Raster. Jaargang 5

[p. 18]

Kenneth White
Poetry and the Tribe I⁺

‘Something long range is taking place’ (Gary Snyder) ‘avant-coureurs candides’ (René Char)

+ References to Gary Snyder's work in this essay are to the following books and editions:
A Range of Poems (London, Fulcrum Press, 1966)
Earth House Hold (London, jonathan Cape, 1970)
and to parts and sections in them according to the following abbreviations:
A Range of Poems
rr / Riprap
cm / Cold Mountain
mt / Myths & Texts
bc / The Back Country

Earth House Hold

lj / Lookout's Journal
pi / Passage to More than India
fta / Japan First Time Around

(k.w.)
Toevoeging redaktie: Sommige titels zijn in Nederland gemakkelijker verkrijgbaar in de New Directions uitgaven.

1 The San Francisco Renaissance

‘When the barbarians appear on the frontiers of a civilization’, writes Lawrence Lipton in The Holy Barbarians, ‘it is the sign of a crisis in that civilization. If the barbarians come, not with weapons of war but with the songs and ikons of peace, it is a sign that the crisis is one of a spiritual nature. In either case the crisis is never welcomed by the entrenched beneficiaries of the status quo. In the case of the holy barbarians it is not an enemy invasion threatening the gates, it is a change felt in the rythm of events...’

Those Kubla-Khanites (rather than Genghis-Khanites) to whom Lipton refers by the term ‘holy barbarians’, have also been variously called: Dharma Bums, Subterraneans, Desolation Angels - not to speak of the more inflated terms ‘beatnik’ and ‘hippie’. These terms, it must be said, while they can be used roughly to designate the whole heterogeneous community (united however in its barbarism, i.e. its being ‘beyond the pale’) have different connotations. The Dharma Bum tends to be an ‘on the roader’ with Lao tse (at least) in his rucksack; the Subterranean will tend more to be a very cool kind of Dostoievskian underground-man (with a hoard of Char-

[p. 19]

lie Parker records) more or less strictly city; Desolation Angel would seem to this writer to refer more particularly to Jack Kerouac himself. As to the two latter, and more notorious terms, so indiscriminately used as to be almost useless, it would appear that the mad nomadry of the Beat Generation has largely given way to the predominant community-conscience of the hippies (a community-conscience that was always more to the fore in, say, Allen Ginsberg, than in Jack Kerouac - the former more Jewish Prophet, just off the roads of Mother Russia; the Jatter more Keltic Saint, on his own wild roads and seaways - Snyder being long in the background, and coming up strong with his own Kwakiutl-Buddhist-Anarchist synthesis).

Anyway, it all tended to converge at one point on San Francisco. ‘It's the beat generation’, writes Kerouac in Desolation Angels, à propos of a night at the jazz Cellar in San Francisco, just after he'd come down from a holy session on the mountains, and was about to set out hitching for Mexico, ‘it's béat, it's the beat to keep, it's the beat of the heart, it's being beat and down in the world and like oldtime low down and like in ancient civilizations...’, giving us all the connotations of the word ‘beat’ in one typical swinging sentence. This ‘Beat Generation’, originally as much an East-American as a West-American phenomenon, had, then, gradually gravititated, by some migratory impulse, to the white city of the West - as though New England and New York had had their Renaissance day already, having created the first ‘flowering’ of the States, and the new ‘Dharma flowering’ (Snyder's term) had to occur where the last frontier hit the ocean.

Certainly, San Francisco had been a ‘literary capital’ before:

‘With magazines and libraries increasing through the War years’, writes Van Wyck Brooks (in The Times of Melville and Whitman), ‘San Francisco had become the literary capital of all the vast country west of the plains and the mountains. There a singular group of writers arose and flourished for a while. Others appeared and joined them as birds of passage’ - but with the Beat Generation, at least in its original impulse and inspiration (and in its development among these who were able to develop it), about a hundred years later, we are concerned with something more than even a ‘singular group of writers’; we are concerned with the germs of a whole mystic-social movement, carried by those whom Kerouac, in The Dharma Bums, describes as ‘my poetic Zen lunatic Dharma Bum friends in San Francisco’, and by one of them in particular, Gary Snyder, in some sense, with regard to the established Beat mass (in Desolation Angels Kerouac himself says that he was tired of the Beat Generation, its attitudes and attitudinizing, even before it really got under way), a

[p. 20]

‘bind of passage’.

It was at a poetry reading one night in San Francisco, the night of the birth of the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance, that Kerouac (alias Ray Smith, in The Dharma Bums) meets Snyder (alias Japhy Ryder in the same novel).

‘Every one was there. It was a mad night. And I was the one who got things jumping by going around collecting dimes and quarters from the rather stiff audience... and coming back with three huge gallon jugs of California Burgundy and getting them all piffed so that by eleven o'clock when Alvah Goldbook (K.W.-i.e. Allen Ginsberg) was... wailing his poem ‘Wail’ (i.e. Howl) drunk with arms outspread, everybody was yelling ‘Go! Go! Go! (like a jam session)... Japhy himself read his fine poems about Coyote the God of the Northwest Indians, Kwakiutl and what all. ‘Fuck you! sang Coyote, and ran away!’ read Japhy to the distinguished audience, making them all howl with joy, it was so pure, fuck being a dirty word that comes out clean. And he had his tender lyrical lines, like the ones about bears eating berries, showing his love of animals, and great mystery lines about oxen on the Mongolian road showing his knowledge of Oriental literature even on to Hsuan Tsung the great Chinese monk who walked from China to Tibet, Lanchow and Mongolia carrying a stick of incense in his hand. Then Japhy showed his sudden barroom humour with lines about Coyote bringing goodies. And his anarchistic ideas about how Americans don't know how to live... His voice was deep and resonant and somehow brave, like the voice of oldtime heroes and orators. Something earnest and strong and humanly hopeful I liked about him, while the other poets were either too dainty in their aestheticism, or too hysterically cynical to hope for anything, or too abstract and indoorsy, or too political or... too incomprehensible’.

Since Kerouac's novel, The Dharma Bums, consists largely of a portrait of Gary Snyder - ‘the number one Dharma Bum of them all and in fact it was he... who coined the phrase’ - it's to it that we can conveniently turn for a general introduction to Snyder as man and poet, before going on to explore particular aspects of his work.

This ‘kid from eastern Oregon’ (‘brought up in the Northwest, on a harsh wilderness farm in eastern Oregon’ - Desolation Angels), we are told, was ‘from the beginning a woods boy, an axman, farmer, interested in animals and Indian lore’. In appearance, he was, on that birth- night of the San Francisco Renaissance, ‘the only one who didn't look like a poet’ (unlike e.g. ‘hornrimmed intellectual hepcats with wild black hair like Alvah Goldbook’). He was, according to Kerouac, ‘strangely Oriental-looking with his somewhat slanted

[p. 21]

green eyes, but he didn't look like a Bohemian at all, and was far from being a Bohemian (a hanger-oneer around the arts).’ As to his clothes, they were in general ‘all old hand-downs bought secondhand... in Goodwill and Salvation Anny stores’. This backwoodsman is also a student, first in anthropology and Indian myth, then he ‘became an Oriental scholar and discovered the greatest Dharma Bums of them all, the Zen lunatics of China and Japan’; he has, then, a strong cultural background, based on long study, behind him. But if he's a student, he's allo a ‘mountain-goat’ (in his own words) and if his heroes include Han Shan, Shih-te and Li Po, zen and taoist poets, they allo include the mountain wanderer John Muir (‘for weeks on end’, says Japhy Ryder, ‘just like John Muir, I'd climb around all by myself following quartzite veins or making posies of flowers for my camp, or just walking around naked singing, and cook my supper and laugh’). So far as his social ideas go, he's an anarchist (‘his always anarchy talk’ - Desolation Angels; he was at one time to be banned from government work in the woods and mountains after an fbi investigation) - ‘being a Northwest boy with idealistic tendencies, he got interested in oldfashioned i.w.w. anarchism and learned to play the guitar and sing old worker songs...’ It is this mixture of scholarship, backwoodsmanship and social radicalism, all coming together in poetry, that make Ginsberg (Alvah Goldbook) and Kerouac (Ray Smith), Easterners in origin, consider that ‘this tremendous little guy’ is ‘really the wildest craziest sharpest cat we've ever met’, the very epitome of the new West Coast thing and potentially ‘a great new hero of American culture’. Before trying to see exactly what Snyder's ideas are concerning American culture, and the ways he has travelled in order to realize his own life, we can best conclude this initial presentation of him by giving what Kerouac has to say about the shack (the projection of what was most clear and simple in his mind) he lived in there in San Francisco:

‘Inside I saw the beautiful simplicity of Japhy's way of living, neat, sensible, strangely rich without a cent having been spent on the decoration. Old clay jars exploded with bouquets of flowers picked around the yard. His books were neatly stacked in orange crates. The floor was covered with inexpensive straw mats. The walas... were lined with burlap... very attractive and nice-smelling. Japhy's mat was covered with a thin mattress and a Paisley shawl over that, and at the head of it, neatly rolled for the day, his sleeping bag. Behind burlap drapes in a closet his rucksack and junk were put away from sight. From the burlap wall hung beautiful prints of old Chinese silk paintings and maps of Marin County and northwest Washington

[p. 22]

and various poems he'd written and just stuck on a nail for anybody to read’.

It is to these poems, the variety of paths they follow, and the range of territory they cover, that we now turn.

2 Rules of Poetic Wandering

In the Rules of Poetic Wandering, attributed to Bashô, we read:

‘The way of haiku is the way of concentration. Look deep into yourself’

- and the precept applies directly to Snyder. He is very much what the Chinese call a ‘mountain and valley scholar’ (as distinguished from the ‘market scholar’), a religious wanderer (‘bhikku’ - a term much in vogue with the San Franciscans) on the path of haiku, which is the path of zen.

In order to ‘look deep into himself’, which is one of the main tenets in the Rules of Poetic Wandering, Snyder shoulders his ‘famous rucksack’ (The Dharma Bums - and hence the notion of ‘rucksack revolution’), leaves the cities, and makes for the wilderness, represented by the wood and mountain area of northern California and Washington (Mt Baker National Forest, The North Cascades, Glacier Peak Wilderness Area, etc) and it is here we find him ‘drifting’:

Hitched north all of Washington
Crossing and re-crossing the passes
Blown like dust, no place to work.

Climbing the steep ridge below Shuksan

clumps or pine

float out the fog

No place to think or work

drifting

(rr / The Late Snow & Lumber Strike of the Summer of Fifty-Four)

- til he finds a place, a job (fire lookout, or forester) where, following his own precept: ‘take up solitary occupations’ (lj), he can get down to the real work, which is, in Thoreau's words (and I can think of no one whom Snyder more resembles) to

‘settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through

[p. 23]

the mud and slush of opinion... through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, through Church and State, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, and say This is, and no mistake...’.

This quotation from Thoreau leads in fact directly (‘rocks in place’, ‘reality’) to Snyder's first book of poems, Riprap:

‘Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks

placed solid, by hands

In choice of place, set
Before the body of the mind

in space and time:

Solidity of bark, leaf or wall

riprap of things:

Cobble of milky way,

straying planets,

These poems, people,

lost ponies with

Dragging saddles -

and rocky sure-foot trails...’

(rr / Riprap)

- the question in these first poems being how to find, make a path for the mind caught in confusion and psychological blockages, into that physical-metaphysical (‘the closer you get to real matter, rock air fire and wood, boy, the more spiritual the world is’ - Japhy Ryder in The Dharma Bums) entity we can call ‘reality’;

Is this real
Is this real
This life I am living?

- as a Tlingit or Haida song (quoted by Snyder, lj) puts this fundamental question.

It is the poem-books and note-books which try to give an answer, or at least show the abrupt path leading to the ‘answer’ which is more the realization of the self than the solution of a philosophical problem. All of it concentres in the physical body, its movements and sensations, and in radical (simple, unencumbered) situations, depicted with the minimum of strokes, and no elaboration:

[p. 24]

 

‘Down valley a smoke haze

 

Three days heat, after five days rain

 

Pitch glows on the fir-cones

 

Across rocks and meadows

 

Swarms of new flies.

 

 

 

I cannot remember things I once read

 

A few friends, but they are in cities

 

Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup

 

Looking down for miles

 

Through high still air’

 

 

 

(rr / Mid August at Sourdough Mountain Lookout)

‘I cannot remember things I once read’ - we know that Snyder had read and was to continue to read, plenty. And if there are particularly high, clear moments when all writings fade away and only dear light remains:

Words and books
Like a small creek off a high ledge
Gone in the dry air

(rr / Piute Creek)

we find him, at less concentrated clarified moments still casting about in books for clues and corroborations. In addition to Eastern texts (Patanjali's yoga system, Huang Po's Doctrine of ‘Universal Mind, the Sutra of Hui Nêng), of which more later, we find him reading Chaucer (which, apart from its racy style and pithy, closeknit English must appeal to him for the folk-thing, his interest in group and community); Blake, where his interest concentrates on ‘the doors of perception’ (Blake's famous phrase: ‘If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. for man has closed himself up, ‘til all he sees is through narrow chinks of his caverns’); and Milton, where the notion of ‘paradise’ must have attracted him, but where he comes to reject the Christian mythology and otherworldliness:

No paradise, no fall
Only the weathering land
The wheeling sky

(rr / Milton by Firelight)

[p. 25]

- these, and also books on geology, astronomy, ornithology, for ‘real facts’ that provide the bone for the visionary eye. The word ‘visionary’ is inappropriate, for what is to be seen is not ‘a vision’ (Kerouac can be embarrassing at times with his Holy Visions on every third page), but what W.C. Williams calls the ‘white light beyond the facts’. It is this ‘white light’ that clears the mind, and what Snyder is striving for is simply ‘a clear, attentive mind’:

A clear, attentive mind
Has no meaning, but that
Which sees is truly seen

(rr / Piute Creek)

The poem-books and note-books are, in one of their aspects, the accounts of his attempts to ‘see truly’.

‘This is the place to observe clouds and the gradual dissolution of snow’, he notes (lj) , continuing: ‘shifting of light and cloud, perfection of chaos, magnificent jiji mu-ge / interlacing interaction’, where he is a kind of Ruskin with eastern terminology. This is nature-observation, but it is not yet the real thing, the poema-thing. The background of the real thing is that ‘whiteness’ we spoke of earlier (whether, at the energy level, as diffuse floating matter; or more sharply defined as pure transparency, incandescence). Snyder gets hold of it in this note: ‘The stove burning wet wood - windows misted over giving the blank white light of Shoji’ (lj). It is this ‘blank white light’ the mind must learn to perceive, and for this it needs energy (hence the penetration to sources of energy-ultimately sexual), and clarity, implying a disencumbrancing, a moving beyond the personal mind-clutter, and ‘all the junk that goes with being human’ (rr / Piute Creek).

‘Almost had it last night’, he writes (lj), ‘no identity’, some ‘general, non-differentiated thing’. How to get, beyond the personal, divided and separate identity into the ‘continuousness’. It means poverty, reducing the ‘person’ to the uttermost possible limit:

fewer the artifacts, less the words,

slowly the life of it

a knack for non-attachment

(lj)

‘Slowly the life of it...’ So we see Snyder practising an outdoor zazen, sometimes getting lost in the profusion of detail that nature is:

[p. 26]

 

One granite ridge

 

A tree, would be enough

 

Or even a rock, a small creek,

 

A bark shred in a pool.

 

Hill beyond hill, folded and twisted

 

Tough trees crammed

 

In their stone fractures

 

A huge moon on it all, is too much.

 

The mind wanders...

 

 

 

(rr / Piute Creek)

at other times, perhaps when he is less consciously and conscientiously concentrating, achieving a true haiku simplicity:

Each dawn is clear
Cold air bites that throat
Thick frost on the pine bough

(mt / Logging, poem 8)

where the simplicity is effortless. But the ability to reflect simplicity such as this is, within our civilization, a lifetime's work. Snyder was well aware of the difficulties involved, and was ready to grapple with them. At the end of his first book of poems, he is still dissatisfied with himself, knowing that although he has become ‘awake’ he is still not cohered and simplified enough:

... a week and I go back
Down 99, through towns, to San Francisco and Japan.
All America south and east,
Twenty-five years in it brought to a trip-stop
Mind-point, where I turn
Caught more on this land - rock tree and man
Awake, than ever before, yet ready to leave.

damned memories,

Whole wasted theories, failures and worse success,
Schools, girls, deals, try to get in
To make this poem a froth, a pity
A dead fiddle for lost good jobs...

(rr / Nooksack Valley).

What we might suggest is that it is difficult for one man's mind to make it alone. There has to be a cultural background, and perhaps even a special discipline within the culture. There were two cultures

[p. 27]

- apart from the modern American culture he could not accept - to which, by his own personal background, or by study, Snyder had access. These were, on the one hand: Red Indian culture, and, on the other: the culture of China and Japan.

3 The Indian Background

‘In the walls of the edifice of the modern world’, writes Martin Lings (in Ancient Beliefs and Modern Superstitions), ‘cracks are beginning to gape which were not there before, and these cracks give access to a point of view which represents the very opposite of all that the modern world stands for’.

Within the context of this radical cultural secession - moving away from the modern towards the archaic - we need only think, for example, of D.H. Lawrence, of whom one critic, Philip Henderson (in The Poet and Society) writes disapprovingly that he ‘tried very hard to return to the myth, to a mental condition appropriate to a pastoral and tribal society’. Likewise, Yeats, turning to myth in his search for unity of being:

‘Have not all races had their first unity from a mythology that marries them to rock and hill?’

and

‘Nations, races, and individual men are unified by an image, or bundle of related images, symbolical or evocative of the state of mind which is, of all states of mind not impossible, the most difficult to that man, race, or nation, because only the greatest obstacle that can be contemplated without despair rouses the will to full intensity’. Still remaining in Europe, and close to Lawrence, there is Antonin Artaud, crying for a more fundamental culture, and claiming to find at least traces of it among the Tarahumara Indians (Voyage au Pays des Tarahumaras). Or Georges Bataille who, in l'Expérience Intérieure, calls for a move away from ‘actuality’ and ‘civilized cacophony’ towards ‘desertic man’:

‘Pour mesurer la distance de l'homme actuel au ‘désert’, de l'homme aux mille niaiseries cacophoniques (à peu près scientifique, idéologie, plaisanterie heureuse, progrés, sentimentalité touchante, croyance aux machines, aux grands mots et, pour finir, discordance et totale ignorante de l'inconnu), je dirai du ‘désert’ qu'il est le plus entier abandon des soucis de l'‘homme actuel’, étant la suite de l'homme ancien, que réglait l'ordonnance des fêtes... entre l'inconnu et lui s'est tu le piaillement des idées, et c'est par-là qu'il est semblable à l'homme ancien: de l'univers, il n'est plus la maîtrise rationnelle

[p. 28]

(prétendue), mais le rêve.’

Closer, at least geographically, to Snyder, there is Robinson Jeffers, looking to a world with:

The cities gone down, the people fewer and the hawks

more numerous,

The rivers mouth to source pure; when the two-footed
Mammal, being someways one of the nobler animals, regains
The dignity of room, the value of rareness...

- and taking his themes from antiquity, deriving from them ‘a more ideal and also more normal beauty, because the myths of our own race were never developed, and have been alienated from us’.

And there is Hart Crane, ‘building a bridge between so-called classic experience and the many divergent realities of our seething, confused cosmos of today, which has no formulated mythology yet for classic poetic reference or for religious exploitation (General Aims and Theories, 1937). It was in the field of tension between the need to create a modern mythology on the one hand, and the nostalgia of a native American myth (‘the primal world of the Indian’, ‘the pure mythical and smoky soil’ - letter to Otto Kahn, 1927), on the other, that Hart Crane lived, and died.

It is ‘the pure mythical and smoken soil’ of the Indian that Snyder went out to find. But before seeing how he went about it, it will be as well to restate clearly the reasons for this archaic quest.

The urge is to move away from the ‘crazed, hooked nations’ (bc / Oil), and their cultural discordance, towards cultural, and personal integrity: the search for a new (lost, and refound) ground of living and thinking. And, with this ground, a rediscovered ‘sharpness’, acuteness of lived life, civilized life having taken the edge off natural alertness and perception. It is no mere ‘return to nature’, or to the conditions of pastoral, nomadic life, for if what is felt as a regeneration is complete, it implies allo intellectual disciplines. The ‘simplicity’ sought for, then, is not without complexity (but is beyond complication):

‘The truly simple man’, as Lings writes again, ‘is an intense unity: he is complete and whole-hearted, not divided against himself. To keep up this close-knit integration, the soul must readjust itself altogether to each new set of circumstances, which means that there must be a great flexibility in the different psychic elements. This closely woven synthesis, upon which the virtue of simplicity is based, is a complexity as distinct from a complication’.

If the mind is to know unity, the soul must regain contact, and if

[p. 29]

the soul is to regain contact, the senses must be alive to the background: sense-perception, mythic thought, and metaphysics in a perfect synthesis. This is ‘re-entering the territory’ rather than merely (in a worshipf ul sense), ‘returning to nature’:

The brush
May point the mountains and streams
Though the territory is lost

(Pa-ta Shan-jen, quoted by Snyder, rr)

- there must be renewed contact with the mountains and streams, but beyond the mountains and streams there is ‘the territory’, the knowing which depends on an intellectual contact as well as on a psychic and physical one.

In ‘Images de l'Esprit’, Frithjof Schuon speaks of ‘the loss of primordial intelligence among the majority’, saying that the civilized mind is ‘supersaturated with factitious constructions or sophisms’. The true function of the intellect is ‘the symbolist vision’ of the cosmos, based on knowledge of ‘virgin nature, that sanctuary, the keys to which the West has lost since the disappearance of the mythologies’.

At the stage of Snyder's development we are ncw discussing, we see him returning to this virgin, sacred territory, through the intermediary of the American Indian.

He had had lome contact with the Indians since his childhood:

Gambling with the Wasco and the Wishram
By the river under Hee Hee Butte

(bc / To the Chinese Comrades)

- had been able, like Thoreau before him, to find traces of the archaic culture with esse:

Hands and knees

Pushing the Bear grass, thousands
Of arrowhead leavings over a
Hundred yards...

(rr / Above Pate Valley)

He was later to extend and perfect his knowledge of Indian culture by studies in anthropology - mainly concerning the tribes of the northwest coast and the intertor (Kwakiutl, Haida, Tsimshian, Yakima, Quilente, Snohomish, Modoc, Klamath, Winnebago, Coeur

[p. 30]

d'Alène, Nez Percé...), and in Pacific Northwest oral literature. He studies the texts, and the myths, writing himself poems for bear, goat, birds, rabbit, deer, salmon, coyote, rattlesnake:

Back there unseen
Cold proud eyes
Of Cougar or Coyote
Watch me rise and go

(rr / Piute Creek)

coming to feel himself as shaman-poet:

I sit without thoughts by the log-road
Hatching a new myth

(mt / Hunting)

and it is with the notion of ‘shamanism’ that we enter the heart of the culture:

‘In many American Indian cultures it is obligatory for every member to get out of the society, out of the human nexus and “out of his head”, at least once in his life. He returns from his solitary vision quest with a secret name, a protective animal spirit, a secret song. It is his “power”’ (p.i)

It is here that drugs (peyote, mushrooms, morningglory seeds, jimson weeds) come in:

‘Peyote and acid have a curious way of tuning some people in to the local soil. The strains and stresses deep beneath one in the rock, the flow and fabric of wildlife around, the human history of Indians on this continent. Older powers become evident...’

(p.i)

but:

‘Most tribes apparently achieved these results simply through yogictype disciplines... sweat-baths, hours of dancing, fasting and total isolation’.

(p.i.)

and further:

For many, the invisible presence of the Indian, and the heartbreaking beauty of America work without fasting or herbs. We make these contacts simply by walking the Sierra or Mohave, learning the old edibles, singing and watching’.

(p.i.)

It is this primordial contact that comes over in texts like these:

[p. 31]

 

First day of the world.

 

White rock ridges

 

new bom

 

Jay chatters the first time

 

Rolling a smoke by the campfire

 

New! never before

 

bitter coffee, cold

 

Dawn wind, sun on the cliffs,

 

You'll find it in Many Old Shoes

 

High! high on poetry and mountains

 

 

 

(mt / Hunting)

-

Sea-foam washing the limpets and barnacles
Rattling the gravel beach
Salmon up creek, bear on the bank,
Wild ducks over the mountains weaving
In a long south flight, the land of
Sea and fir tree with the pine-dry
Sage-flat country to the east

(mt / Logging)

Here the contacts are renewed, on the ‘smoky soil’, with the ‘primal world’. And the poems themselves are like the pine-trees of the coast:

These conifers whose home was ice
age tundra, taiga, they of the

naked sperm

(bc / Foxtail Pine)

It is a beautiful world, complete, a kosmos. But Snyder was not content to stay, then, ‘on the coast’. He had to go ‘over the ocean’ - in an attempt to move even further into the centre.

4 In the Steps of Han Shan

In Snyder's mind, the Indian trails are not separate from the paths of Buddhism, or what we might call the Dharma trails. Cross-references are frequent with him: ‘Han Shan could have lived here’, he says in Logging (mt); and elsewhere in fta, he speaks of ‘loggers making flower arrangements in the yellow-pine tokonomas of their

[p. 32]

plank camp cabins, while ‘the ten pages of Coyote Old Man's ‘Shaman Songs’ contain some small poems that have a sharpness and compression approaching haiku.’ Conversely, in the East, he speaks of monks reciting sutras ‘with a steady Kwakiutl dance drumbeat’ (Japhy Ryder in The Dharma Bums). East and West come together in ‘American-Asian Shamanism’ (‘the subtle steady single-beat of oldest American-AsianShamanism,’ fta), and Snyder looks forward to such cultural encounters as ‘Buddhist lectures on Shoshone texts’ or ‘Shastra commentaries on Navajo creation myth’ (fta).

In any case, on the wooded coast, he was:

‘looking off toward China and Japan’

(mt / Logging)

As with the Indians, Snyder had had contacts with the Chinese and Chinese civilization from early on. ‘...he had one a dem lil Chinese girls down in Seattle dere’, says Blacky Blake of Jarry Wagner in Desolation Angels, while he himself tells how:

Chas Leong showed me how to hold my chopsticks like the brush -
Upstairs a Chinese restaurant catty-corner from the police
Portland, Oregon, nineteen fifty-one

(bc / To the Chinese Comrades)

There seems, further, to be a close cultural connexion between the Pacific Northwest and the East. Snyder himself recounts (pi) how Shigetsu Sasaki, who was later to be known as the Zen Master Sokei-an, roamed the toast just before World War I, living for a while on an island on Puget Sound with Indians for neighbours. While, for the West-East movement, we need only think of Mark Tobey in painting, moving from Indian pictograms to ‘white writing’ inspired by Chinese ideograms.

Going still further, we have Lévi-Strauss writing:

‘My master, Marcel Mauss, chose to suggest that everything in the art and customs of the Northwest evoked for him a mysterious and very primitive China’

while the American linguist, Sapir, died convinced that the Na Dené, one of the most important linguistic families of the Coast, should be connected with Sino-Tibetan...

With these connexions and perspectives in mind, Snyder's studies in Buddhism may seem more ‘natural’, and less exotic - more firmly grounded and connected thans is the case with some other Buddha-enthusiasts.

[p. 33]

Where Kerouac, for example, seems at times to have largely a self-conscious, enthusiastic, sentimental and predominantly religious attitude to Buddhism, Snyder's is lens encumbered, less obviously in the way. Buddhism is less a new religion for him than a means (epistemological - psychological) towards the realization of a certain state of being, about which he is disinclined to be over-wordy. While Kerouac, for example (in The Dharma Bums), rather ostentatiously and self-consciously practises ‘wu-wei’, non-activity, Snyder, with probably already a more thorough conception of what he is about, gets on with the job in hand saying: ‘my Buddhism is activity’. Again:

One moves continually with the consciousness
Of that other, totally alien, non-human:
Humming inside like a taut drum
Carefully avoiding any direct thought of it
Attentive to the real-world flesh and stone

(mt / Burning - our italics).

But before trying to define a little more closely what Snyder's brand of Buddhism is, and what Buddhism has meant to him, we must make some attempt to define Buddhism in general.

When the emperor Wu-ti asked Bodhidharma to define Buddhism, Bodhidharma replied: Vast emptiness. Likewise, in the Chuang-tzu we read: Tao is in the emptiness.

Emptiness - sunyata: ‘a term that presents buddhology with enormous difficulties’, writes Linnart Mäll ((Terminologica Indica). For his part, Edward Conze (in Buddhist Thought in India) writes: ‘The doctrine of emptiness has baffled more than one enquirer’. While Chang Chen-Chi (The Practice of Zen) writes: ‘The outstanding and unique contribution of Buddhism to philosophy is its vast and profound teaching of Voidness (Sunyata)’, adding that ‘the whole field of Sunyata studies remains to be explored fully by Western thinkers’.

It was this field of studies which Snyder was approaching (or at least grappling closer with, for his studies had begun earlier), when he ‘crossed the ocean’.

Speaking, in his Terminologia Indica, of the necessity of elaborating fundamental concepts to describe Buddhism in Western terms, Linnart Mäll proposes for the way of thought and life concerned with Sunyata, i.e. the sunyavada, the term: zerology. And for the related term: moksadharma (the way of thought concerned with liberation) he proposes: lysiology.

[p. 34]

But whether we speak of epistemology, ontology, or zerology (which constitute the intellectual background), Snyder is less concerned with the speculative content of Buddhism than with practical means of liberation. Which is why, rather than speculate on Sunyata (making it the philosophical way by mirroring Sunyata in his mind) his preference goes to the linking of sunyata with tantra (based on sexual practices), which gave rise to the Vajrayana School, or to the linking of sunyata with the practical Chinese mind, which gave rise to Ch'an Buddhism, and hence Zen.

Behind both Tantrism and Zen there is the doctrine or philosophy of Voidness (Modhyamika), but both Tantra and Zen, convinced that no concept can ever describe or define that Voidness, offer practical methods - Tantric sex discipline, Zen arts - for its realization. As Snyder (fta) says of Zen discipline (and the same could be said of tantric sexual practices), the aim is to ‘simplify the mind: like a blade which sharpens to nothing’. It is this ‘sharpening to nothing’ which is enlightenment - not any glorious vision or revelation (based generally on a kind of psychic indigestion). As Snyder writes in these lines that constitute a little haiku

it was nothing special
misty rain on Mt Baker
Neah Bay at low tide

(mt / Burning):

The way of sunyata is a way that leads ‘nowhere’ - like those Holzwege (paths through the wood) that Heidegger speaks of, ‘nowhere’ being ‘das Seiende in seinem Sein’, which we might translate, grotesquely enough, as ‘the what is in its being’ (which again would seem to be to us what the Chinese refer to as tzu-jan, ‘self-thus’).

In his L'Esprit Synthétique de la Chine, Liou Kia-Hway opposes ‘the radical dualism which characterizes the abstract totality of the West’ to the eastern awareness of ‘a concrete totality which suffers no separation’, saying that the fundamental fault of western reason is to cut up the synthetic, complex nature of reality, thereby losing any possibility of attaining to ‘any penetrating study of ontological being’. And he concludes: ‘Let us give ourselves up to an immediate perception of the reality around us. This flash of sun, this blade of grass... immediately reveal the presente of ontological being, an obscure, invisible presence in which everything is gathered-in and nothing excluded... a full and sovereign presence... a presence which makes for the joy of the sage deeply reintegrated with his ontological source’.

[p. 35]

It is this deep reintegration which is the aim of tantric sex-practice, and the arts of Zen, including poetry, which Snyder defines as ‘a riprap on the slick rock of metaphysics’ (mt / Burning). The ultimate aim, an art of life: to ‘dig the universe as playful, cool and infinitely blank’ (rr / t-2 Tanker Blues).

But if we have thus far tried to define the way of poetry, as seen by Snyder in the light of Buddhism, we can best illustrate it with reference to one who travelled that way - who came to the top of the mountain, and kept on going, to quote a Zen saying - and who was Snyder's ontological hero: Han Shan (Cold Mountain - the name referring to himself, his home, and his state of mind), the 8th century Zen hermit-poet.

In The Dharma Bums (dedicated to Han Shan) Kerouac-Smith asks Snyder-Ryder why Han Shan is his hero, and Ryder replies:

‘Because he was a poet, a mountain man, a Buddhist dedicated to the principle of meditation on the essence of all things... and he was a man of solitude who could take off by himself and live purely and truly to himself’. Again, in the words of his translation of Lu Chiu-Yin's introduction to the poems of Cold Mountain, Han Shan was one of those who ‘have made it... unifying categories and interpenetrating things’.

We can do no better than conclude this section by giving some of Han Shan's poems in Snyder's translation (and it is no disparagement of Arthur Waley's work to say that these translations read better than Waley's versions of the same texts):

In a tangle of cliffs I chose a place -
Bird-paths, but no trails for men.
What's beyond the yard?
White clouds clinging to vague rocks
(cm 2)

I wanted a good place to settle
Cold Mountain would be safe.
Light wind in a hidden pine -
Listen close, the sound gets better
(cm 5)

[p. 36]

 

When men sec Han-Shan

 

They all say he's crazy

 

And not much to look at -

 

Dressed in rags and hides.

 

They don't get what I say

 

I don't talk their language.

 

All I can say to those I meet:

 

‘Try and make it to Cold Mountain’.

 

 

 

(cm 24)

(Slot volgt in v nr. 3 / Concluding sections will be published in Raster v nr. 3, autumn '71)