Raster. Jaargang 4

[p. 141]

Kenneth White
The Region of Identity

‘...before all my arrogant poems the real Me stands yet untouch'd, untold, altogether unreach'd’ (Whitman)

It was evening when I got to that beach, after a couple of hundred miles hitching - the time to find a suitable place to lay out my sleeping-bag (in the lee of a drifted, sea-bleached treetrunk), and just to sit there listening to the tide and watching the stars come out, till I turned in. During the night there was a storm, a theatre of amber and blue electricity away down the horizon, with rain coming across the sea in squalls. When I woke, the sky was miraculously clear, and I had that whole coast, ten or twelve miles of it unbroken, all to myself. I started walking......

1.

How many forms discarded

how many selves destroyed

how many dawns and darknesses

until I reach

this place of light and emptiness

where white birds cry

a presence -

or still yet only sign?

[p. 142]

2.

So much life lived

for this one flame

so much travelling

for this one point -

the intelligence trembles

like a youth

approaching the naked body

of his desire

3.

The hard path of the spirit

leads to these places

all powerful feeling

leads to these emptinesses

the destiny of words

to these moving silences

4.

Or still yet only sign? -

to cover my naked body

with signs

and be a sign among signs

or to go beyond signs

into the light

that is not the sun

into the waters

that are not the sea

[p. 143]

5.

Always the metaphysical landscape

but more and more abstract

yet more abrupt

where the farthest of unrealities

are the reality

and life

that dancing flurry

that line of white

that incandescent edge

advancing

beyond meaning and problem

6.

Metaphysical?

- the physical absolute

the opaque burned out

the heaviness dissolved

7.

This pool of water

holding rock and sky

traversed by the wing-flash of birds

is more my original face

than even the face of Buddha

8.

Panic colony:

arch-traces on the sand

flying whiteness in the air

the principles are here -

my species

9.

Cosmic body

the cosmo-comedy

[p. 144]

Cape Breton Elegy

Prolegomena

Just off Capbreton, the sea, which elsewhere round the shores of Britain and France remains at the level of the continental plateau, plunges directly to oceanic depths of 5000 metres and more, once inhabited by some of ‘the big fish God created’: blue whale, finn whale, goose-beaked whale... On these grounds, the area seems a privileged place for poetry.

Is there

anywhere on the dwindling earth

a man like me

walking at the edge of the sea

and

Blue shingle

smooth pebble

dune-grass

express only the essential

fix the mind

White-blow of the waves

confused beginnings

dissolution and amplitude

the emptiness is plenitude

and the gulls

raise their spontaneous cries

[p. 145]

4.

 

Osprey

 

gannet

 

white-arsed petrel

 

pelagians and hyperboreans

 

tantric gulls

 

on this ascetic shore

 

the abandoned ground

 

we haunt

Inland

the lack of reality

the reduction of spirit

is ugly and wearisome

the mind rots

language decays

under cypher and strident opinion

raised up as reason

the earth disappears

from the minds of the living

the real word is lost

At the edge of the world

in the emptiness

maintaining the relations

the primordial contact

the principles by which

reality is formed

on the verge of the abstract

And always the question

is of unifying

simplifying

penetrating

[p. 146]

8.

 

Are the waters female?

 

or is woman a coastline

 

moulded by the wind?

 

walk here girl

 

where everything

 

answers your nakedness

 

eye and sex

 

washed in these elements

 

and the cry of your body

 

at one with the cry of the gulls

This morning

the coast is transparent

and the highest reaches

of the mind

are in their element

The violence of poetry

is still

and goes deep -

to the bone

to the white

Many images blur the mind

the highest poetry

is stricken

with poverty of image

when the white light

is at its blindingest

all objects disappear

the skull like a sun