A Meeting of Minds: Geopoetics and the International Futures Forum

Ian and Marj Prior and I caught the first ferry from the Isle of Luing at 7.30 am and got to Aberdour by 11 after a fine journey between the hills that was splashed with damp autumn colours. We were warmly welcomed at The Boathouse by Andrew Lyon and Tina Sorenson on behalf of the International Futures Forum, and once everyone had assembled we were soon out on the coastal walk over the cliffs and through a wood to the neat little harbour of Aberdour.

A cawing of jackdaws took off from the beach leaving it to an oystercatcher, a redshank and some carrion crows. We walked round the harbour to the Blacksands amid speculation that the lack of signposts pointing there from the village signified the wish of local people to keep this beach to themselves. It was a beautiful little cove with stepping stones carved into the rock at the far end, so who could blame them, were it true?

On the point, a solitary curlew stood unconcerned amongst glistening rack but flew off as more of us approached. As usual we engaged in random snatches of conversations as we walked. Short and longer, familiar and new, sharing news and thoughts, always interesting, leaving you wanting more, but always with a weather eye open for everything around us.

A few of us called in at a small round gallery above the shore which had some good quality paintings and blue metal fish dangling from a frame on the wall. Back around the harbour we climbed up steep, winding steps to the top of the cliffs and found out later that these had been built by the father of a man who had come along that day to find out what geopoetics was about.

Invigorated by the walk, we were ready for a delicious soup and sandwich lunch back at The Boathouse thanks to the generosity of the IFF. In the course of conversation with Andrew and Graham Leicester, IFF Director, I learned that this magnificent new building with its open views over the Forth had once been a boat builder’s which its new owner Pat Henaghan had redesigned as a flexible, contemporary meeting place for hire.

The man himself sat down beside me and told me more about this and another attempted rebuilding project which led (don’t ask me how) into a description, based on a brain surgeon’s knowledge, of how the brain works and how PowerPoint was totally unsuitable for presentations if you wanted to engage with people and stimulate new thinking. Afterwards he gave me a copy of The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within by Edward R. Tufte, complete with a hilarious front cover showing a military parade in Budapest in 1956 and the caption “There’s no bullet list like Stalin’s bullet list!” which totally demolishes its flawed approach. PowerPoint no More!

It turned out that Pat was on his way to Santiago in Chile so I asked him to look up El Observatorio, the fledgling geopoetics centre there who recently got in touch with me, whilst Andrew joked that I might want to let them know that we were sending out our man to check them out.

Andrew, Graham, Jennifer Williams and Tony Hodgson from the IFF steering group sat in on our AGM held in the round in the stunning conference room upstairs as we discussed how our Summer School and Atlantic Islands Festival had led to new creative partnerships and strengthened existing ones, and discussed exciting plans for an Islay weekend in February and a North of England Going Outward event in May 2010. We also discussed our potential participation in a European-wide ASTRAL project which would bring together scientists and artists in creative educational ways.

When an IFF team came to Luing in August on a learning journey to explore the influence of culture on health, they asked us lots of questions about geopoetics and what we did. This time we asked the IFF members how they started off and what they did, and they told us that it began with two meetings in 2001 which led to a realisation that so much current thinking was based on an inadequate conceptual framework and from then on an involvement in a process of going out into the world in search of a wider and deeper approach.

They talked about the holistic science advocated by Brian Goodwin of Schumacher College, about the vision of the prophetic imagination proposed by Walter Brueggemann, and the World Model they had developed of how we conceive the world in which we’re living and the need to put the cosmos back into our thinking. As they spoke it became clearer that essentially we were talking about the same things: where they speak about a conceptual emergency we talk about the dead end of the motorway of western civilisation, where they talk about the need for cultural leadership and creative transgression we speak about a movement for radical cultural renewal.

As we talked Graham was scanning the booklet Geopoetics; place, culture, world by Kenneth White which we’d brought along, was seeing the inter-connections and said so. When one of our group suggested that Kenneth White and geopoetics didn’t engage with social and political issues and another that the IFF’s work was geopoetics with a purpose, I pointed out that some of us had spent many years of our lives doing just that and had come to the conclusion that how we lived our lives creatively could touch just as many, if not more, people than political activity. I also suggested that whatever economic or social situation an individual was in there remained the possibility of opening a world, developing one’s-self and responding creatively in a wide range of forms to it, thereby leading a fuller and fulfilled life.

Geopoetics has always had a purpose, a very ambitious purpose, its purpose is nothing less than a re-founding and re-grounding of contemporary culture on the basis of a new or renewed sense of world. The geopoetics movement begins with individuals who grasp that such an approach is desperately needed and are prepared to work with others to bring about a fundamental shift in thinking, living and expression.

Finding common cause and purpose with the work being done by the International Futures Forum was the revelation of the day and its potential is immeasurable. As we wound up our discussion I spotted a cormorant taking off into the fading light of the Forth estuary. I took that as an auspicious sign.