going beyond one's person

spoken. 

/ genoeg. te veel afleiding. terug naar de boeken, het lezen. (het (laten) vormen.)
retracing steps from earlier this year. 

*

“(..) Kenneth White makes the distinction between five ways of reading: skating-reading and gobble-reading devoted respectively to newspapers and most novels; study-reading, which we do when we want to learn something; meditation-reading which entails ‘texts of high specific density’; and finally illumination-reading, which he describes as ‘almost a state of grace’.”

“(..) the way in which Kenneth White sees reading: as the possibility of going beyond his person to create a new transpersonal context.

It is often and wrongly believed that writing consists of ‘personal expression of the treatment of a problem’. For White, what matters on the contrary is ‘the explosion and the expansion of the person’ and the ‘penetration into a space’. This space exists outside the pervasive and much abused myth of personal genius, and beyond any preoccupation with so-called and often illusory ‘originality’. What is ultimately interesting is the ‘cultural network that someone can create, reveal and radiate’.”

 
“‘I'm looking for a world’, he explains, ‘and if someone seems to me to have approached this world in an admirable way, I salute him and quote him, not content to just borrow ideas on the sly and boil them down into some homogeneous soup.’ This comes from a certain intellectual honesty: to recognise that one is not the inventor of everything, all by oneself. But it is also an integral part of a cultural strategy: ‘When a voice is alone in the desert, it will not have much influence, but when it presents a whole current...’ It also involves a certain mental topology: ‘like abrupt landscapes and mindspaces, with a quotation set in it like a rock in the sea.’”

 
“‘What, among other things, a book like this can do,’ says White about his book on Antonin Artaud, ‘is to bring together minds and energies that never met, or hardly met, in actual life (..)’”

—anne bineau in ‘a geographer of the mind: kenneth white as reader and writer’; p. 123-135 in grounding a world. essays on the work of kenneth white