Essays

Mappings: Landscape, Mindscape, Wordscape

The Collected Works of Kenneth White

Volume 2

– On Scottish Ground

– Ideas of Order à Cape Wrath

– The Wanderer and His Charts

The Book

2021

Essays
23,4 x 15,6 cm
728 pages
Hardcover
ISBN10: 978-1399511131
Edinburgh University Press.

Three collections of essays whose aim is to express the cartography and the experience of a live, open world.

If Kenneth White was keenly interested in early twentieth-century attempts to rescue his home territory, Scotland, from a heavy heritage of historicism, doldrums, flat realism (and its cousin, fantasticality), right from the start he was out for something more radically grounded, more intellectually incisive and culturally more coherent. The three books gathered here illustrate his initial movement on these lines in all its aspects, from politics to poetics.

On Scottish Ground reveals the terrain to be explored, from geology and archaeology up, resituating figures such as David Hume, Patrick Geddes, Hugh MacDiarmid, as well as revisiting the works of scotic thinkers such as Duns Scotus and John Scot Erigena.

Ideas of Order at Cape Wrath takes the exploration further. The word “wrath” here, taken by many to mean “anger”, in fact goes back to the old Norse word signifying “turning point”. White’s turning point is not only geographical, it is fundamental.

The third book, The Wanderer and his Charts, lays out the co-ordinates of the new space White has opened up. He may have left Scotland, but he has taken with him a lot of what we might call a quintessential Scotland, just as Joyce took with him an essential Ireland. Kenneth White is not only a convinced European Scot, but he renews the tradition of the medieval Scotus vagans (‘wandering Scot’), an existence devoted to travelling and learning, finding and founding.

After much moving about, he taught (1983-96) from a specially created Chair of Twentieth-Century Poetics at the Sorbonne. In 1989, he founded the International Institute of Geopoetics, the aim of which is to explore in depth the human and non-human habitation of the earth and the basis of live culture. On the Continent, his work, whether in essay, narrative or poem, has been awarded many prizes, among them the Prix Medicis Etranger and the French Academy’s Grand Prix du Rayonnement.

Publisher’s presentation

Extracts

White, Kenneth, and Cairns Craig. “A Fundamental Project.” Edinburgh University Press, 2021, pp. 328–348. Mappings: Landscape, Mindscape, Wordscape, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv1kd7x1p.33. Accessed 6 Aug. 2024.

Twenty-five centuries ago, three men: a politician, Pericles; an architect, Phidias; and a poet, Sophocles, met on the heights of Athens with the idea of giving a radiant form to the city and making it ‘the school of Greece’, indeed the school of the world. This was one of the great critical and creative moments of human history – the culminating point of an already long evolution that had begun in megalithic times (all those circles and alignments related to stellar space) and was to continue into the first urban developments: the mesopotamian cities of Eridu, Uruk, Warka, Sumer and Ugarit

White, Kenneth, and Cairns Craig. “A Highland Reconnaissance.” Edinburgh University Press, 2021, pp. 185–201. Mappings: Landscape, Mindscape, Wordscape, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv1kd7x1p.20. Accessed 6 Aug. 2024.

Before getting into the stride of this lecture, I want to say just how glad I am to be invited to do some ‘high talk’ up here in Inverness, in the lands of the Old Red, those layers of sandstone sediment left by sea or lake after millennia of stillness and turbulence and stillness again, and that lie open like the leaves of a book (‘the many-folded pages of the Old Red Sandstone’) in which Hugh Miller of the Black Isle saw the signs of evolution. Evolution – a concept seen by many, even geologists, in that day’s Scotland, as a

White, Kenneth, and Cairns Craig. “A New Reading.” Edinburgh University Press, 2021, pp. 46–53. Mappings: Landscape, Mindscape, Wordscape, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv1kd7x1p.9. Accessed 6 Aug. 2024.

‘Tam o’ Shanter’ has generally been considered as a convivial and boisterous piece of comic realism, an extravagant fantasia, to which readers can abandon themselves with relish and with no thought as to ulterior meaning. It is only when we realize the possible overtones of the word ‘Shanter’ that the ‘witch-story’ takes on new dimensions, and a closer reading becomes imperative. It is known that Burns derived the word from the name of a farm. But let readers once look on it with linguistic imagination and even a modicum of poetic thought, and it will become involved in their minds

White, Kenneth, and Cairns Craig. “A Sense of High North.” Edinburgh University Press, 2021, pp. 202–217. Mappings: Landscape, Mindscape, Wordscape, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv1kd7x1p.21. Accessed 6 Aug. 2024.

For a title to this talk, I hesitated between ‘A Sense of High North’ and ‘A High Sense of North’. I finally opted for ‘A Sense of High North’. But the latent, or ‘occult’ title (as Hugh Miller of the Black Isle would have said) is ‘A High Sense of North’. I’ll say what I mean by a ‘high sense’ later. As to that word ‘North’, it has a whole host of connotations. To give it, for a start, some geographical precision. A Canadian acquaintance of mine, the geographer Louis-Edmond Hamelin, in his book Nordicité canadienne (Les Cahiers du Québec,

White, Kenneth, and Cairns Craig. “A Sense of Open World.” Edinburgh University Press, 2021, pp. 461–469. Mappings: Landscape, Mindscape, Wordscape, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv1kd7x1p.44. Accessed 6 Aug. 2024.

I was born and educated in a country, Scotland, that provided the first in-depth study and analysis of the modern amorphous, confused and conflict-ridden situation. I’m referring of course to Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. Because of this study of liberal capitalism, Smith has come to be known as ‘the founder of modern economy’. But Smith’s purpose in that book was analytical, not promotional. In other texts, written during his occupancy of the Chair of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow University, Smith made his thinking concerning the new situation clear: education would be ‘despised or at least neglected’ and ‘the

White, Kenneth, and Cairns Craig. “A Shaman Dancing on the Glacier.” Edinburgh University Press, 2021, pp. 34–45. Mappings: Landscape, Mindscape, Wordscape, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv1kd7x1p.8. Accessed 6 Aug. 2024.

When, at one point in the lead-up to the symposium, ‘Burns, Beuys and Beyond – the figure of the artist in (modern) society’, I was asked what was going to be the title of my lecture, the words ‘A shaman dancing on the glacier’ leaped into my mind with all the inevitability of dictation from the subconscious. Which is another way of saying that my title may sound a bit surrealistic. I didn’t understand it very well at first myself, but, as I worked away, I came to understand it more and more. A good part of what I have to

White, Kenneth, and Cairns Craig. “A Wave And Wind Philosophy.” Edinburgh University Press, 2021, pp. 586–594. Mappings: Landscape, Mindscape, Wordscape, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv1kd7x1p.57. Accessed 6 Aug. 2024.

In that classic text-book for biologists, Forbes and Hanley’s Molluscs, you find the following general description of the octopodidae: ‘The cuttle-fishes of this family have mostly more or less global, inflated bodies. They have rather small heads, prominent eyes protected by eye-lids, fleshy lips to their mouths and strongly curved compressed beaks. Their arms are eight in number, and all similar though more or less unequal, they bear sessile suckers. The mantle is always attached to the neck. They are active animals, swimming and creeping with facility, but living chiefly among the crevices of rocky ground.’ Thereafter, in a section

White, Kenneth, and Cairns Craig. “Aesthetic Considerations on the Calton Hill.” Edinburgh University Press, 2021, pp. 665–677. Mappings: Landscape, Mindscape, Wordscape, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv1kd7x1p.64. Accessed 6 Aug. 2024.

Aesthetics is a difficult word to handle. Like any other essential term, it will have been used in so many different, often confused contexts, that it needs a careening job done on it before it can move thoughtfully at all through the universe of discourse. To some, it may evoke in the first place a context of the late nineteenth century: effete individuals lolling about on purple velvet couches, devoted to the worship of Art as a divine, otherwordly domain. But let me put my own reference cards right away on the table. If I use the word aesthetics, I’m

White, Kenneth, and Cairns Craig. “Along the Atlantic Coast.” Edinburgh University Press, 2021, pp. 571–585. Mappings: Landscape, Mindscape, Wordscape, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv1kd7x1p.56. Accessed 6 Aug. 2024.

In 1847, during the expedition ‘over field and shore’ he made in the company of Maxime du Camp, Gustave Flaubert, during a halt at a lighthouse near Brest, which is to say at the finisterrian tip of Brittany, wrote this: ‘This is where the old world ends: this is its most advanced point, its extreme limit. Behind you lies all Europe, all Asia; in front of you, it’s all sea. However big some areas may seem to our eyes, aren’t they always a bit hemmed-in once we know they’re not limitless? From a French beach, looking across the Channel, you

White, Kenneth, and Cairns Craig. “American Affinities.” Edinburgh University Press, 2021, pp. 441–449. Mappings: Landscape, Mindscape, Wordscape, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv1kd7x1p.42. Accessed 6 Aug. 2024.

My point of departure in this investigation is an essay by Robert Duncan in the anthology The Poetics of the New American Poetry (Grove Press, 1973), which, when I first read it, seemed to chime in with a lot of what had been going on in my own head for some time. But I would like to stress at the outset that ‘new American’ did not constitute in my mind a useful epithet for what I was trying to get at. If I will be referring in this essay-map mainly to American-born poets, I am trying to penetrate to structures

White, Kenneth, and Cairns Craig. “An Outline of Geopoetics.” Edinburgh University Press, 2021, pp. 683–704. Mappings: Landscape, Mindscape, Wordscape, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv1kd7x1p.66. Accessed 6 Aug. 2024.

Over the centuries, civilization has been carried by various powers: myth, religion, metaphysics. Although remnants of all these remain, usually in degraded forms, today civilization is carried by nothing – it just grows and spreads. The last driving force was history itself, as put forward by Hegel, who claimed to see a Weltgeist (‘spirit of the world’) at work in it. From Hegel on, the conviction would be that history was reasonable, that it had a purpose, and that it was leading somewhere. The ideology of progress (with Growth and Prosperity as its motto) was born. The ‘somewhere’ supposedly on the

White, Kenneth, and Cairns Craig. “An Overview of Cultural History.” Edinburgh University Press, 2021, pp. 261–273. Mappings: Landscape, Mindscape, Wordscape, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv1kd7x1p.27. Accessed 6 Aug. 2024.

The last blow-up of history, the last big phase of modernity, was the massive Industrial Revolution with its boom-and-bust economy based on the presence of rich coal and poor folk, notably, so far as Britain was concerned (it was at the centre of it) in its northernmost sections, up by Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield and, especially in my own mind, Glasgow, bringing with it the transplantation of populations, pounding humanity to a pulp – or almost, but not quite, since it saw also strikes and revolts, as also the movements of socialism and communism. At the end of its long series of

White, Kenneth, and Cairns Craig. “Aquitanian Affinities.” Edinburgh University Press, 2021, pp. 516–525. Mappings: Landscape, Mindscape, Wordscape, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv1kd7x1p.51. Accessed 6 Aug. 2024.

I’m sitting down to write this essay in my Pyrenean study. At my side are pinned prints and photographs of other workplaces dear to my mind: Thoreau’s cabin at Walden, the inn frequented by Nietzsche at Sils-Maria in the Engadine, Spinoza’s workshop at Rhynnsburg, a taoist hermitage in the mountains – and Montaigne’s library: ‘It’s on the third floor of a tower, [. . .] a round room, with just enough flat surface for my table and chair. [. . .] It is sixteen paces in diameter and has three wide views of the surrounding countryside. [. . .] That’s where

White, Kenneth, and Cairns Craig. “Common Sense and Uncommon Sense.” Edinburgh University Press, 2021, pp. 367–376. Mappings: Landscape, Mindscape, Wordscape, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv1kd7x1p.36. Accessed 6 Aug. 2024.

The term ‘Common Sense’ in my title refers in the first instance to that type of thinking developed in eighteenth-century Scotland, known in the histories of philosophy as ‘The Common Sense School’. I first became acquainted with the Common Sense School when I attended the class in Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow, where its instigator, Thomas Reid, professed it for years. Not that it was taught as such in that Moral Philosophy class, but its atmosphere was still in the air, as I realized more and more in the course of my own investigations. The fact is that

White, Kenneth, and Cairns Craig. “Elements of a New Cartography.” Edinburgh University Press, 2021, pp. 603–618. Mappings: Landscape, Mindscape, Wordscape, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv1kd7x1p.59. Accessed 6 Aug. 2024.

‘In each age of the world distinguished by high activity’, says Whitehead in Adventures of Ideas, ‘there will be found at its culmination, and among the agencies leading to that culmination, some profound cosmological outlook, implicitly accepted, impressing its own type upon the current springs of action.’ If we’re willing to admit the hypothesis that there exist, in the present age, at least some fields of ‘high activity’, it may be interesting to see what ‘cosmological thought’ is in the air, giving its shape to our mental space. In his studies on the spiritual crisis and revolution of the seventeenth

White, Kenneth, and Cairns Craig. “From Neotechnics to Geopoetics.” Edinburgh University Press, 2021, pp. 114–129. Mappings: Landscape, Mindscape, Wordscape, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv1kd7x1p.15. Accessed 6 Aug. 2024.

If you cross the Luxembourg Gardens, in Paris, from Montparnasse to the Latin Quarter, along the main thoroughfare, just before the pond and the lawn that fronts the Senate House, you come across a statue raised in 1906 by the Société d’Économie Sociale (the Society of Social Economics) to commemorate the birth centenary of Pierre Guillaume Frédéric Le Play. On one face of the pedestal, you have the social functions performed by Le Play (for example, Commissioner at various times of Universal Exhibitions, Senator of the Republic), on the other, a list of some of his books: Les Ouvriers Européens,

White, Kenneth, and Cairns Craig. “Front Matter.” Edinburgh University Press, 2021, pp. i–iv. Mappings: Landscape, Mindscape, Wordscape, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv1kd7x1p.1. Accessed 6 Aug. 2024.

White, Kenneth, and Cairns Craig. “Ideas of Order at Cape Wrath.” Edinburgh University Press, 2021, pp. 349–354. Mappings: Landscape, Mindscape, Wordscape, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv1kd7x1p.34. Accessed 6 Aug. 2024.

A Spanish writer and thinker to my liking, Mariano José de Larra asked himself around 1835: ‘Where is Spain?’, and found the question hard to answer. All he saw was ‘a monotonous and sepulchral silence’, a state of frustration with no investigatory impulse, an accumulation of obstacles against anything like real work or live thought. If it is valid nowadays to put a similar question: ‘Where is Scotland?’, the immediate impression will be different: in the place of a ‘sepulchral silence’ (imposed by an obviously oppressive church and a flagrantly repressive government), what we have nowadays (while subtler forms of

White, Kenneth, and Cairns Craig. “Into the White World.” Edinburgh University Press, 2021, pp. 54–61. Mappings: Landscape, Mindscape, Wordscape, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv1kd7x1p.10. Accessed 6 Aug. 2024.

This essay is written on the assumption that, to understand something about poetry (and poetry speaks ultimately of the white world), it is better to read, say, Knud Rasmussen’s Intellectual Culture of the Iglulik Eskimos, or Shirokogorov’s Psychomental Complex of the Tungus, than the ruck and run of our literary production. It assumes also that poetry is meant neither for weak stomachs nor soft brains – and that it is more than ‘something’ (liberally vague) done by individuals, professionally (according to some economicocultural nexus) entitled poets, working on the nauseatingly incoherent data of an ego-limited conscience, with more or less skill,

White, Kenneth, and Cairns Craig. “Kentigern on Atlantic Quay.” Edinburgh University Press, 2021, pp. 227–235. Mappings: Landscape, Mindscape, Wordscape, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv1kd7x1p.23. Accessed 6 Aug. 2024.

As I said in an earlier section of this book, Kentigern is an old acquaintance of mine. I met up with him first on the stained glass window of a church in Fairlie, Ayrshire, where I was brought up: there he was, book in hand, preaching to the gulls. Under the name of St Mungo, Kentigern became the patron saint of Glasgow. But I prefer the older name: Kentigern – ‘the head of the house of the moon’. In fact, Kentigern is not only an old acquaintance, he’s a kind of alter ego. If somebody even wanted to go so far

White, Kenneth, and Cairns Craig. “Letter from the Pyrenees.” Edinburgh University Press, 2021, pp. 511–515. Mappings: Landscape, Mindscape, Wordscape, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv1kd7x1p.50. Accessed 6 Aug. 2024.

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. Here I am at this present moment on a sandy shore of the Landes, just up from the Basque country, and in a few days’ time I’ll be back in my room in Pau, drinking a glass or two of Auchentoshan (a whisky I drink for ethno-psychological reasons when the moon is full) and

White, Kenneth, and Cairns Craig. “Meditation in Winter.” Edinburgh University Press, 2021, pp. 526–531. Mappings: Landscape, Mindscape, Wordscape, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv1kd7x1p.52. Accessed 6 Aug. 2024.

‘Now suddenly there was nothing but a world of cloud, and we were there alone in the middle of a great white plain with snowy hills and mountains staring at us; and it was very still; but there were whispers.’ That’s the wichasa wakon (‘holy man’) of a Sioux tribe telling of his great vision, his great winter vision. For the Amerindian, far from being a period of the year smitten by absence and negativity, winter is ‘the season of secrets’. The empty silence of a snowy landscape is an invitation to concentration and meditation, offers the possibility of an

White, Kenneth, and Cairns Craig. “Meditations in the Atlantic Library.” Edinburgh University Press, 2021, pp. 450–460. Mappings: Landscape, Mindscape, Wordscape, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv1kd7x1p.43. Accessed 6 Aug. 2024.

What I want to do in this essay is present, amid the most confused mass of literary production that has ever existed, all the aspects of a library, seen as a set of essential archives, a collection of necessary documents. To have such a preoccupation is not simply to be ‘bookish’. What is implied is the laying out of a foundation of knowledge, the opening up of a referential field. A library, public or private, has a great role to play both in the expansion of a mind and in the development of a culture. In the Scottish context, one

White, Kenneth, and Cairns Craig. “Minds in Movement.” Edinburgh University Press, 2021, pp. 477–488. Mappings: Landscape, Mindscape, Wordscape, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv1kd7x1p.46. Accessed 6 Aug. 2024.

Imagine a winter’s night, in the year of grace 1535, in Carpentras, South-Eastern France. The bishop of Carpentras is in his library, deep in study, when a knock comes at the door. It’s his chamberlain saying that a young man has just turned up at the gate. ‘What does he look like?’, says the bishop. ‘A bit wild and travelworn’, says the chamberlain, ‘but he’s wearing a scholar’s gown.’ ‘Oh, well, better show him in’, says the bishop, keeping his forefinger crooked in his book so the visitor will understand he’s interrupted something and not hang about too long. When

White, Kenneth, and Cairns Craig. “North Atlantic Investigations.” Edinburgh University Press, 2021, pp. 166–184. Mappings: Landscape, Mindscape, Wordscape, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv1kd7x1p.19. Accessed 6 Aug. 2024.

Before whaling into the open ocean and developing my theme, a word as to the notion of Atlantic Arc, which has come to the fore in recent years. In Scotland, we’re at its northern edge, since it stretches from the southern tip of Portugal up to the Scottish archipelagoes. The idea of the Atlantic Arc emerged from a meeting at Rennes, in Brittany, on September 8th, 1989. But it gathered full momentum at Faro, in Portugal, a month later (October 9, 1989), when twentythree European regions recognized that, facing out on to it, they shared a common space: the Atlantic,

White, Kenneth, and Cairns Craig. “On a Ridge between Two Seas.” Edinburgh University Press, 2021, pp. 495–500. Mappings: Landscape, Mindscape, Wordscape, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv1kd7x1p.48. Accessed 6 Aug. 2024.

There’s a passage in the fragments Nietzsche wrote for a projected Birth of Philosophy, a passage in which he evokes the earliest of the early Greek philosophers: Thales, Anaximander, Parmenides, Empedocles, Heraclitus . . . In those times, he says, such minds were recognized, acknowledged and listened to. Whereas, at other times, ‘the philosopher is a solitary traveller, placed by chance in a hostile environment, wandering about from place to place [. . .] he is like a comet, an astonishing phenomenon, but not allowed to shine like a star in the solar system of a complete culture.’ Nietzsche in

White, Kenneth, and Cairns Craig. “Origins and Occasions.” Edinburgh University Press, 2021, pp. 251–254. Mappings: Landscape, Mindscape, Wordscape, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv1kd7x1p.25. Accessed 6 Aug. 2024.

This text was a lecture delivered at the symposium of the Scottish Centre for Geopoetics (affiliated to the international Institute of Geopoetics I set up in 1989): ‘The Radical Ground – an indepth exploration of the culture question’, which took place at the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh on Saturday, 16 November 1996. This was written in Glasgow, in 1967. It was first published in my book of essays, La Figure du dehors, Paris, Editions Grasset, 1982. This text was delivered as a lecture at the symposium ‘Burns, Beuys and Beyond’ organized by the Society of Scottish Artists and the

White, Kenneth, and Cairns Craig. “Pilot-Plan for a Highliner University.” Edinburgh University Press, 2021, pp. 398–420. Mappings: Landscape, Mindscape, Wordscape, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv1kd7x1p.39. Accessed 6 Aug. 2024.

Before Scotland took the road to Londonism, administrative colonialism, market-gogetterism, etc. on the one hand, with pathetic identity ideology on the other, the matrix of the Scottish university curriculum, and indeed the backbone of the country, was moral philosophy. Those were the days of Adam Smith, David Hume and Adam Ferguson. Later, when Enlightenment thickened into the Common Sense school, leading eventually to the mix of liberal capitalism, evangelical piety and utilitarian practicality that was Victorian Scotland, when Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (disquietening analysis) degenerated into Carnegie’s The Gospel of Wealth (complacent apology), Scotland had no background left. Given

White, Kenneth, and Cairns Craig. “Politics and Poetics.” Edinburgh University Press, 2021, pp. 280–288. Mappings: Landscape, Mindscape, Wordscape, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv1kd7x1p.29. Accessed 6 Aug. 2024.

There was a time, first in Glasgow, then in Paris, when I was plunged in Russian literature and Russian problematics. I often walked up and down Nekrassov Street and looked along the Nevsky Prospect . . . What preoccupied me in Glasgow was the relationship between nationalism and cosmopolitanism: the big nineteenth-century debate in Russia between the Occidentalists on the one hand and the Slavophiles on the other, both of them concerned with the evolution of culture in Russia and with the question of native genius. Russia has always oscillated between the European West and the Asiatic East. It was

White, Kenneth, and Cairns Craig. “Preface.” Edinburgh University Press, 2021, pp. 3–4. Mappings: Landscape, Mindscape, Wordscape, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv1kd7x1p.5. Accessed 6 Aug. 2024.

White, Kenneth, and Cairns Craig. “Reflections on a Logbook.” Edinburgh University Press, 2021, pp. 532–538. Mappings: Landscape, Mindscape, Wordscape, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv1kd7x1p.53. Accessed 6 Aug. 2024.

One of the Pacific’s island arcs runs from Halmaheira, south of the Philippines, via the Pescadores, Taiwan, Okinawa, the Ryukyu and Hokkaido. Volcanic, these islands are part of what has been called the Pacific Ocean’s ancient ‘fire belt’. This was more or less the line Lapérouse followed when he left Manilla in April 1787, making for the coast of Tartary and the obscure regions of the North-West Pacific. It was an important stage in his expedition (an expedition I’m reading as mind-journey), not only because of the cartographic confusion that prevailed in this part of the world, but because it

White, Kenneth, and Cairns Craig. “Renewing Local Perspectives.” Edinburgh University Press, 2021, pp. 355–366. Mappings: Landscape, Mindscape, Wordscape, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv1kd7x1p.35. Accessed 6 Aug. 2024.

Since, after giving up a certain British context as a bad job, seeing in it a progressive movement to total degradation, I came back to English-language publishing a few years ago, deciding, for various reasons, to do so from Scotland, I’ve been called a lot of things, ranging from prophet to prevaricator via provoker (I’m quoting bits of newspaper articles, and only the polite ones). But the term that turns up most often is ‘Scotland’s writer in exile’, another version of which is ‘Scotland’s absentee poet’. This is repeated so often that, to keep the large perspectives open and counteract

White, Kenneth, and Cairns Craig. “Rimbaud, Glasgow and Ways West.” Edinburgh University Press, 2021, pp. 489–494. Mappings: Landscape, Mindscape, Wordscape, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv1kd7x1p.47. Accessed 6 Aug. 2024.

In his determination to become a voyant (a man of vision) or, to use the old Vedic language in which such a project was formulated for the first time, a rishi, Rimbaud threw himself body and soul into his method. Wanting to find the ‘real meaning’ of the self, which meant regaining the ‘primitive state of a son of the sun’, he set out on what the Veda calls the Northern Route: ‘As for the sun-world, it is to be arrived at on the High North Road, by means of research on the self.’ For such an enterprise, nobody was better

White, Kenneth, and Cairns Craig. “Scotland, History and the Writer.” Edinburgh University Press, 2021, pp. 130–143. Mappings: Landscape, Mindscape, Wordscape, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv1kd7x1p.16. Accessed 6 Aug. 2024.

I’d like to begin by thanking the University of Grenoble, and in particular the group for Scottish Studies, for inviting me as ‘guest speaker’ at their congress. I think it should be remarked at least in passing that this was rather a bold gesture on their part, liable to cause some irritation, certainly not in any enlightened company, but let’s say, in adjacent and dimmer precincts. After all, at the present moment, I have spent almost half of my life outside Scotland. Not only that, but at one moment in my life-line, I broke entirely with English-language publishing, and a

White, Kenneth, and Cairns Craig. “Scotland, Intelligence and Culture.” Edinburgh University Press, 2021, pp. 77–84. Mappings: Landscape, Mindscape, Wordscape, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv1kd7x1p.12. Accessed 6 Aug. 2024.

I would like, in the first instance, to thank the organisers of the 1989 symposium on cultural perspectives in Scotland for inviting to give the ‘keynote talk’ one whom some at least of our fellow citizens would like to see written off or at least marginalised as French, that is, ‘unScottish’. Before actually moving into the field of our concern, let me just evoke briefly the names of some Scottish intellectuals, among the liveliest of the type, who, for one reason or another, chose to live a good part of their lives if not all of it outside Scotland and

White, Kenneth, and Cairns Craig. “Table of Contents.” Edinburgh University Press, 2021, pp. v–vii. Mappings: Landscape, Mindscape, Wordscape, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv1kd7x1p.2. Accessed 6 Aug. 2024.

White, Kenneth, and Cairns Craig. “Talking Transformation.” Edinburgh University Press, 2021, pp. 218–226. Mappings: Landscape, Mindscape, Wordscape, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv1kd7x1p.22. Accessed 6 Aug. 2024.

The pre-text, the point of departure, of this essay is the event organised around the linguistic philosophy of Noam Chomsky by the Free University and the review Scottish Child in Glasgow in January 1990. Its aim will be to move through the field of generative (transformational) grammar as well as the philosophy of common sense, a theme also raised on this occasion, into something else, to be defined. So that, if the initial subtitle of the essay might have been: Scotland, Chomsky and Common Sense, its actual subtitle could be: The crisis of reason, radical research and the new field

White, Kenneth, and Cairns Craig. “The Alban Project.” Edinburgh University Press, 2021, pp. 5–16. Mappings: Landscape, Mindscape, Wordscape, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv1kd7x1p.6. Accessed 6 Aug. 2024.

If I tend to call Scotland ‘Alba’, it’s in much the same way as Walt Whitman called New York ‘Manahatta’: ‘I was asking for something specific and perfect for my city, whereupon lo! upsprang the aboriginal name’. If Manahatta for Whitman was a ‘word nested in nests of water-bays’, Alba for me is . . . Well, before letting it all get dismissed with something like an ‘Och ay, Alba, that’s teuchter for Scotland’, I propose we look into things with some detail, following out land-lines and word-sense. On Ptolemy’s world-map (Alexandria, second century), the northern part of Insula Britanica,

White, Kenneth, and Cairns Craig. “The Archaic Context.” Edinburgh University Press, 2021, pp. 17–33. Mappings: Landscape, Mindscape, Wordscape, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv1kd7x1p.7. Accessed 6 Aug. 2024.

In Highland River (The Porpoise Press, 1937), Neil Gunn tells the story of Kenn, the story of his search for the source of a river which is the source of his life. Aware of an opacity in the civilization around him, and in his own civilized mind, he goes back to the river of his childhood in an attempt to get beyond the opacity and penetrate through to a light: Knowing this, he would like to stop the thickening of his mind, to hunt back into that lost land . . . It was intensely real and Kenn had a

White, Kenneth, and Cairns Craig. “The Birds of Kentigern.” Edinburgh University Press, 2021, pp. 62–76. Mappings: Landscape, Mindscape, Wordscape, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv1kd7x1p.11. Accessed 6 Aug. 2024.

The original title of this essay was ‘Zen and the birds of Kentigern’. It was because I could imagine somebody saying: ‘Oh Christ, here comes another Zen-addict, talking strictly to the birds’, that I decided to drop the Zen reference, at least in the title. One learns to be wary of reflex reactions and reductionist mentalities. Let’s get it straight, right from the start. I was ‘into’ Zen, or let’s rather say, the higher reaches of Mahayana Buddhism, a long time ago, and I’ve been so long in it, so far into it, that I’ve come out of it – at

White, Kenneth, and Cairns Craig. “The Complex Field.” Edinburgh University Press, 2021, pp. 595–602. Mappings: Landscape, Mindscape, Wordscape, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv1kd7x1p.58. Accessed 6 Aug. 2024.

The wind’s howling round my study: ‘Hebrides, Minches, Baillie. South-west backing south-east 6 to gale 8 decreasing 4 for a time. Rain showers. Good becoming poor for a time. Fair Isle, Faroes. Westerly severe gale 9 decreasing 4 backing south-east 6 to gale 8 later . . .’ If there’s anything I listen to with pleasure on the radio, it’s the marine weather report. With very few exceptions, the rest of the news is just the story of never-ending human imbecility. Joyce wanted to waken up from the nightmare. Hegel thought he saw a logic in it and he wrote

White, Kenneth, and Cairns Craig. “The Field of Edge-Knowledge.” Edinburgh University Press, 2021, pp. 421–428. Mappings: Landscape, Mindscape, Wordscape, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv1kd7x1p.40. Accessed 6 Aug. 2024.

Psychological limits, sociological borders, philosophical margins have been a feature of literature and a theme of research at least since romanticism, and have taken on increasing critical acuteness, creative intensity, and cultural intention, since the beginning of the twentieth century, since, say, to mark a date, the ‘crisis in the sciences’ diagnosed and analysed by Husserl. They have certainly been a mark of my own work right from the beginning, partly at least because of my birth in the Atlantic city of Glasgow, by years of childhood and adolescence on Scotland’s fragmented West coast, sojourns as a student in a

White, Kenneth, and Cairns Craig. “The Findhorn Letter.” Edinburgh University Press, 2021, pp. 390–397. Mappings: Landscape, Mindscape, Wordscape, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv1kd7x1p.38. Accessed 6 Aug. 2024.

In January 1842, at Boston, Massachusetts, Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered a lecture entitled ‘The Transcendentalist’. If I choose to begin here, it’s not only because this was the first text on ‘the transcendental’ I ever read, but because it’s a convenient place from which to make an approach to the transcendental field, its terms being still fairly general. ‘It is a sign of our times, conspicuous to the coarsest observer’, wrote Emerson, ‘that many intelligent [. . .] persons withdraw themselves from the common labours and competition of the market and the caucus, and betake themselves to a certain solitary

White, Kenneth, and Cairns Craig. “The Franco-Scottish Connection.” Edinburgh University Press, 2021, pp. 102–113. Mappings: Landscape, Mindscape, Wordscape, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv1kd7x1p.14. Accessed 6 Aug. 2024.

As every professional or assiduously amateur lecturer knows, the thing, when you’re asked for a lecture months before you’re actually going to be on the job, and when your head may be turned in a different if not totally opposite direction, is to provide a title that will cover the theme while at the same time leaving you a good deal of navigational leeway. That was my problem when Edinburgh University got in touch with me about the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the French Institute in Scotland. With the kind of considerations I’ve just evoked in mind, I

White, Kenneth, and Cairns Craig. “The Fronting Shore.” Edinburgh University Press, 2021, pp. 236–250. Mappings: Landscape, Mindscape, Wordscape, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv1kd7x1p.24. Accessed 6 Aug. 2024.

If, throughout my life and work, I have chosen to concentrate so much on the Atlantic coast, it is for several reasons. First of all, I take ‘seaboard’ to be particularly significant space. We are close there to the beginnings of life, we cannot but be aware there of primordial rhythms (tidal, meteorological). In that space, too, we have one foot, as it were, in humanity (inhabited, inscribed, coded space), the other, in the non-human cosmos (chaos cosmos, chaosmos) – and I think it is vitally important to keep that dialogue alive. It may be for reasons similar to those I

White, Kenneth, and Cairns Craig. “The Heritage and Role of a European Writer.” Edinburgh University Press, 2021, pp. 305–316. Mappings: Landscape, Mindscape, Wordscape, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv1kd7x1p.31. Accessed 6 Aug. 2024.

I want to begin by thanking the University of Cologne, and in particular the Centre for European Studies, for their invitation to speak before you. Although I did part of my studies in Germany, at Munich, although I know quite a few German cities, for having travelled through them and sometimes worked in them, this is the first time I have set foot in Cologne. And it is all the more strange in that this city of Cologne occupies a peculiar situation on my mental map. Not only, not mainly, because of Goethe’s essay of 1823, Von deutscher Baukunst, in

White, Kenneth, and Cairns Craig. “The High Field.” Edinburgh University Press, 2021, pp. 152–165. Mappings: Landscape, Mindscape, Wordscape, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv1kd7x1p.18. Accessed 6 Aug. 2024.

When the pamphlet Metaphysics and Poetry appeared in 1975 (Lothlorien Publications), all the logical empiricists and linguistic positivists among us could only see it as an enormous naivety, a harking back to an obsolete mental landscape. For myself, whatever my reservations vis-à-vis the word ‘metaphysics’, it was an invitation to re-open a territory that has tended lately to disappear from the literary maps and now requires some illumination. Hence this essay, as a contribution to that conversation between Hugh MacDiarmid and Walter Perrie, as well as, in the bygoing, a friendly dialogue between myself and some other Scottish writers. Thought

White, Kenneth, and Cairns Craig. “The High Line.” Edinburgh University Press, 2021, pp. 539–555. Mappings: Landscape, Mindscape, Wordscape, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv1kd7x1p.54. Accessed 6 Aug. 2024.

I want to begin this ‘high line’ study by referring to a walking tour that Robert Louis Stevenson did in January 1876, that is, at the age of 26. This was a trip into Ayrshire. In the first place, I suppose inevitably, it’s a Burns pilgrimage, with evocations of Kyle and the Brig o’Doon. But it’s more than that. It’s a psycho-social portrait of Ayrshire as ‘one of the most typical regions of Scotland’, evoking in this ethno-cultural context a plowman in a field by the Shanter river, a shellfish-gatherer, and four carters, ‘long and muscled, with lean, intelligent faces’,

White, Kenneth, and Cairns Craig. “The Music of the Landscape.” Edinburgh University Press, 2021, pp. 678–682. Mappings: Landscape, Mindscape, Wordscape, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv1kd7x1p.65. Accessed 6 Aug. 2024.

As I begin to write this text, rain is beating on the window of my ‘Atlantic studio’ on Brittany’s north coast. This light percussion – a rain raga – is punctuated now and then by gull cries. At such moments of, shall we say, biocosmopoetic plenitude, I often think I don’t need any other music, any fabricated music, at all. I imagine that certain hermits on the Western Isles, in Cappadocia, in the Himalaya or the Tian Shan, must have felt the same. Here’s Henry Thoreau, the hermit of Walden Pond, writing in his Journal under the date June 13th 1851: ‘Walked

White, Kenneth, and Cairns Craig. “The Nature of Radical Writing.” Edinburgh University Press, 2021, pp. 317–327. Mappings: Landscape, Mindscape, Wordscape, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv1kd7x1p.32. Accessed 6 Aug. 2024.

A few weeks ago I was in a little hotel in Paris for the night. It had been a hard day, and I was tired, but my neurones were still jumping. So I rummaged along the shelf of books available, looking for something to have an easy read at while not descending to total piffle, when I came across Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, no doubt left by some American tourist with nostalgia for the Lost Generation days. You can learn a lot from Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast. You can learn, for example, that the whores in Kansas City used to

White, Kenneth, and Cairns Craig. “The New Europe.” Edinburgh University Press, 2021, pp. 642–654. Mappings: Landscape, Mindscape, Wordscape, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv1kd7x1p.62. Accessed 6 Aug. 2024.

What I want to do in the first place is present a general outline of the idea of Europe, and of the various ways that idea has been carried throughout European history. It is not perhaps totally useless to linger a while by the original myth, as recounted, say, by Ovid in his Metamorphoses. According to this story, Europa was a Phoenician princess, daughter of the King of Tyre, who was carried off by Zeus in the guise of a white bull to Crete, where she became the mother of Minos. What the story, with its abduction and journey from

White, Kenneth, and Cairns Craig. “The Perils and Possibilities of Democracy.” Edinburgh University Press, 2021, pp. 274–279. Mappings: Landscape, Mindscape, Wordscape, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv1kd7x1p.28. Accessed 6 Aug. 2024.

We live in what we call a democracy, and we take it for granted. If it’s not the best form of government, it is, we have been told, the least bad. I’d accept that notion, but what we tend to forget is that, if it’s not to become debased, it has to be perpetually worked at – not only politically and socially, but educationally, culturally, intellectually, artistically. Because it’s so easy to lose sight of that high world-line (there are so many urgent particulars pressing in on everybody), the fact is at the moment that we’re not living in a live

White, Kenneth, and Cairns Craig. “The Re-Mapping of Scotland.” Edinburgh University Press, 2021, pp. 655–664. Mappings: Landscape, Mindscape, Wordscape, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv1kd7x1p.63. Accessed 6 Aug. 2024.

The other day in Italy I was talking with a highly-placed official in the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. ‘You Scots are an amazing people’, he said. ‘There are only about five million of you, and you’re all over the place, always in the forefront.’ It was heady stuff. To keep from swooning in sheer self-satisfaction, I felt, in typical Scottish fashion, that I had to bring in a dose of scepticism if not downright cynicism. ‘Oh, we’re great fellows once we get a chance’, I said, ‘but the country’s been checked for a long time; clogged up with crap

White, Kenneth, and Cairns Craig. “The Relationship of Community to Cosmos.” Edinburgh University Press, 2021, pp. 377–389. Mappings: Landscape, Mindscape, Wordscape, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv1kd7x1p.37. Accessed 6 Aug. 2024.

I want to take the example here of a writer who came to the fore at the time of the ‘Scottish Renaissance’. Having written elsewhere of Patrick Geddes and Hugh MacDiarmid, the two figures on the recent Scottish scene who interest me most, here I want to re-examine the case of Neil Gunn. Mainly bacause to my mind his work has only very rarely been seen in its full spectrum. Gunn is more or less definitely catalogued as a ‘communitarian’ writer. This is a myopic curtailment of his intention and his perspectives. There is a whole other dimension to his

White, Kenneth, and Cairns Craig. “The Ruins and Lights of Ezra Pound.” Edinburgh University Press, 2021, pp. 501–508. Mappings: Landscape, Mindscape, Wordscape, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv1kd7x1p.49. Accessed 6 Aug. 2024.

Like his hero, Odysseus the wanderer (‘the live man among duds’ – Polite Essays), Pound carries with him more ‘flames and voices’ than most writers. He is animated by that energy which makes a man want to go outside the existing categories, create, or at least transmit, his apprehension of something that goes beyond himself and may transfigure the all-too-human context, enliven dead time. What Pound, with his ‘flames and voices’, is concerned with is no less than a civilization, a world: ‘Quite simply, I want a new civilization’ (The Exile, n° 3, 1928). This obviously implies other men, hence attempts

White, Kenneth, and Cairns Craig. “The Scot Abroad.” Edinburgh University Press, 2021, pp. 85–101. Mappings: Landscape, Mindscape, Wordscape, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv1kd7x1p.13. Accessed 6 Aug. 2024.

My theme here is ‘the Scot abroad’. As anybody who knows my predilections and propensities will suspect, I’ll be talking less about what comes to mind immediately under such a heading in the customary Scottish context we all know: exiles in Canada or Australia, whole genealogies of colonial administrators, long lines of Bible-toting missionaries, and more – via the evocation of travelling monks, wandering scholars, intellectual nomads, poetic loners, and pilgrims of the void – about broadening of outlook, extension of concept, expansion of being. But since exiles aren’t always just exiles, out to found a Burns Society in the desert (sometimes

White, Kenneth, and Cairns Craig. “The White Bag of Books.” Edinburgh University Press, 2021, pp. 631–641. Mappings: Landscape, Mindscape, Wordscape, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv1kd7x1p.61. Accessed 6 Aug. 2024.

The setting of that poem is Oxfordshire, but it took no great effort for me to translate it into my own Ayrshire context: it was important enough for me to want to import it. Thus, when I read ‘Cumner’, I thought ‘Cumnock’. ‘Hinksey and its wintry ridge’, was, for me, the Kaim Hill, rising up there over Fairlie, maybe the piled-up remains of a glacier’s edge. As for Christ-Church, it was the parish church of St Paul’s, down there at the foot of the Craigie. Not only was my topography taking on poetic density, something which I consider fundamental for anything

White, Kenneth, and Cairns Craig. “Towards a Scottish Republic.” Edinburgh University Press, 2021, pp. 144–151. Mappings: Landscape, Mindscape, Wordscape, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv1kd7x1p.17. Accessed 6 Aug. 2024.

This is touchy territory. In order to create the kind of reasonably rational atmosphere in which I’d like my propositions to be received, I’m going to begin by evoking an imaginary conversation by Walter Savage Landor, that between David Hume, sceptical philosopher, and John Home, patriotic playwright, that would have taken place in Edinburgh around 1760. Hume has just returned to Scotland from one of his frequent sojourns in France, and Home is keen for him to linger a longer while than usual in his home country, assuring him that he will find in Edinburgh ‘a society as polished and

White, Kenneth, and Cairns Craig. “Tracks and Voices in the Wilderness.” Edinburgh University Press, 2021, pp. 429–440. Mappings: Landscape, Mindscape, Wordscape, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv1kd7x1p.41. Accessed 6 Aug. 2024.

In the month of May, 1877, the American consul in Bremen received the following letter: The undersigned – Born in Charleville (France) – Aged 23 – 5ft 6 height – Good healthy – Late a teacher of sciences and languages – recently th deserted from the 47 Regiment of the French army – actually in Bremen without any means, the French consul refusing any Relief. Would like to know on which conditions he could conclude an immediate engagement in the American navy. Speaks and writes English, German, French, Italian and Spanish. Has been four months a sailor in a Scotch bark, from Java to Queenstown, from August

White, Kenneth, and Cairns Craig. “What Is World Writing?” Edinburgh University Press, 2021, pp. 619–628. Mappings: Landscape, Mindscape, Wordscape, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv1kd7x1p.60. Accessed 6 Aug. 2024.

By the ‘world writing’ of my title, I don’t simply mean a panoramic view of the writing done all over the world. Most of what is called ‘creative writing’ done all over the world today is insignificant when it isn’t pernicious. I’m a partisan of what Goethe, back at the end of the eighteenth century, called ‘world literature’ (Weltliteratur), meaning by that the idea that no demanding, expanding mind could be satisfied any longer with any national literature and that it was necessary to look beyond the borders. Since no one can know all the languages of the world, that

White, Kenneth, and Cairns Craig. “Working in the Outer Reaches.” Edinburgh University Press, 2021, pp. 289–304. Mappings: Landscape, Mindscape, Wordscape, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv1kd7x1p.30. Accessed 6 Aug. 2024.

The theme I want to develop in this essay is the extension and expansion of Scottish intelligence. It’s a big theme, and it runs right through all my work, along various latitudes and longitudes. I’ll begin with two epigraphs, two introductions, that I’ll briefly comment on before moving out further into what I trust will be seen as a radical enlightening field. The first is from a seventeeth century English poem, ‘The Rebel Scot’, by John Cleveland. This is a witty, scurrilous satire on Scots and all things Scottish. I’ll quote only six of its 150 or so lines: Like

White, Kenneth, and Cairns Craig. “Writing the Road.” Edinburgh University Press, 2021, pp. 556–570. Mappings: Landscape, Mindscape, Wordscape, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv1kd7x1p.55. Accessed 6 Aug. 2024.

Where prose-writing is concerned, the massive reference is still the novel, even more specifically, the naturalistic novel, in other words, psycho-sociology in this or that context, with a little fantasy (the infantile form of imagination) or perversity (the legacy of Puritanism) on the side. If I waste no time on this kind of literature, I have at one time or another read all the recognized great novels and a good number of the less great. I’m thinking of Melville. But Melville I tend to see now more as one straining towards an epic poem than one settled into straight story-telling