Kenneth White: A vision of a culture Scotland can call its own

Scotland at this moment is in a transitional stage. At surface level, it's a question of politics. At a deeper level, it's a question of poetics. I don't neglect the politics, but I'm more concerned with the poetics. If you get politics and poetics coming together, you can begin to think you've got something like a live, lasting culture.

A country begins with a ground, a geology. When it loses contact with that, it's no longer a country at all. It's just a supermarket, a disneyland or a madhouse. The identity question is paramount and obsessive when a field of energy has been lost and is not yet regained. When a child of two looks in a mirror and says "that's me", everybody's happy: he or she is achieving identity. "Thank God, Charlie's normal." At five or six, the "me, me, me" is a damn nuisance, but it's excused, it's even expected. If at 40, you're still saying "me, me, me", if the only thing you can see all over the place is a reflection of yourself, you're in a state of arrested development. When a whole people is in that state, it's a case of historico-cultural paralysis. A lot of literature, a lot of cultural production, is no more than the paraphrase of that paralysis.

Then came the nationalist explosion, with drunk men gazing at thistles or jitterbugging under the eildon tree. A metaphysical delirium joined forces with a naive brand of political idealism. After that confused utopian outburst, Scotland got hip and joined the mainstream. But what mainstream? Yesterday's mainstream.

So you got a spate of sub-Zola social realism. And when flat realism began to look like the remains of last night's fish-supper, it was sauced up into sordid naturalism. Along with that went various local re-makes of cosmopolitan art that had taken place in New York 20 years before and in Paris 30 years before that.

Till you get to a stage which is already today's, but which may be more and more tomorrow's, where you have an anthropological type you might call the self-made nitwit, the smart semi-educated nonentity, moneyed without being mannered, with an anything-that-sells-is-good mentality, who thinks values are made on the stock exchange, who's never without laptop and portable (he's an important guy) and who, being proud of his Scottish identity, gets married in a kilt.

For a country to have lasting power, it has to be essentialised. There has to be an idea in the air -- like salt in the sea.

I'm making distinctions here, and I know distinctions are what some people, maybe a lot of people, don't want. They'll even say it's undemocratic. I'm neither Utopian or idealist. I know there will always be a load of crap around. I don't envisage bookshops in Scotland, say, divided into two sections: the Crap and the Real Stuff. What I would look to is more and more individuals going into a bookshop and able, at a glance, at a whiff, to make the difference. A demanding democracy, for me, is a society of developed individuals. Otherwise, all you've got, in the name of democracy, is a mixture of populism and demagogy.

I've been speaking as a poet. That word can cover a lot of things, not always very interesting. I like what the poet Mandelstam said about the poet Dante: that he was more than a poet in the banal sense of the word, he was a strategian of mutation.

The country of Scotland today is in a state of mutation or, shall we say, a state of possible mutation. A country implies politics, economics and culture. Political space gives authority. Economic space gives autonomy. Cultural space gives aura. My concern here today has really been to propose a map, or at least the sketch, of a possible culture.

Everybody knows that a map is not the territory. But it can get you out of confused, habit-overgrown reality. It can let you see the great lines. After that, you can go back into the territory, but with vision enlarged. It was a politician, not a poet, who said: without vision, the people die. Let's try and see a bit farther, here in Scotland.

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