Raster. Jaargang 6

[p. 29]

Kenneth White
Into the white world

‘My head is incandescent, on the point of bursting. One of the worlds it conceals is asking to be born.’
(Paul Klee: Journal)

1

This essay is written on the assumption that, to understand something about poetry (and poetry speaks of the white world), it is better to read, say, Knud Rasmussen's ‘Intellectual Culture of the Iglulik Eskimos’, or Shirokogorov's ‘Psychomental Complex of the Tungus’, than the ruck and run of our literary reviews.

It assumes also that poetry is meant neither for weak stomachs nor soft brains - and that it is more than ‘something’ (liberally vague) done by individuals, professionally (according to some economicocultural nexus) entitled poets, working on the nauseatingly incoherent data of an ego-limited conscience, with more or less skill, taste, sensitivity, etc., etc....

Poetry signifies the transcendence of the individual conscience and the introduction to a world (a cosmos, a beautiful whole in movement). It is the absence of these two notions (transcendence, and penetration) which makes for a degraded state of poetry where, for example, observations (more or less ‘deep’) on this, that, and the next thing, event, person, thought, feeling, imagining, pass for poetry - when in fact they are only the literary sub-products of individuals, psycho-physiologically in a larval state (even, and perhaps more so when they're ‘distinguished’) crawling more or less contentedly about a decomposed environment of which they constitute the ‘literary world’, a hideous caricature of the real world of poetry. Real poetry, and the life it implies, begins a few thousand miles, as the gull flies, as the wind blows, away from this ‘civilised’ compound.

[p. 30]

Nietzsche, at Sils-Maria, lived ‘6000 feet above men and time’. The Chinese say (or said) that to know what real poetry is you have to meet a man distant from you by three thousand miles (I'm quoting from memory, and may have got the figures wrong, but you get the idea).

2

‘All of our european culture has for long been moving, under an excruciating tension that has been growing from decade to decade, towards something like a catastrophe: with anxiety, violence, precipitation; like a river that wants to reach its end and which no longer thinks, which is afraid to think. The man who speaks here has on the contrary done nothing up till now but think: a philosopher and a solitary by instinct who... found his profit in isolation, in the outside, in patience and biding his time; a mind ready to take risks, who has already ventured into all the labyrinths of the future... The first perfect european nihilist, but who has already lived out nihilism in himself, who has it in him, beneath him, outside him...’

Thus writes Nietzsche, in the Preface to Der Wille zur Macht.

By now, the catastrophe has occurred. Life goes on, cultural manifestations are still made (‘the show must go on’ - much of our culture being reduced in fact to the level of a show), but it all happens, as Gottfried Benn put it, against a sinking background’ (einen versinkenden Hintergrund).

By the early decades of the twentieth century, Hofmannsthal has the taste of ‘decaying mushrooms’ (‘vermodernde Pilze’) in his mouth; Eliot is moaning liturgically in the Wasteland; Breton is decrying the lack of reality (Discours sur le Peu de Realité). The ‘obscure disaster’ which Mallarmé situated sidereally has become a world phenomenon.

A technologized science meanwhile makes tremendous headway - preparing perhaps a definitive catastrophe. The House of Being (which language was before it turned into what a romantic poet called ‘babylonische Sprachenverwirrung’; what intellectual work was before it turned into cultural show or technological mania) is reduced to a villa, an asylum, or a sanatorium at the side of the tracks, at the side of the technological Highway, containing much wailing and gnashing of teeth, some cynical laughter, some lastminute speeches, some ‘avant-garde’ experiments, some whimperings, many death-croaks...

The picture could be enlarged, details could be added. But this is

[p. 31]

not the subject of the present essay.

The subject of this essay is the real ground, the real world of poetry.

3

The mind cries out for unity, for a unitive experience, for the knowledge of something large and yet which is more, and other, than the massive confusion which is our only alternative to the smallnesses of all kinds that relentlessly beset us and maintain the mind in small activities culminating, detail after detail, in unbearable tension. Psychic health being, apparently, impossible, to escape the torture of the mind, we have recourse to all kinds of temporary tranquilizers or, finally, to madness, when the mind, at the limit of tension, snaps abruptly.

There is a burning need of an intellectual culture, centred around some unifying myth.

But to speak of myth, is it not to show contempt for, despair of, the human intellect, and to invite a regression to a pre-rational, prelogical mentality? Is it not an obvious step backwards, rather than those ‘steps forward’ we hear so much about?

In fact, the process of rationalisation in the human mind has not meant a surpassing of the mythic conscience, but only its suppression. Which is why (like so much else in the mind that civilization has forced underground), it breaks out in degraded and distorted forms. Modern life is rank with degraded mythic conscience - witness the avid interest in horoscopes, the desperate indulgence in all kinds of more or less absurd religion, the highly irrational state of political activity...

To propose a myth, which is a complex of images with an idea of life both personal and social, is to invite, first and foremost, the development of the human mind as a whole and the development of a life, personal and social, corresponding to it. It is to reawaken the sense of a fully and harmoniously developed humanity.

It seems unnecessary to insist on how far from such plenitude and harmony humanity is at the present moment. The only solution, the ‘logical’ conclusion in the present state-of-things and on present lines of thought (the image of ‘lines’ is used intentionally - harmonious development being manifested rather in star-shape or constellation) is to amputate humanity entirely of its faculties and turn the human being into ‘one-dimensional man’, where the word ‘man’ is nothing more than a euphemism. That way he will function more efficiently in the machine - and who but a madman would deny that it's the machine that counts, and that man's happiness

[p. 32]

depends on his utter adaptation to it?

The poet is a madman in this sense.

The desire of a whole world, the nostalgia of unity and unitive experience, can only appear as mad and aberrant in a civilization which, while it satisfies many desires (most of which it has previously fabricated) leaves unsatisfied the one fundamental need, of which the poets, above all, are conscious.

It is the expression of this need that runs like a white thread through modem poetry, like a faster, more urgent current in the general turgid or trivial mass of literature.

4

Hölderlin, that always exemplary figure, knew it, with his nostalgia for Greece, that Greece which his friend Hegel described as ‘an immaculate world, unadulterated by any scission’

And if your soul leaps
With nostalgia outside your own times
You remain alone on a cold riverbank
Beside your fellows and know them not...

paying his desire for that world, and the penetration of his knowledge of it, with isolation and alienation from his own society.

Whitman knew it. What Hart Crane was to call the ‘American psychosis’, eminently illustrated by Whitman, is the desire of the same white world - a desire which, between its own impulsion and the resistant inertia of actual society, can become pathological.

The ‘american psychosis’, which is the desire for the whiteness and the white world, is to be seen right through American literature at its intensest levels.

If Whitman had it (sometimes concealed under a more superficial stars-and-stripes americanism), Melville had it, concealed by nothing (hence the madder nature of his work):

... a white whale. Skin your eyes for him, men; look
sharp for white water; if ye see but a bubble, sing out-

Hart Crane had it:

How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest
The seagull's wings shall dip and pivot him
Shedding white rings of tumult...

[p. 33]

In a less powerful sense, but no less unmistakably, William Carlos Williams has it:

... the difficult thing to realise is that the thrust must
go through to the white, at least somewhere.

Jackson Pollock had it (see the white confused mass of his ‘mappa mundi’).

Robert Duncan, sometimes, has it:

White white white like

a boundary in death advancing

that is our life, that's love

line upon line

breaking in radiance, so soft - sodium-

ly glaring, dominating...

But the white world desire is not only American. We find it at the other pole of the modern world, in Russia, where its most obvious representative is Dostoievski, towering above the moralistic mudflats of the later ‘social realism’.

Dostoievsky's Russia of saints and prophets is also the desire, the search for the white world.

Raskolnikov, Rogoshin, Dimitri-moving through a welter of feeling and soul-complexity, beset by a chaos of questions with no fixed answers, penetrating through humanity social and individual: towards a naked-elementary truth, an elementary-ecstatic state of being which Stefan Zweig, in his essay on Dostoievski, calls ‘whiteglowing feeling (weissglühende Empfindung), and which he says is the lyrical element in the novels, their real raison d'être.

5

Having shown the presence of the white world desire in the modern world, of which we might say it is the very soul, we can try now to look closer at the experience itself. For, before being an idea (with philosophical developments), and a myth (containing, potentially, a social programme), it is an experience, centering on the real body - a psycho-physical experience that can be of the utmost intensity. To this writer, it is the principal experience of poetry, without which no real poetry exists.

In this context, Robert Graves' book ‘The White Goddess’, which purports to be an exploration of the essential theme of poetry, must

[p. 34]

come to mind.

For Graves, real poetry is muse-poetry, implying devotion to and worship of the White Goddess. While in no way denying the White Goddess, there is something beyond muse poetry, white-goddess poetry, something without which muse-poetry itself degenerates, and which is white-world poetry. Beyond the goddess, there is the world

‘Love takes God as being sweet,’ writes Meister Eckhart, ‘but intellect goes deeper, and conceives God as being.’

What is the white-world experience, and what can we say of the state of being it realises?

To say world is to say, first and foremost: earth.

If rationalization has meant for modern man separation, in the mind, from mythic conscience, it has also meant, for the life of his body, separation from the earth.

‘The incandescent reality of the motherly womb of the earth,’ writes Georges Bataille, ‘cannot be touched or possessed by those who fail to recognize it. It is the failure to recognize the earth, the neglect of the star on which they live, the ignorance of the nature of its riches, that is to say the incandescence enclosed in this star, which has put man's existence at the mercy of the merchandise he produces, the more important part of which is consecrated to death.’ Note that this experience of the earth is an experience of the incandescence (the whiteness) of the earth; and is more fundamental than any naturalism or nature-worship.

It is the kind of earth-experience, extremely difficult, if not inconceivable to modern man (who can still accept at least a measure of naturalism - in the form of gardens, parks, reserves) which Artaud describes in his account of the Tarahumara Indians:

‘They have the highest idea of the philosophical movement of Nature,’ adding, as a recommendation for our life now:

‘Life must be lived again in metaphysics, and this difficult attitude, which is off-putting for the people of today, is the attitude of all pure races.’

The earth-experience, which is where white-world knowledge begins, is physical-metaphysical.

To see it, first, at its most physical:

‘The attributes of the poets of the kosmos,’ writes Whitman, concentre in the real body’, and in ‘the pleasure of things’.

The real body, or, to put it more fundamentally still, the erotic flesh - for the experience in question is, ultimately, sexual.

What is later the white world idea, intuition, philosophy, myth - and the vague premonitions of which may be nascent at the initial

[p. 35]

experience, concentre primarily in the erotic flesh, in contact with things and the elements:

... swirling water, the sheer flight of birds, the lithe body of the hare, wet earth, opening flowers, the silver birch's slender and cryptic trunk, the heavy berry-dusters of rowan, the breast of a girl... at the centre of the universe, gathering into itself as much as possible of the real world, towards unlimited marriage, a sheer experience of the nakedness and loveliness of everything, an ecstatic existence, expanding to a sense of cosmic unity.

The erotic experience, then, leads to a sense of cosmic unity, or, to put it in another way, eros leads to logos, physics to metaphysics, the relationship to things to a relationship to being itself.

The ‘logos’ we speak of here, with its roots in erotic experience, has little to do with what we know as ‘logic’, which is only a desiccated version of the real thing. If poetry is ‘illogical’, it's because it's concerned, not with logic (and still less with mere illogicality), but with the logos.

But what is the logos, what is the entity to which we refer by this ‘barbaric’ term?

6

If we wish to discover the meaning, or, more narrowly, find a definition of the logos, we have to go back, in Western civilization, to the presocratics, those poet-philosophers with a tragic sense of separation and the affirmation of unity:

‘Although men are in perpetual relationship with the logos that governs all,’ writes Heraclitus, ‘they are not in harmony with it, and everything appears alien to them.’

The logos, then, ‘governs all’, and is that ‘cosmic unity’ we spoke of above. The aim of the pre-socratics, and it is the aim of poetry, was to recover the sense of that cosmic unity, set humanity in relation to it by creating or re-creating a language based on analogies (to the logos) in the existent world - to recover the lost relation, the primordial contact.

The logos implies a language based on ‘what is clear to the senses and the soul’ (Whitman), expressing the white world of cosmic unity, and able to lead man to it, so that, instead of turning round himself dizzily in a vicious circle as ‘animal rationale’ (with a logic that only further imprisons him), he may become or re-become ‘animal poeticum’, in harmony with the logos; not a victim of his (degraded) environment, but an inhabitant of his world.

[p. 36]

7

But if we refer the word logos to the pre-socratics, and to early Greek civilization, the beginnings of our own, it is in Eastern thought that we find the fullest development of the notions we are discussing.

The East... The culturally blasé will smile. We hear rather a lot about the East: Zen is on the town, and the subways crawl with swamis. In order to scotch the myth of the ‘mystic Orient’, Arthur Koestler went East, with bag and baggage, and came back with the conviction that the whole thing is a romantic wash-out, the reality of the East being wretched and sordid: Indian yogis are softheaded, superconsciousness is a disguise of the death-wish, and Japanese zen abbots goggle before television sets. There is, apparently, nothing in the East worth intelligent notice.

And yet.

And yet, despite the manifestations of Western buddhism and its succedanea (in his analysis of Western culture, Nietzsche predicted for Europe, in the twentieth century, a tepid flood of sentimental buddhism and that such pulp-buddhism, sub-Zen, etc., bulks large on the cultural scene is obvious enough), the conviction remains, with some, that the East contains something which may not merely be an exotic addition to the West's already vast accumulations of dead culture (and ‘creations’), but a confirmation of what is most alive, and most essential, in its own existence. That, beneath the ritualistic irrationalism of the East, and the mechanical rationalism of the West, there lies something of the first significance, something essential to the human being, something which, grasped and incorporated, could change a man's life and lead him to freedom, something the lack of which makes the idea of a fulfilled human existence impossible to realise.

One may not find it by trekking across India, or by residing in a present-day Zen monastery, or by getting all worked-up about occult wisdom, one may, however, at least have intuitions of it on reading, say, a poem by Bashô or on looking at a painting by Sesshu - enough to be determined to look further. Chinese thought, and the Chinese language, present us with a conception of life and expression which is totally at variance with the one prevalent in our western civilization.

As Liou Kia-Hway, the translator (into French) of Chuang-tzu, writes (in his l'Esprit Synthe'tique de la Chine):

‘Let us give ourselves up to an immediate perception of the reality

[p. 37]

around us. This flash of sun, this blade of grass... immediately reveal the presence of ontological being, an obscure, indivisible presence in which everything is gathered-in and nothing excluded... a full and sovereign presence... a presence which makes for the joy of the sage deeply reintegrated with his ontological source.’

It is this immediate perception, this indivisible presence, this awareness of ontological sources which is absent in the West and the tragic loss of which we have already seen in the pre-socratics, who, however, still affirm it.

Analytical, rational thought, which we see entering with Socrates (and perhaps culminating in Kant) means the loss of that ‘concrete totality which suffers no separation’, and the establishment of ‘the radical dualism which characterises the abstract totality of the West’. Practical, empirical Western reason, which has technological achievements to its credit, prevents ‘any penetrating study of ontological being’.

It is with ‘ontological being’ that we are concerned in poetry, which is why poetry, in its higher instances, has always seemed to be on the edge of Western civilization, not an integral part of it.

Kant affirmed that the ‘noumenal world’, as he termed it, was unknowable, and that the life of man must be one of practical reason.

But it is knowledge of the ‘noumenal world’, which we call the white world, that is the passionate research of poetry, and its supreme realisation.

It is this idea (based on the experience referred to above) which is absent from so much of Western poetry (returning to it, however confusedly and obscurely, with romanticism), but which is forever present in the poetry of the East.

‘The ultimate excellence of poetry’, writes Yen Yu (China, 13th century) ‘consists in one thing: entering the spirit. If poetry can succeed in doing this, it will have reached the limit and cannot be surpassed.’

The word Yen Yu uses for ‘the spirit’ is ju shen (spirit of life). To enter the spirit is to enter the world (the ‘real life’, the absence of which Rimbaud was to decry in the West).

We are badly in need of poetry that ‘has a world’.

P.S. (3 months later) Just came across (in William Power's translation of the Hyaku-nin-Isshiu, Oxford, Clarenden Press, 1909) this 7th century Japanese poem by Yamabe no Akahito:

[p. 38]

 

Tago no ura ni

 

Uchi-idete mireba

 

Shirotae no

 

Fuji no takane ni

 

Yuki wa furi-tsutsu

which, speaking of walking along the Tago shore and seeing the white peak of Fuji glistening through the falling snow, expresses pretty well what the writer of this essay feels with regard to his, still approximate, perception of the ‘white world’.