The Gary Snyder Reader: Prose, Poetry, and Translations

by Gary Snyder

that mankind's mother is Nature and Nature should be tenderly respected; that man's life and destiny are growth and enlightenment in self-disciplined freedom; that the divine has been made flesh and that flesh is divine; that we not only should but do love one another.

Those who have gone into their own natures deeply have, for several thousand years now, been reporting that we have nothing to fear if we are willing to train ourselves, to open up, explore and grow.

One of the most significant medieval heresies was the Brotherhood of the Free Spirit, of which Hieronymus Bosch was probably a member. The Brotherhood believed that God was immanent in everything, and that once one had experienced this God-presence in himself he became a Free Spirit; he was again living in the Garden of Eden.

The West and Christian culture on one level deeply wants love to win-and having decided (after several sad tries) that love can't, people who still say it will are like ghosts from an old dream.

The modern American family is the smallest and most barren family that has ever existed. Each newly married couple moves to a new house or apartment-no uncles or grandmothers come to live with them. There are seldom more than two or three children. The children live with their peers and leave home early. Many have never had the least sense of family.

Because it is simpler, more natural, and breaks up tendencies toward property accumulation by individual families, matrilineal descent seems ultimately indicated.

"Poetry" as the skilled and inspired use of the voice and language to embody rare and powerful states of mind that are in immediate origin personal to the singer, but at deep levels common to all who listen.

the field of feeling and energy that one's own body is, the earth they stand on and the wind that wraps around it; and various areas of consciousness.

To live in the "mythological present" in close relation to nature and in basic but disciplined body/mind states suggests a wider-ranging imagination and a closer subjective knowledge of one's own physical properties than is usually available to men living (as they themselves describe it) impotently and inadequately in "history"-their mind-content programmed, and the...

Poetry must sing or speak from authentic experience. Of all the streams of civilized tradition with roots in the paleolithic, poetry is one of the few that can realistically claim an unchanged function and a relevance which will outlast most of the activities that surround us today. Poets, as few others, must live close to the world that primitive men are in: the world, in i...

Religion has tended to become the social justifier, a lackey to power, instead of the vehicle of hair-raising lib...

The poet can make it on his own voice and mother tongue, while steering a course between crystal clouds of utterly incommunicable nonverbal states-and the gleami...

In one school of Mahayana Buddhism, they talk about the "Three Mysteries." These are Body, Voice, and Mind. The things that are what living is for us, in life. Poetry is the vehicle of the mystery of voice. The un...

For Americans, nature means wilderness, the untamed realm of total freedom-not brutish and nasty, but beautiful and terrible. Something is always eating at the American heart like acid: it is the knowledge of what we have done to our continent, and to the American Indian.

Man is a beautiful animal. We know this because other animals admire us and love us. Almost all animals are beautiful and paleolithic hunters were deeply moved by it. To hunt means to use your body and senses to the fullest: to strain your consciousness to feel what the deer are thinking today, this moment; to sit still and let your self go into the birds and wind while waiting by a game trail. Hunting magic is designed to bring the game to you-the creature who has heard your song, witnessed your sincerity, and out of compassion comes within your range. Hunting magic is not only aimed at bringing beasts to their death, but to assist in their birth-to promote their fertility.

A Haida incantation goes: The

The shaman-poet is simply the man whose mind reaches easily out into all manners of shapes and other lives, and gives song to dreams. Poets have carried this function forward all through civilized times: poets don't sing about society, they sing about nature-even if the closest they ever get to nature is their lady's queynt.

A recent article by Lynn White puts the blame for the present ecological crisis on the Judaeo-Christian tradition-animals don't have souls and can't be saved; nature is merely a ground for us to exploit while working out our drama of free will and salvation under the watch of Jehovah.

Breath is the outer world coming into one's body. With pulse-the two always harmonizing-the source of our inward sense of rhythm. Breath is spirit, "inspiration." Expiration, "voiced," makes the signals by which the species connects. Certain emotions and states occasionally seize the body; one becomes a whole tube of air vibrating-all voice.

until-when most weary and bored-a new voice enters, a voice speaks through you clearer and stronger than what you know of yourself, with a sureness and melody of its own, singing out the inner song of the self, and of the planet.

Thus in the Western tradition the Muse and Romantic Love became part of the same energy, and woman as nature the field for experiencing the universe as sacramental. The lovers' bed was the sole place to enact the dances and ritual dramas that link primitive people to their geology and the Milky Way.

so the voice, in everyone, is a mirror of his own deepest self. The voice rises to answer an inner need;

the mystery of voice becomes one with the mystery of body.

Thus nature leads into nature-the wilderness-and the reciprocities and balances by which man lives on earth.

The Australian aborigines live in a world of ongoing recurrence-comradeship with the landscape and continual exchanges of being and form and position; every person, animals, forces, all are related via a web of reincarnation-or rather, they are "interborn." It may well be that rebirth (or interbirth, for we are actually mutually creating each other and all things while living) is the objective fact of existence which we have not yet brought into conscious knowledge and practice.

There is a great truth in the relationship established by hunting: as in love or art, you must become one with the other.

A lot of it is simply in being aware of clouds and wind.

The basic assumption of this chapter is that mythology has a function in culture. This may seem too obvious a fact to require statement, but many past theories of mythology have operated as if myths were irrational diseases from which savage minds suffered, or the result of idle, mistaken savage speculation in which elaborate stories were constructed to describe the phases of the moon or processes of sunrise and sunset.

Myth as it exists in a savage community, that is, in its living primitive form, is not merely a story told but a reality lived. It is not of the nature of fiction, such as we read today in a novel, but it is a living reality, believed to have once happened in primeval times, and continuing ever since to influence the world and human destinies.

Myth is thus a vital ingredient of human civilization; it is not an idle tale, but a hard-worked active force; it is not an intellectual explanation or an artistic imagery, but a pragmatic character of primitive faith and moral wisdom.

Myths are the instruments by which we continually struggle to make our experience intelligible to ourselves. A myth is a large, controlling image that gives philosophical meaning to the facts of ordinary life; that is, which has organizing value for experience.

Literature ceases to be perceptual and tends to degenerate into mere descriptio...

"Myth is fundamental, the dramatic representation of our deepest...

the individual is endowed with infinity already in the germ.

They are these hard realities in projection, their symbolic recognition, coordination and acceptance. Through such mythologies our will is collected, our powers unified, our growth controlled.... Without his mythologies man is only a cruel animal without a soul-for a soul is a central part of his governing mythology-he is a congeries of possibilities without order and without aim.

the rites dedicate the whole people to the work of nature's season.

Myth is, functionally, the verbal equivalent of ritual, magically operating with words, images, and situations in narrative form as ritual operates with symbolic acts.

Unable to discriminate clearly between words and things, the savage commonly fancies that the link between a name and the person or thing denominated by it is not a mere arbitrary and ideal association, but a real and substantial bond which unites the two in such a...

how deeply rooted is the belief that a word has some power over a thing, that it is akin or even identical in its contained "meaning" with the thing or with its prototype.... The word gives power, allows one to exercise an influence over an object or an action.... The w...

Metaphorical thinking is the subjective identification of symbols and referents-on the basis of the control of symbol over referent-in Cassirer's view; another way of saying sympathetic magic.

Myth is a "reality lived" because for every individual it contains, at the moment of telling, the projected content of both his unarticulated and conscious values: simultaneously ordering, organizing, and making comprehensible the world within which the values exist. One might even reformulate the statement to say "Reality is a myth lived."

the surprising truth that our sense-data are primarily symbols.

The function of mythology may then be summarized: it provides a symbolic representation of projected values and empirical knowledge within a framework of belief which relates individual, group, and physical environment, to the end of integration and survival.

It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history....

Instead of narrative method, we may now use the mythical method.

The poetry of our time doesn't matter much, it is a last echo of something important that was alive long ago. What matters is the myth-consciousness of the next generations, the spiritual seed that we plant in our children; their loves and insights and incubating sense of significant community. On th...

Jung suggested the possibility that it might be possible to write literature using symbols from Frazer which would function in modern civilization-for individuals-as myth functions in primitive culture for the group. In doing so, the poet would not only be creating workable private mythologies for his readers, but moving toward the formation of a new social mythology. This is the duty of the modern artist, according to Campbell, who believes that only in the "storehouse of recorded values"-literature-can this be accomplished:

It is not society that is to guide and save the creative hero, but precisely the reverse. And so every one of us shares the supreme ordeal-carries the cross of the redeemer-not in the bright moments of his tribe's great victories, but in the silences of his personal despair.

When I was young, I had an immediate, intuitive, deep sympathy with the natural world, which was not taught me by anyone. In that sense, nature is my "guru" and life is my sadhana. That sense of the authenticity, completeness, and reality of the natural world itself made me aware even as a child of the contradictions that I could see going on around me in the state of Washington, in the way of exploitation, logging, development, pollution.

whole natural world that was half-intact and half-destroyed before my eyes.