"If, today, our world is in crisis, it is because we have forgotten how to correspond. We have engaged, instead, in campaigns of interaction. Parties "If, today, our world is in crisis, it is because we have forgotten how to correspond. We have engaged, instead, in campaigns of interaction. Parties to interaction face each other with their identities and objectives already in place, and transact in ways that serve, but do nothing to transform, their separate interests. Their difference is given from the start, and remains afterwards. Interaction is thus a between relation. Correspondence, however, goes along. (...) correspondence is about the ways along which lives, in their perpetual unfolding or becoming, simultaneously join together and differentiate themselves, one from another. This shift from interaction to correspondence entails a fundamental reorientation, from the between-ness of beings and things to their in-between-ness."
For me, the great value of this book lies in the introductory essay in which Tim Ingold explains his concept of 'correspondence' in a very accessible way. The rest of the book is devoted to short essays in which Ingold more or less successfully puts the theory into practice. I found this less compelling, but that may have to do with many factors beyond the quality of Ingold's experience or writing. For example, I read this on my e-reader, and I am quite sure that this is the kind of book that benefits from being read in hard copy, as a breviary to dip into, rather than as a linear argument. To engage with this book in this way would be an exercise in correspondence.
For me, Ingold is a distinctive representative of an intellectual movement that is reconnecting with the spirit of Romanticism. It is no coincidence that his latest volume of scholarly essays - Imagining for Real: Essays on Creation, Attention and Correspondence - is about imagination. His view can be summed up in a one-liner: "Imagination is being alive". There is a close relationship between imagination and our ability to correspond. When the early Romantic artists and philosophers declared their desire to 'romanticise the world', they wanted to establish a close relationship - Ingold would say 'a correspondence', François Jullien 'une connivence' - between poetry and life. Poetry was understood to encompass all the arts and sciences, as well as the process of shaping our individual and collective lives. All these spheres of human activity were to be imbued with and reflect the productive power of natura naturans. To live well was to love life and to respond to it with care, sensitivity and discernment. This is the spirit of the late Tim Ingold's intellectual-existential project.
Merged review:
"If, today, our world is in crisis, it is because we have forgotten how to correspond. We have engaged, instead, in campaigns of interaction. Parties to interaction face each other with their identities and objectives already in place, and transact in ways that serve, but do nothing to transform, their separate interests. Their difference is given from the start, and remains afterwards. Interaction is thus a between relation. Correspondence, however, goes along. (...) correspondence is about the ways along which lives, in their perpetual unfolding or becoming, simultaneously join together and differentiate themselves, one from another. This shift from interaction to correspondence entails a fundamental reorientation, from the between-ness of beings and things to their in-between-ness."
For me, the great value of this book lies in the introductory essay in which Tim Ingold explains his concept of 'correspondence' in a very accessible way. The rest of the book is devoted to short essays in which Ingold more or less successfully puts the theory into practice. I found this less compelling, but that may have to do with many factors beyond the quality of Ingold's experience or writing. For example, I read this on my e-reader, and I am quite sure that this is the kind of book that benefits from being read in hard copy, as a breviary to dip into, rather than as a linear argument. To engage with this book in this way would be an exercise in correspondence.
For me, Ingold is a distinctive representative of an intellectual movement that is reconnecting with the spirit of Romanticism. It is no coincidence that his latest volume of scholarly essays - Imagining for Real: Essays on Creation, Attention and Correspondence - is about imagination. His view can be summed up in a one-liner: "Imagination is being alive". There is a close relationship between imagination and our ability to correspond. When the early Romantic artists and philosophers declared their desire to 'romanticise the world', they wanted to establish a close relationship - Ingold would say 'a correspondence', François Jullien 'une connivence' - between poetry and life. Poetry was understood to encompass all the arts and sciences, as well as the process of shaping our individual and collective lives. All these spheres of human activity were to be imbued with and reflect the productive power of natura naturans. To live well was to love life and to respond to it with care, sensitivity and discernment. This is the spirit of the late Tim Ingold's intellectual-existential project....more
A gripping psychological portrait on a tightrope between
"Das All war für ihn in Wunden" ('For him, the universe was in wounds')
and
"Ich verlange in A gripping psychological portrait on a tightrope between
"Das All war für ihn in Wunden" ('For him, the universe was in wounds')
and
"Ich verlange in allem Leben, Möglichkeit des Daseins, und dann ist's gut ..." ('I demand life, the possibility of existence, in everything and then it's all right ...')....more
The two volumes of Holmes's biography of Coleridge run to nearly 1,000 well-filled pages, not counting the copious notes. It's an enchanting journey fThe two volumes of Holmes's biography of Coleridge run to nearly 1,000 well-filled pages, not counting the copious notes. It's an enchanting journey for the reader interested in grasping the mind and life of this protean genius.
I extract a quote from Kathleen Coburn's Experience into Thought: Perspectives in the Coleridge Notebooks that succinctly outlines the scope of this vast intellectual and artistic project, driven by unbridled curiosity, extraordinary powers of observation and a profound respect for the intelligence of life.
There are therefore many Coleridges. (...) First the poet (but known chiefly for only three miraculous poems and about three others); then the literary critic, without whom the history of English literary criticism as we know it is inconceivable; the critic of science, the ‘so-so chemist’ as he called himself, whose rôle in sharing the struggle of Davy and others over the concepts and terminology of modern chemistry and biology is just beginning to be appreciated; the logician, whose hitherto unpublished Logic, edited by Professor Robin Jackson, is in the hands of the printers; the journalist, the top leader-writer of his day in the Morning Post and the Courier, whose three volumes of newspaper contributions will reappear any day now; the social and political critic, who wrote the first analysis in English of a post-war economic depression at the close of the Napoleonic wars, a work admired by Maynard Keynes; the psychologist, who grasped the notion of a subconscious mental life and of varying levels of consciousness, who coined the words psycho-analytical and psycho-somatic (as well as hundreds of other words now in our dictionaries), who anticipated the twentieth century on dreams; the educationist, who believed in cultivating the initiative in children and attacked the conventional negative controls by punishment; in theology the ‘higher critic,’ who ploughed methodically through dozens of the heavy German volumes of Eichhorn, Michaelis, and their ilk, and advocated an historical approach to Judaism and Christianity, denouncing what he called the ‘superstitious’ reading of the Scriptures; and one of the most influential of all Coleridges, the analyst of the church as both a spiritual and a temporal society, and of the obligations of both church and state to the national culture; and there is Coleridge the Englishman who was a determined ‘cosmopolite’ (to use another word he coined), who drew up a plan for a league of nations (admittedly with a proviso – although the Napoleonic wars were over–that no Frenchman be allowed to settle outside France or her colonies). And I see I had almost forgotten the philosopher! Yet he delivered possibly the first course of public lectures by an Englishman on the history of that subject – for money (not much money)."
Holmes succeeds where many other biographers fail. (I am thinking here of Rüdiger Safranski's deadpan portrait of Coleridge's contemporary Friedrich Hölderlin). The panoramic vision, the granular chronology, the extensive quotations from Coleridge's notebooks and letters make for an unusually vivid portrait that inspires enthusiasm and love for a brilliant and fallible man. ...more
In Myth and Metropolis, Graeme Gilloch makes a valiant attempt to orient prospective readers in Benjamin's writings on the city. He structures the worIn Myth and Metropolis, Graeme Gilloch makes a valiant attempt to orient prospective readers in Benjamin's writings on the city. He structures the work longitudinally into four main periods, from the early Denkbilder (Naples, Moscow) on Berlin memories, to the Paris Arcades work and the writings on Baudelaire. Vertically (so to speak), Gulloch distinguishes five layers in his reading: physiognomic, phenomenological, historical, mythological and political. Finally, the fabric of Benjamin's metropolitan writings is traversed by numerous modulations: between surface and depth, the monumental and the marginal, the dreamlike and the concrete.
My conclusion after reading this book is that there is no Benjaminian method and no theory except an uncanny isomorphism between city and text. Benjamin's work is a labyrinthine text-as-city, with dead-end streets, shadowy pedestrian bridges, luminous courtyards and enigmatic reflections in shop windows that draw the reader ever further into a kind of mournful and lyrical urban symphony.
Gilloch's effort is commendable, but he might have shaved off another 30 pages or so to avoid repetition and give his account more heft. 3.5 stars....more
Here is a man who rails at the complacency, the cowardice and the falsehood that is corroding our relationship with ourselves and the world. His univeHere is a man who rails at the complacency, the cowardice and the falsehood that is corroding our relationship with ourselves and the world. His universe is starkly existential, denuded of the trappings of consumerism, of greed, of the domestic, of desire to control and to belong. He is an architect, but not in the sense that he merely solves functional puzzles in space. His architecture is cosmology: a reflection of the deep mythic and symbolic structure of the world that human beings have constructed for themselves on this planet. Human beings as place-finding organisms. Places anchored in biological and spiritual need, places where we defiantly, anxiously struggle with the foundational Law that props up co-existence. People are not here to dwell and to know, but to doubt and to roam, to hide and expose themselves behind a tenuous screen of parkland bushes. Settling is serfdom. Architecture is the making of the non-home, of the non-conditioned space, of the space where internalised control is short-circuited. In the end, there is only one question: our common destiny in the face of death. Hence the proliferation of graves and tombs, sprouting from the urban fabric like tufts of grass from the paving stones. Children's classrooms open out over cemeteries. Necropoles rather than department stores occupy the centers of cities. Crematoria expose themselves to the drone and dust of the motorway. Not for the fainthearted. ...more
This book both enthrals and appals me as this thinking about the 'Urgrund' and 'Ungrund' is both deeply systemic (because it essentially deals with hoThis book both enthrals and appals me as this thinking about the 'Urgrund' and 'Ungrund' is both deeply systemic (because it essentially deals with how the world is able to emerge from the undifferentiated archē) and deeply troubling (because it veers towards the occult and the sectarian). However, taking a bit of emotional distance turns the reading into a genuine treat as the book is brimming with ideas from cover to cover. Here I will only foreground a couple of thematic lines that were of particular interest to me.
First, there is the longitudinal perspective that connects the dawn of Western philosophy with motifs in contemporary thought. Although it must be said that thinking about 'origins' in today's cultural and intellectual climate is decidedly politically incorrect, tinged as it is with the excesses of nationalism and ethnocentrism. These misgivings are not entirely without ground, given the historical record. On the other hand, it would be foolish to discard originary motifs from our philosophical reflection, given the key importance of the notion in our intellectual history. The momentous notion of the archē is central in the thinking of the earliest philosophers whose works have come down to us. This book draws an evolutionary line from the Pre-Socratics via classical antiquity to neo-Platonism and Gnosticism, and onwards to medieval German mysticism, Spinoza, Romantic Naturphilosophie, Nietzsche, Heidegger and postmodernism. There is a distinct emphasis on two poles: antiquity and late modern German thought, which can be explained by the fact that this book project emerged from a reflection on Jung's essay 'Archaic Man'. But one can also argue, as does this volume, that the rediscovery of the archaic in 18th century philosophy is a characteristically German affair.
Looking at the re-emergence of the Archaic in the 18th century, there is an interesting tension between a psychological (or anthropological) understanding and a more mystical conception. In the spirit of the former, Kant reflected on the foundations of our knowledge. In contrast, it is no surprise that archaic motifs were sucked into the gravitational field of the single fundamental concept underlying German Idealism - the notion of freedom. Schelling in particular moved in his Naturphilosophie from the individual's intellectual intuition to the foundational act of God per se and expressed this as ‘the longing which the eternal One feels to give birth to itself’. His thinking, influenced by Boehme and Spinoza, signals a clear return to Gnostic themes. Central is this image of an ontological drama that sees the gloom of the undifferentiated as the necessary heritage of reason, order and form. Here also the fascinating but risky resonance is established between the archaic in its darkly mystical manifestation and the aesthetic. Nietzsche is a branching point here. His early work is still significantly under the sway of archaic tropes ('the birth of tragedy'), but he grows decidedly more sceptical of origins in his middle period. That scepticism reverberates in the ideas developed by members of the Frankfurt School and by postmodernists later on. Heidegger, Klages and Jung, on the other hand, form a German counter-tradition that continues to rely on the archaic as a central motif in their thinking.
The latter part of this book focuses exclusively on Jung, for whom "the primordial is not, as Freud suspected it of being, something infantile and hence problematic; rather, it is the solution to the problem of modernity." (Bishop). Indeed, Jung saw his analytical psychology as a reaction against an exaggerated rationalisation of consciousness. The modern Zeitgeist cuts us off from the violent origins of our natural history, which causes the feelings of oppression so typical of modernity. Jung: "That is why so much unlived life succumbs to the unconscious. One lives just as one walks when one’s shoes are too small." When the chaos of the unconscious breaks into people's lives, analytical psychology wants to assist them in working through this primordial experience of the spirit (Urerfahrung des Geistes).
A beautiful theme associated with the mystical interpretation of the archaic is the longing of the undifferentiated to take form. Alan Cardew's long and sprawling essay speaks particularly to this : "Drawing on Spinoza’s notion of nature as a process, natura naturans, Schelling developed a dynamic idea of the cosmos in which Nature and Nature’s God – the two are one – emerged from a dark origin driven by a longing for spiritual awareness and consciousness; the inchoate always seeking form and substance." This notion of a 'ravenous world' is clothed in evocative but disturbing images of 'turbid chaos' and 'consuming fire'. It anchors a vitalist conception of the world. Interesting is the typology of desire proposed by Cardew: "Eros is the desire for something in the future, Pothos for something in the past, and Himeros a desire for that which lies in the present – thus anticipating Bergsonian vitalism and a present made up of retention and protention." Indeed, according to Schelling two forces are present in time and balance in dynamic tension: "one of development, the flow of time itself, and one that holds back, retards and indeed inhibits and stops the flow of time. Without the latter, negative force, the universe (so Schelling claims) would be over ‘in a flash’." So even the negative and seemingly destructive and sinful has a positive role to play.
Here we can again leap forward to Jung whose core idea of the process of individuation mirrors the tenuous emergence of form as a dynamic equilibrium of potencies: "Man, nature, matter, all burn for release and the fulfilment of a need for articulation, and to overcome the force of negation which keeps them in their preset condition. Dreams are seen by Schelling as a window into these inner forces, or rather the inner Potency, and the search for the Philosopher’s Stone is analogous to this quest for potency in material form. Schelling speculates whether an inner force in all things desires to be released to change into a higher spiritual essence, to feed on their own spiritual pabulum." (Cardew)
Finally, I'd like to zoom in on Robert Kozljanič' mytho-phenomenological approach to the Archaic in his fascinating essay on the 'Genius Loci and the Numen of a Place'. Here the tone is somewhat different as the archē is experienced as "a beginning that brings a special magic: a magic that nurtures, fosters life, and helps us to live. A magic that protects, shelters, and guards us on our way through life. (...) it is the fascination, the spell, the allure of the archaic beginning that motivates, moves us forward, and brings forth something new." According to Kozljanič the 'genius' is probably the most beautiful mythological representation of the archaic as enchanting beginning. For the Romans, every person has his personal protecting spirit, the 'genius'. It is closely associated to the milestone events in life: love, marriage, procreation, birth, death. It emphatically also is "a ‘spirit of joy’. It wants the individual human to lead a good life, in the culinary, sexual, and general sensory sense." Pleasure is considered here as going beyond mere excitement. It is an invitation to awaken the formative and individuating powers of the individual. Not only individuals were accompanied by their genius, also specific places were under their protection and influence. Again, the 'genius loci' not only supports biological development, but it represents the site's potential and power and "the creation of identity and the work of memory in a social space". Classic authors evoked the numinous atmosphere of mystery and sublimity - simultaneously enticing and intimidating - that was associated to these places. At times the genius loci also manifested itself as a daimonic, personal epiphany. The key insight here is that place and people are invested in a dynamic, co-evolving relationship. In our contemporary world we have largely lost that capacity of enchantment and that atmospheric connection to the numinous spirit of becoming. However, when human beings are moved by this spirit and its history, and when they preserve and protect the main things and meanings that have grown up around the site, the relationship "makes possible a firm foundation for a future, in which continuity and transformation are not seen as opposites, but as reciprocally interrelated and as establishing the place we call our home."...more
Kris Pints eerste boek - De wilde tuin van de verbeelding - stond in het teken van verzet. Verzet tegen het steriele zelfbeeld van ideale burger-werknKris Pints eerste boek - De wilde tuin van de verbeelding - stond in het teken van verzet. Verzet tegen het steriele zelfbeeld van ideale burger-werknemer-consument dat ons wordt aangereikt vanuit de alomtegenwoordige markt. Die gebruikt daarvoor een waaier van gesofistikeerde 'carrots and sticks'. Ze boezemt gevoelens van angst en afhankelijkheid in. Even goed appelleert ze aan onze zucht naar status, schoonheid en geborgenheid. Maar wie haar wetmatigheden internaliseert, blijft als een lege huls achter, verweesd, en zonder reëel handelingsvermogen.
De verzetstrategie van Kris Pint wortelt in een eigenzinnige capaciteit voor verbeelding. 'De tuin' van het eerste boek suggereerde een activeringsproces in drie fasen: het (figuurlijk) openen van een nieuwe ervaringsruimte (een tuin), het ‘opladen’ van die ruimte met potentie door allerlei verbeeldingsvormen (het ‘herverwilderen' van die tuin), en het cultiveren van die hervonden rijkdom in een hoogstpersoonlijke levenspraxis, een ‘vrolijke wetenschap’.
In dit nieuwe boek trekt Pint deze lijn door. Hij verplaatst de aandacht daarbij van het aardse register, bespeeld door de tuinier, naar het vluchtige van de weersfenomenen, waarmee iedere aardling in principe is vertrouwd. Maar net als de alomtegenwoordige bodem is het weer voor ons vandaag heel ontoegankelijk geworden. We spreken in abstracto over klimaatverandering, maar verloren de capaciteit voor een persoonlijke, intieme en sensorisch alerte omgang met de ons omringende wereld.
Net als in 'de wilde tuin' zoekt Pint in de ontmoeting met kunst en mythe een toegangsweg tot een meer oorspronkelijke en generatieve beleving van weersfenomenen. Neem nu de wind. In de regel is onze waarneming van dit fenomeen beperkt tot enkele oppervlakkige variabelen: hij is zwak of stevig, fris of lauw. Een schilderij van Matisse of een antiek bas-reliëf helpen ons om de speelsheid en de zinnelijkheid van de windervaring te verdichten. Vertrouwdheid met mythen en oorsprongsverhalen uit allerlei culturen scherpen ons gevoel voor de intieme band tussen wind en 'de ziel', de kern van onze existentie. En wat dan nog, zal u misschien vragen? Wel, vanuit deze subtiele ervaringen kunnen we een tegenverbeelding beginnen vormgeven, een verbeelding die ingaat tegen de fnuikende, utilitaire, en lineaire groeivertogen die ons vandaag als individuen en als gemeenschap in een reddeloze cul-de-sac drijven.
In korte hoofdstukken met suggestief, poëtisch proza neemt Kris Pint ons mee door een scala van weersfenomenen. Hij spreidt daarbij een benijdenswaardige eruditie tentoon. Maar er zijn drie constanten: een oosterse esthetisch sensibiliteit, zoals die bijvoorbeeld in de haiku-literatuur naar voren komt, de poëtische dialectiek van Walter Benjamin, en 'de vrolijke wetenschap' van Friedrich Nietzsche. In de drie gevallen gaat het om subtiele of krachtige expressies van existentiële dichtheid, niet met waarheid als inzet, maar 'grote gezondheid' en weerbaarheid....more
This is the first time that I’m venturing beyond Kenneth White’s poems and essays. ’The Wild Swans’ is one of his ‘waybooks’ in which he documents hisThis is the first time that I’m venturing beyond Kenneth White’s poems and essays. ’The Wild Swans’ is one of his ‘waybooks’ in which he documents his geopoetic journeys, in this particular case to the north of Japan. It’s not a travel journal in the ordinary sense but a sediment from an episode of place-based intellectual nomadism. Or, in other words, a reflection of an attempt to establish an ‘intelligent contact’ with a particular habitat through movement, reflection, observation and articulation. "The nomadic intellectual travels through the history of cultures in search of energy centres and penetrates through the layers of time to the archaic. This is when the field of geopoetics begins to open up, which is the attempt to take culture back to its roots.” (quote translated from Le Lieu et la Parole: Entretiens 1987-1997). Hence the numerous references to Japanese lore and literature.
The booklet is slim and consists of about 30 very short chapters. The spirit that animates White’s ventures is that of the haiku, a distinctive form of Japanese poetry which marries extreme brevity to dense atmosphere. Probably, ‘haibun’ - a Japanese literary form that combines prose and haiku - was the model for White’s travelogue. It could explain why White adopted a very understated voice, somewhat elliptic, to narrate his journey. It contrasts with the vigour that speaks from his essays and poems. It doesn’t quite work for me. Something seems to be missing from this book. It’s too tame. I wish White had put a bit of Samurai spirit in it. A book in a similar vein - but more deeply questing, more existentially connected to the elements - is Werner Herzog’s Of Walking in Ice. I certainly recommend that.
[image] Rishiri Island, 2015. The very north of Japan. Not featured in White's book
C'est la première fois que je m'aventure au-delà des poèmes et essais de Kenneth White.’Les Cygnes Sauvages' est l'un de ses "carnets de route" dans lesquels il documente ses voyages géopoétiques, en l'occurrence dans le nord du Japon. Ce n'est pas un carnet de voyage au sens ordinaire du terme, mais un sédiment d'un épisode de nomadisme intellectuel basé sur un lieu. Ou, en d'autres termes, le reflet d'une tentative d'établir un "contact intelligent" avec un habitat particulier par le mouvement, la réflexion, l'observation et l'articulation. "L'intellectuel nomade traverse l'histoire des cultures à la récherche des foyers d'énergie et pénètre à travers les couches du temps jusque dans l'archaïque. C'est à ce moment-là que commence à s'ouvrir le champ de la géopoétique, qui est la tentative de reprendre la culture à la base." (citation de Le Lieu et la Parole: Entretiens 1987-1997). D'où les nombreuses références à la littérature et aux coutumes japonaises.
Le livret est mince et se compose d'une trentaine de chapitres très courts. L'esprit qui anime les aventures de White est celui du haïku, une forme particulière de poésie japonaise qui marie l'extrême brièveté à une atmosphère dense. Le "haïbun" - une forme littéraire japonaise qui combine prose et haïku - a probablement servi de modèle au récit de voyage de White. Cela pourrait expliquer pourquoi White a adopté une voix très discrète, quelque peu elliptique, pour raconter son voyage. Elle contraste avec la vigueur qui se dégage de ses essais et de ses poèmes. Cela ne fonctionne pas tout à fait pour moi. Quelque chose semble manquer à ce livre. Il est trop apprivoisé. J'aurais aimé que White y mette un peu d'esprit samouraï. Un livre dans la même veine - mais plus profondément en quête, plus existentiellement lié aux éléments - est le livre de Werner Herzog, Of Walking in Ice. Je le recommande vivement. (traduction Deepl.com)...more
"What interests me is not a poetry of the self, nor a poetry of the word, but a poetry of the world."
Poet-essayist Kenneth White left his native Scotl"What interests me is not a poetry of the self, nor a poetry of the word, but a poetry of the world."
Poet-essayist Kenneth White left his native Scotland as a young man and settled down in France. Today French readers seem to have privileged access to his work as many English originals have gone out of print. White has made a name for himself as a landscape writer, with an existential edge. His writerly ambition - manifest in a series of essays, poetry collections and 'waybooks' - is to augment, to amplify our sensation of the world, to establish an intelligent contact with our planetary habitat as a basis for a rejuvenation of our culture. He has conceived this practice as 'geopoetics':
"But the myths are dead, the last one being the myth of Infinite Progress. It is now up to man to look around him (neither upwards nor towards the future) and to say to himself: I am here, how can I establish the most sensitive and intelligent possible relationship with all that surrounds me? That is the question. The only one that is fundamentally interesting. If every human being were to ask himself this question, there would be no ideological conflict. That's what geopoetics is all about."
Geopoetic endeavours have been around for a long time. Just picture the Irish monks who explored the northern Atlantic, Basho's journey to the deep north of Japan, the peripatetic philosophising of Nietzsche, or Anton Chekhov's voyage across Siberia to Sakhalin Island. White builds on what these men discovered on the fringes of civilisation, in intimate contact with the elements.
"The real work is to try to pick up where they left off, holding on to their gains. This happens outside of identity ideology and simplistic localism. In a kind of cosmology of energy. (...) The nomadic intellectual travels through the history of cultures in search of energy centres and penetrates through the layers of time to the archaic. This is when the field of geopoetics begins to open up, which is the attempt to take culture back to its roots."
This collection of interviews is an inviting gateway to White's important project. The voice, sources and themes are recognisably his. Whatever the style of questioning of his interlocutor, the reasoning is always sharp, decisive, poised, but never overbearing, intellectualist or doctrinaire. Inevitably there is some overlap between conversations but that's fine as these leitmotifs help the reader to navigate White's layered, cosmopolitan and philosophically profound mindscape. The conversations span a 10-year period. One wonders how White's more recent thinking has evolved in the light of the ever more pressing questions and proliferating ideas about man's place on earth in the anthropocene.
+++
"Ce qui m'intéresse, ce n'est pas une poésie du moi, ni une poésie du mot, mais une poésie du monde."
Le poète-essayiste Kenneth White a quitté son Écosse natale lorsqu'il était jeune et s'est installé en France. Aujourd'hui, les lecteurs français semblent avoir un accès privilégié à son œuvre car de nombreux originaux anglais ont été épuisés. White s'est fait un nom en tant qu'écrivain paysagiste, avec un côté existentiel. Son ambition littéraire - qui se manifeste dans une série d'essais, de recueils de poésie et de carnets de voyage - est d'augmenter, d'amplifier notre sensation du monde, d'établir un contact intelligent avec notre habitat planétaire comme base d'un rajeunissement de notre culture. Il a conçu cette pratique comme de la "géopoétique" :
"Or, les mythes sont morts, le dernier étant le mythe du Progrès infini. C'es à l'homme maintenant de jeter un coup d'oeil autour de lui (ni vers le haut, ni vers le futur), et de se dire: je suis là, comment puis-je établir avec tout ce qui m'entoure le rapport le plus sensible et le plus intelligent possible? Là c'est la question. La seule fondamentalement intéressante. Si chaque être humain se posait cette question-là, il n'y aurait pas de conflit idéologique. C'est le propos de la géopoétique."
Les entreprises géopoétiques existent depuis longtemps. Imaginez les moines irlandais qui ont exploré l'Atlantique Nord, le voyage de Basho dans le grand nord japonais, la philosopherie péripatétique de Nietzsche, ou le voyage d'Anton Tchekhov à travers la Sibérie jusqu'à l'île de Sakhaline. White s'appuie sur ce que ces hommes ont découvert en marge de la civilisation, en contact intime avec les éléments.
"Le vrai travail consiste à essayer the reprendre là où ils sont tombés, en tenant 'le pas gagné'. Cela se passe en dehors de l'idéologie identitaire et de tout localisme simpliste. Dans une sorte de cosmologie de l'énergie. (...) L'intellectuel nomade traverse l'histoire des cultures à la récherche des foyers d'énergie et pénètre à travers les couches du temps jusque dans l'archaïque. C'est à ce moment-là que commence à s'ouvrir le champ de la géopoétique, qui est la tentative de reprendre la culture à la base."
Cette collection d'interviews est une porte d'entrée invitante pour l'important projet de White. La voix, les sources et les thèmes sont reconnaissables à lui. Quel que soit le style d'interrogation de son interlocuteur, le raisonnement est toujours tranchant, décisif, equilibré, mais jamais autoritaire, intellectualiste ou doctrinaire. Inévitablement, il y a un certain chevauchement entre les conversations, mais c'est bien ainsi, car ces leitmotivs aident le lecteur à naviguer le paysage intellectuel cosmopolite et philosophiquement profond de White. Les conversations s'étendent sur une période de dix ans. On se demande comment la pensée plus récente de White a évolué à la lumière des questions de plus en plus pressantes et de la réflexion proliférante sur la place de l'homme sur Terre dans l'anthropocène. ...more
This was a thoroughly engrossing story; it allowed me to immerse myself deeply in the mountain world that I so love. More particularly in the mythic rThis was a thoroughly engrossing story; it allowed me to immerse myself deeply in the mountain world that I so love. More particularly in the mythic realm of our planet's Greater Ranges, the territory of those magnificent peaks of 7.000 meter and higher. Whoever has walked in the shadow of these giants will never forget the feeling of awe and reverence that is evoked by their presence. Ransmayr did a great job of capturing those sentiments in powerful words and images.
The impact of the Himalayan splendour is heightened by the depth of the emotional conflict that plays out between the two protagonists - brothers, Irishmen - who are venturing into the unknown, both geographically and emotionally. In more than one way, this is a report of a journey to the margins of existence. And remarkably enough it is there, in that great Void, that new beginnings become possible. ...more
What is beautiful about this story is the leap from utmost precariousness into even greater peril. Away from dependency and state-sanctioned stigma, iWhat is beautiful about this story is the leap from utmost precariousness into even greater peril. Away from dependency and state-sanctioned stigma, into some form of redemption. In its embrace of existential uncertainty, the book is a trenchant critique on a society that has lost faith in, and even actively discourages the development of resilience and self-curing capabilities in its citizens. Walking is, again, becoming an act of subversion. ...more
Unhelpfully enough I was too impatient while reading this book. Which is all about disengaging from our screens and taking time for observation and foUnhelpfully enough I was too impatient while reading this book. Which is all about disengaging from our screens and taking time for observation and for reconnecting with the mundane but vital marginalia of our daily lifeworld. Odell's tone of voice is attractive enough. A sympathetic blend of the feminine and the masculine, of the nerdy and the bohemian. And she is terribly smart and well-read. But for some reason the mix of diary-like excursions and essayistic argumentation didn't gel, this time, for me. And the hard thing, I suppose, is not the reading but the practice. I may, will probably return to this book. 3,5 stars for now. ...more
This book was a slog. I don't seem to take well to Sebald. But it's hard to put the finger on it. At first sight the mix looks attractive: the polisheThis book was a slog. I don't seem to take well to Sebald. But it's hard to put the finger on it. At first sight the mix looks attractive: the polished prose, the erudition, the wayfaring, the exotic locale, the latent existential drama, the obsession with dissolution and destruction ... But after a while the balloon deflates. The poser is exposed. The crisis appears to be a charade ......more
This is an attempt to experience and sing the living, total mountain. Not as a thing, or even as an ecosystem, but as a pulsating holon, of which the This is an attempt to experience and sing the living, total mountain. Not as a thing, or even as an ecosystem, but as a pulsating holon, of which the tiniest slivers of light and matter reflects the delicacy and wonder of the whole. Human beings who want to experience the grace of partaking in this web of life have to hone their humility, patience and quiescence, their powers of observation, curiosity and willingness to stray from the beaten path. And so the mountain turns into a metaphor for our own lives, enmeshed as they are in a wondrous cosmos. Nan Shepherd’s tribute to the Cairngorm mountains, a hybrid of an essay, a travelogue and a prose poem, is a uniquely perceptive contribution to the alpine literature. The introductory essay by Robert MacFarlane is very worthwhile too. A book to read and reread.
In my personal pantheon of favourite writers, there is a cluster that is rather dear to me. These authors speak directly to the heart and yet, while rIn my personal pantheon of favourite writers, there is a cluster that is rather dear to me. These authors speak directly to the heart and yet, while reading, I find myself often on my guard "Am I being taken for a ride? Isn’t he overplaying his hand here? Isn’t this too windy, too self-conscious, too corny, too adolescent?" But then the next moment I allow myself to be swept up by their wrongheadedness, daring, fragility, cleverness, and generosity.
Nietzsche is in that league, and with Baricco the chatter is even louder. And I am thinking of adding Kenneth White to this bunch too. White is a monomaniac, an inveterate traveler with a life-long obsession for the furthest horizon, for the point of no return, where the ego dissolves into nothingness. His habitat of predilection is the north, the Atlantic coastal regions beyond the 60th parallel. There he seeks solitude, silence, beauty and abstraction, a key to the gate of ‘the real world’. Because inland the earth disappears and the mind only rots. Walking the beach, tracing the bird-path is, for White, a gamble with existential import.
But when I walk alone the rocks or the machair the silence itself is illuminate and I do not think of culture or even subsistence the question in my mind is of going outward always farther outward to the farthest line of light
There is a constant struggle to reduce things to their very essence. Elementary sensory data - a gull’s cry, the wheeling of a gannet’s wing - become cyphers that point to the Real. The poet's task is to be receptive to these signs, hoard them, densify, polish and articulate them.
for the question is always how out of all the chances and changes to select the features of real significance so as to make of the welter a world that will last and how to order the signs and the symbols so that 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
In this hard-edged quest for enlightenment there is an occasional bit of sermonising, a flash of juvenile petulance and a lapse into self-pity or self-aggrandisement.
Is there anywhere on the dwindling earth a man like me walking at the edge of the sea and
White feels alone, a poet destined to keep alive the embers of a scattered, obscure culture, “full of hard beauty that had never run to waste, firmly grounded and yet winged.” He doesn’t hesitate to invoke Nietzsche, Rilke, Hölderlin as fellow travelers. Or itinerant medieval monks, shamans and seafarers who ventured out to the farthest reaches of the mind and the whitest stretches of the map.
having lived in Glasgow lodged in a large dark room with three shelves of books a table a chair a bed on the floor a rough carpet (Connemara red) in one corner a rug (a goatskin from Tibet) on the first wall was pinned a print of Hokusai on the second was an X-ray photo of my ribs on the third was a long quotation from Nietzsche on the fourth was nothing at all that’s the wall I went through before I arrived here
But why not? I sense in White’s poetry also and foremost also a lot of truth. There’s a level of energy that continues to bowl over.
All poetry comes from facing a loveliness all love comes from living in nakedness all naked life comes from the nothingness
The images are bold, the colours fierce and unadulterated.
for like Kandinsky returning to his studio at twilight and seeing a canvas ‘of indescribable and incandescent beauty’ it happens that the ‘known’ materials of my life sunk almost into oblivion by familiarity suddenly blaze out materia poetica of new realities each time more complex and I advance
[image] Somewhere above the Tyrrhenian (2014)...more
It was almost inevitable that someone would take up the plan to retrace Hölderlin's steps on his mythical 1801/1802 journey from Stuttgart to BordeauxIt was almost inevitable that someone would take up the plan to retrace Hölderlin's steps on his mythical 1801/1802 journey from Stuttgart to Bordeaux. Hölderlin's fateful French sojourn is shrouded in mystery. We know what brought him there (an appointment as house tutor for the children of a German businessman and consul) but we don't know why he left Bordeaux after just a few months on the job. The exact route of his journey has also been the subject of much speculation. What is certain, however, is that the whole episode marks a turning point in the poet's biography. Upon his return in Stuttgart, in the spring of 1802, it was clear to his friends and family that Hölderlin was in a very bad shape: he appeared confused, extremely agitated, dishevelled. Something serious must have happened to him during these final weeks in Bordeaux or during his return trip. In the few years after this caesura Hölderlin wrote some his most visionary poetry but around 1806 he was diagnosed as incurably mentally ill.
Thomas Knubben journeyed 53 days on foot in the winter of 2009, faithfully retracing the poet's movements (insofar as possible given the lacunary biographical evidence). In the book he deftly meshes his own travelogue with speculations about the poet's undoing. Knubben's travel report is rather anecdotal and misses an expressive force that would have been able to mirror Hölderlin's highly strung psyche and his tragic sense of fate (Werner Herzog's 'Gewaltmarsch' from Munich to Paris in the winter of 1974, reported in Of Walking in Ice - to which Knubben briefly refers - has that poetic vision in spades). But the more scholarly side of the book is genuinely well done and helps to shed light on the circumstances and setting of Hölderlin's journey. ...more
After having enjoyed Tony McManus’ The Radical Field, an introduction to the work and life of Kenneth White, I was eager to deepen my understanding ofAfter having enjoyed Tony McManus’ The Radical Field, an introduction to the work and life of Kenneth White, I was eager to deepen my understanding of White’s geopoetics through the writings of the man himself. ‘On the Atlantic Edge’ seemed as good any place to start. It is a set of three longish ‘Highland Lectures’, delivered in the late summer and fall of 2005, on the theme of ‘A New Light on the North’.
A shorter lecture delivered on the occasion of the Edinburgh Book Festival prepares the ground for the main part of the book. It sketches the contours of a Whitean reading of the Scottish Enlightenment from which two figures emerge as pivotal to the geopoetics project: the philosopher David Hume and the geologist James Hutton. Two savants who were brave enough to counter dusty metaphysics and ecclesiastical dogma with clearheaded thinking, ruthless curiosity and a thirst for experience.
There is a fascinating corollary to my reading of this introductory essay here. At one point White left Scotland more or less behind him as a permanent place of residence. He settled down in Brittany, in France. In his lecture White mentions that also Hume spent some time in France when he was a young man and working on his monumental A Treatise of Human Nature. A summary internet search led me to a fascinating essay by Alison Gopnik, a well-regarded developmental psychologist, who discovered that Hume’s stay in the Anjou town of La Flèche had been a unique opportunity to partake of first-hand insights on Buddhist culture and religion. La Flèche was a center of Jesuit learning where Hume almost certainly met missionaries with a deep knowledge of the East. This might (or might not) explain the resonances between Hume’s empiricism and Buddhist worldview and philosophy. In any case, these deep, hidden cultural cross-currents render Hume’s work even more ‘world opening’ than White could have suspected.
The lectures themselves survey a very varied terrain - “delving into history, looking at geography, re-examining the literary tradition” - seen through the nodal points of Scotland, the North and Atlanticity. In each essay White double backs to his central theme: the practice-theory of geopoetics. ‘On the Atlantic Edge’ doesn’t put forward a single, monolithic definition of geopoetics but the contours of the project take shape through the literary ‘textonics’ practiced by the author. Through his intellectual and ambulatory peregrinations White lays bare hidden cultural channels and opens up new horizons: “Geopoetics breaks familiarity, and recognizes a strangeness. Beginning with the lie of the land, remaining close to the elements, it opens up a space, and it works out a new mindset. Its basis is a new sense of the land in an enlarged mind.” The ambition of geopoetics is to retrace a path back to an originary point that regrounds the relationship between humans and our planetary habitat, and from that ontological ‘ground zero’ revitalize culture and interhuman relationships.
These lectures have been an unalloyed pleasure to read. The author's erudition, the incisiveness of his prose, and the scope and ambition of the geopoetic project are thrilling. I look forward to continuing the exploration of this rewarding territory....more
This book struck me as a much needed breath of fresh air. It had been waiting in my library for me for many years, and I seemed to have picked it up aThis book struck me as a much needed breath of fresh air. It had been waiting in my library for me for many years, and I seemed to have picked it up at just the right moment. In ‘The Radical Field’ Tony McManus offers a probing introduction to the work of poet-essayist Kenneth White. A Caledonian who spent most of his life outside of his native Scotland, White is the progenitor of ‘geopoetics’, the import of which he explains as follows:
"Geopoetics is concerned with ‘worlding’ (and ‘wording’ is contained in ‘worlding’). In my semantics, ‘world’ emerges from a contact between the human mind and the things, the lines, the rhythms of the earth, the person in relation to the planet. When this contact is sensitive, subtle, intelligent, you have ‘a world’ (a culture) in the strong, confirming and enlightening sense of the word. When that contact is insensitive, simplistic and stupid, you don’t have a world at all, you have a non-world, a pseudo-culture, a dictatorial enclosure, or a mass-mess. Geopoetics is concerned with developing sensitive and intelligent contact, and with working out original ways to express that contact.”
From this book, White emerges as a fearsome trailblazer, a radical with an uncompromising sense of mission, a sharp intellect and an exceptionally gifted poet and writer. In his mystical love for the earth and his scathing condemnation of Western culture, the vitality of which had been fatally sapped by ratiocination, White reminded me of Nietzsche. But, as McManus points out, the Pre-Socratic philosophers or the Japanese masters of haiku are equally topical models.
McManus presents his subject respectfully and with supreme command of its poetic and philosophical ramifications. The first part of the book narrates White’s formative years in Scotland until his final departure for France. The second part cross-sections White’s project and oeuvre from a variety of philosophical, literary and geographic vantage points. The final part zooms in on the three key literary forms relied on by White: the essay, the travelogue (‘waybook’) and the short and long poems.
There is one thing in this book that puzzles, however. In addition to his English output, White produced a considerable body of work in French. However, McManus does seem to quote only from the original. So I assume that White’s French work has remained largely out of the scope of this book.
I’m closing this review with a passage from a poem by White’s countryman Hugh McDiarmid, quoted in the book. To be sure, MacDiarmid’s discursive and suave language is far removed from White’s highly charged and elemental poetics. But the idea expressed in it seems to capture the spirit of the geopoetic project most astutely:
What happens to us Is irrelevant to the world’s geology But what happens to the world’s geology Is not irrelevant to us. We must reconcile ourselves to the stones Not the stones to us. Here a man must shed the encumbrances that muffle Contact with elemental things, the subtleties That seem inseperable from a humane life, and go apart Into a simple and sterner, more beautiful and more Oppressive world, Austerely intoxicating: the first draft is overpowering. Few survive it.
This is a book I like to return to. I have a better understanding of Benjamin's project now than when I first read it. Contrasting Benjamin's HabilitaThis is a book I like to return to. I have a better understanding of Benjamin's project now than when I first read it. Contrasting Benjamin's Habilitationschrift on the German Trauerspiel with One-Way Street, Susan Buck-Morss writes: "But if the style of these two works is antithetical, the content of the old-fashioned work maintains a striking affinity to the new one. The Trauerspiel study attempts to 'redeem' allegory theoretically. One Way Street does this practically, and transforms the meaning of redemption of the process. Not the allegorical object but the allegorical practice is redeemed (...) It is not the desire to rehabilitate an arcane dramatic genre that motivates Benjamin, but the desire to make allegory actual. The allegorical mode allows Benjamin to make visibly palpable the experience of a world in fragments, in which the passing of time means not progress but disintegration."
Each morning the day lies like a fresh shirt on our bed; this incomparably fine, incomparably tightly woven fabric of pure prediction fits us perfectly. The happiness of the next twenty-four hours depends on our ability, on waking, to pick it up.
Is there anyone who has not been stunned, emerging from the Métro into the open air, to step into brilliant sunlight? And yet the sun shone just a brightly a few minutes earlier, when he went down. So quickly has he forgotten the weather of the upper world. And as quickly the world in its turn will forget him. For who can say more of his own existence than that it has passed through the lives of two or three others as gently and closely as the weather?
How much more easily the leave-taker is loved! For the flame burns more purely for those vanishing in the distance, fueled by the fleeting scrap of material waving from the ship or railway window. Separation penetrates the disappearing person like a pigment and steeps him in gentle radiance.
What is ‘solved’? Do not all the questions of our lives, as we live, remain behind us like foliage obstructing our view? To uproot this foliage, even to thin it out, does not occur to us. We stride on, leave it behind, and from a distance it is indeed open to view, but indistinct, shadowy, and all the more enigmatically entangled.