Gary Snyder & Julia Martin: Nobody Home [review]

This is proving to be a good year for us fans of Snyderiana. Earlier this year the correspondence between Wendell Berry and Gary Snyder (my review here) appeared and now there is 'Nobody Home Writing, Buddhism, and Living in Places'. It is a beautiful slim volume that fits perfectly in the side-pocket of your backpack, the perfect format for all books. It collects three interviews with Gary Snyder and the correspondence (1983-2011) with the interviewer Julia Martian, a South-African academic and Buddhist. The interviews are nice but hardly surprising, Snyder as a writer and thinker has a one-track-mind that amtraks towards the next station at his pace and without room for deviation. A near 100% of his output sits on a continues line of what he wants to say and for his steadfast reader these letters allow you to get a ever closer look on the minutiae of his intellectual development. Compared to earlier volumes you do get a little closer to Snyder as a man of teaching and travel, and there is also slightly more shown of the emotional events in his life. The real star of this book for me is Martin. I never heard of her before but we get to know her in her students years writing long overbearingly intellectual letters from the isolation of South Africa to her self-chosen teacher. As the years go by you follow the way she matures and comes into her own. At the background are the great events of her countries recent history: the fall of apartheid, the presidency of Mandela, the normalcy of violence, the presence of deep history and nature. A better title for this book would have been: "Growing up with Gary Snyder".

At the end of the book letters turn into email and this changes the entire tone of the correspondence, less formal, more kindhearted and also quicker, shorter and more pragmatic.

Not once does the word beat or beatnik fall. 

I like seeing Snyder with one of those 1980's pen holders. I always wanted one when I was a child but the only thing I could do was try to make one with toilet paper rolls. And he had one: lucky bastard.

Distant Neighbors, the letters of Wendell Berry and Gary Snyder.

Of all books that I have read last decade Gary Snyder's 'Practice of the Wild' has made the most impact on me. The selected letters of Allen Ginsberg and Snyder came out in 2009 (edited by beat pinata Bill Morgan) and it failed to impress on every level: the letters were short, contained barely any new info, did not make up for it with slylish panache. If you did not know who Ginsberg and Snyder were the letters would have never given you the idea that they were friends, more poet-celebs maintaining a beneficial node in their social network. That book was just another piece of worthless beat nostalgia to rip off the fans. When I saw Distant Neighbors advertised, the selected letters of Snyder and Wendell Berry (edited by Chad Wriglesworth), however I knew that I would get something much better. 

Both Wendell Berry (that eloquent secular-Amish farmer-intellectual whose stodgy perspectives on (agri)culture and nature always seem realistic, conservative and radical at the same time) and Gary Snyder (that zen-mountaineer-poet with a surprisingly small oeuvre) are never going to be Horace Walpole's but then Walpole was not homesteader.
If you think about picking up this book to learn more about the beats then you do not need to bother.

My main problem with Snyder is that never seems to put himself in a position of being under serious scrutiny. His published interviews all have the interviewer assuming the position of humble acolyte listening in awe while the Master sits and teaches with timeless abandon. In that Snyder has with grace reinvented the Confucian (no: Kungian) form for the age of Aquarius. I don't mind it but for an intellectual he has engaged himself in surprisingly little discussion and polemics. His position on overpopulation for instance he has made for at least 40 years but no one has ever made him elaborate on how the population decline he so much desires could be enforced without draconian measures. He takes the position, declares it central, but fails to substantiate it and nobody ever seems to have challenge him about it. But in Distant Neighbors we find Berry critiquing him for it and asking him to clarify his position. I was anticipating a polite but fierce discussion but what does Snyder do? In a next letter he merely shrugs. It confirms the hunch I have about Snyder: he takes critique very badly.

The book begins with a letter from 1973 and ends with a letter from 2013. From a distance we see the man float through life: working the land, traveling to and from public ado's, discussing the seasons and the weather, suggesting books and sharing poems and essays, sometimes they tease. For instance when Snyder in response to Berry's essay on why he will never use a computer sends him a love poem about text processing.

In the background the extended families act as background radiation: children and grandchildren, disease and death. Who would have though that Snyder would so gently break the news to Berry about him swapping wifes with real concern for Berry's more conservative antics on such matters.  Berry takes it well and seems to have taken more to the new partner than he ever did to the old. But that is conjuncture, these are man from  I you think about picking up this book to learn more about beat-matters than don't. Mars, silent on emotions.

So what do we have here: 40 years of correspondence, that show two distant friends keeping in touch. Sometimes they argue, sometimes they ask for advice, often they are planning how and when they are going to meet. I would not call this great letter writing but you see something of the pace of life of both authors and you get a sense of what life was like for them as they were writing their books. I learned something new about how The Practice of the Wild was written. That alone is enough for me.
   

How to live on Planet Earth: Nanao Sakaki

Most people will know about Nanao Sakaki (1923-2008) through Gary Snyder who lived with Sakaki's tribe on the Japanese island of Kyushu in 67/67. From 1969 onwards Sakaki lived in the United States for ten years and published four poetry books. He fought in the second world war and I wonder if behind the seemingly chaotic contours of his life lies an untreated case of post-traumatic stress, ala Robert Graves whose White Goddess is sometimes understood as a kind of sublimated shell shock. The man, in any case, deserves a biography but the publication of his collected poems "How to live on the Planet Earth" (2013, Blackberry books) is even more important. It's a beautiful book with really nice typesetting. I was barely acquainted with his work and am very happy to get the chance to savour it now in it's entirety. 

I haven't digested all of it but the things that immediately strikes me is that there is little 'progress' in his writing throughout his life. Maybe at first he uses slightly more 'poetic' language before becoming ever more sharper, clearer and cleaner. His hallmarks are a disgust with consumer culture and environmental degradation, a proclaiming of the pleasures of a simple life. 

A Big Day

Getting water at the spring

Carrying firewood

Chattering with a neighbor

The sun goes down.

A big day.

Sakaki has a few 'tricks': he lists things, he chants, he calculates, he lives with the weather and the stars. A happy day is when a rare animal shows him/herself. There seems to be little creative development and the work is consistent in tone and content from the first to the last poem. As he gets older he writes more obituaries and their underlying sentiment is one Buddhist acceptation of inevitable suffering. Sakaki wrote down his poetry as it came to him, without doubt and without editing, like a bird singing. Or so it seems. The poems are tribal, he studied the language and literature of the old societies, at times his poems recall forms known from Rothenberg's anthologies of EthnoPoetics. He had a sardonic humour all his own.

Go Walk Mathematics

Suppose you walk 3 kms a day for 40 years.
3 kms x 365 days = 1,095 kms.
forget the 95 kms.
1,000 kms x 40 years = 40,000 kms
40,000 kms = the length of the terrestrial equator
Therefore
Walking 3 kms a day for 40 years
You complete the circuit of the earth.

Suppose you walk 30 kms a day for 36 years.
30 kms x 365 days = 10,950 kms.
10,950 kms x 36 years = 394,200 kms
This figure goes beyond the average distance
Between the earth & the moon 384,400 kms.
Therefore
Walking 30 kms a day for 36 years
You reach the moon.

Nanao Sakaki was a man who lived his life according to his own plans. He was not a sophisticate, maybe the universities will hate him. He was primal, a true original and his poetry reflects that. His style looks simple and easy to copy but I don't think you can fake it. It could be that Buddhist tradition has models for such a man, but if I had to compare him to anyone it would have to be William Blake. Cultish, but only long after his death.

Autobiography

Born of a humble & poor family,
Received minimum education,
Learnt how to live by himself at fourteen,
Survived storms, one after another.
Bullets, starvation & concrete wastelands.

A day's fare - a cup of brown rice, vegetables,
Small fish, a little water, & a lot of wind.
Delighted by children and women,
Sharing beads of sweat with farmers,
Fishermen, carpenters & blacksmiths,
Paying no attention to soap, shampoo,
Toilet paper & newspapers.

Now & again
Loves to suck the nectar of honeysuckle,
To flutter with dragonflies & butterflies,
To chatter with winter wrens,
To sing song with coyotes,
To swim with humpback whales,
And to hug a rock in which dinosaurs sleep.

Feels at home in Alaskan glaciers,
Mexican desert, virgin forest of Tanzania,
Valley of Danube, grasslands of Mongolia,
Vulcanoes in Hokkaido & Okinawan coral reeds.

And - one sunny summer morning
He will disappear on foot.
Leaving no shadow behind.

A foraging poem by Gary Snyder + commentary

Here is a poem by Gary Snyder from his book Turtle Island (1975).

ETHNOBOTANY

In June two oak fell,
rot in the roots

Chainsaw in September
in three days one tree
bucked and quartered in the shed

sour fresh inner oak-wood smell
the main trunk splits
"like opening a book" (J. Tecklin)
And slightly humping oak leaves
deer muzzle and kick it,
Boletus.
one sort, Alice Eastwood
pink and poison; 

Two yellow, edulus
"edible and choice."
only I got just so slightly sick --

Taste all, and hand the knowledge down.

Commentary 

* The entire poem is an allusion to Ezra Pound's "The flavors of the peach and the apricot are not lost from generation to generation. Neither are they transmitted by book learning."

* Quoting Snyder from the same volume: "Know the flowers." 

* Know the flowers, by what name? And which system?

* Can there exist a botany without books & book learning?   

* Foragers only trust other foragers who have tried things for themselves. Who know the where and the what and the how of plants.

* All foragers all moralists.

* All botany is ethnobotany / all botany is culture. 

* Find your own flavours and hand them down to the next generation.

* "I must create a system or be enslaved by another man's." - William Blake

The Gary Snyder book that inspired a Boulder

Waiting at my climbing gym I leafed through a magazine and came across a mention of a Boulder route in Switzerland called "The Practice of the Wild". This is also the title of one my all time favourite books: Gary Snyder's address of deep problems in simple-speech first published in 1990. Surely (95% certain) the boulder route is named after the book and Chris Sharma the climber who 'opened' the route in 2004 is a fellow Snyderian. The route is a cave climb rated 8c, which is extremely tough and it has only been climbed a few times. The shot above is from Tyler Landman's ascent in 2008.

It's great to see how a book's influence can show up in a completely different practise, even though it's not that far removed from Gary Snyder's own interests. The man has been an avid mountain climber all his life. Kerouac describes their trip up the Matterhorn in Dharma Bums, Snyder climbed Mount Everest when in his fifties or sixties. 

There is also a deeper link that is more intuitive. As I was telling about the boulder's name my climbing parter asked me what the book is about and I blanked out completely. I have read it at least four times cover to cover and I read bits from it all the time but what is it about? I am not absolutely sure. It's about a way to live and it shows a way to think about the world and a way to be position yourself in the world in respect to nature from water to cow to human. It describes a moral core. It borrows a lot from anthropology, sixties commune experiments and Buddhism. But that description doesn't feel completely right, it's also something of a mystery book that circambulates a Escherian wordview in which nature is both in a perfect ecological order and unfathomably wild.  A boulder route might well be a wordless koan in response to Snyder's challenges. 

Climbing parlance talks about "opening" a route. What does that mean in ordinary language: is a climb discovered? created? recognized? divined? revealed? or all of those combined? Perhaps that is what the book is about.

One comment: I think life is more like the endurance of a lead climb than like the explosiveness of a boulder, but I wish it was a top rope problem within my more modest capabilities. 

The cover art IS terrible

The journal for the protection of all beings

"The journal for the protection of all beings" was published as the fall 1978 issue of Stewart Brand's CoEvolution Quaterly. The Journal was edited by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael McLure, Gary Snyder (all present at the Six Gallery poetry reading that launched the Beats to the world) and David Meltzer. This publication therefore connects 50 years of West Coast experimentation from beat and anarchist Buddhism to the merry pranksters and early internet happenings. "The journal for the protection of all beings" takes a US Buddhist long view of death and destruction, from the Atom bomb and plutonium fear to the mass extinctions of biological species and human cultures. It brings together a fascinating range of material, a liberal sprinkling of poetry (it all reads great and actually works in the context), positional essays and a few very nice bits about the subjectivity of (linguistic, anthropological) field work. It shows the Beats not as a bunch of Benzedrine fuelled hobo hitch-hikers but as a serious,engaged and inclusive group of people working towards a sustained and coherent non-ideological critique of civilization. The journal is a fascinating document that is well structured and builds up nicely with each new contribution, but, despite myself, I can't really love it. It suffers from an overdose of Buddhist zeal, those poets are self-converted choir boys for a alien faith. Maybe I am missing something that would add a little concreteness to the meta-meaning this journal is hoping to generate bottom-up. Still: it's a thing to cherish and the Gary Snyder essay on Chinese poetry is a brilliant piece that I had not read before and which alone was well worth the 8 dollar the thing cost me on Ebay.

Gary Snyder, "A Bit Much"

There is an early photo of Gary from his student days in Berkeley in which he is sitting, Japanese style, wearing a simple Japanese kimono. He is cradling a bowl of tea and staring at the camera in a reprimanding manner, as if disturbed by the photographer.... When I first encountered this photo in a book about the beats, and before we had even met, I was impressed that he had allowed himself to be photographed at home while drinking tea from a small bowl, dressed in robes, with no evident suggestion whatsoever of being prepared for the photographer. Today, it might appear "a bit much" to wear Japanese clothing and live on a tatami-mat floor while pursuing Asian studies at a university, but at the time, I perceived his apparent total immersion in his subject as a form of exemplary commitment.

The quote is from Peter Coyote, taken from Dimensions of a Life, the excellent distributed biography on Gary Snyder. The photo (Berkeley 1956) is from Ann Charters biography of Jack Kerouac, easily the best biography on any of the beats ever published.

Snyder in the Jaipur observatory

Picture from the excellent Gary Snyder biography 'Dimensions of a Life', the observatory is also the inspiration behind Rohit Gupta's crystal astronomy, but can't find the relevant txt just now.  

Gary Snyder's motto for the children

stay together
learn the flowers
go light

There are italicised recommendations Gary Snyder makes at the end of his poem For the Children. Scot Slovic in The Etiquette of Freedom explains them as such:

Stay Together: "Pay attention to the importance of community. Work with each other. Even if you have opposing perspectives, even if you come from different cultural traditions, find a way to work together to stay together."

Learn the Flowers: "Notice you surroundings and learn about them. To me 'learn' implies actively studying something -  not just learning what it looks like on a superficial level, but actually engaging in an energetic and deliberate effort of study."

Go Light: "Pay attention to you actual lifestyle, to the practical aspects of life. Try to have a light impact on the planet and on the cultural communities that you are intersecting with.'Go Light' means ' live carefully'".

Gary Snyder lionized

Stills from the film

'Etiquette of the Freedom' is a film by John J. Healey about Gary Snyder. The main footage consists of Jim Harrison informally interviewing Gary Snyder, but there is also archival footage and various talking heads explaining the man. The film led to a book published by Counterpoint (2010) that contains the edited transcripts as well as a DVD of the film. I had high hopes, but it was a total bore.

That writes best that writes less. There are many writers half his age who have written at least twice as many words. While he could easily have made a living as an elderly statesman of the Beat he instead labours nine months of the year on his self-sustaining homestead in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. The remaining three months are dedicated to writing, travelling and being famous. Because so much of his work is extra-literary, and because so much of his work comes at the end of a long period of thinking, accompanying volumes like 'The real work, interviews and talks, 1964-1979' fill in a lot of details that are helpful to better understand his barer central publications. I was hoping that 'Etiquette of Freedom' would be such a companion book to Snyder's landmark 'Practise of the wild'. But alas: Snyder may not play the part of the beat legendary who survived, the rest of the world insists that he does.

Snyder is the intellectual of the beats, but nobody ever seemed to dare ask him a serious question. Come on, surely the man can handle a critical question. It would do him (and us) some good to be pressed into a clearer expose of his views. Instead we get the same old stories again and again, no statement Snyder makes is challenged (and he can be controversial), every story he tells is tremendously funny (but as a Snyder-aficionado I have heard them a dozen times before).  Sigh. 

 

Gary Snyer ate horse meat from the pet store

The 1967 Houseboat Summit (earlier) had Timothy Leary, Allen Watts, Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder discussing the future of the psychedelic revolution which at that time was about to merge with/into the Back to the Land movement. Much is about drugs, religion and conciousness but a curiously large segment of the discussion deals with the need to learn the practicalities of homesteading; how appropriate it again seems now the 40 year love-affair with the city is collapsing. According to Charles Perry's book on the Height Ashbury this was quite the event at the time and while he states that not everybody may have read it, the transcript was definitly a thing to have and to keep. Against self-styled guru Leary (who appears completely out of his depth) Gary Snyder comes across as the much-respected outdoors-man with a philosophy: the dark mountain mobster who is listened to. But I may be biased.

The following two quotes by Snyder are taken from the transcript. From the first quote we learn how to live and that Snyder himself got through college by dumpster diving. The second quote tells about the need to learn from the native people, the gist of this was included here earlier.

Well, this isn't news to anybody, but ten or fifteen years ago when we dropped out, there wasn't a community. There wasn't anybody who was going to take care of you at all. You were completely on your own. What it meant was, cutting down on your desires and cutting down on your needs to an absolute minimum; and it also meant, don't be a bit fussy about how you work or what you do for a living. That meant doing any kind of work. Strawberry picking, carpenter, laborer, longshore...Well, longshore is hard to get into. It paid very well. Shipping out...that also pays very well. But at least in my time, it meant being willing to do any goddam kind of labor that came your way, and not being fuzzy about it. And it meant cultivating the virtue of patience -- the patience of sticking with a shitty job long enough to win the bread that you needed to have some more leisure, which meant more freedom to do more things that you wanted to do. And mastering all kinds of techniques of living really cheap... Like getting free rice off the docks, because the loading trucks sometimes fork the rice sacks, and spill little piles of rice on the docks which are usually thrown away. But I had it worked out with some of the guards down on the docks that they would gather 15 or 25 pounds of rice for me, and also tea...I'd pick it up once a week off the docks, and then I'd take it around and give it to friends. This was rice that was going to be thrown away, otherwise. Techniques like that.

...we used to go around at one or two in the morning, around the Safeways and Piggly Wigglies in Berkeley, with a shopping bag, and hit the garbage can out in back. We'd get Chinese cabbage, lots of broccoli and artichokes that were thrown out because they didn't look sellable any more. So, I never bought any vegetables for the three years I was a graduate student at Berkeley. When I ate meat, it was usually horse meat from the pet store, because they don't have a law that permits them to sell horsemeat for human consumption in California like they do in Oregon.

* * * * * *

If you're going to talk this way you have to be able to specifically say to somebody in Wichita, Kansas who says, "I'm going to drop out. How do you advise me to stay living around here in this area which I like?"

All right, say I want to stay where I am. I say, okay, get in touch with the Indian culture here. Find out what was here before. Find out what the mythologies were. Find out what the local deities were. You can get all of this out of books. Go and look at your local archaeological sites. Pay a reverend [sic] visit to the local American Indian tombs, and also the tombs of the early American settlers. Find out what your original ecology was. Is it short grass prairie, or long grass prairie here? Go out and live on the land for a while. Set up a tent and camp out and watch the land and get a sense of what the climate here is. Because, since you've been living in a house all your life, you probably don't know what the climate is.

Then decide how you want to make your living here. Do you want to be a farmer, or do you want to be a hunter and food gatherer? You know, start from the ground up, and you can do it in any part of this country today...cities and all...For this continent I took it back to the Indians. Find out what the Indians were up to in your own area. Whether it's Utah, or Kansas, or New Jersey.

Material incompetence

Wonderful quote by Alan Watts, taken from the Houseboat Summit in 1967: 

Our educational system, in its entirety, does nothing to give us any kind of material competence. In other words, we don't learn how to cook, how to make clothes, how to build houses, how to make love, or to do any of the absolutely fundamental things of life. The whole education that we get for our children in school is entirely in terms of abstractions. It trains you to be an insurance salesman or a bureaucrat, or some kind of cerebral character.

Some additional wild plants that we hadn't tried before

Gary Snyder as a young man

In 1967 and 1968 Gary Snyder associated himself with the Japanese counter-cultural movement founded by the wayfaring poet Nanao Sakaki called the tribe. Hunger was sometimes an issue, and occasionally they had to take a risk and eat plants they hadn't eaten before. The quote is taken from 'The Real Work', the pictures appeared in some old edition of 'He who hunted birds in his father's village'.

Nanao [Sakaki] got the word that one of the Southern islands off Kyushu was underpopulated because it was too isolated and the soil was too bad and that no one would object if some people moved in there and did some homesteading.

So he and seven and eight people went down and spent the first summer doing nothing but cutting back the bamboo tearing out the roots and planting sweet potatoes. The second summer was last summer. I was with them both summers for part of the time. I don't mean to say that they do this just in the summer. They've been doing this continuously since they started, but the summer has been the biggest push in land-clearing.

Last summer we cleared some more land, burned the brush, burned the stomps, rooted out more lands, put more into cultivation, and simultaneously we were able to cut lumber and drag it down from the hills and square off logs towards building a house.

During that period, because of typhoon weather, the ship didn't come. The ship only comes once a week and this little ship can't even come into the island. It has to stop offshore and then a boat goes out to it.

Because the ship didn't come, the food ran out. And this is a common thing for that ashram: to be out of food for three weeks or four weeks at a time. As we ran short on rations, we simply cut down the daily amount of food for everybody to two meals a day - a bowl and a half of gruel per person at a meal - and scrounged upon the countryside, got edible nuts. Because of the heavy surf we weren't able to do much fishing but we were able to gather shellfish. And we tried out some additional wild plants that we hadn't tried before. 

Gary Snyder slightly older. 

Kitkiddizze (the Snyder home)

Building a cabin in the woods (Thoreau, the Unabomber) is the all American form of dissent and Gary Snyder, the favourite essayist of all cryptoforesters, has followed the tradition. Kitkitdizze (the native name for bearclover) was built in the summer of 1970 in the deforested gold-mined foothills of the Sierra Nevada and has become something of an emblem in his personal mythology: the sage-poet living on a 100-acre homestead where "He pays the property tax, but claims no more right to the land than the other creatures that live on it". Kitkitdizze lives the philosophy of "reinhabitation: moving back into a terrain that has been abused and half forgotten – and then replanting trees, dechannelizing streambeds, breaking up asphalt". Snyder is a man of practical skill and his house combines features of traditional Japanese farmhouses and native American earthlodges.

Listen to the Guardian:

Deer peep through the foliage at the visitor on the three-mile unpaved road to Snyder's ranch. On a walk in the surrounding pine and black-oak forest, he points out claw marks on a tree-trunk made by a bear - the same bear, perhaps, that features in a recent poem eating all the pears from a fenced-off tree by the house. A wildcat dispatched his chickens. Until recently, the family had only an outside lavatory some 50 yards away, which, he says wryly, "could be dangerous in the mornings" - pumas also lurk among the pines, though seldom seen - but the Snyders now have the luxury of an inside bathroom with a polished wooden tub. He called the place Kitkitdizze, a local Wintun Indian word for the surrounding low ground-cover bush, also known as mountain misery. "We had our hands full the first 10 years getting up walls and roofs, bathhouse, barn, the woodshed. I set up my library and wrote poems and essays by lantern light." Kai, Snyder's eldest son, was a child when work on the house began in 1969. He has memories "of heat and dust and a lot of people working, and me getting underfoot". In the beginning, says Kai, now in his late 30s, "all our water had to be pumped by hand, which my dad did every day for about 40 minutes. It was good exercise, I guess. All the cooking was done on a wood stove, and our heating was produced by the same method. It was like a 19th-century lifestyle in lots of ways."