seagulls’, which could be the epitome of a vital life, void of systems and classifications, and, most importantly, peopled by ‘the real situation-less man’, uncategorized, and too supple to catch. There is but void to catch, and void cannot be caught, nor can it be explained, so it is better not to try to explain it. What can be tried instead is to enter inside it, within it, and this is the idea of Lie-tzeu: ‘toing and froing in an infinite space’, aimlessly, without a definite intention.220 This way, the path is traced back to the original meaning of Tao. ‘Writing the Road’, an essay in The Wanderer and his Charts, provides this definition of Tao(ism): The word tao, ‘way’, is written in Chinese with two root characters, the one representing ‘feet’, the other ‘head’. Taoism, then, could mean

217

Scènes d’un monde flottant (1983), in Duclos, Kenneth White: nomade intellectuel, 196. 218 L’Esprit nomade, 190. In The Wanderer and His Charts, White gives the colour yellow to the centre, and the East is given the colour white; 60. For more on this see Part II, Section 2. 219 Une Apocalypse tranquille, 198–9. 220 Ibid., 201.

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something like ‘how to move with your head’, or ‘how to make headway’.221

With feet the mind surfs the universe. The process of ‘taoisizing’ looks like an ‘ecology of the body in the world, and of the spirit in space’,222 and the more one practises it, the better one is able to become present in the world.223 The more one ‘taoisizes’, the more can be done, and the more these deeds can appear as if not done.224 This cannot be understood by systematic minds – such as that of the pedagogue, since he does not belong to the category of people of high calibre, argues Tchouang-tzeu, the father of Taoism.225 The close and complex relation Taoism has with the cosmos stems from its origin. In his attempts to explore the secrets of Taoism, White goes to the source, Tao To King, a text written in the sixth century BC by the Taoist Lao Tzu, to tell us what his point is. If Tao is a ‘way’, it is that way, that ‘indeterminate’, ‘independent’, and ‘unalterable’ ‘something’, that preceded the birth of the universe. Due to its untiring movement, it looks like the ‘Mother of the World’, and since it is nameless, it had to be given a name: ‘Tao’.226 The original words, the translated words in fact, are: 221

The Wanderer and His Charts, 105. Op. cit., 201. 223 Le Plateau de l’albatros, 223. 224 Une Apocalypse tranquille, 201. 225 Ibid., 200. 226 La Figure du dehors, 164. Here is the text White speaks about: 222

The Greatness of Dao There is a thing confusedly formed, Born before heaven and earth. Silent and void It stands alone and does not change, Goes round and does not weary. It is capable of being the mother of the world. I know not its name So I style it ‘the way’. I give it the makeshift name of ‘the great’. Being great, it is further described as receding, Receding, it is described as far away, Being far away, it is described as turning back. Hence the way is great; Heaven is great;

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Silent and void […] It is capable of being the mother of the world. I know not its name So I style it ‘the way’.227

This floating, elusive image of Tao that is in constant movement in the universe ‘represents’, says White, ‘something profound and obscure’ that ‘contains a sort of essence’.228 What he means by essence is that ability to see the void in the soul and to live without preventing it from living (in) the world. Such an essence is perceived only by the ‘man of Tao’,229 or what Zen Rinzaï (a school of Zen) calls the ‘situation-less real man’, or the ‘real man without situation’, who is described in this way: He is at home, but still he has not quit the road [Tao]. He is on the road, but still he has not quit home. Isn’t he a man like the others, or is he on the road towards something else? Who could say? […] Even Buddha cannot direct him. Once we try to catch him, he disappears – he is on the other side of the mountains.230

By building links and at the same time by undoing them, the idea becomes evident that this ‘real man without situation’ is as elusive as that ‘profound’ thing called Tao. This elusiveness creates what is referred to above as ‘void’ and ‘emptiness’, a world where categorizations are ignored, where the universe is the ‘creative energy’, and where the ‘original face’ of man, of the Taoist and his ‘identity’, can be realized. This is where White meets with his companion Tchouang-tseu.231

Earth is great; The king is also great. Within the realm there are four things that are great, And the king counts as one. Man models himself on earth, Earth on heaven, Heaven on the way, And the way on that which is naturally so. 227

Dao is another name for Tao. See Association Française des Professeurs de Chinois, available online at http://afpc.asso.fr. 228 La Figure du dehors, 164. 229 Ibid., 166. 230 Ibid., 165. 231 Ibid., 166.

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What is meant by being immersed in excavating the void to arrive at the ‘original face’, the face ‘one has before he is born’ in the lexis of Chan Buddhist master Dajian Hui-neng (638–713), is not an escape from the ‘malaise’ of the world. On the contrary, by journeying to this ‘original face’ and space, the Taoist (the equivalent of the walker, the saunterer, the wanderer, since they all share the common feature of going out) is also finding a way for his society.232 By ‘taoisizing’ – or simply töing! – the Taoist gains what Lao Tzu calls tö, the power and energy gained through the peregrinations in the ecology of the mind, which can be the radical and total solution to political and social chaos.233 Lao Tzu’s tö is akin to Tchouang-tseu’s wisdom, and wise man: ‘the wise penetrates the mystery of heaven and earth, and comprehends their principles, without being driven into their havoc’.234 He keeps a distance so that his scrutinizing sage’s look can leave the scope of thinking open to cosmic dimensions, away from being pigeonholed in tiny political and social cages. The quest is the source, the source of all sources, that is the Source found in the following words uttered by an ‘old-young’ woman when asked by T’ien Ken (literally Heaven Root) about tao: Find your way with ‘the lamp of chaos’ […]. Keep in mind a sense of wandering ‘where there is no trail’. […] I heard [this advice] from the son of Aided-by-Ink, and Aided-by-Ink heard it from the grandson of Repeated Recitation, and the grandson of Repeated Recitation heard it from Seeing-Brightly, and Seeing-Brightly heard it from WhisperedAgreement, and Whispered-Agreement heard it from Waiting-for-Use, and Waiting-for-Use heard it from Exclaimed-Wonder, and ExclaimedWonder heard it from Dark-Obscurity, and Dark-Obscurity heard it from Participation-in-Mystery, and Participation-in-Mystery heard it from Follow-the Source.235

T’ien Ken’s journey started with his question, ‘How is it possible to get some order into the world?’, and he was advised to ‘go’ to ‘ch’ԇ’ (to go, going, toing)236 till he arrived at Tao and the Source. Taoism is highly esteemed in Chinese culture. It is the source of order in mind and land. From Tchouang-tseu’s perspective:

232

Ibid., 170. Ibid., 168–9. 234 Ibid., 169. 235 The Wanderer and His Charts, 107. 236 Ibid., 106. 233

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The universe is the unity of all things. That man recognizes once his identity with this unity, then life and death, beginning and end will no longer trouble his tranquillity.237

The unity the passage above values is realizable through wandering out in the landscape, with the feet, and in the mindscape as well, with the mind. Feet and mind, in retrospect, remind the reader of the meaning of Tao: feet and head. Thus, unity is realizable through Taoism. This unity is exemplified in the poetry and poetic words of Hui-neng and his ‘original face’, Lao Tzu and his tö, Tchouang-tseu and his wise man. It is also manifested in the paintings of Wang Wei. Painting is among the most prominent aspects of Chinese culture. White quotes ‘one of the most interesting essays of aesthetics ever written’, Philosophy of Forest and Fountain by Kuo Hsi (998–1078): Wordly men can handle a brush. Technically, they paint. But they do not realize that painting is a difficult thing, requiring more than technique and talent […]. Ku K’ai-chih of T’sin built a high-storied pavilion for his studio, so his thought would be more free […]. Unless I dwell in a quiet house, seat myself in a retired room with the windows open, table cleared and dusted, triviality and commonplace removed, I cannot have good feeling for painting and cannot create the yu [the deep and the marvellous] […]. In landscape painting [sansui – ‘mountain and water’], there are principles and thoughts that cannot be expressed roughly and hurriedly. […] To paint in an unprincipled, careless manner, without realizing the great idea, is like flinging dung into the wind.238

Like poetry, painting, according to Kuo Hsi, requires a profound comprehension of the world and of the self in the world. Solitude and meditation are primordial precepts for this. Wang Wei, who preceded Kuo Hsi, was aware of this. He painted and wrote his ideas in solitude so as to achieve the sensation of the ‘white clouds’ and go beyond their whiteness. Nietzsche was mad about earth and always called for being close to it: ‘Brothers, remain true to the earth.’ Wang was mad about the white clouds: ‘Keep company with the white clouds.’239 With these ‘white clouds’ one remembers the joyful sigh of White when he arrives in China: ‘Ah, I am in China, I am really in China.’ He also says ‘I am maybe Chinese too’.240 237

La Figure du dehors, 166. Op. cit., 209–10. The italics are mine. 239 Kenneth White, Lettres de Gourgounel, transl. Gil and Marie Jouanard (Paris: Presses d’aujourd’hui, 1979), 101–2. 240 Open World, 214–15. 238

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Japan In Les Cygnes Sauvages (1990), which narrates his travels to Japan in 1985, Kenneth White writes that to know Japan, and to be able to know what Japan knows, he had to travel mentally.241 Physical travels followed mental ones to pursue the paths of the great painter Matsuo Bashǀ to Hokkaiko summits in an attempt to reach the North, the space of silence, emptiness, and self-realization. Japan forms part of this North that signifies closeness to the original world. Some mention has already been made of the Labradorian ventures in the section dealing with America and the ‘A Train’ of 1982. The A Train is now in Asia, in Japan, the land nearest to the North: To travel North is to travel to the centre of one’s self. I suppose the same thing is true for the South, the East or the West (any ‘pure direction’, as it were) but it seems good to me that the North, with the East maybe, is privileged. When we advance towards the North, the landscape denudes, the points of interest rarefy. The self shines. […] The self shines [gains delight] and gets lost in a relishing ecstasy.242

Japan, the land of the Eastern rising sun,243 is the land that most valorizes the journey – ‘life itself is a journey’ – and develops it into a ‘literature of the road’, michiyuki-bun, a literature which embodies the inside and outside landscapes and expresses them in a poetic form.244 This form, the haiku, is a source of attraction to White because of the cosmic dimensions it is fraught with. Early in Les limbes incandescentes, as in Lettres de Gourgounel, there are signs, direct or indirect, of haiku peregrinations, through either the reading245 or the reworking of haiku poetry.246 We make a stop first at the linguistic signification of the term, and subsequently a move to consider its cosmic/philosophic weight seems a necessity, before examples by Matsuo Bashǀ, Yosa Buson (1716–1784), Toyo Sesshnj (1420–1506), and White himself are given. It is in ‘Vent d’est’ (‘Wind of the East’), in La Figure du dehors, that White defines haiku and links it with the Zen of Buddhism to arrive at the void (‘le vide’), emptiness. Haiku, haikai or hokku, is a Japanese form of poetry that developed from tanka, a poem made of five verses, each made 241

In Delbard, Les Lieux de Kenneth White, 99. In Duclos, Le Monde ouvert, 209. My italics. 243 La Figure du dehors, 173. 244 L’Esprit nomade, 263–4. 245 Les Limbes incandescentes, 170. 246 Lettres de Gourgounel, 173. 242

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of 5-7-5-7-7 syllables. In the renga tradition, participating poets would take turns to provide alternating verses of 5-7-5 syllables and 7-7 syllables.247 In English, haiku is/are248 usually written in three lines. In English literature, the imagists were very much influenced by haiku, as the American imagist John Gould Fletcher (1886–1950) believes, because it ‘helped them write brief, concise, and full of direct sensations poems’.249 But White recognizes the limitations of the imagists, since they took from haiku only fragmentary aspects. Writing genuine haiku is not easy, and Matsuo Bashǀ, the father of the genre, says that in writing ten haiku in one’s life, one becomes a master of the genre.250 The keenness White nurtures for haiku emanates from its powerful spirit to engage and be engaged in the cosmos, taking nature as its point of departure and arrival, as exemplified in Bashǀ’s words ‘follow nature, return to nature’. As for Buson, he also thinks of haiku as an elevating medium for the soul, and this starts by leaving the trivialities (of the world) and simultaneously making use of them.251 In other words, the haiku gains power from the power of nature, and from transforming this power by and into freshness: ‘haiku without freshness is no longer haiku […]. Freshness is the essence of the art of haiku’, writes White in his Gourgounel laboratory where he read, worked, and reworked some haiku.252 Having deepened his studies about Japanese haiku, White arrives at an age where he can refute the translation he comes across by reworking them in the haiku style and words he deems most convenient. For instance, Miyamori translate a haiku of Buson as: Contemplate! The sea in spring undulates and undulates the whole day long

White reforms it into: Ah! The waves of the sea in spring waves of the sea in spring the whole day long253 247

La Figure du dehors, 183. Haiku is both singular and plural, though ‘haikus’ is also possible for the plural. 249 Ibid., 184. 250 La Figure du dehors, 184. 251 Ibid., 183. 252 Lettres de Gourgounel, 173. 253 Ibid., 173. There is no full stop in the poem. Most of White’s poetry is not punctuated, and most interestingly it is full-stop-free most of the time. The influence of haiku is noticeable. Maybe he leaves the words open to the winds of 248

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The metamorphosis the translated version of Miyamori has undergone concerns first the number of lines. White respects the number of lines of the Japanese haiku when translated into English: three lines. Further than that, he simplifies the style by dropping the ‘grandiloquent’ verb ‘contemplate’, replacing it with a natural sigh/sign, ‘Ah!’ He does the same with the ‘dead word’ ‘undulate’ by writing ‘waves’ instead, to make it fresher and more vivid. The haiku, whether written by the Japanese or by White, reminds us of the importance of poetry, or rather poetics, which language should be pregnant with in the geopoetic project, and in the world that White is opening. It may be as simple as one can think of, but it is heavy with meanings. This has long been a tradition in Japanese culture. In On Scottish Ground (1998), White refers to a thirteenth-century Japanese work of poetry, Shashekishu, in which the writer Ichien Muju (1227–1312) attempts to build bridges between philosophy and poetry.254 In his peregrinations in America, as narrated in La Route bleue, White’s Chinese and Japanese ‘figures du dehors’ accompany his intellect. Their haiku haunts him. So, he finds himself writing haiku too: ‘I write haiku’.255 Writing haiku is first a means of giving tribute to the form. Second, ‘to write haiku is to go beyond oneself, to forget oneself, and go out take some fresh air’.256 It is more or less a remaking of the self, a revision of its fields of energy and search for ‘better fields of exploration (and evolution)’.257 This is how White sees haiku, and this is why he says he has written little books that are ‘haikucultural’.258 More interestingly, he invites other people to write haiku,259 as it is like an exercise of yoga, a mental more than a physical exercise that aims at expanding consciousness through much meditation. By the Platonic syllogism, and since haiku is among the most expressive poetic forms, this point is reached: poetry is yoga, as White says in an interview.260 From this introduction to White’s interest in haiku, the shift is now some steps further, to get to Zen philosophy, and ‘le vide’ that it the air, since he is in constant movement, ‘voyage-voyance’! He hardly capitalizes first letters, apart from the first word in the poem. 254 On Scottish Ground, 213. 255 La Route bleue, 145. 256 Ibid., 145. 257 Une Apocalypse tranquille, 215. 258 Ibid. The books he means are Le Chemin du haiku, and l’Anorak du géoland, both collections of poems. See Duclos, Le Monde ouvert, 204. 259 Duclos, Le Poète cosmographe, 202. 260 Ibid., 21.

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culminates in. When asked by a student about the way to penetrate the spirit of haiku, Buson answered: ‘plunge yourself into the Chinese poetry’. This the father of haiku did – for the student was Bashǀ.261 Here, links appear. Since Chinese poetry was influenced by Buddhism and Taoism (Buddhist Taoism), as illustrated earlier, the Japanese haiku that was in evolution would be influenced too, but by Zen Buddhism. A pause is again needed to explain what Zen Buddhism means, so that the way to ‘le chemin du vide’ and ‘le monde blanc’ is clarified. For White, ‘Buddhism is above all logic’, the ‘logic of the void’.262 With Buddhism no one goes ‘nowhere’, because ‘one does not exist’ and thus cannot go anywhere, nowhere, ‘nulle part’. It is all about being in the world, a white world void of distinctions.263 Now that he has ‘sucked’ what he wants from Buddhism and Zen, i.e. he has caught up with ‘le chemin du vide’ and ‘le monde blanc’, White begins to distance himself from them: ‘in fact, it is better to push aside words like “Buddhism” and “Zen”’. Using the Buddhist monk Bodhidharma’s (fifth- or sixth-century) words, it is like ‘killing Buddha’ and walking on the road of the void towards the void, ‘le vide’, ‘vacuité’. It is also like ‘dezennifying the Zen’264 – these are White’s words. By ‘void’ he does not mean ‘nothing’. Rather, he means that there is nothing without something else. There is nothing that stands alone, without connections. He gives this example: ‘a tree “is not” without earth, without water, without clouds, without winds’.265 The same thing is applicable to man: man ‘is not’ without being connected back to the cosmos. The point is that White tries to transcend what he calls the ‘negativist logic of Buddha’ by ways of ‘nirvanization’, though there is no Nirvana (the perfect state of mind).266 There is no contradiction here. Nirvanization without Nirvana is analogous to taking the road without arriving anywhere. The arrival is at the white fields, the white world. In Open World it is expressed in a comparable way: ‘the place of the spirit is nowhere, it’s like the tracks of birds in the sky’.267 Reference is made to the white world, and that ‘the way to it is the birdpath’. At this stage of development White echoes Whitman, as ‘The Region of Identity’ depicts:

261

Une Apocalypse tranquille, 222. La Figure du dehors, 214. 263 Ibid., 215. 264 Ibid., 215–18. 265 Duclos, Le Poète cosmographe, 199. 266 La Figure du dehors, 217. 267 Open World, 192. 262

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Part II The Region of Identity ‘…before all my arrogant poems the real Me stands Yet untouched, untold, altogether unreached’ (Whitman) […] 1. How many forms discarded how many selves destroyed how many dawns and darknesses until I reach this place of light and emptiness where white birds cry a presence – or still yet only sigh? 2. So much life lived for this one flame so much travelling for this one point – the intelligence trembles at the approach of naked being. 3. The hard path of the spirit leads to these places all powerful feeling leads to these emptinesses the destiny of words to these moving silences. 4. Or still yet only sign? – to cover my naked body with signs and be a sign among signs or to go beyond signs into the light that is not the sun into the waters that are not the sea. 5. Always the metaphysical landscape but more and more abstract yet more abrupt where the farthest of realities are the reality and life that dancing flurry

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that line of white that incandescent edge advancing beyond meaning and problem. 6. Metaphysical? – the physical absolute the opaque burned out the heaviness dissolved. 7. This pool of water holding rock and sky traversed by the wing-flash of birds is more my original face than even the face of Buddha. 8. Panic colony: arch-traces on the sand flying whiteness in the air the principles are here – my species. 9. Cosmic body The cosmo-comedy.268

‘Emptinesses’, ‘darknesses’, ‘light’, ‘physical absolute’, ‘naked body’, ‘principles’, and ‘cosmic body’ are some of the elemental features of ‘the original face’ White, the poet, travels to. They are ‘regions’ of the identity of the self on ‘the road of void’ towards the white world. There is not one pure identity, because on the road the ‘cosmic body’ is always on the move, unable to be defined, measured, and thus not identified.269 The road to ‘the original face’ has by now been illustrated enough, though there is still much to be explored in Part III, where the greater focus is on White, and the white, open world, the culmination of his world peregrinations and intellectual nomadism. Still, by way of retracing the road back to the Japanese haiku, ‘the expression of the road of void’, as White thinks of it in Une Apocalypse tranquille,270 ‘The Gannet Philosophy’ is quoted below to display White’s march towards the master of haiku, Bashǀ, and how he sees in the East in general the embodiment of

268

Open World, 202–4. My italics. Une Apocalypse tranquille, 221. 270 Ibid., 224. 269

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the ‘regions’ of the North (needless to say again that the North should be understood ‘metaphorically’, ‘meta-geographically’271): The Gannet Philosophy […] 1. Way up north where the great wind blows he is walking way up north where the dawn-light breaks he is walking way up north in the difficult land he is walking. 2. The more I walk this northern coast the closer I am to the East though I bear the soil of Europe in my bones it is an eastern light I see striking these stones. 3. The white hills have perfect reflections I came through Lochaber in the dead of winter to meet Matsuo Bashǀ on the Island of Dogs. 4. All poetry comes from facing a loveliness all love comes from living in nakedness

271

Ibid., 217.

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all naked life comes from the nakedness. 5. Let your poem be as the gannet’s wing with power and clarity in its wheeling bearing erotic flesh to the ecstasy of being.272

On the way ‘To the East / the rising sun’,273 White meets Bashǀ, with whom he engages in an indirect conversation. Like Bashǀ, who ‘was a poet / out for unheard poetry’,274 he follows nature, and returns to nature by dints of the ‘power and clarity’ of the ‘poem’ that communicates the ‘ecstasy of being’. Though it is not written in a haiku form, the spirit of haiku is present: ‘nakedness’ (‘the original face’), ‘power and clarity’. If it is right to say that the haiku is one of the most interesting ‘difficult areas’ in Japanese culture, painting is of no less value. Toyo Sesshnj, a renowned Japanese painter, is given space to close L’Esprit nomade in an essay entitled ‘Voyage dans un bateau de neige’ (‘Journey on Snow Boat’). Sesshnj, the name, signifies ‘Snow Boat’ – a charming name for White.275 Among what he admires in Sesshnj is his seventeen-metre long ‘landscape roll’, full of natural landscapes, spotted with meditants on the road, white fields, rocks, trees, temples, boat, sea, waves, ending with winter season scenery, dense forest, snow, whiteness, and silence. This is the landscape White is after. His words express it: ‘I am home […]. Ahhh…’.276 Knowing that Sesshnj lived and wandered in China for some time before settling in Japan to develop his art in painting, White appreciates the painter’s finesse in holding his brush: Sesshnj After years in China emptiness achieved he painted with the fewest of strokes the hardness of rocks 272

Open World, 192–4. My italics. Atlantica, 132. 274 Op. cit., 14. 275 L’Esprit nomade, 291–2. 276 Ibid., 293. 273

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80 the twistedness of roots.277

Sesshnj appears endowed with the haiku spirit that is able to catch the cosmic dimensions in brief and concise words. Sesshnj did that with his ‘fewest strokes’. Cannot he then be called a ‘haiku painter’ as his compatriots who use the art in poetry? The statement of the renowned Japanese playwright and poet Masao Kume Santei (1891–1952) could be reworded by changing ‘haiku poet’ to ‘haiku painter’: ‘With regard to a unity in life, art, and mental attitude, there is no other artist for whom it is as harmonized as for the haiku poet [/haiku painter]’.278 With Japan this part dealing with White’s visited territories or readabout trajectories comes to its end. By means of intellectual nomadism, White has visited the lands he could not visit geographically. Having started from Europe, where he belongs, to fill in the void of its civilization he annexes the American soil to his project. But since both continents seem already exhausted, a new land, ‘un sol nouveau’, had to be explored. Eyes turned to the Orient, mainly Asia. The rationale behind these peregrinations is to found on a unifying soil, Euramerasia. White is still trying to pave the way for the fourth road, building on what Oswald Spengler thought of: three roads, the classical that sticks to the present and near-future, the romantic that scrutinizes what is far, and the Chinese that consists in wandering aimlessly. The addition of White is the fourth road, which envisages a ‘combination’, a ‘constellation’, of the three. Going North, South, East, and West is a way to find out a ‘new center’,279 new fields of energy that could bring the world to its ‘original face’, to its ‘poetics’.280 The pathways to the fourth road that reach ‘la voie vide’ have actually led to the silent, the empty, and also to the white open world. It is the meeting point he has been pining for. The fact that he followed the paths of companions here and there does not mean he is influenced in the negative sense of the word. He is critical upon whichever soil he stands. Tony McManus has this to say concerning the point: He was never out to be an orientalist scholar. ‘To be that’, he says in Pilgrim of the Void [1992] ‘has never been my aim’, defining himself rather as a ‘late-modern Western writer, that is, a mind-traveller, looking for new ways of thinking, writing, and being’. If the prime motivation was

277

Open World, 85. Ibid., 212. 279 La Route bleue, 144. 280 L’Esprit nomade, 224. 278

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not scholarly, it was also not religious, as it has been with many Westerners. White has never considered ‘converting’ himself to some system of belief or practice […]. He has also avoided the more obvious literary influences […]. He is not one to frequent the haiku circles that have arisen all over Europe and America.281

That is, White sauntered around to seek fields of energy for the reconstruction of lost cosmic dimensions, away from the existent classifications, ideologies, religions, philosophies, and journalistic discourses. In his work there is deconstruction and reconstruction. There is rebuilding, or building upon what is already there. He says that the paths he has travelled are not about imitation, nor about following without direction; rather, they are about tracing as originally as possible one’s way.282 By way of illustration, White says that it was not his intention to make of Buddha and Tao an ‘obsession’, because real Buddha ‘gives way to the “original face”’.283 White’s perambulations are also the starting point for a new work in Europe in particular, the territory he has left to go back to for remedy: ‘I do not deny Europe […] I analyse it’.284 The void he meets with in Buddhism, Taoism, and Zen, along with the density of sensations of the haiku, are all of pivotal importance in reworking and rediscovering the Western tradition, and world diversity and richness: ‘There is a need to breathe again, to breathe a fresh air […]. Rediscovering the world […], that is why […] I speak about geopoetics.’285 White puts the same idea clearly in the last paragraph of ‘Le Champ blanc’ (‘The White Field’), an essay in Une Apocalypse tranquille, so that the ‘sociocultural, intellectual, and psychopoetic contexts’ can be avoided and ‘world poetics’ recovered.286 In the same context, White does not say that the start should be purely from the East. He recognizes the energy of the West as well, ‘the “primitive” thing [the original world] Bashǀ looked for […] is not, of course, an “oriental” speciality; it exists at home too, and it was equally looked for by Occidental spirits’.287 This implies that sometimes the quest is the same, in East as in West, in North as in South, and what is needed is a project to unite the efforts. White’s undertaking attempts that unification. In the third and last part of this work the attempt is to illustrate how he lives his life as a practitioner of geopoetics. 281

McManus, The Radical Field, 109. La Figure du dehors, 64. 283 Ibid., 166. 284 Duclos, Le Poète cosmographe, 197. 285 Ibid., 200–1. 286 Une Apocalypse tranquille, 224. 287 Ibid., 218. 282

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A note is needed before closing this part on ‘territories and trajectories’. White includes Africa in his geopoetic project, though he admits that one cannot do everything and be everywhere. In an interview with Daniel Curtis, White says that in his spirit there are regions of Europe, America, and Asia, ‘with some of Africa, and maybe there will be some more (but we cannot do everything…)’.288 Time constraints may be among the main hindrances in giving more space to Africa. Moreover, the Arab-Islamic world is part of the Orient (and the Occident), and has received descriptions by European scholars of different disciplines for centuries. But White does not devote special space to it because he treats geographies and outgoing figures, and not the Orient as a construction (read Edward Said). This is why his earlier note on often using the word ‘Asia’ and not ‘Orient’ is relevant. Still, he has travelled to North Africa, to Tunis and Morocco,289 and has since his early founding texts made references to Islamic Sufism,290 and to Arab and Persian poets and scholars.291

288

Duclos, Le Poète cosmographe, 51. For geopoetics in Arab lands, see Khalid Hajji, ‘Kenneth White’, interview, almun‘ataf cultural magazine (Oujda annaۜƗh), 11, 1995; Omar Bsaithi, ‘In Arab Lands: A Geopoetic Sketch’, in Bowd, et al., Grounding, 162, and Omar Bsaithi, Land and Mind: Kenneth White’s Geopoetics in the Arabian Context (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008). Across the Territories and Le rodeur des confins, for example, narrate White’s travels to Morocco. 290 L’Esprit nomade, 265. 291 Le Plateau de l’albatros, 220–2. 289

PART III KENNETH WHITE: FROM INTELLECTUAL NOMADISM TO THE OPEN WORLD

I am the survivor of a great catastrophe and I am trying to re-establish contact. I walk and I write for the same reason. To make the right movements and to renew lost relationships. —Kenneth White, Les Limbes incandescentes, 18 (trans. McManus)

Part II of this work nomadizes with Kenneth White in the major spaces his geopoetics projects push him to visit, starting from Europe, passing through America, and arriving in Asia – with little reference to Africa. He reaches the white spaces he has been after by means of meditations, peregrinations, deconstruction, and reconstruction. So far, one can understand that White has behind him the (whole) Western tradition, European and American, combined with the wisdom of the Orient. By now one feels that White’s target is a new space that has nothing to do with the existent histories, ideologies, religions, sciences, socio- and psycho-cultural discourses. The objective is a new space, a new world where the ‘original face’, the ‘original world’, can be sensed anew. As to this final part of the present work, it accompanies White in his explanations of how the white world can be achieved. At this stage, the focus is on him as a practitioner of geopoetics, and not his companions. In addition to his five major essay-books that have been considered already (La Figure du dehors, l’Esprit nomade, Une Apocalypse tranquille, Le Plateau de l’Albatros, and The Wanderer and His Charts), this part uses two of his waybooks, La Route bleue and Across the Territories, three of his narratives, Les Limbes incandescentes, Lettres de Gourgounel, and House of Tides, and two collections of poems, Atlantica and Open World.

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This part sheds light on the way White conceives of life and how he spends his time throughout the territories he crosses (in Section 1), dwells in (Section 2), or writes about (Section 3). They all make up the harmonious whole of geopoetics. The fact that White (like his companions before him) manages to live according to these new but still open precepts shows that they are not utopic but realistic; only they are not easy to pursue collectively.

1. Nomadizing: Listening to Land and Mind White is a world intellectual nomad, who keeps thinking while perambulating worldwide. He applies to himself the category of man that he adds to the four kinds of man of Plato, i.e. he is a mondomaniac: Plato distinguished four types of man: appetitive man (the one who tries to gather everything into himself, like an infant); spirited man (the man of heart and of courage, the man of action); rational man (aiming at mastery of life and the world); and demonic man (the man who follows his daimon, a superpersonal power linking him obscurely to what surrounds him). To this list I’d like to add one more type, close to the demonic, but nevertheless distinct from him (less inclined to frenzy and characterized more by clear energy than by obscure impulse), which I’ll call: mondomaniac, the man who has a mania for mondo, mundus, world.1

If White is a ‘mondomaniac’, he is also a ‘spirited man’ since he is a man who does carry out what his intellect suggests: he travels; he walks; he wanders out. He is also a ‘rational man’ since he aims at knowing the essence of life and world, though he might have reservations about the use of the term. He is rational in the sense that he wants to master not the world, but himself in the world. He is ‘demonic’, but more ‘mondomaniac’. He is ‘daimonionized’ – using Socrates term.2 White has been ‘inhabited’ by the cosmic charm since his childhood, as his words in the preface to La Route bleue manifest.3 He would later bring to life these memories of the blue road. It would become a vital concept in his waybook of the same title: La Route bleue. Defining it in simple terms is hard for him. All that it clearly means is a ‘way’. To explore it he had to go to it: ‘The blue road is perhaps simply the way,

1

The Wanderer and His Charts, 145–6. For Socrates, ‘daimonion’ signifies the spirit, the energy that pushes the human being forward and guides him. Une Stratégie paradoxale, 233. 3 La Route bleue, preface, 11. See the quote Part II, Section 2. 2

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possible way. In any case, I wanted to go out, go up there and see.’4 This road is the highway towards the ‘meta-geographic’ North (the epitome of whiteness), Labrador, the space of laborare and adorare: that is, the field of enormous work (laborare, labour), along with a great love for the world (adorare).5 The blueness of Labrador puts White ‘on the profound road’ which leads a person to ‘live a more profound experience’, the ‘radiant way of knowledge’.6 White is a man of Labrador. Since his childhood his paths have been towards it, away from his birthplace: One cannot remain Scottish all his life. One should know how to leave his hamlet, and get involved in the world […]. The great outdoors […]. I have been walking towards Labrador ever since I took to walk. I took the road the day I left the cradle […] to have a look at my Original Face […]. The first space.7

Labrador came to White at a time when his mind felt an urgent need for a space, far from the ‘cultural claustration [enclosure]’, ‘all that I need for the moment is a space, a large space for life and for ultimate meditation […]. We suffer from a cultural claustration […]. We have to leave the old ruts, and go far away’. The way out of these ‘old ruts’ is the ‘A Train’ that he takes with his companions, his ‘ghosts’: ‘I travel with my ghosts’. He, ‘the migrant of the Great Western Road’,8 does not travel alone. ‘Geomental meditations’ are always a part of this Ishmaelite world: ‘Call me Ismail, the intellectual nomad’. He does not quit wandering and sightseeing even when having his coffee: his coffees, too, are ‘philosophic’.9 Among the directions in which his meditations take him is the construction of an oceanic library where ideas can flourish and research groups meet: Will building an Atlantic Library, a space for energy that will transcend all the humdrum, somewhere at the edge of the world, [be] the thing that should be done now? Or, beyond all the libraries, shall we try to put the finger on our live earth and let the primordial world talk freely, though in a discontinuous manner?10

4

Ibid., 11–12. Duclos, Le Poète cosmographe, 118. 6 Op. cit., 209. 7 Ibid., 18, 24, 28, 126. 8 Ibid., 24, 43, 87. 9 Ibid., 30–6. 10 Ibid., 81. 5

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But who is eligible to work in and benefit by this library? About one hundred pages later, this answer is provided: open spirits, men and women, from all over the world can work together, and form an archipelago of erratic and extravagant spirits of fresh air to open up new ways, new configurations in the cultural field. Such people can make up the board of White’s ‘Geopoetic Research Bureau’ as well. With the Bureau and the Atlantic Library White is suggesting ways of being in touch with the outer space. He is aware that this remains a dream, a version of ‘utopia’,11 but creative attempts remain valid as long as they answer primordial questions. White’s meetings with Amerindian and Eskimo families make up an important part of his peregrinations in the northern lands of America. He spends a good deal of his time with them, to investigate their past and the changes their culture has borne since they came into contact with the white man and his ‘civilizing mission’. Regarding this point, White touches on Louis-Armand de la Hontan’s Dialogues curieux avec un sauvage (1703), and his defence of and preference for the Indians’ way of life over that of the Europeans. He esteems their culture and calls them ‘philosophes nus’ (naked philosophers), in place of the labels by which they are commonly known (‘savages’, or ‘poor people of the woods’). Afterwards, White invokes some historical incidents in which he converses with an old Indian lady, Rose Marie Fontaine, who narrates how the European white man tried to turn them into ‘invisible’ beings.12 With a nostalgic tone in mind about the vanishing of ‘one of the most interesting cultures in the world’, White saunters around with more Indians and Eskimos (and sometimes a mixture of both), attends an Indian wedding ceremony, and listens to their music, without putting his quest into oblivion: to look for more shamanic individuals, ‘ghost shamans’,13 who find themselves outdoors more than indoors. When with an EskimoIndian family, the Robinsons, White engages with its members in a debate over the meaning of ‘voyage’, travelling, only to find that this family has now adopted a more or less sedentary way of life, in contradistinction to their old nomadic habits. Now, they spend a lot of time in front of the TV. As to travelling, one of the family members says that for him it is possible by plane, and the orientation is to look for women. They recognize the nomadism of White and think that he is more Indian than they are: ‘You are more Indian than us’.14 11

Ibid., 186. Ibid., 63, 110. 13 Ibid., 61, 66, 127, 118. 14 Ibid., 67. 12

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One major aspect of White’s ‘Indianness’ is the backpack on his shoulders and the night and day ambulations. The waybook is spotted with sentences, phrases, and flashbacks that all substantiate the idea that he is an intellectual nomad: ‘I wander in the deserted streets’; ‘I spent a night, a long night, walking in the great arctic peace’; ‘all the night I sit in front of the window […]. I sit listening to the wind […]. I go out to salute the morning and the world.’15 There is happiness in what he does, which reminds us of Whitman’s ‘The Open Road’ and the beauty and happiness it brings to the soul. White’s walks invoke this feeling too: ‘It was the beginning of a new day, fresh and blue and I was happy to walk, happy to be there, outdoors, in the center of nowhere, alone, to look at these big gulls turning in the wind’; ‘I was exalted by the wind, exalted by the great whiteness of the St Laurence. Exalted by ideas.’ These outdoor ventures are part of the space where ‘we could listen to the world’.16 Deep down in the mind, there is that Indian heritage inculcated: to live in communion with nature, and not at the expense of nature: ‘The Indians didn’t know what to do with nature. They lived in harmony with it. They didn’t know how to master it and possess it.’17 This made of them the people most friendly to earth, and thus most close to the cosmos. Applying Heidegger’s poetic words previously quoted, one may say ‘they protect the beginnings’, and ‘salute the world’. At the close of the notes on his ambulatory itinerary in America, White ends with an epilogue which he expands into a long poem that takes the same name as the space: ‘Labrador’. In this poem he encapsulates what his nomadic intellect has led him to. Below most of the poem is cited despite its length: Labrador 1. […] Once more I felt that breadth of mind like being drunk but this was colder and more clear than anything that might come of a jug it was what I’d always lived for what I always will live for till they throw me into the trough of the waves 15

Ibid., 59, 201, 209–10. Ibid., 141, 93, 177. 17 Ibid., 164. 16

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I was used to dance over […] In all my lonely ongoings I have thought of many things I have thought of the earth of its beginnings […] I have dreamed of a primal place […] the earth then was a nameless place I have been in love with nameless places now there are too many names […] names, names, names […] It was time to move farther West […] and still no other land in sight only the green waves and the wind and a vision strong in the mind. 2. […] it was a time of white silence I carved a poem on the rocks in praise of winter and the white silence among the best runes ever done Men with long eyes and high cheek-bones came to visit me I gave them cloth they gave me skins there was peace between us […] I travelled farther South into a land of forest I met red men there dressed like birds I was aware of a new land a new world but I was loath to name it so soon simply content to use my senses feeling my way step by step into the reality I was no longer Christian nor yet had I gone back to Thor

Kenneth White: From Intellectual Nomadism to the Open World there was something else calling me Calling me out and waiting, perhaps, to be called Something sensual and yet abstract something fearsome and yet beautiful it was beyond me and yet more myself than myself […] here was no place for Christ or Thor here the earth worked out its destiny its destiny of rocks and trees and sunlight and darkness worked out its destiny in silence I tried to learn the language of that silence more difficult than the Latin […] 3. A whole new field in which to labour and to think […] I lived and moved as I had never done before became a little more than human even knew a larger identity […] and this was a new world and my mind was, almost, a new mind […] Religion and philosophy what I’d learnt in the churches and the schools were all too heavy for this travelling life all that remained to me was poetry […] I am an old man now an old man very old I have cut these runes on a rock to be my testament perhaps no one will read them and that is no matter they will stand on the rock

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90 beside the scratching of the ice open to wind and weather.18

Life in Labrador has, then, ushered White to the world that ‘I’d always lived for’, and to ‘what I always will live for’, a ‘beautiful’, ‘sensual’, world of ‘labour’, ‘think[ing]’, and ‘lonely ongoings’, a world that is a ‘primal space’ for him where ‘white silence’, ‘new land’, ‘new field’, ‘new mind’, ‘travelling life’, ‘language’, and ‘poetry’ are both results and effects of its beauty. With these Labradorian notes, more open spaces across the territories open up. About twenty years after the journey to Labrador, White would commence a nomadic enterprise that charted more territories. Across the Territories (2004), or its French version Le Rôdeur des confins (2006),19 is the text that recounts the itineraries of this enterprise. It covers travels from Orkney in the north of Scotland, passing through the Scandinavian lands (Denmark, Norway and Sweden), central Europe (Poland), and Corsica, the Iberian Peninsula (Portugal and Andalusia), the Atlas (Morocco), and North America (St Lawrence River), arriving at the Polynesian Rangiroa. Along these territories, White practises his intellectual nomadism through thinking, much thinking, meditating, wandering (and through reading and writing, as the last section will show). Before recounting some aspects of nomadism in this essay-book, the foreword in the French version is rich and requires consideration. Among the first key declarations the foreword to Le Rôdeur des confins makes is that land, geography (landscape), and mind (mindscape) go together in White’s project. His geographical itineraries reflect his mental maps. The more open spaces there are, the more intellect there is, and consequently the more cosmic being it becomes: ‘It is not only a question of geography; it is a question of mental landscape.’20 This intellect that finds itself more in the outer than in the inner space originates from the anguish modern life has brought about. White is very aware of this, and his geopoetic answer is an attempt in many facets to come safely out of this quagmire. Here are his words:

18

Open World, 520–5. My italics. Though citations are mainly from Across the Territories (Edinburgh: Polygon, 2004), some are from the foreword to Le Rôdeur des confins, which the English version does not have. Kenneth White, Le Rôdeur des confins, transl. MarieClaude White (Paris: Albin Michel, 2006). 20 La Route bleue, 9. 19

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I do not think that I am the only one who is situated at this vicinity. On the contrary, I think that we are all now more or less vaguely conscious of having arrived at the end of a historical process, and an ideological itinerary. Hence the dismay of our societies and a series of attitudes ranging from cynicism the most vulgar to spiritualism the most ephemeral. With, always, deep down in the conscience, the question: What to do? Where to turn? This is the substantive issue that I have been trying to give an answer to for years (the years of the great drift) – for myself first, then for others, if my attempts, which have their space and their places outside the central hubbub, concern them. In fact, this is not to give a ‘response’ of a metaphysical, religious, or other (I do not belong to the neo-prophetism); it is an open space of existence and promotion of a new presence in the world.21

‘What to do? Where to turn?’ The answer is the ‘open space’, to reinvigorate the intellect. Part of the work, then, is to bring to the fore historical attempts, historical figures, in whatever geography one is located. White does this kind of work. For example, in Copenhagen he speaks about Soren Kierkegaard (1813–1855), in Stockholm he remembers Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772), in Corsica he talks about Jean J. Rousseau (1712–1778) and Paul Valéry (1871–1945), in Tahiti he mentions Herman Melville (1819–1891), in Morocco he refers to Abdurrahman Ibn Khaldun (1333–1406). When he mentions them, and many others, he refers to their intellectual achievements, to their philosophies, and to their books, which he has read either before travelling to their lands or during these travels, at night or during the day: Wandering round Stockholm, I went into one antiquarian bookshop after another, looking for a particular text of Swedenborg’s that I wanted to have with me […]. In his section on Sufism in the Prolegomena, Ibn Khaldun speaks of a move from science to presence, and of the rising, via ‘tastes’, ‘openings’, ‘enlightenings’, and ecstasies’, to the ‘farthest horizon’. That’s what I was thinking about, there at Fez, in Morocco, on the edge of the great desert. The farthest horizon… […]. Ordering a rum, I let myself drift into another freewheeling Melvillean meditation.22

This said, one would agree with White that such a work does not belong to the ordinary genre labelled ‘travel literature’. The latter lacks especially the intellectual criterion. As a way of discriminating his work from travel literature, White uses the term ‘literature of peregrinations’. Since this is 21 22

Ibid., 10. My italics. Across the Territories, 11, 196, 207. My italics.

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the case, White is a traveller of a different kind. The label Paul Valéry liked for himself could be applied to the intellectual nomad of geopoetics too: the ‘intellectual Robinson Crusoe’,23 since Crusoe is generally said to be the best known fictitious English traveller. Going out is, according to White, the way ‘to capture the maximum sensations, intuitions, [and] inspirations’.24 He invites his readership to follow suit, both in the foreword and later in the text: ‘You have to go out. You have to open space, and deepen place. Fill your eyes with the changing light.’25 Love of space is highly esteemed in some cultures since it is part of identity. In Sweden, White’s guide Leif Akerman informs him that there is part of a poem – ‘I live best in the open landscape’ – which sings the landscape and is part of the national hymn: you [Sweden, the country] old one you free one you mountain high northland you trustful one you gladsome one […] yes I want to live I want to die in the North.26

The Swedish geographical north reminds us of the meta-geographic North, the open, white-world White, like Nietzsche before him, tries to live in. It is the North of the Hyperboreans, one of the fascinating terms White uses from time to time to designate the same meaning Nietzsche gave it; i.e. the seekers of another world far from the crowd, and away from the ordinary sociocultural scene.27 The Scandinavian lands are rich in landscapes that cultivate ‘sensations, intuitions, [and] inspirations’ in the mindscape of those who dream of the Hyperborean white world. In Sweden, White feels the mesmerization of the ‘Hyperborean’ land, and wants to seize the moments there. The nomadic and Hyperborean spirits in him find him a cabin ‘of his dreams’ in which to be in complete contact with the planet and its elements and creatures: 23

Ibid., 89. Ibid., 13. 25 Op. cit., 51. 26 Ibid., 13 27 Nietzsche used to say, ‘let’s be clear. We are Hyperboreans. We are fully aware of the remoteness of where we live.’ See White’s essay entitled ‘A Letter to All the Hyperboreans’, in Une Stratégie paradoxale, 84. 24

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Near Tallberg, I came upon this cabin on a little promontory: weathered grey wood, with darkred facings at door and windows. Inside, two rooms and a little kitchen. It was to let, like many others I’d seen round the lake. I rented it (for a week). […] My main company for the next week consisted of a black and grey crow, two magpies, a squirrel, a blackbird, and, at night, an owl. Not forgetting the lake itself, with its amazing colours, the little promontory with its birches, and the shore with its mossy rocks. How good it can feel to get out of all the agitation, all the opening and the discoursing, and just be at peace for a while with the planet.28

A similar note is perceived in White’s writing about the North when dealing with Norway, the land of Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906). He says that it is ‘considered the land of origins, place of resources, field of possibilities’.29 For a Hyperborean like White, then, it deserves a long stay and at least as much ambulatory time. In one morning, he salutes NorgeLofoten, enjoys the morning sights, and practises his geological scrutiny of the surrounding rocks: When I open the curtains, I see the sky is unbelievably blue. My eyes take in a rack of drying fish, two huge gulls with great hooked yellow beaks sitting among their starry shit-splashings, and in the lee of a big mosscovered rock, eleven darkblue crocuses, the advance guard of Spring. ‘Good morning, Norge – hello, Lofoten’. There’s a tremendous sensation of freshness and unbesullied reality. You don’t have to move about a lot in the Lofoten to see not only that the landscape is strangely beautiful but that it’s a complex unity, made up largely of two types of rocks: old Caledonian masses, rugged, worn; and younger ranges of sharp Alpine crests.30

White’s search for the freshness of the world with historical notes wherever he goes is what characterizes his being in the North as in the South, in the East as in the West. Whether in a nomadic or sedentary state, there are always touches of peregrinations, in the mind or in the land. In America, in St Lawrence, he walks;31 in Portugal he wanders in the rain,32 and walks in the forest for about four hours for contemplation;33 in Alhambra he walks round the old castles ‘in that lovely country, that limit28

Across the Territories, 19; Le Rôdeur des confins, 65-67. Across the Territories, 23. 30 Ibid., 30. 31 Le Rôdeur des confins, 134. 32 Ibid., 191. 33 Ibid., 199–202. 29

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country, Andalusia’; in Tahiti as in Corsica, he also goes out to feel the ‘concentration’ as well the ‘openness’ of the islands;34 in the Atlas and in the south of Morocco he wanders out and meets the descendents of the lovers of earth, the Berbers, the ‘barabira’ (from bar bar, earth earth),35 and shares some moments with the peripatetic Bedouins of Tendrara. There is a poem in Open World which describes the steadfast change of space of the Bedou because of drought, the geological sphere, and the Bedouin religious and contemplative tone at the end: Bedouin They’d come from the Tendrara country because of the drought and no grass then rented truck had broken down so they’d pitched their tents there in that area of wind and scrub ‘Is there anything you need?’ – it was an old woman, small and spare blue tatooings on a wizened face hands and feet caked in dust who’d hirpled over to speak with us ‘Thank you, no, we’re just moving around from place to place in the Oriental stopping here and there to look at the land’ ‘It is good to walk and look while you’re on earth, see the world under the earth, you see nothing’ rosy light on darkblue rock white snailshells dotting hard parched soil a black-winged hawk ‘May Allah keep you and open the way, amen’.36

34

Ibid., 326, 147. Ibid., 288. 36 Open World, 374. My italics. 35

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With these touches upon some of the peregrinations across the territories of White’s trajectories one can see that he is an intellectual nomad, a Hyperborean in Nietzsche’s term, and an active member of Whitman’s ‘gang of Kosmos’. He marches on the margins, beyond the confines, as his French title of the essay demonstrates (Le Rôdeur des confine), in places visited by different historical figures in different historical eras, but not one of these figures was able to go out and visit-read many of these margins as White has done. The margins he visits are not energy-free. They are all fields of energy, good food for thought for the geopoetic project, and for the ‘practitioner of geopoetics’: ‘I am just […] a practitioner of geopoetics.’37 In other words, his travels aim at rekindling the sensations of the world, of the self, and at collecting more energy for more profound work, word(s), and world(s): ‘I travelled through territories, culling elements from all the cultures of the known world.’38 White is aware of the hardships of the endeavour; he quotes Heidegger: ‘it is long, the road most necessary for our thought’.39 He puts the idea in succinct terms in the last sentence of The Wanderer and His Charts as well: ‘Geopoetics implies new wording, new working, new worlding.’40 The fact that White travels around the world to feel earth does not mean that his native land and where he resides are not rich enough in the geomental material he needs. His various residences in Europe show another aspect of his intellectual nomadism and geopoetic practices.

2. Dwelling: Into the White World Besides its physical manifestations, geopoetics appears to have its own metaphysics, or at least it constructs them from various traditions and trajectories. White’s personal experience of geopoetics is an example. That is, the world of White is neither physically very ordinary nor metaphysically very common; it tries to find a unifying point or stage between the two, an experience which he calls ‘physical-metaphysical’.41 His definition of ‘whiteness’ and the ‘white world’ clarify these geopoetic open metaphysics.

37

Le Rôdeur des confins, 187. Op. cit., Foreword, xxvi. 39 The Wanderer and His Charts, 94. 40 Ibid., 247. 41 On Scottish Ground, 64. 38

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Kenneth White and the White World In La Figure du dehors, White says that the white world signifies first and foremost ‘an effort to renew our vision of the world’, ‘an affirmation of the self vis-à-vis the world’, as well as ‘the exploration of the inner space of the self’. As to the choice of the term ‘white’, he says it is a mere coincidence, and has nothing to do with any racial or personal preference. It is the culmination of long years of reading, writing, and intellectual nomadism. It is that space of the ‘original face’ that many of his ‘companions de route’ have been after. It is also part of the Buddhist tradition to which the road that leads nowhere leads. That is, it is the state of ‘full being in the world, free from classifications and distinctions, a white world’.42 The white world in White’s contention, as described in ‘Into the White World’, an essay in On Scottish Ground (1998), takes earth, and love of earth, as its ‘energy-field’ towards a ‘unity and unitive experience’ of the cosmos.43 This erotic adoration, eros, of earth is a way of recognizing it, and the first step towards ‘white-world knowledge’: What is later the white world idea, intuition, philosophy – and the vague premonitions of which may be nascent at the initial experience, concentre primarily in the erotic flesh, in contact with things and the elements: […] swirling water, the sheer flight of birds, the little body of the hare, wet earth, opening flowers, the silver birch’s slender and cryptic trunk, the heavy berryclusters of the rowan, the breast of a girl […] at the centre of the universe, gathering into itself as much as possible of the real world, towards unlimited marriage, a sheer experience of the nakedness and loveliness of everything, an ecstatic existence, expanding to a sense of cosmic unity.44

The movement from ‘erotic flesh’ and ‘contact with things and the elements’ to the ‘sense of cosmic unity’ is a movement from ‘eros to logos’, from ‘physics to metaphysics’, to the ‘physical-metaphysical’.45 In other words, neither the physical nor the metaphysical alone can comprehend the ‘earth-experience’. Too much physical involvement dumbs the senses. Too much metaphysics alienates the self from contact with earth. The ‘cosmic unity’, as well as ‘white-world knowledge’, result from both together. The metaphysics of White is governed by logos, and 42

Ibid., 215 Ibid., 61–3. 44 Ibid., 64. My italics. 45 Ibid., 64. 43

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not logic – the pre-Socratic logos that targets the return to the original source(s) of the world, ‘the lost relation, the primordial contact’, ‘the white world’.46 With logos, man will be able to express the language, the grammar of life,47 the whiteness of the white world, instead of being a slave, a cog in the chain of rationalism and logic. White affirms that with logos Man quits the circle of ‘animal rationale’ to enter the open sphere of ‘animal poeticum’, where the poetics of the cosmos vibrate, to become ‘an inhabitant of [t]his world’. For White, the white world is the realm of poetics, the arena of an interdisciplinary ‘general context’. It is a ‘new world’, an ‘open world’: It is possible, in my cogent and coherent sense, to speak nowadays of a ‘new world’ or, since that term has so many uncongenial theo-terroristic, ethno-terroristic and techno-terroristic connotations, what I prefer to call an ‘open world’.48

The newness and openness of the white world is able to contain a wide spectrum of disciplines without them being pigeonholed. Its first three major pillars are philosophy, poetry, and science, but all three are worked on and considered as a single entity, with no sharp division between them and other activities in social life. Under them various (sub-)fields can have space, as open and large as the cosmos: This opening up of a new context is much more necessary, and much more difficult, than piling up texts and artefacts within a context that is moribund or dead. Action, activism leads only to agitation, or lassitude, without a new attitude from which new acts can proceed. This goes for politics and economics as well as for poetry and art. If you write only poems, these poems will be relegated to the hold-all category of ‘poetry’, too confusionist and at times nonentical [nonexistent, nonsensical] to be of any real validity or efficiency. The same goes for art-work. The ultimate thing is to open up a world. And in a world, poetry and art are not separated from other activities of the mind, other aspects of society, other fields of the multiverse.49

46

Ibid., 62–5. White stresses the link between the logos and language/poetry as well. See Part I, Section 2, and Part II, Section 3. We concentrate here on the importance of logos to the generation of the white world – that is, language at this point should be understood in its metaphorical meaning, the language or grammar of life, meaning the code and mode of life. 48 The Wanderer and His Charts, 125. 49 Ibid., 125. 47

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What these words mean is that there are no definite borders between disciplines. The project is open, and the white world is open as long as these fields all have earth and the cosmos as their beginning and end, and as long as the whiteness of the world, the primal face, or la vie principielle, is the target. Such a target is neither ideal nor utopic. In an interview with Marc Klugkist, White says that the project is ‘a search for a new space for thinking, for poetry, and for life’, and that the white world ‘is not a space to achieve, but a space where to evolve. It is not an aim to attain, but a territory where to travel. The white world is not ideal.’50 The white world does not belong to the ‘absolute utopia’ (which could otherwise be called the ‘impossible world’): rather, it is possible through much work; it could be located in what the Hungarian sociologist of knowledge Karl Mannheim (1893–1947) terms ‘the relative utopia’51 (or the ‘possible world’), in opposition to the ‘absolute’ one. The open possibilities of the Whitian white world are ‘not fixed and coded’: this is why he prefers the italicized word, world: If we use ‘world’ for the ordinary context, World, with a capital, for all the other worlds, the world I’m implicated in might be written with italics, world, to indicate that it is in progress, and also that it contains the trembling of existence and is not fixed and coded.52

This implies that ‘white’ can also take the italicized form, since it is an integral part of this open world. As to the colour itself, white, though it is the field for the realization of the self, as White writes in La Figure du dehors, it does not, however, reflect any ‘narcissistic ego-trip’ as some critics have thought of it. In his presentation ‘Grounding a World’, bearing the same title as the symposium organized at the University of St Andrews, in Scotland, to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the publication of the first collection of poetry (Wild Coal, 1963) in Paris, White asserts that ‘the fact of my own name was a coincidental bonus’. To avoid any misinterpretation and confusion between his name and the white world, White has for years ‘talked rather of blue roads, red canyons, grey fjords, yellow sands, letting the whiteness shine through from the background in its own’. In the same line of thinking is a saying of Confucius (551–479 BC) which White likes to cite: ‘Colour comes only after the preparation of the ground’ (White’s

50

Duclos, Le Poète cosmographe, 80. Une Stratégie paradoxale, 94 52 Kenneth White, ‘Grounding a World’, in Bowd et al., Grounding, 200. 51

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italics).53 The practitioner of geopoetics has followed suit: he talks about the blue road, the possible road, in America, and visits the yellow land, China, the red Atlas, and the whiteness of the Scandinavian lands, before he starts to talk about the white world – without forgetting that his origins as a Celt tell him that the original name of Scotland is Alba, meaning ‘the white country’. With this note of his birthplace, we return to the way White has proceeded with this project since his childhood through his different dwellings in Europe, from Scotland, with a brief passage through Germany, to France.

Dwelling: A Manifestation of the White World Kenneth White came to life in the Gorbals region of Glasgow, Scotland, on 28 April 1936. His father was a railway signalman and a voracious reader of literature and political works, about whom his son Kenneth would later say he used to read more than many university teachers could. Kenneth was attracted by his father’s signalman’s box, where he spent some good times practising his writing, which would later become his career. His mother wanted him to become a doctor or lawyer, while his father would laughingly say he would become an ‘intellectual tramp’54 – a prophecy that hit the nail on the head if by ‘tramp’ he meant a ‘nomad’. Three years after the birth of Kenneth, the Whites moved to Fairlie, Ayrshire, to the south-west of Glasgow, on the west coast of Scotland, where lie the shores and landscapes that would interest Kenneth, the youth and the intellectual. On the shore he would collect the wrack and shellfish for sale, build huts, look for birds’ eggs and stones, and mimic the yells of the gulls. For White, the seascape, in Tony McManus’ term, takes Man to the ‘primordial life’, to the borders between the ‘human’ and ‘non-human’ world: I take ‘seaboard’ (littoral, shore) to be particularly significant space. We are close there to the beginnings of life, we cannot but be aware there of primordial rhythms (tidal, meteorological). In that space, too, we have one foot, as it were, in humanity (inhabited, inscribed space), the other in the non-human cosmos (chaos-cosmos, chaosmos) – and I think it is vitally important to keep that dialogue live.55

53

Ibid., 199. McManus, The Radical Field, 2–4. 55 Ibid., 8. In a lecture delivered at the University of Tübingen, Germany, 7 July 1997. 54

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The fascination of the Scottish seascape has its roots in the ancient Celtic culture, which White thinks is historically and geographically different from that of the rest of Europe, which easily fell under the influence of the Greeks, the Romans, and Christianity. The Celts and the Vikings – ‘my ancestors’, ‘the people of the North’,56 he calls them – retained the savage, primordial, and white aspects of life. The original names of Scotland he evokes corroborate his point: Caledonia, the land of the forest, or Alba, the land of the white hills.57 As to ‘Scot’, he says that one of its possible etymologies is ‘errant’, ‘wanderer’.58 White’s work on geology and geography has helped him a lot in making such links, especially given that he wrote his first piece of work at the age of sixteen when he was ‘engaged in local studies of the history, geology, and archaeology of Ayrshire, which then extended into similar studies of Scotland’.59 The location of Kenneth’s room also deepened his seashore sensations. It allowed him to enjoy the rhythms of the waves of the sea all the time, which empowered his passion for outdoor walks, busied his mind with thinking, and distanced him from the Church and religion.60 ‘Scotia Deserta’, a long poem written years later, compresses these perceptions of ‘seeing the openness’ and eagerness to go out to explore the remains of the past life of Alba: Scotia Deserta […] thinking back to the ice […] Alba *** white beach meditations mountain contemplations imprinted in the mind […] other figures cross the scene like this one: Kentigern they cried him in the church I attended

56

La Figure du dehors, 20. Delbard, Les Lieux de Kenneth White, 123. 58 Ibid., 128. 59 McManus, The Radical Field, 6. 60 Duclos, Kenneth White: nomade intellectuel, 25. 57

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around the age of nine was that stained glass window showing a man with a book in his hand standing on a seashore preaching to the gulls I’d be gazing at the window and forgetting the sermon (all about good and evil with a lot of mangled metaphor and heavy comparison) eager to get back out on to the naked shore there to walk for hours on end with a book sometimes in my hand but never a thought of preaching in my mind trying to grasp at something […] walking the coast all those kyles, lochs and sounds sensing the openness feeling out the lines order and anarchy chaos and cosmology a mental geography.61

With walking, contact with the landscape and seascape in particular would take on a white colour, among the other different colours of the cosmos, and would become an intensive and unavoidable exercise for Kenneth, the growing intellectual Scot/nomad. In Glasgow, White would read avidly and walk tirelessly, mainly along the banks of the River Clyde and the shores beyond the city. His intellectual tendencies would flourish when he entered Glasgow University in 1954, and opted for French and German literature, with Latin and Philosophy as minor subjects. The university provided him with libraries where he would spend a great deal of time devouring the shelves

61

Open World, 598–602. My italics.

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of books: ‘I devoured the bookshelves, from theology to mineralogy.’62 He is against the use of universities as factories for the production of degrees.63 He had a student-writer’s room where he gathered papers and notes that reflected his intellectual wanderings among libraries. His readings would soon awaken him to the crisis the European tradition appeared to be in, according to him: I read like a demon all the most extravagant literature I could get my hands on: theological, mystical, philosophical – not because I was looking for truth, but because they gave me matter that I could burn. It was less a question of information and culture than of combustion. Those readings and those walkings helped me to take off. […] I was living in Glasgow, at that time one of Europe’s hell-holes, where I wandered about obsessively by day and by night, but now and then I’d leave the city on foot to walk the thirty or so miles down to the coast.64

‘It was the second stage beginning’, he says, ‘the intellectual realization’.65 ‘It was the winter of the mind’ and he ‘had to start again’ with his ‘companions’ (Rimbaud, Van Gogh, Nietzsche, Thoreau, Whitman, etc.) behind him. Glasgow would appear to him at the time as the ‘id of Western civilization’, a ‘Hell’ as he says in Travels in the Drifting Dawn,66 or a ‘hell-hole’ as he calls it in The Wanderer and His Charts.67 Though White ‘accepts’ the Hell of Glasgow – ‘I am part of this Hell, I accept its necessity’ – he seizes the first chance to travel to the land of Nietzsche, Germany, after one of his professors notices in him an ‘alarming intellectual unrest’ and advises him to change his context. He wins a one-year scholarship (1956–1957) to Munich, where he lodges in a winter shack to read German philosophy, Nietzsche and Heidegger, as well as some Eastern texts. There, too, he does not feel positive about the cultural scene. But he has time for ‘frozen solitude’ and meditation as a ‘barbarian outsider’.68 The symptoms of a break with Great Britain and the move to the Continent start when he came back from Munich, received a Double First in French and German in 1959, and was nominated First Student in the Faculty of Arts, which won him a post-graduate scholarship. 62

McManus, The Radical Field, 17–19. See his articles on the university, ‘L’université bidon’, and ‘Vers une université creatrice’, in Une Stratégié paradoxale, 31–43, 87–100. 64 The Wanderer and His Charts, 18–20. 65 Ibid., 20. 66 In McManus, The Radical Field, 20. 67 The Wanderer and His Charts, 18. 68 Op. cit., 22–3. 63

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He chose Paris, which hosted him for four years (1959–1963). During this period he married Marie-Claude Charlut, researched surrealism and politics, tutored in English to earn a living, and settled in the city of Meuden, where he came up with most of Les Limbes incandescentes (some of it was written during his next visit to Paris, 1970–1971).69 Les Limbes incandescentes is abundant in terms of the walking done around the streets, in art galleries and expositions of Oriental art, in libraries, and with some personalities. He also refers to the private classes he gave in English,70 and the reading he did, illustrated by the various citations that mark the (autobiographical) narrative from cover to cover. At the time of carrying out these activities, his mind was always obsessed with nomadism, about which he says that it has no end and no particular location as an aim once the nomadic journey opens. The idea again is that nomadism and space have accompanied White since his early boyhood days, and the fact that he settles in France does not mean any sedentariness: ‘The feeling of space has always occupied me, without worrying me about my place in the world.’71 The dwelling, for White, does not signify a stand-still stage. There is always movement, if not in space, then in mind, hence the utility of intellectual nomadism. Les Limbes incandescentes, notwithstanding the praise it received from the French poet André Breton, who wrote to White expressing his admiration for the narrative’s ‘high accent of originality’,72 did not bring an answer to the ‘Hell’ of Glasgow. In Meuden, there are aspects of the morose life White does not like: the room on the seventh floor, the noise of the neighbours, the cars,73 and the disturbance of the mosquitoes in a tiny room that lacks fresh air.74 At certain times, panic visits him, his worries about the future and envy of those who have a job, family, house, loom over his thinking. But still, this never causes him to despair; his unstable dwelling has a purpose, and it is part of the project that is developing, ‘working and living at all levels’.75 Having tried Paris and its outskirts, Meuden, as a residence after the irritating malaise of Glasgow, White sought a more solitary and dry space to placate the sensation of the ‘exile’ he constantly felt.76 The result was to 69

White, ‘Grounding a World’, 216. Les Limbes incandescentes, 20, 40, 104, 123. 71 Ibid., 111, 119. 72 McManus, The Radical Field, 30. 73 Op. cit., 109–11. 74 Ibid., 16–45. 75 Ibid., 111–12. 76 Lettres de Gourgounel, praface to the 1st French ed., 15. 70

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move to Gourgounel, in l’Ardèche, some kilometres away from the French capital, to find the self, to improve it, and to live the experience he had been yearning for.77 This experience is narrated in Lettres de Gourgounel, the first prose work written by the intellectual nomad, in 1962. When first published in London in 1966, it was dismissed in Britain as a work ‘beyond the norms of the contemporary literature’, writes the author in the preface.78 ‘In the post-War Britain’, confirms White in Grounding a World, ‘there was no intellectual energy in the air’, and France provided ‘a field’ for more profound work, confirming thus the Nietzschean view that ‘it’s in France that one finds the finest and more intelligent European culture’.79 Gourgounel is part of that field. Lettres de Gourgounel retells the details of the sojourn of White on an abandoned farm in l’Ardèche, an old space he bought cheaply to live a life more or less like Thoreau’s in Walden. It was an experience meant to help him realize and find the self, and dissociate it from the dull life of the city. The aim was not to fulfil the whim of living a pastoral life, as he says, but to care in solitude for a work he had in mind: I met a good number of people, talked a lot, but did not find the space I had been looking for, a space where everybody talks about the essential, that is, solitude, silence, wind, sun, and storm. But […] I have found Gourgounel […]. I came here […] to conduct a particular kind of work.80

The essential for White is earth, and in Gourgounel he meets the kind of people who appreciate its (earth) goodness. The guardian of the church, an old lady, tells White that ‘we can live by earth; earth is good; everything comes to us from earth […] earth is good – and, anyway, we are not from this world’.81 White tries to tame the Gourgounel land despite its harshness and heat. He reconstructs the house, and does the housework himself, with some help from the neighbours sometimes.82 The words of the old lady are true when it comes to his Gourgounel experience: ‘we can live by earth’. Goat’s cheese, mushrooms, and blueberries of the forest are among White’s earth food. In an interview, White says that Gourgounel was hard for its people to live in, but not for him, because he did not do much cultivation of the land, agriculture.83 A good part of his time was given to 77

Ibid., 24. Ibid., 15. 79 Ibid., 205–6. 80 Ibid., 38, 81–2. 81 Ibid., 25–6. 82 Ibid., 70, 77 83 Duclos, Le Poète cosmographe, 11. 78

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the cultivation of the mind, reading ‘Provencal culture, Taoism and Buddhism, granite, schist and calcite [geology]’.84 In the same interview, he was asked whether his Gourgounel experience was a kind of return to nature, and his reply was ‘It is not my case’ since ‘there was a question […] that I had to answer practically, essentially […] a sort of yoga exercise’.85 This ‘yoga exercise’ resembles Thoreau’s without being an imitation of it, since his experience was a success and there was no need to repeat the same thing: ‘there is no imitation from my part, […] Walden […] was a reference’, says White to Gilles Farcet.86 The ‘yoga exercises’ in Gourgounel catch the fresh air that the seventhfloor room of Les Limbes incadescents lacks. There is the freshness of the vast space of the forest – mingled with the freshness of the Japanese Haiku,87 the poetry of the Chinese Wang Wei (699–761),88 and the paintings of Mi Fu (1051–1107).89 From the first days in Gourgounel, White senses the difference between the past life and his new one. He can now see the sky, the sun, and the moon under which he sleeps directly and contemplatively.90 As to walking, there is always time for that: I spend the morning walking in the forest, pausing here and there to lie for a moment under a tree. […] I spend the afternoon as I spent the morning. Five or six hours later, I take the road back. I walk now on the road. Back to Gourgounel, and through Gourgounel, somewhere else.91

From Gourgounel, White goes back to Scotland for four years (1963– 1967), as a university lecturer in Glasgow (where he practises more the walking theory as he calls it in La Figure du dehors), then to Edinburgh, where he writes a long poem, A Walk Along the Shore, ‘which sums up his itinerarium mentis up to that point’.92 In 1967 White quits Great Britain to settle in France. He heads to Pau in the Pyrenees, where he dwells for about fifteen years (till 1983). He lectures at Bordeaux University, from which he is soon fired because he takes part in the May ’68 events. Soon he joins Paris VII to lecture, but prefers the ‘Atlantic-Pyrenees’ for a 84

White, ‘Grounding a World’, 209. Op. cit., 10. 86 Ibid., 127. 87 Lettres de Gourgounel, 173 88 Ibid., 100. 89 Ibid., 162 90 Ibid., 44. 91 Ibid., 189. 92 White, ‘Grounding a World’, 217. 85

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dwelling, where there is an ‘association between the mountain and the ocean’.93 There, from a window in an apartment, he relishes the whiteness of the crests of the mountains, which bring to his mind the prehistoric space: ‘it is also a paleolithic territory par excellence’94 – paleolithic as William Carlos Williams describes it. White quotes him in a poem, ‘The Master of the Labyrinth’: ‘I ride in my car I think of prehistoric caves in the Pyrenees’ – William Carlos Williams New York State circa 1920.95

White takes it that the Pyrenees are historically an incandescent energyfield. They represent the ‘old earth’ and are one of the ‘sources of Europe’ and French culture as Charles Olson considers them.96 These ‘Pyrenean Meditations’ and findings seem to busy White and silence him – in terms of publications – for nine years. During this period he reads and writes enormously, and travels to the Orient (to Hong Kong, Taiwan, Thailand) and America (to Labrador), as if, says Michèle Duclos, preparing for a ‘larger space’.97 Actually, the stay in the Pyrenees strengthens the Atlantic waves in the poet-thinker’s mind, with some help from his peregrinations in the Basque country, as ‘The Western Gateways’ recalls: The Western Gateways From a crystal window at Saint-Jean-de-Luz I look out on the Western Seas Listening to the winds: Enbata, the see breeze Iphara, the northerner Iduzki-haizea, the wind of the sun Hegochuria, the hot south wind Haize-belza, the dark northwesterly

93

Delbard, Les Lieux de Kenneth White, 144. In Delbard, Les Lieux de Kenneth White, 145. 95 Open World, 272. 96 Duclos, Kenneth White: nomade intellectuel, 137. 97 Ibid., 137. 94

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Thinking of the sea of the philosophers But also of whales and whalemen98

Having inhaled the winds of the seas in the Basque country, he leaves the acrid life of Paris suburbs, the open space of Gourgounel, and the white summits of the paleolithic Pyrenees to reach the Atlantic, the Armorican coast, the current space of residence of White. The eros and logos in White have taken him to places around the world to explore and exploit energies for a white-world realization. The year 1983 is when this thirst conduces him to settle in the northwestern French province of Brittany, near the port of Trébeurden, close to the sounds of the Atlantic waves. The Armorican region is another field of energy that appeals to White: For us, now, who aspire to start something, The Armorica is first and foremost a geologically powerful landscape, a promontory projected to the outer space, and there is archaic energy in the air. I have come here to live a certain life and do a certain work, a cosmopsychologic work, geopoetic […] which will certainly lead to a book.99

The book he means is the one he embarks on at this time, namely House of Tides – Letters from Brittany and Other Lands of the West, 2000. In the book he justifies his choice and narrates his Atlantic experiences. In the Prologue to the Letters, he writes: We were living then, Marie-Claude and I, at Pau, in an apartment that looked over a long range of the Pyrenees […]. It was a fine place, and the living, down there in the south-west was good. But it was only an apartment, in a big-high building, and we were beginning to think in terms of a house, a real down-to-earth house of wood or stone somewhere. Seeing that ‘somewhere’ as near the sea, on the coast, we thought vaguely of the Basque, or the pinelands of Lands.100

Later in ‘Paths of Stone and Winds’ he gives a geological explanation and description of the ‘big stone road’ of Brittany or ‘the Atlantic stone’ that stretches out in most Europe101 to reiterate and solidify his choice of this ‘archaic’, ‘energetic’ space:

98

Op. cit., 480. In Duclos, Kenneth White: nomade intellectuel, 143. 100 House of Tides, 2–3. 101 Ibid., 60–1. 99

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Part III If we had opted for a house in Brittany, in a relatively out-of-the-way place (though near enough to a post-office and a station – I’m a hermit with timetables at my elbow), it was also with the idea of just opening the door and, without an intermediary of any kind (car, bus or whatever), being able to start walking in any direction, sure of a beautiful, uncongested landscape.102

The main reasons to move the place of residence to the Atlantic area are, then, (a), to dig more into the Armorican geography shared by much of western and northern Europe to make what is called in geology a ‘complex center’,103 (b), to be as close to earth as possible (house instead of apartment), and (c), being in a ‘lieu of departure that the Atlantic has always played, departure towards Africa, America, Polynesia, and Asia’.104 The last element also relates to the ‘pelagic front’ where ‘waters of various types mix, a place of wild dynamics. It’s also a place where life is abundant: fish life and plankton life flourish there.’105 Among what White has in mind when raising the point is Thoreau’s ‘true Atlantic House, where the ocean is landlord as well as sealord’. That is, the Atlantic landscape and seascape have commonalities, and share the beauty of the earthscape, in water, in land, and in the sky. White realizes this: I have come to love with something more than love the windy shores and the rainy lanes of this place, where the country paths smell of seaweed and where the waves reflect the flowers of the yellow whin.106

Regarding the same argument, Jean-Yves Kerguelen says that White ‘is a spirit of the human kind that is in quest for a habitable landscape, a home’.107 The ‘Armoricanism’ and ‘Atlanticity’ he has practised are full of ‘concentration’ elements, or concentrated energies, be they ‘biologic’, ‘geographico-cultural’, ‘intellectual’, or ‘poetic’.108 These sketches of the Atlantic, the outside face of the shelter that opens up to most world regions, help in giving a picture of the shelter, White’s ‘cosmopoetic laboratory’,109 from inside – but always with reference to life outside.

102

Ibid., 62. Une Apocalypse tranquille, 36. 104 Le Plateau de l’albatros, 15. 105 House of Tides, 4. 106 Ibid., 5. 107 Jean-Yves Kerguelen, Kenneth White et la Bretagne (MoƟlan-sur-Mer: Blanc Silex, 2002), 30. 108 Ibid., 35–42. 109 House of Tides, 5. 103

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Obsessed by ancient Celtic language and culture, White chooses Gwenved as a name for the house: We decided to call it Gwenved. That is an old Celtic word which, in Christian texts, translates the notion of paradise. But it antedates Christianity by far. Literally ‘white land’, it indicates a place of light and concentration. In the Triads of the Isle of Briton, one reads: ‘Three things the soul will find in the circle of Gwenved: primal power, primal memory, primal love.’110

Taking into account what was said above, these links can be drawn: (a), ‘primal power’ stems from the geologically Armorican ‘complex center’ and the Atlantic ‘lieu of departure’; b), ‘primal memory’ finds its nourishment in White’s reading about the significance of whiteness (in poetry, haiku, the North, and his world travels); c), ‘primal love’ is the eros spirit that has stimulated all these movements and achievements till now. The three bring whiteness to the fore. They make part of the cosmic unity that is governed by the logos, hence the feeling of being in the ‘white land’, a little white world, a miniature of the original white world that is still to be worked for. Once settled, wandering out becomes the temptation of the outdoors, for ‘no doubt about it, the earth is an interesting place’.111 Solitude is a good company when walking: ‘those first days, I wandered quite a lot around Trébeurden, and I remember walking in its main street one night around midnight. It was raining […]. Not a soul in sight.’112 Residing in Trébeurden, however, does not limit the space of White’s ongoing mapped trajectories. For example, he visits his native land, Scotland, wanders in Glasgow,113 Aberdeen, and Edinburgh: ‘I’m wandering around like some Ishmael […]. I went to Glasgow, with which I started this erratic pilgrimage […]. I sat there in the west coast Scottish night, listening to the tide.’114 Listening brings to mind that inseparable relation between the physically seen and the mentally heard landscape. Briefly put, White listens to the landscape as much as he sees it. Listening to the landscape is another major aspect in White’s movements. He does not wander aimlessly. He does not resort to solitude to escape the world, but to listen to it and build, or rather rebuild, lost 110

Ibid., 6. Ibid., 59. 112 Ibid., 24. 113 Ibid., 213. 114 Ibid., 222–3. 111

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contact. Listening to landscape is mentioned throughout the studied essays as well as the narratives and the collection of poems. In ‘La musique du monde’ (Music of the World), in Le Plateau de l’albatros, he says ‘we live in a daily cacophonic cacotopy’ because of which ‘no one is able to listen to his thought, nor is one able to think at all’.115 The music he likes corresponds to the geography of his spirit and the geography where he likes to live.116 At an early period of time, Eastern music was to his liking, as he writes in ‘The Music of the Landscape’ in The Wanderer and His Charts: it was Eastern music I’d listen to, from Hindu raga to Japanese bamboo flute. In Sanskrit poetics, from which it’s all derived, at the basis of everything, there is Brahma, who is silence. Out of the silence comes Vak, which is thought and voice, intelligence and language, word and music.117

But when he started taking to writing, his music of the world turned into words of the world: ‘Once I plunged into the ocean of writing, I listened to very little music […]. I was looking for something else. Something that came to me from the universe’,118 since the music of the world makes his soul dance, as Lettres de Gourgounel narrates (‘What is it that makes my soul dance, then? The music of the world’119) or as his ears hear when in Corsica (‘after dinner, I went up to my room, and stayed out for a while on the little balcony, listening to the torrent rushing below’120), or later in Brittany (‘I pour tea in the cup again / and lie there listening to the quiet rain’121). House of Tides describes music of the world, and the few people that listen to it, now that technological means of distraction are abundant: There’s a music of the landscape. It has rarely been listened to. Maybe before civilization, but even then. Maybe primitive man really listened only to the sounds liable to have an immediate effect on his life, his survival: the cracking of a branch signalling the approach of an animal, the rising of the wind announcing a tempest […]. Far from entering into the great relationship, he was only interested in what related to himself. But it could be I’m exaggerating. Maybe, here and there, there were ears able to listen in to the pure music of the landscape that announces nothing. What 115

Le Plateau de l’albatros, 92. Ibid., 94. 117 The Wanderer and His Charts, 224. 118 Ibid., 224. 119 Lettres de Gourgounel, 177. 120 Across the Territories, 106. 121 Open World, 590. 116

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is certain is that with the arrival of civilization, and especially its development, people stopped listening to anything like this. They listened to political harangues, to religious homelies, to all kinds of fabricated music, and to themselves. It’s only now (the end of a civilization?) that, in isolated places, individuals have begun again to listen to the landscape.122

White’s last sentence is more optimistic. He believes that since the beginnings of the twenty-first century there has been a tendency to go back to the natural sounds of earth.123 With these ‘geopoetico-musical meditations’ this section closes on the ‘white land’ space and what goes with it: the Armorican geographicointellectual energy, meditations, walkings, music of the world, the white gulls, and the white waves of the Atlantic. There are poems written on the whiteness and silence of Brittany, but they are left to the last section, devoted to writing. Yet, this section is signed with White’s own ideogram that expresses the vastness of the space and numerous waves of the ocean that faces his self, his body: W W W K

W W W

W W W W

W W W W

W

W W W W

W W W

W W W

W W W124

In a not very different manner, Fabio Scotto chooses to end one of his articles on White, silence, and whiteness: Kenneth White Kenneth Wild Kenneth Wise Kenneth Why? Kenneth Smiles Kenneth Flies125

122

House of Tides, 64. The Wanderer and His Charts, 223. 124 Duclos, Kenneth White: nomade intellectuel, 142. 125 Jean-Jacques Wunenburger, ed. Autour de Kenneth White: espace, pensée, poétique (Dijon: Presses Universitaires de Dijon, 1996), 108. 123

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What may be of interest to temporarily conclude with is that if White, in the Gourgounel, prefers to live without electricity and to sleep and wake up guided by the rise and set of the sun, in Brittany he makes use of the means of communications (as he says in an interview)126 which must have helped him in founding the International Institute for Geopoetics in 1989 in Paris, where he was also appointed to the newly founded Chair of Twentieth-Century Poetics at the Sorbonne (from 1983 to 1996, when he willingly withdrew from it).127 Brittany has proven that it is, as he first thought of it, a real field of energy for geopoetic work.

3. Writing: From Landscape-Mindscape to Wordscape Writing is of momentous importance to geopoetics. White developed a keen enthusiasm for writing when he used to visit his father, the railway signalman, in his workplace. In the tiny space filled with notes and papers, Kenneth’s father would give him the occasion to discover his writing habit and skill. As an adult, White remembers those days and says, ‘in some sense my writing began in a signalbox’.128 He also had the habit of rewriting the conversations he would hear while roaming in the streets.129 Learning the German language and doing much translation from it sharpened this habit of handling the pen easily. Rewriting whole texts is an activity he always practises, to ‘contain’ their gist: ‘I’ve always copied out texts, with the idea that by so doing I could sort of incorporate them.’130 His first public essay emerged when he was engaged at the local library to research the history, geology, and archaeology of Ayrshire – that was at the age of sixteen.131 His talent would stimulate him to read a lot, and with great fervour (it was already pointed out that libraries were his company, and that he received a Double First in French and German, and was nominated the First Student in the School of Arts during his university studies). Reading, for White, intertwines with writing. In an interview with Frédérik de Towarniki in the early 1980s he says that when he was moving to Brittany, the assistants helping him told him there were about three tons of books in his library.132 He is what he calls ‘a bibliophile’.133 He says 126

Duclos, Le Poète cosmographe, 147. White, ‘Grounding a World’, 218–19. 128 McManus, The Radical Field, 2–4. 129 Duclos, Kenneth White: nomade intellectuel, 26. 130 House of Tides, 48. 131 McManus, The Radical Field, 162. 132 Duclos, Le Poète cosmographe, 117. 127

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that ‘the book remains the royal road to the spirit’.134 In reading White’s essays, narratives, or even poetry, one meets with many names, known and unknown, of writers, poets, philosophers, philologists, archaeologists, geographers, geologists, scientists, painters, etc. from different cultures and geographies of the world. He quotes them with ‘intellectual honesty’, as Ann Bineau says.135 They testify to the reading which he did/does throughout the day, at home (‘I work here [giving the example of his Atlantic studio, his ‘intellectual lighthouse’] about twelve hours a day’136) while eating (‘[in Corsica] I read while eating without pressure’137), or when travelling (‘[in Tahiti,] lying on the terrace, I read the whole night’138). His library is arranged into sections: languages and literatures (Russian, Scandinavian…), French literature, English literature, American literature, India, China, Japan, Celtic lands, human sciences, exact sciences, etc.,139 in addition to rare manuscripts he has collected from here and there: If my Atlantic library is pretty well stocked with books (a few thousand volumes in several languages) and in maps (all kinds of atlases, portulans and charts), it also has a special section devoted to manuscripts […], old texts I’ve managed to sniff out and pick up here and there.140

With such encyclopaedic reading, writing becomes a complementary and energetic exercise towards the realization of the self and the singing of world poetics. The crisis of White’s first (European) tradition left him with the idea that there was not much good writing available. In Lettres de Gourgounel he asserts the idea: no one has yet reached the extreme ends of writing, no one has realized the dreamed of book, the book that is as dense as the rock, limpid like spring, light like a wind. The prose of the world has not yet been revealed – apart from, maybe, some poems.141

133

Anne Bineau, ‘A Geographer of the Mind: Kenneth White as Reader and Writer’, in Bowd et al., Grounding, 123. 134 Op. cit., 116. 135 Bineau, ‘A Geographer of the Mind’, 125. 136 House of Tides, 46. 137 Le Rôdeur des confins, 179. 138 Ibid., 326. 139 Duclos, Le Poète cosmographe, 117. 140 House of Tides, 51. 141 Lettres de Gourgounel, 21.

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Writing is consequently established as a major path to be taken in order to return to the vanished world poetry. For White, writing is ‘power’ (‘puissance’) and a ‘sacred activity related to the natural phenomena’.142 It is a ‘profound activity’143 and creates ‘openness’ (‘ouverture’) to the world.144 The writer in this sense is the one who ‘augments the sensation of life’ by dint of his words. This is what White tries to do: It is not a reality, the state of things which is ours today. It hasn’t the body of a reality; it has neither the fibre nor the tetchiness of a reality. It is a universe of distance and separation, a world where boredom and catastrophe follow each other, deprived of depth and essential continuity. I want real reality. Everything I write is a move towards a little real reality […]. I am the survivor of a great catastrophe and I am trying to reestablish contact. I walk and I write for the same reason. To make the right movements and to renew lost relationships.145

Like nomadizing, listening to land and earth, writing is, then, a fundamental pillar in the geopoetic base. The writings of White can be divided into three categories: (1) waybooks, (2) staybooks, and (3) poetry. The first two are prose works, which White defines as follows: The waybooks: Travels in the Drifting Dawn, The Blue Road, The Face of the East Wind, The Wild Swans […] aren’t novels, nor are they travelogues, because they’ve got more energy and urgency in them, more extravagance and another dimension than what is found in most travelwriting. They roam, physically and mentally, over fairly wide and varied landscapes, through city spaces too, but always end up at some limit, some edge – looking out to Open World. As to the staybooks, well, […] I was engaged in my multifarious historic-cultural research […]. What is certain is that there is a double tendency in my nature, innate or strategical, maybe both innate and strategical. In my life and work there’s always been a to-and-fro, a dialectic between errancy and residence, the traveller and the hermit.146

Accordingly, Les Limbes incandescentes, Lettres de Gourgounel, and House of Tides are narratives, and are among his staybooks. They are 142

La Figure du dehors, 22. Ibid., 170–1. 144 Ibid., 94. 145 Les Limbes incandescentes, 52; 76. The translation is from McManus, The Radical Filed, 28–9. 146 White, ‘Grounding a World’, 208–9. 143

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written at periods of little movement (Paris, Gourgounel, Pyrenees, and Brittany) despite the dialectic idiosyncrasy of the writer, ‘between errancy and residence’. As to La Figure du dehors, Une Apocalypse tranquille, L’Esprit nomade, Le Plateau de l’albatros, and The Wanderer and His Charts, they can also be classed as staybooks, but in essay form. They embody his movement of geopoetics and empower the role of the essay over the common literature that he sees as unable to answer primordial questions. In Une Stratégie paradoxale, he says that the essay is ‘the attempt to think freely and quickly’.147 There are more poetics in a free and smooth essay, away from ornamented and well-chosen words. The target is ‘poetic writing’,148 a ‘new poetics’ of writing and living, because ‘language is a form of life’, according to MacDiarmid.149 But which language is most able to convey the contact with the universe? The language of the world is the answer. The winds, the waves, the stars, the seas, the earth, the birds, the gulls, the day, and the night; the elements of nature are the language of the world and its grammar. Speaking this language has been the work of White, the poet-thinker: Living tides and multiple spaces. Exercising thinking to exactitudes. Always in a search for a new language.150

Like a migrating bird that is closer to the fresh air in the sky than to man on earth, White wants to speak a different ‘lingo’: say the world anew dawn-talk grammar of rain, tree, stone all birds talk dawn-talk in different lingos151

To face the ‘mediocratic inflation of language’, new vocabulary needs to be created,152 vocabulary that is up to the whiteness of the white world. Generating words, which is also possible through going back to archaic

147

Une Stratégie paradoxale, 14. Une Apocalypse tranquille, 124. 149 Le Plateau de l’albatros, 55. 150 Ibid., 55. 151 Atlantica, 26. 152 Une Stratégie paradoxale, 15. 148

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terms that embody cosmic dimensions, makes up part of the geopoetic movement, which implies, among other things, ‘new wording’. Poetry, as has already been expounded, is the speaking device of the white world. If Plato closed the door of his ideal city to the poets, White opens it wide to them, on condition that they are ‘real’, ‘wild’ poets. He believes in the message of poetry and the poet. The real poet is the closest to earth, and the most enlightened,153 and people need his enlightenment, as seen with Emerson in ‘The Poet’. It is no wonder, then, that a collection of poetry, Wild Coal (1963), is the poet’s first published work. In general terms, White’s poetry is a reflection of his physical and mental itineraries, and is part of what he calls ‘world poetry’. Early in his career, he wrote rhymed poetry – maybe to prove that he knew what rhyming poetry meant and to dissociate himself from it thereafter. Now, the form he adopts is open, moving, like waves: ‘there is no language for being / you can only outline it / with poetic intelligence’.154 By means of poetic intelligence, White includes citations, names, and dates in his poetry. Sometimes the works are long, sometimes short, like the haiku poems, brief but dense. Below some extracts of poems from the Open World and Atlantica collections are provided. They instance the ability of poetry to contain the whiteness of the world and listen to its landscape. They also instance for the intellectual nomadism of White across world territories to arrive to the ‘white land’, Gwenved, and to the breezes of the open world, the original face and phase of man. Their order (not the form) here is mine. I have interfered only to italicize, put in bold, or bracket some words, phrases, or verses as a way of putting a finger on what I would like to emphasize. With these poetic peregrinations/sketches, this work closes: High Blue Day on Scalpay This is the summit of contemplation, and no art can touch it blue, so blue, the far-out archipelago and the sea shimmering, shimmering no art can touch it, the mind can only try to become attuned to it to become quiet, and space itself, out, to become open and still, unworlded knowing itself in the diamond country, in the ultimate unlettered light.155 --------------------153

La Figure du dehors, 145. Open World, 78. 155 Ibid., 98. 154

Kenneth White: From Intellectual Nomadism to the Open World Mountain and Glacier World Arrived at this point where the whiteness is manifest here in the mountains where the element my coldness surrounds me with eternity Arrived at this point the high crest of nothingness where the ‘I’ has no meaning and the self is ecstatically alone with its aloneness Shall I blow out my brains?156 ------------------------------Walking the Coast […] believing that the biological aim of art is to project around us the images the proofs the manifestations of a power of synthesis at one with life and maintaining life against solitude and fragmentation the cold aggressiveness of the space-time world.157 […] the poem being what happens when a welter of substantial feelings and facts have paused through the thalamus the belly of the brain and ascended without shortcircuiting right up into the cortical region from where 156 157

Ibid., 111. Ibid., 137.

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118 abstracted they return again worded on the tongue.158 elwise an attempt to get at and say out all that the world comprises which man only rarely realizes.159

-------------------House of Insight ‘Developing insight is like diving Into the deep waters of sensation’ (Nagasena, Vipassana) […] coming always coming and be-coming you think it’s over another lovely wave comes undisturbed the sacred sequence physics of being physics of writing all one words […] knowing things in the deep pleasure-core […] a whole white space we haven’t got into yet the white of a milky wave everything so absolutely beautiful clear […]

158 159

Ibid., 171. Ibid., 172.

Kenneth White: From Intellectual Nomadism to the Open World something else trying to light up at the back of my skull getting down to the wave and pulse level maybe deep down we live this way all the time but we don’t know it our consciousness isn’t alive to it our conscious is full of social noise I could probably invent a mathematics but my mind is in love with another kind of truth the flow doesn’t really want philosophies or science it wants you to get into the flow stop worrying at the world all those dogmas all that back biting all that anxiety ah! the long morning of the mind smoke dancing birds flying River flowing Seeing into it and feeling it all out there’s no essence Only multi-movement […] Wave-world […] in-being fields of in-being no wishful thinking

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120 philosophy’s holiday an ontological vacation no paradise but to move in a multiple paradoxical field glow-flow Silent Listen… Multiple meditations The wonderful understanding Wunderstanding […]160

------------------The Eight Eccentrics […] I come back up into the hills to follow the way of the white clouds. […] when I go into town I put a shoe on one foot and leave the other bare […] up in the mountains I like sprawling naked in the snow reading the Autumn Waters when the notion comes over me I get up on the back of a white crane and do some celestial sight-seeing […] I used to go for long walks in the country thinking about the Way […] you will never know the real way of things when people ask me to explain the way I just point to the sun and the moon […] I never wanted to be president of the company, or the country I wanted to be what I read in the old books ‘a real man without situation’161 160

Ibid., 240–4.

Kenneth White: From Intellectual Nomadism to the Open World ------------------Armorica Under cloud-scudding sky late Autumn the sea out there greylygreen quick-flecked with white in a blue-shuttered Breton town the Inn of the West Wind […] I sat in there for a while listening to the conversation looking out at the cloud then left again out on the road again The old sea-road to Gwenadur.162 --------------The Winter Ceremony The whole department of the Cotes-du-Nord is absolutely snow-bound it has been snowing on Ushant for the first time in a century here at Gwenved […] let’s go into the snow out there […] I walk along the shoreline in the snow163 -----------------Into the Whiteness Now I have burnt all my knowledge and am learning to live with the whiteness naked what I call art is now nothing made but the pure pathology of my body and mind at the heart of a terrible and joyous world.164 ---------------------

161

Ibid., 248. Ibid., 447. 163 Atlantica, 180–8. 164 Open World, 109. 162

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The Shaman’s Way I was called out the big sky spoke to me the dark wood spoke to me I was called out […] sleeping in a tree’s roots I had dreams and dreams: strange language, strange like the trembling of a thousand leaves […] I am a Shaman, says I […] here’s a trip I often make I go south to start with climb up the big mountain then come down to the red desert no crow could cross it I cross it, singing […] this time I am going under the sea […] this morning took a trip to the big sky at the red sky had a flight with a bear at the yellow sky had talk with a wolf at the green sky looked a snake in the eye at the blue sky swam about with a whale at the white sky danced with a crane […]165 ---------------The Music of the landscape Listening (late August morning) to the music of the landscape […]166 165 166

Ibid., 187–91. Ibid., 588–97.

Kenneth White: From Intellectual Nomadism to the Open World ---------------The Armorican Manuscript […] To the East the rising sun to the South red moors to the West the great coast to the North white fields […] where goes the world? to the white where goes the white? to the void? where goes the void? the void comes and goes like the light167

167

Atlantica, 132–48.

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CONCLUSION

This work has aimed at introducing the movement/project of geopoetics and its practitioner, the ‘poet-philosopher’ Kenneth White. Being a witness of the discontent of modern civilization, about which he says it ‘has been carried by various powers: myth, religion, metaphysics’ over the centuries and today ‘is carried by nothing- it just grows and spreads, like cancer’, White starts from the present, visits the past, tradition, travels the world and some of its prominent rich traditions, and comes back to the present to suggest ways out, for a better future. This work, he says, is ‘radical’. Seeing that the modern man, as has been the case with his ancestors for centuries, is getting more and more involved in the city, industry, and technology, and gradually losing his primordial senses, White suggests a return to the origins of man that is grounded on communication with earth in various ways: walking, thinking, contemplating, cultivating, listening, reading, etc. The task requires perseverance and strenuous endeavours, physical and mental, the first of which is to forget about the ‘cultural shows’ and ‘cinema talks’ heard here and there about poetry, philosophy, and science, and all the sociocultural and religious discourses. Part I of this work has shown how earth and poetry, geography and the poetics of life, make geopoetics. Earth is there, but a few people know what it means and how to live in it primitively – in the sense of directly and candidly. Poetry is also heard and read in newspapers, on radio stations and TV, etc. But the profound meaning of these concepts is being diluted. To this meaning White wants to return. Unless there is a genuine sensation of earth, no poetry can emerge, and no true life can be fully lived, so ‘the real work consists in changing the categories, grounding a new anthropology, moving towards a new experience of the earth and of life’.1 The way ahead is ‘cosmic unity’, the logos that generates all. Part II has, with White, crossed territories and brought to mind the names of travellers, writers, painters, philosophers, scientists, and poets from a wide spectrum of cultures of the world, taking Europe as the point of departure and arrival, passing through America and Asia and some North African territories. The objective has been to find common ground 1

The Wanderer and His Charts, 22.

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for geopoetics all over the world, doing without narrow-minded nationalisms, regionalisms, or cultural and ethnocentric differences and prejudices. Finding meeting points has been the target. Figures of wisdom, those free spirits or gangs of the road, have been found in various parts of the world, irrespective of their cultural belonging. On whatever territory he lands, White’s encyclopaedic mind manages to compare works and names, and subsequently to bring geography (landscape) to mind (mindscape) and take mind to geography. Though the East, the far Orient in particular, seems to provide more answers to White than any other space, this, however, does not imprison his thought and limit it to Asian perspectives. It only feeds part of his project as a ‘field of energy’. In The Outward Movement (1997) he writes: The purpose of the present book is the search, via mental landscape of East and West and some exceptional figures, for an archipelago of thought which transcends the opposition Orient–Occident, and which may be recognized and shared by all.2

East or West, North or South, the move is to an open, more multicultural, and more intercultural world. Part III has taken White as its base in relation to geopoetics and the white world – the quest of geopoetics. It has traced his travels as well as his dwellings to arrive at the idea that he is both an intellectual nomad and a hermit, errant as well as sedentary. This part of the book has also dwelt on the types of his writing and how they reflect his project, his physical and mental itineraries, making of them what he calls a ‘cartography’.3 Omar Bsaithi summarizes White’s writing style in four complementary ‘axes’: From various references to poems, essays and waybooks, it has appeared clearly that they stem from one source and that they are complementary. The meeting ground between the three modes of articulation revolves around four major axes: 1. Multiplicity and openness 2. The experience of the world 3. The primal ground 4. Poetics and language.4

2

In Bsaithi, Land and Mind, 183. The Wanderer and His Charts, 77. 4 Bsaithi, Land and Mind, 92. 3

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University friends used to call White ‘post-Nietzschean’, as he recounts, because this was the period when he put his mind into reading Nietzsche. He is ‘post-Nietzschean’; he belongs to the ‘thousand paths’ Nietzsche believed to be open to future explorations, to ‘future philosophers’: There are a thousand paths that have not yet been followed, a thousand types of health, a thousand lands hidden from life. Neither man nor the earth have been discovered yet. Stay awake and listen, you solitaries. From the future you will hear breezes coming, full of secret wing-beats.5

White has travelled to some of the ‘thousand lands hidden from life’ and has remained alert, to ‘listen’ to earth. In a prose paragraph in the poem ‘The Valley of Birches’, in Atlantica, White echoes the idea of listening to reality through silence, a language that pre-exists reality: Before we can say anything, anything at all, we must link ourselves, by a long silent process, to the reality. Only long hours of silence can lead us to our language, only long miles of strangeness can lead us to our home.6

Part of man’s language in this context is his code of life, and his home is earth: that is, by listening to earth, one knows the way home, otherwise one goes astray in a globalized world, interlinked by the various networks of technological communication – leaving little space for human–nature communication. Geopoetics is a modern project, and at the same time warns against the excessive consumerist culture of modernity. It endorses science on the condition that the human is not turned into a mere object of science. What science needs is openness to the poetics of the world, to poetry in its original significance.7 Geopoetics ‘does not imitate the savage life, it integrates certain elements from it’.8 White believes that man is ‘connected to the outdoors’, and cannot do without it, and says that this has no bearing on the romantic love of nature, ‘Nothing to do with a cerebral, sentimental, and verbal love of nature’. What counts is ‘being in the world, the most possible way, in silence’,9 for the latter gives man time to regenerate his energy and to look for other hidden spaces for ‘profound resources’.10 5

Op. cit., 97. Atlantica, 17. 7 Duclos, Le Poète cosmographe, 91. 8 Duclos, Kenneth White: nomade intellectuel, 263. 9 Op. cit., 152–3. 10 Ibid., 143. 6

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Conclusion

In La Figure du dehors White says that geopoetics is a way of life that could placate the anguish of the modern age: I am not preaching a unique happiness, a contentment without flaws. An old Chinese proverb expresses well my thought: you cannot prevent birds of bad omen to fly over your head, but you can at least prevent them from building their nests in your hair… So, needless to lament the time of anguish, nor to situate the self, artistically, in the state of anguish, but adopt a technique of life, an economy of life which helps in the deployment and reemployment of this energy that is the rhythm of true life. True life can, after all, be present.11

An interesting passage from House of Tides exemplifies the point. The words are those of Jacques Martinelli, a reader and fan of White: Before I met up with your books, I’d lost faith in everything. And I’m not the only one. You clear up the atmosphere, open up new tracks, new lifespaces […]. I know what I’m talking about.12

This said, and before the closure of this work, some notes are conveyed here for future investigations. These notes concern some among the many premises geopoetics could be opened up to, such as postmodernism, multiculturalism, interculturalism, open society, ethics, and wisdom. If postmodernism is seen as ‘a contradictory phenomenon, one that uses and abuses, installs and then subverts, the very concepts it challenges – be it architecture, literature, painting, sculpture, film, video, dance, TV, music, philosophy, aesthetic theory, psychoanalysis, linguistics, or historiography’13 – White thinks that this age is still laden with the aftermaths of modernism and is still in a state of ‘lostness’. In other words, White thinks that geopoetics can be ‘a real postmodern project’ in that it can revitalize the notion of culture that is ‘lost in a heterogeneous mass of triviality’, and consequentially refine that ‘totally insignificant’14 and ‘vague term of postmodernism’.15 ‘With very little conception of value’ in the modern cultural show, White adds, we are faced with a culture that is

11

La Figure du dehors, 71. House of Tides, 135. 13 Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics to Postmodernism – History, Theory, Fiction (New York and London: Routledge, 1988), 3. 14 White, ‘Pathways to an Open World’, 35–8. 15 Gary B. Madison and Marty Fairbairn, The Ethics of Postmodernity – Current Trends in Continental Thought (Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2000), 1. 12

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far from being or having ‘paideia’16 – that is, instruction, education, and values. With the question of values White raises the question of ethics in all fields, which is becoming more and more dominant. If classical philosophers espoused the practice of philosophizing with virtue, mainstream modern Western philosophy appears to have broken away from such a tradition by making of ethics an independent discipline. A modern philosopher does not need to be virtuous or ethicist; the relation between thought and practice is broken, as is the relation between man and nature that White describes. There is a need to give back to thought its value by matching theory with practice. Of course, the debate over which influences which remains, especially given that philosophy no longer ‘contains’ beneath its umbrella other disciplines (e.g. maths, physics, natural sciences, etc.), as used to be the case in premodern times; this is why responsibility cannot be put on philosophers alone. Other fields of study have to bear this question of ethics too in their own ways; the emerging fields of bioethics and environmental ethics17 are examples of this growing awareness of what it means to value nature and man as integral parts of each other. What is broadly meant by ethics is that inner human consciousness that aspires for good for the other as part of the self. It is the inner and sincere good intent of the conscience (niyya and ‫ڲ‬amƯr, respectively, in Arabic). It is this type of ethics – which can have multiple manifestations – that breeds wisdom; and wisdom breeds internal and external peace. This looks like the same wisdom that White refers to in La Figure du dehors when dealing with Celtic-Gaelic past culture. He gives the story of Adnae and his son Nede. The father is a big man of science and poetry in Ireland. He sends his son to Scotland to receive better education. The latter’s words, which he repeats when walking along the shore as a way of meditation, are relevant to this point: I am the son of poetry, and poetry is the daughter of reflection, and reflection is the daughter of meditation, and meditation is the daughter of science, and science is the daughter of research, and research is the daughter of much learning, and much learning is the daughter of great intelligence, and the great intelligence is the daughter of comprehension,

16

Op. cit., 38. Mohammed Hashas, ‘Geopoetics Call’, in Critical Muslim, 19, 2016 (Special edition: Nature, ed. Ziauddin Sardar), 72–90.

17

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Conclusion and comprehension is the daughter of wisdom, and wisdom is the daughter of gods.18

It is this same geopoetic wisdom that informs White of the complexity of the modern multicultural world, which can turn the richness of diversity into a ‘cacophony’. Communication among diverging ‘multi-’ discourses is a requirement for a ‘new way of thinking’: Today, for the first time in the history of humanity, winds blow from all regions of the globe at once, and each and every one of us has access to all the cultures of the world. That can give rise to cacophony, to disarray, lassitude in front of so much accumulated richness, but it can also give rise, with analytical work and synthesis […] to a new way of thinking, a great world poem, liveable by everyone.19

Geopoetics is an intercultural project for the wise minds of world cultures, literatures, philosophies, and religions. It searches for what is shared among them and elevates it, and at the same time turns what is different into a music of the world. It seriously deserves our attention so that we can discover hidden fields of positive energy, away from narrow-minded nationalisms, populisms, dogmas, and ideologies.

18 19

La Figure du dehors, 30. In McManus, The Radical Field, 196.

AFTERWORD THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING A GEOPOET FRANCESCA M. CORRAO PROFESSOR OF ARABIC LANGUAGE AND CULTURE, LUISS GUIDO CARLI UNIVERSITY, ROME

Kenneth White is an exponent of what might be called ‘refreshed humanness’ through which human beings are reminded of the complexity of the modern multicultural world. The creativity of the poet is the result of an endless journey in human cultural production. White’s poetry, besides other works, writes earthly beauty and investigates the many new cultural experiences that enriched his long journey. We have grown up in an age that opened our eyes to the evidence that we are all related. Human beings are obviously related, and they are one with nature, earth in particular. White’s work on geopoetics gives us the chance to visit many memoria loci (memories of the place) that he has been charting for the last four to five decades. Travelling helps in becoming aware of this evidence; travelling is also what we do when we read from a culture that is not the one in which we have been brought up, as is the case with me, for example. I have travelled for over forty years in the mentality of many others to find that these others belong to me; they have helped me complete my identity, my understanding of myself and the world I live in. I keep completing my identity through meeting other people, or, to use a famous metaphor dear to Adonis, the Syrian poet, I am the other. This simple concept is part of a more complex idea that corresponds to the Buddhist concept of ‘dependent origination’, as explained by the Japanese philosopher Daisaku Ikeda: ‘However tenuous our connections may appear on the surface, this does not change the fact that the world is woven of the profound bonds and connections of one life to another. It is this that makes it at all times possible for us to take the kind of action that will generate ripples of positive impact across the full spectrum of our connections’ (Ikeda, 2014 Peace Proposal – Value Creation for Global Change: Building Resilient and Sustainable Societies).

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‘The very earth in which we try to live’, to echo White, is where we express our feelings through words and deeds; we give names, meanings, and explanations; we divide and then we observe what is part of an evolution that transforms incessantly the reality where we live. The poetic word indicates a new relation between meaning and thing; it holds a new vision, to use again Adonis’ words, ‘a vision that goes beyond the actual concepts; it is also a change in the order of things and in the way we look at them’. Human history, to agree with the Palestinian intellectual Edward Said, is not homogeneous, but rather a never-ending change and a human product; language, through which humans express themselves, shapes history (Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism, 2004). Our life is an eternal movement and we should be able to perceive it in its ephemeral beauty, but human beings are afraid of this movement and try to fix rigid laws in order to feel more secure and stable. This cannot work; in fact, it does not work. As in the stories of the apparently silly but actually intelligent and wise figure of Juha in the Arab tradition, our lives keep oscillating from stupidity to wisdom. As a Buddhist teaching explains it, the difference between the wise and the fool is in the behaviour. To be rigid brings one to a deadlock, a point of rupture, while life is endless evolution and this is clear in the eyes of the wise. White thinks that it is time to return to the aesthetic connotation of the word ‘cosmos’, which etymologically meant ‘a beautiful, harmonious totality’, and I believe that in an age where work is no longer considered a value, human beings should discover again the beauty of value-creating: to create for the sake of beauty, good, and utility. Here I quote the valuecreating theory of the Japanese pedagogue Tsunesaburu Makiguchi (1871– 1944), founder of the Sǀka Kyǀiku Gakkai (Value-Creating Education Society), whose principle is to call forth the best from within each of us. It is not far from the sensible perception White had during his journeys in Japan. White is working to create values and bring back the concept of culture to ‘paideia’ – that is, instruction, education, and values. His search for harmony in different fields of knowledge aims at establishing geopoetics as a form of ‘refreshed humanness’, where again the human being and earth and nature are at the centre of investigation for the sake of discovering the precious mystery of life. Old Arabic poetry and literature, which I have been immersed in for decades, contain a lot of what geopoetics is about – rebuilding contact with earth for a more profound existence and connection with the world. We hope that the coming generations open up these fields that share these human concerns for better understanding of the human. The fact that

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Mohammed Hashas comes from this ‘Arabic tradition’ and at the same time examines this emerging ‘geopoetics tradition’ outside the geographic Arab world is just an example of how the word and the world connect and get connected. White’s geopoetics deserves our attention in this hasty world that is losing values, connectedness, and humanness, and Hashas renders us this service intelligently in this work.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Major References White, Kenneth. Across the Territories. Edinburgh: Polygon, 2004. —. Atlantica. Bilingual edition. Transl. Marie-Claude White. Paris: Grasset, 1986. —. ‘Carnet de Bord’. International Institute for Geopoetics, Issue 3, Spring 2005. —. Geopoetics: Place, Culture, World. Edinburgh: Alba Editions, 2003. —. House of Tides. Edinburgh: Polygon, 2000. —. Inaugural speech for the International Institute for Geopoetics, Paris, 26 April 1989. Available at http://geopoetique.net/archipel_fr/institut/texte_inaugural/index.html. —. L’Esprit nomade. Paris: Grasset, 1987. —. La Figure du dehors. Paris: Grasset, 1982. —. La Route bleue. Transl. Marie-Claude White. Paris: Grasset, 1983. —. Le Plateau de l’albatros: introduction à la géopoétique. Paris: Grasset, 1994. —. Le Rôdeur des confins. Transl. Marie-Claude White. Paris: Albin Michel, 2006. —. Les Limbes incandescentes. Transl. Patrick Mayoux. Paris: Denoël, 1976. —. Lettres de Gourgounel. Transl. Gil and Marie Jouanard. Paris: Presses d’aujourd’hui, 1979. —. On Scottish Ground – Selected Essays. Edinburgh: Polygon, 1998. —. Open World – The Collected Poems 1960–2000. Edinburgh: Polygon, 2003. —. ‘Pathways to an Open World’. In Islam and the West – For a Better World. Ed. Khalid Hajji. Beirut: Arab Scientific Publishers, 2007. —. The Wanderer and His Charts – Exploring the Fields of Vagrant Thought and Vagabond Beauty. Edinburgh: Polygon, 2004. —. Une Apocalypse tranquille. Paris : Grasset, 1985. —. Une Stratégie paradoxale, essais de résistance culturelle. Bordeaux: Presses universitaires de Bordeaux, 1998.

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Further References Abderrahmane, Taha. suҴƗl al-a‫ې‬lƗq: musƗhamah fƯ l-naqd al-a‫ې‬lƗqƯ li-l‫ۊ‬adƗ‫ܔ‬ah al-ƥarbiyya [The Question of Ethics: A Contribution to Ethical Criticism of Western Modernity]. Beirut and Casablanca, alMarkaz al-৮aqƗfƯ al-‫ޏ‬arabƯ, 2000. —. rnj‫ ۊ‬al-‫ۊ‬adƗ‫ܔ‬a: na‫ۊ‬wa al-taҴsƯs li-‫ۊ‬adƗ‫ܔ‬a islƗmiyya [The Spirit of Modernity: An Introduction to Founding an Islamic Modernity]. Beirut and Casablanca, al-markaz al-৮aqƗfƯ al-‫ޏ‬arabƯ, 2006. Adonis. An Introduction to Arab Poetics. Transl. Catherine Cobham. London: Saqi Books, 1990. Attar, Samar. The Vital Roots of European Enlightenment: Ibn Tufayl’s Influence on Modern Western Thought. Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2007. Barks, Coleman, et al. Transl. The Essential Rumi. Edison, NJ: Castle Books, 1997. Baym, Nicola, et al. Eds. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. 3rd ed. New York: Norton and Company, 1979. Bowd, Gavin, Charles Forsdick, and Norman Bissell. Eds. Grounding a World: Essays on the Work of Kenneth White. Glasgow: Alba Editions, 2005. Bsaithi, Omar. Land and Mind: Kenneth White’s Geopoetics in the Arabian Context. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008. Dallmayr, Fred. Return to Nature? An Ecological Counterhistory. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2011. Dall’Aglio, Emmanuel. Kenneth White: du nomadisme à la géopoétique. Évreux: Centre Départemental de Documentation Pédagogique de l’EURE, 1997. Delbard, Olivier. Les Lieux de Kenneth White: paysage, pensée, poétique. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1999. Duclos, Michèle. Le Poète cosmographe: vers un nouvel espace culturel. Bordeaux: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 1987. —. Ed. Le Monde ouvert de Kenneth White. Bordeaux: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 1995. —. Kenneth White: nomade intellectuel, poète du monde. Grenoble: ELLUG, 2006. Dunn, Ross E. The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the 14th Century. 1986; Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 2012.

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Hajji, Khalid. ‘Geography between Politics and Poetics’. In Discourse Analysis: A Cognitive and Educational Tool or a Metalinguistic Gimmick? Oujda: Faculty of Letters Publications, 1997. —. ‘Kenneth White’. Interview. al-mun’ataf, 11, 1995. Hashas, Mohammed. ‘Geopoetics Call’. Critical Muslim, 19, 2016, 72–90. Special edition: Nature. Ed. Ziauddin Sardar. —. ‘The American Proto-Geopoetician: Henry David Thoreau (1817– 1862) and Kenneth White: The Euramerasian’. Online Journal of the Scottish Centre for Geopoetics, 1, 2015. Available at www.geopoetics.org.uk/?s=Mohammed+Hashas. Heidegger, Martin. ‘Only a God Can Save Us’. 1966 Der Spiegel interview, published in Richard Wollin, ed. The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader. 1976; Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 1993. Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics to Postmodernism – History, Theory, Fiction. New York and London: Routledge, 1988. Ibn Bajja. TadbƯr al-Mutawa‫ۊۊ‬id [Rule of the Solitary]. Tunis: Cérès Editions, 1964. Ibn Tufayl, Abu Bakr. The History of Hay Ibn Yagzan. Transl. Simon Ockley. Intr. A.S. Fulton. New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company, n.d. Jamet, Pierre. Le Local et le global dans l’œuvre de Kenneth White. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2002. Kerguelen, Jean-Yves. Kenneth White et la Bretagne. MoƟlan-sur-Mer: Blanc Silex, 2002. Kukathas, Chandran. The Liberal Archipelago: A Theory of Diversity and Freedom. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Kymlicka, Will. Multicultural Odysseys: Navigating the New International Politics of Diversity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. LeMaster, James R., and Donald D. Kummings. Eds. Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia. New York: Garland Publishing, 1998. Madison, Gary B., and Marty Fairbairn. The Ethics of Postmodernity – Current Trends in Continental Thought. Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2000. Margantin, Laurent. Ed. Kenneth White et la géopoétique. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2006. McManus, Tony. The Radical Field: Kenneth White and Geopoetics. Dingwall: Sandstone Press, 2007. Miller, Edwin Haviland. Walt Whitman’s ‘Song of Myself’. Michigan: Iowa University Press, 1991.

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Modood, Tariq. Multiculturalism: A Civic Idea. 2nd ed. 2007; Cambridge and Malden: Polity, 2013. Nasr, Seyyed Hossein. Man and Nature: The Spiritual Crisis in Modern Man. 1968; London and Boston: Unwin Paperbacks, 1990. Nietzsche, Friedrich Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. Ed. Rolf-Peter Horstmann and Judith Norman. Transl. Judith Norman. 1886; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. —. Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None. Ed. Adrian del Caro and Robert Pippin. 1883; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Parekh, Bhikhu. Rethinking Multiculturalism: Cultural Diversity and Political Theory. London: Macmillan Press Ltd, 2000. Peterson, Linda H. Ed. The Norton Reader. 9th edition. New York: Norton and Company, 1996. Roncato, Christophe. Kenneth White, une oeuvre-monde. Preface Régis Poulet. Rennes: Rennes University Press, 2014. Taylor, Charles, et al. Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition. Ed. and intr. Amy Gutmann. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994. Thoreau, Henry David. Walden. Ed. Owen Thomas. New York: Norton and Company, 1966. Torrey, Bradford. The Writings of Henry David Thoreau. New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1906. Tzu, Lao. Tao To King. 6th century BC. Ed. Association Française des Professeurs de Chinois. Available at http://afpc.asso.fr. Wunenburger, Jean-Jacques. Ed. Autour de Kenneth White: espace, pensée, poétique. Dijon: Presses Universitaires de Dijon, 1996.

APPENDIX KENNETH WHITE: TITLES AND DISTINCTIONS, BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES, AND FURTHER BIBLIOGRAPHY

Titles and Distinctions University Degrees MA, Honours 1st class, Glasgow. Docteur d’État, Paris. Functions Professor (Chair of Twentieth-Century Poetics), University of ParisSorbonne, 1983–1996. Visiting Professor at the Millenium Project, University of the Highlands and Islands, Scotland. Founder-President of the International Institute of Geopoetics. Honorary Distinctions D. Lit. Hon. Causa, University of Glasgow. D. Lit. Hon. Causa, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh. D. Lit. Hon. Causa, Open University. Chevalier dans l’ordre des Arts et Lettres, 1986. Officier dans l’ordre des Arts et Lettres, 1993. Honorary member, Royal Scottish Academy. Literary Prizes Prix Médicis étranger for La Route bleue, 1983. Grand prix du rayonnement français de l’Académie française for his work as a whole, 1985. Grand prix Question de for Une apocalypse tranquille, 1986. Grand prix Alfred de Vigny for Atlantica, 1987. Premio Aleramo (Italy), for Scotia Deserta, 1996. Insigne poeta de la Generación del 27, Málaga, 1997.

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Prix Roger Caillois for his work as a whole, 1998. Prix ARDUA for his work as a whole, Bordeaux, 2002. Prix Édouard Glissant (Université de Paris 8), for his openness to the cultures of the world, 2004. Prix Bretagne for his work as a whole, 2006. Premio Grinzane-Biamonti (Italy), for his work as a whole, 2008. Grand Prix Maurice Genevoix de l’Académie française for Les Affinités extrêmes, 2010. Prix Alain Bosquet for Les Archives du littoral, 2011.

Biographical Notes and Further Bibliography 1936 Born in Glasgow, south side of the river, in the Gorbals. Father, railway signalman, socially minded, avid reader of books. Grandfather, musician, dancer, foundryman. 1939–1954 Raised on the west coast of Scotland; sea, woods, hills, and moor. Physical movement in this territory. Schooling at Fairlie, Largs, Ardrossan. Works on farms and on the shore (shellfish-gathering for Billingsgate), also as postman and purser on the Clyde steamers. Studies local geology and archaeology (first public text on the archaeology of Ayrshire). Reads Thoreau, Whitman, Melville. 1954–1956 Student at the University of Glasgow: French and German, with Latin and philosophy. Does a lot of reading in the university library: all sections, from metaphysics to mineralogy. Particular affinities with Ovid, Rimbaud, Hölderlin. 1956–1957 In Munich, lodged in a wooden shack on the banks of the Isar. Reads Nietzsche and Heidegger. Tough winter, beautiful spring. 1957–1959 Back in Glasgow. Double First in French and German. Named first student in the Faculty of Arts. With a post-graduate scholarship, leaves for Paris.

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1959–1963 Marriage with Marie-Claude Charlut. Lodged in seventh-floor rooms in Paris. Exploring Surrealism (Breton, Artaud), and connected fields (Daumal, Michaux). After two years, settles out in Meudon. Begins the manuscript that will become Incandescent Limbo. Gives private lessons in English. 1961 Buys Gourgounel, an old farm in the mountains of the Ardèche, with several acres of moor, wood, and rock. Hermit kingdom! Spends summers and autumns there, handling mattock and scythe, studying Eastern literature and thought (Taoism, Ch’an Buddhism). Works at the manuscript that will become Letters from Gourgounel. 1962–1963 Teaching at the Sorbonne. The students of English publish his first book of poems: Wild Coal. 1963 Back to Scotland; sense of unfinished business in Glasgow. Much stravaiging in the streets. Assistant lecturer then lecturer at the university: teaching twentieth-century poetry and the Encyclopedists. Founds a parauniversity group, The Jargon Group, for lectures, debates, poetry readings. Talks in terms of ‘cultural revolution’ (worked out the concept for himself – no reference to Mao). 1964 En toute candeur, early poems plus three biographical sketches, appears at the Mercure de France in Paris. The only living author in that collection (‘Domaine anglais’). 1966 Two books, one prose, one poetry, come out simultaneously from Jonathan Cape, London: Letters from Gourgounel and The Cold Wind of Dawn. Considered as being outside the norms of contemporary British literature: sort of erratic boulders. 1966–1967 Living in Edinburgh, thinking of Stevenson, De Quincey, and other physical-mental travellers. Working at a long poem, A Walk along the Shore, which sums up his itinerarium mentis up to that point. Meets MacDiarmid: affinities and differences.

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1967–1968 Back to France, living at Pau, in the Atlantic-Pyrenees, teaching at the University of Bordeaux in Pau. Founds a group and a review: Feuillage. Involved in the May ’68 movement. Expelled from the university. The students protest. Goes for a long walk in the Basque country. 1968–1969 Out of (socioeconomic), work in Pau. Studies and writes a lot, facing the Pyrenees, mountains he comes to know better and better. A book of poems, The Most Difficult Area, appears from Cape Goliard, London. As of this date, in Britain, his name is surrounded with silence. Does nothing to change this state of affairs, too engrossed in his own work-field. 1969–1973 Still in Pau, but lecturing at the University of Paris VII. Founds another group, another review: The Feathered Egg. 1973–1975 Senior Associate at the University of Paris VII. Founds a research seminar ‘East–West’, which will be known familiarly as ‘The Cold Mountain Seminar’ or ‘The Old Pond Seminar’. Moving around Europe, from Dublin to Marseilles, Amsterdam to Barcelona. These trans-Europe trips are the basis of Travels in the Drifting Dawn. 1975 White’s post as Senior Associate terminating, after a new governmental decision, at the end of two years, he finds himself reduced to the position of ‘foreign assistant’, while continuing the same work and directing research. 1975–1976 Travelling in South-East Asia (Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan, Thailand…). Working at a manuscript: The Face of the East Wind. 1976 As of this date, the manuscripts accumulated during the Pyrenean period begin to appear in Paris at a rapid rate. 1979 Defends a State doctorate thesis on the theme of ‘intellectual nomadism’: it is recognized by the jury as opening up a new field of studies, and

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several of its concepts (geopoetics etc.) are now being used by geographers and psychologists, not to speak of writers. Leaves on a trip along the north bank of the St Lawrence into Labrador, which will turn into the book The Blue Road. 1983 Leaving the Pyrenees, settles on the north coast of Brittany. Appointed to newly founded Chair of Twentieth-Century Poetics at the Sorbonne. The Labrador book, La Route bleue, published by Grasset, is awarded the Prix Médicis Étranger. 1984 Trip to Japan, where he follows Basho’s trail from Tokyo north and continues on into Hokkaido, a trip which will result in The Wild Swans. 1985 Awarded the French Academy’s Grand Prix du Rayonnement Français for the totality of his work. Archives on his work are established at the municipal library of Bordeaux. 1987 Awarded the Prix Alfred de Vigny for Atlantica. 1988 Trip to the Isles of America (Martinique). 1989 After a long exile, renews contact with English-language publishing. Publishes The Bird Path, Collected Longer Poems, and Travels in the Drifting Dawn. Second trip to the Isles of America (Guadeloupe, Saintes, Martinique). Founds the International Institute of Geopoetics. 1990 Publishes Handbook for the Diamond Country, Collected Shorter Poems, and The Blue Road. Brings out also the first number of the geopoetics review, Cahiers de Géopoétique. 1991 Receives an Honorary D. Lit. from the University of Glasgow. Third trip to the Isles of America (Dominica, St Vincent, Grenada).

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1992 More progress made in getting his work available in English with Pilgrim of the Void, which brings together two books recounting his Asian travels published separately in Paris: The Face of the East Wind (Hong Kong, South China Sea, Taiwan, Thailand), and The Wild Swans (Japan). Fourth trip to the Isles of America (the northern section of the Antillian Arc). 1993 Promoted in Paris from Chevalier des Arts et Lettres to Officier des Arts et Lettres. Fifth trip to the Isles of America (the Virgins). 1994 Is awarded the prize of the Société de Géographie in Paris for Frontières d’Asie. Sixth trip to the Isles of America (the Virgins). 1995 Trip to Corsica. Seventh trip to the Isles of America (the Virgins). 1996 The National Library of Scotland stages an exhibition on his work: ‘White World, the Itinerary of Kenneth White’, which is later shown in other cities and towns. Publishes a collection of interviews, Coast to Coast. Travels in Italy, Sweden, Norway, Canada. In Italy, receives the Aleramo Prize for his work in poetry. Eighth trip to the Isles of America (the Virgins). Withdraws from the Chair of Twentieth-Century Poetics at the Sorbonne. 1997 Travels and lectures in Serbia, Montenegro, Sweden, Germany, Scotland, Spain. At Málaga, is awarded the Insignia of the Generación del 27. Ninth trip to the Isles of America (the Virgins). Publishes, in Paris, The Shores of Silence, the result of nine years’ work in the poetic field. 1998 Travels and lectures in Poland, Sweden, Scotland, and Morocco. Awarded a D. Lit. Hon Causa by Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh. Tenth trip to the Isles of America (the Virgins). Publishes, in France, the book Strategy of Paradox, which sums up his sociopolitical itinerary. Commences the publication of his essays in English with On Scottish Ground. In France, is awarded the Prix Roger Caillois for his work as a whole. The French version, adapted and augmented, of the National Library of Scotland

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exhibition, retitled ‘Open World, the Itinerary of Kenneth White’, begins to circulate in France: Le Vaudreuil, March; Trouville, April–May; Rouen, June–July. 1999 Travels and lectures in Sweden and in Scotland. Trip to Spain and Portugal. First trip to the Indian Ocean: Reunion, Mauritius. Eleventh trip to the Isles of America (the Virgins). Elected to a three-year fellowship at Edinburgh College of Art. The exhibition ‘Open World’ is presented at Rennes in January. 2000 Publishes a new book of poetry in Paris, Limits and Margins. Second trip to the Indian Ocean (the Seychelles archipelago). An exhibition of his artist-books (close on a hundred) is held at the Librairie Nicaise in Paris. The exhibition ‘Open World’ is shown at Évreux in March, at Le Lavandou in June, at Pau in November. 2001 Publishes House of Tides at Edinburgh. Elected honorary member of the Royal Scottish Academy. Member of the executive council of the World Academy of Poetry (Verona, Italy). Founding member of the Atlantic Academy (France). Delivers the Consignia lecture at the International Book Festival in Edinburgh: ‘The Re-mapping of Scotland’. Third trip to the Indian Ocean (the Seychelles archipelago). ‘Open World’: at Besançon in January, at Châteauroux in February–March, at Mende in April, at Fontainebleau in December. 2002 Is awarded the ARDUA prize (Bordeaux) for his work as a whole. Prepares the edition of his Collected Poems. Fourth trip to the Indian Ocean (the Seychelles archipelago). ‘Open World’: at Nancy in April– May, at Dunkirk in November. 2003 A symposium, ‘Horizons of Kenneth White – Literature, Thought, Geopoetics’, is held at Bordeaux (February) and another, ‘Forty Years of the White World’, in St Andrews (October). Trip to Polynesia: a lecture on Gauguin at Tahiti in the context of a conference organized by the University of French Polynesia, followed by a journey from island to island. In May, back to the Indian Ocean. In June, lecture on a French

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cruise boat down the Caledonian Canal and up the Hebrides. Publishes Open World: Collected Poems 1960–2000 and Geopoetics: Place, Culture, World. ‘Open World’ at Brussels in January. 2004 February: takes part in an international poetry symposium in Italy at Stresa-Orta organized by the literary review Atelier. March: an international colloquium on geopoetics is held at Geneva, organized by the University of Geneva. Delivers a lecture on Rimbaud, at the poet’s birthplace, Charleville-Mézières. September: delivers another lecture on Saint-John Perse at Paris in an international colloquium on that poet organized by the Sorbonne. Publishes two new books in Britain: The Wanderer and His Charts and Across the Territories. Receives the Édouard Glissant prize awarded by the University of Paris VIII for his ‘openness to the cultures of the world’. ‘Open World’ at CharlevilleMézières, March–April. 2005 Publishes three new books in France: Le Passage extérieur (poems), La Maison des marées (French version of House of Tides), L’Hermitage des brumes (interviews). June: lecture on the theory of complexity at an international symposium in Cerisy. August: lecture at the Edinburgh Book Festival: ‘What is World Writing?’ October: lecture on prehistory and geopoetics at the National Museum of Prehistory in the Dordogne. Lecture tour in the north of Scotland on the first Hi-Arts International Fellowship. Receives an honorary doctorate from the Open University. ‘Open World’: Caen, September. 2006 Publication of Le Rodeur des confins (French version of Across the Territories). March: lecture at the Cité des Sciences on the theme of ‘Poetic Intelligence’; lecture ‘Travelling and Founding’ at the Iberian and Latino-American section of the University of Paris III. Awarded the Prix Bretagne for his book La Maison des mares and his work as a whole. In Scotland, nominated Visiting Professor to the projected University of the Highlands and Islands. Publishes On the Atlantic Edge. 2007 Publication in Paris, in the collection Poésie/Gallimard, of Un monde ouvert, a large selection of his complete poetic work to date. This year sees also the publication of his essay on Deleuze, Dialogue avec Deleuze,

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along with the re-edition of his book on Victor Segalen, Les Finisterres de l’esprit, at Isolato Editions, Paris; and a re-edition of his Asian travels, Le Visage du vent d’est, with Albin Michel, Paris. A new study of his work, by Tony McManus, is published in Scotland : The Radical Field. Readings at the National People’s Theatre (TNP) of Villeurbanne and at the festival Étonnants Voyageurs at Saint-Malo. Lectures: in Paris, in the ‘Travel series’ of the Éditions Transboréal; at the Ullapool Book Festival, on Scottish literature; at Tournefeuille at the Festival of History and Literature; at the Edinburgh Book Festival, on ‘radical writing’; at the Hebridean Book Festival, Stornoway, on the question of insularity; at the Inverness Book Festival, on the work of Neil Gunn. President of the International Poetry Biennale at Liège, in Belgium. Guest of honour at the Books in Brittany festival at Bécherel (lectures and readings). Honorary President of the Breton Book Festival, Guérande. To cool off, trip to Alaska. 2008 Begins to sort out manuscripts and correspondence for a deposit of his French archives at the IMEC (Institut Mémoires de l’Édition Contemporaine), the equivalent of his Scottish archives at the National Library in Edinburgh. Inaugural lecture (‘Pilot-Plan for a Highliner University’) as Visiting Professor at the projected University of the Highlands and Islands. Takes part at the St Andrews Poetry Festival. Later in the year, at the Istrian Book Festival, Pula, Croatia, with talks, interviews, and readings on the theme of nomadism. In Italy, receives the Grinzane-Biamonti prize for his work as a whole. Publication of Land and Mind: Kenneth White’s Geopeotics in the Arabian Context, by Omar Bsaithi, Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 2009 Continues his activity as travelling lecturer. In France at the municipal library of Dinan, Brittany; at the book festival in Montpellier; and at the School of Architecture, Clermont-Ferrand. Guest of honour at the Book Festival of Montenegro, with lectures and readings. Delivers a lecture at the National Library of Scotland: ‘Moving Out: The Extension and Expansion of Scottish Intelligence’. In Paris, publishes a book of essays, Les Affinités extrêmes, which is at one and the same time a homage to certain French writers and a kind of intellectual biography by proxy. This book is awarded the Grand Prix Maurice Genevoix of the Académie française.

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2010 Celebrates the new year by breaking a leg on the icy granite steps of his workshop. Carrying in his hands a Japanese earthen teapot, he saves the teapot but shatters his left femur. After ten days in the hospital at Lannion, where he reads Schopenhauer while listening to the talk of the nurses, he gets back to Gwenved where, after a few sessions of kinesitherapy, he begins stomping about on crutches, first around the garden, then on the Pors Mabo road, which has never before seemed to him so beautiful. He uses this accident as a point of departure for studies in bone structure, the mechanisms of walking, and the practice of proprioception. In October, back on his feet again, he gives a lecture and a reading on the occasion of the staging, at the town library of Saint-Brieuc, of the exhibition ’Open World’. 2011 Publishes simultaneously La Carte de Guido, un pèlerinage européen (prose) and a new book of poems, Les Archives du littoral, which is awarded the Prix Alain Bosquet. Lecture and reading tour in Corsica: Ajaccio, on intellectual nomadism; Corte, on geopoetics; Bastia, on politics and culture; Bonifacio, a reading of island poems. Other lectures at the European Centre for Archaeology in the Morvan (on geopoetics); at Pau on ‘Travel and Writing’; at the Parc régional of the Narbonne area on ‘Walking the Territories’; guest of honour at the Parole ambulante festival in Lyon. Seminar on geopoetics at the University of Paris 3. Participates in a symposium at the Centre culturel of Cerisy-la-Salle on ‘Alternative Cultures’, with a presentation of the geopoetics movement. Writes the text, ‘Le territoire extrême’, for an album on the Finistère district of Brittany. Finalizes further loads of archives: English-language material for the National Library of Scotland at Edinburgh, French material for the IMEC at the Abbaye d’Ardenne near Caen. 2012 March, in Albi, Tarn en poésie encounters. June, in Gonevoa: Festival internazionale di Poesia di Genova. August, in Houlgate, Summer encounters in Normandy (Rencontres d'été en Normandie). 2013 Publication of The Winds of Vancouver: A Nomadic Report from the North Pacific Edge, Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies, University of Aberdeen. Translation of La Route bleue from English, by MarieClaude White, Marseille: Le mot et le reste.

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January, on France Culture programme. March, at Caen, bibliothèque municipal. April, at Grenoble, Stendhal University. May, at Aberdeen, Aberdeen World Festival; at Sait-Malo, Festival Étonnants voyageurs; and at Huelgoat, Colloque Victor Segalen à l’espace d’art ‘L'École des filles’. 2014 Translation of Les Vents de Vancouver from English by Marie-Claude White, Marseille: Le mot et le reste. March, at Saint-Agathon, Festival du conte et de la poésie. October, Mouans-Sartoux, Festival du livre. 2015 Publication of Le Gang du kosmos: poétique et politique en terre américaine, Wildproject Editions. March, in Penvenan, Francophonie week, ‘Kenneth White sur les traces du oète japonais Matsuo Bashǀ’. July, in Marseille Bibliothèque L'Alcazar. September, Metz, Conference ‘Redécouvrir la terre, ouvrir un monde’; Nancy, Conference ‘Pour une littérature vraiment mondiale’. October, Laval, ‘Le monde ouvert de Kenneth White’. 2016 Publication of La mer des lumières, translated from English by MarieClaude White, Marseille: Le mot et le reste. May, in Luxemburg, a series of lectures on geopoetics; in Chartes, ‘Auteur de Kenneth White’. Kenneth White’s archives are deposited as follows: English documents at the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh. French documents at the IMEC (Institut mémoires de l’édition contemporaine), Abbaye d’Ardenne, 14280 Saint-Germain-la-BlancheHerbe. Another collection of documents and objects bearing on ecology has been deposited at the Musée du vivant, Paris. More at White’s personal webpage: www.kennethwhite.org; the International Institute of Geopoetics’ earlier webpage: www.geopoetique.net; and the current page in many languages: http://institut-geopoetique.org/fr/.

INDEX A[sian] Train, 61 Abderrahmane, Taha, 5 Adonis, 5, 131, 132 Africa, 30, 54, 55, 82, 83, 108, 125 age of technicity, 4 See Heidegger Alhambra, 93 Amazighs, 1, See Berbers American civilization, 43 Amerindian culture, 43 Amerindians, 44 Andalusia, 90, 94 Andalusian, 2 Arab-Islamic tradition, 1 Arab-Islamic world, 82 Arabic, 132 Arabo-Islamic culture, xii Aristotelian, 7, 13 Aristotle, 12, 20 Artaud, Antonin, 8, 23, 30, 40, 44 Asia, 33, 42, 59, 62, 63, 64, 65, 83, 125 Atlantic Library, 85-86, 113 Bashǀ, Matsuo, 9, 30, 40, 66, 72, 73, 75, 77-81 Bataille, George, 41 Bedouin, 94 Berbers, 1, 94, See Amazighs blue road, 9, 43, 84, 98, 99, 114, See La Route Bleue Buddhism, 30, 59, 66, 72, 75, 81, 105 Cameron, David, 3 Canada, 11, 30 Cartesianism, 13 Celts, 100 Cendrars, Blaise, 41 chaos-cosmos, 22 chaosmos, 22 Chateaubriand, Francois René, 53

Chaucer, 53 China, 6, 9, 61, 63, 64, 66-71, 79, 99, 113 Chinese civilization, 66 Christianity, 7, 12, 13, 100, 109 Cioran, Emil Michel, 19 Classical Age, 12, 13 climate change, 6 complete man, 48 conscience, 91, 129 consumerism, 16 cosmic unity, 22 cosmos, 2, 4, 7, 9, 11, 14, 16, 21, 22, 27, 40, 41, 46, 68, 73, 75, 87, 96-99, 101, 132 cosmosculture, 16 Crane, Hart, 32, 43 Critical Muslim, 129 n. 17 criticism, 20 cultural claustration, 85 Dallmayr, Fred, 6 Daniel Defoe, 2 de la Hontan, Louis-Armand, 86 Delteil, Gerard, 31, 42, 62, 64 Delteil, Joseph, 42 Descartes, 22 discontent of civilization, 31 Dostoevsky, 32 Dryden, John, 19 Einstein, Albert, 24 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 8, 43, 4549, 50, 52, 54, 116 enlargement, 4, 64 Eratosthenes, 20 eros, 8, 21, 22 27, 96, 107, 109 Eskimos, 30, 44, 86 ethics, 5, 6, 7, 128, 129 Euramerasian, 42 Eurocentrism, 3

152 field of possibilities, 93 fields of energy, 30, 31, 41, 44, 54, 56, 74, 80, 81, 95 gangs of kosmos, 55 Gauguin, 31 geopoet, 131 Geopoetic Research Bureau, 86 geopolitics, xi German field, 35 Glasgow, 101, 102, 103, 105, 109, gods, 4, 13, 130 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 38 Greeks, 20, 21, 100 Gwenved, 9, 33, 109, 116, 121 haiku, 8, 30, 72, 73, 74, 75, 77, 79, 80, 81, 105, 109, 116 haikucultural, 74 Hakuin, 30 Hay Ibn Yagzan, 2 Hegel, 13, 38, 40 Hegelian, 7 Heidegger, Martin, 4, 8, 19, 22, 30, 35-38, 51, 87, 95, 102 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 8, 35-36, 38 home-cosmology, 50 Homer, 53 Hong Kong, 63 n. 195, 106 Hsi, Kuo, 66, 70, 71 Hui-neng, Dajian, 70 Humboldt, Alexandre von, 8, 24, 38, 39 Hyperborean, 53, 92, 92 n.27, 93, 95, See Nietzsche Ibn Bajja, 2 Ibn Battuta, 2 Ibn Khaldun, Abdurrahman, 91 Ibn Tufayl, 2 Ibsen, Henrik, 93 Ikeda, Daisaku, 131 Ilya Prigogine, 17 India of spirit, 66 India, 6, 35, 57, 58, 61, 63, 64, 6566, 113 Indians (American), 8, 30, 86, 87, See Amerindians and naked philosophers

Index infantilism, 16 intellectual nomadism, 2, 3, 7, 8, 11, 14, 25-27, 46, 49, 50, 77, 80, 90, 95, 96, 103, 116, intent (niyya, ঌamƯr), 129 intercultural geopoetics, 4, 5, 6 intercultural, xi, 4, 6, 16, 126, 130, See transcultural, and intercultural geopoetics interculturalism, xii, 2, 3, 5, 6, 128 interdisciplinary, 4, 6, 7, 24, 25, 97, See transdisciplinary International Institute of Geopoetics, 8 Islamic Sufism, 82 Japan, 9, 61, 63, 72-80, 113, 132 Kerouac, Jack, 8, 43, 45, 59 Kierkegaard, Soren, 91 Kukathas, Chandran, 5 Kymlicka, Will, 5 Kyǀiku Gakkai, Sǀka, 132 La Route Bleue, 9, 42, 43, 60, 74, 83, 84, See blue road la terre jaune, 67 la vie originelle, 52 la vie principielle, 40 landscape, 49, 55, 56, 71, 72, 79, 90, 92, 93, 99, 101, 107-116 Lao Tzu, 66, 68, 70, 71 Lawrence, D.H., 41 le chemin du vide, 75 le moi essentiel, 64 le monde blanc, 75 liberalism, 4 logos, 8, 22, 27, 96, 97, 107, 125 London, Jack, 8, 45, 59-61 Lyotard, Jean-Francois, 23 MacDiarmid, Hugh, 8, 31, 42, 62-64 Makiguchi, Tsunesaburu, 132 Mannheim, Karl, 98 Maturana, Chilean Humberto, 24 Melville, Herman, 8, 40, 43, 45, 5960, 91 Ménétrier, Jacques, 26 mental geography, 26

Intercultural Geopoetics in Kenneth White’s Open World Menu, 53 Merkel, Angela, 3 Mestegmer, 1 meta-geographic North, 42, 85 metaphysics, 18 Middle Ages, 13 migration, 3, 58 Miller, Henry, 31 mindscape, 5, 26, 49, 71, 90, 92, 112, 126 modern man, 11 modern state, 4 modernity, 13 Modood, Tariq, 5 monomaniac Motorway, 26 Morocco, 1, 30, 82, 90, 91, 94 Moses, 53 Motorway of Western Civilization, 12 Muju, Ichien, 74 multiculturalism, 2, 3, 5, 6, 128 multiple being, 4 music, 25 naked philosophers, 86, See Indians (American), and Amerindians Nasr, Seyyed Hossein, 6 new world, 14, 20, 41, 60, 97, 83, 88, 89, 95, 97, See white world, and open world Newton, 22 Nicolesco, Basarab, 25 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 2, 3, 8, 19, 20, 21, 30, 31, 33-35, 38, 42, 44, 61, 62, 65, 66, 71, 92, 95, 102, 104, 127 nomadic intellect, 46, See intellectual nomadism Novalis, Friedrich von Hardenberg, 35, 38, 39 Occident, 8 Olson, Charles, 43, 45, 59, 60, 106 open world, 3, 17, 21, 27, 29, 57, 63, 77, 80, 97, 98, 116, See Open World

153

Open World, 9, 18, 23, 29, 34, 60, 61, 75, 83, 94, 114, 116, See open world, new world, and white world Orient–Occident, 126 Orient, 8 original face, 69, 70, 71, 77, 79, 80, 81, 83, 85, 96, 116 outgoerism, 27 outgoingness, 27 paideia, 129, 132 Parekh, Bhikhu, 5 Paris, 25, 30, 31, 98, 103, 105, 107, 112, 115 peace, 87, 88, 93, 129, 131 Perse, Saint-John, 40 Persian poets, 82 physical geography, 26 Plato, 12, 20, 37, 74, 84, 116 Platonic, 7, 74 poet-thinker, 20, See thinker-poet, 20 post-Nietzschean, 127 postcolonialism, 3 postmodern, 38 postmodernism, 128 Pound, Ezra, 31, 41 proto-geopoetician, 49 pseudo-world, 22 real self, 21 real-poetry, 21 religion, 18 Renaissance, 7, 12, 62 René Daumal, 21 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 31, 35 Rimbaud, Arthur, 8, 19, 20, 30, 3132, 36, 44, 53, 102 Robinson Crusoe, 2 Roditi, Georges, 26 Romans, 100 Romanticism, 13 Rousseau, Jean J., 91 Rumi, Jalal al-Din Muhammad, 4 Said, Edward, 82, 132

154 Sarkozy, Nicolas, 3 savoir voir, 49 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 26 secularism, 4 Segalen, 25 Sesshnj, Tǀyǀ, 9, 30, 66, 72, 79, 80 Shaman, 122, 33 n. 27 shi’r, xii simplicity, 44 situation-less real man, 69 Sorbonne, xi, 25, 49, 112 staybooks, 9 Swedenborg, Emanuel, 91 T’ien Ken, 70 Taiwan, 63, n. 195, 106 Taoism, 30, 59, 67, 68, 70, 71, 75, 81, 105 Taylor, Charles, 5 Tchouang-tzeu, 9, 66, 68 Thailand, 63, n. 195, 106 Thoreau, Henry David, 2, 8, 30, 4345, 48-53, 54-58, 65-66, 102, 104-105, 108 Tibet, 9, 63 n. 195, 64 trans-European trips, 30 transcultural, 6, 16, See intercultural transdisciplinary, 8, 11, 24, 25, See interdisciplinary travel literature, 21 n. 1, 91 Tung-p’o, Su, 33 Valéry, Paul, 91, 92 Van Gogh, Vincent, 8, 19, 30-33, 102 Varela, Francisco, 24

Index Vikings, 100 void, 17, 26, 31, 32, 49, 61, 67, 69, 70, 72, 75, 77, 80, 81, 123 voyage-voyance, 49 waybooks, 9, 29, 65, 83, 114, 126 Wei, Wang, 9, 30, 66, 71, 105 Western (tradition, philosophy), 3, 6, 37, 81, 83, 102, 129 white land, 109, 111, 116 white world, 21, 22, 44, 49, 59, 75, 77, 83, 92, 95-99, 109, 115-116, 126, See open world, and white world white-world knowledge, 96 white-world poetry, 21 whiteness, 21, 49, 61, 71, 77, 79, 85, 87, 95, 97- 99, 106, 109, 111, 115-117, 121 Whitman, Walt, 4, 8, 30, 43-45, 4749, 53-59, 64, 65, 75, 87, 95, 102 Williams, William Carlos, 106 wisdom, 6, 48, 56, 57, 66, 70, 83, 126, 128, 129, 130, 132, 133 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 42 wordscape, 15 n. 21, 49, 112 world concern, 43 world literature, 43 world poetry, 21 yoga-tao-zen, 65 Yoga, 8 Yutang, Lin, 51 Zen, 30, 32, 65, 66, 69, 72, 74, 75, 81