Articles

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.

Answers to defamatory allegations about the Gwenved case

Régis POULET

President of the International Institute of Geopoetics

Kenneth White is one of the few people who changed the course of my life.

The trust and friendship he granted me from our first meeting, which only grew until his last moments, allow me to fight for three years to ensure that his wishes, whether strictly testamentary or intellectual, are respected, against all embezzlement and all betrayal.

The "Gwenved Affair" — from the name of the house that Kenneth White wanted to turn into a residence for artists and writers — crystallizes many elements on which I will not have the time to elaborate today. Let us say that it is a question of respect for demanding thought, geopoetics, and its inventor.

I have been applying this requirement to myself and often to others since 2013. I do not intend to change it.

The International Institute of Geopoetics, which has been in existence since 1989, carries with it the seeds of a powerful transformation of the world. What we learned from Kenneth White and from geopoetics is that in any place, our relationship to the world and our relationship to others are at stake. The safeguarding of the White house is more than a gesture to safeguard a heritage, it is a gesture to save a living place of culture, so that it can still serve as a home of culture.

Faced with the declared risk of selling Gwenved, I took the initiative, after discussion within our institution, to launch a petition to prevent the sale and bring about the project of an artists’ and writers' house, which is about to be buried under artificial flowers and ceremonies. The line defended is simple: scrupulously respect the wishes clearly expressed by Kenneth White. Widely heard in France and abroad (in about fifty countries), it arouses resistance among those who, with the death of Kenneth White, seem to have interests other than the posthumous defense of their family.

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.

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