Through to the White

JOHN ABERDEIN reflects on the thought of Kenneth White

THE CULTURAL CHALLENGE of Kenneth White seems vital, simplified, penetrating, evasive, grounded, airy. Thus White may partake of that same Scottish antisyzygy, that same tendency to simultaneously harbour, and nurture, psycho-cultural extremes which he exported himself to repudiate.

To paraphrase Joyce, he has chosen exile, sounding and kenning. All three terms carry excitement, promise, suspicion. For example sounding may be sounding-off, but it may also be sounding neglected depths and making new sounds.

Kenning, that northern metaphor-flash which Ken White extols (exemplifying the sort of nominal determinism which saw BNFL once appoint a director called Con Allday), I’ve tried tussling with in the boxed poem below. Exile, particularly voluntary exile, can substitute the flamboyant cloak of ego-justification for the complex garments of the originating community.

White talks continually of finding or refinding ground, field and world. The attempt to create a new ‘poetics’, to wit geopoetics, is immensely valuable. In its emphasis on ontology it may seriously claim to be the ‘be-all’: yet in its rejection of current ongoings, whether in Scotland or in the West as a whole, as mere culture, it fails by some distance to be an ‘end-all’.

White’s central point is that you can’t have growth without ground, and in particular no healthy growth without re-found ground. Such Maoism of the mind seems very much a 60s project. White says he turned to it after May 68 fizzled out (he was teaching in the Sorbonne at the time).

White should be read and reread, listened to, responded to and criticised.

A slogan of the 60s, existentialist through and through, was If you don’t like your life, change it. In his rejection of Scottish Renaissance in favour of re-connaissance, his dismissal of humanism / socialism / nationalism in favour of mondism or monism, there is more than a suggestion that White was eager to sacrifice the dis-eased organs of Art and Society in order to get at the stuff and skein of Life.

As epigraph to ‘The Glass of Pure Water’, Hugh McDiarmid quotes approvingly Aldous Huxley on D H Lawrence: “…he was able, as it were, to taste the hydrogen and oxygen in his glass of water.” White similarly can put us in touch with DNA, so that we momently wade upstream in that river of life we share with amoeba, gull, diatom and birch. At his best, White unites shamanism and Taoism.

To those who may wonder what might be the necessary connection between poetics and philosophy, White replies ‘poetry is fast thought’. This seems to me an excellent start and, in the same moment, suggests a poetry open to all experience. White, however, as evidenced by his lecture ‘The Sense of High North’ as HI~Arts Fellow in Kirkwall on 31st October, fritters useful energy battening on the poetic approaches of others. Let me take an example.

White made bold to attack the work of George Mackay Brown in what he perhaps took as the local shrine. He finds Brown’s conception inadequate to life in the isles. Accusing the Orkney writer en passant of being ‘sedentary to the point of chronic incrustation’ and prone to give way to ‘communitarian comforts’, the main charges against Brown are of being ‘stubbornly naive, a ‘christological folklorist’, ‘militantly anti-Enlightenment, anti-democratic, and anti-Protestant’.

Brown’s search for a ‘lost kingdom’, says White, is an exercise in ‘literary heraldry’ and ‘invalid’ today. All of which has sufficient truth to have a ring. None of which explains why Brown is still a better poet than White himself.

Poetry, of course, is a lot more than ‘fast thought’. The openness of poetry is also an open ear for the polysemantics of centuries’ use, by oppressors and liberators, clodhoppers and marvellers, and for the rhythms of heart and drum, fast thought and swinging tide.

Ultimately, though I write this as a sort of review, it is more as a continuing response. All practising artists create an aesthetics that allows them to continue to grow. For example in his rejection of the novel as a valent form, I might have agreed with White once upon a time. But I don’t agree now. It seems to me now that the novel too has its poetics, more omnivorous, as most humans are.

White should be read and reread, listened to, responded to and criticised. To what extent, we might ask, is his ‘sense of high north’ a geographically-conditioned or inherited mentality and to what extent a willed mental realigning, away from the metropolitan to the frontiers of awareness? One assumes the latter is the dominant reading, but under continual cover, continual cold comfort one might say, of the former.

My current take is this. As prophet Kenneth White is inspiring, insofar as he leads us into the wilderness; as poet he seems divided against himself, as if he wants to have his stone and eat it; as philosopher he is as vital and vanescent as phosphorus in water.
 

Kenning

We ken
we cry
the sea
whale’s road,
bright sword
a fish,
and death
white goad –

the world
one field
(its here
no hence)
lights all
cold our
co res
pondence.

John Aberdein
 

John Aberdein is the author of Amande’s Bed, published by Thirsty Books

© John Aberdein, 2005

 Audio of Kenneth White’s full lecture, “A Sense of High North”, is available to download here.