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Kenneth White
Open Letter To All Hyperboreans
‘We are Hyperboreans. We are well enough aware in what remoteness we live. Pindar knew of us: Neither by land nor sea will you find the way to the Hyperboreans... Beyond the North, the sea and ice lies our life, our happiness.’ (Nietzsche )
‘Give yourself room for a real beginning The man who works in a narrow space Builds no more than prison or grave’ (K.W.: The Cold Wind of Dawn)
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I
In No 34. (June 28th-July 11th, 1968) of the International Times appeared an article by Nathaniel Tarn: The Work Laid Before Us In This Disunited Kingdom, which is a forcible protest against the cultural situation in Britain, and the outline of a programme for the future.
After making the point that poetry of any validity and power in Britain over the past fifty years or so has been American, Celtic, or the work of poets ‘in the wilderness’ (outside the established norms of poetry and domestic literary politics), Tarn directs his criticism at the British academy, ‘so stilted, so hemmed in by dead language’; at the thinness of the cultural atmosphere, impoverished by lack of information; at the inadequacy and derisory nature of communications, ‘primary matter (being) drowned in an ocean of secondary verbiage’; and, finally, at the superficiality of most of what passes for poetry: ‘I fear that poetry here is relentlessly superficial: the poet slinks in corners with immemorial British shyness, a shyness which can, at the drop of a hat, become rabid arrogance when it is suggested we might learn from the outside world.’
Anyone who can take a long, hard look from a distance at the state- | |
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of-things in Britain can only agree wholeheartedly. Indeed, in recent times, many of the poets with the life-desire and intellectual demands that go with the production of the most powerful poetry have found it impossible to go on living within British precincts at all. We need only think of D.H. Lawrence, with his loathing of the ‘pettyfogging narrowness’ of England - and if Dylan Thomas, another exemplary figure, remained, who would deny that it was the British set-up and cultural atmosphere that obliged him to turn himself into a kind of Divine Clown, playing incessantly a tragicomic rôle and perhaps never reaching anything like his full development as a poet. And there is Yeats, considering that London is the enemy of all real culture, trying to ground a more fundamental culture around that lonely tower in Galway; and Joyce who, if he took the trouble to criticize Ireland, felt that England was beneath criticism; and MacDiarmid, who has been raging now in vociferous Anglophobia and hatred of ‘grey Englishry’ (the cause, as he sees it, of what we might call ‘grey Scottishry’) for half-a-century.
Many a poet, then, whose birth-roots are in Britain, and whose essential landscape is somewhere within these Islands could, looking at the socio-cultural nexus in which, by force of circumstance, he is expected to participate, echo, with personal conviction, Nietzsche's Zarathoustra when he speaks of ‘The Land of Civilization’:
‘You are sterile, that is why you have no faith... but the man who wanted to create always had his dreams and stars... You are doors half-open, and the gravediggers are just waiting to come in...’
leaving this corner of insipidity in order to take the way of the Hyperborean (‘We are well enough aware in what remoteness we live...’), which is a way of life and which we shall investigate presently (at least with regard to some of its aspects, for the subject is large). But in the meantime let us return to Tarn's article.
Moving from critique to programme, Tarn states that ‘the central issue here is the poetry of polities’, and his article is essentially a plea for a new political poetry, not as ‘propaganda and simple-minded rhetoric’, but understood as ‘a broad, positive concern for the fate of mankind everywhere in the world and for the relation of man to the natural environment in which he lives: politics of environment framing the politics of community’ - which implies an extension of the scope of poetic matter: ‘The Arena now, should be as wide as it can be and set against the whining ifs-and-buts of the little shepherds’, and of its depth (for this ‘political poetry’ is not divorced from ‘inner poetry’).
What this extension of scope and depth involves is the opening of British culture to an active consciousness of cultural areas such as
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the poetry of Latin America (Vallejo, Neruda, Paz); the language-revolution in the United States (‘language is growing over there’); Primitive Poetry, The East, Dada, Surrealism, and their succedanea; and Science (anthropology, linguistics, ethnology, comparative religion, epistemology...).
This encyclopedic humanism means a re-stocking of the cultural reserves of British poetry, which will give it both self-confidence and authority: ‘We have no need to fear that knowledge which will broaden poetry and return it to its legislative rôle’, freeing it from its actual ‘smallness of mind and purpose’.
While, again, wholly in agreement with Tarn that British poetry has to be ‘re-floated’, and that the garden of ‘Little England’ (and the same goes for little Scotland, little Ireland and little Wales - the real climate begins beyond the nationalist belt) is a brazos on which no more cane will grow, the programme as he states it while useful, indeed essential, as an opening of channels, and an awareness of possibilities, still leaves, I think, something to be desired: a coherence, a concentration, a more radical grounding within our own context.
With Tarn's programme, British poetry, while re-floated, might still tend to wallow in a humanist-cultural welter, a vessel under full sail on the universal seas of culture, sometimes magnificent, but perhaps too culturally encumbered to make its way in really difficult waters. However admirably informed and engaged, it would still tend to remain on secondary levels, rarely penetrating ‘through to the white’ (‘The difficult thing to realise is that the thrust must go through to the white, at least somewhere’ - W.C. Williams). That is why I would put forward a development, or a radicalisation of Tarn's programme, which we might call (referring back to Nietzsche's phrase) The Hyperborean Programme, running as follows:
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II
What British poetry (and the same goes for poetry in countries other than Britain - this letter, if it is directed mainly to my fellow-Britons, being, with regard to its general principles, by no means restricted to them) needs, and the realisation is difficult, is a culture, not ‘culture’ (a culture-world, not a cultural hoard); the language it needs is not culturally informed discourse, but a realisation of the word as an act of violence, revelation, and renovation; the revolutionary action of poetry, and poets, consists not in overt political concern, the handling of ‘public’ themes, but in the creation of a transcendence, a hard core of poetic thought (of conflagrative and explosive value), and in the revolutionary action (activities) of the
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poet within the socio-existential context he may, at any moment, find himself in.
The first essential is to refuse, at every step, by whatever means seem most appropriate to the occasion (silence or violence) the trivialization of thought and life which is general in these Islands, as elsewhere. The second is to move beyond the anti-intellectualism and low-pressured intellectual climate of present-day Britain towards a more radical thinking.
This means a travelling through arid and abstract (at least apparently) territories, which will be repugnant if not anathema to the man still attached to his ‘person’ and to the poetry of individual expression (let it be clear once and for all that the poetry of the individual has had its day) - but the poet ‘denies that abstraction is a vice, except to the fatuous’ (Wallace Stevens). This travelling leads (as André Breton says, ‘poetry must lead somewhere’) to the realisation of the essential in a soul and a body, and of unity in the mind. These phrases (the essential, unity...) suggest, no doubt, ‘metaphysics’. That is, in fact - let us risk the word - what we are concerned with (the intellectual background of poetry), and it is long since Britain has known anything of the kind (British life and society consisting of individuals trotting about with a vague intuitionism and a solid common-sense, all wrapped up, especially in academic-intellectual circles, in supercilious self-satisfaction).
‘Possibly a reason why metaphysics in the grand style is out of favour at present’, writes D. Emmet in The Nature of Metaphysical Thinking, ‘is not only due to the preoccupation of philosophers with problems of method and analysis, but is also due to the lack of relating ideas in terms of which some co-ordination of thought and experience might be achieved. This may be due to a lack of philosophers with sufficient breadth of intellectual vision and intuitive penetration. It may also be due to the actual situation both of our intellectual world and of our historical circumstances.’
Let's make it clear from the start that the ‘metaphysics’ we envisage here does not mean only intellectual head-work, but existential soul-and-body work (practical metaphysics). And if we remain sceptical of metaphysics ‘in the grand style’ (to be real and actual, thought does not have to be in ‘the grand style’) we can retain above all from the preceding paragraph the necessity of ‘relating ideas in terms of which some co-ordination of thought and experience might be achieved.’
Where, apart from individual initiators and inspirers, can we find them, where can we find points of departure, co-ordinates ‘of thought and experience’ - on a quasi-pedagogical scale - leading,
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through whatever fracture zones and difficulties may occur, to an essential unity?
It is possible to indicate here, and these are no more than indications, at least two ‘disciplines’, ‘practices’ (not unrelated, however superficially they may seem apart), going beyond the caricatures, fashion-distortions and semi-conceptions concerning them that abound. I refer to surrealism (in order to move irrevocably beyond the personal, to re-find, re-found the real in a larger area of experience) and what I choose grotesquely enough (to avoid immediate false associations) to call Easternism - Eastern sense, not incense (in order, by reorientation, to find a deeper West).
This means neither collecting, nor being ‘interested in’ the bric-à-brac of any particular Surrealist group, nor getting up to Zenstunts or expecting Truth to come pouring out of the trick-sacks of orientalizing Father Christmases.
To put it at its simplest, it could mean, as a cure (a therapeutic divergent activity), to open up the mind to territories beyond the personal (henceforth, any poetry, any literature situated intellectually on the other side of Surrealism is nul and numb from the start), the practice of automatic writing. As for Zen at its simplest, if more people said ‘Kwatz’! to themselves more often, there would be less chit-chat and less verbiage, less of the opiniated self-satisfaction that passes for thinking, less of the narrow prejudice that passes for taste.
Going further, it means, so far as surrealism goes, in addition to an awareness of the surreal and the possible approaches to it, a serious study and development of the work and thought of André Breton (and of the general unitary ferment of Surrealism). This has never been taken seriously, on any general scale, in Britain. Firstly, on the grounds that ‘surrealism’ was already built into the British mentality (where surrealism is equated with the vague intuitionism spoken of above, or, worse, with a mere lack of logic); secondly, on the grounds that surrealism (equated here with the collected automatic writings, considered as literature, of certain Surrealists) means only a distortion of rational imagery and is no more than a process for the production of a superficial kind of anti-literature. This refusal of surrealism on the grounds of superficiality is itself based on superficial, uninformed grounds. André Breton himself said [how much of his work is known to the British public, even the ‘educated’ public - it is unfortunate that Surrealism should be known in the English-speaking countries mainly through its painting, perhaps its least interesting aspect] that the whole history of automatic writing was unfortunate, and its ideal hardly, if ever, realised (his own
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writing, at its highest moments, remains an exception), the peculiar ‘askesis’ it demands only rarely being practised, and the ‘state of grace’ it supposes, attained. Whatever may have been the misfortunes or inadequacies of any particular practitioners, the aim of surrealism remains, to attain to the ‘point of the mind’ Breton speaks of, by use of ‘the real functioning of thought’.
Here perhaps already (the point of the mind, i.e. transcendence of dualisms) a possible link with the East may be evident. Without at all approaching an exposition of Ch'an Buddhism (one of the things we must get rid of is the habit of ‘digests’, and partial information of all kinds) it is useful to quote in this context, as a part of a programme for poetry, here and now, the following extract from Hubert Benoît's Theory and Practice of Detachment according to Zen:
‘In a general way the relative harmonization of a life... consists in the construction of a world representation (or ‘inner world’) which is harmoniously convergent. The construction is made around an ‘image centre’ to which the organism of the subject ‘resonates’ in a very consonant fashion. This image must be able to play the rôle of directive idea, of general hypostasis, for the imaginative films which are incessantly renewed. It must be able to be the centre of all kinds of thought, feelings and actions which gravitate around it... When an image centre is thus animated and the theoretical conceptions of the subject approve this love - in other words, when the love of the image is at the same time deep and well rationalized - this centre exercises a magnetic influence on the inner world which attracts around it a growing number of psychic elements. The image organizes around it, little by little, the inner world in a positive way, by a process of convergence or concentration... This process of crystallization is accomplished more completely as the image centre becomes more vast and as it is able to tie more elements in this world together.’ (our italics).
It is the lack of such an image-centre (iconology), the lack of a recognizable world gravitating around it (as the universe round the ‘galactic centre’) which makes for a poetry of world-less (however ‘talented’) individuals consisting in comments on their environment (which are more or less intelligent, honest, full of more or less feeling, form, etc., etc., etc. - all the qualities of this basically groundless poetry).
These ideas are ‘in the air’ - until they are incorporated, incarnated by a subject (not an ‘individual’, not a ‘person’). It is this subject (who does not lose himself in culture, but transcends himself to a world, which stands in the same relation to the world-as-it-is as anti-matter to matter) I call, mythopoetically, the Hyperborean.
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Why: Hyperborean?
First, as mentioned above, because this is the term used by Nietzsche (who remains one of the essential precursors) to designate those men who, alienated from the society around them, have the determination to realise another world.
Second (and here we approach the shores of Britain) because of the existence of a ‘Hyperborean culture’, a north-western circumpolar culture that was once extant in the area stretching from North America through the icelandic regions (touching Britain) to Siberia, China, North Japan - a culture which the Greeks knew of (‘The Hyperborean Apollo’), and vestiges of which can be seen in a Kwakiutl totem pole, an eskimo mask, or in those poems we call ‘celtic’.
This is the real world (space of being) to which ‘British Culture’ has had, and can have, access, and which can open it to a wider complex of relations than is indicated by the term ‘English’, ‘Scottish’, etc., and yet still leave it rooted, so it can grow, and not merely pile up data from other cultures. It is from this culture-complex that we can obtain the iconology and references necessary for a unified and vital culture.
I use, then, the term ‘Hyperborean’ in two related senses:
(1) To designate the man who, on the basis of an instinctive revolt, has undertaken a radical criticism of our civilisation, and found it badly wanting - and who, further, is engaged in travelling the way to something else.
(2) To designate that north-western circumpolar cultural and psychomental complex which the early Greeks had wind of, but which was later obscured by hellenization, romanization, and Christianization, and which is the cultural area to which the British Isles - rendered progressively more brutish through the domination of various power-establishments - initially and fundamentally belongs. It is no longer a regional or a cultural unity, but there are at least signs of it still extant (Red Indian art and thought, Eskimo culture, Siberian shamanism, Shinto...). This area is the genetic ground of an essential British culture: the awareness of it could give a new culture in Britain, a real contact, beyond superficial yeah-man americanism, with America on the one hand, and, beyond any mere exotic attraction, with sino-japanese thought on the other.
It is on this ultimate ground that a real British culture, or let us rather say an English-language culture, centred in Britain (but able, in the persons of its representatives, to range widely over the world without feeling ‘exiled’), with unity and direction, could be
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founded, and hence a modern poetry that, on the one hand, does not have to depend on ideas of nationalist culture for a socio-psychological basis, and, on the other, is not merely confusedly or technologically modernist.
In order to move beyond the present bewildered (underground) or frigid (establishment) state of culture, which is nothing like a world of culture, with a recognizable unity and movement, but merely an ever-growing mass of objects and comments on this, that and the next thing (done with more or less skill, sensitivity, etc, - secondary technical or psychological criteria covering the absence of the real thing, the real reality) which, like any series of little pleasures, inspires in an exacting mind only nausea, we must revolutionize our whole conception of the principles of literature. It is only by being clear about the principles that we can at all approach a valid unified practice.
The question of poetry is not a question of literary talents nor of literary pleasure, nor of technical legerdemain, but of knowledge (not learning - learning is knowledge run-to-waste, or not yet cohered, the accumulation of fragments of knowledge, not what the Hindus call ‘the fire of knowledge’), knowledge of a world.
We must renew our relations with this world (‘The primordial relations are broken’ - André Breton), found and ground it in our own life, on our own earth.
This means moving beyond ‘British culture’ (which in effect is ‘English culture’, with one or two nationalist appendices) - blasted once and for all, as a worn-out and inauthentic habitation, by Joyce (who, admittedly, found no other) - the culture of individuals moving about in their ego-cages within an environment that is becoming almost daily more stilted, vulgarized and unsubstantial; it means moving beyond this into something at once more fundamental and more large.
This ‘moving beyond’ is not easy. The ‘advance to first principles’ (which was how Whitman, that other essential precursor, described the work of ‘the poets of the cosmos’), towards the eventual discovery of ‘a whole world of power and beauty’ (Nietzsche) means, at least at the beginning, a going into the wilderness (not to cry in it - but to pursue the work) away from literary politics and the phoney culture-nexus. It means a personal askesis, and the penetration, ever more original (in the real sense of the word), ever more knowing (in the sense of ‘knowing’ a woman), of the ‘sensory background’ (W.C. Williams) that is our place-of-birth, our place-of-origins.
That, as I see it, is the poetic work before us.
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