Genesis, Structure, and Meaning in Gary Snyder's Mountains and Rivers Without End
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Genesis, Structure, and Meaning in Gary Snyder's Mountains and Rivers Without End

Anthony Hunt

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Genesis, Structure, and Meaning in Gary Snyder's Mountains and Rivers Without End

Anthony Hunt

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About This Book

When Gary Snyder's long poem Mountains and Rivers Without End was published in 1996, it was hailed as a masterpiece of American poetry. Anthony Hunt offers a detailed historical and explicative analysis of this complex work using, among his many sources, Snyder's personal papers, letters, and interviews. Hunt traces the work's origins, as well as some of the sources of its themes and structure, including N? drama; East Asian landscape painting; the rhythms of storytelling, chant, and song; Jungian archetypal psychology; world mythology; Buddhist philosophy and ritual; Native American traditions; and planetary geology, hydrology, and ecology. His analysis addresses the poem not merely by its content, but through the structure of individual lines and the arrangement of the parts, examining the personal and cultural influences on Snyder's work. Hunt's benchmark study will be rewarding reading for anyone who enjoys the contemplation of Snyder's artistry and ideas and, more generally, for those who are intrigued by the cultural and intellectual workings of artistic composition.

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Year
2016
ISBN
9780874174762

1

Finding the Paths

Bearings
“I’m sixty-eight” he said,
“I first bucked hay when I was seventeen.
I thought, that day I started,
I sure would hate to do this all my life.
And dammit, that’s just what
I’ve gone and done.”
from “Hay for the Horses” (Riprap, & Cold Mountain Poems 13)
At what point in time does one recognize what one has “gone and done”? Where, among the events of the past, did diverse flows of energy come together to culminate in the making of a significant lifetime? Remarkably, in the case of Gary Snyder, much of what he has come to represent as an elder of the tribe has always been there.
Raised on a dairy farm just outside of Seattle on the edge of an old clear-cut forest, as a child Snyder played among huge twelve-by-twelve-foot stumps of ancient trees that struck him as ghosts from the past, some that even “spoke” to him. Remembering his childhood, Snyder recalls several trees close to his home that he had climbed, “especially one Western Red Cedar (xelpai’its in Snohomish) that I fancied became my advisor” (Practice 117). Rocks, trees, sheep, rabbits, coyotes, eagles, bear, deer, and ravens all speak to him, for him, and through him. Even “grass-seed-buddhas” and rain drops—“tiny people gliding slanting down” (MRWE 81)—are alive in his poems. Snyder’s knowledge of the land, especially that of his immediate community and the bioregion encircling it, extends to an interaction over time of its geology, plants, animals, and humans. In this vast planetary web of being, as he continually reminds us, humans share in the irrevocable fact of edibility. Linked by the food chain, all beings provide nourishment, literal and otherwise, for other beings. Conversely, the richness and diversity of the nonhuman world only deepens Snyder’s felt responsibility for the human one.
Work has always been a primary force in the poet’s life, as it was in the life of his father who split shakes to make money in the depression years, or in the lives of other relatives and friends, male and female, dead or alive, who have known what it was and is to work to live. His poems often celebrate the intensity of work; the words capture the pure musical rhythm, the “riprap” of those who labor with their hands. Male voices, especially in earlier poems, speak in various ethnic accents: seamen, loggers, trail crewmen, farmers, truck drivers, cowboys. Hard-drinking, earthy, frequently carnal, they live close to the edge, their Dionysian wisdom that of people who have managed to persevere, even celebrate, in difficult times.
Notwithstanding the elbow grease and eroticism, Snyder is, and always has been, a scholar-poet. Wherever he goes he takes notes as he studies the animals, the trees, the flowers, the herbs. He contemplates the religious, the philosophical, the cultural, and the historical. He knows both the Paleolithic and the present; he is as informed about the old ways—the traditions, artifacts, and tools of both ancient and contemporary inhabitory peoples—as he is about modern technology and culture. His mother, he says, gave him his love for literature and poetry. She enrolled him at Lincoln High in Portland and later urged him to attend Reed College where his scholarship was energized by the tutelage of teachers like Lloyd Reynolds, Stanley Moore, and David French. Reed also provided intellectual classmates like Philip Whalen, his lifelong friend, and the challenge, in 1951, of writing a senior thesis, “He Who Hunted Birds in His Father’s Village,” that, even today, is comparable to some doctoral dissertations. Yet Snyder’s is a Zen intellect: hours spent in gathering knowledge, complemented by physical labor and meditations on the tangibility of emptiness. The intellect is never a goal in itself.
Never claiming to speak for Native Americans, Snyder surely identifies with many of their traditions. Long before most non–Native Americans knew of the Hump-backed Flute Player, Snyder had incorporated Kokop’ele into his poetry and thought. “Turtle Island”—the “old/new name for the continent, based on many creation myths of the people who have been living here for millennia, and reapplied by some of them to ‘North America’ in recent years”—became the title of Snyder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book of poems. The phrase clearly took hold of an American consciousness replete with “Anglos, Black people, Chicanos, and others beached up on these shores” who hardly knew such names had been there all the time (Turtle Island [xi]). Like the old-growth trees that stood on the edge of his father’s farm, the Native American traditions, rituals, and factual history are ghostlike presences lurking in the corners of the modern mind waiting to reassert themselves.
Similarly, Snyder has meditated at length on the mythical and/or prehistorical artifacts of civilization’s past. For him, these are the palpable ghosts of the Paleolithic: the ageless mythical time of oral narratives; the magico-mystical power of the healing shaman; the expressive link between human and animal found in the “language” of 40,000-year-old cave paintings; the sophistication of prehistory’s technology; and a profound encounter with what some have called a “Great Goddess.”
Snyder’s poetry is filled with the feminine: the Magna Mater, Lady of the Animals, the Bear Mother, Mother Bos, Kuan-yin, Māyā, Pārvāti, Kali, Tārā, Yamamba, the Moon, Gaia, Mother Earth, and so many others. Although he reverently traces his matriarchal lineage to a modest Kansas gravestone where he plants a kiss on a rock inscribed with the name of Harriet Callicotte, his maternal great-grandmother (Halper 169–73), Snyder often depicts the feminine in a conflicted manner. He credits his mother with being an advanced thinker for her time and for inspiring him to be a poet; but in interviews and correspondence he sometimes refers to her as domineering and aggressive, even manic-depressive. Like Actaeon observing Artemis bathing at her virgin spring in the forest, deep in Snyder’s mythological consciousness there is an ongoing—and enigmatic—encounter with Swan Maiden, a mysterious naked beauty who bathes in a mountain lake or by a river. Her presence was the impulse for his Reed thesis, a work that he acknowledged in 1978 as “really” about “lost love” (He Who Hunted xi). She may correspond to Alison, his first wife, whom he portrays as a literal bathing forest maiden in “For the Boy Who Was Dodger Point Lookout Fifteen Years Ago,” yet the mysterious aspects of this mythical woman are more strongly reminiscent of Robin Collins, a classmate at Reed, whose haunting image emerges in correspondence, journal notations, or in early poems (“Four Poems for Robin”). The ecstasy of the erotic, whether sacred or secular, is frequent in Snyder’s life and writing, and the oppositional energy of the feminine is easily traced in the record of his marriages and liaisons. Joanne Kyger’s published journal depicts their four-year marriage as one of both passionate attachment and a clash of egos. Named in an early version of “The Elwha River,” Kyger, like so much else in that early poem, becomes a “lost thing” for Snyder. Masa Uehara, his third wife, becomes an emblem of woman as sexual partner, wife, and mother in the poems of Regarding Wave. Carole Koda’s presence is explicit among the pages of Mountains and Rivers Without End; she is named in “Cross-Legg’d” and “Macaques in the Sky”; she is the other “soul” or “paddle” or “wing” in the double kayak of “Afloat.” She is the lover and wife mentioned in “Finding the Space in the Heart.” Literal associations aside, Snyder’s creativity unquestionably drinks at the well of feminine inspiration. The poetic power of The Goddess, whoever she is, whether fearsome or beatific, derives in part from her ability to walk the line between mythology and actuality; she is the perennial dancing partner for the ascetic god-hero of the mountain. Encounters with her lead to enlightenment.
Perhaps Asia entered the web of Snyder’s imagination merely because as a spatially oriented person he lived on one side of the Pacific and dreamed of the other, but it is more likely that it had to do with wilderness and mountaineering. Snyder himself has pointed to a significant moment when, barely a teenager, he saw an exhibit of Chinese landscape paintings in the Seattle Art Museum and marveled at the ephemeral reality they depicted. Summer times during high school years were spent exploring the high country of the Cascades. Later, as he sat, like Han Shan, in his lookout’s post on the top of Sourdough Mountain, he consciously emulated the life of an Asian mountain ascetic. Throughout these years his technical skill and scholarship continued: at Reed, Chinese calligraphy and poetry with Lloyd Reynolds and Charles Leong; at Berkeley, the study of Oriental languages, and lessons in sumi painting under Chiura Obata. Still, it was the mountains that provided him with the “call” to the journey he would undertake. In a journal entry, written several years (1954) after the event, Snyder recorded a moment of direct insight into nature’s ways. He was twenty years old at the time:
Walking out of the Olympics in 1950: the sudden realization of order & chaos, chaos in nature: the paths and gardens are not trimmed and ordered. Everything falls everwhich way, the birds swoop all directions, the deer go crashing off through the brush, & the glaciers fall down & smash the trees: but NOTHING IS OUT OF PLACE. That is why they say: The Tao is like (=)? Nature. Here is a koan for you. order & chaos. . . .
He goes on to ask himself:
why?? did I at so early an age become a nature-mystic? it wa’nt anything I read?? what did it. This puzzles me. . . . (Robertson, “Real Matter” 224)
A similar experience apparently took place in mid-1951. According to Allen Ginsberg, while Snyder was sitting on the banks of the Willamette River shortly after turning in the final version of his Reed thesis, he experienced a satori in which he was overwhelmed by a consciousness that “the entire universe is alive” (Ginsberg 150; Ginsberg incorrectly states the year as 1948).1 Given the gift of hindsight, these intimations of interconnectedness helped push Snyder in the direction of Zen Buddhism and the formulation of Mountains and Rivers Without End. By the age of twenty-four, without knowing exactly why or how it had come about, the poet felt himself to be a “nature-mystic.” A mere two years later, in the spring of 1956, he finished the manuscript for Myths & Texts, began work on his new long poem, and embarked for Japan to take up formal Zen studies.
As a finished artifact, Mountains and Rivers Without End was to become a veritable river of knowledge, a flowing landscape packed with information on ecology, geology, travel, painting theory, Buddhist philosophy, and food chains, to name a few of its more obvious topics. In the years between the setting forth and the accomplishment, from the evidence of letters, interviews, and public statements, we know that Snyder often thought, mistakenly so, that he was only a few months away from completing his masterpiece. Clearly, the only certitude among these multiple interweavings is that Gary Snyder, as a young man in his mid-twenties, never envisioned spending forty years of his life on the making of Mountains and Rivers Without End, but dammit, that’s sure what he went and did.
Opening the Poem
On October 22, 1965, Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Allen Ginsberg ritually hiked around Mount Tamalpais, just north of San Francisco, in accord with an ancient Hindu-Buddhist practice known as pradakshina. The event is commemorated in “The Circumambulation of Mt. Tamalpais,” a prominent section of Snyder’s Mountains and Rivers Without End. In a note to the poem, as first published in journal form, Snyder tells us that pradakshina is performed as a way of “opening the mountain”:
You circumambulate (always clockwise) a stupa, a tree, a person you wish to show respect to, or a mountain. On Mt. Hiei some of the practicers of the Tendai sect go around the mountain every day for 100 or 1000 days, as a magical and meditative exercise. (Coyote’s Journal 5-6: 5)2
Similarly, “circumambulation” is a fitting term to describe each reader’s exploration of Mountains and Rivers Without End. To “open” the resonant energies of Snyder’s poem, one must integrate an attentive step-by-step passage along the spiraling pathways of its verbal panorama with an inspired consciousness of what lies just off its virtual trails. Still, as a mountain has a way of just “being mountain” regardless of how many times one walks around it, a complete grasp of Snyder’s long poem will always exist beyond any single description, analysis, interpretation, or evaluation of it. Despite the fixity of words and images on the page, Snyder’s virtual streams and mountains, like their counterparts in our “real” world, will “never stay the same.” Each attentive “walking” of this poetic landscape produces new interconnections, new inspirations, new insights. Simultaneously enticing and resistant, Mountains and Rivers Without End ultimately has a way of just “being poem,” always simply there, awaiting yet another critical circumambulation. Forty years in the making, Snyder’s poem, a landmark work engendered by a life lived with commitment and significance, plainly merits respect.
Snyder once expressed a wish that his poem would be “self-informing” (Faas 132), but it is obvious that the journey through Mountains and Rivers Without End is not a trip to be taken lightly. The poet’s unusual blend of materials—mythological references, East Asian landscape painting, Buddhist philosophy and ritual, the Japanese Nō theater, Native American customs and folkways, planetary hydrology and geology, to name just a few—and his unique way of interweaving that content into a whole comprising distinct parts and sections make his poem challenging even for well-educated readers. Yet it is equally clear that Snyder is a poet who wishes to be read by a wider audience than the allusiveness of Mountains and Rivers Without End might imply. His reputation first took shape in the so-called “beatnik era,” a time of social activism and populist revolutionary expectations; forty years later, he continues to espouse those concerns, although his focus has shifted toward psychological and spiritual change as he talks of “Finding the Space in the Heart.” Writers like Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac who also emerged out of that narrowly defined beatnik milieu may have sought and received more public attention, but Snyder’s Mountains and Rivers Without End positions him to become the still point of the turning circle of his times. Like T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, Mountains and Rivers Without End is a long meditative poem involving personal and cultural survival, yet Snyder’s major frame of reference is Buddhist whereas Eliot’s is Christian, and Snyder’s concerns are with the planet and all beings whereas Eliot notably fixes on the human species and Western traditions. As a sage for our times, with a reputation and expertise that extends well beyond the confines of academia, clearly Snyder wishes to have his poem read by a broad spectrum of people: among others, readers caught up in cultural studies, anthropology, religion, comparative poetry, and environmental studies.
In the process of providing an account of the poem’s historical development and readings for individual sections, I hope to demonstrate conclusively that Mountains and Rivers Without End is no mere random gathering of thirty-nine individual poems, but a carefully constructed interweaving of sound, image, and sense, the result of both intuition and conscious intention. The formal constraints of both the East Asian landscape scroll and the Japanese Nō play have profoundly affected the arrangement of sections within the four parts of the larger poem, the linear order of the thirty-nine sections, and even the composition of lines within individual sections. Additionally, the underlying “story” of Mountains and Rivers Without End is associated with a particular kind of Nō play wherein a wandering monk or lay pilgrim encounters a spirit, first in the guise of an ordinary person (a woodchopper, a woman by a well, etc.) and later as an awesome, whether beatific or horrific, spirit of the place. That encounter normally becomes “enlightening” in the Buddhist sense of the word. Snyder’s long poem contains a series of such meetings between the narrator (typically Snyder as a character in his own poem) and, more often than not, a feminine “Other”; these confrontations grow in intensity as the poem moves linearly through its sections, culminating in the climactic section, “The Mountain Spirit.” Significantly, Snyder’s attention to this well-known archetypal pattern predates his acquaintance with the Nō play in Japan. As an undergraduate student at Reed he read widely in the scholarly work of writers such as C. G. Jung, Erich Neumann, Joseph Campbell, and the poet Robert Graves. In Mountains and Rivers Without End, this “Meeting with The Goddess” is easy to misread as a case of gendered duality, but, as always in this poem, Snyder’s focus is on the enlightenment that results from the eternal dance of opposed forces and not on one, the other, or even both in their particularity.
As a teacher I have struggled to bring meaningful texts into close proximity with truly curious minds in order to allow those minds to “see” that there is more to life than the evening news, video games, and fast-food restaurants, although those too are part of the web of existence. I do not see my book as a “Reader’s Guide” to Mountains and Rivers Without End, a key to allusive words, phrases, or meanings; nor do I have any desire to rob readers of the illuminating joy of personal discovery. In a perfect world readers would indeed discover meanings by themselves, and teachers, like myself, would be unnecessary. Nevertheless, as I hav...

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