In praise of wildness

As we knew, Gary Snyder knows of what he speaks. Every time I pick up one of his books - poetry, essays, whatever - I rediscover what an amazing guy he is. The Practice of the Wild (1990), which I ran across in the library while looking for something else, dontchaknow, is eye-opening.

Alvar Nunez, who for eight years walked naked across Texas and New Mexico, came out transformed into a person of the New World. He had rejoined the old ways and was never the same again. He gained a compassionate heart, a taste for self-sufficiency and simplicity, and a knack for healing....Nunez was the first European to encounter North America and its native myth-mind....It is perennially within us, dormant as a hard-shelled seed, awaiting the fire or flood that awakes it again. (p. 14)

The next day, I paused to rest while weeding a perennial bed and sat at the little patio table to eat a piece of leftover pizza. My eyes came to rest on the flowering plum tree next to the side gate. It's well past full bloom and all leafed-out in reddish purple leaves. It happens fast in the spring, in all its unruly glory leaning lopsided out over the fence and badly in need of pruning in the irregular upper branches. I can (and did) pinch off the suckers sprouting from the trunk, but up higher the tree follows its own laws to reach away from the roof and towering pine tree to get some light and do what it has to do. It's a glorious mess but I gotta like it.

It would be a mistake to think that human beings got "smarter" at some point and invented first language and then society. Language and culture emerge from our biological-social natural existence, animals that we were/are. Language is a mind-body system that coevolved with our needs and nerves. Like imagination and the body, language rises unbidden. (p. 18)

David Dye was interviewing two rock gods on the radio the other night on "The World Cafe," and when they weren't rhapsodizing over their own amazing talents they were going on about how much they love to walk. Cool, I thought, pop musicians who take the trouble to contemplate their somatic existence. Then their egos got the better of them, and they repeated like five times their fascination with walking because only humans walk just for fun, and "this is what makes us different from animals."

Oh really. I wouldn't know, since I'm not a rock god, but I thought humans were animals, as in homo sapiens? And being ignorant of the inner thoughts, intentions, and awareness of wolves, tigers, deer, rabbits, and groundhogs, I did not know their every cognition regarding locomotion. But Mr. REM and friend do know (telepathically?) what mere animals think about (and don't), happy to share with the rest of us that mere animals only walk to find food, whereas rock gods walk around Manhattan just for the heck of it, or because they're too cool to take the subway while being inspired to create their next double-platinum hit. To paraphrase Scott Fitzgerald, the very rich are different from you and me; they're totally full of shit.

American society (like any other) has its own set of unquestioned assumptions. It still maintains a largely uncritical faith in the notion of continually unfolding progress. It cleaves to the idea that there can be unblemished scientific objectivity. And most fundamentally it operates under the delusion that we are each a kind of "solitary knower" - that we exist as rootless intelligences without layers of localized contexts. Just a "self" and the "world". In this there is no real recognition that grandparents, place, grammar, pets, friends, lovers, children, tools, the poems and songs we remember, are what we think with. Such a solitary mind - if it could exist - would be a boring prisoner of abstractions. (p. 65)

One of Snyder's best qualities as a writer is his unwillingness to make it too easy for himself or his readers. I don't think he sat down with his literary agent or his editor at Shoemaker & Hoard, a division of Avalon Publishing Group, and let them decide what kind of book would sell the most copies or reach their desired target market. "Yeah right, Gary, I get the whole wilderness schtick, I've got a time-share in Aspen, and the mountains rock. But what we're looking for is self-help for middle managers, ya dig? Seven spiritual secrets of the wilderness poet. Talk to me, babe." He doesn't reduce it all to a formula for entrepreneurial success, thinner thighs in thirty days, or how to have it all. It's more complex and difficult than that. If that's a turn-off, skip this book.

The point is to make intimate contact with the real world, real self. Sacred refers to that which helps take us (not only human beings) out of our little selves into the whole mountains-and-rivers mandala universe....The wilderness as a temple is only a beginning. One should not dwell in the specialness of the extraordinary experience nor hope to leave the political quagg behind to enter a perpetual state of heightened insight....to come back to the lowlands and see all the land about us, agricultural, suburban, urban, as part of the same territory - never totally ruined, never completely unnatural. (p. 101)

The man actually has hope for himself, his tribe, his home bioregion, his fellow critters, and the planet. But true believers beware. One-issue revolutionaries beware. Reductionists and positivists beware. No book - least of all this one - will ever tell you who you are, why you are here, what it all means, or what to do about it. Read Gary Snyder the way you would read Carl Sandberg's biography of Lincoln, for the fun of reading the prose writing of a craftsman who actually has something to say abaout stuff that matters. The way you might listen to a song where both the words and music both hold up on repeated listening.

I suspect that primary peoples all know that their myths are somehow "made up." They do not take them literally and at the same time they hold the stories very real. Only upon being invaded by history and whipsawed by alien values do a people begin to declare that their myths are "literally true." This literalness in turn provokes skeptical questioning and the whole critical exercise. What a final refinement of confusion about the role of myths it is to declare that although they are not to be believed, they are nonetheless aesthetic and psychological constructs which bring order to an otherwise chaotic world and to which we should willfully commit ourselves! (p. 121)

This book might just piss you off. It might make you want to go for a walk, cook some oatmeal, sew on a button, smash the state, meditate, build something with hand tools, watch birds, or write your congressperson. It made me want to write something, but that's just me, and clearly I'm having a hard time doing that coherently. To tell the truth, I'm not sure what my next move will be.

People love to do hard work together and to feel that the work is real; that is to say primary, productive, needed....And our conservationist-environmentalist outrage is often (in its frustration) aimed at the logger or the rancher, when the real power is in the hands of people who make unimaginably larger sums of money, people impecably groomed, excellently educated at the best universities - male and female alike - eating fine foods and reading classy literature, while orchestrating the investment and legislation that ruin the world. (p. 127)