Turtle Island

by Gary Snyder

The “U.S.A.” and its states and counties are arbitrary and inaccurate impositions on what is really here. The poems speak of place, and the energy-pathways that sustain life. Each living being is a swirl in the flow, a formal turbulence, a “song.” The land, the planet itself, is also a living being—at another pace. Anglos, Black people, Chicanos, and others beached up on these shores all share such views at the deepest levels of their old cultural traditions—African, Asian, or European. Hark again to those roots, to see our ancient solidarity, and then to the work of being together on Turtle Island.

And around the curve of islands foggy volcanoes on, to North Japan. The bears & fish-spears of the Ainu. Gilyak.

THE DEAD BY THE SIDE OF THE ROAD How did a great Red-tailed Hawk come to lie—all stiff and dry— on the shoulder of Interstate 5? Her wings for dance fans Zac skinned a skunk with a crushed head washed the pelt in gas; it hangs, tanned, in his tent Fawn stew on Hallowe’en hit by a truck on highway forty-nine offer cornmeal by the mouth; skin it out. Log trucks run on fossil fuel I never saw a Ringtail til I found one in the road: case-skinned it with the toenails footpads, nose, and whiskers on; it soaks in salt and water sulphuric acid pickle; she will be a pouch for magic tools.

That short-haired joy and roughness— America—your stupidity. I could almost love you again. We left—onto the freeway shoulders— under the tough old stars— In the shadow of bluffs I came back to myself, To the real work, to “What is to be done.”

Behind is a forest that goes to the Arctic And a desert that still belongs to the Piute And here we must draw Our line.

Fire is an old story. I would like, with a sense of helpful order, with respect for laws of nature, to help my land with a burn, a hot clean burn. (manzanita seeds will only open after a fire passes over or once passed through a bear) And then

Gratitude to Mother Earth, sailing through night and day— and to her soil: rich, rare, and sweet in our minds so be it.

Before dawn the coyotes weave medicine songs dream nets—spirit baskets— milky way music they cook young girls with to be woman; or the whirling dance of striped boys—

PINE TREE TOPS in the blue night frost haze, the sky glows with the moon pine tree tops bend snow-blue, fade into sky, frost, starlight. the creak of boots. rabbit tracks, deer tracks, what do we know.

The robots argue how to parcel out our Mother Earth To last a little longer like vultures flapping Belching, gurgling, near a dying Doe. “In yonder field a slain knight lies— We’ll fly to him and eat his eyes with a down derry derry derry down down.”

and somewhere from inside the ground squirrel a bit of aluminum foil. The secret. and the secret hidden deep in that.

Aluminum beer cans, plastic spoons, plywood veneer, PVC pipe, vinyl seat covers, don’t exactly burn, don’t quite rot, flood over us, robes and garbs of the Kālī-yūga end of days.

Position: Man is but a part of the fabric of life—dependent on the whole fabric for his very existence. As the most highly developed tool-using animal, he must recognize that the unknown evolutionary destinies of other life forms are to be respected, and act as gentle steward of the earth’s community of being.

And that all talk about raising food-production—well intentioned as it is—simply puts off the only real solution: reduce population.

oppose and correct simple-minded boosterism that equates population growth with continuing prosperity.

[The governments are the wrong agents to address. Their most likely use of a problem, or crisis, is to seize it as another excuse for extending their own powers.

Let reverence for life and reverence for the feminine mean also a reverence for other species, and future human lives, most of which are threatened.

Position: Pollution is of two types. One sort results from an excess of some fairly ordinary substance—smoke, or solid waste —which cannot be absorbed or transmitted rapidly enough to offset its introduction into the environment, thus causing changes the great cycle is not prepared for.

The other sort is powerful modern chemicals and poisons, products of recent technology, which the biosphere is totally unprepared for.

mankind has become a locustlike blight on the planet that will leave a bare cupboard for its own children-all the while in a kind of Addict’s Dream of affluence, comfort, eternal progress—using the great achievements of science to produce software and swill.

Don’t shoot a deer if you don’t know how to use all the meat and preserve that which you can’t eat, to tan the hide and use the leather—to use it all, with gratitude, right down to the sinew and hooves. Simplicity and mindfulness in diet is a starting point for many people.

Within this web of forces there are certain spaces and loops which allow to some persons the experience of inner freedom and illumination.

Situation: Civilization, which has made us so successful a species, has overshot itself and now threatens us with its inertia. There also is some evidence that civilized life isn’t good for the human gene pool. To achieve the Changes we must change the very foundations of our society and our minds.

Nothing short of total transformation will do much good.

—A basic cultural outlook and social organization that inhibits power and property-seeking while encouraging exploration and challenge in things like music, meditation, mathematics, mountaineering, magic, and all other ways of authentic being-in-the-world. Women totally free and equal. A new kind of family-responsible, but more festive and relaxed—is implicit.

Ultimately cities may exist only as joyous tribal gatherings and fairs, to dissolve after a few weeks. Investigating new life-styles is our work, as is the exploration of Ways to explore our inner realms—with the known dangers of crashing that go with such.

The United States, Europe, the Soviet Union, and Japan have a habit. They are addicted to heavy energy use, great gulps and injections of fossil fuel. As fossil-fuel reserves go down, they will take dangerous gambles with the future health of the biosphere (through nuclear power) to keep up their habit.

Eugene Odum, in his useful paper “The Strategy of Ecosystem Development,” points out how the United States has the characteristics of a young ecosystem.

In Pueblo societies a kind of ultimate democracy is practiced. Plants and animals are also people, and, through certain rituals and dances, are given a place and a voice in the political discussions of the humans.

Black Mesa speaks to us through an ancient, complex web of myth. She is sacred territory. To hear her voice is to give up the European word “America” and accept the new-old name for the continent, “Turtle Island.”

A scaled-down, balanced technology is possible, if cut loose from the cancer of exploitation-heavy-industry-perpetual growth. Those who have already sensed these necessities and have begun, whether in the country or the city, to “grow with less,” are the only counterculture that counts. Electricity for Los Angeles is not energy. As Blake said: “Energy Is Eternal Delight.”

I am a poet. My teachers are other poets, American Indians, and a few Buddhist priests in Japan. The reason I am here is because I wish to bring a voice from the wilderness, my constituency. I wish to be a spokesman for a realm that is not usually represented either in intellectual chambers or in the chambers of government.

Unfortunately, there isn’t a senator for all that. And I would like to think of a new definition of humanism and a new definition of democracy that would include the nonhuman, that would have representation from those spheres. This is what I think we mean by an ecological conscience.

But a culture that alienates itself from the very ground of its own being—from the wilderness outside (that is to say, wild nature, the wild, self-contained, self-informing ecosystems) and from that other wilderness, the wilderness within—is doomed to a very destructive behavior, ultimately perhaps self-destructive behavior. The West is not the only culture that carries these destructive seeds. China had effectively deforested itself by 1000 A.D.

India had effectively deforested itself by 800 A.D. The soils of the Middle East were ruined even earlier. The forests that once covered the mountains of Yugoslavia were stripped to build the Roman fleet, and those mountains have looked like Utah ever since. The soils of southern Italy and Sicily were ruined by latifundia slave-labor farming in the Roman Empire. The soils of the Atlantic seaboard in the United States were effectively ruined before the American Revolution because of the one-crop (tobacco) farming. So the same forces have been at work in East and West. You would not think a poet would get involved in these things. But the voice that speaks to me as a poet, what Westerners have called the Muse, is the voice of nature herself, whom the ancient poets called the great goddess, the Magna Mater. I regard that voice as a very real entity. At the root of the problem where our civilization goes wrong is the mistaken belief that nature is something less than authentic, that nature is not as alive as man is, or as intelligent, that in a sense it is dead, and that animals are of so low an order of intelligence and feeling, we need not take their feelings into account.

You cannot communicate with the forces of nature in the laboratory. One of the problems is that we simply do not know much about primitive people and primitive cultures.

In this total information context, man may not be necessarily the highest or most interesting product.

What we must find a way to do, then, is incorporate the other people—what the Sioux Indians called the creeping people, and the standing people, and the flying people, and the swimming people—into the councils of government. This isn’t as difficult as you might think. If we don’t do it, they will revolt against us. They will submit non-negotiable demands about our stay on the earth. We are beginning to get non-negotiable demands right now from the air, the water, the soil.

The paintings of bison and bears in the caves of southern France were of that order. The animals were speaking through the people and making their point. And when, in the dances of the Pueblo Indians and other peoples, certain individuals became seized, as it were, by the spirit of the deer, and danced as a deer would dance, or danced the dance of the corn maidens, or impersonated the squash blossom, they were no longer speaking for humanity, they were taking it on themselves to interpret, through their humanity, what these other life-forms were. That is about all we know so far concerning the possibilities of incorporating spokesmanship for the rest of life in our democratic society.

So, the ridge and the river. Back up again by dark. Under the pine and oak, three thousand feet, it’s also cool. And only three miles from a mailbox. Watershed: west slope of the northern Sierra Nevada, south slope of the east-west running ridge above the south fork, at the level of Black oak mixed with Ponderosa pine.

Earth is our Mother and a man or woman goes directly to her, needing no intermediary.

Air is our breath, spirit, inspiration; a flow which becomes speech when “sounded“—the curling back on the same thrust”

Fire must have a fuel and the heart’s fuel is love. The love that makes poetry burn is not just the green of this spring, but draws on the ancient web of sympathetic, compassionate, and erotic acts that lies behind our very existence, a stored energy in our genes and dreams—fossil love a sly term for that deep-buried sweetness brought to conscious thought. Water is creation, the mud we crawled on; the wash of tides in the cells. The Water Poet is the Creator. His calligraphy is the trails and tracks we living beings leave in each other; in the world; his poem.