Gary Snyder Reader, is dedicated to one of my earliest friends and mentors, a fellow
student at Reed college in the early fifties, Philip Zenshin Whalen, retired abbot of the
Hartford Street Zen Center, who was one of the first people to seriously scold me for my
intellectual shortcomings when we were both undergraduates at Reed. Except he was older,
and he had been in the Air Force, one of those World War II GI Bill guys. So, the book’s
dedicated to Philip Whalen, with a quotation from Confucius.
[READING]
PC: Thank you, Gary. Anyone who listens to any of these poems is struck
immediately by a sense of detail. I wanted to tell one little personal story on you which
relates to this sense of detail and then ask you a question about it. One time Gary took
me into his study, and in the center of his study was a large library card file actually
from a library, you know, the kind before there were computers, with lots and lots and
lots of little drawers with little cards in them. And each of these drawers was fully
annotated alphabetically with Gary’s readings for the last thirty years, cross-indexed to
his journals. And I was simultaneously overwhelmed with that effort and also relieved that
all of those details didn’t come out of his memory because I was losing mine. So, one of
the things that I wanted to ask you about–I remember when the Diggers first came up to
San Juan Ridge, and we had this meeting. The Diggers were my leftist anarchist family in
San Francisco, and we were going on a caravan to spread the word about living in place.
And the first place we stopped was Gary’s community, and they were a little suspicious
about us as gypsies, not particularly as individuals–although they would have been wise
to be suspicious about us as individuals. But I remember being struck by the community’s
commitment to live in place and defend this place, and it strikes me that there’s a kind
of commonality about detail, about becoming intimate with place through the detail of what
lives there and grows there, detail in poetry and, for want of a better word, the suchness
of detail and Buddhist practice. And those are all three kinds of themes that you and I
have talked about a lot, and I would like you to just freewheel about detail and how the
appreciation for precision and specificity relates to place, poetry and practice.
GS: That’s a big order, Peter.
PC: We have time.
GS: I don’t know. Well, I’m very suspicious of detail…
PC: That finishes me off for this evening, thank you very much.
GS: But I’m suspicious of it because I’m so drawn to it. I hope at its
best that by covering detail in work and community and political life, one is freed up to
take risks, to venture into the formless. There’s a delicate balance there, and I have to
watch myself very carefully not to fall into the temptation to be a geek, which always
lurks over your shoulder…Coyote, Coyote, old man, do you suppose Coyote old man
carries a little calendar under his armpit as he trots along or something to keep up with
what his plans are? Maybe he does; but attention in the moment, attention to what’s going
on; hearing and seeing and listening is of utmost value; it is so beautiful. Whether or
not you have to remember it or write it down is another question. However, if it’s there,
it comes back to you when you need it, maybe.
PC: Well, I wasn’t actually talking or thinking so much of the writing.
What I was thinking of was how the flip side of the formless is boundless detail,
boundless, each grain of sand different, each flower petal; no one will ever have this
face again–
GS: Ohhh, leave that to God!
PC: Yeah, so, one of the things of value about place is the detail of the
gene pool, the detail of what grows here, and it seems to me that’s something that has
informed a lot of your work. And I’m not talking about the geek aspect; I’m actually
talking about the reverential aspect.
GS: Well, I appreciate that distinction. You know, it’s been a lifelong
struggle to keep the right balance between taking notes on my reading and trying to learn
a few more birds and a few more flowers and losing track–as one may sometimes–of the
fact that learning the name of a bird doesn’t tell you a whole lot about the actual
critter. You have to, as Basho says, go to the pine tree to learn of the pine, go to the
bamboo to learn of the bamboo. And that means, go to that being, go to that presence and
be with it experientially, feel it, be one with it, let it enter into you. You don’t need
a taxonomy to do that. Yet, having the taxonomy at hand adds another dimension that is
very valuable, especially when you’re at a forest service hearing and you’re called on to
testify. So it’s some balance there.
PC: Well, let me ask it another way. Which is, what’s the difference
between traveling and staying at home? I mean, you were in the Arabian Sea and the
Bosporus in Constantinople, and here you are when we visit–I mean, for twenty years it
seemed every time I visited Gary at Kitkitdizze, which is the name of his house, we would
clear brush, and we would talk, and we would hack and talk and pile up brush as a fire
break. And over the years you could actually see the changes that you made, and so we were
not cutting everything down in our path; we were cutting down specific bushes, specific
undergrowth, and so, as I was listening to you read in all this travel and all this detail
of things that you were seeing–is it the same thing as walking on the ridge, or is it
something different?
GS: Taking what’s at hand and taking it on…when I was working in the
engine room of the Sappa Creek, I had some maintenance jobs that, if I didn’t keep track
of them, I could ruin this giant engine. And so I took it to heart as my responsibility. I
even wrote a poem of compassion and sympathy for this tanker that I knew was going to be
busted up as scrap in about five more years. So when you’re up in the Sierra Nevada, you
better clear the underbrush, or it’s all going to burn down. In part, that’s just taking
on what’s in your life, what’s given to you in your surroundings, I guess.
PC: Well, I’m trying to tease out of you, clumsily, an articulation about
how you’re thinking about living in place. What living in place and getting intimate with
place really means. And somewhere in my mind that I can’t articulate too clearly is a
connection having to do with the details of a place, the way a place presents itself
through the details, not the taxonomy, of its different species and the interactions of
those species. And I see a connection between that language and the language of poetry.
Maybe that’s my own mind.
GS: Well, let me tell a little story on me and on my life. Thirty years
living in this one spot, most of the time there, developing a forest, managing a little
forest, some big trees, wild, and developing a water system, a solar electric power
system, a small garden, and moving about, keeping an eye on things, cutting down the pine
trees that had been killed by western bark beetles before the bark beetles could spread,
cutting that up for firewood, loading it in the truck, getting it out of the meadow so it
wouldn’t spread to the other trees, studying the cheat grass and other invader species of
grass in some of the meadows that were expanding too rapidly, wondering about them, etc.,
etc. Thirty years. Back and forth by one old live oak tree that happened to be standing
right alongside this trail, and one day I’m going by that live oak tree, and for no
particular reason at all that I can figure, I saw it. I totally saw it. It came to me; it
opened itself to me. And I stood there, and I thought, "I have never seen this tree
before; I have never been in the presence of this tree like I am now." It was a fully
living presence. It was deeply moving. And I also saw the tree in a way I had never seen
it before, that is to say, in beautiful detail of the bark, the leaves, the serrations on
the leaves, the scattered dead leaves on the ground, the shapes of the limbs, the shapes
of the twigs. So I met the tree. And thought in reflection on that, that that’s a
wonderful experience. In a way, that’s what we live for. But at the same time, doing all
the chores, taking care of the place, changing the oil in the generator are absolutely
necessary and just as beautiful, too. And they prepare the way for that moment when you
get to meet the tree, meet the oak tree, that the two go side by side. And, indeed, that
is the model of a Zen training center where there are all kinds of little details that you
do well from day to day, and then maybe there’s more that’s going to happen too, but you
don’t insist on it. You do what you do as boring as it is or as repetitious as it is, in
the same good spirit ‘well’, everyday; so that’s called practice. Poetry is the same.
PC: That’s the answer I wanted.
GS: I’m sorry I’m so slow.
PC: I’m starting to feel selfish and greedy, and I think I want to
include the rest of the audience in this. Do you think you could turn up the house lights
so we could see people out there? and I would invite people to ask Gary questions or
myself, and I will try to moderate and ask you to speak loudly, and I will repeat it in
the microphone just in case people don’t hear. So please feel free. A show of hands. Yes?
[muffled audience question]
PC: The question is a question to Gary–how come you don’t deal with the
problems of overpopulation?
GS: Well, you know, because poetry is not a program. I have talked about
overpopulation in some of my essays, particularly a little manifesto called Four Changes.
But that’s basically a prose job.
[muffled audience comment]
PC: Can you hear that in the back, that story? He’s recounting the story
about how Gary and he went to visit a poet in New Mexico, and the poet was apologizing
that the upstairs toilet was leaking…and that…the question was about…a
young man kind of mythologizing Gary and was startled when Gary launched into this fellow
and said, "You know, this is a critical life tool. How can you let the toilet
leak?" That was kind of a little Zen epiphany.
GS: You said it so well, Peter
PC: I just repeated what he said.
GS: Well, I guess I did that. I gave him a little dharma lecture on
maintenance.
[muffled audience question]
PC: The question to Gary was how do you deal with a sense of place; does
a sense of place have to be related to an environment around it which is still alive?
GS: You know, you can’t be anywhere on this planet in which the
environment around you isn’t alive. Maybe in the cities, in the urban centers it’s not
quite as evident, but there are mites in these seats and spiders under your chair,
not to mention billions of germs flying around–these are all sentient, organic, living
beings. We can enjoy that. As Dogen says, "Tiles, bricks, broken walls teach the
dharma to us." Do not make a foolish distinction between sentient and non-sentient,
Dogen would say. So we have an environment whether we like it or not, wherever we are. And
it’s a relationship, place is a relationship like a marriage. Either you enter into that
relationship, and it’s very rewarding, or you deny that relationship, and you live in
loneliness.
[muffled audience question]
GS: I will have to say, as I said to Latif in Santo Domingo Pueblo, you
seem to be in a very negative space…which hostile environment is this? We are
companions to the whole universe; this isn’t a hostile environment.
[muffled audience comeback]
GS: Oh, there’s mosquitoes, that’s true.
AUDIENCE: Would you talk about the sense of place and possession, or
ownership, of place?
GS: Well, it’s a different topic. Ownership is not a question. Again,
let’s think of it as relationship. A relationship does not require ownership, of a place
or of a person. None of us own the wind; none of us own the yellow-rumped warblers; none
of us own the sea. But we can have a relationship to them, also.
PC: The question was would you compare, or compare and contrast, the
epiphanies that come as a writer or an artist with those that come from some kind of
spiritual practice and pursuit.
GS: That’s a hard question to answer because, first of all, not all
spiritual practices and pursuits are the same. And there are several different tracks of
practice and experience that cultivate and encourage somewhat different experiences.
Devotional bliss, absorption in the One, is the focus of some traditions. The experience
of the artist is hands-on; it is dealing with the material world regardless of which
particular material you are dealing with, and so it is loving and close to matter; it
cannot and would not deny matter. But there are schools of spirituality who would choose
to leave that world behind, and so it’s hard to say. However, in the Zen Buddhist
tradition for one there is an unqualified delight in the arts. But also the monks in Song
Dynasty China or in Tokugawa Japan practicing painting or poetry laughed at themselves and
each other and said the worst kind of Zen person gets involved in poesy…
PC: Present company excluded?
GS: However, you know, let’s take one of the best thinkers in this
territory, Basho–the great haiku poet who says, "Go to the pine tree to learn of the
pine tree." And then in one little saying he sums it all up. Either for the artist or
the would be spiritual practicer he says, "Don’t try to follow in the footsteps of
the old masters; go to the source that they went to." There you are; go to the
source.
AUDIENCE: What we can do to educate the young about poetry?
GS: The kind of poetry that I write gets a little hard for kids to read
below sixth grade.
AUDIENCE: What about teenagers?
GS: Well, teenagers, yeah, I do that in high school sometimes. In fact,
just last week I was with the local grade school up in the Sierra Nevada hanging out with
the kids and working on some environmental projects, sure. Although, you know, what we
really need is a place-based, environmentally oriented curriculum built into the
California school system, especially in K&endash;8, so that local environmental
education would not be a hit or miss proposition relying on one or two dedicated school
teachers who love nature and do a whole lot extra for the kids. A curriculum that taught
nature and biology and environment on the basis of exploring whichever place you’re in and
taking the kids out on field trips and into hands-on projects would be the very best sort.
AUDIENCE: How do you think that writing poetry to express your life and life
experiences has effected your life and life experiences?
GS: Like, what’s the feedback loop? so to speak. I think poetry has
sharpened my seeing and gratitude. Writing poetry is its own reward. It is so delightful
to hit on the right language, the right music for a specific occasion or insight or image
or moment. In an odd way, the universe is absolutely brand new every day, and there are
unexpected things coming up that have never happened before. So you keep alert and are
enlightened by that, and doing your art is–it’s a kind of a prayer; it’s a meditation and
a constant teacher. You know, I could get really stoked about talking about this.
AUDIENCE: Relating to Gary’s ideas of place, what are your thoughts on
travelers and gypsies and nomads?
GS: I’m glad you asked that question because it gives me an opportunity
to clarify a little further some of the issues and questions that are around this idea of
place that Peter and I have been working over for so many years, each in our own way.
Place is a novel idea in American society. It’s so novel that it is unsettling to people.
Because it’s unsettling they don’t realize that it’s flexible, metaphoric and playful and
that it doesn’t automatically require that you sign up to live somewhere and not ever go
anywhere again. It’s not some new variety of political correctness; it’s nothing that you
have to do at all because you’re already in a place. What it’s asking us to do is simply
to take this particular relationship that’s always in our lives a little more seriously,
to pay a little more attention to it, and that will be true wherever you are. It is also a
way to think about the neighbors. The neighbors include the nonhuman as well as the human.