Raster. Jaargang 5

[p. 415]

Kenneth White
Poetry and the Tribe II^*

5 Return to the West

Back in Berkeley after a bout of ‘solitary occupations’ in the mountains, Snyder had noted (October 1953): ‘I am here to handle some of the preliminary arrangements for the Apocalypse’. Years later, returning to San Francisco after his solitary mind-journey to Cold Mountain, where he had ‘made it alone’:

I was obsessed with a plan
I thought I must make it alone. I
Have done that
(bc)¹

he is all the more convinced of the necessity of these ‘arrangements for the Apocalypse’ or, shall we say, in less evangelistic terms, the necessity for radical change at the level of society. He had been far enough out on his own:

‘Comes a time when the poet must choose: either to step deep in the stream of his people, history, tradition, folding and folding himself in wealth of persons and pasts, philosophy, humanity, to be-

* The first four sections of this essay were published in Raster v/1, Spring '71.

1 References in these pages to Gary Snyder's work are to the following books: Earth House Hold (New Directions, N.Y., and Jonathan Cape, London) and A Range of Poems (Fulcrum Press, London), and to parts and sections in them, according to the following abbreviations:

Earth House Hold

fta / Japan First Time Around

br / Buddhism and the Coming Revolution

pi / Passage to More than India

pp / Poetry and the Primitive

wt / Why Tribe

A Range of Poems

bc / The Back Country

mt / Myths and Texts

[p. 416]

come richly foundationed and great and sane and ordered. Or, to step beyond the bound onto the way out, into horrors and angels, possible madness or silly Faustian doom, possible utter transcendence, possible enlightened return, possible ignominious wormish perishing’ (fta)

Snyder's return to the West is marked initially by a critique of Buddhism - an awareness of its inadequacies, but also of its still possible significance for a more radical Western culture.

Social awareness and concern had always been strong in Snyder, from his early interest in anarchism and the I.W.W. movement, and it is this awareness and concern which he finds lacking in Buddhism (at least institutional Buddhism):

‘...the major concern of Buddhist philosophy is epistemology and “psychology” with no attention paid to historical or sociological problems’ (br)

-whereas ‘no one today can erfford to be innocent, or indulge himself in ignorance of the nature of contemporary governments, politics and social orders.’ (br)

If, again, Buddhism (at least Mahayana Buddhism) has ‘a grand vision of universal salvation’, it tended in practice ‘to accept or ignore the inequalities and tyrannies of whatever political system it found itself under’.

‘India and China as societies’, he saw again, ‘are as burdensome to human beings as any others; perhaps more so’.

The problem, for Snyder at this juncture, was how to tranplant, or transfuse, the central truth of Buddhism (which he considered to be quite independent of Indian or Chinese civilization and society) into another culture, that of the post-Christian West, thus bringing about a transformative process amounting to revolution - what he was to refer to as ‘the Dharma² revolution’.

The West seemed to him to be ready for this truth - concerning ‘the nature of human nature’. ‘For several centuries now Western Man has been ponderously preparing himself for a new look at the inner world and the spiritual realms’ (pi). More ready for it, in fact, than the modern East, which is why he can say, with reference

2 Dharma - not easy to translate. Like all such Sanskrit terms, contains, for us, a whole constellation of meanings. But if we consider that the root of tbc word is dhr, signifying ‘carry’, ‘support’, ‘bear’, we might render it approximately by ‘basic law’ or ‘fundamental process’. ‘Dharma revolution’, then, would be ‘basic’ or ‘fundamental’ revolution -
k.w.

[p. 417]

to Zen, that ‘the center in this world is quietly moving to San Francisco where it's most alive’ (fta).

It was from a meeting of East (with its insight into ‘the basic self-void’ - br), and West (with its ethos of social revolution) that Snyder hoped to see a new great ‘Dharma flowering’:

‘East'll meet West anyway’, says Japhy Ryder in The Dharma Bums, ‘Think what a great world revolution will take place when East meets West finally, and it'll be guys like us that can start the thing. Think of millions of guys all over the world with rucksacks on their backs tramping around the back country and hitchhiking and bringing the word down to everybody’. ‘That's a lot like the early days of the Crusades’, replies Ray Smith (Kerouac), ‘Walter the Penniless and Peter the Hermit leading ragged bands of believers to the Holy Land’. ‘Yeah’, retorts Ryder, ‘but that was all such European gloom and crap, I want my Dharma Bums to have springtime in their hearts.’

The naïve religious enthusiasm that comes over in this text may be due to Kerouac's reporting, or to Snyder's own juvenility at the time. At any rate, years later, with more thought, experience and study behind him, if the impulse remains the same, the outlook is less rosily, more rationally, expressed. It is revolutionary reason, based on a recognition of energies and possibilities which ‘reasonable’ reason, geared ultimately to Realpolitik, represses, that Snyder will be talking henceforth:

‘There is nothing in human nature or the requirements of human social organization’, he writes (br), ‘which intrinsically requires that a culture be contradictory, repressive and productive of violent and frustrated personalities. Recent findings in anthropology and psychology make this more and more evident.’

His own escape from the socio-economic cultural nexus of modern Western society (by nomadism and monastic retreat), allied to the practice of meditation (‘wiping out mountains of junk being pumped into the mind by the mass media and supermarket universities’ - br), had certainly gone a long way to free Snyder from his own conflicts and frustrations. In this situation, which many might call, or even dismiss as ‘privileged’ (though they would probably be very unwilling to undertake the privations that go with it), he might have adopted a purely transcendental standpoint, seeing human reality and human affairs simply as part of a great scheme in which notions such as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ have no place. In fact, Snyder remains more ‘human’ and ‘moral’:

[p. 418]

‘Avatamsaka (Kegon) Buddhist philosophy’, he writes (br), ‘sees the world as a vast interrelated network in which all objects and creatures are necessary and illuminated. From one standpoint, governments, wars, or all that we consider “evil” are uncompromisingly contained in this totalistic realen ... From the “human” standpoint, we cannot live in those terms unless all beings see with the same enlightened eye. The Bodhisattva lives by the sufferer's standard, and he must be effective in aiding those who suffer.’

His final comprehension of Buddhism is based on the three aspects, to the neglect of no single aspect, of the traditional Dharma path (which had tended, by a process of sectarianisation, to divide into separate disciplines): wisdom (prajna), or intuitive mind-knowledge, to be discovered at a level deeper than the ego; meditation (dhyana), or the practice of penetrating into the mind to discover prajna; morality (sila), or realising prajna in one's way of life,³ towards the establishment of the true community of all beings.

It is with this ‘truc community’ that Snyder is now concerned. And the moral aspect of the Dharma path means for him ‘supporting any cultural and economic revolution that moves clearly towards a free, international, classless world’ (br).

In fact, however, with Snyder and his ‘Dharma Bums’ it will be less a case of ‘supporting’ any existing revolutionary movement than of actively living-out their own Dharma Revolution, a revolution sui generis whose proponents carry with them ‘worlds of behaviour and custom long banned by the Judaeo - Capitalist - Christian -Marxist West’ (br).

Although no existent revolutionary movement fully carried with it either the aims, or the methods, of the Dharma Revolution, germs of such a revolution could be seen cropping up here and there throughout the history of both East and West, having a common root in a pre-history common to both. Snyder delves down to this common root. The poet as delver, speaking for and by the ‘common root’ ...

3 The list of virtues required for the bodhisattva path varies from text to text. Snyder gives a short list of three. The list one comes across most frequently in Buddhist literature gives six, among which, in addition to the three virtues mentioned by Snyder, we find dana (generosity), ksanti (resilience), and virya (energy). A long list of ten, adds upayakausalya (skill), pranidhana (devotion), bala (force), and jnana (knowledge). There may be still longer lists (it's an old Indian custom) hut I don't know of them, and anyway ten virtues are enough for anybody, I mean if he wants to keep mobile -
k.w.

[p. 419]

6 The Great Subculture

‘The groves are down

cut down

Groves of Ahab, of Cybele
Pine-trees, knobbed twigs

thick cone and seed

Cybele's tree this, sacred in groves

Pine of Seami, cedar of Haida
Cut down by the prophets of Israel

the fairies of Athens

the thugs of Rome

both ancient and modern;

Cut down to make room for the suburbs
Bulldozed by Luther and Weyerhaueser...’

writes Snyder (mt) and, the epigraph, from the Book of Acts, to this section of his work refers to ‘the great Goddess Diana ... whom all Asia and the world worshippeth’. ‘All Asia and the world’ - it is in the Goddess Diana, then, that East and West meet; it is also in her that ‘our craft’, poetry, finds its primal root. With her, Diana of the Grove (Diana nemorensis or nemetona), the culture of which Snyder is trying to trace the roots, is intimately connected.

Robert Graves, in The White Goddess, has devoted a whole book to the relation between poetry and the Goddess, his principal thesis being that the fundamental nostalgia of the West is for some form of goddess-worship. For historical developments and an intricate mythological exposition, we can refer to this study. Here we need simply concentrate on Snyder's text.

Diana here is the Muse, and the muse, as Snyder writes (pp) ‘is anything that touches you and moves you... Breaks through the ego-barrier’.

The Muse, then, and the archaic ritual dramas connected with her worship, aim at breaking the boundaries of the ego, and expanding the consciousness - ‘The archaic and primitive ritual dramas which acknowledged all the sides of human nature, including the destructive, demonic, and ambivalent, were liberating and harmonizing...’ (pp).

It is just this freedom and harmony which is lacking in civilization (see Freud: Das Unbehagen in der Kultur) and in the ‘smallminded social systems’ (pp) which constitute it:

‘Civilisation is... a lack of faith, a human laziness, a willingness to

[p. 420]

accept the perceptions and decisions of others in place of your own - to be less than a full man. Plus, perhaps, a primate inheritance of excessive socializing; and surviving submission/dominance traits (as e.g. monkey or baboon bands) closely related to exploitative sexuality’ (pp).

The demonic (i.e. beyond-the-ego) energies, suppressed for the purposes of a society based on egoistic relations, and the culture based on their recognition and deployment, forced more or less underground, survived in two restricted areas: poetry, and love. In the absence of the full ‘cosmic consciousness’, ‘the lovers' bed was the sole place to enact the dances and ritual dramas that link primitive people to their geology and the Milky Way’ (pp) . If poetry, too, where and when it still retained some sap and loveliness, tended to be restricted to love-poetry, at the beginning, the original experience from which poetry sprang, and can spring, is ‘the phenomenal world experienced at certain pitches’ - an experience ‘totally divine, exciting, mysterious, filling one with a trembling awe, leaving one grateful and humble. The wonder of the mystery returns direct to one's senses and consciousness: inside and outside; the voice breathes, ‘Ah!’ (pp), hence ‘the inner song of the self, and of the plant’ (pp).

It is to the re-discovery of this cosmic poetry, and the culture, the world that enables it to come into existence, fostering it, absorbing it, that Snyder has devoted himself - seeing cultural history in this perspective, searching for islands of awareness within the general wasteland, trying to realise it in his own life.

In Earth House Hold, he gives a culture-historical survey (A Quick Review of the Present Yuga), which runs as follows:

1.	Nature and Man - the great Paleolitic Goddess and the antler'd dancer - magic paintings in caves; red hands; red dots.
2.	Social Energy and Man - the gathering of bronze and iron-age power; tribes become ‘nations’ and expand - the Pole Star, the War Chief, and the penis-as-weapon resolve as God in Heaven.
3.	A reaction to pure social and warrior-power mystiques: teachers of social management - Confucius, Zoroaster, Judaic reforms; spiritual - social disciplines like the Gîta.
4.	Christianity, Buddhism, Confucianism, temper the power hunger of states and castles; with emphasis on individual responsibility and liberation.
5.	These systems become power-manipulators in turn, while within survivals of archaic Nature-and-Man traditions regain influence.

[p. 421]

	Yogacara Buddhism leading toward Vajrayana; Mediterranean mystery cults leading toward dozens of occidental occult and alchemical streams of thought.
6.	Contemporary science: the knowledge that society and any given cultural outlook is arbitrary; and that the more we conquer Nature the weaker we get. The objective eye of science, striving to see Nature plain, must finally look at ‘subject’ and ‘object’ and the very Eye that looks. We discover that all of us carry within us caves; with animals and gods on the walls; a place of ritual and magic.’

With this culture-historical perspective in mind, the revolution (the very term implies the recuperation of a certain past, and the ‘coming full circle’), ‘will close the circle and link us in many ways with the most creative aspects of our archaic past’ (br).

Looking at culture-history both East and West, Snyder finds groups - ‘certain small but influential heretical and esoteric movements’ (wt) - which have maintained something of the archaic past. He lists among others, Taoism (the Yellow Turban movement as well as Lao-tse); Zen Buddhism (up till early Sung); the Sufis; Tantrism in India; and in the West, a string of heresies starting with th Gnostics. All of these he sees as ‘outcroppings of the Great Subculture which runs underground all through history. This is the tradition that runs without a break from Paleo-Siberian Shamanism and Magdalenian cave-painting through megaliths and Mysteries, astronomers, ritualists, alchemists and Albigensians, gnostics and vagantes right down to Golden Gate Park’ (wt).

If Snyder were to privilege one of these groups and movements, it would be Buddhist Tantrism (a late flowering of Buddhism, based on the worship of Shakti, or female energy, and on the union of male and female):

‘Buddhist Tantrism, or Vajrayana as it's also known, is probably the finest and most modem statement of this ancient shamanistic - yogic - gnostic - socioeconomic view; that mankind's mother is Nature and Nature schould be tenderly respected; that man's life and destiny is growth and enlightenment in self-disciplined freedom; that the divine has been made flesh and that flesh is divine; that we not only should but do love one another.’ (pi).

As Snyder sees it, the time is ripe for a new flowering of the Subculture in America:

‘My own opinion is that we are now experiencing a surfacing (in a

[p. 422]

specifically ‘American’ incarnation) of the Great Subculture which goes back as far perhaps as the late Paleolithic.’ (pi)

What has distinguished the Subculture always in its manifestations is a ‘community style of life’ (wt), and it is to the new communal life-style accompanying this new resurgence, that we can now focus. Snyder refers to it as The Tribe.

7 The Tribe

If one of the principal characteristics of our modern Western culture (at least in its ‘open’ territory, beyond the culture-clutter) is a certain ‘orientalisation’, another equally prominent feature is its interest in millenarist and utopian movements - witness books (among many others) like Norman Cohn's ‘The Pursuit of the Millenium’, Wilhelm Mühlmann's ‘Chiliasmus und Nativismus’, Sylvia Thrupp's ‘Millenial Dreams in Action’.

This historical and theoretical interest has its practical counterpart in ‘the underground’, or the ‘sub-culture’. And the question is whether this ‘underground’ is doomed to be a marginal ‘scene’, or whether it contains, in addition to sympathetic impulses and picturesque theatrality, a sufficiently coherent theory and praxis for it, eventually, to make for a radical renovation of society as a whole. In ‘Bomti Culture’ (England, 1968), Jeff Nuttall gives a useful summary of the aims of the Underground as follows:

‘a)	To spread an ego-dissolving delirium wherein a tribal telepathic understanding could grow up among men.
b)	To re-ignite an overwhelming sense of wonderment at the Universe, to cultivate aesthetic perception in the face of utilitarian perception...
c)	To expand the range of human consciousness outside the continuing and ultimately soul-destroying boundaries of the political/utilitarian frame of reference.
d)	To institute an international tribe or class outside the destructive system of the nations.
e)	To outflank police, educationists, moralists through whom the death-machine was/is maintained.
f)	To release forces into the prevailing culture that would dislocate society, untie its stabilizing knots of morality, punctuality, servility, and property.
g)	To institute a sense of festivity into public life whereby people

[p. 423]

	could fuck freely and guiltlessly...
h)	To eradicate utterly and forever the Pauline lie implicit in Christian convention that people neither shit, piss nor fuck. To set up a common public idea of what a human being is that retains no hypocrisy or falsehood...’

This is adressed (here and there in appropriate, if jejune, antipuritan terms) to the United Squaredom of Great Britain and Ireland. Likewise, in the u.s., we have Allen Ginsberg addressing an audience of ministers at the Arlington Street Church in Boston (Nov. 1966 - printed in International Times, Jan. 1967):

‘What can the young do with themselves faced with the American version of the plant? The most sensitive and among the ‘best minds’ drop out. They wander over the body of the nation looking into the faces of their elders, they wear long Adamic hair and form Keristan communities in the slums, they pilgrimage to Big Sur and live naked in the forests seeking natural vision and meditation, they dwell in the Lower East Side as if it were an hermetic forest. And they assemble, thousands together as they have done this year in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco or Thompkins Park in New York to manifest their peaceableness in demonstrations of Fantasy that transcend protest against - or for - the hostilities of Vietnam. Young men and women in speckled clothes, minstrel's garb, jester's robes, carrying balloons, signs ‘President Johnson we are praying for you’, gathered chanting Hindu and Buddhist mantras to calm their fellow citizens who are otherwise entrapped in a planetary bar-room brawl.

But there has been no recognition of this insight on the part of the fathers and the teachers of these young. What's lacking in the great institutions of learning? The specific wisdom discipline that the young propose: search into inner space...

Likely an enlarged family unit will emerge for many citizens; possibly, as the Zen Buddhist anarchist anthropologist Gary Snyder observed, with matrilineal descent... Children may be held in common, with the orgy an acceptable community sacrament - one that brings all people closer together... America's political need is orgies in the parks, on Boston Common and in the Public Gardens, with naked bacchantes in our national forests.

I am not proposing idealistic fancies, I am acknowledging what is already happening among the young in fact and fantasy, and proposing official blessing for these breakthroughs of community spirit. Among the young we find a new breed of White Indians in Californa communing with illuminated desert redskins; we find

[p. 424]

our teenagers dancing Nigerian Yoruba dances and entering trance states to the electric vibrations of the Beatles who have borrowed shamanism from Afric sources. We find communal religious use of ganja, the hemp sacred to Mahadev (Great Lord) Shiva. There's now heard the spread of mantra chanting in private and such public manifestations as peace marches, and soon we will have Mantra Rock over the airwaves. All the available traditions of u.s. Indian vision-quest, peyotl ritual, mask dancing, Oriental pranayama, east Indian ear music are becoming available to the u.s. unconscious through the spiritual search of the young...

What satisfaction is now possible for the young? Only the satisfaction of their Desire - love, the body, and orgy: the satisfaction of a peaceful natural community where they can circulate and explore Persons, cities, and the nature of the planet - the satisfaction of encouraged self-awareness, and the satiety and cessation of desire, anger, grasping, craving...

I am in effect setting up moral codes and standards which include drugs, orgy, music and primitive magic as worship rituals - educational tools which are supposedly contrary to our cultural mores...’

In the first of these texts, the Nuttal version of where it's at, we find several references to ‘tribe’, in the second, the Ginsberg version, amid A.G.'s own wordy brew, the principal reference is to Snyder. In fact, the ‘movement’, taken in its largest sense, as a vast underground unrest, sometimes exploding at particular points in more or less political terms, at other times expanding and surfacing in waves of more or less vaguely orientated migration (think of the hordes of ‘Uncle Tim's⁴ Children’ moving in to Haight-Ashbury for the love-in and the freak-out, ending more often than not in a fuck-up), seems more and more to be looking towards Snyder for theory and spokesmanship.

So much, so far, for the Tribe. As for poetry, in an interview in Detroit (1970), Ginsberg (symbol and symptom of the sub-states) replying disgruntedly to the question: ‘What place poetry has in connection with the movement in America today’, replied:

‘Here's what I'm bridling about is that what is happening socially now, which here in Detroit, right now, is being called the movement, is a little wavelet on a larger awareness that's growing in people,

4 Tim, i.e. Timothy Leary, founder of l.s.d. (League for Spiritual Development) - k.w.

[p. 425]

which is a biological awareness rather than a political awareness. Or another kind of politics is slowly emerging which is indistinguishable from biology or ecology and that ideological politics, ideological Marxist politics has become completely bankrupted along with capitalism in the biological crisis that's overtaken the planet... I don't think the movement as it is known here is yet ecologically oriented and biologically conscious or complete and, therefore, the movement is full of shit... the whole revolutionary movement is not yet into the realization of the fact that man's material grasping is actually destroying other species and is actually beginning to threaten the existence of the plant itself.

As Gary Snyder points out, the exploited masses are not just blacks and hippies and the Chinese, the exploited masses are the trees and the fish in the sea, those are the exploited masses, the rest of the sentient beings on the planet. So I think we need things like Snyder's ‘Smokey Bear Sutra’, and then they've got a new thing called ‘The Declaration of Interdependence...’

Poetry, then, is linked to a planetary consciousness, which again is allied to experimental social organization, and it is this poetico - cosmo - social consciousness that is attached to Snyder's name.

As we've already noted with reference to his ‘anarchy talk’ (Kerouac), Snyder had always had at the back of his mind ideas of community, and an attraction to experiments in social organization. In The Dharma Bums, Kerouac has him (as Japhy Ryder) hold forth ecstatically:

‘...later on in our future life we can have a fine freewheeling tribe in these California hills, get girls and have dozens of radiant enlightened brats, live like Indians in hogans and eat berries and buds’,

projecting

‘a series of monasteries for fellows to go and monastate and meditate in. We can have groups of shacks up in the Sierras or the High Cascades... and have big wild gangs of pure holy men getting together to drink and talk and pray, think of the waves of salvation can flow out of nights like that, and finally have women too, wives, small huts with religious families, like the old days of the Puritans. Who's to say the cops of America and the Republicans and Democrats are gonna tell everybody what to do?’

[p. 426]

Now that Snyder had ‘made it alone’ and come back with a cooler, clearer and more complete mind, if the religious fervour (we must always allow, though, for Kerouac's recordings) had toned down, the social utopianism was as strong as ever.

If he uses the term ‘tribe’ to describe the type of new society he sees ‘emerging within the industrial nations’ (wt), the immediate reference is to the aboriginals of the American continent (models for those citizens of the u.s. seeking a new home on the continent, and a new relationship to their surroundings) and, beyond them, to primitive life in general.

The term ‘primitive’ is by no means a pejorative term for Snyder. By this term he refers to ‘those societies which have remained non-literate and non-political while necessarily exploring and developing in directions that civilized societies have tended to ignore’ (pp) - our italics) - ‘Having fewer tools, no concern with history, a living oral tradition rather than an accumulated library, no overriding social goals, and considerable freedom of sexual and inner life, such people live vastly in the present’ (pp) - ‘To live in the “mythological present” in close relation to nature and in basic but disciplined body/mind states suggests a wider-ranging imagination and a closer subjective knowledge of one's own physical properties than is usually available to men living... impotently and inadequately in “history” - their mind-content programmed, and their caressing of nature complicated by the extensions and abstractions which elaborated tools are...’ (pp)

‘Primitive’ refers, by and large, to the Great Subculture. As we have seen, Snyder feels the presence of a new upsurge of this Subculture in modern America, carried, more or less consciously, by individuals and groups not as yet socially organized, but looking for cohesion and social organization:

‘The tribe, it seems, is the newest development in the Great Subculture. We have almost unintentionally linked ourselves to a transmission of gnosis, a potential social order, and techniques of enlightenment, surviving from prehistoric times.’ (wt)

Snyder sees the elements of the Tribe evolving, through vague unrest and false alliances to original conceptions, since the end of World War i:

‘As the number of alienated intellectuals, creative types and general social misfits grew, they came to recognize each other by various minute signals.’ (wt)

[p. 427]

In the 30's and 40's, much of this energy was canalized into Communism, but ‘all the anarchists and left-deviationists - and many Trotskyites - were tribesmen at heart’ (wt) . It was only after World War ii that a new generation took a second look at Communism and found it wanting:

‘The suspicion grew that perhaps the whole Western Tradition, of which Marxism is hut a (Millenial Protestant) part, is off the track.’ (wt)

To get back on ‘the track’ meant for many, including Snyder, a ‘detour’ through India and China, their philosophies and mythologies, which offered larger perspectives than the dominant Western tradition and, what is more, appeared to be more in line with the findings of the most far-out ((i.e. less publicly and politically exploited) modern Western science. It was this opening on to Eastern thought, combined with explorations into primitive culture, which blasted conditionings and increased the desire for a new experiential way to the realization of man's true potential, distorted in all modern societies. And just as these societies destroy man's truc potential, they destroy his natural ambiance:

‘The soil, the forests and all animal life are being consumed by these cancerous collectivities; the air and water of the planet is being fouled by them.’ (br)

so that the complete Nature-Man relationship is being eradicated. The Tribesmen are setting out to renew that lost relationship, and they are setting about it experimentally:

‘The Revolution has ceased to be an ideological concern. Instead, people are trying it out right now - communism in small communities, new family organizations.’ (wt)

In the Laws, Plato, a community-oriented philosopher (as Snyder, unlike, say, Kerouac, is finally a community-oriented poet), presents politics as ‘the art of taking care of the natural dispositions of souls’, that is, a kind of therapeutic. It was perhaps also a similar notion of social therapy that Rousseau had in mind when, in his essay De l'Inégalité pasmi les Hommes, he asks what social experiments would be necessary in order to foster the development of ‘natural man’, and what possibilities there are of pursuing such experiments within society - ‘au sein de la société’. Snyder's projects whether

[p. 428]

or not he would accept even a passing identification with Rousseau, can be seen as a development along this line.

Since every society is doomed to sclerosis, and since every social structure (like every mental structure, only more so) is bound to become oppressive, an enlightened politics would allow, within the City, for dissident, marginalist, catechumenist groups (and individuals) that would keep its frontiers from hardening too irrevocably. It would consider such groups as factors of health. But since ‘health’ is hardly the main concern of our societies, and since enlightened politics is practically non-existent, such groups are, to say the least of it, not encouraged.

Encouraged or no, however, the last ten years have seen an increasing interest in small communities and in micro-social experimentation. Society at large having revealed itself to be more and more insane and insalubrious, and even ‘unreal’, the need to ‘get out’ has become more and more pressing. This need has manifested itself in more or less disoriented individual or collective migration. The notion of Tribe can best be seen as an attempt to give this migration some coherence, and as existing in a dialectical relation to-society-as-it-is. A dialectical relationship, that is, neither totally integrated into society-as-it-is, as a kind of floating Church, doomed sooner or later to found itself on a rock, nor totally refusing it in a mere primitivistic regression, a kind of back-to-Methusaleh pioneerdom. Snyder as a Buddhist knows the value of the middle way, and seems to be trying to trace it out, amid a forest of references, attractions, and more or less partial realisations - see Earth House Hold.

How far the Tribe will get in its own existence, and in its transformative possibilities, remains to be seen (the pamphlet Four Changes lays out a triple path of action, comprising sociopolitical demands, community experimentation, and psychological reconditioning), but Smokey the Bear (a reincarnation of the Great Sun Buddha on the American continent - cf. Smokey the Bear Sutra⁵, the ‘hymn’ of the Tribe) seems to suggest that everything will be o.k., give or take a few million years. Svaha!

5 Published in Raster v/i, spring '71.