Gary Snyder and the Pacific Rim: Creating Countercultural Community
376
Gary Snyder and the Pacific Rim: Creating Countercultural Community
376Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781587296666 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Iowa Press |
| Publication date: | 10/01/2006 |
| Series: | Contemp North American Poetry |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 376 |
| File size: | 580 KB |
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Read an Excerpt
GARY SNYDER and the Pacific Rim CREATING COUNTER-CULTURAL COMMUNITY
By Timothy Gray
UNIVERSITY OF IOWA PRESS Copyright © 2006 the University of Iowa Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-87745-976-7
Chapter One MIGRATING
Exploring the Creaturely Byways of the Pacific Northwest
In Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century, anthropologist James Clifford discusses a variety of postmodern predicaments resulting from increased contact among global or "traveling" cultures. Travel, as Clifford attempts to define it throughout his book's collage of essays and personal notes, encompasses "an increasingly complex range of experiences: practices of crossing and interaction that [have] troubled the localism of many common assumptions about culture." Although Clifford occasionally apologizes for his imperfect explanation of travel and its effects, he reminds all members of "heterogeneous modernity" how difficult it is to see the interactive processes that condition or "translate" our being. Part of the problem is our own myopia. As Clifford and other contemporary scholars of diaspora would have us recognize, we tend to focus on "roots" of culture while ignoring the "routes" that make cultural contacts possible. We focus too much of our attention on the location of culture and too little on the displacement of culture resulting from an endless series of global/local encounters.
Clifford's thesis finds it apotheosis in "Fort Ross Meditation," the luminous personal essay that closes Routes. "I'm looking for history at Fort Ross," Clifford writes, journal-style. "I want to understand my location among others in time and space." Clifford's location, geographically speaking, is on the northern California coast, at the site of a Russian-American Company fort abandoned in 1842, yet the routes he espies extend far beyond that site. As his perspective shifts from local place to global space, Clifford comes to understand that extended movements along the rim of the Pacific-arrivals and retreats of human populations, migrations of animals, introductions of plant species-affect his sense of place and "may provide enough 'depth' to help make sense of a future, some possible futures." By "making room for other stories, other discoveries and origins, for a United States with roots and routes in the Asian Pacific," Clifford's meditation draws a new cognitive map, a space of contingency where "contact relations, borders and powers, line up differently" before "definitive" histories of westward expansion and geopolitical fantasies about Pacific Rim community.
Clifford's work is exciting, inasmuch as it challenges Americans to rethink the spatial and historical contours of their nation by locating a space of interactive identity, or "contact zone." Still, I cannot help but think that a certain poet had formulated a similar geographical paradigm years earlier. From an early age, Gary Snyder has regarded the Pacific Rim as a migratory space, the configuration of which can be determined simply by observing the interactive movements of its many forms of wildlife (humans included). For centuries, the Rim has conditioned basic subsistence practices, spurred migrations, and fostered exchanges, thereby accommodating an extended community of living beings and preserving an ancient cultural continuum. Glimpsed from this perspective, the ways (methods, practices, rites, literatures) of West Coast culture are inseparable from the various byways (trajectories, routes, paths) through which they physically make landfall and through which they psychically come to consciousness.
As Snyder's personal aura was to evolve during the Beat and hippie eras, other writers in the San Francisco community would sometimes liken him to an animal, primarily because of the way he moved effortlessly through the landscapes and seascapes of the Pacific region. If Snyder did in fact move like an animal, it was probably because he had already studied the migratory pathways taken by the creatures he calls "critters" (after frontier lingo) or "animal-people" (after Native American oral legends). In a long career devoted to recovering the "old ways" of Pacific Rim culture, he has repeatedly summoned the example of migratory animals, and the mythologies they have inspired, in order to challenge official national histories, resist capitalism's destruction of natural resources, and engage the multitude of biological and cultural currents that have been forgotten, repressed, or otherwise obscured. This chapter tracks the emergence of Snyder's migratory sensibility, following the poet from his boyhood on Puget Sound, to his college years in Portland, to the composition of his first volume of verse. Even at this early juncture, we shall notice, Pacific Rim consciousness was shaping his thinking.
Early Movements The experience of moving came early for Snyder. Born in San Francisco in 1930, he moved at age two to Lake City, Washington, just north of Seattle, where his father tried his hand at dairy farming (with less than stellar results). During his boyhood forays into nearby wilderness areas, some of which lasted for days on end, he honed his survival skills and learned about the natural powers that dwarf human pretension. Because he sensed that the natural world was profoundly interconnected, he lost patience with philosophies or religions that privileged one group of living beings over another. The son of confirmed atheists, he held a particular aversion to Christian doctrines maintaining that animals do not have souls, a precept he knew instinctively to be false. Through his contact with the wilderness areas of the Pacific Northwest, he came to respect native cultures that live close to the land. Snyder was particularly struck by the fact that an old Salish Indian who occasionally visited the family's dairy farm had a more intimate knowledge of that place than his parents ever did. As Snyder would say years later, the Salishan man "knew better than anyone else I had ever met where I was." The descendents of white settlers, by contrast, had only a rudimentary sense of the place they had bought into. "Looking back at all the different trees and plants that made up my second-growth Douglas-fir forest plus cow pasture childhood universe, I realized that my parents were short on a certain kind of knowledge. They could say, 'That's a Doug fir, that's a cedar, that's a bracken fern,' but I perceived a subtlety and complexity in those woods that went far beyond a few names" (PS 183-84).
Canoeing, fishing, clamming, gathering bark, and picking blackberries were the other first steps Snyder remembers taking in order to gain a more nuanced understanding of his place in the Pacific Northwest. His second step involved traveling to a Seattle Public Library branch in the university district, where he read as much as he could, including mountain writings by John Muir, poems by D. H. Lawrence, and accounts of American Indians by Ernest Thompson Seton. He also began hanging out at the University of Washington Anthropology Museum, studying its excellent collection of Indian artifacts and reinforcing his "idea that the local folks knew something that the white folks didn't know." Confronted with such documentary evidence, Snyder realized that humans had the choice of whether they wanted to destroy large ecosystems or preserve them. As was often the case, though, Snyder found that the wilderness was an even better teacher than a library or museum. In an interview with Bill Moyers, he recalled that his family's property bordered a "clear cut where some of the largest conifer forests in the world had been." In the midst of this deforested area, he dedicated himself to reversing the cycle of ecological abuse. "Right back of our cow pasture there were stumps twelve feet high and twelve feet across, the giant Douglas fir and Western hemlock and Western red cedar of Puget Sound, and I played among them as a kid. I became so tuned in and, in a certain sense, radicalized so early that I like to think the ghosts of those giant trees were whispering to me as a kid, 'Do something about this.'"
By his teens, when he moved with his mother to Portland, Oregon, Snyder was increasing his store of ecological knowledge with a series of mountaineering adventures. Before he left high school, he had already scaled many of Washington's and Oregon's major peaks, including Mount Hood and Mount Adams, as well as Mount Saint Helens, an active volcano he climbed on 13 August 1945, just one week after the Hiroshima bombing provided an earthshaking eruption of an entirely different sort. On treks up these mountains, which he came to know by their Indian names (Wy'east, Klickitat, and Loowit), Snyder remembers being afforded a panoramic view of the Pacific Northwest and "an initiation by all the great gods of the land." In the 1970s, when he had children of his own, he would take them to the tops of mountains so that they could "see our place." For Snyder, climbing a peak to gain a new perspective "is the way the world should be learned. It's an intense geography that is never far removed from your body."
From his mountain perches, Snyder came to understand that the Puget Sound and Portland areas are not fixed places, but rather nodal points constructed by movements, exchanges, and traversals. Weather patterns, animal migrations, and tectonic rumblings, when taken together or combined with other kinetic variables, create a spatial vortex lending each place on earth its unique character. A place that appears to be local actually has far-flung origins, which in turn have far-reaching consequences for other places around the world. As Snyder would explain decades later, as he attempted to pinpoint the location of Kitkitdizze, the farmhouse/compound he built in the Sierra Nevada foothills in 1970, a place is "but one tiny node in an evolving net of bioregional homesteads and camps" (PS 262). In the Pacific Northwest, it just so happens, the majority of nodal relationships are routed along the ecological and cultural zone we call the Pacific Rim. "The geographical significance of East Asia to the west coast was palpable, as I was growing up," Snyder once told me. "Seattle had a Chinatown, the Seattle Art Museum had a big East Asian collection, one of my playmates was a Japanese boy whose father was a farmer, we all knew that the Indians were racially related to the East Asians and that they had got there via Alaska, & there were freighters from China and Japan in Puget Sound, a constant sense of exchange."
While still a boy, Snyder attended two exhibits that further enhanced his Pacific Rim consciousness. The first was the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco, where he saw a performance of Chinese acrobats along with other attractions devoted to Pacific culture. The second was an exhibit of Chinese sumi landscape paintings, done in ink brush, on display at the Seattle Art Museum. To the boy's great surprise, the depiction of Chinese mountains in the sumi paintings looked hauntingly familiar. "When I was eleven or twelve," Snyder recalled in a 1977 interview, "I went into the Chinese room at the Seattle art museum and saw Chinese landscape paintings; they blew my mind. My shock of recognition was very simple: 'It looks just like the Cascades.' The waterfalls, the pines, the clouds, the mist looked a lot like the northwest United States. The Chinese had an eye for the world that I saw as real.... It was no great lesson except for an instantaneous, deep respect for something in Chinese culture that always stuck in my mind and that I would come back to again years later" (TRW 93-94). Snyder reiterates the germinal importance of the sumi paintings in his unfinished "Hokkaido Book" manuscript, where he refers to the museum experience as a "seed in my store-house-consciousness to be watered later when I first read Arthur Waley's translations of Chinese poetry and then Ezra Pound's. I thought, here is a high civilization that has managed to keep in tune with nature. The philosophical and religious writings I later read from the Chinese seemed to back this up. I even thought for a time that simply because China had not been Christian, and had been spared an ideology which separated humankind from all other living beings (with the two categories of redeemable and unredeemable) that it naturally had an organic, process-oriented view of the world."
For Snyder, and for anyone else who subscribes to a "process-oriented view of the world," the various landscapes of the Pacific are all of one piece, since they not only share an ocean but also a historical and cultural development based on similar topographical wonders. What we need, Snyder realized early on, is an art that is able to translate these natural connections to civilized people who have long forgotten them. Importantly, his early observations suggested that Asian and Native American arts and literatures were more adept than those in Western civilization at registering these kinds of connections. Little wonder, then, that Snyder's magnum opus, Mountains and Rivers without End, took its inspiration from Chinese scroll paintings, which Snyder appreciated for their "energies of mist, white water, rock formation, air swirls-a chaotic universe where everything is in place" (MR 153). Operating on the Buddhist premise that humanity itself is less important than a landscape full of interconnected and mutually respectful sentient beings, the painters of the Chi'ing and Sung dynasties pictured a realm in which arbitrary boundaries of civilization were subject to natural dissolution and reconfiguration. Behind Snyder's "shock of recognition" there existed an ancient impulse to shrink distances and reestablish communal ties.
I Want to Create Wilderness out of Empire When it came time to go to college, Snyder chose not to migrate very far. As a double major in literature and anthropology at Reed College, located in his new hometown of Portland, Snyder received the scholarly training that helped him delve more deeply into the Pacific Rim cultures and ecological concerns that had fascinated him since childhood. By his own account, the education he received at Reed was rigorous. "They wouldn't tolerate bullshit.... It was an intensive, useful experience" (TRW 64). But classroom rigors constituted only one part of Snyder's education. One of the most fruitful outcomes of his college experience was the close friendship he forged with fellow students Philip Whalen and Lew Welch. As they discovered common literary interests, these fledgling poets established the Adelaide Crapsey-Oswald Spengler Memorial Society, an outsider intellectual clique inspired by a poet renowned for her five-line hokku experiments and a historian famous for his prophetic and weighty tome, The Decline of the West. The decline theorized by Spengler, and eventually picked up by the Beats on both coasts (including Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs), did not signify imminent cultural oblivion so much as it heralded new discoveries of what lay beyond traditional Western comprehension. As Snyder, Whalen, and Welch came to understand it, the decline of the West meant the rise of Pacific Rim consciousness, for it encouraged Americans to look beyond the western horizon in search of alternative cultural roots/routes.
This is not to say that the members of the society turned their backs on all things Western. In fact, all three men were drawn to the work of modernist experimentalists in the Anglo-American tradition, including Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, although it must be remembered that these two poets were among the first in the West to incorporate Asian rhythms into their own verse. When Williams visited Reed during a 1950 lecture tour, he found time to meet with three young admirers named Snyder, Whalen, and Welch, and they in turn initiated him into their society. Over the next decade, Williams was to become an outspoken champion of the New American Poets, writing the introduction to Allen Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems and helping other young writers make their way in the literary world. Still, except perhaps for Welch, whose senior thesis was a study of Gertrude Stein, the members of the society were moving toward a more natural and primitive aesthetic, one they felt the Anglo-American modernists had either ignored or misrepresented. While Snyder and his friends continued to respect Pound and Williams for their literary daring, and especially for their Asian-inflected poetics, they found themselves edging closer to a rugged West Coast style grounded in local landscapes and the oral literatures of indigenous cultures.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from GARY SNYDER and the Pacific Rim by Timothy Gray Copyright © 2006 by the University of Iowa Press. Excerpted by permission.
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