I’m reminded of what Robert Duncan said: “To be poetry it has to have both music and magic.” And magic is the entry of the wild.
Turn off the calculating mind!
Life is not just a diurnal property of large interesting vertebrates; it is also nocturnal, anaerobic, cannibalistic, microscopic, digestive, fermentative: cooking away in the warm dark.
Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild, “Blue Mountains Constantly Walking”
GS: The little series of poems that I wrote with the title “How Poetry Comes to Me,” I wrote them thinking about the ways that I perceive poetry as being there, or being accessible, and one particular poem, I think, was “It stays frightened outside the circle of our campfire. I go to meet it at the edge of the light.”
JH: Yeah. I go to meet it—
GS : I go to meet it.
JH: It’s coming out of the darkness.
GS: But you have to meet it halfway.
JH: And who knows what causes the opening and closing of the door. In terms of poetry you are in the ring of the firelight and you go to meet the arriving poem at the edge of the darkness.
GS: And so the suggestion is that the dark is very rich too.
JH: True—fecund.
GS: That came to me, actually, camping one night in the Northern Sierra. It happened the night that I went up that peak on the boundary line—the Matterhorn.
Our “soul” is our dream of the other.
Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild, “Survival and Sacrament”
GS: I started getting my woods training when I was only six or seven years old, and like you I was going into the thickets and finding ways through the swamps in Washington, and then finding my own campsites, and fixing them up a little bit, and then I would go back to it in order to learn to see where I was and to get around.
JH: Have you ever been lost?
GS: I have been in situations where I didn’t know where I was for a while, but I didn’t think I was lost. I knew that I would get out of it sooner or later and figure out where I was.
JH: The interesting thing about being lost is, suddenly everything is in question, including your own nature. It’s that dramatic.
GS: If you have reached a point where nothing looks familiar and you can’t figure out how to reassemble it . . .
JH: I like it.
GS: The only time I have ever been that lost was in the city of Katmandu. I got lost in some back alleys.
JH: I’ve often thought being lost is like a sesshin when you sit for a long time and then a gong goes off and you get up and the world looks completely different.
GS: Well, that is like enlightenment.
I was hiking in the Sierra high country on scree and talus fields one time, you know, looking at my feet. And I noticed then every rock was different—no two little rocks the same. Maybe there is no identity in the whole universe. No two things are actually totally alike.
Every year, in the fall, a certain small number of ponderosa pines in the forest that surrounds my place start dying of western bark beetle. It’s never too many, it’s a certain number—but why are they dying and why aren’t the others?
JH: One wonders.
GS: It’s in their nature. Gradually the ponderosa pines that are resistant to western bark beetles are becoming the established trees of the forest. But genetically there’s always going to be a few that are vulnerable. What a curious idea.
JH: Sometimes we as liberal Democrats get discomfited by the inequalities of nature.
GS: Well, to go back for a second to The Practice of the Wild—many people, including environmentalists, have not taken well to the distinctions I tried to make there between nature, wild, and wilderness. And I want to say again, the way I want to use the word “nature” would mean the whole physical universe—like in physics. So, not “the outdoors.”
JH: Not a dualism.
GS: Nature is what we are in. Now, if you want to try and figure out what is supernatural, you can do that too. But you don’t have to.
Then “the wild” really refers to process—a process that has been going on for eons or however long. And finally, “wilderness” is simply topos—it is areas where the process is dominant. Not 100 percent dominant, but a big percentage.
JH: But what you run into, in promoting this schema, is people very much preferring things to be fuzzy.
GS: Well, it is fuzzy. So one of the terms I find myself using more now is the term “working landscapes,” to be distinguished from the idea of totally pristine wilderness landscapes. And that’s what we have here along the California coast—a lot of working landscapes. The wild works on all scales.
JH: Yeah. Some of the wildest places in England are the old Roman cart trails that have eroded. They’re called “hollow ways,” twenty feet deep; they’ve become these preposterously dense thickets.
GS: And that’s part of it—the wild can be a wood lot. Even the vacant lot in the city can be wild.
GS: The word “wilderness” is commonly interpreted nowadays by the media and by a lot of environmentalists in terms of the language of the Wilderness Act, which made a particular kind of definition of wilderness that was equable to its use on American public lands. And we realize in hindsight that they went a little too far in declaring that wilderness was totally pristine, showing no sign of the hands of man. It’s just language, is all.
When I was younger, working for the Forest Service, we were called on to take out an old sheepherder’s structure, dating back to the nineteenth century when the Basques actually drove the sheep into the high country meadows. But, well, you know, this has to be pristine now; we’ve got to take that shelter down. This is supposed to be pristine and this old shelter looks inappropriate.
But now that whole mentality has been reversed, too—now you have to have some different vocabulary, so it’s declared of “historical value,” and they leave it be. This is an ongoing thing. There are people who say that there have always been human beings around, so therefore nothing is wilderness. But the presence of human beings does not negate wilderness. It’s a matter of how much wildness as process is left intact.
WILL HEARST: The Mississippi of the environmental movement, as I understand it, was the Blue Planet movement—here’s this whole fragile planet . . . Whereas when I hear you talk, you don’t talk so much in these cosmic terms. You talk about nature outside my door, ten feet from where I’m sitting, a mile from my house, and that nature ought to be approached first in this region that is smaller and more local and more human-scaled.
GS: The Blue Planet image came from satellite photography. Stewart Brand picked it up and put it on the cover of the first Whole Earth Catalog and said, “Our whole sense of the planet has changed because we now have this picture of the planet Earth from outer space; this is one Earth; this is where we live.” And I said to Stewart, “Sure, that’s good, but people still don’t know or learn much, if that’s all you say.” People say they love nature. What they mean is they love what they see with their eyes and smell with their senses: the plant or animal life in their back-yard or the nearby creek or