In his late manuscripts, Nietzsche speaks of the most crying need of our civilization: “temporary isolation . . . a kind of deepest concentration on oneself and self-recovery – not to avoid temptations, but obligations”. It is the desire to “get away from the tyranny of stimuli and influences which sentences us to spend our strength in reaction, and does not permit us any more to let it accumulate to the point of spontaneous activity”.
After four years at Glasgow University (with a break of isolation in between at Munich) I left Britain, where I felt I was bound to live more and more by reaction only, and went to Paris. But after two years in that city, I found reactivity again setting in, and removed a few miles out of it to the relative quietude of Meudon, where I lived in a house surrounded by a garden, and began to feel and live and express the kind of life I wanted.
It was there in Meudon that I heard of the Ardèche, part of what was then called “the French desert”, where houses were being abandoned by locals, the last remnants of the French peasantry, making for the big city. With the intention of acquiring such a house, before they all went to rack and ruin, I did some more translating, gave some more lessons in English, performed one or two other jobs in order to gather in some extra cash, and began to study the territory.
“In the month of May 1844, travelling from Nîmes to Le Puy”, wrote Michelet in his book The People of France, “I crossed the Ardèche, that harsh country, one of the hardest Nature has ever made.” It sounded like one of those “places” the old travellers and hermits were always looking for, a kind of Thebaid. That was exactly what I wanted.
One of the foremost nineteenth-century French poets, Stéphane Mallarmé, taught English at a college in the Ardèche. He said that the very name, “Ardèche”, summed up his life: l’art (art) and la dèche (slang for “poverty”). A more serious etymology might see in the name: ardesco (I burn). But it’s maybe better to think in terms of the Celtic ard, meaning “height” (as in Ardrossan, where I’d gone to school). I liked to put the two notions together, arriving at “the burning heights”.
As to the name of the house I finally found, Gourgounel, that word gurgled, it spoke the language of deep sources.
In a poem written later I talked of the “twelve books” gathered at Gourgounel. It was a symbolic number, but roughly true. In addition to studies on the language, literature, culture and politics of Occitania (a principal reference, by the way, for renaissance policy in Scotland), I had Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo, several volumes of Chinese and Japanese poetry, including the four haiku books composed by Blythe, a few sutras such as the Lankavatara, and the Ta Hio, which advises the meditant to “read the signs in the sky and follow the lines of the earth”.
Along with these oriental affinities, I had very much in mind Schopenhauer’s “natural monk”, the man who, feeling that his faculties reach beyond what is required for normal social life, prefers to relinquish family, profession, career, live apart, and concentrate on something more unique and universal.
If there was a great deal of contemplation at Gourgounel, there was also a lot of sheer physical existence, both in and around the house, in the chestnut wood, and on the paths of Mt Tanargue (“thunder mountain”) that rose on the horizon.
I went to Gourgounel for the first time in 1961, and the book’s first version was written in the summer of 1962 within the space of three weeks’ total exhilaration. When it was published at London in 1966, it was haled in the press as “a fascinating curiosity of literature”, standing outside “the mainstream (or muddy eddy) of contemporary classifications.” In France, where it came out in 1979, the book was seen both as an unusual literary gesture and as a socio-political stance.
It is certainly a book not easy to define in the terms of normal literary discourse. But there are at least analogies to it in world literature.
An eleventh century Chinese text by the scholar Lieu Tsong-yuan has this:
“South of the river Kuan there’s a stream flowing East. I decided to settle there for a while. I never learned its accepted name, so I had to give it one. Since I felt a bit crazy myself, I called it Crazy River. Society can make no profit out of Crazy River, but it reflects all the movements of nature. I tried to live with it and follow its way. That’s how I came to write this Crazy River Collection.”
Another old Chinese writer (sixteenth century), Yuan Hong-dao, of his book Clouds and Stones, has this to say: “This isn’t for minds that are low, limited, mean. It’s for those who want some space and freedom, something vast and luminous. The literature I love comes from the minds and hands of hermit monks and fervent travellers, not from those of literary vulgarians.”
And there are examples in the West as in the East. Speaking of Thoreau, the hermit of Walden Pond, who was out for an extravagant literature, “as wild as lichens”, Emerson said that he could have taken part in the construction of the United States, but that he’d preferred to “go and gather blueberries”. Thoreau wasn’t there at Walden just to gather blueberries. He was trying to get in touch with basics, to work out other developments from there. Witness his later essays on economics and civil liberty.
It was with a similar set of complex motivations I went to Gourgounel.
from the book The Collected Works of Kenneth White, Volume 1 Underground to Otherground
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