The Fundamental Field: Thought, Poetics, World 9781474485289

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The Fundamental Field

The Fundamental Field Thought, Poetics, World

Jeff Malpas and Kenneth White

Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com

© Jeff Malpas and Kenneth White, 2021 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road, 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry, Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in Bembo by R. J. Footring Ltd, Derby, UK, and printed and bound in Great Britain. A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 8526 5 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 8528 9 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 8527 2 (paperback) ISBN 978 1 4744 8529 6 (epub)

The right of Jeff Malpas and Kenneth White to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

Contents

Acknowledgements

vii

Preface

viii

I. Talking Topology in the Finisterras  Kenneth White Prologue Day 1: Ploughing Through the Problematics Day 2: Crisis and Catastrophe in Philosophy  Day 3: Crisis and Catastrophe in Poetry Day 4: The General Outlook

3 6 26 42 61

II. ‘Where Hegel Meets the Chinese Gulls’: Place, Work and World  Jeff Malpas Prologue First Sighting: The Question of World Second Sighting: Placing Thinking Third Sighting: Narrative and Place Fourth Sighting: The Dynamics of Place Fifth Sighting: The Language of the World Sixth Sighting: Poetics, Politics and Critique

71 75 81 90 96 112 120

III. Three Philosophical Poems Kenneth White The Etna Letters Nietzsche in Nice At Skjolden

127 134 138

contents Epilogue

144

Biographical Notes149 Bibliography

157

Index

166

vi

Acknowledgements

The cover image and the three inside images are from the photographic work of Marie-Claude White, in particular from two of her series: Secrets d’écorces and D’une grève à l’autre. For a survey of Marie-Claude White’s art, see her website: . Acknowledgement also to Laurent Brunet for the graphic work involved in the presentation of these photographs for insertion into the format of this book.

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Preface

This is a short book, but a highly concentrated one, and rather complex. From the organisational and structural point of view, it is more than the juxtaposition of a philosopher and a poet, with Malpas (the philosopher) writing on White (the poet), and vice versa. It consists of two approaches, each with its references (some shared, some different) to a field common to them both, which both have explored in their own way over the years, and concerning which they attempt here not only to make a summing-up, but to reach a culminating point. A risk is taken in calling this field ‘the fundamental field’. A risky enterprise in a cultural context where the plural takes precedence over the singular, and where the indefinite article is preferred to the definite one. The risk is increased further by extending the notion of ‘field’ to that of ‘world’, which, in normal usage, has all kinds of socio-political and historico-cultural implications. This ‘normal’ world has for long been under sharp criticism. ‘The world is too much with us’, says Wordsworth in one of his poems, meaning here by ‘world’, the general socio-psycho-political ambiance of tedious obligation and deep-seated frustration that Freud was to present and analyse in Civilisation and Its Discontents. In his book, Hyperion (‘the man with hyper-demands’), the poet Hölderlin intensified the context further by saying to his protagonist ‘What you want is a world’, intending by the term something other than a naïve New World or a remake of the Ancient World. viii

preface In the wake of Hölderlin, the philosopher Heidegger (an important reference for both Malpas and White) in his essays speaks of ‘the worlding of a world’ (das Welten der Welt) and makes statements such as ‘The world never is, it is always a becoming’ (Welt ist nie, sondern weltet). The authors of this book have had all this cogitation in mind for years. It was by chance (objective chance?) that they came together, with Jeff Malpas (resident in Australia) hearing on a radio programme on the ABC (the Australian Broadcasting Corporation) an interview with Kenneth White recorded at his residence in Brittany. Thereafter Malpas got in touch with White, they exchanged books and texts, and a meeting was arranged between them at White’s place on the Breton coast. This book is the result of their conversations, and ensuing developments. To come back on its title. Contemporary history is there to show that unless we get at something fundamental (a question of founding and grounding), the world is going to be more and more beset by simplistic fundamentalisms of various types, but all destructive of live thought and anything like a complete existence. The book has three parts. The first two take the form of essays: the first is by White and the second by Malpas. They embody different styles and modes of approach, but what they come to and work within is indeed the one field of thought and engagement. The book is completed by the third part, a set of philosophical poems by White. JM KW

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The question of place is a difficult one. Place is a thing, cer­tainly, but it also has power. The power of place, close to chaos and emptiness, memorable in itself, precedes all things. Aristotle, Physics The poetic nature of thought is still unseen. Where it does appear, it will long seem like a kind of place-no-place of semipoetic understanding. Heidegger, From the Experience of Thinking Intelligibility is infinite. It takes place in an intellect actively engaged in attempting to comprehend totality. Duns Scotus, Treatise on the First Principle

I. Talking Topology in the Finisterras Kenneth White

Prologue

I’ve conceived this text as the extension and expansion of a series of dialogues between Jeff Malpas and myself when he came to visit me at my place on the Breton coast in February 2012. Malpas had already sent me four of his books: Place and Experience; Heidegger’s Topology; The Place of Landscape; Heidegger and the Thinking of Place. I’d sent him some of mine. It was obvious from the outset that we had a great deal in common. Even a superficial comparison of the works of Malpas and myself would reveal similarities of preoccupation, conceptualisation, and even vocabulary. The trilogical subtitle of Malpas’s book Heidegger’s Topology, ‘Being, Place, World’, has a close equivalent in the title of a succinct presentation I did of my own theory-practice, geopoetics, Place, Culture, World. In chapter 4 of Heidegger and the Thinking of Place, entitled ‘Ground, Unity, and Limit’, we have this: ‘Ground is not a common term in the contemporary philosophical vocabulary’. Anyone the least acquainted with my own bibliography will know just how frequent the term is in my work: On Scottish Ground, Grounding a World – ‘founding and grounding’ is one of my leitmotivs.1 Not to speak of the term ‘topology’ itself, on which both of us have rung changes, from a cosmological space-time model to a mode 1 ‘Grounding a World’ was the title of my personal contribution to a symposium on my work at the University of St Andrews, 10–11 October 2003, the entire proceedings of which were published as Gavin Bowd, Charles Forsdick and Norman Bissell (eds), Grounding a World: Essays on the Work of Kenneth White (Glasgow: Alba, 2005).

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the fundamental field of local apprehension and comprehension via various interpretations and manipulations of that enigmatic combination: topos plus logos. That said, the aim of this essay will in no way be systematic comparison. The intention is to delineate the contours and render sensible the substance of a general field that we both approach. Before going into the matter of the dialogues and their development, given the themes that will be under review, it’s maybe appropriate to begin by evoking the physical context in which our dialogical meeting took place. The other day I picked out from my shelves a book I hadn’t read for years, an anthology of texts on aesthetics,2 and was surprised to come across one by William Sharp written after a visit to Brittany roughly a century ago.3 In it he evokes ‘those wild Breton coasts of the Tréguier headland’, with the ‘grey, muttering waste’ of the sea, and ‘the cold and barren drift of the tides’. Little did I realise, when I must have read these phrases at the age of fourteen on a cliff overlooking the north end of the village of Fairlie, in Ayrshire, Scotland (my favourite spot for reading that kind of book), that years later I would be living in that self-same area. There’s maybe an existential logic to it, in addition to other logics. Sharp’s evocation of an atmospherical greyness, meteoro­ logical and marine, reminds me of Hegel’s reference to a philosophical greyness: ‘When it comes to trying to say what the world should be, philosophy always comes too late. As

2 Richard Aldington (ed.), The Religion of Beauty: Selections from the Aesthetes (London: Heinemann, 1950). 3 William Sharp, ‘The Two Voices’, in Aldington (ed.), The Religion of Beauty, pp. 304–6.

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talking topology in the finisterras world-thinking, it turns up only when reality has completed its process of formation. It paints grey in a greyness.’4 I want to go further into that greyness. First of all, I can’t see it as grim. It’s a relief from all the noisy glare that fills our world, and it has its own aesthetics. One of my favourite modern paintings, by Paul Klee, is entitled The Grey Man and the Coast. Thus, greyness can be the preparation for another kind of light. On the very day after his vision of the Breton coast as a grey waste, Sharp saw it as ‘a tossing wilderness of blue and white’, interpreting its light as ‘the moving dazzle of exultant life’, experiencing ‘tides of happiness’. Finally, if what is habitually called philosophy does always arrive on the scene too late, after activist history and techno-terrorism have wreaked havoc, taking the form of commentary or analysis, the most interesting philosophers of those late times have tried to get at a thinking earlier than ‘philosophy’. And if at times, nowadays, it may seem too late for anything deeply satisfying actually to take place, and ‘worldify’, the kind of activity some of us are engaged in can, at the very least, be seen on the general historical level as a last stand. But it can still stimulate, maybe even inspire, individual thinking and living. And, who knows, it may also be seen, without undue optimism, as providing the sub-stance for a new beginning – a new organisation, a new organon. As to the organisation of this essay, I’ve written it having in mind Hesiod’s Works and Days.

4 See the Preface to Hegel’s Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts (Berlin: Nicolai, 1821) – translated as Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

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Day 1: Ploughing Through the Problematics

Consider, if you will, this first section, concerning problematics (and semantics) as preliminary labour, primary propaedeutics. The basic ground is place and space, place-space, spaceplace. In recent years, it has become a central thematics, with a host of subsidiary themes, resulting in a mass of documentation and publication by specialists of this or that discipline, representatives of this or that locality. Given this context, some kind of panoramic critical enquiry is called for, if only to clear the decks for further advance, further opening. The best location to demonstrate this is the collection of essays Malpas edited under the title The Place of Landscape. These essays bring in elements from philosophy, aesthetics, geography, ethnology, cinematography, sociology and religion. What I want to do in this first section is lay out thoroughly the preliminary discussions between Malpas and myself concerning the general attitudes to space throughout history, as well as the ‘issues’ raised by the question of space and place on the contemporary scene, with, always in view, the contours of a new field and always bearing in mind that a field is defined as much by what one leaves out as by what one puts in.

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talking topology in the finisterras The Politics of Place That place, outside obvious polis, can have a political connotation is certain. In Swedish, the very word landskap, now applied to the various provinces (Dalarna, Gotland, ­Ängermanland, Västerbotten . . .) once referred to a political region, in fact a small kingdom, with its own thing (government). For the incidence of politics on landscape, we need look no further than toponymy: from Edinburgh’s New Town, which has ‘Britain’ written all over it (George Street, Rose Street, Thistle Street . . .), to what were known up to recently as the Queen Charlotte Islands. As to the use of landscape for political purposes, History has made all kinds of variations on this theme, and the literature is voluminous. Among recent studies, there are, for example, Jean Gottman’s La Politique des États et leur géographie,5 Kenneth Robert Olwig’s Landscape, Nature and the Body Politic,6 Denis Cosgrove’s Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape,7 to which can be added many a historico-sociological essay concerning this or that locality at this or that point in time. These go from evocations of enclosures and clearances to the analysis (psychological, social, statistical) of contemporary holidays (erstwhile ‘holy days’) commandeered by industrial tourism, the successor of an earlier Grand Tour, part integral of an aristocratic set-up, meant for ‘seeing the world’, but reduced in most cases to a fast look at a cathedral or a countryside, long bouts of drunkenness, and short-time visits to brothels.

5 Jean Gottman, La Politique des États et leur géographie (Paris: Armand Colin, 1952). 6 Kenneth Robert Olwig, Landscape, Nature and the Body Politic (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002). 7 Denis Cosgrove, Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape (London: Croom Helm, 1984).

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the fundamental field All of these studies have their validity and interest. It’s only when they start to draw general conclusions that some of the neo-Marxist, post-colonial positionings can lead up blind alleys ending in crude reductionism, if not sheer ineptitude. At least four of the sixteen essays contained in the overview volume The Place of Landscape are concerned with this political aspect of the question: ‘This Green Unpleasant Land – Landscape and Contemporary Britain’, by Michel Rosenthal; ‘The Lie of the Land – Reflections on Irish Nature and Landscape’, by Nigel Everett; ‘Landscapes of Class in Contemporary Chinese Film’, by Stephanie Hemelryk Donald; and ‘The Political Meaning of Landscape’, by Bernard Debarbieux. Since it’s Debarbieux’s essay that opens the largest conceptual field, it’s on it I’ll concentrate here. Debarbieux begins in the context of the historical studies I evoked above, exemplifying, first, ‘the construction of a national territory and a corresponding national society through the manipulation of appropriate symbology’,8 and, second, the domination over a landscape by this or that individual, group or institution. As an example of the first, he examines the case of Switzerland: the construction of a Helvetian national identity via the Alpine landscape and an Alpine myth concerning the harmony, freedom and egalitarianism of a mountain community, which he debunks. For the second, he refers to the eighteenth-century English landscape gardening of Lancelot Brown, involving the enclosure of large tracts of private property, and the

8 Bernard Debarbieux, ‘The Political Meaning of Landscape (Through the Lens of Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition)’, in Jeff Malpas (ed.), The Place of Landscape: Concepts, Contexts, Studies (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), p. 137.

8

talking topology in the finisterras construction of a space exclusive of the forms developed by a working population of peasants or their picturesque exploitation. Beyond the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century schemas of the exploitation and instrumentalisation of landscape, leading to generalised alienation (the vocabulary here is of course clearly Marxist), Debarbieux looks to recent ‘political collectivities endowed with new competences’, such as Scotland after devolution, seeing there ‘a revival of objectives and modalities’, but finding in that revivalism no more than another type of alienation. Still looking for a real revivification, he looks to ‘new political and democratic practices’ in the nation-states, thinking of the post-1982 decentralisation process in France by which more autonomy was given to communes, départements and régions, and thereafter to other levels of organisation such as pays and communautés de communes. I see him in that context trying to convince himself that, via ‘a political project with new territorial basis’, a real possibility of dis-alienation exists and that the social sciences are on the verge of a new paradigm.9 I can sympathise with his hopes, but hardly concur with the perspectives. What Debarbieux is left with is the notion of ‘landscape action’ as it comes across in the thinking of Hannah Arendt.10 ‘Action’ here is conceived as, I quote Debarbieux, ‘the source of the definition of the political identity of the subject and the modality through which men and women in society define what they have in common and what they

  9 Ibid., pp. 142, 146, 146, 141, for the respective quotations. 10 See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958).

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the fundamental field place at the heart of the public space’.11 To say the least, it is specious. As Debarbieux himself says, it would require ‘a more delicate formulation’.12 So, let’s move on. The Humanity of Place In ‘our’ civilisation, in ‘our’ culture (the inverted commas indicate already a definite distance on my part), the accent on the human and on humanity is ponderously, pervasively, monotonously, stiflingly present. It’s probably the biggest blockage there is on the way to anything like a larger conception of things. ‘Before man could begin to appreciate landscape, or rather, the elements that constitute a landscape, he had to put his mark on it. Only when he has planted his orchards and fruit trees and gardens does it become for him a source of delight for the senses’, writes Enzo Carli.13 If a statement like this can have some validity within a strictly historical (over-humanised) context, it is by no means true of ‘man’ in general. One need only think of Celtic culture, of Far-­ Eastern culture, and of certain aboriginal nomadic cultures.14 ‘This is how we should think of landscapes’, writes John B. Jackson,15 ‘not merely how they look, how they conform 11 Debarbieux, ‘The Political Meaning of Landscape’, p. 132. 12 Ibid., p. 146. For this question of formulation, see my essay ‘Place and Formulation’, in Jeff Malpas (ed.), The Intelligence of Place: Topographies and Poetics (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), pp. 221–52. 13 Enzo Carli, The Landscape in Art (New York: William Morrow, 1980), p. 17, quoted in Malpas, The Place of Landscape, p. 7. 14 The documentation here is huge, if long neglected and scattered. References and developments will be found throughout my work, be it in essay, travel narrative or poem. 15 In an essay ‘Learning About Landscapes’ in a volume of essays entitled

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talking topology in the finisterras to an aesthetic ideal, but how they satisfy elementary needs: the need for sharing some of those sensory experiences in a familiar place: popular songs, popular dishes, a special kind of weather found nowhere else, a special kind of sport or game, played only here in this spot. These things remind us that we belong – or used to belong – to a specific place: a country, a town, a neighborhood. A landscape should establish bonds between people, the bond of language, manners, of the same kind of work and leisure.’ This is not only intellectually and culturally limited, it is pathetically domestic. Furthermore, to say, as Jackson apparently does,16 that ‘the American conservation movement has its origins in a frontiersman mythology and rhetoric that posited an idealized conception of forest and woodland tied to an idealized conception of the relation between the human and the natural’, is not only, I submit, patently untrue, it borders on the nonsensical. Frontiersmanship and idealisation are mutually incompatible, antinomic. And the founder of the American conservation movement, John Muir, expressly said that it was high time for America to leave the frontier attitude and mentality, looking to conservation as the basis for a whole re-creation of humanity.17 The Necessity for Ruins and Other Topics (Amherst: University of Massa­chusetts Press, 1980), pp. 16–17, quoted by Malpas in The Place of Landscape, p. 15. 16 Quoted by Malpas in The Place of Landscape, pp. 14–15. 17 For an American discourse at once larger and more precise than that of Jackson, see Walt Whitman, not only in the poems, but in essays and notes such as ‘The Prairies and Great Plains’, ‘America’s Characteristic Landscape’, ‘The Savage Saguenay’; see also Henry David Thoreau, Walden (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1910), as well as essays such as ‘Katahdin’. For John Muir, see his book of 1901, Our National Parks (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1901), as well, of course, as The Mountains of California (Boston: Houghton Mifflin

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the fundamental field It’s with something like relief that I turn back to Hannah Arendt, because with her the argumentation rises to another, more general level. Commenting on her book The Human Condition, Bernard Debarbieux says that ‘skeptical of any abstract statement concerning human nature, she strives to define the human condition as it is conditioned by our existence on Earth and our material environment’.18 So far, so good, I can go with that – but in fact, on a closer reading of her text, it is evident that Arendt has no real sense of place at all. Her position is all too humanised. She is less concerned with Earth and material environment than she is with human interaction and human artefact in a closed human world: ‘. . . the term “public” signifies the world itself, in so far as it is common to all of us [. . .]. This world, however, is not identical with the earth or with nature, as the limited space for the movement of men and the general condition of organic life. It is related, rather, to the human artefact, the fabrication of human hands, as well as to affairs which go on among those who inhabit the man-made world together.”19 I have myself no abstract, essentialist conception of ‘human nature’. But I am sceptical of any discourse concerning ‘the human condition’. That there is conditioning (rather than ‘being’) of human existence, there is no doubt: conditioning socio-historical, educational, etc. But once

Co., 1917), The Yosemite (Mineola: Dover Publications, 2018 [1912]), etc. All of this thinking is continued in the essays and studies of Carl Sauer, such as ‘The Barrens of Kentucky’, ‘Environment and Culture During the Last Glaciation’, ‘Seashore – Primitive Home of Man?’ For a convenient anthology of Sauer’s work, see Land and Life, ed. John Leighly (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963). 18 Debarbieux, ‘The Political Meaning of Landscape’, p. 131. 19 Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 52.

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talking topology in the finisterras you’ve accepted the notion of conditioning, you must be at least open to the notion of de-conditioning. It’s this idea which is totally absent from even the most interesting and far-reaching attempts to enlarge human perception and experience, from, say, Friedrich ­Schiller’s Aesthetic Education of Humanity of 1793/4,20 based on Kantian principles, to Eric Dardel’s humanistic geography, based on phenomenology, as presented in his L’Homme et la terre of 1952.21 Beyond ‘humanity’, there is, for some minds, a dimension vaguely referred to as ‘spirituality’. It’s this I propose to go into now. The Spirit of Place In recent and contemporary Western civilisation, there has been and there still is a loose usage of the old term genius loci, its derivative ‘spirit of place’ being vaguely attached to the notion of ‘the sacred’. Here at random are some examples. Advising Richard Boyle, Earl of Burlington, on the landscaping of an eighteenth-century garden, Alexander Pope22 writes: Consult the genius of the place in all; That tells the waters or to rise, or fall; [...]

20 My source is volume 10 of the Sämtliche Werke (Berlin: Knaur Verlag, 1906). 21 Eric Dardel, L’homme et la terre (Paris: Editions du Comité des Travaux Historiques et Scientifiques, 1990). 22 Alexander Pope, The Poetical Works (London: Forgotten Books – Classic Reprint, 2016).

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the fundamental field Calls in the country, catches opening glades, Joins willing woods, and varies shades from shades, Now breaks, or now directs, th’intending lines; Paints as you plant, and, as you work, designs.

A theoretician of architecture entitles Genius Loci 23 a study on what he calls ‘phenomenology in architecture’, that is, largely, the use of elemental vernacular forms. A convention held in Quebec City, 2008, organised by ICOMOS (the International Council on Monuments and Sites) was entitled Spirit of Place. In its intentions and declarations, it called for ‘the safeguarding of tangible and intangible heritage’, the promotion of ‘the spirit of places, namely their living, social and spiritual nature’, the defence of ‘local communities that are the custodians of these values’ and who uphold ‘the physical, visual and natural aspects as well as social and spiritual practices, customs, traditional knowledge, [ . . . ] the physical and the spiritual elements that give meaning, value, emotion and mystery to place’, all of this in the interest of ‘sustainable and social development throughout [ . . . ] today’s globalized world’.24 This is well meaning, but, to my mind, a bit of a hotch-potch. And when, to ‘spirit of place’ as ‘a relational concept’ with ‘a plural and dynamic character’, the adepts of this conception and approach add, for ‘enchantment, emotion and mystery’, the arts in the form of ‘folk tales, stories, memories, beliefs’, one can’t help feeling that pucks, fairies, elves, ghosts, not 23 See Christian Norberg-Schulz, Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1980). 24 Québec Declaration on the Preservation of the Spirit of Place, adopted by the ICOMOS 16th General Assembly and International Scientific Symposium, Québec, Canada, 4 October 2008. Available at (accessed 11 November 2020). Emphasis added in quotation below.

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talking topology in the finisterras forgetting green men and hobbits, are in the offing, waiting in the wings of this sociological-psychological theatre. What I retain from it, if anything, is the open-door conclusion: ‘We encourage discussion and debates in order to develop a new conceptual vocabulary that will take into account the ontological changes of the spirit of place’, while being convinced that this kind of development takes more than discussions and debates. It’s here that we can make a transition to yet one more stage (with, as always, a certain amount of connection and overlapping in this critical run-up). The Poetry of Place If symposia on ‘the spirit of place’ are frequent,25 anthologies of literature and poetry abound. I’ll refer here only to one: the book put out by Richard Aldington in 1944, entitled, precisely, The Spirit of Place.26 The reason I select this anthology for scrutiny is that it is devoted to the work of one of the very few English writers of the twentieth century who have really and deeply interested me: D. H. Lawrence. I can’t read him much today, because I find his style of writing all too repetitive and hyper-nervously staccatic (even in those books of his I prefer: Twilight in Italy,

25 I’m thinking among others of those run in the United States and Japan by James and Roberta Swan, as consigned in books such as James A. Swan (ed.), The Power of Place (Wheaton: Quest Books, 1995) and James A. Swan and Roberta Swan (eds), Dialogues with the Living Earth (Wheaton: Quest Books, 1996). 26 Richard Aldington (ed.), The Spirit of Place (London: Heinemann, 1944). The passages of Lawrence quoted are to be found, respectively, on p. 95 (excerpt from Lady Chatterley’s Lover) and pp. 119–20 (excerpt from the introduction to Memoirs of the Foreign Legion).

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the fundamental field Sea and Sardinia, Etruscan Places, Mornings in Mexico), but he has intuitions, fulgurations, perceptions galore, and a lot of it centres on a sensation of place. Here he is on England: England, my England! But which is my England? The stately homes of England make good photographs, and create the illusion of a connection with the Elizabethans. The handsome old halls are there, from the days of Good Queen Anne and Tom Jones. But smuts fall and blacken on the drab stucco, that has long ceased to be golden. And one by one, like the stately homes, they were abandoned. Now they are being pulled down. As for the cottages of England – there they are – great plasterings of brick dwellings on the hopeless countryside.

Here he is on Sicily: Lovely, lovely Sicily, the dawn-place, Europe’s dawn, with Odysseus pushing his ship out of the shadows into the blue. Whatever had died for me, Sicily had then not died: dawn-lovely Sicily and the Ionian sea.

But to come now to conceptual and cultural issues. In his Introduction, Aldington has this: These passages of The Spirit of Place have been chosen because I believe they illustrate a side of Lawrence which is most accessible to English writers, and most likely to delight them. This love of the non-human world both for its own sake and in its relations with human beings is not peculiar to English literature, but is a strong and persistent feature, as everyone recognizes. French literature always tends to become absorbed in purely human and social interests; with the Italians of the Renaissance ‘Nature’ was a theme for very formal treatment, while with the modern Italians it is a theme for rhetorical treatment and is made to share the hysteria of the protagonists. In Spain, Azorin is a

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talking topology in the finisterras great exception – for him the visible world exists and he is almost perfect in his evocation of the unique moment of the Spirit of Place. But for him the spirit of time past is as important – Una Hora d’Espagna – and there is always the human figure, always the Latin tendency to conventional formal abstraction. The world of the English is wider and more irregular. They are picture-thinkers, but the picture moves.

There’s a certain amount of truth in this, but only a certain amount, and it’s middle-zone truth. If it can be said with some degree of validity that the English mentality is more ‘nature-friendly’ than rationalistic France, and that English literature has more nature-writing than the literature of France, which does indeed tend (at least in the middle-zone) to ‘human and social interests’, it has to be immediately noted that it’s by study and analysis of the human that one can move beyond conventional conceptions of individual and social humanity. The only man to attempt this on the British scene was David Hume, and he had a hard time of it, feeling intellectually at home only in France. It was to certain ‘old Frenchmen’, such as Montaigne, and to the seventeenth-century ‘moralists’, such as La Rochefoucauld, that Nietzsche looked at a significant stage in his trajectory away and out of ‘the all too human’. It could also be said, in passing, that when Aldington says of Azorin that for him ‘the visible world exists’, he is quoting, verbatim, but apparently unknowingly, or forgetfully, a French writer, Théophile Gautier. It also looks as if he knew nothing at all of, for example, Victor Hugo on the Channel Islands, or Jean Giono in Provence. But to come back across the Channel. That the ‘poetry of place’ is a feature of English literature, there is no doubt. Again, anthologies abound. With some 17

the fundamental field rare but notable exceptions (Hopkins, Doughty, Powys, but they belong in another category, of which more later), English poetry of place is, to say the least, homely. It began with the praise of country houses on landed property, as seen with Pope, and it tends to stay in that context. Even Wordsworth, who, at his best, spreads a wider sail (though I hardly share his moralisation of the cosmos), can come perilously close to the established Housman–Betjeman line. By ‘Housman’, I mean of course A. E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad,27 that cycle of sixty-three poems, with its evocations of ‘blue remembered hills’, ‘the broom [. . .] on Wenlock Edge’ and ‘the land of lost content’, and its message – life is short, love is fleeting, death is round the corner – that was carried by so many English soldiers into the trenches of the 1914–18 War, in a spirit of nostalgia, compensation and resignation. As to Betjeman, John, whose Collected Poems appeared in London, introduced by the Earl of Birkenhead, in 1958,28 they were presented by the magazine Time and Tide as follows: ‘Mr Betjeman is genius loci, the fond top­ ographer at our elbow to reveal to us undreamt-of visual and social joys. Here is a proud, passionate, pugnacious, poetical Englishman, writing from the heart about his own country, her land, her buildings, her people.’29 A few examples will suffice. Here’s a piece on Harrow-on-the-Hill: When melancholy Autumn comes to Wembley And electric trains are lighted after tea

27 A. E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1896). 28 John Betjeman, Collected Poems (London: John Murray, 1958). 29 Eulogy presented, along with others, on the sleeve of Betjeman, Collected Poems.

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talking topology in the finisterras The poplars near the Stadium are trembly With their tap and tap and whispering to me.

Here’s one on Essex: And as I turn the colour-plates Edwardian Essex opens wide, Mirrored in ponds and seen through gates Sweet eventful countryside. Like streams the little by-roads run Through oats and barley round a hill To where blue willows catch the sun By some white weather-boarded mill . . .

And here, as finale, is one on Cornwall: We used to picnic where the thrift Grew deep and tufted to the edge We saw the yellow foam-flakes drift In trembling sponges on the ledge . . .

If I’ve evoked here in the first instance, as the most widespread references,30 Housman and Betjeman, I’m aware that we could extend the list of poets and the geography to, say, Crabbe on the Sussex coast, Cowper on the banks of the Ouse, Barnes in Dorsetshire, and so on. But with this English ‘poetry of place’ we never go beyond locality as localism. I’ve seen it written that ‘modern man in search of a soul31 could seek sustenance at this source.

30 In one of the Titanic films (the 1953 version directed by Jean Negulesco and starring Clifton Webb and Barbara Stanwyck), A Shropshire Lad is read from just before the ship sinks. 31 The reference of course is to Carl Jung’s Modern Man in Search of a Soul (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1933).

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the fundamental field Whatever ‘soul’ may be satisfied with, I think ‘modern man’ needs and can absorb much more. Place as Heimat It’s because modern man has been exposed there to more plights and perils than England has known, but also because thinking has gone on there in a larger field, with sharper concepts, that it’s to a certain Europe I now turn. There, the equivalent of the English ‘poetry of place’ is a preoccupation with Heimat, the German word now in common usage in this context. I may say as a preamble that I can’t look without deep emotion at photographs in one of the Heimat books32 in my library: photographs of the Harz mountains, the Lüneburger Heide, a Black Forest house in the snow, the Schwäbische Alb, early spring on the Bodensee, the cliffs at Rügen, Goethe’s garden house in Weimar, Bacharach on the Rhine, the port of Danzig, the Wanderdünen (moving dunes) on the East Prussian coast . . . . It was when travelling in Poland and in that Grenzgebiet (limit region) between East Prussia and western Russia that I began looking into the local problematics more conceptually and making initial contacts. A hefty collective volume entitled The Face of My Homeland,33 published in 1996, brings together texts in German, alongside texts translated into German from Polish, Russian and Lithuanian. What the book sets out to do is gather traces of a ‘sunken world’, referred to 32 Karl Robert Langewiesche, Die schöne Heimat (Königstein im Taunus: Karl Robert Langewiesche Verlag, 1955). 33 Wilfried Lipscher and Kazimierz Brakoniecki (eds), Meiner Heimat Gesicht. Ostpreussen im Spiegel der Literatur (Munich: Herbig Verlag, 1996).

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talking topology in the finisterras metaphorically as ‘the Atlantis of the North’, and it does so with a sense of urgency, a determined cogency and a will to coherence. If it contains texts, marked by nostalgia and pathos, of a homecoming after long years of exodus and exile (‘Who will give us back our dreams?’, ‘Only the storks remain’), if it talks of Selbstfindung (self-discovery), it goes beyond any facile identity ideology and its frequent concomitant, narrow nationalism. In its search for traces, it goes back into Latin texts, for example, those of Copernicus on the movement of celestial bodies with their groundbreaking Secunda Petitio (‘The centre of the earth is not the centre of the world . . . ’), goes from there to the essays of Kant on Enlightenment (‘Enlightenment is man’s exit from his self-inflicted infantility’), Hamann on ‘The Origin of Language’, and thereafter to the literary writings of such as Arno Holz, Hermann Sudermann, Max Fürst, Ferdinand Gregorovius, with their evocations of the Baltic coast, the lakes and woods of Ermland (now, in Polish, Warmia) and Masuren (Mazury), as well as towns such as Tilsit (Tylza), Wilma (Wilno), Allenstein (Olsztyn), not forgetting Kant’s place, the old grey town of Königsberg. What I see in this whole enterprise, which involves landscape, history and culture, is the attempt, while insisting on the significance of place, the necessity of emplacement, to get beyond anything like regional thematics, smallminded localism, couthy homeliness. If the heart is present, any dwelling in sentimentality is out, the accent is on a place of the mind (geistige Heimat), and if there is a search for identity, it is ‘new identity’, that is, it takes place outside the search for ‘roots’. Over against anything like identity ideology, it is universal value that is put forward. Close to this in my reading is the feeling out, the thinking out, the outreaching to a new sense of Europe, outside the mental 21

the fundamental field categories of the nation-state, and beyond what perhaps can be seen as the intermediary stages of glasnost and perestroika. More abstractly still, but no less essential (on the contrary), there is a dialectic of limitedness and non-limitation. To live within limits is a necessity, to live perpetually within opinionated precincts is necrogenous. Hence the need to cross over limits and boundaries – with the increasing awareness thereby of the need for ‘surroundings’ (Umwelt). Lastly, but not leastly, a word turns up in these pages on which I’d like to insist and give more emphasis to: Anfangsgründe, grounds for a new beginning. I’ve concentrated here on developments in that high north-eastern territory, but propositions and projects going more or less in a similar direction can be detected all over Europe. In 1990, I took part in a German (English-German) symposium on ‘Regionalism, Nationality and Inter­ nationality in Contemporary Poetry’.34 It did not go far, but it was at least on a potentially interesting line. German contributions included ‘The Landscape Poetry of Jürgen Becker’ and ‘Postwar Berlin, a Playground, a Grey Place’ by Uwe Kolbe. As for English language poetry, the contributions went, in a predictable kind of way, from a study on the poetry of Edward Thomas, followed by others on Geoffrey Hill (‘A Mercia of the Mind’), ‘Tony Harrison and the Poetry of Leeds’, and ‘Myth, Language and Place in Seamus Heaney’s Poetry’. My own contribution was entitled: ‘The Atlantic Seaboard: Poetic Topology of the European West’. It all comes down to the question of topology.

34 See Lothar Fietz, Paul Hoffmann and Hans-Werner Ludwig (eds), Regionalität, Nationalität, Internationalität in der zeitgenössischen Lyrik (Tübingen: Attempto Verlag, 1992).

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talking topology in the finisterras But before going further into that question, let me just try to sum up the contents of the first day’s discussion and try to work out an abstract conclusion. The first question that arose in my mind as, after general overview, I went meticulously through the contents of the book The Place of Landscape, texts gathered together by Malpas, adding material from my own store of reference as I went along, was this: how pluralistic and relativistic must you be if you want to really open up a new field? I can appreciate the statements made by Malpas in his Introduction: that ‘landscape opens out on to a multiplicity of different genres’, that the problem to hand cannot be ‘the sole preserve of any one field of discipline’, that ‘only a plurality of answers and approaches can begin to do justice to the iridescent and often opaque character of landscape and place’.35 But at the same time, I’d say that an excess of relativism and pluralism can confuse the issue, drown the fish, which is why I felt the need to do some trenchant criticism of certain positions. What I’m suggesting is that the time has come to move out from pluridisciplinary and interdisciplinary activity, via a transdisciplinary activity into a new activity altogether. This is not to deny the value of the various disciplines as they exist today. But it is, perhaps, to give them a density and an edge.36 35 Malpas, The Place of Landscape, p. xii. 36 This notion of ‘edge’ has been with me for a very long time. Witness the titles of some of my books: On the Atlantic Edge, Aux limites, Limites et Marges. For years, in universities, I did lectures and courses entitled ‘At the Limits of Literature’. And when I started up the Cahiers de Géopoétique, I invited aboard people I saw situated at the edge of their disciplines, be these geography, biology, psychology, or

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the fundamental field We hear much also of ‘collective intelligence’. Hence a multiplicity of colloquies. I have no objection to, indeed I have a liking for, that verb behind the substantive colloquium: colloquere, to ‘talk together’. I think simply that this activity is most enjoyable, and productive of the best results, when it takes place between few interlocutors, indeed perhaps at best two, rather than in any kind of ‘round table’ debate, which becomes more of a rhetorical spectacle or, at a lower level still, of a verbal show. And I go one further: rather than to anything like Collective Intelligence, I look to the Singular Intelligence – with the following provisos and definitions. The Singular Intelligence is neither ‘personal’ nor ‘subjective’; it is suprapersonal and evolves outside the subjective–objective framework. Then, the Singular Intelligence does not exist ‘on its own’. It is, in fact, and in act, a singular-plural, because the searching singular intelligence will have ranged over a large area of experience, knowledge and cogitation (this is one aspect of what I call ‘intellectual nomadism’). Malpas, my interlocutor of these ‘works and days’, is a generous, perspicacious and efficient symposiumist. That he is eminent among the band of researchers who have gone furthest into the problematics of place is obvious enough and now generally recognised. What is maybe less obvious is that he is one of the smaller band who have tried to get the most out of it. If, in the Introduction to the book he edited, The Place of Landscape, he makes collaborative, oecumenical statements whatever. That is why I agree wholeheartedly, whole-mindedly, with what Edward Casey says in his essay on ‘The Edge(s) of Landscape’ in The Place of Landscape. I just don’t see any intellectual interest in positing ‘liminology’ as an ‘emergent discipline’. Too many -logies spoil the logos.

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talking topology in the finisterras such as those I’ve quoted, we hear him also talking later in his contribution of ‘an enlarged analysis’, ‘a larger conceptual domain’, a ‘conceptual topography’. It’s in this topographical–topological field that Malpas and I essentially meet; this is the ultimate ground we move on. In our apprehension of it, we have sometimes used the same references, sometimes different ones, his move often philosophic, mine more often poetic, both of us being able to move also in the other’s domain. What I submit now, for the continuance of these investi­ gations, is that to get at the fundamental topology now at issue, beyond all the topics that can be piled up in the interim, it is absolutely necessary to move out, to be aware, in all its implications, of a radical crisis, indeed a catastrophe, both in philosophy and in poetry. Which brings us to Day 2.

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Day 2: Crisis and Catastrophe in Philosophy

The theme here will be the attempts made by some avantgarde and more than avant-garde philosophers to get something ‘different’ out of philosophy. The reference most commonly bandied about at the moment is Derrida’s ‘deconstruction’. Leaving aside all its trivial usages, what this means essentially is picking holes in Hegel, excavating the Hegelian System.37 After deconstruction (but it can be an unending tunnel) came grammatology (winding up in a very sticky syntax). After grammatology, differance (with an ‘a’), that is, the textuality of perpetual deferment. And finally, in the margins, as the ghost of a distant possibility, ‘white mythology’. Another term going the rounds in this intermediate context is metaphilosophy.38 As generally conceived and practised, especially in Anglo-Saxon circles, what this means is the liquidation, or at the least a several dilution of speculative thought, reducing concept to ‘the facts’, discourse to logical positivism, defining a precinct of scientistic pragmatical empiricism where it can take the form of the history of philosophy, the analysis of works, or the study of philosophical methodology. All of this hardly merits such a prestigious title as metaphilosophy (‘beyond

37 See Jacques Derrida, Glas (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1974). Glas, meaning ‘knell’, signifies here the end of monumental philosophy. 38 See the journal Metaphilosophy, which has been in operation for over forty years and is currently published by John Wiley and Sons.

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talking topology in the finisterras philosophy’). To find some substance in this term, to see the field it opens, one has to turn to Henri Lefebvre in France.39 Neither pure epistemologist, nor realist (engaged with ‘concrete’ problems), Lefebvre remains ‘speculative’, but in an at least would-be innovative sense. His initial reference, as with Derrida, is to Hegelianism, considered as the end-point and finality of Western philosophy, the traversing of which is a necessity for any mind looking for an exit out of the contemporary political-intellectual quandary (of which ‘politics’ understands little or nothing), searching for an entry into new territory. That meant, for philosophy, a great leap. And the first to attempt it, Lefebvre recognises, was Nietzsche, who inaugurated a forceful way of thinking about what already existed (the ‘hammer philosophy’), as well as (this is the ‘dove’s feet’ aspect of Nietzsche, less often perceived) a meditation on what might be possible. The way I read Lefebvre, he leaves ‘the leap’ in the air, and the ‘dove’s feet’ field, sticking closer to Marx’s famous eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, according to which ‘the philosophers have done nothing but propose different interpretations of the world, what matters now is to change it’ – while believing less and less in the possibility of total revolution.40 So that what ‘metaphilosophy’, which started out as something sharper in Lefebvre’s mind, finally boils down to is a thematics of social practice concerned with alienation, urbanism, daily living, with the philosopher playing more and more the public role of a sociological whistleblower,

39 Henri Lefebvre, Metaphilosophie (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1965) – subtitle: Prolégomènes. 40 Henri Lefebvre, La Fin de l’histoire (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1970 – subtitle: Epilégomènes.

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the fundamental field warning against, for example, the hegemony of linguistics and structuralism,41 or the invasion of cyber­anthropology42. As to Gilles Deleuze, he came to my attention and interest with his book on Nietzsche,43 one of the first to rescue this German anti-German poet-thinker from the precincts of National Socialism in which his unfinished work had been set by his executors after the brutal ending of his own intellectual life. What Deleuze first saw in Nietzsche was less a philosophical search for truth than an evaluation of what is high and great in living and thinking over against what is cheap and vile – in other words, philosophy turns into a typology (of existential figures) and a topology (the place where thought can expansively go on). Second, N ­ ietzsche’s work aimed at an exit from the long history, the obscure labyrinth, of otherworld thinking: the negation of life-onearth by religion; the negation of existence by metaphysical idealism; the negation of everything but profitable productivism by the ‘last men’. And finally, what Deleuze discerned in Nietzsche’s writing was a kind of nomadism,44 a perpetual displacement of inten­sities, a drifting, a de­territorialisation, going on outside the established socio-mental codes and frameworks: ‘To graft thought on to the Outside is something that philosophers have never done.’ In so much philosophy there is not only a sedentariness but a sedateness, whereas in these writings of Nietzsche, something ‘leapt’ from the pages, opening ‘a field of exteriority’. It’s out of all this that Deleuze developed his notion of nomadology. But 41 Henri Lefebvre, Au-delà du structuralisme (Paris: Anthropos, 1972). 42 Henri Lefebvre, Vers le Cybernanthrope (Paris: Denoël-Gonthier, 1971). 43 Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche et la philosophie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1962). 44 See the essay ‘Pensée nomade’ in the collective volume Nietzsche aujourd’hui (Paris: Union Générale d’Éditions, 1973).

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talking topology in the finisterras if there was ‘a leap’ in ­Nietzsche’s thinking, and writing, and if it was a similar ‘leap’ into post-Marxist, post-structuralist space that Lefebvre was calling for, what we find in Deleuze is a perpetual holos-bolos fuite-en-avant across a thousand plateaux45 terminating in a ‘geophilosophy’ which is little more than the comparative description of national culturecontexts.46 In this overview I’m doing of displacements in phil­ osophy, that have been trying to move out, but never quite making it, a special place has to be given to Edmund Husserl. Anyone who has taken a look into the bewildering mass of ‘Research manuscripts’ (Forschungsmanuskripte) at the Husserl archives in Louvain – unpublished essays with their prolongations and embranchings of complementary texts, Annexes (I, II, III . . . ) and Additional Notes – can only come away with a feeling that combines both admiration and commiseration. In historical circumstances that were drastic (economic krach, Fascism and Nazism, Marxism-­ Leninism sliding into Stalinism . . . ) the work of this singular figure appears to my eyes as an attempt, in the face of total obscurity and obscurantism, the lapse of humanity back into infantility (but this time with world-shaking means at its disposal), as a last, desperate attempt at a general Enlightenment, seen, though, more as a re-grounding than

45 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Mille Plateaux – capitalisme et schizophrénie (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1980). For a detailed reading of Deleuze, see my Dialogue avec Deleuze (Paris: Éditions Isolato, 2007). 46 See the essay ‘Géophilosophie’, in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1991), pp. 82–108. It should perhaps be noted that Deleuze and Guattari only came out with the term ‘geophilosophy’ years after I’d launched the term ‘geopoetics’.

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the fundamental field an up-clearing. Moralism and politics being hardly adequate to the situation, it’s first of all to the Geist47 (of Europe) that Husserl makes an appeal. But well aware that such a call, like most voices in the desert, would in all likelihood not be heard, it’s at a deeper level that he goes to work, at, in fact, what he considers the deepest level of all, the ultimate cause of the historico-cultural situation: a crisis in worldknowledge, in earth-experience. This comes across in the first place with the radical, epistemological analysis of the regional limits of scientific research contained in Husserl’s essay of 1936: The Crisis in European Sciences.48 What had happened to scientific research was a positivistic reduction in the guise of ‘objectivity’, leading to a complete loss of a sense of living reality and the concomitant loss of the capacity for saying anything adequate to existential distress and socio-economico-political stress. The Crisis is largely a historical account, from the Renaissance on, of how this came about: the Galilean mathematisation of Nature, the reduction of knowledge to codes, increasing technicisation. . . . But beyond analysis and elucidation, Husserl is out for the opening of another field. To do this, he goes back to the ‘original founding genius of 47 Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes (Bamburg and Würzburg: Joseph Anton Goebhardt, 1807) is a more complex and interesting work than the stately system with which he is so often identified. 48 See The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1989). The manuscript of the volume, which remained unfinished, and was posthumously published in that state, was based on lectures delivered at Vienna and Prague and on a text that appeared as ‘Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie: Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie’, Philosophia [Belgrade], 1 (1936), pp. 76–176.

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talking topology in the finisterras modern philosophy’: René Descartes, and in particular to his Meditationes de prima philosophia. In his Cartesian Meditations,49 he says that what was going on in Descartes’s mind was so deep (something at once rationalist and ‘transcendental’) that Descartes himself didn’t understand it. Engaged in his under-standing of Descartes, implying a lot more than what has been established as curriculum ‘Cartesian­ ism’, he radical­ises the radicality of Descartes, sketching out a method going outside the methodology that Descartes had laid out for himself in his Regulae ad directionem ingenii (‘rules for mind-guidance’). And it is this which leads him50 to the field he designates as ‘transcendental phenomenology’. Phenomenology in itself was no new thing for Husserl. His text Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie (Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology) dates back to 1913. It’s the ‘transcen­ dental’ that is new, though it also had been building up over the years, as witnessed by his essay Formale und trans­cendentale Logik of 1929. Transcendental phenomenology, based on a sub-jectivity transcendent to positive objectivity, a transgression of its limitations, and which, geo-logically, might be seen as a tectonic subduction, is presented as a new foundation, an Urstiftung, ‘a more profound foundation’ for the sciences, for world-knowledge, and for earth-living. It’s on the latter that Husserl insists in one of his last texts, ‘Funda­ mental investigations into the phenomenological origin of the spatiality of Nature’, provocatively entitled, with

49 Based in his lectures at the Sorbonne, in the Amphitheatre Descartes, on 23 and 25 February 1929, and published in 1931 – see Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. D. Cairns (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1988). 50 I’m not following a chronology here, I’m thinking rather in terms of a geo-logy.

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the fundamental field anti-Galilean, anti-Copernican intention, Die Ur-Arche Erde bewegt sich nicht (The Originary Earth Doesn’t Move). In 1928 Husserl had given a series of lectures51 on the human being’s intimate consciousness of time; here he is concerned with the consciousness of space: the fundamental experience of an ambience that is ‘a system of places’. This, in contrast to a human reality made up of historico-cultural sedimentation, an artificial ambience that is the product of techno-science, and a vague astronomic, astrophysical sense of space as infinite. The idea thereafter is an entry, via kinesthetics (kinéo, move; aisthésis, sensitive perception), into, first, a field of feeling, eventually into a world of living: ‘feeling’ to be understood here not as mere sentiment, impression, allied to imagination, fantasy (all that can arise from historico-­ cultural sedimentation, and which is the usual stuff of ‘art’ and ‘poetry’), but as primary ex­perience, the moving on earth-ground, within the earth-sphere. And if the first apprehension is that of things (phenomena), the possibility, the intentionality, is to go also beyond things (which is to say farther than the art and poetry of ‘thingness’, Sachlichkeit, that took over from the art-poetry of sentiment, etc.). What can take place is a configuration that is not only spatial (in a mathematical sense), but has a qualifying, that is, aesthetic factor (aesthetics here in a larger sense than habitually understood by aesthetes). What makes the difference is intentionality, that is, the possibility of a synthesis, a unity. Normally, we see only aspects of things; it is intentionality that fills in the blanks, the voids, the whites (though, let me say in passing, I see the possibility of an 51 Edmund Husserl, Vorlesungen zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins, Husserliana X, ed. Rudolf Boehm (The Hague: Martinus Nijhof, 1966).

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talking topology in the finisterras even finer configuration that will, intentionally, leave some of the blanks). This primary perception, this originary experience, this moving in a primordiality, leads, potentially, to a living world that has different levels, that has room for the singular and the plural, that has both a given background and a horizon of open possibility. At the end of his life, Husserl felt he had not yet entered ‘the promised land’ (he still had recourse to this kind of metaphor), and that ‘other roads’ might be possible. It’s to these other roads we now turn. From Husserl to Heidegger there is only a step: at the start Husserl’s pupil, Heidegger edited some of Husserl’s texts, and he had himself gone far into phenomenology.52 But the step was to extend and it was to lead eventually into Heidegger’s own particular field. Here’s Heidegger talking about philosophy in general:53 If there is something like a catastrophe in the creations of great thinkers, it’s not that they stop advancing or fail, it’s because they ‘carry on’, carried away by the first effects of their thought, which are always defective. It’s always a mistake to keep going ‘forward’ instead of holding back, and staying at the source. It will be extremely useful one day to re-consider the whole of Western philosophy from this point of view. It could lead to some very singular and remarkable results.

52 See his essay ‘Mein Weg in die Phänomenologie’, in Zur Sache des Denkens (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1969). 53 In his Nietzsche, 2 vols (Pfullingen: Neske, 1961), vol. I, part II, ‘Die Ewige Wiederkehr des Gleichen’ (‘The Eternal Return of the Same’), ‘Midday and Eternity – indications for a new life’, p. 301 – translation by KW, as elsewhere.

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the fundamental field This is largely the work – on Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Fichte, Schelling . . . – that Heidegger did in his university lectures at Marburg and Freiburg. In one of his Zollikon seminars,54 he said of his own philosophy that its original impetus was ‘an Aristotelian proposition’ concerning the various statements and ex­ pressions of ‘being’, his aim as a philosopher from that moment on being to work out ‘the unity of these various meanings’. This is eminently true of his magnum opus philosophicum, Being and Time. But in his later years, the same (but not the same) Heidegger was to write essays such as ‘The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thought’,55 which explore a territory and an originary experience antedating his identification as ‘a philosophizing philosopher’. It’s this fundamental re-placement I want to investigate now. For those in the departments of philosophy who were aghast at the title of Heidegger’s essay, considering that it was tolling the death-knell of philosophy, Heidegger was quick to have recourse to the Nietzschean juxtaposition of end-point (Endepunkt) and high-point (Höhepunkt).56 In speaking of the ‘end’ of philosophy, he wasn’t finishing it off, he was taking it to its highest point, to its finality. I think there was a certain amount of diplomacy, ambiguity and double-dealing in this, as not infrequently in Heidegger, because what he was moving towards was in fact something 54 See ‘Zollikoner Seminare’, in Günther Neske (ed.), Erinnerung an M. Heidegger (Pfullingen: Neske, 1977). 55 ‘Das Ende der Philosophie und die Aufgabe des Denkens’, in Zur Sache des Denkens. 56 These terms were employed by Nietzsche in his reading of the phil­ osophy of Hegel concerning the ‘end of history’.

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talking topology in the finisterras lying away out and beyond most of the ‘philosophising’ (Heidegger calls it Philosophieren, I call it philosophantism) done in most of the departments, not to speak of other precincts such as philosophical forums and debating halls. In that small but highly significant and illuminating book of his, From the Experience of Thinking,57 he speaks of the three great dangers facing thought. The worst is ‘philosophising’. The second is ‘thinking itself ’ – if thinkers aren’t capable of thinking over against thought, their thinking will lack an essential dimension. The third and last danger, but considered as ‘a wholesome danger’, is ‘the neighbourhood of singing poets’. It’s in that ‘neighbourhood’, I submit, that the real new thinking begins to try to take place. I first read Heidegger when I was a student, of poetics and philosophy, in Munich, 1956–7, and I have frequented his work ever since. The first two books of his I read were that little volume on the ‘experience’ of thought and his essay Der Satz vom Grund.58 I quote the title in German because the usual translation, The Principle of Reason, I find anything but satisfactory. The German title has an entirely different sound and ground to it.59 If we push Satz back to setzen, we could get something like Positing a Ground; if we go from Satz to Aufsatz, we could arrive at Essay on

57 Martin Heidegger, Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens (Pfullingen: Neske, 1954). 58 Martin Heidegger, Der Satz vom Grund (Pfullingen: Neske, 1957). 59 An early essay by Heidegger on grounding, where an original tonality was already evident, appeared in 1929, Vom Wesen des Grundes (Halle: Niemeyer, 1929), and picked up again in Wegmarken, Gesamtausgabe 9 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1967), and available in English as Pathmarks, trans. William McNeil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

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the fundamental field Regrounding, and from there at A Fundamental Proposition. Whatever be the accepted or acceptable translation, we’re concerned with a transfer: a recovering from idealism and the discovering of new (fundamental) ground, the move from metaphysics onto a basis (a grounding) in physis. This is what I read into it, and it was this that interested me, and continues to interest me. In the philosophical thinking of Heidegger, the question is one of radical displacement. To think creatively has nothing to do with problematic compilation. The mind doesn’t live in belief, or on problematics, it lives in space and on place (on the ground). Your habitual Heideggerians tend to do little more than paraphrase and comment on the displacement; they never displace themselves. Which is why, more than slightly exasperated, Heidegger was to say at one point that to understand his thought you have to see it. Seeing means representation and techniques of representation, which brings us to writing and art – an art of evidentia. Before I read Heidegger talking in the From the Experience of Thinking about the ‘poetic character of thought’ (to which one can add ‘the thinking character of poetry’), saying that for long it would seem like a ‘utopia’, I’d read the Fragmente of Novalis:60 ‘The separation of the philosopher from the poet is superficial, and it’s to the detriment of both. It’s the sign of a diminished constitution.’ The thing was, how to get back to a ‘Heraclitean’ unity and harmony, avoiding the twin pitfalls of those ill-begotten monstrosities: ponderously philosophising poetry and trivi­ ally poetising philosophy.

60 The volume I used at that time, and still have with me, was Novalis, ed. Walther Rehm (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Bücherei, 1956).

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talking topology in the finisterras Heidegger’s conceptual (as distinguished from existential) approach to the relationship between philosophy and poetry I did not find satisfactory, and still do not. Especially when he speaks of the ‘singing poet’ (der singende Dichter). If it is traditional, part integral of classic rhetorical practice, in which Heidegger was well versed (as he was also well acquainted with religious incantation), the notion of the ‘singing poet’ has, in any live and demanding context, long since lost all validity and relevance. Even if he may at times use traditional vocabulary such as ‘canto’, Ezra Pound, in his advanced work, is hardly a ‘singing poet’, nor is Blaise Cendrars in his ‘Prose of the Transiberian’. In other words, if, in his more strictly philosophical work, Heidegger is ready to put the whole tradition of Western philosophy in question, he maintains for long attached to an obstinately conventional conception of poetry, as ‘song’, and as connected to ‘the sacred’. It is this that invalidates a lot of his discourse in this domain – but not all of it, because he is able also (his writing draws him on to other lines), albeit with difficulty, taking one step forward and two steps back, to think against his own thinking about poetics. Fundamental perhaps to the difficulties in this highly charged field is the central concept of Dasein. A few paragraphs above, I brought up the question of representation. Beyond the purely mimetic sense, representation leads to the notion of re-presencing, in which is implicated the very nature of presence. This is where Dasein comes in. This term has always seemed to me to have a Christian (­ Christian-existentialist if not Christian-evangelist) tinge and echo to it: the having been thrown into existence.61 I 61 This comes across most obviously in Heidegger’s concept of the Geviert (the Quadriparti, the Fourfold: Earth, World, Mortals, Gods,

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the fundamental field prefer the Hiersein of Rilke (to which, if my memory serves me well, in all his writings on Rilke, Heidegger never refers) as it comes across in the Seventh Duino Elegy:62 Hiersein ist herrlich (‘being here is glorious’), which is more Nietzschean63 than Heideggerian, more atheistically vital than onto-theological, more spatial than temporal.64 But let’s go further into what I see as Heidegger’s central and most sensitive field. In Being and Time, he has this: ‘The level of a science is measured by the amplitude of the crisis it can cause in the context of its fundamental concepts.’65 Such a crisis marked the year 1936. It was in that year that Husserl was working up into book form the lecture he’d given at the Kulturbund in Vienna in May 1935: ‘The Crisis of European Humanity and Philosophy’. It was in that self-same year, 1936, that Heidegger began his Erlaüterungen (elucidations) of the poetry of Hölderlin. Husserl was working on a range that ran from epistemology to politics. Heidegger was working from topology into poetics. Both were labouring at an extremity situated beyond and outside any mere ‘avant-gardism’. as presented e.g. in the essay ‘Bauen Wohnen Denken’, in Vorträge und Aufsätze, Gesamtausgabe 7 (Pfullingen: Neske, 1954). I’d suggest that it’s a humanism stemming from the same source that induces Heidegger to perpetrate philosophantine howlers such as this (in the same essay): ‘The bridge does not connect banks that are already there. The banks emerge as banks only as the bridge crosses the stream.’ Tell that to the mariners. 62 Written at an isolated spot in the Valais district of Switzerland, in the early spring of 1922. 63 I’m thinking of that injunction at the beginning of Also Sprach Zarathustra about forgetting ‘other worlds beyond’ and ‘remaining true to the Earth’. 64 A note, by the way: ‘Not There-Here’ is the title of a painting by Barnett Newman. 65 Sein u Zeit (70th edn, Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1993), H9 (my own gloss).

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talking topology in the finisterras We’re at the furthest limits of metaphysics, at the ‘end’ of metaphysics, trying to touch on something else. For Heidegger, as he makes explicit in his essay ‘The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thought’, ‘end’ means the same as ‘place’. From one end to the other means: from one place to another. The end of philosophy is the place, that place, in which the whole of philosophy is gathered at its most extreme possibility. The move at this furthest point is from topoi (the topics, the themes of discourse) to topos (the thesis of place, implying the recompositioning of space). The old Greeks of ‘being’ are not forgotten (for a while Heidegger wrote the German word for ‘being’, Sein, with a ‘y’, which the French call the ‘i grec’), but what he was going to call more and more ‘anfängliches Denken’ (a beginning thinking, an initial thinking, a first and fresh grasp of things) was something else again. And it was this he was going to try to get at, initially, in his workings with the poetry of Hölderlin, that is a poetry that was much more, and far other, than the poetry he described in the Holzwege as the last refuge of a humanist culture more and more impoverished, more and more hollow. Heidegger’s elucidations (Erlaüterungen) of Hölderlin’s poems that started in 1936 and went on, edition after augmented edition, practically up to his death, are less to be seen as interpretations (though they are also that) than as penetrations into a new space of thinking: a field of poetic thought. The dialogue Heidegger enters into here between philosophy and poetry is more demanding than that between Heidegger and the early Greeks or that between the fullness of being and disastrous forgetfulness. A first sounding, on its way to a ‘proximity with being’, gets held up at the notion of ‘the sacred’ as a halfway state (between the divine and the human). A second sounding, 39

the fundamental field still not very satisfactory, has Heidegger saying that whereas the philosopher moves towards ‘the unfamiliar’ (das Unheimische), the poet moves around the familiar (das Heimische). We’re getting nearer the real place but still in the ‘homely’ way I laid out in the previous section. It’s only when Heidegger gets into Hölderlin’s ‘outlandish’ poems during and after the ontological break of his exiled sojourn in Bordeaux, followed by the ‘estranging simplicity’ of the Tower poems of Tübingen that, to my mind, he really begins to see what’s going on and what’s being presented. It’s then he begins to say that the poet Hölderlin had gone further and faster than the philosopher Hegel. That’s when he listens deeply into phrases by Hölderlin, such as: ‘What truly has duration, it’s the poets who inaugurate it’.66 Till he finally arrives at the superb text about ‘poetic habitation of the Earth’.67 In his essay ‘The Origins of the Work of Art’,68 Heidegger speaks of ‘the Earth as foundation’. Which is why we see him more and more thinking, not from some established conceptual set-up, but from places and spaces: a wood, a path, a clearing, a winter landscape. . . . To some philosophical intelligences (of the intellectualistic sort), this may seem ‘superficial’. But as Nietzsche says, it is possible to be ‘superficial’ – out of depth. It all depends in the last instance on the writing. Heidegger was never satisfied

66 ‘Was bleibt stiften die Dichter’ is from the Hölderlin poem Andenken. Heidegger’s essay on the poem is contained in the Erlaüterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung, Gesamtausgabe 4 (Frankfurt am Main: Kloster­ mann, 1971). 67 The quotation is from Hölderlin’s last poem, ‘In lieblicher Bläue’ (‘In lovely blueness’). Heidegger’s text is contained in Vortrage und Aufsätze. 68 One of the Holzwege in the volume Holzwege, Gesamtausgabe 5 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1950).

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talking topology in the finisterras with his. All through his texts we see him searching for a different kind of writing. On the theme of language, we see him moving from everyday usage (Sprache) to the notion of Ansprache (‘talking on’ not just expatiating on a theme, but, in a way analogous to Andenken, ‘thinking on’, talking in conjunction with, shall we say, a place), and from there to Ausprache, ‘speaking out’ (which is a lot more than mere ‘self-expression’). What I’ve been laying out here is what I take to be, how I see, the central energy-field of the dialogue, the dialectics, going on between Malpas and myself, between our two works-and-ways. The following section will try to go into it further still.

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Day 3: Crisis and Catastrophe in Poetry

On 1 January 1799, the poet Friedrich Hölderlin, then beginning to put the finishing touches to his drama The Death of Empedocles, wrote a long straggling letter to his brother Karl about the relationship between poetry and philosophy.69 He had been plunged for months in a depth study of the Fragments of Empedocles. For years he had been pre­ occupied by the philosophy of Kant: ‘Kant is the Moses of our nation. He tore it away from pharaonic paralysis, led it across the free, solitary desert of speculation and brought down from the holy mountain the energetic law.’70 If he had entered whole-mindedly, ever since his adolescence, into the study of philosophy, it was so as not to be considered simply as an ‘empty poet’. Now, however, he was beginning to see the limits not only of Kantian philosophy, but of the great bulk of philosophy in general. If he still felt no deep affinity with ‘the corporation of German poets’, it was, he 69 My source for this letter is its French translation by Denise Naville contained in the Pléiade edition of Hölderlin, Œuvres (Paris: Gallimard, 1967), pp. 688–93. 70 Quotations here and below (my translations) are from the correspond­ ence of Hölderlin as presented in the section ‘Lettres’ of the volume Friedrich Hölderlin, Oeuvres (Paris: Gallimard, 1967), pp. 671–767. It’s maybe worth noting here that in addition to his preoccupation with reasoning and categorical imperatives, Kant also had a strong sense of space and place. At the Albertus University in Königsberg, throughout his teaching career, alongside his lectures on philosophy, he also taught geography. His lectures in that field began with ‘water, earth, atmosphere’, moved from there to human habitation, then to a global survey, continent after continent.

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talking topology in the finisterras saw, nevertheless in the area of this activity commonly called ‘poetry’ that his real way lay (‘No one has yet meditated on the real nature of art, poetry in particular’). He felt that, poetically, he was approaching a reality outside the normal literary categories, but also outside the established domain of philosophy. He had made this position even clearer, without the biblical metaphorising, a year before, in a letter (24 December 1798) to his friend Isaac Sinclair: ‘An a priori philosophy, that is, a philosophy independent of all experience, can be nothing but an absurdity [ . . . ]. Particularity and totality form one single living unit.’ The accent is on experience, and experience implies a living space, a movement, and an emplacement arising from that living and that movement. Hölderlin’s original landscape-mindscape was that of classical Greece, in which he had been immersed, at the Foundation in Tübingen. Presenting that classical Greek landscape in his The Earth, the Temple, and the Gods,71 Vincent Scully has this: ‘The mountains and valleys of Greece were punctuated during antiquity by hard white forms, touched with bright colours, which stood in geometric contrast to the shapes of the earth. These were the temples of the gods, they housed the image of a god.’72 It is, Scully goes on to say, and it is this that is germane to my argumentation at this point, the trilogy of ‘earth, temples, god’ that allows for a ‘full experience’ of the landscape, whereas, when it fades, 71 Vincent Scully, The Earth, the Temple, and the Gods: Greek Sacred Architecture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962). If I stress argumentation ‘at this point’, it’s because in my own itinerary, from early on, I was deep in an experience of landscape similar, but without the temples. 72 Ibid., p. 2.

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the fundamental field ‘when the gods finally begin to die completely out of the land and when many human beings begin to live lives totally removed from nature’, all that remains is romantic nostalgia, idyllic picturesqueness, a much reduced ‘poetry of place’. If ever a human mind had an experience of the original Greek landscape-mindscape that was neither classicist nor romantic, but nostalgic, yes, it was that of Friedrich Hölderlin. He expressed it, beautifully and powerfully, in a long poem composed in 1800 entitled ‘The Archipelago’: Are the cranes returning to you and are the boats Once more frequenting your shore? Are the wished-for winds Giving breath to your calm waters, and is the dolphin Exposing its lovely back to the sun’s new light? Is Ionia in flower? Is it the time? 73

Wishful thinking, as he well knew, and that experience was to teach him more and more. . . . The experience that brought about the big break, an ontological break, in Hölderlin’s mindscape was the trip he made to France in 1801, to take up a post as preceptor in the household of the German consul at Bordeaux. He left Tübingen on 10 December 1801, stopped for a while in Strasburg, then, travelling at times by coach, but often on foot, he made down to Lyons, crossing the Auvergne mountains, in the Massif Central of France, through blizzards of hail and snow, arriving in Bordeaux on 28 January 1802.74

73 My translation from the German of ‘Der Archipelagus’. My source here is Friedrich Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, ed. D. E. Sattler, vol. 3 (Darmstadt: Hermann Luchterhand Verlag, 1979). 74 I tried to express what this experience meant to Hölderlin, and for poetry, in the poem ‘Hölderlin in Bordeaux’, in Open World. The Collected Poems 1960–2000 (Edinburgh: Polygon, 2003), pp. 287–8.

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talking topology in the finisterras Hölderlin managed to hold out about fourteen weeks in the consul’s house. But by May, he was on the road again, making, via Paris, where he stayed a little while, back to Germany, arriving in Stuttgart totally exhausted. Back in Germany, while retaining fond memories of France and Bordeaux, he continued writing long letters on the theory of poetics, and also composing poems. Here’s an extract from a poem he wrote on his memories of Bordeaux but also about his firm stance on poetic ground: There’s a wild northeaster blowing The wind I love the most For a promise it is to sailors Of high spirits and a fair passage. But go now and give my greetings To the beautiful Garonne And the gardens of Bordeaux Where the path goes along By the steep banks and the brook Tumbles into the stream, with oaks And silver poplars looking nobly on. [...] But where are the friends? Bellarmin With his companion? Many a one Will fight shy of going to the source But all richness has its origin In the sea. Like painters Seamen bring together the beauties Of the earth and do not disdain Winged war, nor do they fear To live alone year after year under The trimmed mast, where civic splendours Their harping and traditional dancing Never gleam through the night. Meanwhile the men Have left for Indian realms

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the fundamental field Over on the windy headland By the grapeladen hills where the Dordogne Downward coursing Mingles its waters with the stately Garonne and broad as a sea The stream flows on and out. But if ocean Withdraws and brings back memories If love has eyes that fondly gaze Only poetry stands on lasting ground.75

As for the letters, the most important is the one written to Casimir Ulrich Böhlendorff in November 1802: The physical presence of the southern people, amid the vestiges of classical culture, gave me insight into the real nature of the ancient Greeks. I came to know their character, their wisdom [. . .], also the way they grew to maturity in their climate [. . .].   All this gave them shape as a people [. . .]. That’s what constitutes their originality, and if it comes across in such a lively manner, it’s because for the Greeks the highest function of the mind is the faculty of reflection. [. . .]   The impression produced on my mind by a contemplation of the antiquities in the Louvre has given me a better understanding not only of the Greeks, but of what is highest in art in general. Even when concepts are being moved about and phenomenalized in the highest manner, even when intentions are of the most serious, art still maintains every thing in and for itself, so that definiteness in this sense is the sign supreme. [. . .] After much emotion and commotion of the soul, I felt the need to settle down for a while, and at the moment I am living in my native town.

75 My translation from the German Andenken. See Friedrich Hölderlin, Bordeaux Memories, a poem followed by five letters translated from the German by Kenneth White (Bordeaux: William Blake & Co., 1984).

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talking topology in the finisterras   The more I study nature’s manifestations here in my native country, the more deeply I am moved by them. Storm, seen not only in its highest manifestation but, from this very point of view, as power and figure among the other forms of the sky; light, by its effects, [. . .], light as a principle, almost as a destiny [. . .], the intensity of its coming and going; the particular shape of the woods here; the coming together in one region of different aspects of nature,[. . .]; and the philosophical light at my window – all that gives me great joy in living at this moment; I hope I’ll be able to stay on the path that brought me here! Dear friend, I think we shall spend no more time commenting on the poetry of the past. The art of poetry is about to change radically. And if we are not quite up to it yet, it’s because, since the Greeks, we’re the first to make a new beginning.76

On the basis of this incipient theorising, Hölderlin was going to write some great poems, notably, to my mind, the series of European river-poems on the Neckar, the Rhine, the Danube.77 But the existential tension he’d lived in, and the intellectual strain he had undergone, were too much. By 1806 he was interned at a clinic in Tübingen, and from 1807, till his death in 1843, he lived more or less permanently in a tower room overlooking a river scene, half-mad,

76 Letter translated by me from the German. See Hölderlin, Bordeaux Memories. What I here translate as ‘native-national’ in the original German is nationel. I don’t think this is a mis-spelling, as I’ve seen suggested. To my mind, Hölderlin wanted to indicate a clear distinction from ‘national’. If I chose finally not to write ‘nationel’ in English, it’s because this might have been seen as a mis-spelling in its turn. What is important to see is that the notion has nothing to do with nationalism. 77 See Kenneth White, ‘Les Fleuves de l’esprit’, in Au large de l’histoire: éléments d’un espace-temps à venir (Marseilles: Le Mot et le Reste, 2015), pp. 255–67.

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the fundamental field but with poetic fulgurations now and then and, at least intermittently, the ‘philosophical light’ at his window. Is there anything like this attempt at a radical re­begin­ ning in English? Concerning English ‘poetry of place’, I said that Hopkins, Doughty and Powys really belong to another category. It’s the moment now to be more precise about what I meant by that. That Hopkins has a strong sense of nature (as a ‘Heraclitean fire’)78 is evident. That he has a phenomenological sense of perception (based ultimately on the haeceitas of Duns Scot) is just as evident. But he enrols it all into religion, wraps it up in an episcopal package. As for Doughty, it’s as a traveller that he’s known, as the author of that great work Arabia Deserta, but it’s a fact, often unknown, forgotten or neglected, that if he travelled in those harsh lands vastly different from the English countryside, and in a linguistic context outside what he considered ‘the decadence of the English language’, it was in the interests of a poetics. As he wrote in a letter:79 ‘It is the Ars Poetica to which I have been entirely wedded; and I have devoted my life thereto ever since I left Cambridge. My travels, wanderings and sojourns in other lands have been but incidents therein.’ The sad thing is, however, that when he does come to write poetry, as in that patriotic effort The Dawn in Britain,80 the project falls flat, ploughing mile 78 See the poem ‘That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire’, in Gerard Manley Hopkins (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953). 79 Letter to Edward Garnett, 15 February 1922. See the Introduction by Garnett to Charles M. Doughty, Passages from Arabia Deserta, selected by Edward Garnett (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1956). 80 Doughty, The Dawn in Britain, six vols (London: Duckworth & Co., 1906).

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talking topology in the finisterras upon mile of pseudo-epicality. It’s in ‘incidental’ passages of his nomadic Arabian journey that his strongest poetry comes across: ‘We had ten marches through the northern highlands’; ‘There arose Mount Hermon aloft before us, hoar-headed with the first snows’; ‘The dawn discovered the same barren upland before us, of shallow gravel and clay ground upon limestone’; ‘a stony nakedness blackened by the weather’. For his part, John Cowper Powys, author of one of the best autobiographies in the English language,81 and of philosophical essays such as A Philosophy of Solitude82 (‘a detached life of mystic-sensuous contemplation’), has a strong sense and perception of landscape-seascape in Weymouth Sands83 (‘The sea lost nothing of the swallowing identity of its great outer mass of waters in the emphatic, individual character of each particular wave’), but gets lost at the end in an elfish kind of goofiness. To these three great-minded Englishmen I would add the Scot Hugh MacDiarmid (prickly patronymical pseudonym of Christopher Grieve), who, in collections such as Stony Limits)84 (‘In the Caledonian Forest’, ‘On a Raised Beach’), has a conception of nature, landscape and humanity that lies away outside the intellectual comfort of so much English ‘nature poetry’, but tends to lose the sense of formation in mammoth pile-ups of sheer information.

81 John Cowper Powys, Autobiography (London: John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1934; reprinted London: Macdonald, 1967). 82 John Cowper Powys, A Philosophy of Solitude (London: Jonathan Cape, 1933; reprinted London: Village Press, 1974). 83 John Cowper Powys, Weymouth Sands (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1934; reprinted Cambridge: Rivers Press, 1973). 84 See Hugh MacDiarmid, Collected Poems (London: Collier-Macmillan, 1967), pp. 204–67.

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the fundamental field Among other ‘preludes’ to what I was going to call ‘geopoetics’, I’ll adduce here Walt Whitman, thinking of him in contemplation of a chaos of rocks in Colorado,85 saying that he’d be willing to abandon everything most people think of as ‘poetry’, if only he could get something of that presence into his writing. Thinking also of Rilke speaking of a totality in which we can sometimes participate,86 of Saint-John Perse presenting the sea as an example of the greatest text,87 of Victor Segalen,88 who starts off in the dialectics of the real and the imaginary, then, after crossing the Chinese loess-country, approaching the confines of Tibet, moves in the dialectics of being and non-being, asking himself perpetually the question: ‘Where is the place, the site, the ground?’ To come now, as I must in this essay-dialogue, to my own mapping and moving. In the long poem Walking the Coast (an itinerarium mentis in fifty-three sections, every section coming in like a breaking wave), I lay out my intentions: ............... for the question is always how out of all the chances and changes to select the features of real significance so as to make 85 See the poem ‘Spirit That Formed This Scene’, in Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1973), p. 486. 86 See the ‘Duino elegies’, in Rainer Maria Rilke, Die Gedichte (Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1957), pp. 629–70. 87 See Amers, in Saint-John Perse, Œuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), pp. 253–379. 88 See the poem ‘Thibet’, in Victor Segalen, Œuvres completes (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1995), pp. 605–39.

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talking topology in the finisterras 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 with all of being – there is only poetry.89

That is a programme. As for the catastrophic grammar of the landscapemindscape I envisaged, it comes across perhaps most emblematically in the following poem, entitled ‘Letter from Cape Wrath’: Interfluvial archipelagoes excentric excessive exposed high cliffs deep clefts topography suddenly interrupted brutally sundered ravines fissures gaps 89 Kenneth White, Open World, pp. 125–79.

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the fundamental field lines of force lines of fragility powers of erosion hierarchies of resistance masses of drift cloaks of moraine abrased platforms lithology littorality.90

We are very far there from the regionalism and subregionalism of the aforementioned ‘poetry of place’. We’re concerned, I submit, with a power-full matrix from which live and luminous propositions can be derived. I’m using ‘matrix’ there in a quasi-mathematical, geometric kind of way. Which reminds me of a proposition (that he did not always follow himself) put forward by the American poet William Carlos Williams:91 A course in mathematics would not be wasted on a poet if he remembers no more from it than the geometric principle of the intersections of loci: from all angles lines converging and crossing established points. He might carry it further and say [. . .] that apprehension perforates at places through to understanding – as white is at the intersection of blue and green and yellow and red. It is this white light that is the background of all good work. [. . .] Local colour is not, as the parodists, the localists believe, an object of art. 90 White, Open World, p. 122. 91 See the essay ‘Marianne Moore’, in William Carlos Williams, Selected Essays (New York: Random House, 1954; reprinted New York: New Directions Books, 1969).

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talking topology in the finisterras It is merely a variant serving to locate some acme point of white penetration.

References to mathematics (catastrophe theory included) will be found throughout all my texts. As, for example, in the poem ‘Point Omega Transit’: no use at all (you listening, Aristotle?) in praying to Plato or making out with the muses (even if they come from Ipanema) modo latino while the commentators of these end times serve up the same old classical themes in current sociological sauce the eminent exercise is to move out (like Cantor or Duns Scot) from paradox to paradox and from desolation to delight on unedited tracks.92

A lot of my early references in this area of physics and mathematics are from my reading of Alfred North Whitehead.93 It’s to him I first turned for a more general and abstract approach to the field in question, a field lying way outside anything like localism. 92 For ‘Point Omega Transit’, see White, Open World, p. 408. If the reference here is to Cantor (the ‘transfinite’), others will be found throughout my workings to René Thom (the theory of catastrophe) and to Dirac (the states of a dynamical system and the ways in which the dynamical variables are interconnected). 93 Mainly Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (corrected edn, New York: The Free Press, 1978) and Adventures of Ideas (New York: The Free Press, 1961).

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the fundamental field ‘Modern physics’, he writes,94 ‘has abandoned the doctrine of Simple Location [. . .]. There is a focal region, which in common speech is where the thing is. But its influence streams away from it with infinite velocity throughout the utmost recesses of space and time.’ The language of physics is, essentially, mathematics. But as Whitehead recognised, the human being needs also another kind of language. Which is where philosophy and poetry come in, but not in any ordinary way, and not without difficulties. ‘Philosophers’, says Whitehead,95 ‘never hope to formulate metaphysical first principles. Weakness of insight and deficiencies of language stand in the way inexorably. Words and phrases must be stretched towards a generality foreign to their ordinary usage, and however such elements of language be stabilized as technicalities, they remain metaphors mutely appealing for an imaginative leap.’ If any minds were inclined to see in this an excuse for the rejection of ‘philosophy’ for ‘poetry’, they should read on: ‘The language of literature breaks down precisely at the task of expressing in explicit form the larger generalities which metaphysics seeks to express.’96 Both philosophy and poetry are confronted by the same kind of problem, that of a larger generality. And the radical question for some time now has concerned the possibility of opening a kind of thinking-expressing outside philosophy as normally understood and practised. Speaking of the transitions to ‘new fruitfulness of understanding’, Whitehead says they are achieved by ‘recurrence 94 Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, p. 157. 95 Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 4. 96 Ibid., p. 11.

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talking topology in the finisterras to the utmost depths of intuition for the refreshment of imagination’.97 I still feel close to Whitehead, but I find this statement rather fulsome, even hollow, especially when we fall back on that much-used term ‘imagination’. I’m thinking there of Ossip Mandelstam’s essay on Dante98 in which he says that Dante is more than ‘a poet in the banal sense of the word’, he is more than ‘a creator of images’ (or metaphors), he is ‘an instrument-maker’ (understand, instruments of navigation) and ‘a strategist of mutation’. If we accept to use, in passing, another much-abused word ‘creativity’, we can see it as ‘that ultimate principle by which the many, which are the universe disjunctively, become the one actual occasion, which is the universe conjunctively. It lies in the nature of things that the many enter into complex unity.’99 There, we avoid such vague terms as ‘intuition’ and ‘imagination’, with all the congeries of half-notions and semi-actions they give rise to; we stay grounded in ‘the nature of things’, among the phenomenological data of the world. We are not in a conceptual system, we are in what I prefer to call a landscape-mindscape. Concerning the nature of this ‘scape’, Whitehead has this: ‘The philosophy of organism seems to approximate more to some strains of Indian, or Chinese thought than

97 Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, p. 159. 98 I use the French edition, Ossip Mandelstam, Entretien sur Dante, trans. Louis Martinez (Lausanne: Éditions L’Age d’Homme, 1977); the original text was written in 1933. 99 Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 21.

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the fundamental field to Western thought. One side makes process ultimate, the other side makes fact ultimate.’100 This opens up other perspectives. I’ve worked a great deal at this Eastern connection over the years, as is evidenced in essay, prose, narrative and poem. I remember when, as a student in Glasgow, with what mental excitement I came across, in George Rowley’s book on the principles of Chinese landscape painting, this list:101 li (universal pattern), ssū (thought), i (conception), shih (reality), ku-fa (structure), shêng-tung (life-movement). There we have a landscape-mindscape comprising composition, consonance, coherence, equilibrium and tension, design in surface and in depth, form and non-form, plenitudes and voids, chaos and cosmos, with ‘catastrophe’ integrated into the strophism. Those who pushed these principles (applicable as much to poetics as to painting) to the limit were the ‘scholar painters’102 such as Su Shih, Mi Fu or Ni Tsan, all of them, as Su Shih said, ‘like a crane released from the cage’. I’ve tried to push the ‘great principles’ to the limit myself, ready to undertake all that is implied in the practice. As one of the scholar-painters, quoted by Rowley, put it: ‘How can you be a master of painting without reading ten thousand books and travelling ten thousand miles?’ That’s an apology pro vita mea and pro meo opere. But enough, for the moment, of exegesis and definition.

100 Ibid., p. 7. 101 George Rowley, Principles of Chinese Painting (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947). 102 See Susan Bush, The Chinese Literati on Painting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971).

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talking topology in the finisterras Maybe the best way to end the workings of this third day, with its quick light and crashing tide, is with a poem:103 Wave, wind, wing plunges veers play and display idea-energies blue, yellow, white the light changes no knowledge, Mister only the being there outside what you were a space full of events originary practice what? words without language fragmentary syntax and yet coherence chaos-poem this that is coming Ereignis hah! watch, listen white wing red roof the writing, the thing the thing seen, heard 103 ‘The Chaoticist Manifesto’, in White, Open World, pp. 550–3. ‘Chaoticism’ is one of those neologisms, such as ‘supernihilism’, ‘erotocosmology’, ‘littorality’, ‘biocosmography’, ‘geopoetics’ I’ve felt the need of, at various times in the course of all these poeticophilosophical investigations.

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the fundamental field the thing thought raised into what is not metaphysics but claritas le bel aujourd’hui they’re all here the thinkers those of the Anfang writhing in the wrack wheeling in the light blowing in the wind the gathering colloque de la côte towards the plural poem chorus coruscations (where’s the Chinaman? up there on the hill running helter-skelter down to the sea feng shui) this is today raised out of history the pencil has been sharpened the eye has been cleaned the hand confirmed no remains economy of presence here now this worked out space no scheming anarchic and yet archaic (archaic anarchy – the most beautiful paradox) Pelagius

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talking topology in the finisterras steps out of a hollybush bright! Erigena walks quiet along the shore sunt lumina the mind is inspired the landscape enlightened the mindscape exists (no reason no anguish) who what without why and the questioning fresh as the cry of the gull on the headland keeya! keeya! keeya! keeya! here at the sea’s edge laughing laughing a new laugh (quotations, quotations at home in this topography beyond the nations) whiteness is what it means but a whiteness written like birch bark like wave crest with lines and with sound original (no ideal, no model) eventual nothing is absent and this body-mind says it all

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the fundamental field all the ways lead to here have led to here the sky has broken and the earth sea-washed is all diamond.

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Day 4: The General Outlook

‘To what purpose, poets in a time of dearth?’, asked Hölderlin,104 to which one can add: ‘to what purpose philosophers?’ A first stab at an answer might be this: to analyse exactly the ‘time of dearth’, and to offer an approach to another sense-perception, another earth-experience, another landscape-mindscape, another life-world. It’s possible to write an informed and intelligent history of philosophy, likewise a history of poetry, ringing the changes on Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Leibniz, Rousseau, Kant, as on Homer, Chaucer, Goethe, without once getting even remotely into that kind of landscape-mindscape. As I’ve tried to show, the move implies awareness of a deep crisis, even of a catastrophe, in the domains of philosophy and poetry, then an advance into what I’ve called edge-knowledge, thereafter into landscape-mindscape and wording-worlding. After an examination of terms such as limit, perimeter, periphery, rim, gap, border, here’s Edward Casey, in a beautiful essay, ‘The Edge(s) of Landscape’,105 moving on to the notion that they constitute ‘parameters of placeworlds’. In the bygoing, he refers to Darwin, postulating that ‘it is at the edges of primitive human settlements that the most innovative adaptations occur’, and to Gadamer, ‘In such edgeful intensities, we witness what Gadamer calls Seinszuwachs, “the augmentation of being”, adding his own 104 The line is from Hölderlin’s poem ‘Brot und Wein’ (‘Bread and Wine’), begun autumn 1800 and completed that winter. 105 In Malpas (ed.), The Place of Landscape, pp. 91–109.

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the fundamental field commentary on these ideas and areas: ‘The edge is where the most concerted activity is to be found, including activity that exceeds what we would predict on a simple summative paradigm [. . .] rather than 1+1=2, we have a circumstance of 1+1=2+n’. What I want to do now is go into the nature of that ‘n’, as it has tried to take shape in these pages. The dialogue between Jeff Malpas and myself was never simply a meeting between ‘philosopher’ and ‘poet’. More radically put, both of us are situated in some sense ‘on the edge’ of our respective disciplines and have been variously engaged in cross-overing. To stay close for the moment to the habitual, socio-cultural sense of ‘poet’, it will be said, for example, with or without reference to Goethe’s aphorism ‘Grey is all theory, and green the tree of life’,106 that poetry is not meant to be theoretical. This is construed in two ways, but two ways that are combined. Seen ‘positively’, the role of poetry is, supposedly, not only to provide relief from the stress of existence, but to offer some kind of ‘soul-supplement’ or ‘enchantment’. Seen ‘negatively’, it means that poetry is theoretically (philosophically, scientifically) negligible. Given the context we’ve now opened up, we can leave the first ‘positive’ category to light music, versification of commonplace, and mellifluous song. While noting that if there is a great deal of dross, there are also some nuggets, much preferable to phoney poetry and ponderous philosophantism. As to the second attitude, the ‘negative’ one, considering poetry as theoretically negligible, it requires refutation 106 Fortunately, Goethe himself did not stick to the tenet of this aphorism, as anyone knows who has read his essays on vision and colour, dynamics in geology or the rise of organic forms.

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talking topology in the finisterras by argument, indeed a Nietzschean re-evaluation of values. This has largely been the task of the preceding days’ work. But here, in this conclusion, a quick summarising may be useful. If the first book of poems I published, The Cold Wind of Dawn (a very Nietzschean title), was an initial gust of energy, in the second, The Most Difficult Area, the word ‘theory’ is set, provocatively, to the fore, in a poem specifically entitled ‘Theory’. Here, in the first place, is the poem:107 1. The white cell almost in darkness outside: rocks in abruption, seasilence wavering. It is there. 2. Rough shape, clifted, that quartz chaos-given, ashored, tide-washed and in the good space gazed-at. 3. Cast – the first stone; only the thrust and the not-silver, not-white, not-crystal splash – no reading in the widening circles. 4. Great reason grasped, the twelve-worded orator walks on the shingle with quiet eyes.

A detailed, hermeneutical reading of this short poem would be possible and, perhaps desirable, because something 107 Kenneth White, in Handbook for the Diamond Country: Collected Shorter Poems 1960–1990 (Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1990), p. 108. Taken up again in White, Open World, p. 115.

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the fundamental field is, unobtrusively, taking place there. But I’ll stick to main lines and general principles. The word ‘theory’ in the title of this poem may seem totally out of place. A hard-minded epistemologist will say (1) that a theory is based on observation and experience, (2) that it can be refuted or verified, (3) that its function is to render coherent and conceptualise data hitherto isolated and unexplained. Little of that in this poem. But theories, like methodologies, can be a block on thought, especially when only a certain type of theory, a certain type of methodology is entertained. Maybe this poem goes back to a more primordial sense of theory, the one still present in Aristotle when he says that life spent in theory is ontologically extraordinary. The ‘great reason’ that this poem evokes, while being no enemy of rational discourse, is something not only more than, but radically different from, endless ratiocination. From the beginning, I felt that there was a greater proximity, a greater complicity, between real poetry and live philosophy. Something more than Heidegger’s twin mountains.108 That Heidegger is one of the few thinkers to have ventured into this field is evident, largely for long neglected because of the psycho-political imbroglio of the post-war context, but now, one would hope, recognised. What is certain is that Heidegger’s thinking, his worldworking, was an important station on the itineraries of Malpas and myself, and constituted our first meeting ground. Malpas may here and there be more indulgent to certain aspects of Heidegger than I would be: he is, or has been,

108 As throughout his writings and, particularly, in Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens.

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talking topology in the finisterras more amenable than myself to such aspects of Heidegger’s work as the Quadriparti, language as ‘the House of Being’ and he’s even ready (or was, in one of the lighter moments of our conversations, which were always full of laughing gai savoir) to defend Heidegger’s statement in the famous Spiegel interview of 23 May 1976 that ‘only a god can save us’. But in Heidegger and the Thinking of Place,109 while making yet one more close and cogent reading of Heidegger, it is clear from the start that he is also working out his own agenda, and that agenda is both incisive and expansive: ‘The aim of this volume’, he says: . . . is to contribute both to the topological understanding of Heidegger and the continuing articulation and elaboration of topology as philosophically conceived. In this respect the essays aim to supplement and expand the analysis of Heideggerian topology already begun in my Heidegger’s Topology, but they can equally be seen as contributing to my own project of philosophical topography as first set out in my earlier volume Place and Experience. The essays collected here (essays that span a decade or more of writing) thus focus on the idea of place, first, as it appears in Heidegger’s thinking as it arises in a number of ways and in relation to a range of issues, and, second, as it can be seen to provide the focus for a distinctive mode of philosophical thinking that encompasses, but is not restricted to, the Heideggerian.

Subtitled ‘Explorations in the Topology of Being’, Malpas’s book is divided into three main sections: ‘Topological Thinking’, ‘Topological Concepts’, ‘Topological Horizons’. As such, it is at once a summing-up of Malpas’s

109 Jeff Malpas, Heidegger and the Thinking of Place: Explorations in the Topology of Being (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012).

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the fundamental field thinking, editing and writing to date, and a push into new territory. The first section explores the turning of philosophy (a term which often covers no more than an institutional and socio-cultural entity, the history of philosophy from, say, Plato on, or a set of inherited logical, epistemological problems) to the question, the experience, the expression of place. The second ranges over a set of contemporary problematics (I refer back to the second section of this essay) involving concepts such as biology, politics, space, geography, place, ground, unity, limit, nihilism. It’s in the third section that, though there were signs of this development throughout, things really begin to open out. Those three words, ‘thinking’, ‘concepts’, ‘horizons’, indicate an ongoing radical movement. There we see Malpas, the philosopher, the topologist, delving back into the origins of philosophy, contemplating place-in-the-world with renewed intention and insight, and investigating, tentatively, carefully, the relationship between philosophy and poetics, between topos and opus. Enquiring about the primal motivations and the prime moves of philosophy, Malpas passes in review ‘curiosity’, ‘puzzlement’, ‘questioning’, before giving his principal attention, for a while, to ‘wonder’. The notion has a longstanding genealogy, going back to Aristotle’s thaumazein. Unfortunately, in my view of things, since Aristotle, this word, along with its concomitants, ‘the marvellous’, ‘the mysterious’, has been so overworked in secondary contexts, not to speak of the tertiary departments, that it is no longer operative. And Malpas himself is far from stopping at anything so dazzle-eyed as ‘a philosophy of wonder’. He goes on to other notions such as ‘recognition’, ‘selfevidence’, ‘opening’ – ‘the experience of the opening of 66

talking topology in the finisterras space’, until he gets to ‘situatedness on the ground’, ‘beingin-the-world’. There is nothing ‘behind appearances’ to be got at: Divinity, Being, Truth or Essence. There is only ‘being there’, in all its simplicity-complexity. Remains the question of language, the ‘adequation of language’. The ‘encounter’ (that is probably not the best word – conjunction?) with the physis of the world may, he recognises, ‘not always be well articulated’. Which brings him, as it did Heidegger, to poetics. Trying to see where philosophy ‘ends’ (not its termination, as we saw, but its finality) and where poetry begins, he enters into that ultimate field of difficulty. Again, passing in review some attempts at distinction (e.g. philosophy as ‘explanation’, poetry as ‘evocation’), he is, and how much I agree with him, hardly satisfied with them. Finally, he resorts to showing a connection, with reference to T. S. Eliot. Passing over his comparison between Eliot’s Four Quartets and Heidegger’s fourfold Quadriparti (Das Geviert), which I find more than a bit forced, I’d suggest that to propose, even fleetingly, an equation between the ‘horizon’ of thinking we’re concerned with here and Eliot’s is unfortunate. Despite intermittent flashes of something else,110 Eliot’s horizon is not only religious, it is ecclesiastical. I propose for examination and meditation, as I’ve done throughout this essay, that the equation ‘philosophy and poetry’ can be solved only through a different conception of philosophy, a different practice of poetry. 110 As in the little series Landscapes, presented in the Collected Poems 1909–1935 (London: Faber, 1957), as ‘minor poems’. In particular, the one located on Cape Ann (p. 152): ‘Resign this land at the end, resign it / To its true owner, the tough one, the sea-gull / The palaver is finished.’

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the fundamental field For the moment, there is ample evidence in these pages that Malpas is ready to consider and handle the relationship of philosophy to poetry (the extant question for Heidegger) at a high conceptual level and on a ground more radical even than that of Heidegger, who, as I’ve suggested, never got wholly rid of the onto-theological. In this most recent configuration of Malpas’s work, the image of the philosopher, searching for the ‘beyond’ (the meta), wrapped in perplexity, pondering over problems, or, worse, ready at the drop of a hat to ‘philosophise’ about everything and anything, disappears from the scene. Malpas is less and less concerned with a ‘beyond’, more and more with a ‘between’. He proposes hermeneutics as more fundamental than any metaphysics, seeing that practice as based radically on ‘betweenness’, between mind and text, between self-presence and cosmos, between individual and individual. What is also more and more evident in his thinking, or, let us rather say, his experience of thought (Heidegger’s Erfahrung), is that he is more and more exposed, beyond any in-house dialectic of internal and external, to an ‘outside’, which has entailed his moving out of ontology into a topology of which he is still exploring the elements. This was the context, the area, the ‘field’ in which we met and conversed during those Breton days. As we moved ‘peripatetically’ over the Finisterrian landscape, I think that Malpas ‘the philosopher’ and White ‘the poet’ had more and more the sensation of walking on common, if unfamiliar, ground and of witnessing the opening of an unedited space.

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II. ‘Where Hegel Meets the Chinese Gulls’: Place, Work and World Jeff Malpas . . . We’ve been in this kind of context for a long time. Hegel tried to get out of it via dialectics. I suggest a further shift from dialectics to poetics. That is the empty shore where Hegel meets the Chinese gulls – Kenneth White.1

1 Kenneth White, Coast to Coast: Interviews and Conversations 1985–1995 (Glasgow: Open World, 1996), p. 116; originally in ‘Hegel et les mouettes chinoises’, in Une Stratégie paradoxalen (Bordeaux: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 1998), pp. 169–79.

Prologue

As noted in the Preface to this volume, the exchange that appears here grew out of a series of conversations between the two of us that began after I heard Kenneth White speaking on an Australian Broadcasting Corporation radio programme. I was immediately struck, not only by the force of White’s poetry, but also by the way the ideas being explored, as well as the images evoked, were so close to key elements in my own philosophical work. After that first heard encounter, I began exploring White’s work in its written form, and was not disappointed by what I found. We subsequently met up at his home in Brittany, where we enjoyed some intense conversations during a sequence of cold and wintry March days some years ago. An important intellectual meeting point for the two of us is in the philosophy of the German thinker Martin Heidegger. As I indicate below, it is in Heidegger’s work that the questions of place and of world, so central to White’s work as well as mine, emerge in an especially explicit and significant fashion. Moreover, the engagement of both of us with Heidegger’s work also opens into an engagement with a broader line of thinking, seldom drawn out in any integrated fashion otherwise, that takes seriously the being of human being as essentially given over to the world through its active involvement in place, and all that comes with that. Of significance too is the way that involvement is not an involvement outside of or apart from language, but fundamentally bound up with it – which is why poetry must loom so large here. Poetry, I am inclined to say, is always of and in place, and it is thus that it also 71

the fundamental field always speaks of and to the world – and it does so even as it also speaks of and to us. White’s engagement with Heidegger, as is true of his engagement with all the many thinkers and works that fill his texts, is not an engagement that operates within the usual structures of academic discourse. In that respect, his writing has a wide-ranging and personal character that offers a contrast to what may well appear my own more conventional ‘academic’ prose. We have not tried to cover over that divergence, or to smooth away the other differences between our texts (and even in relation to Heidegger, there are some things we read very differently). The diverg­ ence and difference here are not, of course, simply to be expressed in terms of the academic and non-academic. White is no less an academic than am I (both of us have occupied university chairs), but the practice of poetry, and the nature of his creative and intellectual activities outside of academia, lend a different tone to his writing, and perhaps also a different cast of mind. My early training in the demands of analytic philosophical thought gives a different character to my intellectual practice, while my own extraacademic involvement has also been in a different direction from White’s. The point, however, is not whether we talk or write in the same way or whether we draw on similar styles and methods, but that we can indeed find points of fruitful collaboration in the talking and writing we are able to undertake in relation to one another. The conversation is what matters, and the best conversations are almost always those that are carried between and across the spaces opened by difference and divergence. It is in virtue of that space between and across that real convergence comes about. For myself, one of the most important things that I have taken from White – quite apart from the simple pleasure that 72

‘where hegel meets the chinese gulls’ comes from the reading of his poetry and prose – has been to recognise more clearly something that I already knew but had not so clearly articulated for myself prior to the encounter with White, namely, the absolute centrality of place as the opening of the world, and the way that occurs in relation to both movement and rest, staying and journeying, departure and return. This is a key idea that seems to me to run throughout all of White’s writing. For me it is an idea that is central to poetry and to philosophy, and, of course, to the geo-poetical and the topological, but it is also central to the hermeneutical. It is only from where we are, from the fact of our being always already here (or there, depending on your indexical preference), that we are opened to the encounter with the world – an encounter that extends back to encompass the very place in which we are and those many other places to which we have yet to come. The interplay of place and world, of staying and journeying, of familiar and strange is precisely what has come to be defining of much twentieth-century hermeneutical thought, especially, but not exclusively, in the work of Heidegger and Gadamer. It is an interplay that is also expressed, in Gadamer’s thought, in the idea of the ­essentially conversational character, not only of language and understanding, but of human being. The engagement with White in the conversation that is partly payed out here, but that has also been played out in Brittany and between Brittany and Tasmania, exemplifies many of the hallmarks of this conversational paradigm, but also of the engagement in, through and with place that opens out and beyond. Unlike White’s contribution, mine is not structured around a series of days. Instead I have used the conceit of a set of ‘sightings’ to understand the movement of the writing and reading presented here. The reference to such ‘sightings’, 73

the fundamental field while it is indeed something of a conceit, also carries some real significance. Rather than think of philosophical enquiry as a single linear path, the focus on place brings with it the idea of thinking as always a matter of multiple views across the same terrain – like the triangulations and traverses of the topographical surveyor mapping out a stretch of country. The field that figures in the title to this volume – the fundamental field – is not grasped through one single pass, whether mine or White’s, but rather emerges only out of a series of sightings made from different vantage points and towards different landmarks. Here those vantage points and landmarks include ideas of world, thought, language, narrative, dynamicity and critique. No one of these opens up the entirety of what is at issue, just as no one sighting provides a complete view, but together, and especially as they overlap and intersect, they begin to offer a sense of the landscape, the place, the field, across which they move.

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First Sighting: The Question of World

At the very core of Kenneth White’s work is the question of ‘world’. As he says in one of the essays in On Scottish Ground, ‘I talked about a sense of world. All my work is about this theme, which is more than a theme, maybe more like a destiny’,2 and in ‘The White Bag of Books’, ‘Out of that original territory, and from territory to territory, it’s always world I’m trying to get at, to work my way into. World, that is, an area beyond the person, beyond the social context: a space of general being.’3 Yet although the question of world as it appears in White’s work has not gone entirely unrecognised, it is overlooked or taken for granted by many readers and is seldom the focus of sustained discussion. Undoubtedly this is partly connected with the relative paucity of critical philosophical engagements with White’s thinking, especially in English, and the associated tendency for White to be approached from within frameworks that are primarily literary (the vast majority of critical writing on White in English comes from those working within literature, and especially Scottish literature). However, it also seems to be a function of the fact that philosophy, along with contemporary thought in general, continues to have difficulty in recognising the concept of world and the problem that it presents, whilst the more specific philosophical approaches

2 Kenneth White, ‘Kentigern on Atlantic Quay’, in On Scottish Ground (Edinburg: Polygon, 1998), p. 200. 3 Kenneth White, ‘The White Bag of Books’, in The Wanderer and His Charts: Exploring the Fields of Vagrant Thought and Vagabond Beauty (Edinburgh: Polygon, 2010), p. 173.

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the fundamental field that dominate among many of those who have engaged with White’s thinking (approaches deriving, for instance, from the work of Gilles Deleuze) similarly tend to ignore or even to eschew any concern with world in the sense at issue here. Such engagements are usually more concerned with Deleuze than with White, and I know of no serious attempt genuinely to think through the philosophical aspects of White’s work in its own terms. From a philosophical point of view, the focus on world is especially important and interesting, not least because it brings White into close proximity to Martin Heidegger, one of the philosophers to whom White often makes reference, and who has such a special relevance to my own work. The problem of world is central to Heidegger’s thinking – so much so that we might say that the celebrated ‘question of being’ (die Seinsfrage) is itself inseparable from the question of world. ‘The elucidation of the concept of world’, claimed Heidegger in 1929, ‘is one of the most central tasks of philosophy’, and yet, he added, ‘the concept of world and the phenomenon it designates has never yet been recognized in philosophy at all’.4 Heidegger’s own influence has certainly led to greater philosophical attention being given to the concept of world, although one might still question the extent to which the concept is genuinely taken up in a manner that would have satisfied Heidegger. Indeed, it may be that the concept of world is one that takes us beyond the purely philosophical. As a thinker of world, Heidegger locates his own work in relation to that of poets such as Hölderlin, Trakl and Rilke (he also enjoyed a close friendship with René 4 Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), p. 165.

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‘where hegel meets the chinese gulls’ Char5), as well as artists such as Cézanne and Klee,6 and at the same time characterises his thinking in ways that draw it into proximity with poetry – a poetry ‘that thinks’.7 White locates his work – including his poetry and his prose, his ‘fiction’ (the quotation marks here indicating the inadequacy of this category to the specifics of White’s prose narrative writing – of which more later) and his essays – in relation to a company that includes philosophers and explorers (‘adventurers of ideas’ in the broadest sense) no less than fellow poets and writers. Like Heidegger, White also owes a heavy debt to Nietzsche, whose own work displays a similar eclect­ icism as well as idiosyncratic brilliance (and perhaps even a sense of world-concern that adumbrates that of Heidegger and White), although the particularities of their respective relationships to the genius of Sils Maria are very different. ‘Geopoetics’ is a term that White has made his own, and the term could as easily be understood as ‘world-poetics’, were it not for the fact that the latter term might be thought too suggestive of something similar to ‘world literature’ or ‘world music’ (terms that can sometimes carry problematic associations).

5 See my ‘The Anthropology of the World’, in In the Brightness of Place: Topological Thinking in and after Heidegger (Albany: SUNY Press, 2021) for an exploration of the relationship between the poet and the thinker, as well as its poetic and philosophical significance; see also Michael Whorton, ‘“Between” Poetry and Philosophy: René Char and Martin Heidegger’, in R. King and B. McGuirk (eds), Reconceptions: Reading Modern French Poetry (Nottingham: University of Nottingham, 1996), pp. 137–57. 6 See Julian Young, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), esp. pp. 150–62. 7 ‘The Thinker as Poet’, in Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), p. 12.

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the fundamental field White himself tells us that ‘geopoetics is concerned with “worlding”’, and, after noting parenthetically that ‘“wording” is contained in “worlding”’, he adds that ‘in my semantics, “world” emerges from a contact between the human mind and the things, the lines, the rhythms of the earth’.8 The active sense of world as ‘worlding’ – as, one might say, the happening of world – itself echoes an idiosyncratic Heideggerian usage (die Welt weltet – ‘the world worlds’9). Moreover, if we read into White’s use of poetics Heidegger’s understanding of the Greek poiesis as a mode of ‘bringing forth’, then one sense to be attached to geopoetics is the idea of the ‘bringing forth’ of world – not only in the sense of the world’s own self-presencing in relation to the earth, but also in the sense of the bringing to presence of that very bringing forth. The proximity of White’s work to Heidegger’s is striking – and unsurprising given the extent to which White not only draws on many similar sources to Heidegger himself, but also given White’s own close reading of the Freiburg philosopher. Part of what I will offer here may thus be construed as an exploration of that proximity, and so as a ‘Heideggerian’ reading of White. But my own relation to Heidegger is far from straightforward, and my reading of Heidegger is one that looks to situate his thinking within a very particular landscape.10 Rather than an attempt to

 8 White, Coast to Coast, p. 122.   9 A phrase that appears very early in Heidegger’s thinking – see, for instance, its appearance in the 1919 lecture published as Towards the Definition of Philosophy, trans. Ted Sadler (London: Continuum, 2008), p. 61. 10 See my Heidegger’s Topology: Being, Place, World (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006) and also Heidegger and the Thinking of Place: Explorations in the Topology of Being (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012).

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‘where hegel meets the chinese gulls’ a­ ssimilate White to Heidegger, my discussion here is part of a larger project aimed at the mapping of the landscape of a kind of topographical thinking to which I would argue both White and Heidegger can be said to belong (talk of ‘topographical thinking’ deliberately harks back to Immanuel Kant’s characterisation of himself as a ‘geographer of reason’,11 but also draws on Heidegger’s identification of his own thinking as taking the form of a ‘topology of being’12). The affinities between White and Heidegger are thus the affinities that come from being situated within the same or neighbouring territories (neighbouring ‘fields’ as White puts it) – an affinity, essentially, of place. In fact, it is this latter concept – place or topos – that is the key term that underpins the focus on world, and without which the concept of world cannot properly be elucidated. Perhaps one might say that I therefore read White’s geopoetics as also a topopoetics. In the focus on topos, it is place that is brought to the fore, and it is place that seems to me to be a central notion in White’s poetic thinking. The core of this essay is thus an exploration of White’s thinking as essentially a thinking of place, but a thinking that is also not apart from poetry – not apart from a close and careful listening and saying. It is also an attempt to delineate the place of White’s own thinking – perhaps a delineation of the ‘white field’ itself. It is a place found on that 11 See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood, The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), A760/B 788; see also Jeff Malpas and Karsten Thiel, ‘Kant’s Geography of Reason’, in Stuart Elden and Eduardo Mendieta (eds), Kant’s Geography (New York: SUNY Press, 2011), pp. 195–214. 12 ‘Seminar in Le Thor 1969’, in Martin Heidegger, Four Seminars, trans. Andrew J. Mitchell and François Raffoul (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), p. 47; see also Malpas, Heidegger’s Topology, the whole of which is an attempt to explicate the topology at issue.

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the fundamental field ‘empty shore’ between ‘Hegel and the Chinese gulls’ – an intermediate and open space between traditions, even as it is also grounded in a tradition of its own; between cultures, even though it shapes its own culture; between thinkers and between realms, even as it also draws out its own thought, evokes its own realm.

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Second Sighting: Placing Thinking

Heidegger famously writes about the locatedness of his thinking in a particular place: a two-room wooden hut on the hillside at Todtnauberg in the Black Forest.13 No less clearly, and in some ways even more directly, Nietzsche ties his thinking to place, and to very specific places: most obviously Sils Maria, high on the Engadine plateau in the Swiss mountains, but also Turin, Genoa, Nice and, es­pecially, Venice.14 Something similar can also be said of a host of other philosophers, poets and artists – including many of those already cited above – from Cézanne, grounded in the countryside of Provence (named by Heidegger as his own second homeland), to Hölderlin (perhaps the pre-eminent German ‘poet of place’), as well as Albert Camus, René Char and even Montaigne, another thinker who looms large in White’s personal pantheon. The origin of White’s work in the places in which he has lived, worked and travelled, most notably the mountainous landscape of the Pyrenees (the focus of White’s first major work, Letters from 13 See Martin Heidegger, ‘Why Do I Stay in the Provinces?’, in Thomas Sheehan (ed.), Heidegger: The Man and The Thinker (Chicago: Precedent, 1981), pp. 27–30. See also White’s short poem ‘Black Forest – Heidegger at Home’, in Open World. The Collected Poems 1960–2000 (Edinburgh: Polygon, 2003), p. 92, and my discussion in ‘Heidegger in Benjamin’s City’, in Heidegger and the Thinking of Place, pp. 225–35. For an in-depth study of the hut, see Adam Scharr, Heidegger’s Hut (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006). 14 See Jeff Malpas, ‘We Hyperboreans: Notes Towards a Nietz­schean Topography’, in Julian Young (ed.), Nietzsche: Individual and ­ Community (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 195–213.

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the fundamental field Gourgounel 15) and, latterly, the often wild Breton coast (‘this north coast of Brittany where I now live, work and have my being’16) is something to which he himself returns on many occasions in his writing. The very room in which White works, a room that connects to a library underneath, and might be thought to be an extension of it (the thinking and writing done above being founded on the materials held in the library below), is explicitly invoked in some of White’s writing.17 But beyond that, the building of which the room is part, the land on which it sits, the place itself, and the places around that place, from the fields and towns to the coast and sea, appear throughout his work.18 Where else can thinking – or writing – begin other than in the places in which we always already find ourselves? Not only do those places provide the physical support and susten­ ance that makes human thinking possible, but those places also provide the stimulus to thought and the very stuff of thinking. In White’s case, the room in which he writes is filled with a collection of books, maps, charts and documents, as well as objects and curiosities from around the world,19 that make up a magpie’s next of materials out of which thinking and writing can be made. In its setting within the Breton landscape, so too does that room – White’s workplace (and his homeplace with it) – open up to an even wider body of materials for thought, and through that landscape, opens to a horizon that in turn opens out to the world. Thinking 15 Letters from Gourgounel (London: Jonathan Cape, 1966). 16 ‘The Complex Field’, in The Wanderer and His Charts, p. 147. 17 Most notably so in ‘An Atlantic Studio’, in House of Tides: Letters from Brittany and Other Lands of the West (Edinburgh: Polygon, 2000), pp. 43–50. 18 It is a particular focus in House of Tides. 19 ‘Along the Atlantic Coast’, in The Wanderer and His Charts, p. 122.

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‘where hegel meets the chinese gulls’ is thus grounded no less in what is without than in what is within. If White sometimes identifies himself with those Celtic monks, sequestered away on the rocky coasts of Alba and Hibernia – Scotland and Ireland – it is not because he admires their studious isolation from the world, but because of the way they exemplify a mode of life that is turned to the world in and through the solitude of thought. Thinking, it is sometimes said, is without a place – atopos20 – but it is far better to say that thinking is always turned to the world out of its own place. It cannot forget that place, or at least, if it does, then it risks losing its proper ground, losing its footing, slipping into an empty meaninglessness. This beginning of thinking in place is itself tied to what might be thought of as a certain solitariness that belongs to thinking. Such solitariness is clearly discernible in White’s case – and is so in spite of the fact that White’s life and thought have developed in the company of his wife, also his translator, Marie-Claude, and even though he is clearly nested within a wider community of thinkers, writers and makers in Brittany, in Scotland and in other parts of the world. The solitariness that belongs to thinking is not a matter of some sort of selfish isolation, nor does it entail any failure of communality (genuine community is surely a 20 As Hannah Arendt seems to suggest – see The Life of the Mind (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977), vol. 1, pp. 197–216. Arendt’s position is complicated, however, and, in the final analysis, perhaps not so far removed from the position described here (see my discussion of Arendt’s position in In the Brightness of Place, chapter 10). White himself makes use of the word atopia (e.g. in ‘The Complex Field’, in The Wanderer and His Charts, p. 144), but in a different sense from Arendt. First, in deliberate contrast to the idealistic projections of utopia, and second, as a locality outside localism – this sense of the atopic is directly connected to White’s emphasis on place as it stands in relation to world.

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the fundamental field belonging together of those who are also solitary21). Instead it involves a recognition and awareness of one’s thinking as essentially one’s own – as that which one must undertake by and for oneself and that for which one is alone responsible – and so too a recognition and awareness of one’s being as oneself. Such recognition and awareness require attentiveness to one’s own apartness and relatedness – an apartness and relatedness that encompass both others and the world (as Char writes of poetry, ‘[it] is the loneliness without distance amid the busyness of all’22) – which means an attentiveness to one’s own singular placedness. It is in this way that we should understand White’s emphasis on the role of a certain ‘Cartesian’ starting point to his thinking.23 To refer to Descartes in a context in which Heidegger has already been so strongly invoked might seem odd (although less so when one recalls the connection, of which White is well aware,24 between Descartes’s project and Husserl’s phenomenological explorations). Yet Descartes is indeed significant here and precisely because he stands as the figure who marks out a path of thinking that, wherever else it may end up in the course of modernity, begins with the questioning of the self, and so with the questioning of one’s own place in the world. In beginning 21 See Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural, trans. Robert D. Richard­ son and Anne E. O’Byrne (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). 22 ‘La poésie est la solitude sans distance parmi l’affairement de tous’ – René Char, Oeuvres completes (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1983), p. 742. 23 See Kenneth White, ‘An Overview of Cultural History’, in Ideas of Order at Cape Wrath (Aberdeen: Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies, 2013), p. 8. 24 See e.g. ‘The Findhorn Letter’, in Ideas of Order at Cape Wrath, pp. 135–6.

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‘where hegel meets the chinese gulls’ thus, Descartes’s thinking brings us back to that point which is, perhaps, the only genuine starting-point from which thinking can begin. If there is a potential for misunderstanding here, it is to suppose that in beginning with the self we begin with something already known – with the self as if it were indeed a subjectum, an hypokeimenon, an already given and determined principle and ground. However, if we read Descartes as White implicitly suggests (which is not quite the same as the manner in which Descartes often appears in Heidegger – especially in that seemingly most anti-­Cartesian work, Being and Time), then the manner of Descartes’s beginning is precisely with the self as opening up a space for questioning and enquiry, rather than as already foreclosing it. Thus White can write that it is ‘only with the thinker in isolation, the thinker in search of knowledge . . . that a new beginning can be made’,25 and that is indeed the new beginning that Descartes attempts, as well as Husserl. Here a path opens that leads from egopoetics to geo­poetics – from self to world. Place is directly implicated here, since the very character of the self as self is inseparable from the self as placed, and as it stands in relation to place.26 In its being-placed the self is also opened up to the world – and it is precisely the mode of being-in-place of the self, such that place becomes an issue for the self in virtue of its being-of that place, that such an opening to the world occurs. Moreover, place is that which relates, but only as it also separates; it is that which separates, but only as it also relates. Such relating-separating, and the

25 ‘An Overview of Cultural History’, in Ideas of Order at Cape Wrath, p. 7. 26 This is the key idea in my Place and Experience: A Philosophical ­Topography (2nd edn, Abingdon: Routledge, 2018).

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the fundamental field bounded openness that it presupposes, is part of the spatiality of place, and so part of the openness that extends back to the self and out to the world, in the same way as the dynamic character of that relating-separating, and its vibrating dimensionality belongs to place’s essential tempor­ality (relating and separating being understood, not primarily as states, but as modes of emergence, of unfolding, of coming to presence).27 Thinking can thus be said to arise as a response to the questionability, the dynamic openness and indeterminacy, of our placed being in the world. Moreover, in being so placed, we are not in the world in some general­ ised fashion – as if we were everywhere or nowhere – but always in some place, and in being there, we find ourselves already given over to a situation to which we must respond, a situation in which our own being is already at issue. The solitariness of thinking, which is the very solitariness of existence, is evident in the work of every thinker and writer – but evident in a superlative fashion in those who are most given over to such thinking and writing and so to a reflective engagement in and with it. Thinking is in­ extricably tied to such solitariness, is a response to it, and an articulation of it (it also requires it – as it requires a certain free and open space in which to find itself). In White’s work, the solitariness at issue here is especially evident in the uncompromisingly personal tone of his writing. The thinking and writing that White undertakes are not some abstract, distanced form of analysis, but are always given in his own voice, through his own situatedness, from out of his own place – and that remains so in spite of the other thinkers 27 See Jeff Malpas, ‘Putting Space in Place: Relational Geography and Philosophical Topography’, Planning and Environment D: Space and Society, 30 (2012), pp. 226–42.

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‘where hegel meets the chinese gulls’ and writers whose company White so often invokes. ‘In the philosopher’, Nietzsche famously writes in Beyond Good and Evil, ‘there is nothing whatever that is impersonal; and above all, his morality bears decided and decisive witness to who he is’.28 White’s work is suffused with his own presence – his work (and the morality, or, better, the ethics carried within it) bears clear witness to who he is. White’s own references to the ‘white world’, and his frequent play on ‘white’ and ‘whiteness’,29 are an indication of the extremity to which his work is decisively personal, decisively his own, even as it goes beyond the personal alone. Indeed, it is because White is so clearly and personally present in his work that it can have the interpersonal force and character that it does. Writing of René Char, Maurice Blanchot speaks of the solitariness of the poet as ‘a walking fire, a branch of the primal sun shining shadowless into the dark. “Under the concordant supremacy of a wonder common to all, individual destiny fulfils itself all the way to solitude, to the oracular”. – The oracle is the future’s only loneliness.’30 The personal character of his work is something White himself acknowledges, although in terms of the ‘individual’ rather than the ‘personal’ as such. He writes: My stance may seem highly individualistic. It is. I submit that it’s with individuals (individuals who have concentrated in their work-field the maximum of general energies and elements) that the really significant developments 28 Beyond Good and Evil, trans. W. Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1966), §6. 29 See ‘Into the White World’, in Kenneth White, On Scottish Ground; first published as Approches du monde blanc (Paris: Éditions du Nouveau Commerce, 1976). 30 Maurice Blanchot, in Maurice Blanchot et al., René Char’s Poetry (Rome: Editions de Luca, 1956), p. 22.

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the fundamental field begin. It’s the individual who has taken the time and the pains to develop his/her life and thought who has in the long run, on the long view, in the last analysis, the most to offer society in general.31

The explicitly ‘individual’ character of White’s writing and thinking – their ‘personal’ character as I have put it here – undoubtedly goes against the grain of most contemporary writing and thinking. It clearly irritates some who see it as a source of pretension – as egoistic and even narcissistic.32 But this is to misunderstand the character of White’s work, and perhaps also the style of thinking that it exemplifies. White’s work is founded in the same insistence on the individual voice that is evident in Nietzsche (an insistence that, in Nietzsche, leads to an apparent emphasis on the individual ‘genius’ as taking precedence over the wider society) – the same individual voice that is evident in so many of the thinkers on whom White himself draws. This emphasis on the individual voice may be said to follow directly from 31 ‘The White Bag of Books’, in The Wanderer and His Charts, p. 178. White has himself acknowledged the charge of egoism: ‘Ego-­ centered? Yes, of course, on what else would you want to focus? One has to focus on the ego, concentrate on it, and move across it to enter the open field. Without this, one becomes caught up in all sorts of camouflaged egoism.’ White, Les Limbes incandescent (Paris: Denoël, 1976), p. 114. 32 The most extreme version of this reaction undoubtedly being James Kelman, ‘There is a first-order radical thinker of European standing such that he exists: or, tantalising twinkles’, in And the Judges Said . . . : Essays (Edinburgh: Polygon, 2002), pp. 187–93. Ironically, Kelman’s parodic critique seems expressive of a form of intellectual self-­certainty that is no less problematic than any pretension to be found in White. For a more sympathetic, though still not uncritical view, see the discussion in Lesley Graham, ‘Kenneth White’s Essays: Cartography Grounded in Self/Une cartographie très personnelle: les essais de Kenneth White’, Études écossaises, 14 (2011), pp. 217–25.

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‘where hegel meets the chinese gulls’ White’s poetic stance (is not the poet always present in the poem?), but it is not a function of that stance alone. It is directly tied to the character of thinking as indeed arising out of its own placedness – its own singular being in the world – and as a response to it. In White’s words, ‘thought is always connected to sensed space, a lived existence’.33 What is at issue in White’s thinking is thus White’s own existence, White’s own life, and it is no surprise to find that life so powerfully and explicitly addressed in White’s work: ‘It’s a strange life, this life of mine, full of ups and downs, distance and silence, refusing to separate, for the sake of some facile unity, the near and the far, the sublime and the grotesque, the self and the not-self, the human and the non-human’.34

33 The Wanderer and His Charts, p. viii. 34 ‘Letter from the Pyrenees’, in The Wanderer and His Charts, p. 41.

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Third Sighting: Narrative and Place

The centrality of White’s presence in his work is not mitigated by White’s very occasional tendency to refer to himself in the third person (as, for instance, ‘our Scottishborn intellectual nomad’35), even though it may serve to placate some of those English readers who find White’s personal voice discomfiting. If anything, such oblique selfreference is reinforcing, in a certain sense ‘doubling’ White’s presence – White appearing as if he were the main character in an ongoing narrative and, at the same time, its narrator. That there is a personal narrative here seems clear enough, regardless of whether it is given in the first or the third person. Indeed, one might view thinking as itself a kind of narration, just as narration is a kind of thinking. Yet it is not just any narrative that appears in White’s writing – the narrative he recounts, the thinking he sets before us, is a narrative that can only be White’s own, even though it is a narrative that speaks to more than White’s own personal situation, that speaks to and of the world. Although White has written about narrative, he has offered little analysis of it – and he has also been highly critical of the current fashion for stories and ‘storytelling’.36 Indeed, White is suspicious, like Plato, of the story – mûthos in Greek – as a promoter of falsehood,37 and of the tendency for us 35 On Scottish Ground, pp. 120–1. 36 White has written on narrative at many places in his work: see, for instance, ‘Reflections on a Logbook’ and ‘Writing the Road’, both in The Wanderer and His Charts, and ‘The Nature of Radical Writing’, in Ideas of Order at Cape Wrath. 37 See Plato, The Republic, trans. Paul Shorey, Bk II, 377, in Edith

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‘where hegel meets the chinese gulls’ to become enmeshed by the seductive power of story and our own mythmaking. But if we keep to the term ‘narrative’ rather than merely ‘story’, then we might note that, etymologically, ‘narrative’ has the same root as ‘knowledge’ – both come from the Proto-Indo-European ‘gnō-’. The story is thus, one might say, a mode of knowledge, perhaps even the proper place in which knowledge is held, nurtured and passed on. Certainly, White’s own writing is full of narratives (just as Plato’s is also full of ‘myths’38) – both his own as well as the narratives of those whom he invokes as travellers on the same path; narratives that are grounded in the places about which White writes, tracing out their contours and direction, following the passages that run in and through them, exploring their clearings and their shadows, and looking always to the larger world to which they open. The very idea of narrative carries an important connection to place. Places are given shape and identity through the narratives that belong to them, although since narratives, or perhaps we should say ‘stories’, grow around places like weeds in an untended garden, so one must take care to attend to the differences between narratives, and to the possibility that some have merely a superficial connection to the places, and so also the lives, with which they are associated. The narratives that matter cannot be mere inventions or fancies but must rather be integral to and constitutive of that to which they also belong – in much the same way as a certain geology, ecology or topography are integral Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (eds), Plato: The Collected Dialogues, Bollingen Series LXXI (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963) – mûthos is there translated as ‘fable’. 38 There is a very large literature on the topic of ‘myth’ and story in Plato – as a starting point, see Catalin Partenie (ed.), Plato’s Myths (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

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the fundamental field to and constitutive of a locality or region. The narratives that belong to a place – or a life – are thus part of its very fabric and structure, and coming to know and understand that place is thus a matter of differentiating between the narratives that belong to it, that are written into its tracks and contours, from those that are impositions upon it. If the narrative is indeed the place of knowledge – that in which it finds a home – it cannot, nonetheless, be taken for granted. A similar sense of narrative (although not so directly connected to place39) is to be found in the work of the hermeneuticist Paul Ricoeur. Although he is less focused on place as a key concept, Ricoeur develops an account of narrative, in much the same sense as is at issue here, as constituting a fundamental mode – perhaps the fundamental mode – of understanding, and as central to the structure of human identity.40 There is, of course, a common tendency – expressed to some extent in Louis Mink’s famous claim that stories are not lived, but told41 – to suppose that narratives are always subjective constructs produced by a storyteller. But this is already to adopt a very particular view of the nature of narrative, on that might be said to mistakenly assimilate narrative to mere story, and that in doing so treats narrative as always secondary to what it is about, as exhausted by its role as essentially a mode of representation. What is at issue 39 Although see his comments in Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), where Ed Casey’s influence is clearly evident (and acknowledged by Ricoeur, notably pp. 37–43, and also p. 149), and where place therefore also appears. 40 See Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 3 vols, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984, 1985, 1988). 41 Louis Mink, Historical Understanding (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), p. 60.

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‘where hegel meets the chinese gulls’ here, however, is precisely a concept of narrative that is not merely representational – even though it may be given as a representation – but is rather ontological (something especially clear in Ricoeur’s account). On this rather different conception, narrative is exemplified not merely by the structure of our recounting, but by a structure and form that belong to that to which the narrative belongs – which is why the narrative does indeed belong rather than being merely imposed. Narration is the means by which place and self are shaped and understood – it is because places and selves are constituted in and through narratives that they can be understood by means of narrative. It is also the case that such narration never involves place or self as taken separately, but always and only as they are brought together – as they belong originally together. Self-narration is thus always a narration of place, as place-narration is also always a narration of self – both individually and collectively. This does not mean that places are ‘subjectively’ constituted any more than they can be said to be constituted ‘objectively’; instead, places and selves appear together in intimate relation, each implicating the other, but neither reducible to the other.42 White’s work exemplifies the sort of narrative inter-articulation of place and self that is evident here – both in terms of the entanglement of his own writing with the places to which that

42 The nature of this inter-relation is something explored in more detail throughout my Place and Experience, as well as in Heidegger’s Topology – in the latter, the issue is examined specifically in relation to Heidegger’s concept of the ‘Fourfold’, in which mortals, divinities, earth and sky stand in an essential and inextricable relation to one another. It is important to recognise the distinction between place as a fundamental ontological structure (that which grounds all and any appearings, including the appearing of specific selves and places) and individual places – see Place and Experience, pp. 202–3.

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the fundamental field writing belongs, and in terms of the engagement with place that his writing explores. Such inter-articulation has the consequence that neither self nor place can be understood as possessed of some self-same identity that is independent of the other, and this means that the narration of self and of place must remain always incomplete, always indeterminate, always in question. Self and place are thus essentially open and dynamic structures – each both shaping and shaped by the other; each given over to a constant interplay that always implicates other selves and other places; each taken up in that larger event that is the happening of world. The mutual shaping of self and place as that occurs in narrative reflects the role of narrative in the shaping of identity as such. Narrative is a fundamental mode of connection – again something especially evident in Ricoeur – and especially of that form of connection that enables both differentiation and unity. Of unity itself, White comments that ‘[it] is not something given, to be taken for granted, it has to be composed’.43 I take this take to indicate the character of unity as always something to be worked out (which means that unity is always active and founded in activity), and not merely this, but as also always complex – unity is thus never the unity of simple homogeneity or numerical singularity (even though the latter conception is all too often the one that tends to be assumed). This is something of which both Aristotle and Kant were well aware – it is partly why, for Aristotle, the paradigmatic unity is that of the living organism, whose very form is given in activity,44 and why, 43 ‘Along the Atlantic Coast’, in The Wanderer and His Charts, p. 123. 44 See Aristotle, On the Soul, esp. Bk II, chapter 1, in Jonathan Barnes (ed.), The Complete Works of Aristotle. The Revised Oxford Translation, Vol. 2, Bollingen Series LXXI (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984).

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‘where hegel meets the chinese gulls’ for Kant, the ground for the unity of experience is to be found in the pure activity that is at the heart of what he calls the transcendental schematism.45 Places exemplify the sort of complex and dynamic unity that is at issue here – indeed, this unity is itself essentially topological or topographical in character. It is a unity that I have elsewhere tried to elucidate using the example of old-fashioned topographical surveying in which the unity of a certain domain or region is given through the interconnection between the locations that lie within it (interconnections established through triangulation and traverse). The identity of each location is thus dependent on its interconnection within the larger unity of the region, as the identity of the region is dependent on its articulation through the multiplicity of locations.46 In White’s case, the identity and unity of the places that figure in his writings, from Gourgounel to Glasgow, from the Saint Lawrence River to Finisterre, have the same character as being worked out through the drawing of multiple connections – connections that are made evident through the connections of those places to White himself, to the lives of those he encounters, and through the connections that are made within and between those places.

45 See ‘On the schematism of the pure concepts of the understanding’, in Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A137/B176–A147/B187. The schemat­ism is a special point of focus for Heidegger’s analysis of Kant’s project as developed in Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. Richard Taft (Bloomington: Indian University Press, 1997), part III, pp. 89–142. 46 See Malpas, Place and Experience, pp. 37–9.

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Fourth Sighting: The Dynamics of Place

To connect is also to move – to move between and among. If narrative is a connecting, then it is also a moving, and so the most basic form of narrative is the narrative of movement, especially the narrative of the passage through, across and between. It is thus that the earliest stories are so often stories of journeying – whether of gods, heroes or other travellers – and the traveller’s tale would itself seem to be the original precursor to the modern novel. Of his own work, or of a certain vision of that work, White writes that it is ‘a practice, an activity. . . which consists in moving about in place (space and time) and trying to say what one is aware of around oneself. . . .’47 Such movement is evident in the style of White’s writing – in its dynamic, active, mobile character – as well as White’s focus on journeys and journeying as a key element in his work (and not only in his travel writings). The narrative element in White’s work can be discerned in this very emphasis on movement. Yet movement always presupposes free space, room (Raum in German) – such space being precisely space for movement – space that itself belongs to and arises out of the openness of place. As movement is also, first and foremost, change in or of place, so place is invoked by the very idea of movement. The connection between place and narrative is thus mirrored by the connection between place and movement. The connection is a close one: movement requires place as

47 ‘The Complex Field’, in The Wanderer and His Charts, p. 144. White adds: ‘But what is this place, and what is that “self ”?’

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‘where hegel meets the chinese gulls’ its essential precondition; place, in its turn, is articulated and accessed, at the most basic level, through movement. There is a common tendency to think of place and places as essentially unmoving – an idea perhaps given clearest expression in the thinking associated with the ‘method of loci’ that is part of the art of memory (the ars memorativa).48 In this case, memory, which otherwise seems prone to uncertainty and loss, is apparently given fixity precisely through the associ­ation of memory with place: what is to be remembered is identified with a particular location, or object within that location, within a larger system of locations – the system usually taking the form of an imagined building (a palace or cathedral) that holds many locations within a single plan. Yet despite the way the method of loci is often understood, places themselves are characterised more by their dynamic rather than their static character. This is evident even within the method of loci, in which it is precisely the interconnection between locations, accessed only by means of movement between them, that is the key to the method as the basis for the art of memory. Thus, the system of locations is an interconnected system that is activated only through the practitioner’s engagement within that system – which is to say through movement between those locations (whether real or imagined). It is, indeed, through movement, or the capacity for movement, that place is known, and by means of which any engagement with place is possible (it is also the means by which place itself appears as place). This is not only evident 48 For more on this topic see Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966) – see also the discussion of this in Jeff Malpas, ‘The Remembrance of Place’, in Azucena Cruz-Pierre and Don Landes (eds), The Voice of Place: Essays and Interviews Exploring the Work of Edward S. Casey (London: Continuum, 2013), pp. 63–72.

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the fundamental field from the way in which the topographical surveyor depends on triangulation and traverse across a landscape as the means by which the landscape is mapped, but, at a more basic level, through the way in which orientation depends on being able to move oneself within and in relation to that place. We find ourselves in place not by simply remaining in one place, but by engaging with that place, by connecting the place to ourselves, which means, in the first instance, to our bodies, and by connecting that place to other places. Such engagement and connection are fundamentally based in movement and the capacity for movement. Of course, movement itself requires orientation (that is, if it is not to be mere movement – uncoordinated and undirected), but this does not detract from the role of movement, and the capacity for movement, in making possible orientation, and so as basic to any form of genuine placedness. The general connection between movement and orientation that is evident here carries over into the character of thinking. Kant famously makes a connection between bodily and spatial orientation, and orientation in thinking.49 Undoubtedly there is a connection here, and it is tied, at least in part, to thinking as itself requiring a certain space and time that belong to it – something that Kant also takes up in the first Critique, through the discussion of the role of space in representation,50 and elsewhere, through a notion of the ‘public’ as it operates in the ‘common sense’ that is at work 49 Immanuel Kant, ‘What does it mean to orient oneself in thinking’, in Religion and Rational Theology, ed. A. Wood and G. Di Giovanni, The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 1–18. 50 See Malpas and Günter Zöller, ‘Reading Kant Geographically: From Critical Philosophy to Empirical Geography’, in Roxana Baiasu, Graham Bird and A. W. Moore (eds), Contemporary Kantian

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‘where hegel meets the chinese gulls’ in aesthetic judgement51 as well as in relation to the use of reason more broadly.52 The connection between thinking and spatiality is evident in the character of narrative. It is also an important element in the solitariness of thinking. In such solitariness there is an essential apartness, which is of necessity also a spatial apartness, that appears as an essential element in the character of thinking. The role of spatiality in thinking is also evident in the way in which thinking is tied to the experience of a certain sort of openness – an openness that appears in terms of the experience of both ‘interiority’ as well as ‘exteriority’ (which can in turn be tied back to the experience of solitariness). The way thinking opens up an ‘inner’ space of the self that contrast with an ‘outer’ space of the wider world is an essential element in the possibility of thought. Although this contrast has often been misconstrued in ways that have given rise to many problematic tendencies within the history of philosophy, it cannot be abandoned or ignored. Only because thinking does indeed open up in this way, only because it does entail a certain sense of apartness and separation, can it engage reflectively with itself and with its objects. Heidegger writes that ‘In the poetry of the poet, and in the thinking of the thinker, there is always so much world-space to spare that each and every thing – a Metaphysics: New Essays on Space and Time (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 146–66. 51 See Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews, The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), §§18–22 and §40, pp. 121–4 and 173–6. 52 Of special importance in the essay ‘An answer to the question: what is enlightenment? (1784)’, in Immanuel Kant, Practical Philosophy, trans. Mary J. Gregor, The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 11–22.

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the fundamental field tree, a mountain, a house, the call of a bird – completely loses its indifference and familiarity’.53 The freeing-up of things to which Heidegger draws attention is a more radical version of the same opening – the same setting apart, in relation to self and to thing, that is also a form of bringing close – that characterises all thinking, and that is part of the character of thinking as not only an unfolding, a temporalising, but, as an opening, also a spatialising (and as it is both so it is also genuinely topological – space and time standing in an essential relation to place, and neither being reducible to exclusively physical concepts54). In the work of a thinker such as White – or, indeed, Heidegger – such spatialising or opening-up itself becomes part of that to which thinking must directed. Thinking becomes both an enactment and an exploration of the very space and place in which it arises and to which it gives rise. ‘How to inaugurate and develop a new thinking-in-the-territory (implicated in it, not imposed upon it)?’, asks White, and he answers: ‘Maybe thought can be like a landscape – with fields and running waters (fluid concepts). A landscape-mindscape. That’s maybe what we could map our way towards’55 – towards

53 Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 28. 54 See Malpas, ‘Putting Space in Place’. It is important to note that the spatialisation at issue here – the spatialisation/temporalisation that is properly topological – is distinct from that other spatialisation that is characteristic of technological modernity and in which both time and place are lost in the anonymous and boundless spatialised extension of network and flow. The latter form of spatialisation is discussed in the final chapter of Place and Experience (2nd edn), pp. 200–9. 55 ‘Meditation in Winter’, in The Wanderer and His Charts, p. 63. Notice the emphasis here on thinking that is ‘implicated in’ and not ‘imposed upon’ – a similar point to that at issue in the discussion of narrative above.

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‘where hegel meets the chinese gulls’ what looks very close to a genuine ‘topology’ of thinking as well as a ‘thinking’ topology. The connection of thinking to spatiality and to movement takes on a particular character in Nietzsche’s thinking – not only through his own explicit thematisation of certain places and landscapes, but in his connecting of thinking and writing to bodily movement, especially to walking (‘Give no credence to any thought that was not born outdoors while one moved about freely’56) and in his seemingly unsettled lifestyle following his resignation of his university post at Basel. The very epigrammatic style of Nietzsche’s thought also epitomises its active and dynamic character. White’s biography may exhibit a more settled mode of life than Nietzsche’s, and his work is expressed in the poem and essay rather than the epigram, and yet it is, as should already be clear, no less active or dynamic. ‘Live thought’, White writes, ‘is erratic and erotic in its nature, full of tentative explanations and existential energy, and the essay-form proceeds by a series of intellectual sensations and logical leaps’.57 This emphasis on activity and movement, and so also on spatiality, as vital characteristics of thought feeds directly into White’s characterisation of his thinking, using a notion that Gilles Deleuze also uses specifically in relation to Nietzsche,58 as ‘nomadic’. The nomadic is a key concept in White’s thinking, drawing together several important elements: the use of multiple authors and sources;

56 Ecce Homo, in Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals/Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1989), pp. 239–40. 57 The Wanderer and His Charts, p. vii. 58 See Gilles Deleuze, ‘Nomad Thought’, in David B. Allison (ed.), The New Nietzsche: Contemporary Styles of Interpretation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), pp. 142–9.

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the fundamental field the engagement across traditions and cultures; the active and mobile character of thought; the very openness of world. It is also, of course, a concept that immediately implicates notions of place and the topological, since the nomad is precisely one who is defined by a relation to place, and by the character of that relation. Although the nomadism to be found in White can indeed be compared to a similar nomadic quality in Nietzsche, it is nevertheless quite distinct from the idea of ‘nomad thinking’ that appears in Deleuze’s work – and remains so in spite of Deleuze’s own invocation of Nietzsche in this regard. Writing of Deleuze and Guattari, as well as Baudrillard, White comments: ‘concerned with flight from constrictions, stifling enclosures, and with a line of flight anxious only to flee further and further, beyond all emplacement, into a dimensionless abstract, they are like men who leave a motel to hop onto a jet’.59 Part of what is at issue here is Deleuze and Guattari’s seeming inattention to – one might even say their refusal of – any sense of the proper role to be accorded to the idea of the bounded in the thinking of place or of space, and so also, one might add, any real sense of place or of the open. Instead, the focus is on the move beyond any notion of boundedness (even of horizon) into a space, if it be that, of seemingly endless transmission, transformation and flow.60 Moreover, although often cited as theorists of space and place, the nomadism that one finds in Deleuze and Guattari actually has little to do with any notion of

59 ‘Elements of a New Cartography’, in The Wanderer and His Charts, pp. 164–5. 60 This flight into ‘a dimensionless abstract’ seems to have become characteristic of much contemporary theory – see Malpas, ‘Putting Space in Place’.

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‘where hegel meets the chinese gulls’ the spatial or the topographic except in a metaphorical or figurative sense61 – spatial and topographic ideas and images are deployed, but neither space nor place, nor world either, is a primary focus of enquiry. The focus of Deleuze and Guattari is almost entirely political (that is, it pays little or no attention to ideas and images beyond their political effects), and the ‘nomadic’ becomes, in Deleuze’s writings, little more than a trope designed to epitomise a particular form of political resistance and refusal. In spite of having been an examiner of White’s doctoral thesis, Deleuze seems relatively insensitive to the substantive differences between his own position and White’s. When, in collaboration with Félix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaux, Deleuze briefly discusses White’s use of the language of the nomadic, it is not to identify any differences in relation to nomadism itself but seems instead to be aimed at advancing a purely political critique of what might otherwise be thought of as White’s Celticism and eclecticism – specifically his combining of elements from both Western and Eastern traditions. Deleuze and Guattari talk of how, in White’s work, ‘this strange composite, the marriage of the Celt and the Orient, inspires a properly nomad thought that sweeps up English literature and constitutes American literature’. They then add:

61 Although a feature of A Thousand Plateaux, this metaphoric deployment of the spatial and topographic is also evident in their treatment of Nietzsche – see Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchill (London: Verso, 1994) – and is given particular emphasis in Stephan Günzel’s development of this theme in his Geophilosophie: Nietzsches philosophische ­Geo­graphie (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2001). See also Stephan Günzel, ‘­Nietzsche’s Geo­ philosophie’, Journal of Nietzsche Studies, 25 (2003), pp. 103–16.

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the fundamental field We immediately see the dangers, the profound ambiguities accompanying this enterprise, as if each effort and each creation faced a possible infamy. For what can be done to prevent the theme of a race from turning into a racism, a dominant and all-encompassing fascism, or into a sect and a folklore, microfascisms? And what can be done to prevent the oriental pole from becoming a phantasy that reactivates all the fascisms in a different way, and also all the folklores, yoga, Zen, and karate? It is certainly not enough to travel to escape phantasy, and it is certainly not by invoking a past, real or mythical, that one avoids racism.62

One might note that neither is it enough to ask r­hetorical questions to engage critically, and it is certainly not by merely invoking a danger that one shows a position to be vulnerable to it. The criticism that Deleuze and Guattari advance against White in this passage is so general and so disconnected from White’s own work as to be almost irrelevant. White makes no use of the language of race at all – his references to the ‘Celtic’ cannot be read in racial terms without considerable additional evidence and argument (which is conspicuously absent), and there is nothing to support the idea that his references to Eastern thought are indicative of some sort of Orientalism – even less can one see how a commitment to fascism might be taken to be suggested by White’s writings. Nevertheless, what Deleuze and Guattari’s response to White exemplifies is a tendency that is not restricted to Deleuze and Guattari but that seems to come all too easily, and all too frequently, in response to any attempt to take up the placed character of thinking.

62 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaux: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Bloomsbury, 2004), p. 379.

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‘where hegel meets the chinese gulls’ The way White draws upon ideas of the ‘Celtic’ – as well as of the Northern and the Atlantic – bears comparison with Nietzsche’s opposition of the ‘Southern’ with the ‘Northern’, in Nietzsche’s case meaning, primarily, the ‘Prussian’, or Albert Camus’s use of the idea of the ‘Mediterranean’ as contrasted with the ‘European’.63 Here thinking is directly tied to a place or a region – in Nietzsche and Camus’s case, in a way that is also polemical and oppositional. Although seldom directed in the same way at Nietzsche (perhaps surprisingly), thinkers who connect thinking to a place or region in this way are often the target for exactly the sort of critique that Deleuze and Guattari direct at White. This is especially so in the case of Camus, whose work has often been attacked for its supposedly implicit colonialist and racist biases, and whose emphasis on a Mediterranean sensibility (also present in the work of his close friend René Char) is frequently seen as exclusionary and parochial.64 Yet although it might be argued that there are complications in Camus’s case (arising largely from his own Algerian background), it is by no means obvious that the connecting of a certain character or quality of thinking to a place or a region, whether in White, Nietzsche, Camus, or others, is 63 See Albert Camus, ‘The New Mediterranean Culture’, in Neil Foxlee, Albert Camus’s ‘The New Mediterranean Culture’: A Text and Its Contexts (Bern: Peter Lang, 2010), pp. 38–49 (annotated translation); see also Albert Camus, ‘Helen’s Exile’, in The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983), pp. 185–92. 64 See especially Conor Cruise O’Brien, ‘Camus, Algeria, and “The Fall”’, New York Review of Books (9 October 1969), pp. 6, 8, 10–12. Many of the issues at stake here, as well as the broader context in which they appear, are addressed by Foxlee in Albert Camus’s ‘The New Mediterranean Culture’.

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the fundamental field indeed such as generally to warrant accusations of parochialism, implicit racism or fascism. In the case of Nietzsche and Camus, their appeal to notions of place and region is itself advanced, often quite explicitly, as a counter to certain forms of nationalist and racist sentiment. It can also be seen as part of an attempt to disrupt the usual ordering of things and to reorient thinking towards a different landscape – to shift the focus of attention from the centre and towards the margins. For Nietzsche, this means shifting attention from North to South, from the ‘German’ to the ‘European’; for Camus, from the ‘European’ to the ‘Mediterranean’ and the Southern; for White, it is a shift to the coast, to the far North (the ‘Hyperborean’), to the Atlantic, to the ‘Celtic fringe’ of Europe. It is noteworthy that for all three, whatever other landscapes they invoke (the mountain and high plateau in Nietzsche, for instance), the coastal is especially important – Nietzsche extols the virtues of Genoa and Venice; the very idea of the Mediterranean in Camus is the idea of a region of coast and island; White, of course, looks to the coasts of the Atlantic. The coastal is essentially marginal, liminal, a point of departure as well as meeting. The coastal and maritime is equally important in the southerly context that belongs, for instance, to Hone Tuwhare’s work (from which I quote briefly below) as well as my own.65 Situated as I am at another edge, in Tasmania, at the edge of the extreme South (the ‘Hyperaustrean’ perhaps), this focus on the margin is especially salient – and significant. The emphasis on the margin, the edge, the border is characteristic of precisely that mode of thinking that turns explicitly toward place. Such thinking is a thinking of, and 65 See ‘Place and Singularity’, in Jeff Malpas (ed.), The Intelligence of Place: Topographies and Poetics (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), p. 85.

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‘where hegel meets the chinese gulls’ typically at, the edge, since it is there, and not at the centre, that place most readily appears – indeed, the Greek tópos is itself tied to notions of surface and limit, and so this focus on the edge can be understood as already present in the very idea of place as such.66 White locates himself at the borders, not only through his location in Brittany, or in his focus on Scotland, but also through his intellectual location at the margins of contemporary intellectual culture, fitting into no ‘dominant paradigm’ and, like Nietzsche, aiming to unsettle existing trends and traditions: ‘Drifting, drifting . . . that’s the way it looks on the edges of our civilization. A drifting, a searching, beyond all the known grounds, for an other ground . . . an other ground: a space of being, an area of the mind; and the way(s) to it’.67 It is just this marginal space that is at issue in White’s invocation of the place ‘where Hegel meets the Chinese gulls’ – a place that is indeed marginal, as are all meeting points; a place that is uncertain and ambiguous; a place that is genuinely open. One of the great complications in any discussion of this matter is, of course, Heidegger himself. Heidegger connects his thinking with a place and region in a quite explicit fashion – not only does Heidegger himself talk of the rootedness of his thinking in the Alemannic-­Swabian countryside, but he also privileges the German and Greek languages as languages for thinking. Moreover, in ­Heidegger’s case, the charge that such place-oriented thinking is indeed tied to nationalism, as well as to racism and fascism, is frequently 66 The idea of the edge is an important focus (as noted earlier) in Ed Casey’s work – see his The World on Edge (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017) – while surface and limit loom large in my own work also. 67 Preface to Kenneth White, Travels in the Drifting Dawn (London: Penguin, 1990), p. 7.

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the fundamental field taken to be directly substantiated by Heidegger’s personal involvement with Nazism, as well as by the Nazis’ own apparent invocation of notions of place and belonging to place. Such connections have been seen by many to be confirmed by the often extreme comments in Heidegger’s Notebooks of the 1930s and 1940s.68 There is no doubt that Heidegger was attracted by what he saw as the revolutionary potential of National Socialism in the early 1930s, and that his thinking through much of the 1930s and into the 1940s was taken up by an obsessive and idiosyncratic thinking of the history of being inextricably bound to a sense of philosophical-national identity as expressed in the idea of a people, and especially the German people.69 But it would be a mistake simply to identify this thinking with Nazism and, indeed, Heidegger frequently takes issue with what he came to see as the superficiality of the politics of his time – including the politics of Nazism. Moreover, Heidegger’s thinking itself shifts, and a large part of that shift is bound up precisely with his attempt to think and rethink the placed character of thinking. Indeed, there is good reason to take his engagement with place as itself part of what moves him away from Nazism rather than closer to it. The increasing 68 See Martin Heidegger, Ponderings II–IV, Black Notebooks 1931–1938, trans. Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016); Ponderings V–VIII, Black Notebooks 1938–1939, trans. Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017); Ponderings XII–XV: Black Notebooks 1939–1941, trans. Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017); and Martin Heidegger, Anmerkungen I–V (Schwarze Hefte 1942–1948), ed. Peter Trawny (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2015). See also Ingo Farin and Jeff Malpas (eds), Reading Heidegger’s Black Notebooks 1931–1941 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015). 69 See Jeff Malpas, ‘Assessing the Significance of Heidegger’s Black Notebooks’, Geographica Helvetica, 73 (2018), pp. 109–14.

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‘where hegel meets the chinese gulls’ explication and elaboration of topographic notions in his thinking are indeed a feature of his thinking in the period after 1933–4, rather than before, reaching its clearest focus in his writings after the war, in the 1950s and 1960s, when his thinking takes on a calmer and clearer tone, in striking contrast to the obsessive extremism of the 1930s and 1940s.70 Heidegger’s own acknowledgement, explicit in the Notebooks, of the mistunings and misdirections in his earlier thinking is itself directly connected with the shift towards the direct engagement with the placed character of thought, and with the character of place itself. Significantly, the concept of place that emerges in ­Heidegger’s thinking, especially his late thinking, is not the idea of some homogenous and determinate ‘ground’ that underlies individual or collective identity, nor is the relation to place a matter of simple rootedness in a single unchanging locale. Instead, place is that which is both questionable and the very ground of questionability – it is that which encompasses unity as well as difference, limit as well as openness, movement as well as rest. The Fourfold (or Quadriparti, as White refers to it above) that appears in H ­ eidegger’s later writings is thus an essentially relational structure that resists reduction to any single one of the elements that make it up, and that, through the gathering of elements, also allows the differentiation of those elements to be apparent. It is also a dynamic structure – Heidegger talks of it as a ‘dance’, a ‘roundelay’– it is the very opening of world as that occurs, necessarily, through the opening of place. Although White himself sometimes presents Heidegger as given over to residence rather than journeying,71 the 70 See Malpas, In the Brightness of Place, chapter 1. 71 See, for instance, White’s comments in ‘Elements of New

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the fundamental field Fourfold should not be understood as implying any purely sedentary mode of existence. Already, in his lectures on Hölderlin’s Der Ister, Heidegger talked of residence and journey as belonging essentially together – so the river is both locality (Ortschaft) and journeying (Wanderung).72 If we think of the river as itself that which has the capacity to gather, and so as the locus for the happening, the Fourfold, then the river makes evident the character of the Fourfold as that which enables both residence and journeying (each of which encompasses the other). The much misunderstood notion of ‘dwelling’ (Wohnen) is thus not a matter of remaining rooted in a single spot, but rather implies an active mode of engagement in the world that recognises its own finitude – its own placedness. White’s emphasis on both residence and journeying – one of the points on which his work is clearly differentiated from that of writers such as Deleuze and Guattari – is thus one of the points on which he is, despite any suggestions to the contrary, actually brought close to Heidegger. This emphasis on the importance of attending to both journey and residence has an important precedent in Kant, and especially in Kant’s conception of himself (along with Hume) as a ‘geographer’ of reason. Kant is the one who introduces the idea of the ‘nomadic’ into philosophy, although he understands it rather differently from White, and, although

Cartography’, in The Wanderer and His Charts, p. 165: ‘[compared to Deleuze and Guattari] Heidegger is the opposite. He is much concerned with residence, dwelling, with quiet paths of thought around a well-felt place, which can border on localist pietism and Heimat ideology’. 72 Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn ‘The Ister’, trans. William McNeill and Julia Davis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996) – see esp. pp. 27–33.

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‘where hegel meets the chinese gulls’ negatively disposed toward it, uses it in a manner closer to Deleuze and Guattari. Thus, in the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant contrasts those who would aim to rebuild the house of metaphysics on a single plan with those ‘nomads who abhor all permanent cultivation of the soil’.73 Kant rejects the grandiose plans of traditional metaphysics (in the Critique he concludes that we have only the materials to build a modest residence – Wohnhaus – that is just sufficient for our needs and no more74) and yet also argues that philosophical nomadism (which he associates with extreme forms of scepticism and empiricism) is inadequate, in that it provides only a ‘resting-place [Ruheplatz]’, but ‘not a dwelling-place for permanent residence [Wohnplatz]’.75 Kant acknowledges a certain capacity for movement as essential to the mapping of reason that he aims to undertake – the bounds of reason can be marked out only through engaging with the territory in which reason is situated. Yet Kant also objects to the nomadic refusal of residence on the grounds that such refusal, as he sees it, implies a refusal to recognise our own prior belonging to the world. The critique of traditional metaphysics, as well as nomadism, arises, in part, out of a recognition of this prior belonging, and of the manner in it serves to ground knowledge and understanding within their proper limits.76

73 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Aix. 74 See Critique of Pure Reason, B735. 75 Critique of Pure Reason, A761/B789. 76 See Kant’s comments at the end of Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, p. 114.

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Fifth Sighting: The Language of the World

The placed character of White’s thought, and its own thematisation of that placedness, is itself tied to a feature that also belongs essentially to the poetic: its rootedness in the unique and the singular, in the situated and concrete. Even the most abstract of poetry has its origins in sensory experience – and almost all poetry begins in a close attentiveness to the ordinary details of the world. It is in those details, and not apart from them, that any real transcendence – under­ stood more as an opening into than a going beyond – is to be found. At the end of Letters from Gourgounel, White writes: ‘And I blessed the name of poetry, and up there in that wood, knew the glory of the poet, the real poet, who writes and speaks from the heart of nature, his greater home, and sends its living streams through the world’.77 The experience that lies behind these words is an experience of nature, not merely as that which is distinct from the ‘human’, but also as the sheer and constant presencing of being. That experience is one that comes to White not in any abstracted realm of the mind (if there could truly be such), nor in some anonymous and emptied location apart from the world, but ‘high up there on the slope of the valley, among the chestnuts and the whins . . . near thick clumps of pink serpolet’.78 We find the world by entering into it, and it is place that is the entry into world – where, one might say,

77 Letters from Gourgounel, p. 141. 78 Letters from Gourgounel, p. 139.

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‘where hegel meets the chinese gulls’ the world has its beginning – and where perhaps the poetic has its origin also, so the poetic is always a speaking and working ‘out’ of place. The poetic vision that is at issue here has some affinities with surrealism – with its refusal of separation and its reembrace of the world. Such a connection might seem an obvious one to make given White’s own early influences and interests. Yet the connection also has the potential to mislead, since surrealism leads along its own path here, and that path is certainly not identical with White’s – influence there may have been, but White is no surrealist. Moreover, the vision at issue here is in no way peculiar to surrealism – Bashō’s poetry, for instance, which is such an important source and point of reference for White, is just as much tied to a vision of the essential intimacy of self and world, and to the concrete experience of that intimacy. Moreover, even the emphasis on this vision as poetic cannot be taken to imply that it belongs only to poetry as a literary form. The poetics of place and of the world that is surely invoked here concerns the intimacy of the relation of language and place, and of word with world, and so relates to an understanding of language that sees it as inseparably tied to the opening of world. This too is something powerfully present in Heidegger’s thought as well as White’s. For this reason, one might argue that Heidegger’s own apparent linguistic chauvinism – the prioritisation of German and Greek – is less to do with any form of nationalistic blindness than with a reflection of Heidegger’s own inability to think other than in those languages in which he is already ‘at home’. One might say that the only language in which we can genuinely think – or in which we can poetise (which is perhaps not far from being the same thing) – is indeed our own. If Heidegger did not put it in just these terms himself, 113

the fundamental field it is perhaps a result of his inability to distinguish his own thought from thinking as such – a philosophical egotism to which he was undoubtedly prone – rather than of any simple nationalistic sentiment. Yet every thinker is surely tied to their home language, as is every poet to their native tongue. White may be thought to present an intriguing case, in this regard, working as he does across both English and French – although his poetry, the real essence of his thinking, is, for the most part, in English, even if perhaps Scots English, and not in French. It is not uncommon, of course, to find language being cited, not as that which gives us entry to the world, but rather as that which obstructs or prevents such access. Language is, in Frederic Jameson’s misquotation of Nietzsche, a ‘prisonhouse’,79 and as such surely something to be escaped from or struggled against – so language is that which must be overcome, surpassed, or somehow got beyond. Notwithstanding what is at play in this idea in Nietzsche’s original comment, there is something deeply problematic about the view that appears here. It is a view that essentially separates language from the world – since, as a prison-house, language presumably holds us apart from things – and in so doing, that view empties language of meaning and of the possibility of truth. Indeed, such a view of language typically

79 The relevant passage in Nietzsche reads: ‘We cease to think when we refuse to do so under the constraint of language; we barely reach the doubt that sees this limitation as a limitation’ – aphorism 522, in Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J, Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1968), p. 283. The passage, with ‘prison-house’ appearing in place of ‘constraint’ appears as the epigraph (immediately before the title page) to Frederic Jameson, The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972).

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‘where hegel meets the chinese gulls’ sees language as misleading, deceitful, a source of error and illusion. Understood as a prison-house, language becomes a mere play of elements devoid of significance, while the world is rendered inaccessible to and hidden from us – a mystery that can properly not even be grasped as a mystery. Just as we enter the world only though the places in which we reside and in which we act, so too is that entry one that takes place in and through language. It is in our speaking that the world is opened to us – which is why poetry looms so large here. The significance of poetry does not lie in any capacity somehow to go beyond language – as if poetry could break through the very language on which it depends and in which it is expressed – but rather in the fact that poetry speaks to the very essence of language and world as they belong together. Heidegger famously says, in the ‘Letter on Humanism’, that ‘language is the house of being’.80 This remark resounds and is repeated throughout the ‘Letter’. It is explicitly not a remark intended merely ‘metaphorically’ (‘not the transfer of the image “house” onto being’81), but instead it points towards a more originary sense of ‘house’ (and of ‘home’) that is given in language and its relation to being. Language is that which shelters being, which allows being to come into its own, and which is also 80 ‘Letter on Humanism’, trans. Frank A. Capuzzi, in Martin Heidegger, Pathmarks, ed. William McNeil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 239–76. 81 ‘Letter on Humanism’, p. 272. It is commonplace to find readers of Heidegger talking of his ‘metaphorical’ language and doing so as if this is what was at the heart of the poetic element in his thought. But there is no ‘metaphor’ in Heidegger, and he makes very clear his explicit rejection of the metaphorical on the grounds of its metaphysical character. Rather than metaphors, Heidegger draws on highly concentrated images – images that serve to re-orient and re-envision. See Malpas, In the Brightness of Place, chapter 6.

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the fundamental field that in which the human properly dwells and in which it finds its essence. As language is the house of being, then so it is a house that takes as many forms as there are languages – and there is indeed no language that stands above and apart from this multiplicity. Language is thus always given over, as is being, to such multiplicity, at the same time as it also carries within it an essential unity. The character of language as the ‘house’ of being, which is indeed no metaphor, as Heidegger presents it, points towards an essential spatiality, or, better, dimensionality, that belongs to language and to being. As the house of being, language provides space for being – it gives it room. The connection at issue here, in which space and place are both implicated, is one already presaged in the discussion of the relation between spatiality and thinking. The space that thinking requires and that it opens is a space that is given only in relation to language. It is not only thinking that is implicated here, however, but being, and being itself appears as a certain fundamental mode of dimensionality – a dimensionality that is always the dimensionality of the between, of the relation, and so also of both difference and sameness. Thus Heidegger comments that ‘everything spatial and all time-space occur essentially in the dimensionality that being itself is’.82 It is this dimensionality that appears, in White’s terms, as the openness of world. The New Zealand poet Hone Tuwhare writes of this same sense of dimension­ality

82 ‘Letter on Humanism’, p. 254. For more on the relation between being and language, and the role of place in this relation, see Malpas, ‘The Beckoning of Language: Heidegger’s Hermeneutic Transformation of Thinking’, in Ingo Farin and Michael Bowler (eds), Hermeneutic Heidegger (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2017), pp. 203–21.

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‘where hegel meets the chinese gulls’ and openness from the perspective of his own southerly location: Way out and beyond, I sense a whole World in movement and flex. On the same latitude, Chile nudges, just over the horizon. And because the sea is multi-lingual, I share its collective heart-beat, with all poets, in all lands, joined together by oceans of applause – and a fine mutuality of taste, for fish (and chips, please).83

The openness that Tuwhare sees in the sea, specifically the Pacific, and that is present in White’s similar engagement with the Atlantic, is also, of course, an openness that occurs in and out of place. It is thus that Tuwhare’s poem has the name of a place, ‘Kaka Point’, and the poem is itself embedded in its local context. It is through the word of poetry, through genuinely poetic speaking – whether it occurs in the essay or the poem – and which is always a placed speaking, that the relation between word and world comes most clearly into view. It is for this reason, in Tuwhare’s terms, that one can say that not only is the sea multi-lingual, but so too is the poet, and no more so than when the poet speaks the language by which he or she is owned, which is to say, from out of the place to which he or she belongs. The multi-lingualism of the poet comes not from having learned to speak in a variety of tongues (though in White’s case, one suspects that breaking out of the linguistic insularity of English may have been an important element in his own poetic and philosophical develop­ment), but rather from an attentiveness to

83 Hone Tuwhare, ‘Kaka Point’, in Shape Shifter (Wellington: Steele Roberts, 1997), p. 82.

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the fundamental field and respect for language as language, which means also: for language as it already belongs to the world, as language comes from the world, as language is the saying of the world. Here language appears as nothing subjective, but as essentially worldly, and its worldliness speaks through all the many ‘dialects’, all the many linguistic forms (the ‘languages’ as we usually speak of them), that constitute the realm of human speaking. Language is that primordial ‘saying’ (as Heidegger has it) by which world comes to be as world. The poet is the one who lets the world itself speak, and so also the one who allows the language of the world to emerge. This is indicated in that original Greek sense of poiesis – already alluded to above – as ‘bringing forth’, emergence, ‘worlding’. It is, of course, just this sense of poiesis that sits at the heart of much of Heidegger’s thinking, but which is also present, if differently thematised, in White. Such poiesis is the primordial poetry of the world, and as such, it is also that which speaks the world, that which speaks the human. ‘Language speaks’, declares Heidegger, and he adds: ‘If we let ourselves fall into the abyss denoted by this sentence, we do not go tumbling into emptiness. We fall upward, to a height. Its loftiness opens up a depth.’84 Once again, what is at issue here is precisely the essential dimensionality that belongs to language – a dimensionality that allows relatedness and separation, hiddenness and disclosedness, difference and sameness, proximity and distance. In White’s work this dimensionality is precisely what appears in the idea of the ‘open world’ that is disclosed poetically, and so such dimensionality can be seen to lie at the very heart of the notion of geopoetics. My only addendum to 84 Martin Heidegger, ‘Language’, in Poetry, Language, Thought, pp. 191–2.

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‘where hegel meets the chinese gulls’ that is to say that geopoetics must itself take the form of a topopoetics – the poetry of world is the poetry of place, since it is with place, and only with place, that the world begins. The opening of place, which is the happening of being as well as the speaking of language, is itself the taking place (the ‘worlding’) of world. In talking of that empty shore ‘where Hegel meets the Chinese gulls’, White not only indicates his attempt to move beyond the dichotomies of previous Western or European modes of thinking, but he also draws attention to the concrete situation of poetising and thinking as always out at the edge, at the point of intersecting lines of flight, looking towards the far horizons of land and sea. White’s own shore is on the northern coasts of France and Scotland; mine (like Tuwhare’s) is at the other end of the earth – in southern Tasmania, at the edge of the great Southern Ocean, looking towards the vast continent of Antarctica. These places are distant as well as different, and yet they also exhibit a remarkable similarity. If White’s work and mine, like White’s and Heidegger’s, form two neighbouring fields, then those fields open out to similar shores and seas, and to similar pathways and views. The character of White’s ‘empty shore’ as a place where different paths and lines of thinking may meet, and from which new possibilities for thinking may emerge, reflects not only its being a meeting-point, but also a ‘between-place’, a space of liminality – a place in which both speaking and thinking can be said to have their origin. To some extent, we all begin on that empty shore – a shore on which there is no subject or object, no mind and thing, but only the stillness into which language beckons us, a stillness that itself belongs to the openness of world, and that gives space to all things in the speaking that belongs to them. 119

Sixth Sighting: Poetics, Politics and Critique

White’s reference to this place, this ‘shore’, invokes a certain place for thinking, and as such articulates a singular ontological poetics – a poetics of world and worlding. But although the thinking at issue here is fundamental, both in character and orientation, it is not a thinking that occurs ‘merely’ at the level of an abstracted or internalised reflection removed and apart from things: ‘We’re talking about a poetics that does not aim at closed artefact, nor is content to simply comment on the sociological context, but is based ultimately on the idea of an energy moving across space’.85 It is, in other words, a poetics that is active and engaged – ‘the language of an open self in an open context’86 – just as the conception of world that it elaborates is itself dynamic and expansive. It is a poetics that brings with it a form of cultural critique and a proposal for cultural renewal (which for White is also a renewal in our relationship with the earth) that also implies a different kind of politics: For early Greek thought, the institution of a city, a polis, is the object of politeia, politics. But politics cannot exist alone. If they are not to degenerate into mere management

85 ‘American Affinities’, in Ideas of Order at Cape Wrath, p. 190. 86 ‘A Sense of Open World’, in Ideas of Order at Cape Wrath, p. 212. Here White also makes reference to the Aristotelian idea of nous poiêtikos (White glosses this as ‘poetic intelligence’) which denotes mind understood in its activity (poiêtikos having the sense, once again, of productivity, bringing forth, emergence) – see Aristotle, On the Soul, Bk III, chapter 5, in The Complete Works of Aristotle.

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‘where hegel meets the chinese gulls’ and manipulation, they must be accompanied by paideia, education – a philosophical and poetic education, the purpose of which is to create virtue (poiètike arétès), this virtue to be understood in more than merely moral terms. What it implies is a specific density of being, that of the enlightened attentive inhabitant of a place, which is the basis of all real culture.87

What White seems to envisage here is a culturally grounded politics that, in being attentive to its place, is also attentive to the openness of world (is therefore genuinely enlightened) – and this openness, one might argue, is surely at the very heart of the democratic. Indeed, it is surely what separates democracy from the majoritarian, the demagogic, the populist. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that White argues that ‘at the moment, . . . we’re not living in a live democracy at all, we’re living in what I call a mediocracy’,88 a situation he also describes as ‘a hollowness, filled with more and more images, more and more noise. Mediocrity raised to a social and political power. Down the centre, a mindless helterskeltering. Along the rim, a literature, and art, that is little more than a reflection of this situation, this condition.’89 If geopoetics is about the openness of world, then our contemporary situation, as White reads it, takes the form of a closing-off of the world, and this is just what is at issue in White’s idea of mediocracy: a generalised levelling-down and emptying-out, a turning away from any real sense of participation in life or in the world, a mode of being 87 ‘The Heritage and Role of a European Writer’, in Ideas of Order at Cape Wrath, p. 63. 88 ‘The Perils and Possibilities of Democracy’, in Ideas of Order at Cape Wrath, p. 25. 89 ‘An Outline of Geopoetics’, in Ideas of Order at Cape Wrath, p. 229.

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the fundamental field ‘almost totally inverted, marked by an almost complete lack of sentient, intelligent, creative contact with the environment – that contact without which . . . no live contact with the world can come into existence and be maintained’.90 Heidegger does not himself draw on the language of democracy (although whether he can be read to democratic ends is another matter), but White’s account of contem­ porary mediocracy is not far removed from Heidegger’s talk of the present age (already in the 1950s) as characterised by a ‘flight from thinking’91 – a flight that is specifically tied, as Heidegger sees it, to the displacing and de-worlding effects of modern technologies. Compared to White, Heidegger looks to have a darker view of our contemporary situation, refusing the possibility that there is anything that we, as human beings, can do that would extricate ourselves from our predicament (although he also quotes from Friedrich Hölderlin’s Patmos, ‘But where danger is, grows/ the saving power also’92). Whether we side with White or Heidegger here – and, in particular, whether we endorse White’s vision of geopoetics as offering a genuine pathway towards cultural and political renewal – is not the most important issue. Both thinkers engage in a similar critical activity, and they largely converge in the nature of their critique. Moreover, although Heidegger refuses to offer any global solution to our situation, his account of a

90 ‘The Perils and Possibilities of Democracy’, in Ideas of Order at Cape Wrath, p. 28. 91 ‘Memorial Address’, in Martin Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking. A Translation of Gelassenheit, trans. John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), p. 45. 92 See ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, in Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), p. 28.

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‘where hegel meets the chinese gulls’ mode of personal comportment in the face of that situation, and especially as a mode of relating to contemporary technology, which he calls Gelassenheit, resonates closely with White’s own account of geopoetics. Gelassenheit, as its English translation as ‘releasement’ suggests, is a freeing-up of the relation between self and world, a ‘letting-be’ that is also an ‘opening towards’.93 What matters most here is the recognition, common to White and to Heidegger, that it is only through our re-engagement with the openness of the world that we can re-engage with ourselves, and that this is possible only in and through the concrete singularity of place – and so through both residence and journey, stillness and movement, nearness and distance. In the early twenty-first century, amidst the rupture and tumult of recent world events – from the global pandemic to the Black Lives Matter protests to the catastrophic fires, droughts and floods that have now become so commonplace – the need for such re-engagement is more urgent than ever before. The question of world is indeed not a question that arises out of mere intellectual provocation or curiosity – a question that we may choose to take up or put down. It is the fundamental question of our or any age. In asking after world we also ask after ourselves – who are we, what are we, but also where are we?94

93 See Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking; see also my discussion in ‘What Is Architecture For?’, International Journal of Architectural Theory, 22 (2017), pp. 117–26. 94 As Heidegger writes: ‘We reside in a realm constantly permeated by the casting toward and the casting-away of being. To be sure, we hardly ever pay attention to this characteristic of our abode, but we now ask: “where” are we “there,” when we are thus placed into such an abode?’ Martin Heidegger, Basic Concepts, trans. Gary Aylesworth (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), p. 75.

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the fundamental field On that empty shore, amidst the cries of the gulls, we find ourselves at the edge of the world and yet also at its very centre. Here, at the very threshold of existence, where thinking and poetry come together, the world itself beckons, and we are left either to respond or else to relapse into forgetfulness and oblivion.

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III. Three Philosophical Poems Kenneth White

The Etna Letters

In memoriam Empedocles 1. An offspring of la bella Sicilia born at Agrigent in the beginning I spoke Greek with an Italian accent. 2. Ah, Agrigent on my triple-shored island around it the tumultuous Ionian Sea that gouges out its spacious gulfs isle where you hear the mountain’s murmur where your eyes see its flames and flashes it’s there I made my first discoveries. 3. When I’d finished my studies at the suprematist schools of Parmenides and Pythagoras 127

the fundamental field I was designated physician philosopher of nature to my own mind more enigmatically poet-thinker. 4. In the constitution of the universe I distinguished four great elements earth, water, fire and air back of them a hyper-special power a vibratory movement, a wandering force no simple entity having nothing at all to do with any kind of divinity associations and dissociations combinations and permutations according to moment and place. 5. Here are two extracts from my works maybe worth meditating on: sometimes the One emerges from the Multiple at other times the Multiple from the One 128

three philosophical poems walking always from summit to summit I never follow a single route. 6. One day in the future some run-of-the-mill philosopher will dismiss me as belonging to “the screeching muses of Ionia” but other minds of a finer fibre will be able to see farther into what I was after the music of a multiverse a cosmo-poetic symphony. 7. For years I travelled all over Hellas delivering lectures in public spaces writing my books in quieter places I even attempted to clean up the mess of politics.

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the fundamental field 8. They ended up banishing me from the City that happens regularly to minds of my calibre it’s the destiny of all extremophiles. 9. For some time now I’ve been living in a place apart on the flanks of this arid mountain enjoying a solar solitude. 10. I have a garden full of the flowers of indigence those that can stand up to anything like that old whin out there at the door.

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three philosophical poems 11. My body is no longer what it was but my mind is sharper than before seeing in to things more powerfully than ever. 12. When the sun rises over the sea when the wind blows over the mountain when the little Spring rains fall the absolute exile that I’ve become knows exquisite ecstasies. 13. Naturally I think now and then of my death determined to avoid any pitiful wasting away immolation by fire seems the best way one of these full-moon nights I’ll throw myself into the chasm.

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the fundamental field 14. In the meantime I continue walking on the mountain paths among the goats and the curlews shouting out in defiant exuberance a cry or a phrase. 15. My writings I’ll hide them in a grotto as for these notes I scribble as I sit at table after a glass or two of wine by way of a testament I’ll scatter them on the wind maybe one or two of them will be picked up in time. 16. My legacy to this twisted society will be a mix of contempt and hilarity to those for whom my life and thought was a scandal 132

three philosophical poems I’ll leave on the edge of the crater a dirty old sandal. KW 2007

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Nietzsche in Nice

1. That late Autumn of ’83 he’d started exploring the azure shore stopping for a few weeks at Menton where in a burst of solar exaltation he composed the dionysian songs of the Gaya Scienza then made further along for Nice rented a room in an obscure little street overlooking the harbour with its cosmopolitan crowd so rejoicingly ausserdeutscb. 2. Himself, he never used the name Nice always said Nizza the Italian form he heard around him down there in the Old Town quarter ‘Nietzsche in Nizza’ the very phonetics of the thing was enough to give him the feeling that at last he had found his place the perfect topos for the principal theme 134

three philosophical poems of all those kilos of manuscript he always lugged about with him. 3. Strolling in the streets those early days he came across the figure of this slim slip of a girl Nike in the flesh or maybe the nymph Nicaea chased after by Dionysos as recounted in the Dionysiaca of Nonnos did no chasing after (fleeting memories of Lou Salomé) simply pleased to know she was there part integral of the atmosphere. 4. What obsessed him now was his future book a book of endings and beginnings saying to himself that with ten years of solitude and silence luminous days and starry nights he’d write a work that would open up an entirely new world.

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the fundamental field 5. Six miles out of Nice to the north-east lies the village of Eze-by-the-Sea there begins a winding track cut into the calcareous rock bordered by olive and oak with here and there a detached boulder riddled by millenia of tumultuous water offering the higher you go an observation and contemplation post over the wide blue expanse of the Bay of Angels. 6. ‘What language will such a spirit entone when he speaks with himself alone?’ either in the emerald hour before dawn or in the nights of shooting stars not only a ‘poetic’ language but an unconditioned language proceeding by leaps and bounds mingling silences and sounds gathering a heterogeneous multiplicity into an unedited unity.

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three philosophical poems 7. Halcyon weather the lights of all the world dancing over the bay no day could possibly be more beautiful than this day. KW 2007

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At Skjolden

Salutations to Wittgenstein 1. Under this dark grey coat is hidden someone who’s already almost nothing the ghost of a gogolian logician. 2. What a boring invention humanity all that tragi-comedy with hopelessly limited understanding they never stop talking. 3. Norwegr That’s the name given here to the wildcat 138

three philosophical poems who stalks along the secret tracks of the mental North. 4. The world is “all that is the case” I wrote years back maybe it’s true maybe open to doubt anyway it’s no longer a problem I care to think about deep down it’s not that world I find at all interesting. 5. The whistling of the wind the roaring of the waves waiting for some clear gesture like the flight of that sea-eagle there. 6. Rather be shaman monk or madman anything anywhere 139

the fundamental field so as not to end up in that dominion of theirs a pontifical don. 7. A hut simple and bare in the midst of nowhere a lake a scattering of rocks the writing of a manuscript. 8. Every single day lines and lights labour and illumination.

9. Thought? a thin white line on a great blackboard which at rare so very rare moments 140

three philosophical poems is alive with light. 10. Words from afar close to a thing un-named a wording discretely circulating around and around a nothingness. 11. Above all absolute absence of anything like philosophantery. 12. There was the brown quair and the blue quair and the black quair now, a white quair the score of a silent music.

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the fundamental field 13. According to the philosopher a region without fixed limits isn’t a region the same goes, he says for the concept that sounds reasonable but here in this obscure region I put one foot in front of the other across a landscape outside reasoning. 14. They think they can grasp the essence of nature but all they really do and ever will is go round and round on the rim of the framework they fabricate in order to effect the examining. 15. A grammar hitherto unconceived 142

three philosophical poems a graphing marvellously brute. 16. Coming to a place where there is neither complication nor explanation going forward step by step absolutely attentive to what is there and what is not there. KW 2007

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Epilogue

Seen in very large terms (but it’s they that lie beyond the multitude of commentaries and analyses that constitute the bulk of our mental world), the radical historico-social question, ever since, shall we say, the French Revolution and its concomitants, has been the relationship between basic politico-economic movement and cultural super­structure. For Marxism (the last thoroughgoing response), a new revolutionised politico-economic structure would bring about its own cultural space. For capitalism, still thriving long after the diagnosis of Marx, there really is no problem: capital, adroitly manipulated, handles all, and the space of ‘culture’ (never examined in anything but a superficial way) is filled with anything that sells. To this socio-economic question has been added recently the planetary question. This question has been an undercurrent in human thought almost from its inception, and has been broached in various ways by acute and farseeing minds (Aristotle, Zhwangzi, Humboldt, Reclus). Since 1860, with Haeckel, it has been defined as ecology, and has very recently come into the public eye as such. So much the better. But thinking around the concept has hardly got beyond the level of a catechism, and anything like deeply founded and coherent action is still conspicuous by its absence. The larger and finer issues have hardly got into the public domain at all. Conceptually, even classic studies 144

epilogue such as Bateson’s Mind and Nature1 or Glacken’s Traces on the Rhodian Shore 2 don’t quite make it. It is a large questioning and questing over socio-­ economical-cultural-ecological ground that lies at the back of this book, The Fundamental Field. In hindsight, the word ‘fundamental’ requires perhaps a little elucidation and confirmation, since apart from those many instances where it is used simply to assert something as basic or important, the most common usages of the word belong either to fundamental laboratory research in science or to hard-core fundamentalism. References familiar to the two authors of this book would include this, from René Thom’s essay on topological semantics: ‘The sensorial representation of the world surrounding us is fundamental’;3 and this from René Daumal’s essay ‘A Fundamental Experiment’: ‘What was ordinarily called “the world” seemed senseless, absurd. What took its place was a world intensely more real.’4 On a lower level of insight, but still one of 1 Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity (New York: Dutton, 1979). 2 Clarence J. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967). 3 René Thom. Modèles mathématiques de la morphogenèse, Collection 10/18 (Paris: Union Générale d’Éditions, 1974), chapter VI, ‘Langage et catastrophes: Eléments pour une sémantique topologique’, pp. 89–127, the passage cited is on p. 120. 4 The most convenient source for this essay is the volume on Daumal’s movement, Le Grand Jeu, textes essentiels et documents (Paris: Éditions Denoël, 1970), pp. 67–75 (translation of title and excerpt by KW). An English translation of the text exists, under the title A Fundamental Experiment, trans. Roger Shattuck (Madras: Hanuman Books, 1987). The term ‘experiment’ is by no means uncongenial to Daumal (his early conception of Le Grand Jeu was ‘an experimental metaphysics’) and if a certain psycho-physiological experimentalism is to the fore

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the fundamental field the rare books in English trying to get at a view of things both radical and global, Arthur Koestler’s The Yogi and the Commissar (demetaphorised, the relation between bio-­ psychic development and socio-political organisation, as, for example, between surrealism and communism in the 1930s), Koestler also approaches fundamental ground.5 Against the background of such uses of the word is ­Heidegger’s talk of ‘fundamental ontology’ in Being and Time, where it names the project of an ‘existential analytic of Dasein in general’6 – the accomplishment of which is the central task of Heidegger’s magnum opus. Wherever it is used, ‘fundamental’ refers to that which founds or in which a foundation is to be found. The field we look to here is fundamental in just such a sense. The term ‘field’ also requires some comment. At the most basic level – the level at which a word carries a sense of something experienced and embodied – the term brings with it the idea of a place of work (an area of land to be maintained, tilled, planted, cared for) as well as a place for growth and life (and not always only crops: there is also the wild field, the field left fallow), and a place across which one might set out (like Heidegger’s field path, in his home town in the essay, what ultimately counts is the experience that takes place in the space approached by experimentation. 5 Arthur Koestler, The Yogi and the Commissar (London: Jonathan Cape, 1945). In the final, summarising and perspectival section, after surveying classical conceptual topics, religious and philosophical, such as free will versus determinism, moving on then to modern (as from the seventeenth-century) methodology based on measurement and quantitative statistics, arriving thereafter at the late-modern collapse of established models, Koestler evokes the need for a fundamentally different evolution. 6 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), p.35.

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epilogue of Messkirch, that runs from the castle garden across the open fields and towards the woods7) and around which the horizon encloses and beckons. This sense of ‘field’ remains in those other, more abstract senses, in which the field is that open but bounded expanse within which location or appearance is possible – or in which some object can be made a focus of action or study – and which it can also name a domain of enquiry, a body of knowledge, a discipline or practice. The field here could refer to the two fields, set side by side, of the work of our two authors, but it is not only that. The field could be taken as the field of poetic-philosophical/philosophical-poetic enquiry also, but it is not only that. It could be the field, whether in Tasmania or Brittany, that each of us looks out to every day, and that is the field of our life and experience as it opens out towards the horizon. But it is not only that. Fundamentally, we might say, the field is opening of the world itself, which encompasses all of this. For all its breadth, for all that is concerned with the ‘fundamental’, the engagement that occurs here between a philosopher and a poet is not anything esoteric or unusual. It is just the attempt genuinely to attend to and to articulate the ‘here/there’ of the world – that place in and through which the world comes to appearance, and in and through which we are brought into engagement with the world, one another and with ourselves. Although this speaking of place is different for each of us, the phenomenon to which the speaking is addressed is the same. Moreover, in this speaking, the poetic and the philosophical do not stand apart from but rather extend out to and implicate one 7 See Martin Heidegger, Der Feldweg [lit. ‘The Field Path’ or, perhaps better, ‘The Country Path’] (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1949).

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the fundamental field another. This speaking of place is thus a speaking of that in which poetry and philosophy find a common origin and a shared field. Here, the poetic is necessarily philosophical – ‘a poetry that thinks’, in Heidegger’s phrase, and the philosophical is necessarily also poetic – ‘a thinking that poetises’, to invoke Heidegger once more. This mode of the poetic-philosophical or philosophical-poetic nevertheless represents a bypassing of much of the traditional frame into which poetry and philosophy are set. Although the engagement between us is one carried out by means of a written text (though against the background of the face-toface encounter), it bypasses the ‘academic’ context in which such texts are usually set. This conversation between poet and philosopher is not a conversation that belongs merely to the lecture room or the seminar, but must instead be heard, much as the original conversation itself took place, amidst the sounds of the world itself – amidst the call of the gulls, against the sounds of the wind and the sea. Beginning on one shore, this conversation has been continued from two different shores. Yet it is a conversation drawn always together towards the same experience of the openness of world. In that experience, poetry and philosophy, as well as Brittany and Tasmania, our two outlying territories, are one. JM KW

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Biographical Notes

Jeff Malpas

Summary Biography Born in the western suburbs of Sydney, Australia, but growing up in South Auckland, New Zealand (as well as spending some time in England), Jeff Malpas studied History and Philosophy at the University of Auckland, before going on to complete a PhD in Philosophy at the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia (where he worked under the supervision of J. J. C. Smart and Philip Pettit). A Humboldt Fellow, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, Malpas has held positions at the University of New England and Murdoch University. He took up the Chair of Philosophy at the University of Tasmania in 1999, being made Distinguished Professor in 2011, and Emeritus Distinguished Professor in 2019. He has also held honorary positions at RMIT University and Latrobe University. Much of Malpas’s early work focused on the thinking of the American philosopher Donald Davidson, not only providing one of the first comprehensive studies of Davidson’s ideas on language, truth and interpretation, but also connecting those ideas with hermeneutic and phenomenological thinking, especially as instantiated in the writings of Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer. Visiting both Berkeley (where he was involved with Hubert Dreyfus as well as Davidson) and Heidelberg (where Gadamer remained active), Malpas worked for many years on integrat­ing analytical and ‘Continental’ thinking, although also becoming increasingly pessimistic about the possibility of any genuine 151

the fundamental field overcoming of a divide that is more institutional and political than philosophical. A key element in Malpas’s reading of Davidson was the idea of the dependence of language and understanding of the active, situated engagement of speakers in the world. This fed directly into the idea of the essential role of situation or place in the formation of mind, self and identity. The 1999 book Place and Experience (a second edition of which appeared in 2018) developed the idea of ‘philosophical topography’ in which place is the central philosophical concept. The book set out an account of place as distinct from both space and time (as well as being fundamental to both) and of human existence as ‘topographical’ in character. Although Davidson’s work was an important touchstone here, so too was that of Martin Heidegger. In 2006, Heidegger’s Topology: Being, Place, World appeared, which advanced the first detailed analysis of Heidegger’s thought as a ‘topology of being’ (a phrase that originates with Heidegger), and so as itself giving a central role to place. Malpas’s work in hermeneutics, especially as it relates to Gadamer, has taken this idea further, arguing for the idea of place or ‘being-placed’ as the enabling condition for the very possibility of meaning, truth and understanding. Working in an increasingly interdisciplinary fashion, across art, architecture, geography, history, literature, sociology and even music, Malpas’s thinking has centred on the elaboration of an essentially place-oriented conception of philosophy – philosophy as topography/topology, and so as an exploration of the place of being and the being of place, of the thinking of place and the place of thinking.

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biographical notes Selected Publications Death and Philosophy (ed. with Robert C. Solomon) (London: Routledge, 1999). Dialogues with Davidson: New Perspectives on His Philosophy (ed.) (Cam­ bridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011). Donald Davidson and the Mirror of Meaning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Heidegger and the Thinking of Place: Explorations in the Topology of Being (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012). Heidegger’s Topology: Being, Place, World (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006). In the Brightness of Place: Topological Thinking with and after Heidegger (Albany: SUNY Press, 2021). Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography (2nd edn, London: Rout­ ledge, 2018). Reading Heidegger’s Black Notebooks 1931–1941 (ed .with Ingo Farin) (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016). Rethinking Dwelling: Heidegger, Place, Architecture (London: Bloomsbury, 2021). The Intelligence of Place: Topographies and Poetics (ed.) (London: Bloomsbury, 2015). The Place of Landscape: Concepts, Contexts, Studies (ed.) (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2011). Transcendental Heidegger (ed. with Steven Galt Crowell) (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007).

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Kenneth White

Summary Biography Born in Glasgow, then in the last throes of the Industrial Revolution, Kenneth White spent his early years on the west coast of Scotland, in an environment of seashore, moor and mountain. After schooling in Ayshire, he studied Classics (Heraclitus alone in Ionia, Ovid’s exile on the shores of the Black Sea), Modern Languages and Literatures (mainly French and German) and Philosophy (principally, Nietzsche and Heidegger), at the universities of Glasgow, Munich and Paris. After publishing his first books from London, he taught for a few years at Glasgow University (his theme, poetry after Rimbaud), founding in Glasgow a para-university group devoted to cultural regrounding. Then, feeling more and more at variance with the social, political and intellectual context of Britain, he decided, as a Scoto-European, to situate his life and work on the Continent, first in Paris, then in other parts of France, only renewing contact with the English culture scene decades later. Apart from, developing out from, an increasing and expanding body of work taking the shape of essay, narrative and poem, White is known as the inventor and elaborator of two general concepts: intellectual nomadism and geo­ poetics. It was in Paris, at the Sorbonne, that he defended his Doctorat d’État (State Doctorate) on intellectual nomadism (Gilles Deleuze was on the jury), a thesis that was recognised as opening up a new field of research and thought. 154

biographical notes It was after years of intellectual nomadism, travelling across territories and cultures (recounted in what he called ‘waybooks’, narratives other than the novel and more than travelogues) that White came to the notion of geopoetics, of which he laid out the ground and the perspectives, from three points of view, philosophical, scientific and literary, in the volume Le Plateau de l’Albatros. White occupied the Chair of Twentieth-Century Poetics at Paris-Sorbonne from 1983 to 1996, and in 1989 he founded the International Institute of Geopoetics, the central energy and resource point of a network that started out from France (Paris, Lyons, Bordeaux) and later spread to other countries such as Scotland, Italy, Germany, Belgium, Canada and Chile. Kenneth White now lives with his wife, Marie-Claude, translator and photographer, on the North Coast of Brittany.

Selected Publications White’s work in English and in French has been substantially translated into several other languages. Essays Dialogue avec Deleuze (Paris: Editions Isolato, 2007). Ideas of Order at Cape Wrath (Aberdeen: Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies, University of Aberdeen, 2013). L’Esprit nomade, théorie-pratique du nomadisme intellectuel (Paris: Éditions Grasset, 1987). Le Plateau de l’Albatros, introduction à la géopoétique (Paris: Éditions Grasset, 1994). On Scottish Ground (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1998). The Wanderer and His Charts: Exploring the Fields of Vagrant Thought and Vagabond Beauty (Edinburgh: Polygon, 2010).

155

the fundamental field Narrative Guido’s Map (Aberdeen: Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies, University of Aberdeen, 2015). House of Tides: Letters from Brittany and Other Lands of the West (Edinburgh: Polygon, 2000). L’Archipel du songe (Marseille: Le Mot et le reste, 2018). Letters from Gourgounel (London: Jonathan Cape, 1966). Pilgrim of the Void (Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing, 1990). The Blue Road (Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing, 1983). The Winds of Vancouver (Aberdeen: Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies, University of Aberdeen, 2013). Travels in the Drifting Dawn (Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing, 1989).

Poetry Atlantica (Paris: Editions Grasset, 1986). Le Monde Ouvert (Paris: Gallimard, 2006). Les Archives du littoral (Paris: Mercure de France, 2011). Mémorial de la terre océane (Paris: Mercure de France, 2019). Open World. The Collected Poems 1960–2000 (Edinburgh: Polygon, 2003). The Most Difficult Area (London: Cape Goliard, 1968).

156

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165

Index

academic v. non-academic, 72 aesthetics, 32 Aldington, Richard, 15–17 American conservation movement, 11 Anfangsgründe, 22 Arabia Deserta, 48–9 Arendt, Hannah, 9, 12–13, 83n Aristotle, 64, 66, 94 ars memorative (art of memory), 97 atopia, 83, 83n Bashō, 113 being, 39, 115 Betjeman, John, 18 between 68, 72, 116, 119 bound/boundary, 21, 102, 111 Brittany, 4–5 Brown, Lancelot, 8–9 Camus, Albert, 105–6 capital/capitalism, 144 Carli, Enzo, 10 Cartesian Meditations, 31 Casey, Edward, S, 24n, 61–2 Celtic/Celticism, 103–4, 105

chaoticism, 57n Char, René, 87 Chinese landscape painting, 57 Collective Intelligence, 24 colloquere, 24 colloquium, 24 connection, 94, 96 conversation, 72, 73, 148 creativity, 55 Crisis in European Sciences, The, 30–1 Dasein, 36–7 Daumal, René, 145, 145n Debarbieux, Bernard, 8 deconstruction, 26 Deleuze, Gilles, 28–9, 76, 101, 102–3 democracy, 121 Derrida, Jacques, 26 Descartes, René, 31, 84–5 dialectic (of limitedness and non-limitation), 22 difference, 26 dimensionality, 86, 116, 118 dis-placement, 36 Doughty, Charles M., 48–9 dwelling, 110

166

index earth, 40 edge, 23, 61–2 egoism, 88, 88n Eliot, T. S., 67 ‘empty shore’, 80, 119, 124 end of philosophy, 34, 39 England, 16, 17–20 English literature, 17–20, 48–9 English mentality, 17 Essence of Reason, The see Satz vom Grund, Der Essex, 19 experience, 43, 95, 112–13 Face of My Homeland, The, 20–1 Fairlie (Ayrshire, Scotland), 5 familiar, 40 fascism, 104, 106 field, 6, 53, 79, 146–147 field path, 147 ‘flight from thinking’, 122 Fourfold (Geviert), 37n, 93, 93n, 109–10; see also Quadriparti French literature, 17 fundamental, 145–6 Gadamer, H-G., 61–2, 73 gardens, 10 Gelassenheit (releasement/​ ‘letting-be’), 123 genius loci, 13, 18 geo-logy, 31 geophilosophy, 29 geopoetics, 50, 77–8, 79, 118–19, 122–3 Goethe, J. W. von, 62, 62n grammatology, 26

Greece, 43–4 Grey Man and the Coast, The, 5 ground/grounding, 3, 21, 35–6, 85 Guattari, Félix, 102–3 Harrow-on-the-Hill, 18 Hegel, G. W. F., 5, 26 Hegelian system, 26 Heidegger, Martin, 33–41, 64–5, 71–2, 76–9, 81, 93, 93n, 107–9, 113–14, 122–3 Heidegger and the Thinking of Place, 3, 64–7 Heidegger’s Topology, 3, 93n Heimat, 20–1 hermeneutics, 68, 73 Hesiod, 5 Hiersein, 37 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 39–40, 42–7 homecoming, 21 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 48 ‘house of being’, 115–16 Housman, A. E., 18–19 human, 12–13, 113 human nature, 12–13 humanism, 38n humanity, 10–13 Hume, David, 17 Husserl, Edmund, 29–33, 38 Husserl archives (Louvain), 29 Hyperion, 8 hypokeimenon, 85 identity, 8–10, 21, 94, 109 imagination, 55

167

the fundamental field individual, 87–8 intentionality, 32–3 International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), 14 Ister, Der, 110 Jackson, John B., 10–11 Jameson, Frederic, 114, 114n journey/journeying, 73, 96, 109–11 ‘Kaka Point’, 117 Kant, Immanuel, 42, 79, 94–5, 98, 110–11 kinaesthetics, 32 Klee, Paul, 5 Koestler, Arthur, 146, 146n landscape, 43–4 landscape action, 9–10 landscape-mindscape, 43–4, 51–2, 55–6 landscape painting, 57 Landskap, 7 language, 43, 113–19 Lawrence, D. H., 15–17 Lefebvre, Henri, 27 ‘letting-be’, 123 life, 83–4, 88, 89, 91–2 liminality, 119 limit, 21, 107 localism, 19–20, 83n MacDiarmid, Hugh, 49 Mandelstam, Ossip, 55 Marx, Karl, 27, 144 mathematics, 53–4

matrix, 52 mediocracy, 121–2 Mediterranean, 105 memory, 97 metaphilosophy, 26–8 metaphysics, 111 metaphor, 115, 115n method of loci, 97 Mink, Louis, 92 movement, 73, 96–8 Muir, John, 11, 11–12n multilingualism, 117 myth, 90–1 narrative/narration, 90–5, 96 national identity, 8–10, 21 National Socialism, 108 nationalism, 21, 47n, 106, 107–9 nature, 12–13, 112 Nazism, 108 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 17, 27, 28, 77, 81, 88, 101, 105–6, 114, 114n nomad/nomadism, 101, 110–11 nomadology, 28 On Scottish Ground, 3 ontology/ontological, 93 openness, 86, 99–100, 102, 117, 118, 121, 123, 147 Orientalism, 104 orientation, 98 person/personal, 86–8, 90 phenomenology, 31

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index philosophy, 4–5, 33–5, 36, 39–40, 42–3, 54, 61, 62, 64, 66–8, 76, 147–8 physics, 53–4 place, 7–10, 10–15, 15–20, 20–1, 34, 36, 39–40, 43–52, 61, 72, 73–4, 79–80, 80–7, 89, 91–2, 93–4, 95, 96–8, 101–3, 105, 107–10, 112–13, 117, 119, 120, 123, 147–8 Place, Culture, World, 3 Place of Landscape, The, 6, 8, 23, 24–5 Plato, 90, 91 poetics, 37–8, 48–50, 67, 78, 113, 120 poetry, 36–7, 39–40, 44–52, 54, 61, 62–4, 67–8, 71–2, 76–7, 78, 87, 112–13, 115, 117–19, 147–8 poetry of place, 15–20, 44–52, 119, 120 poiesis, 78, 118 politics/political, 7–10, 120, 144 Pope, Alexander, 13 Powys, John Cowper, 49 ‘prison-house’ of language, 114–15, 114n Quadriparti (Fourfold), 37n, 65, 67 race/racism, 104, 106, 107 Raum (space), 96

relation/relationality, 109 releasement, 123 re-placement, 34 representation, 37, 92–3 residence, 109–11 Ricoeur, Paul, 92 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 38 room, 116; see also space/ spatiality Satz vom Grund, Der, 35–6 Sauer, Carl, 12n science, 30 Scotland, 9 Scully, Vincent, 42–4 Segalen, Victor, 50 Selbstfindung, 21 self, 85–6, 93–4, 113 self-discovery, 21 self-reference, 90 Sharp, William, 5 shore, 80, 119, 124, 148 Shropshire Lad, A, 18 Sicily, 16 sighting, 73–4 Singular Intelligence, 24 solitariness, 83–4, 86, 87 space/spatiality, 86, 96, 99–100, 102, 116, 119 spirit of place, 14–15 Spirit of Place, The, 15 spirituality, 13–15 story/storytelling, 90–1 subjectum, 85 surface, 107 surrealism, 113 surveying, 74, 95, 98 Switzerland, 8

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the fundamental field technology, 122 territory, 8–10 thaumazein, 66 theory, 63–4 thought/thinking, 26, 28, 34–5, 36, 39, 41, 64, 68, 74, 79, 82–7, 89, 99–102, 105, 107–9, 116, 119, 122 Thousand Plateaux, A, 103 time, 32 topography, 25, 65, 95 topology, 22–5, 28, 73–4, 79, 95, 100–1 topopoetics, 79, 119 topos, 39, 79; see also place transcendence, 113 transcendental, 31 Tuwhare, Hone, 116–17

Umwelt, 22 unfamiliar, 40 unity, 94–5 Whitehead, Alfred North, 53–5 Whitman, Walt, 11n, 50 Williams, William Carlos, 52 Wohnen (dwelling), 110 wonder, 66–7 Wordsworth, William, viii Works and Days, 5 world, 75–80, 113–15, 117, 118, 119, 120, 147 worlding, 78, 120 Yogi and the Commissar, The, 146, 146n

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