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Gary Snyder- danger on peaks

Gary Snyder. danger on peaks. Shoemaker & Hoard, Publishers, 2004. Paper $14.00.

Review by Tom Pynn

Who can leap the world's ties

And sit with me among the white clouds?

--Han Shan, from Cold Mountain Poems,

translated by Gary Snyder

In his unreleased film, Nietzsche's Thinking Places, Graham Parkes notes that the German philosopher-poet loved to walk the cliffs high above Ravello with the Italian village below and cerulean Mediterranean beyond. Nietzsche yearned for the heights that led him along paths into the depths. He wrote in Twilight of the Idols, "Only ideas won by walking have any value." Thought is always already on the move and when prompted by geophysical distances, prepares us for the arrival of what is always unanticipated.

In his first full collection of new poems since he published his forty year masterwork Mountains and Rivers Without End (1956-1996) Gary Snyder poses this rhetorical question in "The Climb": Who wouldn't take the chance to climb a snowpeak and get the long view? As with Han Shan (whose Chinese literary name translates as "Cold Mountain") and Nietzsche, Snyder has sought a view transcending the limited (dualistic and frozen) view of the human-centric. He quotes the 12^th century Soto Zen Master Dogen in "Pearly Everlasting": "Do not be tricked by human-centered views." From the perspective of the short view, mountains do not walk, bird shit on a rock is not writing, and trees are simply raw material for disposable diapers. In short, the time-being of humans in the natural attitude is a radical self-interest forgetting tending toward solipsism and alienation. Thus, Snyder has long maintained that our quarrel, externalized as violence toward each other and the natural world, is ultimately with ourselves.

Since his early childhood, Snyder has been moved to be a voice for wilderness in our time when there is less than 4% of old growth forest left in North America. As he told Bill Moyers in 1995, his initiation into the deep life of the environment was really a

gift to me from childhood . . . Growing up on a dairy farm in northern Washington on the edge of a clear cut where some of the largest conifer forests in the world had been. 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 that the ghosts of those giant trees were whispering to me as a kid, "do something about this."

In "Atomic Dawn," he recalls the first time he climbed Mt. St. Helens (August 13, 1945): "Horrified, blaming scientists and politicians and the governments of the world, I swore a vow to myself, something like, 'By the purity and beauty and permanence of Mt. St. Helens, I will fight against this cruel destructive power and those who would seek to use it, for all my life'." Whether in his essays, poems, translations, interviews, or activism, Snyder has been a consistent and committed friend to the wild things and wild places. In doing so he has been involved in real work--what he has come to call "reinhabitation"-- benefiting all living things: "becoming native in your heart, coming to understand that we really live here, that this is really the continent we're on and that our loyalties are here, to these mountains and rivers, to these plant zones, to these creatures." Learning to see from the long view is to see "Things spread out/ rolling and unrolling, packing and unpacking, / --this painful impermanent world."

As a poet coming into his own with other writers in the North Beach area of San Francisco in the 1950s such as Philip Whelan, Lew Welch, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Bob Kaufman, ruth weiss, Alan Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and others, he has consistently maintained that while the counter-cultural/Bohemian movements known alternately as San Francisco Renaissance and Beat was primarily a literary movement, it was nonetheless a movement of dissent, dissent with American attitudes generally, and in Snyder's case, dissent with American attitudes toward the environment. Recall that moment in Kerouac's novel The Dharma Bums when Japhy Ryder (based on Snyder) announces his vision of "a world full of rucksack wanderers, Dharma Bums refusing

to subscribe to the general demand that they consume production and therefore have to work for the privilege of consuming, all that crap they didn't really want anyway such as refrigerators, TV sets, cars at least new fancy cars, certain hair oils and deodorants and general junk you finally always see a week later in the garbage anyway, all of them imprisoned in a system of work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume.

In its social aspect, the concerns of the Beats embodied a zest for living that entailed revaluating American attitudes towards sex, mind altering substances, music, visual art, religion, and politics. In its literary aspect, the Beats were prompted to return to the world of things ("No ideas but in things") and express/project their innermost minds and hearts. For Snyder, all of this is "the real work."

Over the years and this his tenth volume of poetry, Snyder's work has taken the two-fold emphasis of getting "right down on life and death" and a careful attentiveness to the natural world such as he expresses at the close of "Really the Real":

And back to Davis, forty miles, forty minutes

shivering to remember what's going on

just a few miles west of the 5:

in the wetlands, in the ongoing elder what you might call,

really the real, world.

The former concern is informed by Snyder's long deepening study of the Buddhist traditions, particularly Zen. With its insistence on peering into things themselves, especially one's own mind, deepened by meditation practice and communication of insight structured by brevity, humor, compassion, and compression, Buddhist aesthetic practice has infused Snyder's work. We would be naive, however, if we saw Snyder's Buddhist enlightening practice as the attempt to appropriate the oriental/exotic. Snyder, like other artists of his time, is also deeply influenced by Romantic (Blake), Transcendentalist (Whitman) and Objectivist (Williams) aesthetics. While not identical, these all share enough affinities to make the project of cross-cultural understanding not simply possible, but probable. In "Sharing an Oyster With The Captain," Snyder's attention to the things themselves is the form of the line: "Along the roadside yarrow, scotch broom, forbs/ hills of layered angled boughs like an Edo woodcut, / rare tree--bishop pine--storm-tuned."

One often heard in the 1950s the question, "Why do these guys have to go to the east? Isn't western culture good enough?" Yes and no. What Snyder and others find important in western culture is not what most westerners subscribe to or care to articulate. Buddhist aesthetic practice allows Snyder and others to open questions and pursue lines of living, composing, and thinking that have been marginalized by what C. Wright Mills saw as a constricting conformity that dehumanized individuals (White Collar, 1952) and a new constellation of power manifested in the matrix of government, military, and corporation operating on fear of the other (The Power Elite, 1955). As Kerouac himself wrote in a 1945 manuscript recently published as Orpheus Emerged, "I want to know where all this meanness of spirit comes from--the world's crazy!" Buddhism allowed for a recovery of spiritual and aesthetic wholeness in a world Snyder and others saw as increasingly pathological, what Ginsberg named "the syndrome of shutdown."

What one notices in danger on peaks, and throughout all of Snyder's work since his poetry and prose began appearing in little magazines such as Evergreen Review, Origin, Yugen, and Black Mountain Review, is his reverence for and wide ranging knowledge of the natural environment. While Snyder has long been an advocate for wilderness in his work, he does not offer a one-sided view of nature; e.g. as a good in itself, as opposed to human culture, or as being solely for human use. As the title of the book suggests, wilderness is at once dangerous because anything might happen and one has to know where one is, and our home that one should know about lest one become a danger not only to wilderness, but also all forms of life. Also missing in Snyder's view of nature are traces of sentimentality as the short poem "Baby Jackrabbit" attests to:

Baby jackrabbit on the ground

thick furry brindled coat

little black tailtip

back of the neck ate out,

life for an owl.

In "Elk Trails" (Left Out in the Rain, 1986), a poem Snyder composed on Mt. St. Helens in 1947, he walks "Ancient, world-old Elk paths. The planet, and the cosmos it is a part of, is ancient. The Elk have been here on this continent longer than we. Our time pales in comparison to geological time --what is the time of mountains? Certainly our concerns about war, how to live with others, power junkies masquerading as politicians masquerading as public servants are old, but there are "Yet Older Matters" Snyder insists that we consider the time-being of mountains and in considering the time of mountains we find ourselves taking a longer view.

It is appropriate that danger on peaks ends with a section of five poems uniting Snyder's two-fold emphasis of Buddhist enlightening practice and careful attentiveness to the natural world. Entitled "After Bamiyan," the name of the valley in Afghanistan where huge carved Buddhas were destroyed by the Taliban,--"idolaters of the book," acting out of "woman-and-nature-denying authoritarian worldviews that go back much farther than Abraham"-- Snyder takes the long view of the human presence on earth, at once so small and so destructive. Snyder sees the statues serving as a model for human practice:

Not even

under mortar fire

do they flinch.

The Buddhas of Bamiyan

Take Refuge in the dust.

The reference in the last line to the Buddhist practice of taking refuge in the Three Jewels (Buddha, Dharma and Sangha) signifies a long view-- Who can leap the world's ties / And sit with me among the white clouds? asks Han Shan. Which is to ask, who can live in an impermanent world without getting so caught up in it that one constructs weapons of mass destruction that threaten not only mass murder, but also the end of life itself?

Humanity,

said Jeffers, is like a quick

explosion on the planet

we're loose on earth

half a million years

our weird blast spreading--

and after,

rubble--millennia to weather,

soften, fragment,

sprout, and green again.

The long view is neither apathetic, nor indulgent, but is grounded in Buddha-nature that is compassionate. So, it is fitting that these last poems end with prayerful gestures "For all beings/ living or not, beings or not, // inside or outside of time." The section's last poem, Snyder's translation from the Chinese, entitled "Envoy," acts as a kind of capping verse that re-emphasizes, but from a poetic perspective, the main points of a dharma talk. In the case of danger on peaks, the poem reiterates the themes of return in an impermanent world, honoring of all beings and non-beings that pass through the impermanent world, and saluting "all noble woke-up-big-heart beings" and the "great wisdom of the path that goes beyond // Mahaprajnaparamita."