IFF last weekend hosted the annual general meeting of the Scottish Centre for Geopoetics at our home at The Boathouse, Aberdour. This was the result of earlier encounters with the Centre by my colleague Andrew Lyon in connection with a project about the influence of culture on Scotland’s health. The meeting provided an opportunity for other members of IFF to meet members of the geopoetics group and to learn more about this remarkable perspective on the world. It was a life-enhancing encounter.
I have become enthralled. A quick browse through Kenneth White’s short pamphlet Geopoetics – place, culture, world was enough on the day to allow me to declare that IFF has always since its inception been seeking to practise geopoetics. And I never knew.
In this short pamphlet, 30 pages of the most lucid prose, White opens up a way of seeing and being in the world, ‘founded and grounded’, that I find resonates beautifully with the IFF’s work. Most impressively, for White is a philosopher-artist, he starts to provide a language for the discipline of ‘self-developing individuals cultivating a live and life-enhancing world’. This cannot be achieved without geopoetics.
White describes the history of Western civilisation from Plato and Aristotle, through the classical age, the middle ages, the renaissance etc to modernity as like a motorway – with a linear drive towards progress. This has led us to the ‘the Contemporary Situation: a confused, incoherent mess controlled and exploited by a mediocracy…. Down the centre of the Motorway, a mindless helter-skeltering. Along its rim, a literature, an art, that is nothing more than a reflection of this situation, this condition’.
‘Where to now?’ asks White. And, in terms that are becoming ever more apparent in my own reading of the contemporary world, tells us where to look for an answer:
‘There is no strictly political solution… All politics on its own can do is try to cope with symptoms, in a more or less competent way. The fundamental question is cultural rather than political. A really active culture implies a co-ordination of politics and poetics at a higher level. Beyond the legislative and the executive lies the exemplary’.
White founded the International Institute of Geopoetics in 1989 and there are now enthusiastic branches all over the world. As far as I understand it, this is a term intentionally chosen to contain a multitude. ‘Geo’ is both about the Earth and about the World, or rather the many worlds which we inhabit. White stresses the open, connected nature of the world: the global really is local, the river flows to the ocean, the rocks on the local beach come from half a world away, and so on. ‘Poetics’, he suggest, is a language, like mathematics. And it has become a language increasingly of science because ‘science has entered an area in which ‘normal’ language no longer seems adequate, and in which the structure of reality seems more poetic than mechanistic’.
Einstein’s Cosmological Considerations of 1917 is seen as a turning point in this regard. I was surprised to find Einstein arguing so early in the 20th century for a more holistic, multi-perspectival view of the world, a reconciliation between mathematical reasoning and ‘the loveliness of life’. White sees scope for this reconciliation in the word ‘cosmos’ itself: originally meaning ‘a beautiful, harmonious totality’ – a meaning that tellingly lingers only in the Contemporary Situation in ‘cosmetics’.
I feel I have pulled just one tiny pearl from a rich treasure trove. But already I can see that Kenneth White and the Scottish Centre for Geopoetics have much to contribute to IFF’s dialogues eg on beauty and aesthetics as ways of knowing; on cultural leadership and what it takes to lead a culture (‘the individual can always move faster than a society’ writes White); on what it is to really operate in and inhabit the framework for thinking and learning that is the IFF world model; and the reconnection of ways of perception implied by White’s ideal of the ‘philosopher-artist’ (Walt Whitman: the aim of any poetry worth its salt is to ‘make cosmos’).
I am pleased too that IFF’s stance resonated with the geopoetics group. One challenge to White that came up in our discussion was that he never really got his hands dirty, never engaged in active work in society to shift the culture to a better place. The same charge cannot be levelled at IFF – we have bravely taken a multi-dimensional, loving and compassionate human reading of our situtation actively into the world, including into rundown and ‘deprived’ communities. And it is often the most ‘deprived’ (under the classifications of modernity and the Contemporary Situation) who know its power better than we do. It was heart-warming and encouraging therefore to have our work of several years reframed by one member of the group as ‘geopoetics with a purpose’.
Tags: arts, culture, culture change, geopoetics, world game
It is hugely encouraging to encounter an organisation and individuals who are intuitively responsive to geopoetics, since I have found such resistance elsewhere. We clearly have a lot to say to one another - what matters is this mutual encouragement to give us both the confidence to go forward, unafraid to enlarge our horizons. I came away from our meeting thinking it was the best we had ever had….
With so many thanks for making it possible.
Jim
I’m sorry I missed the Aberdour event, although I did manage to get to Calton Hill for a magnificent sunset view over Fife, the Pentlands, and a large swathe of Central Scotland. So I was maybe in visual contact if not present.
Regarding the ASTRAL project, what I discussed with Marion Sheridan, and which led to mention of mutual interests in Geopoetics, was the fusion of arts approaches to science with some form of social engagement, based on substantial funding. This might enable geopoetics to take the next step on its peregrination, from Kenneth White’s early personal journey, through his emergence into the public/cultural sphere, to where it is now.
And where is it now? It is good to see that the SCG is flourishing, and that it is still encouraging us all to go on journeys of thought, beyond the confines of current thinking. I wonder if we need to be more attentive to the range of possible journeys that beckon?
If I could take this opportunity to explain more about ASTRAL (which might end up being called something else)…it is the result of a surprisingly bold encouagement from the European Commission Directorate General for research. The call is for experimental approaches to increasing public engagement with science through works of various kinds involving the arts, in a wide sense. Norman, Graham, Jim and others have pointed to how science has increasingly moved away from an instrumental, mechanistic worldview to one which encompasses spirituality, questions about the nature of being, social concern and aesthetics.
There is therefore an opportunity here to do something really exciting. I don’t really know what that will look like, but we’re open to suggestions! I will be in contact with NB really soon with an outline of where the project stands at the moment, and I hope we will be able to work together to make things happen.
I thought the meeting of people and minds between IFF and SCfG was most auspicious.
In a world increasingly prone to division between expertise and mediocrity, can we look at the boundary zones of living a bit more closely, indeed rigorously and at the nature/culture collisions perhaps in their ebbtides? It cannot be just an accident that so much good poetry is written on, and about, and out of those strands and beaches of detritus and old and new life between high and low tides.
I am still most interested in what social theorists often refer to as ‘the commons’ - what is being lost, enclosed, expropriated, debased - and even if ecological thinking and acting has moved and developed, if anything, what is so much missing is the emotional, the humanly immediate connectedness to nature/place or the social space with nature…….looking closely again at the marks and movements in the ebbtide strands.
Your recognition of the common ground between the analysis and work of the IFF and geopoetics is highly significant. This is the first time that the Scottish Centre for Geopoetics has encountered this level of discussion and agreement outwith our own members and those of the International Institute of Geopoetics. It opens up all kinds of possibilities for further discussions and interventions.
Our contributions that day reflected similar feelings of revelation that independently we had been working on the same profound concerns about the contemporary situation, albeit taking a different approach. It’s true that, unlike the IFF, geopoetics has not sought to intervene directly in social, economic or political issues but this doesn’t mean that geopoetics has not had a purpose. We see the solution to the current conceptual emergency which underlies so many seemingly intractable problems as requiring a fundamental shift in the prevailing culture which involves developing a deeper sense of world beyond the human, the attempt to express that sense creatively in a myriad of ways, and joint working in various fields with others who also see the need.
Such an open and radical approach to the world is available to everyone whatever one’s economic or social situation, and can in fact provide a purpose to life which superficial political fixes do not. Geopoetics is indeed about enhancing lives, wherever they are being lived. My understanding is that the IFF, whilst intervening in these situations, is also saying that the customary political solutions are insufficient for the challenges we face.
The ASTRAL project indeed represents an exciting opportunity for joint working by scientists, artists and communities, and the SCG is keen to be involved. We already have far-reaching ideas as to how this could be developed on the Isle of Luing in Argyll and I’m looking forward to discussing these with Peter.
My own fuller response to our most inspiring day with the IFF in Aberdour can be found at normanbissell.blogspot.com.
Apart from replacing ’such’ with ‘much’ in my original comment, I found myself agreeing warmly with the other comments above. For a number of reasons, I have been recently re-learning different aspects of the natural world with a fuller realisation that the combination of so-called ’science’ (i.e. knowledge) combined with genuine responsive awareness is not only a source of delight but also of confidence in our connectedness to that world, which is of course also the human world. I keep coming back to the need for enlightened education in this field.