The Wilds of Poetry Quotes

“We are the empty awareness (empty mind) that watches identity rehearsing itself in thoughts and memories relentlessly coming and going. Eventually the stream of thought falls silent, and you inhabit empty mind, free of that center of identity -free, that is, of the self-absorbed and relentless process of thought that precludes CONTACT in our day to day experience. It is here that you inhabit the full depth of immediate.

Chinese poetry gets back near the process of nature by means of its vivid image, and its wealth of images. The prehistoric poets who created language discovered the whole harmonious framework of nature. We should avoid “is” and bring in a wealth of neglected English verbs.”
― David Hinton, The Wilds of Poetry: Adventures in Mind and Landscape

“A realm that is beautiful and spiritual, sustaining and transforming- we take for granted those attitudes toward the wild, but they were all but unknown in the West before the Deists and Romantics. Instead the wild was generally seen as loathsome and hideous, fearsome and threatening, desolate and evil and devilish. Hence, romantic and deist thought represents a transformation in our relationship to the natural world so profound it is difficult now to imagine it. Alexander von Humboldt was an international superstar, and his hugely influential science dispensed with God or the divine and proposed that romantic awe in the face of sublime wilderness derives from our “communion with nature” as a magisterial presence, “a unity in diversity of phenomena; a harmony, blending together all created things, one great whole animated by the breath of life.” Humboldt’s revolutionary ideas…were transformative for Thoreau, and for Walt Whitman, who kept Humboldt’s books on his desk as he wrong “Song of Myself.”
― David Hinton, The Wilds of Poetry: Adventures in Mind and Landscape

“While native cultures had inhabited the Maine woods for ten thousand years and left the ecosystem intact, white colonizers devasted it in a matter of decades. Enlightenment science was showing how false traditional cosmology was and replacing it in intellectual history by various kinds of post-Christian/scientific pantheism-most notably Deism, which had been the prevailing conceptual framework among America’s intellectuals…including America’s Founding Fathers. Deism considered art and science to the true religion because those practices engaged us with the immediate reality of the cosmos and that reality itself was the divine. There were various versions of pantheism among Romantic poets and painters, for who the natural world evoked a profound sense of awe, awe they could only explain as a kind of religious experience.”
― David Hinton, The Wilds of Poetry: Adventures in Mind and Landscape

“They are the most profound questions possible, really, for at their deepest level they allow no answer. They simply pose the unsayable reality of contact, which is all question and all mystery-a moment in which the mind’s orienting certainties fail, even the certainty of self-identity, leaving one open to the experience of sheer immediacy. It is the experience of a mind perfectly emptied of all content, all the received explanations and assumptions about who we are and where we are; and so, a mind open to the fundamental reality of the material Cosmos in and of itself, open therefore to these very wilds we inhabit day by day, however rarely we are aware of that existential level of immediacy.”
― David Hinton, The Wilds of Poetry: Adventures in Mind and Landscape

“Thoreau made two attempts to climb Mt Ktaadn in Maine and failed because the mountain was smothered in wind-blown clouds, though it almost seems he found the raw wildness of the place as daunting and impassable as the billowing cloud-cover. It was on the descent that Thoreau’s experience of existential CONTACT occurred: a moment where all the explanations and assumptions fell away…his failure left him open to absorb unexpected implications of his disorienting experience on the mountain…his reason became “dispersed and shadowy, more thin and subtil, like the air” as he faced “vast, Titanic, inhuman Nature…”
― David Hinton, The Wilds of Poetry: Adventures in Mind and Landscape