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Groundzone and Horizon

In the Zohar, it is said of an “old sage”, alone in his room, deep in the study of “the Law” (to vary the cultural context, we could say “the Logos” or “the Tao”), that he “keeps the universe in movement and sustains the world.”

Crazy stuff indeed. But you don’t read books like the Zohar the way you read the daily newspaper or the latest novel.

I don’t see myself as a kabbalistic “old sage” (I work out in the open field and the territory is often tough, rough, abrupt and tricky), but in these days of confinement imposed by virological plague, it’s that image that came in the first place to my mind.

Intercultural Geopoetics in Kenneth White’s Open World by Mohammed Hashas

by Michèle DUCLOS

A strange kind of predestination seems to have presided over the writing of this book on Kenneth White and Geopoetics. Its author, Mohammed Hashas, is an ex-student of Professor Khalid Haji, who was himself a student under Kenneth White at the Sorbonne.

An enthusiastic and open-minded reader of Kenneth White’s books, and now himself an established teacher, Hashas divides the impressive material he has assembled into three large, clear parts :

Interim Reports from Folding Landscapes

by Tim ROBINSON

Although I have been making maps for a dozen years now, cartography, in the sense of a general desire and competence to make maps, remains alien to me. The maps I have so far undertaken cover all the land I can see from where I live, and are elaborated and externalized version of the mental sketchmaps one makes to situate oneself, cognitively and emotionally, in a new locality. Since it was the disorientating nature of the place I had opted to live in that urged me to map it, I should begin this brief retrospect with a hint of its strangeness to one coming there directly from London. The Aran Islands are three chips of limestone off the Burren, the paradoxical character of which is well indicated by the name of its ruined abbey, 'St Mary of the Fertile Rock'. However the islands are more on speaking terms with Connemara, sharing with it the honour and burden of a language in retreat, carrying an oral tradition older than Christianity. The Atlantic batters, caresses, bewilders and depresses the two mainlands and lavishes its attentions on the islands in particular. That will do; that is already more than I knew when I arrived in 1972, to live in a hamlet an hour's walk west of the little port of Árainn, the largest of the islands.

The Complex Field

by Kenneth WHITE

« Disintegrating the image, turning meaning into movement. »

(Mandelstam)

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 the Phenomenology of the Mind in order to demonstrate the fact. In my more philosophical moments, I’m tempted to compose a Meteorology of the Mind, but I’ve come to want to leave the -logies alone and work closer in to the landscape, in an intellectual context still to be defined. I’ve been calling it for some time now geopoetics, and consider it as aiming at a new mental geography and a new language of communication (a wave-length our culture hasn’t yet tuned into.)

That’s what I’ve come to work at here in Brittany.

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