Mountain Watching and Zen Mind in the Writings of Gary Snyder and Wendell Berry Author
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Title: The community of lookouts : mountain watching and zen mind in the writings of Gary Snyder and Wendell Berry Author: Gabriela Marszołek Citation style: Marszołek Gabriela. (2011). The community of lookouts : mountain watching and zen mind in the writings of Gary Snyder and Wendell Berry. Praca doktorska. Katowice : Uniwersytet Śląski Uniwersytet Śląski w Katowicach Wydział Filologiczny Katedra Literatury Porównawczej Gabriela Marszołek The Community of Lookouts. Mountain Watching and Zen Mind in the Writings of Gary Snyder and Wendell Berry. Praca doktorska napisana pod kierunkiem Prof. dr hab. Tadeusza Sławka Katowice, 2011 Wspólnota Obserwacyjnych Wież. Góry i Zen w Twórczości Gary’ego Snydera i Wendella Berry. Praca naukowa finansowana ze środków na naukę w latach 2009-2010 jako projekt badawczy. Table of Contents Acknowledgments Abbreviations Preface 1 1. Community. Extending the Notion, Tying New Cords. 10 1.1. Community – the Transitory Term. 11 1.2. Ecotones, Watersheds. California Mosaics. 22 1.3 Unplaced on Earth. On Displacement. 34 1.4 Wendell Berry’s Being-In-Place. 38 2. Civilization, the Primitive, and the Trails In-between. 47 2.1. Descent to the Primitive and Back. 48 2.2. “Civilization.” 54 2.3. The Palimpsest of Trails. 59 2.4. “Deer Foot Down Scree.” 67 3. Experiencing the Mountains. 77 3.1. „Long Ago When the Mountains Were People.” 78 3.1.1. Loowit. 80 3.2. Walking, Stalking, Circumambulating. 95 3.2.1. Temples Among the Ridges. 100 3.2.2. Circumambulating Mt. Tamalpais. 117 4. Lookout. A Study of a Cultural Phenomenon. 133 4.1 Background Information. 134 4.2. Lookout – the Imagery. 138 4.3. Lookouting in the Cascades (1952-1953). 144 4.3.1. The Changing Terrain. 144 4.3.2. No Importance Upon Words and Letters. 151 4.3.3. On a Spiritual Path. 157 4.3.4. Crater Shan Revisited. 164 4.3.5. Han Shan, a Place and a Poet. 166 4.3.6. The Laughable Path and a Sense of Place. 171 4.3.7. “Ever, Ever Be on the Lookout!” (Daito Kokushi). 174 5. Riprapping in the Sierras (1955). 186 5.1. Riprap, Cobbles and Words. 187 6. At Home in the World. Snyder’s Mind and Berry’s Window. 196 Conclusions: The Final Insight. “Mind Has Mountains.” 206 Streszczenie 209 Bibliography 211 Appendix: Photos 217 Acknowledgments Mapping out this project, I have fortunately benefited from the support and timely assistance of many people during the years of my Ph.D study, which I greatly appreciate. My initial thanks go to my supervisor Professor Tadeusz Sławek, who assisted me in scrutinizing and polishing the thesis. Thanks to his encouragement and assistance I have made it part of a research project and have been entitled to benefit from a research grant provided by the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education, and go on a field trip to the geographical areas upon which the work focuses, and do an extensive research in the libraries at the University of California in Davis and San Diego. I wish to give special thanks to Julia Simon, Dick Terdiman, and Donald and Judith Wesling for their incredible generosity and assistance that I received during my stay in the USA. I am particularly indebted to the American science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson, whom I met during my stay at Davis and had an interesting talk on mountains and the sublime, and thanks to whom I was able to meet the poet Gary Snyder in Davis, California, in March, 2010. Special thanks are reserved for Gary Snyder for his assistance at an early stage of my project and his correspondence. At the University of California, Davis, I wish to thank Professor David Robertson. I also wish to thank all those individuals who advised me during my Ph.D study. I owe my gratitude to my family, my parents. Without their encouragement, great comfort and financial support, I could not have finished my dissertation on time. Abbreviations References to Gary Snyder’s and Wendell Berry’s volumes of prose and poetry as well as critical studies are cited parenthetically in the text with the following abbreviations. Other sources occurring sparsely in particular chapters are included in the footnotes. Gary Snyder’s prose and poetry PW The Practice of the Wild (New York: North Point Press, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999). RW The Real Work. Interviews and Talks 1964-1979, ed. William Scott McLean (New York: New Directions, 1980). OW The Old Ways: Six Essays (San Francisco: City Lights, 1977). MT Myths and Texts (New York: New Directions Book, 1978). TI Turtle Island (New York: New Directions Press, 1974). EHH Earth House Hold: Technical Notes and Queries to Fellow Dharma Revolutionaries (New York: New Directions Press, 1969) MRWE Mountains and Rivers Without End (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 1996) RCM Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems (Washington, D.C.: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2004). PLS A Place in Space. Ethics, Aesthetics, and Watersheds (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 1995). RGW Regarding Wave (New York: New Directions, 1970). BF Back on the Fire. Essays (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2007). DP Danger on Peaks (Berkeley: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2005). HSJ The High Sierra of California, poems and journals by Gary Snyder; woodcuts and essays by Ton Killion (Berkeley: Heyday Books, 2002). TOC Gary Snyder, Wendell Berry, Carole Koda, Three On Community (printed and bound during the spring of 1986 by Rick and RosemaryArdinger in edition of 800 copies). OM Opening the Mountain. Circumambulating Mount Tamalpais. A Ritual Walk (Emeryville: Avalon Publishing Group, 2006). Articles, Books, and Critical Studies on Gary Snyder NYH “Not Here Yet.” Remarks by Gary Snyder on Buddhism, Ecology & the Poetics of Homelesness in: Shambhala Sun, vol 2, no. 4 (March 1994). DTI “Gary Snyder’s Descent to Turtle Island: Searching for Fossil Love,” in Western American Literature (University of Iowa, Summer 1985, XV). PP Poets on the Peaks. Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen & Jack Kerouac in the North Cascades (New York: Counterpoint, 2002). GSPR Gary Snyder and the Pacific Rim. Creating Counter-cultural Community (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2006). PFW A Place for Wayfaring. The Poetry and Prose of Gary Snyder (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2000). CE Critical Essays on Gary Snyder (Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1991). EZB Essays in Zen Buddhism. First Series (New York: Grove Press, 1949). HCBC Han Shan, Chan Buddhism and Gary Snyder’s Ecopoetic Way (Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press, 2009). NKS Nature’s Kindred Spirits. Aldo Leopold, Joseph Wood Krutch. Edward Abbey, Annie Dillard, and Gary Snyder (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1994). FBUT “Forest Beatniks” and “Urban Thoreaus” (New York: Peter Lang Publishings, 2000). SFR The San Francisco Renaissance. Poetics and Community at Mid- century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. GSM Genesis, Structure, and Meaning in Gary Snyder’s Mountains and Rivers Without End (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2004). Recordings DPCD Danger on Peaks. A Recording. The Cloud House Poetry Archives, San Francisco. Recorded by Stephen Kushner. Wendell Berry’s prose and poetry LHH The Long-Legged House. Essays (Washington, D.C., Shoemaker & Hoard, 1969). CP The Collected Poems 1957-1982 (New York: North Point Press: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987). WP Window Poems (Emeryville: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2007). SEFC Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community (New York, San Francisco: Pantheon Books, 1993). Articles, Books, and Critical Studies on Wendell Berry WBLW Wendell Berry. Life and Work (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2007). Other major works cited PTC Pilgrim At Tinker Creek (New York: Harper Perennial, 1988). ISP In Search of the Primitive. A Critique of Civilization (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2007). SPS The Spell of the Sensuous. Perception and Language in a More-than- human World (New York: Vintage Books, 1996). CSCM The Collected Songs of Cold Mountain (trans. Bill Porter) (Washington: Copper Canyon Press, 2000). TMW Thoreau’s Morning Work. Memory and Perception in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, the Journal, and Walden (Chelsea, Michigan: BookCrafters, 1990). SP Sustainable Poetry. Four American Ecopoets (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1999). Preface The Sacred Territory of the Mind The territory that has long preoccupied Gary Snyder is that of the mind in the first place. The mind has myriads of expressions and impressions though. Its vast space is germane to the idea of wilderness, and “encloses a huge void”i of the world exterior, interconnected with the area reflected in the mind. Snyder’s conceptions of the mind have surfaced throughout his poems and encompass real places brimming with the spirits of their native grounds, the long-forgotten ghosts of Turtle Island—the old/new name for America. Since Snyder’s vision is non-dualistic, the outer world and the inner one interweave, which depicts “the human mind in an inquiring, outwardlooking mood.”ii The terra of the mind hides worlds aplenty, with particular niches for each individual existence. The sense of the mind, deprived of its constraints, places it within the imagery of lookout towers, whose mere presence in the land—cragged, enormously distant and impermanent, though lasting to some extent—includes something of the very idea of a community. The area of the North Cascades of Washington and Oregon, with the lonely lookout towers, envisages one’s path to that community, which is “the community of lookouts,”iii Gary Snyder belonged to in his early twenties. This niche is that of the Zen mind as well—“free and creative,”iv—whose space outlooks into the world of experience, the mundane, the real work, and into being that is intricately incorporated with seeing the relations one is supported by. Nonetheless, as stated in a Wilderness Journey, indulging oneself in the metaphor and thus being carried a little further, there is another area, a “territory of civilization, or a little urban zone,”v which allows us to pursue our life in terms of standardized ways of expressing ourselves in the real world.