I'm talking to two important Scottish artists today – here's why

The National

a day ago

The events of the world today make this more urgent than ever. I've probably quoted before in these columns the lines given to me by Sandy Moffat which formed the closing words of a speech by the distinguished German musicologist Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht, delivered at a symposium held in May 1995 in the Hochschule der Kunste. They bear repeating.
The conference was entitled May '45 – Remembrance and the Future – On the Representation of the Non-Representable in the Arts. Here's how Sandy introduced the context: 'The terms of the symposium were set out as follows: 'In a world plagued by social and ethnic conflict, by war and terrorism, schools of art and design and schools of music are confronted with the challenge to make a contribution toward peace among nations, not only through the work they each carry out in the fields of the arts and education, but also through international co-operation'.
'All of the speakers – from Russia, France, the Czech Republic, Hungary, the United Kingdom, the United States, Israel, Poland, Latvia, Estonia – offered outstanding papers.
'Some were moving, others gripping and some electrifying, especially On the Relationship of Music to Memory, which Eggenbrecht started thinking about on May 8, 1945, as he lay wounded in a prisoner of war camp, and most especially his closing words.
And these are Eggebrecht's closing words: 'Compose, play, teach and contemplate music as devotedly as ever, but in the knowledge that war and Auschwitz did and do exist; and in the knowledge that nothing is more vital than art for the deepening, the honing, the sensitising of our awareness; but also in the knowledge that music can be ambiguous, that it can – yes, even the music of Beethoven, Liszt, and Bruckner – be used in the service of totalitarianism, war, genocide.
'Therefore, for all your devotion to art, do not lose sight of that which is the basis of everything: experience, which carrying with it as it does the consciousness of war and Auschwitz can be the defining authority for the active rejection of standardisation, intolerance and totalitarianism.'
Now, here's the question. Can you show me a minister for the arts in ANY European country who would endorse that?
When Sandy, Ruth Nicol and I foregather this afternoon, that will be our opening text. Do come if you can. But if you can't, another event will soon be taking place where such concerns will also be foregrounded.
Scotland in Europe and the Scottish Centre for Geopoetics are organising a Festival of Hope at GalGael, 15 Fairley Street, Govan this coming Saturday to mark almost two years since the death of the poet Kenneth White.
Alistair McIntosh and Norman Bissell will speak about him and show an excerpt from their film Expressing the Earth. There will be some traditional music, workshops and a stall. What connects these two events is the recognition that all the arts constitute the most vital component of human life – or let me put it this way, the arts are 'human existence come to life'.
All the arts – literature and poetry, painting and sculpture, music of all kinds, architecture, and how we use the adult languages of communication to engage with the priorities of the arts – must be at the forefront of our concerns in an era where lies, misinformation, misdirection, confusion and disillusionment seem to be the steady practice of almost all mass media and almost all public-facing politicians and the faceless big business international corporations behind them.
The situation is as dreadful today as it has ever been in terms of media saturation. The evidence of genocide, bloodshed, violence and power we can see and read about every day from the uncomfortable securities of our living rooms – safe for the time being perhaps – is merely evidence of how far so many in power have departed from such priorities.
The arts are so important in this context because they connect humanity to reality immediately and in ways that nothing else can do. We can remind ourselves of those priorities and this connection with a poem by Kenneth White himself, A High Blue Day on Scalpay. Here it is, from his collection Open World, Collected Poems 1960-2000 (Polygon):
this is the summit of contemplation, and
no art can touch it
blue, so blue, the far-out archipelago and the sea shimmering, shimmering
no art can touch it, the mind can only
try to become attuned to it
to become quiet and space itself out, to
become open and still, unworlded
knowing itself in the diamond country, in
the ultimate unlettered light.
He says, 'no art can touch it' and repeats the phrase, and speaks of 'unlettered light' but this is a poem, letters are its matter, words are its medium, poetic form is its means of conveyance, and the 'touching' is right there on the page, between the words as we read them and the imagination realising the 'high clear day', which exists only in nature, in reality.
By contrast, TV, film, radio, politicians' speeches, can sometimes evoke, occasionally illustrate or perhaps just refer to this connection but none of them can present it with the immediacy of a poem or a painting or a piece of music.
Another way of approaching Kenneth White and the virtues of the arts is through the idea of 'geopoetics' which is associated with him so closely.
Geopoetics in this understanding is a sensitivity, physical, spiritual and intellectual, outwardly enquiring. It isn't so far away from psychogeography, which is an understanding in the perceiving person, the singular mind at work.
There are numerous books and essays and a long tradition of ecological thinking about and within literature and the arts.
Louisa Gairn's book Ecology and Modern Scottish Literature (2008) and Monika Szuba's books, The Poetics of Space and Place in Scottish [[Literature]] and Contemporary Scottish Poetry and the Natural World, discussing poets such as John Burnside, Kathleen Jamie, Robin Robertson and Kenneth White, are especially pertinent. Both were published in 2019.
One of the closest readings of Kenneth White in the totality of his achievement and the extension of his legacy, is Norman Bissell's Living on an Island: Expressing the Earth (2024).
This is an extraordinary compendium, an autobiographical account of Norman's accommodation with the ecology of his own experience of life on a small island, as he has lived on Luing in the Slate Islands for many years.
The book delivers a growing understanding of a community of care and concern, but also an intellectual enquiry into the term 'geopoetics' itself: A way of living in what the American poet Charles Olson called a 'human universe' – an earth of actual value.
But it's more than that. It's a meticulous literary exploration of the author's grateful relationship with Kenneth White, taking into full account White's long residence in Brittany and his experiences as a world-traveller, geographically and spiritually, an intellectual nomad, yet a poet grounded in glancing but profound realities, shorelines of understanding, coastal territories, tidal places.
Bissell tells his own story of meeting White and then weaves into it their parting company and his search for, and reconnecting with White, years later. He includes a full exposition of White's writing, documenting his own growing comprehension of an earth increasingly under threat in a climate of political encroachment.
Bissell deftly and fairly indicates some of White's own limitations as well as summarising the sometimes harsh and reflexive criticisms White has come in for.
The book is a quest narrative. Bissell takes us into his confidence, and locates White, and himself, in the company of a wide range of other writers, ecologists and artists whose priorities are shared, sometimes exchanged and largely endorsed, including Nan Shepherd, Jessie Kesson, Katharine Stewart, Rachel Carson and Joan Eardley.
His argument is that these women were in pursuit of similar or related and overlapping realisations in their respective works. White's writing may be masculinist in various obvious ways, but his concerns are not a male prerogative.
In fact, one might argue, feminine principles are deeply ingrained in them, no matter how macho, or even, one might say, misogynist, he can sometimes be in his writings. Ultimately, Bissell's book is an affirmation of a world where truths can be accurately valued. And it's a moving history of a friendship. Here's his poem, Elegy for KW:
It's hard to take in
that he's gone
the man who was such
a big part of my life
and thoughts for almost sixty years.
I think back to those
Jargon Group days
when he opened my mind
to so many ideas and
more than ideas
to the joy of life itself
and how after we went
our separate ways
he to pursue a cultural revolution
I to foment a social revolution
I tracked him down
at the Sorbonne and en Bretagne
after twenty years.
Reading his work this past year
when writing my book about geopoetics
I felt I got to know him
even better and to tell my truth
about how I found him.
His books will live on
to influence even more
seekers of truth
and to spread the good news
of the creative expression
of the Earth.
That afternoon when I heard
of his passing
we walked along the shore
and out in the bay
the rigging on a white schooner
clanged a death knell
for the life of Kenneth White.
And this is reminding me of those wonderful lines of Charles Olson: 'There are no hierarchies, no infinite, no such many as mass, there are only / eyes in all heads, / to be looked out of' – which when I think of it now extends my own remit all the way around the world to New Zealand, where I spent 14 years of my own life, and I'm remembering the first book of my friend the artist and poet Gregory O'Brien, entitled, Location of the Least Person (1987).
And this now draws me to my last point here about Kenneth White's legacy, that it stands as a permanent reminder and encouragement, so that we know that the world is in need, even of us, however damned and marginal we might seem to be.
The legacy of White's work may not directly be the spread or escalation of 'geopoetics'. The poetic initiatives already being undertaken in the condition of global climate catastrophe have their own dynamics, and as Norman Bissell explains in his book, White described Geopoetics, but did not define or originate its meaning or purpose. Its practise predates him, overlaps with his contemporaries, and goes far beyond without reference to him. I'll come back to it.
The legacy of his writing lies in the threefold identification of its genres: poetry, fictionalised travel journals, and skipping, skimming philosophical essays, referencing rich sources.
Each genre is written lightly, some might say, superficially, glancing at great depths below, indicating other writers of far more difficulty, challenge and provocation, but embodying a spirit of enquiry and observation.
He can be flat-footed, but never very ponderous. He can risk banality, pretentiousness and stridency, but is not over-wrought with anxiety or gestural ennui. What seems like innocence can be insouciance. This means that a sober critical account of his poetry is yet to be made.
As Guy Davenport says in an essay on Ronald Johnson, 'A poem as it is generally understood is a metrical composition either lyric, dramatic, or pensive made by a poet whose spiritual dominion flows through his words like the wind through the leaves or the lark's song through twilight.'
White's actual practice doesn't quite match that conventional romanticism. But if his legacy is a prioritisation of open enquiry, opposed to the closed mind of predestined conclusions, and that's no bad thing to be remembered for, and for future generations to take forward.
And it's a lasting reminder that what always matters most is the reality all our arts are founded upon, draw themselves from, and, yes, can take forward – even against all the odds, vast as they seem at present.