CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, NORTHRIDGE

QUEST FOR PLACE THE POETRY OF GARY SNYDER AND WENDELL BERRY

A thesis submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English by Patrick Dennis Murphy

May, 1983 The Thesis of Patrick Dennis Murphy is approved:

William Walsh

Loilisoweris

Benjamin Saltman, Committee Chairman

. California State University, Northridge

ii For Izumichan who encouraged me to return to school. Ojisan

iii Table of Contents

Abstract v Chapter One: Introduction 1 Chapter Two: Convergence 7 Chapter Three: Placing Han 14 Chapter Four: Placing Spirituality 35 Chapter Five: Man and Spirituality in Place 50 Chapter Six: Conclusion 77 Key to Abbreviations in the Text 87 Notes 88 Bibliography 97 Appendix A: "Bubbs Creek Haircut" 103 Appendix B: "Clearing," "From The Crest," and "Reverdure" 108

iv ABSTRACT

QUEST FOR PLACE THE POETRY OF GARY SNYDER AND WENDELL BERRY

by

Patrick Dennis Murphy

Master of Arts in English

Gary Snyder and Wendell Berry are often grouped together as ecological poets due to common themes evident in their poetry. A certain convergence of lifestyles and con­ cerns provides a basis for comparing the two, but as the comparison proceeds it soon becomes evident that Snyder and Berry diverge more than they converge. The first two sections of this essay discuss the basis for comparison and the areas of convergence. Also, the first section opens with a polemical consideration of current criticism on both poets. The next two sections focus first on the conflicting I concepts of place held by Snyder and Berry and their oppos- ing views on man's proper relationship to the land, and, second, on their conflicting spiritual beliefs which funda­ mentally affect their views on that relationship. Snyder seeks a return to a primitivist inhabitation of wilderness with a spirituality based on a combination of Buddhist, American Indian, and shamanist beliefs arl.d traditions, while Berry seeks a return to a society based on nature-harmonious

v p ' agriculture sustained by an ecologically oriented spiritual­ ity based on tenets of the Judaeo-Christian religious tradition. A close reading of poems from both poets follows, serving to exemplify the presence of these beliefs in their work. Finally, the concluding remarks briefly discuss each poet's attitude toward the efficacy of poetry in bringing about change, further areas for critical study, and the contribution of this essay's thesis to future criticism.

vi When the Tao is present in the universe, The horses haul manure. When the Tao is absent from the universe, War horses are bred outside the city.

(Tao Te Ching, forty-six)

vii Introduction

I learned that it is land, plac~~ that makes people provides for the~ the.pdssibilities they will have of becoming something more than mere lumps of sucking matter. We today who live so much from the inheritance of land and culture do not understand this as well as we need to. Few of us these days are really residents anywhere, in the deep sense of that term. We live off the sur­ face of things and places, the culture as well as the land; ours is a derivative life: we take what we find without thought, without regard for origin or consequences, both natural and cultural as fast diminishing.l (John Haines)

To be a resident, in John Haines' sense, is to estab­ lish oneself in place with the land, with the world. Gary Snyder and Wendell Berry have sought to become residents in that sense. They have summed up, discussed, presented that seeking in their poetry. They are two poets who share Haines' recognition of the importance of the land, who would argue that man realizes himself through acceptance of his limited, temporal role upon the planet, through integration in the natural processes of the world which move before and beyond him. Unfortunately, many critics of Snyder and Berry have continued in the "derivative life," choosing only to consid­ er the surface of things. Much has been written on Snyder, but not much on Berry, and in both cases much has missed the mark. A few critics approach Snyder carefully and meticu­ lously, having a sense of his philosophical depth--Bob Steu-

1 2

~ing and Bert Almon to name two.2 Many others demonstrate serious interpretive weaknesses, taking two basic forms: some critics fail to include a crucial philosophical compon­ ent, and some approach Snyder with a variety of reductionist schemata. Donald Tarbet exemplifies the first category by omit­ ting any reference to Snyder's fundamental grounding in Zen Buddhism. Without considering Snyder's adherence to Zen, Tarbet fails to understand the anti-Christian, nonlapsarian 3 content of "Milton by Firelight." Thomas Parkinson, who considers Snyder to be creating a "new culture," misrepre­ sents Snyder's characterization of man's interrelatedness with nat~re by describing it in egocentric terms. Parkin­ son's error reflects a failure to sufficiently analyze the Buddhist and Amerindian beliefs in Snyder's ethos, particu­ 4 larly in relation to property and self-interest. And Lee Bartlett in a very recent essay commits errors of both omis­ sion and reductionism. He omits Robert Graves' influence, Snyder's acquaintance with Campbell's Jungian archetypal theory, and Snyder's emphasis on goddesses in his mythopo­ eia. He also practices reductionism, placing Snyder in an essentially classical, Western tradition of Apollonian/Dio­ nysian dualism through lumping Zen and Amerindian spiritual 5 quests in with the tradition of the Romantic quest. William Everson introduces a reductionist "Western 6 archetype" into Snyder criticism. He claims that Snyder's studies in Japan represent a continuation of the western

American lite~ary tradition rather than a rejection of the classical Judaeo-Christian tradition upon which most Ameri­ can literature is based. He further misrepresents Snyder's northwestern American influence by excluding the Amerindian heritage from the archetype that Snyder allegedly epito­ mizes. Finally, Charles Altieri omits Snyder's concern for ~nd emulation of shamanism to set up a contradiction be­ 7 'tween the poet as seer and as prophet in Turtle Island. He argues that Sn~der should remain a seer because.he dis- 3

!fikes the "ideological resonance" of some of the Turtle Is­ land poems. His claim that the poem, "Front Lines," fails because the issues "are questions of degree and of reconcil­ ing interests; ... not absolute issues requiring unyielding defense of one's principles" reflects ideological disagree­ 8 ment rather than literary criticism. Many of the critical errors made in analyzing Snyder are difficult to recognize when read in isolation from other criticism. One way to clarify such misinterpretations is to set Snyder's work alongside Berry's,_ to compare the content of two poets who apparently and at least superficially share similar preoccupations. Careful explication reveals that Snyder and Berry differ from each other far more than they parallel one another. As one begins to dig more deeply into Snyder's poetry, into the philosophy underlying it, and into the critical statements about it, appreciation of Snyder's complexity deepens and recognition of shortcomings in Snyder criticism increases. On the other hand, as one seeks to use Berry for such a comparison, his poetry and essays reveal problems in the unity of his world view, which current Berry criticism fails to understand. Berry's critics, even Robert Hass and Speer Morgan who make serious efforts, generally fail to penetr~te deeply into his work to adequately defend it or to successfully c~iticize it. 9 Too often criticism of Berry becomes either an appreciation or a condemnation of the way he writes. For 10 example, Dick Allen comments on The Country of Marriage "poems which are endangered by sentimentality, but escape i ·I into wisdom." He praises Berry because he is "our primary contemporary poet of clarity}' And, Edwin Fussell attacks 11 Berry on the basis that "he is mainly genre." Several critics in the early 1970s argued that Berry had exhausted his subjects of nature, family, and farm and would have to turn to new topics to continue writing. John Ditsky and Kenneth Fields are two representatives of this group with Fields going another step fn the wrong direction 4 by trying to separate Berry's poetry into a "private" voice and a "public" one, thereby ignoring Berry's efforts to uni­ fy the aspects of his life by focusing on the land of his 12 heritage. And Frederick Waage, in an otherwise interest­ ing effort, makes two serious errors in his analysis: one, that Berry has achieved a sense of a "type of non-linear history," which contradicts Berry's concern for atonement; two, his claim that Berry is moving toward the idea that the farm can merely be a form of consciousness, which denies the epistemological relationship that Berry has established be­ tween man's environment and his consciousness. 13

Why compare Snyder and Berry, rather than treat them separately? First, a number of critics have already made comparisons, though usually in passing and almost always re­ ferring to Snyder while discussing Berry, measuring Berry against Snyder. But then, that is understandable~ fo~ Snyder's reputation was firmly established before Berry's first book of poetry appeared. Only a few critics have corn­ pared them with equal emphasis and at least one of these, Donald Tarbet, misrepresented Berry and rendered Snyder uni­ dentifiable. Second, they tend to be grouped in people's minds as !'ecology poets," or as Berry terms it, "nature poets.'' This reflects a certain commonality of concern and interest, as well as style, and provides a starting point for analyzing their poetry, whethere separately or compara­ tively. The ecological starting point can also mislead critics because Snyder's and Berry's differences predomi­ nate. They may begin from similar points, but their sepa­ rate visions carry them and their readers toward very dif­ ferent ends. A comparative analysis, then, can more sharply define their different and eventually opposed beliefs; and, in the course of this analysis reveal the dangers of inade­ quate philosophical and historical exploration, particularly in regard to Snyder. In other words, by CQnjuting an aco.u­ rate image of each poet's vision, I intend to dispel false 5 spirits created by others, and to test the relative powers of their visions in open contest. To begin, then, with similarities, Snyder and Berry are united by common concerns and initially common directions for mankind based on a return to an organic relationship with the land, and therefore, a rejection of modern, urban­ ized~ techno-industrial society. Both men have sought to implement such a return in their own lives and h~ve used these experiences as rich sources for their writings. They have also influenced each other through their publications, correspondence, and personal contact. These exist as topi­ cal concerns which provide a starting point, a reservoir, from which the separate streams of their poetic themes flow and increasingly diverge. This divergence is first made evident through analysis of each poet's concept of place and man's relation to the land. This concept forms the central axis of both men's work. Snyder views the whole earth, fertile and infertile, organic and inorganic, as Gaia's temple, built of mountains and forests and rivers to worship the Goddess wherever man stands~ Berry views the ecologically based farm as a kind of Greek temple on the grounds of which a sacred grove is preserved as a separate space set aside for worship of the God of Creation. Or, to use another mythological metaphor, the difference sets Diana against Dionysus Liber. The form­ er view proceeds from a universal belief in the sacredness of the entire world to a reverent preservation of each par­ ticular place and fragment of nature as a component of the temple. The latter view proceeds from a developing rever­ ence for the enclosed grove to an affinity for all of nature. Snyder emphasizes wilderness, Berry emphasizes the farm. In the following pages the analysis will focus on a consideration of their differing spiritual and religious be­ liefs. Snyder grounds himself firmly in Zen Buddhism and Amerindian spirituality, seeing them both as developments of 6 a spirituality originating in primitive shamanism. In con­ 'trast, Berry moves ever more deeply into Judaeo-Christian beliefs. Snyder works with paradoxes of reality as illusion and wholeness through loss of self; Berry often appears eschatological, emphasizing atonement and self-realization through labor. After close readings of a few major poems of Snyder and Berry, this essay will conclude with a brief dis­ cussion of the continuing directions of each poet's work and some further needs of criticism in continuing to evaluate their achievements. Convergence

What does it take to make a journey? A place to start from, something to leave behind. A road, a trail, or a river. Companions, and something like destination: a camp, an inn, or another shore. We might imagine a journey with no destination, nothing but the act of going, and with never an arrival. But I think we would always hope to find something or someone, however unexpected and unprepared for. Seen from a distance or taken part in, all journeys may be ~he same, and we arrive exactly where we are. 1 (John Haines)

Both Snyder and Berry have journeyed and these journeys have .been essential in their development as poets. Yet they underwent very different experiences. Wendell Berry grew up in western Kentucky and went to college in Louisville, not far from the family farm. And though he travelled, after receiving his master's degree from the University of Ken­ tuoky, teaching and writing at Stanford, visiting Europe, and lecturing at New York University, he returned to Ken­ tucky within seven years. Berry returned to a professorship at his alma mater and a house ln the same valley his family had lived in and farmed for one-hundred-sixty years. It be­ came his homecoming: "Our return from New York in early June of 1964 changed our lives .... From then on, my relation to my native country here might be interrupted occasionally, 15 but it would not be broken." His travelling reinforced his belief that a man must put down roots in one place and stay there. The first stanza of his poem, "Stay Home,"

7 8 exemplifies this belief:

I will wait here in the fields to see how well the rain brings on the grass. In the labor of the fields longer than a man's life I am at home. Dom't come with me. You stay home too.16

But Berry's man cannot just stay in one place, he must be­ come a true resident. He must care for the place, nurture the land rather than exploit it. Although Berry stayed on at Kentucky for thirteen years, he increasingly turned his attention away from teach­ ing toward farming. First, he turned his twelve-acre home into a working farm. Then, in 1972 he bought an adjacent abandoned farm and began restoring it, using real horsepower instead of diesel power. In 1977 he finally made the break with academia, taking up subsistence farming as a major ac­ tivity. He has gradually removed himself further and further from urban America and has involved himself ever more deeply in organic farming in theory, practice, and publication. And whatever travelling he does today, such as his trips to Peru and the American southwest, is investiga­ tion bound up with this enterprise. He has simplified his life and become a member and spokesman for a new subculture: the organic farmer, a part of the ecological movement. Snyder has also journeyed and returned. He grew up in the Depression on a small, failing farm in Washington,, at the edge of second-growth forest returning to wilderness. Just before he entered high school his family moved to Port­ land; but he turned to the mountain wilderness beyond the city, as he had done in Washington, hiking, climbing, and camping. He also continued to develop his interest in American Indian culture. Throughout his youth he recog­ nized a dichotomy between "the civilized world" and "the natural world," and between "white culture" and "Indian 9 culture." In both cases he found himself drawn to the latter of the two: "from the time I was thirteen, I went into the Cascade Mountains .... At that age I found very 17 little in the civilized realm that interested me." At Reed College, Snyder majored in Anthropology and Literature. He continued to collect American Indian folk­ lore and stayed in touch with the wild through working for the Park Service and later the Forest Service. He also spent a summer at sea. But unlike Berry, Snyder's family had no single ancestral place. In the spirit of their I.W.W. political tendencies, they were on the move. Snyder's place was not a particular valley or farm, but the wilderness, whether of the land or the sea. Snyder concluded his studies at Reed with a bachelor's 'thesis, He Who Hunted Birds in His Father's Village, an 18 interdisciplinary study of a Haida myth. In it Snyder not only demonstrates a deep knowledge and sensitivity to the spirituality and culture of the American Indian, but also indicates the basic direction of his philosophical development. 19 He too would travel after college, but with a far clearer sense of direction than Berry di~played. In the early 1950s Snyder lived an ascetic life, having decided, as Berry did many years later, to abandon an aca­ demic career to devote himself to the craft of poetry. As he began working on the poems that would become Riprap and 20 Myths & Texts, he realized that the study of his craft required him to go to Japan, to break out of the Judaeo­ Christian literary and philosophical tradition of American letters. He continued working in the wilderness during the summer while studying Oriental languages during the winter. In 1956 Snyder left San Francisco on the first of several journeys to Japan. For the next twelve years he only occasionally visited the United States, until returning permanently in 1968. Like Berry, Snyder settled in one place, reinhabiting abandoned second-growth land in northern California on the edge of the Sierra wilderness. There he 10 could protect and live harmoniously with the land's own process of natural restoration, raising his family in a very ascetic lifestyle, a part of another American sub­ culture: subsistence communal living, which involves some farming, and is also a part of the ecological movement. The opening lines of "The Bath" describe a part of this life:

Washing Kai in the sauna, the kerosene lantern set on a box outside the ground-level window, Lights up the edge of the iron stove and the washtub down on the slab Steaming air and crackle of waterdrops brushed by on the pile of rocks on top He stands in wa~rm water( TI, 12)

What links Snyder and Berry is far more than being of the same generation, having rural roots, or even partici­ pating in subculture lifestyles. They share similar concerns; both have become spokesmen for ecology, inside and outside their poetry. Snyder has attended United Nations conferences on the environment and presented papers in defense of the wilderness at such places as the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions. Berry has partici­ pated in meetings, such as the International Hill Land Symposium, and has engaged in civil disobedience opposing nuclear power plants. Both have written in opposition to nuclear power; for example, in Berry's essay, "The Reactor 21 and the Garden," and in Snyder's poem, "LMFBR":

·neath himself (Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactor) stands grinning, beckoning. Plutonium tooth glow. Eyebrows buzzing. Strip-mining scythe. Kali dances on the dead stiff cock. Aluminum beer cans, plastic spoons, plywood veneer, PVC pipe, vinyl seat covers, don't exactly burn, don't quite rot, flood over us, 11

robes and garbs of the Kali-yuga

end of days.(TI,67)

Both poets have written poems demonstrating opposition to the Vietnam War and all wars of aggression: Berry's "Against the War in Viet Nam" and "To a Siberian \tJ'oodsman," and Snyder's "In the House of the Rising Sun" and "Vapor 22 Trails." But for both the Vietnam War, deforestation, ,radioactive poisoning, strip-mining, and the genocide of species form different parts of a larger conflict: the life

of the planet, i~ncluding man, against the civilization that threatens it. This conflict requires more than words, even

~ore than single actions. It requires a person's entire way of life, as Snyder's "Front Lines" states and as Berry argues in "Dark With Power":

Front Lines

The edge of the cancer Swells against the hill--we feel a foul breeze-­ And it sinks back down. The deer winter here A chainsaw growls in the gorge.

Ten wet days and the log trucks stop, The trees breathe. Sunday the 4-wheel jeep of the Realty company brings in Landseekers, lookers, they say

To the land,I Spread your legs.

The jets crack sound overhead, it's OK here; Every pulse of the rot at the heart In the sick fat veins of Amerika Pushes the edge up closer--

A bulldozer grinding and slobbering Sideslipping and belching on top of The skinned-up bodies of still-live bushes In the pay of a man From town. 12

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.(TI,18)

Dark \Vi th Power Dark with power, we remain the invaders of our land, leaving deserts where forests were, scars where there were hills.

On the mountains, on the rivers, on the cities, on the farmlands we lay weighted hands, our breath potent with the death of all things.

Pray to us, farmers and villagers of Viet Nam. Pray to us, mothers and children of helpless countries. Ask for nothing.

We are carried in the belly of what we have become toward the shambles of our triumph, far from the quiet houses.

Fed with dying, we gaze on our might's monument of fire. The world dangles from us while we gaze.(Op,27)

Quoted at length, such poems provide a full sense of these poets' emotions as well as their intellectual posi­ tions; for Snyder and Berry are not simply poets who share common concerns; they also share common topics. Many poets opposed the Vietnam War, but a much smaller percentage wrote or were able to write poems voicing that opposition. I stress this because it enables the critic to evaluate Snyder and Berry not merely on what they choose to promote and oppose, but on the way in which they handle such topics. They are "ecology poets," but this does not mean in the end that they can be grouped together philosophically, or that their common concerns lead them to mutually reinforc·ing conclusions. In many ways they agree with one another on 13 what they oppose: ecological destruction, nuclear suicide, technology dependent consumer societies, amoral irrespon­ sible individualism, and political exploitation. And yet, precisely because their opposition to the current order proves so far-reaching and so radical, they are required by their own beliefs to propose in their art alternative ways to live--well-conceived and deeply felt resolutions of the conflict between modern civilization and nature--alterna­ tives which not only differ, but contradict each other. Placing Man

A consequence of modern history is that the world has become increasingly an object to be viewed from a distance. We are less and less a part of nature, or at least it can be said that we func­ tion at consid~xable inner, as. well as outer, distance from it .... The world is dominated by ma­ chines and their products, things which looked at objectively are incapable of self-sustained life and of passion. In any valid sense, the world most modern people live in is dead.

Maybe one way out is through a new simplicity and forthrightness, born of attachment to and love of a place, any pla~e.23 (John Haines)

Snyder and Berry agree with Haines that "the world most modern people live in is dead" and that few people 24 really inhabit any place. They seek to live in and write of a different place, one in which the fetishism of commodi­ ties does not stand between man and the land. As Snyder sees it, quoting Marshall Sahlins, "There is no class of landless paupers in primitive culture. Landless paupers be­ long to civilization."(OW,34) In both poets, their con­ cepts of place require land, but the land differs and, as a result, so do their places. The poetry itself and the poets' prose comments provide the starting point for pre­ senting these differences. In Riprap, Snyder's first published book, several poems epitomize his sense of the wilderness and call up the mysterious, timeless quality of the raw landscape with its hard-edged dimensions and nonhuman life too great for the mind to focus on and encompass. "Piute Creek" and "Above

14 15

'Pate Valley" contain the same view of the land, but in the ,latter Snyder includes the continuity of human life as only :fragments and trails upon nature's surface:

One granite ridge A tree would be enough Or even a rock, a small creek, A bark shred in a pool. Hill beyond hill, folded and twisted Tough trees crammed In thin stone fractures A huge moon on it all, is too much. The mind wanders.(RR,6)

...• I spied A glitter, and found a flake -Black vo 1 c.:nli c ·g"las s--obs idi an-­ .... thousands Of arrowhead leavings over a Hundred yards .... A land of fat summer deer, They came to camp. On their Own trails. I followed my own Trail here. Picked up the cold-drill, Pick, singlejack, and sack Of dynamite. Ten thousand years.(RR,9)

Snyder pays homage in these two poems not only to the vast­ ness of the land, but also to the inhabitants, the animals whose names he capitalizes out of respect and to the Amer­ indians who preceded the poet but who also in some way par­ 25 allel him. They have their tools, he has his. They came by different trails, but to the same place--not merely the same location. Other locations appear in Riprap, Japan and the Sappa Creek tanker, they do not produce poems focused on place, but rather poems focused on the individual or relationships among people. Myths & Texts, written contemporaneously with Riprap, returns the reader to the mountains and log­ ging camps of the northwest. And The Back Country depicts the circular journey from that area to Japan and India, again to Japan, and back. As Snyder describes it, "So it 16

)cfoes complete a circle. Starting with Douglas fir and Pan­ j derosa pine and ending with Douglas fir ans Ponderosa pine." l(RWI,86) Note, Snyder mentions the trees because they are I 'as much the land as is the soil. A short poem in Regarding Wave suggests the reason for this circle:

Roots Draw over and dig The loose ash soil Hoe handles are short, The sun's course long Fingers deep in the earth search Roots, pull them out; feel through; Roots are strong.(RW,25)

Though written of an experience in Japan, this poem speaks to the strength of the roots in the soil, and meta­ phorically refers to the roots of one's own, in this case the poet's, life experiences. Snyder grew up in the west coast mountains, the land he writes about in Riprap and Myths & Texts, and even though he had to journey to Japan and beyond to learn the spiritual and philosophical values "to find somehow a way to actually 'belong to the land," that land was always a place populated with Douglas fir and Ponderosa pine.(M&T,viii) This land appears again throughout Turtle Island, I' iforming the background for "Front Lines," quoted earlier. lone should remark here that the mountains, forests, deserts i !and animals do not form some pastoral preserve for the Ro- 1 /mantic to visit on a leisurely sojourn, nor some well- .-;-'I 1 I !cropped farm land where Marvell can meditate. In this wil- !derness man should live and eventually must live if man is I ---- !to survive for as long as the evolution of the planet can \sustain him. 26 "Source" in Turtle Island makes this point, I \but "By Frazier Creek Falls" more forcefully declares it: I I listen. This living flowing land I[ __ 17

is all there is, forever

~ve are it it sings through us-- We could live on this earth without clothes or tools!(TI,41)

The point here is not, as Altieri may claim in his criticism of Turtle Island, whether or not man can actually live naked and nonmechanical, but that man has become so dependent on the artificial atmosphere of the enclosed,- contained city 27 that he soon may not be able to live at a11. In inter­ jviews and essays, Snyder states that men may live in commu­ nities and even cities if organized in harmony with ecology, but at the same time he stresses the need for the individual to enter into direct relation with the land. He presents this need in a poem about his son, "Meeting the Mountains":

He crawls to the edge of the foaming creek He backs up the slab ledge He puts a finger in the water He turns to a trapped pool Puts both hands in the water Puts one foot in the pool Drops pebbles in the pool He slaps the water surface with both hands He cries out, rises up and stands Facing toward the torrent and the mountain Raises up both hands and shouts three times!ffiW,6~

His son Kai performs a ritual of immersion and reverence, a ritual basic to man's ability to rise and stand, to become

~uman by becoming a part of what he touches. Natural abundance provides Snyder with another crucial ingredient for his concept of place. Within abundance also resides renewal and regeneration. In Myths & Texts, Snydei latches on to the lodgepole pine as a permanent symbol of renewal and nature's ability to heal itself after man's de­ structive alterations. The lodgepole pine's seedcones re­ main closed and unharmed through fires, then shed their seeds in the hot ashes, "and a new growth springs up." (N&T, 4) 18

~nother such symbol is the berry bush, which not only pro­ i ~ides food without planting, but also represents one of the i common second growth plants in areas that have been logged and farmland that has been abandoned (one will see later that Wendell Berry has a very different attitude toward such brambles). Snyder uses this symbol in Myths & Texts and be­ gins The Back Country with "A Berry Feast," a poem in which he develops Amerindian bear and coyote myths tying man and animal together on the land. As Julian Gitzen interprets it:

The forest's ability to reseed itself, particular­ ly as manifested in the lodgepole pine, provides the poet with an emblem not only of natural fer­ tility but of the spiritual re-awakening which he is encouraging .•.. "A Berry Feast" clearly indi­ cates that for Snyder the wild berry briars which so often flourish in freshly logged regions sym­ bolize the regenerative powers of the wilderness, its eternal capability of producing f§od and shel­ ter to replace what has disappeared.2

The Back Country ends with "Oysters," which Altieri, in an essay predating his criticism of Turtle Island, considers "is both the thematic summary of the volume and perhaps the most casual poem in it." He argues:

To have all one wants is the American dream .... But the contrast created by the last line and, more importantly, the tone of the poem suggest an entirely new way of realizing that dream .... in the inner peace that derives from comprehending the sacramental ecology which lies all around us.29

In "Oysters," Snyder presents the bounty of nature symbolized by the oysters as being obtained not through hard labor cultivation but through "hunting" and gathering. He also includes rocks as part of this bounty, given as gifts, a sharing of identity. Man, food, and land all connected, all in,a communion of abundance without waste, defines the plentitude of Snyder's place, as demonstrated by this short 19

poem:

Oysters

First Samish Bay. then all morning, hunting oysters A huge feed on white wood State Park slab-plank bench­ and table at Birch Bay where we picked up rocks for presents. And ate oysters, fried--raw--cookt in milk rolld in crumbs-- all we wanted. -ALL,ME WANTED & got back in our wagon, drove away.(TBC,128)

Although Snyder's poetry may be sufficient, one need not rely solely on it for understanding Snyder's place, but can reinforce interpretation through reference to his prose and interviews. In the 1978 introduction to Myths & Texts he declares: "we are most of us a still rootless population of non-natives who don't even know the plants .... [!] set out like everyone else, to make sense, and to find somehow a way to actually 'belong to the land. '"(M&T,viii) Turtle Is­ land's introduction goes even further:

[Turtle Island] A name: that we may see ourselves more accurately on this continent of watersheds and life-communities--plant zones, physiographic prov~nces, culture areas; following natural boun­ daries .... The poems speak of place, and the energy-path­ ways 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.

In one of the interviews in The Real Work, Snyder clarifies .his political stance: "My political position is to be a spokesman for wild nature," and that his understanding of 20 irTian's.relation to the land as not being limited to its top­ !soil, but including, as in the case of the Sierra Nevada, ! ;its "115-million-year-old geological formation rhythms .•.. All the way down to some Tertiary gravels ~hich contain a lot of gold from the Pliocene."(RWI,48-9) Whatever place man chooses to live in, then, connects him not just with the terrain or soil of that region but with an entire interconnected entity, with a history preced­ ing man and, as Snyder has indicated, continuing after him. And, that interconnectedness requires man to establish a re­

~ationship which defends nature's independent wild integrity and not merely its preservation as perpetuator of man's ~xistenc~~ Wendell Berry's position on the issue, on the pther hand, presents a surprisingly different perspective.

In The Long-Legged House Berry declares the long poem, "Diagon," "the first poetry that I still feel represented by."30 It describes the river that Berry has lived near most of his life. The poem suggests the mystery of the river's power, its integration with the rhythms of the sea­ sons, and its meaning for man. Berry presents the river's power in terms of its ability to drown men, to flood homes, to eat away the fields along its shores. The river belongs in its "maimed channel" and the flooding stands in Berry's eyes as some power beyond man, almost a punishment or vio­ lence visited upon land and men:

In the day~ of rain The valley leveled With the brown flood. The massed water held The hill trough beyond beginning In the darkness of fish. In the crippled eyes Of the river men No known shape twisted A word from their tongues.

The river's injury is its shape.(BG,6) 21

The river stands out in its activity from the solidity 'and quiescence of the land. Unlike a stream it can never be encompassed by a farm, but only help form its boundaries. Here and elsewhere there seems to exist an ambivalence in Berry toward the river that he does not express toward the land, as if they are not equally part of nature. "A Wet Time" in Farming: A Handbook particularly evidences this:

The land is an ark, full of things waiting . ...• I stand deep in the mud of the shore, like a stake planted to measure the rise, the water rising, the earth falling to meet it .•. .... I turn like an ancient worshipper to the thoughts of solid ground. I was not ready for this parting, my native land putting out to sea.31

However, Berry spends little time exploring this mystery, focusing mainly on the land and the way streams and rain affect it and men. In Findings, considered by some critics to represent the real beginning of Berry's "own" voice, he focuses on the 32 idea of house as the defining metaphor of man and family.

He defines nature in this collection of poems ~n relation to domestic life and family and the legacy of preceding genera­ tions. Here the house defines the land around it, man cre­ ates order through homesteading and farming:

Above the map alive with rivers, autumn sycamores, changing, bronze and white, by the bank ~dges, the hill lifts up to the white walls of the shouse.

And bricked walks turned from its. doorw~ys, the house's knowledge of its hill, an orderly geography, handwrought, advancing among seasons, harvests, barns, and turning back, laden, welcomed, to the doorways, the closeness of the house:(~dgj11-12) 22

No wilderness enters Berry's earlier books of poetry, except a lost one marked by the singing of birds:

In the empty lot--a place not natural, but wild--among the trash of human absence .... They are its remembrance of what it is.(BG,45)

Rather than wilderness, Berry speaks of rural areas, of farmland, country fields and woods--not forests. Never far from houses, farms, even towns, these places provide free­ dom from the noise and pollution of the cities. He opens his third book of poems w,'ith the imag~ of s:uch a place:

--a place where thought can take its shape as quietly in the mind as water in a pitcher,

or a man can be safely without thought --see the day begin and lean back, a stmple wakefulness filling perfectly the spaces among the leaves.(Op,3)

Berry moves fairly quickly from this early "Romantic" image of nature as the garden beyond the city. In a way he has to because his early descriptions muddle the difference between wilderness and rural lands. His various discussions of the influence of Marvell on his thought and writing demonstrate the problem. In discussing, "Upon Appleton House, to my Lord Fairfax" in The Long-Legged House, Berry states that Marvell "is talking about a river valley of farms and woodlands such as I had known all my life" and praises the poet's ability to see and describe the landscape as it exists, rather than as a source of transcend~nce.(RE, 40-2) A year later, though, again discussing the same poem, Berry declares: "In the stanza where he turns from the 23 house to the fields, he makes this stunning acknowledgement of the wildness and mystery in nature," with Berry claiming that Marvell's valley woods, and by extension his own, rep­ 33 resent a "wild place." Such woods within walking distance of a lord's manor may produce a feeling for wildness within a sensitive poet, but they are hardly wild in comparison with the wilderness of the Sierra Nevada and Northwest forests which Snyder describes. Berry clarifies the dif­ ference by moving away from romanticism through rooting his vision of the land in the concept of the farm and settled rural areas. As Speer Morgan observes, "Berry's maturity is defined by increasingly elegant simplicity. His style is that of a' farmer who =pt'c:nits and tends straight rows, not a Romantic who wanders temporarily in the luxuriance of a wild . f. . t 1134 or ~n ~n~ e nature. Although Berry's settling into the farm takes some time, from the first he has focused on the same geographical area, the Kentucky of his boyhood. In Openings he has not yet centered on the farm; many poems flow from experiences of walking the land beyond the edge of the farm, but he remains within the confines of rural farmland. And, by spe­ cifically naming Kentucky, as in "White-Throated Sparrow," he develops his concept of place within present geopolitical boundaries. He accepts the "arbitrary" governmental borders that Snyder rejects. The history of the region also defines his concept of place, and necessarily then his view of the proper relationship of man to the land. He ties himself to this particular land, not because it represents the type of land in which he believes and chooses to settle, as Snyder settled in an area near the kind of wilderness he images in his early poems, but because history has determined that Western Kentucky is Berry land. The last stanza of "My Great-Grandfather's Slaves" explains this:

I am owned by the blood of all of them who ever were owned by my blood. We cannot be free of each other.(Op,S) 24

I Berry finds himself married to this land, this partie- I ular area of rural, southern United States, and must decide ; how to live there and nowhere else. In Openings he seems to waver between residing quietly on the land--using it as a source of inspiration, a place of memories and images in the tradition of American nature poetry, residing but not tamp­ ering--and the need to labor on it that he first asserted in Findings. "The Return" clarifies the issue and proffers its resolution .. This long poem speaks first of his return to the land: "To re-enter/ the place of beginning, the place/ whose possibilities I am one of." Then it turns to the his­ tory of exploitive farming and his dream to redress the · damage. In the third section he imagines the land returned· to its natural state, to the way the Shawnees kept it in their centuries of stewardship, but he cannot accept this course. He views imagining it as pristine again as romantic pretense, as a looking backward rather than forward to the 35 task ahead. In Farming: A Handbook and Clearing Berry establishes the farm as his central conception of place and the farmer, husbandman and agriculturalist, as the proper relation of 36 man to the land. Only by becoming a farmer, a worker in the soil, can man become an active agent in the cycle of nature, in the harmony of life, and in the regeneration of the earth. He opens Farming with "The Man Born to Farming" which begins:

The grower of trees, the gardener, the man born to farming, whose hands reach into the ground and sprout, to him the soil is a divine drug. He has seen the light lie down in the dung heap, and rise again in the corn. (FH,3)

And in "Sowing" Berry takes his stand as farmer against the natural reversion of abandoned farmland to briars and trees: " .... Bet~een/ history's death upon the place and the trees that would have come/ I claim, and act, and am mingled in 25

~-- - -- !the world." ( FH, 6) He "claims" the land for himself, for man. And finally, in "Rain" Berry defines himself entirely !in terms of farming. The rain prevents him from working and so: "My life stands in place, covered, like a hay rick or a mushroom."(FH,12) Near the end of Openings, Berry empha­ sizes farming as a form of atonement for the ruination of the land by previous generations, a theme he continues to develop after that in his poetry. Farming, then, not only means labor to prove worthy of the fruits of the land, but also reparation to pay a debt for "the bad work left behind us, demanding to be done."37 Clearing further develops Berry's position, from the epigraph taken from the I Ching: "What hasbeen spoiled :through man's fault can be made good again through man's MTOrk," to the final poem. In Part Six of "The Clearing" he declares that "The farm is the proper destiny,/ here now and to come." And, he closes the book with "Reverdure," a de­ scription of the farmer's creation of a sacred grove on the land, a small, fenced-in, field-surrounded woods where a man may walk in peaceful meditation beneath the leaves of trees organized by the farmer: " ... I made my way/ into the woods, leaving an order/ that was mine, a way opening behind me/ by which I came out again."(Cl,25 and 51) Wilderness, the wildness of nature is commemorated by a small patch of un­ productive land set aside by the farmer, ~ the farm, con­ tained within the domestic domain. Berry declares in "From The Crest": "Cleared, the field must be/ kept clear. There are more/ clarities to make./ The farm is an infinite form." I (Cl,41,emphasis added) Berry reduces the unworked part of the land to a passive stand of trees, describing it in such a way as to return the reader to Marvell and to a Romantic notion of wilderness:

And this steep woods will be left standing, a part of the farm not farmed, its sacred grove,' where we 26

will have nothing to do.(Cl,52)

Within the poem Berry reveals that the land set aside for the grove is unproductive for farming, making the reader wonder if otherwise it would have been spared. Berry speaks throughout his poetry about "relinquish­ ment," connecting labor on the land with the death of the body and its return to the soil. And yet, the idea of pos­ session as part of man's relation to the land remains near the surface in many of his poems, as in "The Stones," the second poem of Farming, which begins ''I owned a slope full of stones." It comes out more completely in his prose, though. In A ContinuOU~H.B.i-mony Berty states:

A farmer's relation to his land is the basic and central connection in the relation of humanity to the creation; the agricultural relation stands for the larger relation. Similarly, marriage is the basic and central community tie .... And these relationships to the creation and to the human community are in turn basic to, and may stand for our relationship to God.(RE,213-14)38

And, in A Long-Legged House he admits the difficulty of mov­ ing from the individual-centered connection to the land to a universal concept of man-land harmony: "I must attempt to care as much for the world as for my household." As Fred­ erick Waage observes, "Farming: A Handbook is full of these intimations that a cyclic sense of life, redemptive of pub­ lic history, will (or can) begin by rooting in a closed . 39 l private space--ideally, a farm." For Berry, a place where man can enter into a proper relationship with the land has to have boundaries in which the individual can exercise a certain amount of control through the labor of rebuilding and the continuity of gene­ rational history. He requires a place which provides-"the kind of independence which allows a person to provide some of his own needs and permits him to do what he sees right 27 without having to gain the permission of a crowd."40 In such a place the woods are fenced and trimmed, intentionally limited: "But we cannot hope--for reasons practical and hu­ mane, we cannot even wish--to preserve more than a small portion of the land in wilderness. Most of it we will have 41 to use." And, the Kentucky River becomes an enemysteal­ ing "the land," rather than forming a part of it and a part of nature's continuous change.

Hendell Berry's farm contains a "sacred grove," shaped and limited by his own hands. It forms an aspect of his concept of place and a symbol of his belief in the necessity of man having ·reverence 'for: ''Creation." Yet, it would be inaccurate to believe that the grove represents his symbol of man's relationship to the land. It is the farm, rather, that "infinite form," that embodies the proper life of man. The grove serves as a token of wilderness within the boundaries of the farm. Like the farm, it is a particular, specific area in which the farmer works and worships in an effort to harmonize with nature, atone for the sins of pre­ vious generations, and develop a universal appreciation and protective instinct for all of nature. But this greater vision requires a protracted struggle against the narrowness of the farm's particularization: "I must attempt to care as much for the world as for my household. Those are the poles between which a competent morality would balance and medi­ 43 ate: the doorstep and the planet." Berry accepts the continuation of man's separation from nature. Snyder proceeds from the opposite direction. In the beginning of Myths & Texts he tells of the destruction wrought by those who have followed the injunction, "But ye shall destroy their altars,/ break their images, and cut down their groves."(M&T,3) And, his epigraph from Acts speaks out in defense of the worship of the goddess Diana. Snyder worships Diana, opposing the Christian cutting down of the sacred groves, but his groves are not fenced-off 28 steep hillsides they are every forest on the face of the planet--as in "Front Lines," "Behind is a forest that goes to the Arctic." Diana, as one manifestation of the White Goddess, leads Snyder to another manifestation, Gaia--Mother Earth--the true focus of man's worship. To worship Gaia 44 requires revering and holding sacred her entire planet. The poem, "Mother Earth: Her Whales," in Turtle Island, sums up Snyder's universal conception of place. Man's place is in the planet. That is to say, rather than having a household which he builds up, reveres, and roots in a single place as an individual, and on the basis of that growth learns to look out beyond its fences to love the rest; man, as a collectively li-nked being, forms a part of the "Earth , ' House Hold" of Gaia, whom he serves in cohabitation with the rest of her life.

IS man most precious of all things? --then let us love him, and his brothers, all those Fading living beings--

North America, Turtle Island, taken by invaders who wage war around the world. May ants, may abalone, otters, wolves and elk Rise! and pull away their giving from the robot nations.

Solidarity. The People. Standing Tree People! Flying Bird People! Swimming Sea People! Four-legged, two-legged, people!(TI,48)

One way to concretize these differing conceptions is to look at Snyder's and Berry's descriptions of the land. As has been shown, Snyder's descriptions embrace the wilder­ ness, nature unfettered by man's shaping and short-time sensed organizing. He upholds the wild, which man may and does enter and live in, as a self-regenerating force both in 45 its "virgin" state and in the areas man has damaged. For Snyder "a direct sense of relation to the 'land'--... really 29

means, the totality of the local bio-region system, from cirrus clouds to leaf-mold."(OW,59) Also in The Old Ways he speaks of the Gaia Hypothesis: "the whole of the bio­ sphere is one living organism which has strategically pro­ grammed its evolution for 3 billion years, including produc­ ing us."(OW,39) And, from this universality he moves to the "minute particulars," as in "Gaia":

Twenty thousand square hill miles of manzanita. some beautiful tiny manzanita. I saw a single, perfect, lovely, little manzanita. ah. ( SG, n. p. )

In the Gaia hypothesis all aspects of the planet are productive of the overall life of the organism. Berry, how­ ever, has a very different and narrower conception of pro­ ductivity. Proceeding from the particularity of the ecolo­ gically based farm he defines it in terms of crops, fodder, fuel, and materials. He never speaks of the river as

productive~ It takes away the land, and though he tries to accept it as part of continuous change, he fails to mention that the river redeposits the soil it takes in "slips" some­ where else downriver. Further, only where " .... The farm/ reaches one of its limits" is the grove allowed to stand, on land too steep to be "productive."(Cl,51) Although Berry must know that mountains, among other activities, produce and shape the watersheds, they never enter his poetry or be­ come a concern of his prose. Productive land, then, means ' land upon which man may produce what he chooses, land amenable to his reorganizing and "clarifying." Robert Haas, in praising Berry's poetry, agrees with his remarks in The Unsettling.of America that only a small portion of land can remain as wilderness. Hass, interpret­ ing Berry, states: "The fenced-off land that is possession without obligation [allowed to return to a wild state] and the ~enced-off places of the mind are both efforts to make a 30 world pristine and unchangable outside of history."46 Hass accepts Berry's denial of the regenerative power of nature, his refusal to accept the long~term, slow process of second growth reclamation of abandoned land. The contrast between Berry and Snyder on this issue can be seen by their con­ flicting attitudes toward berry bushes and brambles. Snyder praises them, just as he praises manzanita and lodgepole pine--both of which share a resistance to fire, and recog­ nizes that the berry bushes form one stage in the process of climax restoration. Berry sees them as a threat to farmland and as an obstacle to keeping the fields cleared. Rather than letting nature take its course in restoring ecological balance, Berry demands that man take a part in the restora­ tion, even if it means fighting "the second coming of the trees."(Op,47) This notion expressed in "Window Poems" continues Berry's idea that "The earth turns/ against all living, in the end."(Op,35) But this can only seem true if one does not believe as Snyder does that the earth herself lives "at her own pace." The attitudes of the two poets toward bushes and crops also appears in the description and appreciation of animals in their poetry. As Bert Almon notes of Gary Snyder:

Many of Snyder's 'people' are birds, coyotes, whales, insects or even plants .... His problems as a poet of the whole range of living beings is to create poems in which animals and plants appear as autonomous presences, not as mere symbols for human feelings or concepts .... The aim is not to raise the supposedly lower orders to a human level, but to see all beings as co-citizens in a community of life.47

The same cannot be said for Berry's world. He most fre­ quently speaks of domesticated animals and limits considera­ tion of wild animals to birds of the river and the woods. Often, these animals enter the poems not as "autonomous presences" but as markers for thoughts on. man or symbols of freedom from c_onsciousness. In "The Dead Calf" Berry's 31

concern focuses on his reaction to the animal's death, not on the event itself: "It was nameless and familiar./ He was fitted to it. In me/ is where the horror is. In my mind." (Op,34) And horses provide an example for man: "The day's time/ is their time. They do not move/ toward it or away. Their minds/ are at home in this world,/ diminished by no question."(AP,19) Often, Berry does not even speak of the birds so much as he notes their songs as part of the natural background. Crows and kingfishers are used mainly to mark 48 the change of seasons in Openings. The choices of animals do not mark the contrast between Snyder and Berry nearly as much as the different relation­ ships established in the poerirs between· animals and men. Snyder, drawing heavily on American Indian myth, speaks of animal-human matings, of magical animal-gods, of an equality of existence based on cohabitation of the planet, and of animals sacrificing themselves as food, with men occasion­ ally finding themselves in the same role. For Berry, of course, men never become food directly but only fertilizer, and man and animal do not inhabit the same world because man is benighted with self-consciousness and the need to labor. "The Heron" reveals this separateness in Berry's thought. (FH,113-14) Even as he recalls that "there is other life than men have made," he admits his own alienation from it: "While the summer's growth kept me/ anxious in planted rows, I forgot the river." He ventures away from the fields, down to the river and sees the heron there, living a life alien to the laboring farmer:

a heron--so still that I believe he is a bit of drift hung dead above the water. And then I see the articulation of feather and living form, a brilliance I receive beyond my power to make, as he . ~'(, ):L receives in his great patience !ii• ~\ the river's providence. And then I see that I am seen, admitted, my silence accepted in his silence. Still as I keep, t I might be a tree for all the fear he shows. .

. ' . ;.~:: i~. 32

Suddenly I know I have passed across to a shore where I do not live.

Berry expresses himself accurately. He does not live there, but such a place precisely represents where Snyder wants man to live: in the bounty of nature, as presented in "Oysters," and in simplicity, proclaimed in the.lines, "We could live on this earth/ without clothes or tools!" The heron hunts. Berry has come upon him fishing the river with patience, waiting for his abundance. The farmer anxious over his crops does not live with the same patience, does not wait for but creates his bounty. It is the way of the ~untg~~gathere~ that Snyder wants man to emulate, with --· -- .. -- -- . ·--· . . -~· agriculture providing a support system for man's participa- tion in the food chain, rather than as his mainstay. "I think that ultimately, ideally, in the most poetic and visionary terms, the best economy is a hunting and gathering 49 economy." He realizes, of course, that such an economy remains in the distant future, having come out of a distant past. In the meantime, the ecologically based farm can function as an intermediate step toward an "infinite form" far more radical than individually owned cropland. For Snyder hunting and gathering do not merely provide suste­ nance; they also provide a means of identifying with the rest of Gaia's household:

To hunt means to use your body and sense 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 not only aimed at bringing beasts to their death, but to assist in their birth--to promote fertility.SO

Taking his stand with the primitive hunter as a model, Snyder looks to paleolithic and neolithic man and his still lingering primitive representatives as a source for inspira­ tion and knowledge of "the old ways," which will enable man 33 to stop his post-Ice Age decline and move on beyond civili­ zation. In 1978 Snyder made this statement in his new introduction to Myths & Texts:

Why this going back into the roots and the past, instead of leaping off into the future, I'm sometimes asked. But it's not in time at all that we study our world and ourselves. There's no close or far. We have, simply, the chance to fill out the whole picture now, for the first time in human experience. It is beginning to be possible to look in one wide gaze at all that human beings have been and don~ on the whole planet, as one small part of the web of Gaia the earth-life­ Goddess.

Wendell Berry does not seek so far back in time. Aside from a few references to American Indians in his poetry and an effort to connect his concepts with the Israelites being promised Canaan in his prose (which will be discussed at length in the next chapter), he focuses on the history of the European settlers in North America. He looks to the yeoman farmer, defined by Jeffersonian agrarianism, as the 51 model for emulation. In 1979 he formulated his argument in this way:

the issue of life-long devotion and perseverance in unheroic tasks, and the issue of good workman­ ship or "right livelihood." It can be argued, I believe, that until fairly recently there was simply no need for attention to such issues, for there existed yeoman or peasant or artisan classes .•.. As long as those earth­ keeping classes and their traditions were strong, there was at least the hope that the world would be well used.(GGL,277)

Berry's notion of the yeoman and his notion of the ecologi­ cal farmer who inherits his legacy depends on a postlap­ sarian conception that makes hard labor an essential ingredient of "right livelihood." As Jack Hicks observes: 34

Thus man, particularly the historical white man, lives fragmented since his fall from harmony with nature, divided, condemned .... The farm itself is not a "natural" shape, but .•. a man-attended order, often an attempt by Berry's farmers to heal the geographical and historical scars of their wrong­ headed ancestors.52

Berry's hard working yeoman farmer exists in example so close to the present that one critic interprets his ideal as being essentially a restoration of the "rural community culture" that existed just fifty years ago in Henry County, 53 Kentucky. Clearly, Berry's conception of the right relationship to the land cannot be simplified to a mere return to the "good olddays" on Grandpa's farm. However, such a misinterpretation suggests the degree to which Berry's poetry and prose produce images and ideas locked into the particularities of the land he lives on and the brief history of white settlement and modern agriculture that have shaped that place. Briefly, then, one can characterize these two poets' opposing concepts of place through the following two images. Berry's belief appears as a yeoman farmer laboring on his land, taking time out to walk his grove and worship the Creation. And, Snyder's belief appears as a primitive­ minded man gathering the bounty of nature, cohabitating a climax forest with the other creatures of Gaia's household. Placing Spirituality

"What is important," said a white-bearded Hindu pilgrim as the train pulled into Benares, "is not the object worshipped, but the depth and sincer­ ity of the worship." .... Functioning as a "way," mythology and ritual:­ conduce to a transformation of the individual, disengaging him from his local, historical condi­ tions and leading him toward some kind of inef­ fable experience. Functioning as an "ethnic idea," on the other hand, the image binds the in­ dividual to his family's system of historically conditioned sentiments, activities, and beliefs as a functioning member of a sociological organism.54 (Joseph Campbell)

Value, worth, derives from "right livelihood" which requires a proper relationship to the land, based on a clear 55 concept of place and including a spiritual dimension. So Snyder believes, so Berry believes. To attain such concepts of place as these two poets have developed, one must have a directed life, a way of becoming a whole person integrated 56 in the life/death cycles of the natural world. As the ~ previous chapter demonstrated, Snyder and Berry diverge in their presentations of the proper relationship of man to the land and the parameters of the place they envision for him to achieve his integration with Gaia's household or his re­ integration with the Creation. The direction of their beliefs is reflected in the differing, even opposing, reli~­ gious traditions with which they identify and on which they build for their own spirituality. It is not possible in a brief essay to delineate, much less thoroughly analyze, the

35 36 entire religious and philosophical background which these two poets have drawn on to develop their own beliefs, but it is possible to indicate aspects of this background which directly affect their concepts of place. Both Snyder and Berry were born into and educated with­ in the Judaeo-Christian philosophical and literary tradition of American culture and its public education system. Both rejected Christian religious orthodoxy in favor of more naturalistic beliefs, which can be characterized as Snyder's Gaia and Berry's Creation. Snyder's Gaia, a pagan deity, is a living, self-generating entity, a separate being--the Earth Goddess; while Berry's Creation, a Biblically derived term, exists as a product of some primarycreative act by a pre-existent being. Both sets of beliefs have undergone and continue to undergo changes, but one element clearly reveals itself: Snyder's beliefs have remained outside of and in opposition to the Judaeo-Christian tradition; Berry's beliefs have gradually and more openly returned to that tra­ dition. Neither poet, however, has aligned himself with any 57 institutionalized religious system.

Berry's direction has been toward the Christian sense .} of man's stewardship of the land. In his emphasis of action over ideas--"Action draws the line"--and in the demonstra­ tion of morality rather than the discussion of it, he rejects any "soul-searching" that precedes activity: "I am interested in the relationship of a person to other persons and to place, not in the (to me apocryphal) relationship of 58 a person to him- or herself." Berry also promotes the • sense of rootedness, a demonstration of one's belief in the place where he is fated to live, a cultivation of the soil and of the neighbors of the place in which one finds one­ self. 59 Through this sense of stewardship farming becomes a spiritual activity, an accumulation of grace, of the merits of "right livelihood," through deeds, both agri-cultural and socio-cultural--land and community. His early poetry rarely speaks of "God" or religion 37 except to denounce institutional hypocrisy, as in the poem "Canticle":

.... Money slots in the altar rails can make a jukebox of the world, the mind paying its gnawed coins for the safety of ignorance.(BG,38)

But although the references appear only occasionally, they imply a belief in Christ which surfaces in some of his con­ demnations of hypocrisy, as in "The Design of the House: Ideal and hard Time" in Findings. It also surfaces in a poem like, "The Gy,est'' .i-:m:;• The Broken Ground, where a Christ figure is presented and the narrator considers himself the good Samaritan. Further, the capitalization of God in the poems pertaining to Christ and Christian themes--with an apparent reverence for Christ--in contrast to "The god of the river"--a nature deity symbol which Berry does not capi­ talize--in these early poems suggests some belief in a supreme being, a creator-god, based on the Bible. Berry's emphasis, though, rests not on a creator but on the creation, the earth in its natural state. Poems like "Grace" in Openings present the idea of a unity between the cycle of the earth and the will of a god. To align oneself through a relationship to the land, through imitating nature and practicin~ agriculture, is to align oneself with a spir­ itual goal. Berry elaborates the idea of imitation in "Window Poems":

He said: If man, who has killed his brothers and hated himself, is made in the image of God, then surely the bloodroot, wild phlox, trillium and May apple .are more truly made in God's image, for they have desired to be no more than they are, and they have spared each other. Their future . is undiminished by their past.(Op,54) 38

For Berry the way of nature is the way of God, and the practicing of agriculture on the farm can imitate nature and revere this way through nurturing and safeguarding, caring and revitalizing. Yet, Berry faces a contradiction because, although the farmer's cycle of planting and har­ vesting may follow the natural cycle of the seasons, farming does not actually imitate nature. A farmer can never achieve such fecundity, nor can he afford such profligacy. He must hoard his seeds, nurse his stock back from illness, and constantly compel the soil to yield to him crops of his choosing. Berry does not resolve this contradiction, but tends to circumvent -:l.:t by focusing on the issue of revitalizatio-n:. Man needs to work at revitalizing and nurturing because, unlike the trillium or wild phlox, he has been diminished by his past. "The Morning's News" and "The Wages of History" in Farming: A Handbook express this belief. By revitaliz­ ing the land through practicing a caring, nurturing form of agriculture, Berry believes man can achieve grace and atone for the sins of previous generations against the land. Even though he defines this atonement in a naturalistic way as "at-one-ment" with the earth, his own poems and arguments develop it as an act of restitution and penance for man's past failures and the individual's own failings. From the Judaeo-Christian tradition, then, despite whatever institutional aspects he rejects, Berry adopts the belief that man lives in a postlapsarian world. He accepts r at least a secular equivalent of original sin--the living must make restitution for the sins of preceding generations. He defines this postlapsarian state in both naturalistic and Christian terms:

It was his passion to be true to the condition of the Fall-- to live by the sweat of his face, to e~ his bread, assured that cost was paid. · 0 r: ' rr,,· r~,., (.l 39

And in the same poem, Berry identifies nature as being a part of God: "The Creator is divided in Creation/ for the joys of recognition."(Hh,12) This more open Christian presentation of the Creation (not capitalized until his more recent poems) appears most frequently in his last two books of verse. Such a stance also appears in his essays earlier than in his poems, and is reinforced by his latest collection, The Gift of Good Land.

Berry focuses in "A Native Hill" on the hypocrisy and de~ structiveness of the "schism between body and soul, Heaven and earth," because "churchly formulas" have encouraged denigrating the importance of the world as part of getting to heaven. Berry, however, does not deny the existence-of a Christian heaven: "I can only imagine it and desire it in terms of what I know of the earth."(RE,101-2) And, in "Discipline and Hope," he unites the role of farmer with the Christian dogma that man is made in the ''likeness of God, the greater husbandman." He claims this description repre­ sents "an ancient system of analogies ... of farmer and field, of husband and wife, of the world and God."(RE,213) The earth, then, is not sacred in its own right, but only sacred in so far as it represents the "Creator," or contains him within its aspects; just as the land may be fertile, but is not productive except to the degree to which the farmer works it--an idea of Berry's analyzed in the previous section. Although Berry verges on an acceptance of certain basic Christian tenets, he is not quite at ease. In "A Secular Pilgrimage," written only a few years before the publication of "Discipline and Hope," he defines his use of the word "religious" to exclude such beliefs: "And I will never use the word here to refer to any of those revealed certainties that are so large a part of the lore of the various churches. 61 He mainly objects to the otherworldliness of religions and adopts his concept of "at-one-ment" from John Collis, who uses this idea in order to return to a primitive 40

~'intimation of the Divine, which will link us again with 62 animism." One finds, however, no animism in Berry's writings. Rather, one finds this sort of ambivalence or vacillation between a naturalistic faith and fundamental Judaeo-Christian beliefs. In "Discipline and Hope" Berry links Collis's pagan and animistic spirituality with Christian analogies. It would seem that Berry was involved in an internal struggle over the nature of his spiritual beliefs in the early 1970s, torn between a kind of nine­ teenth century Nature faith and Christianity. With the publication of A Part and The Wheel and his new book of essays, this inner spiritual conflict appears to resolve itself in favor~of'''2Jfudaeo-Christian doctrine. In A Part three poems stand out: "To The Holy Spirit," which ends "By Thy wide grace show me Thy narrow gate"; "The Way of Pain," which speaks of Abraham's sacrifice and the Cruci­ fixion; and, "We Hho Prayed and Wept," which ends with the lines, "We have failed Thy grace./ Lord, I flinch and pray,/ send Thy necessity."(AP,28-32) The overt Christianity of these poems, as well as others in The Wheel, is reinforced by the title essay in The Gift of Good Land. In This essay Berry sets out "to attempt a Biblical argument for ecologi­ cal and agricultural responsibility."(GGL,267) Here, as elsewhere, he criticizes Christianity because it "is not earthly enough." But he also attacks Lynn White Jr.'s essay, "The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis," which argues that the Biblical tradition has been one of the 63 causes of modern civilization's ecological destruction. • In attempting to repudiate this essay Berry does not use the Bible metaphorically, but accepts the idea that "the Promised Land is a divine gift to a fallen people." He argues:

In the Bible's long working out of the understand­ ing of this gift, we may find the beginning--and, by implication, the end--of the definition of an ecol~gical discipline.(GGL,269) 41 ln this essay, then, Berry demonstrates an acceptance of the Judaeo-Christian concept of a fall from grace, and an accep­ tance of the Bible as a source for a spiritual-philosophical approach to the proper relationship to the land. He also designates that land as belonging to Jehovah: "God too loves material things; He invented them."(GGL,278) Berry seeks to reform and revive the Judaeo-Christian tradition through an accurate reinterpretation that would make it more "earthly," and he would demonstrate this rein­ terpretation through proper stewardship of the good land given to fallen man by the Creator. Berry's increasing emphasis on the "Fall," on atonement and restitution for ecological sins, 6n"tl:lec.notion of grace, and finally, on the Bible as an authoritative source of spiritual guidance all indicate that his definition of "religious" has changed since he wrote "A Secular Pilgrimage." It has changed in that he has moved away from Collis's "intimation of the Divine" and ideas of animistic nature worship back toward divine revelations of the Old Testament God and New Testa­ ment Christ.

When one turns to Snyder and attempts to chart his direction in the same manner as charting Berry's, one encounters a web of paths rather than a single path depart­ ing from and returning to one tradition. Rather than toward stewardship, Snyder moves toward an immersion in natural process, a union with the land in all its aspects, wild and cultivated. 64 This course inclu~es an early repudiation of the Judaeo-Christian tradition, not merely a rejection of its hypocritical elements. Conveniently, Snyder also makes explicit reference to Lynn White Jr.'s essay, but he upholds it as an example illustrating the need to overthrow the myth of the Old Testament god, "the Jehovah Imperator God-figure, a projection of the gathered power of anti-natural social forces."(EHH,123-4) His childhood contact with the wilder­ ness and the non-Hestern Amerindian cultures of Oregon 42 helped him to consider the possibility that a man does not have to accept the tradition into which he is born:

When I went to college I was bedeviled already by the question of these contradictions of living in and supposedly being a member of a society that was destroying its own ground .... ! began to per­ ceive that maybe it was all of Western culture that was off the track.(RWI,94)

The American culture's relationship to the land, then, provided Snyder not only with a basis for rejecting Western culture and its religious tradition, but also a criterion for evaluating other traditions that might contribute to a new culture for America--one in which spiritual beliefs would consider the land and its plants and animals as sacred. Amerindian tribes provided Snyder with just such an example. In college he maintained direct contact with Amer­ indian groups through anthropological work and supplemented this with formal study. However, he soon discovered that the kind of study he wished to undertake of the spiritual beliefs of Amerindian tribes was not available to a non­ Amerindian: "Its content, perhaps, is universal, but you must be a Hopi to follow the Hopi way."(RWI,17) At the same time, his limited immersion provided Snyder with a solid spiritual-philosophic base for the next phase of his work, the inward journey of formal Zen training. Two works provide a detailed presentation of the beliefs developed by Snyder during and immediately after his undergraduate study, the years before he departed for,Japan. He Who Hunted Birds in His Father's Village, his bachelor's thesis, presents an analysis of a Haida Amerindian myth. In it he demonstrates his working out of the relationships be­ tween Amerindian cultures and ancient shamanism--modern and historical primitivism. He also develops his belief in the relationship between shaman as visionary and myth preserver in primitive cultures and the role of the modern poet as creator of new cultural myths and preserver of the ancient ~rimitive traditions in the present. Myths & Texts presents 'these understandings as well as Snyder's linkages among :ancient shamanism, Amerindian primitiyism, and Hindu­ Buddhist beliefs in a poetic vision quest. Nathaniel Tarn claims in his preface to He Who Hunted Birds in His Father's Village that "The basic themes of Snyder's work, many of which appear in filigree in the thesis, are all set out in Myths & Texts.''(m.JH,xvi) Directly from the Haida culture he studied, Snyder adopts animism as one of his own beliefs. He also upholds the Haida matrilineal system as one attribute linking them to an ancient system of goddess worship pre-dating Hellenism and the Judaeo-Christian tradition. In Snyder's study,--the­ Amerindians form part of a nexus of myth-united cultures stretching from Samothrace to pre-Aryan India to the Ameri­ cas. He also sees vestiges of this cultural unity surfacing continuously among the patrilineal, male-god systems that replaced it (In Earth House Hold and interviews Snyder unites these vestiges in the idea of The Great Subculture with a 40,000 year history[EHH,114-15]). To the latter patrilineal, male-god cultures, Snyder ascribes the same separation of body and mind, man and nature, reason and spirit that Berry spoke of. Essentially, Snyder synthesizes a series of anthropological, psychological, and mythological theories drawn from Jung, Campbell, Cassirer, Kerenyi, Frazer and others into a single theory following Robert Graves' White Goddess argument into a primitive cultural- 65 sp~r~tua. . 1 arc h e t ype. On the basis of a belief in the underlying mythological unity among ancient and primitive cultural tradi~ions, Snyder sees a relationship between the vision quests and shamanist practices of primitive cultures and Zen, indicat­ ing that as he turned toward the study of Buddhism he had already formed a larger philosophical and spiritual frame­ work from which to approach it. Buddhism would not serve as merely a replacement for his Amerindian studies or an 44 alternative to Judaeo-Christian beliefs, but another aspect of his study of an ongoing spiritual tradition connecting modern man with his ancient brothers--a tradition requiring new developments to enable it to move from the position of subculture back to main culture. And, within this revitali­ zation the poet, modern descendant of the shaman, must play a vital role. Amerindian tribal spiritualism and Buddhism, then, form two different spiritual paths within a single larger tradi­ tion. Amerindian tribalism demonstrates a direct cultural link, while Buddhism demonstrates a tortuous philosophical tradition wending its way through several national cultures and undergoing various tram:fformations into different schools and sects. Nevertheless, Snyder believes that Zen, Tantrism, Avatamsaka, Taoism, and other offshoots can all be traced back to Vajrayana, which he claims "has traditional continuous links that go back to the Stone Age."(RWI,176;EH H,34-5) Snyder includes gnostic and Christian secret soci­ eties within this tradition as well; but these, like the Amerindian tribes, are relatively inaccessible or extinct and incapable of acting as the vehicle for a "new social mythology."(HWH,112;N&T,viii) Snyder went to Japan because Buddhism might provide that vehicle:

I knew that Zen monasteries in Japan would be more open to me than the old Paiute or Shoshone Indians in eastern Oregon, because they have to be open-­ that's what Nahayana Buddhism isaiT about.(RWI,95)

In an interview Snyder explained that Hinduism and Buddhism have made significant contributions to primitive cultural beliefs. In particular, "There is nothing in primitive cul­ tures that is at all equivalent to Nahayana philosophy or logic."(RWI,15) Snyder views the religious disciplines of the Orient as providing an organized approach to the study of the 'powers achieved through meditation and yoga, powers 45

wielded by ancient shamans but never understood or handed down by them in the manner of religious learned traditions, such as Tantrism or Zen. Snyder never, however, intended to go to Japan to be­ come a Zen monk aligned with a particular sect. He always intended to return to the United States, but "It wasn't just returning--the next step of my own practice was to be here." (RWI,99) This practice would be nothing short of promoting the formation of a new culture:

What we need to do now is to take the great intellectual achievement of the Mahayana Buddhists and bringit_back to a community style of life which~ isc~no·t"'~hecessarily monastic. Some Native American groups are a good example.(RWI,16)

Some of his essays in Earth House Hold, such as "Why Tribe," also speak to this task. And for Snyder himself it would mean imitating Padmasambhava who took Buddhism to Tibet. Nathaniel Tarn suggests Padmasambhava as a model for Snyder's "syncretism" and his goal of bringing Buddhism to the United States and amalgamating it with primitive 66 beliefs. Snyder had such a goal in mind when he left for Japan, :j and he had also determined the means for achieving that goal: poetry. He presents this belief in Myths & Texts: "I sit without thoughts by the log road/ Hatching a new myth." Significantly, he includes these lines in the section subtitled, "first shaman song."(M&T,19) It is not possible 'to adequately discuss Myths & Texts in a few pages; its complexity denies such a synopsis. Julian Gitzen captures the interconnections woven through the book when he observes that

Buddhist compassion and Indian empathy are avail­ able as instruments for restoring Diana's rule while bringing harmony to our lives and to our natural surroundings.b7 ~,,'. ; . '

' l;' 46 Jir

Here Diana's rule represents the Triple Goddess and a reverence for all of nature, animals and plants. Later, Snyder clarifies this mythological symbol through employing Gaia, the earth mother, in place of Diana.(OW,39) But here, Diana serves an additional purpose because defense of the goddess represents an opposition to Christianity.(OW,13) The epigraph from Acts refers to Christianity's threat to the worship of Diana, and in the first section, "Logging," Snyder quotes Exodus: "But ye shall destroy their altars, break their images, and cut down their groves."(M&T,3) In several places in the book Snyder attacks the rapacity of 68 the Christian tradition. But he also points out that this . ' '1::radi t:i()n of' ~xploi ta tion and destruction is not limited ,to, the West, but has also occurred in China and Japan.(M&T,3-4) In other words, all the societies which have departed from the primitive worship of the goddess share responsibility for the cutting down of the sacred groves, the loss of a proper relationship to the land based on recognition of its sacredness. The vision quest of Myths & Texts not only describes the separation of man from nature as a result of following false traditions, but also presents the spiritual elements needed to form a hew culture that can end this separation. Myths & Texts emphasizes that this separation repre­ sents a f'als~ dichotomy which can be overcome by a new con­ sciousness that will lead to a new lifestyle. It results from a false separation of myths and t:exts--"sy:mbols and sense-impressions"--which primarily requires a new vision I that recognizes their genuine unity. The first step in this process, then, is the undertaking of an inward journey, not an outward one. The outward journey, contact with wilder­ ness and the land, can provide the evidence of the reality-­ the texts--of man's life on the planet, but only the inward journey can reveal that reality is composed of both myths and texts in an equal interpenetrating relationship. Concept of place and practical relationship to the ·land 47 form an identity. Levi-Strauss summarized such a relation­ ship in Myth and Meaning:

If we are led to believe that what takes place in our mind is something not substantially or fundamentally different from the basic phenomenon of life itself, and if we are led to the feeling that there is not this kind of gap which is impossible to overcome between mankind on the one hand and all other living beings--not only animals, but also plants--on the other, then perhaps we will reach more wisdo~~ let us say, than we think we are capable of.

In The Back Country and in Mountains and Rivers Without End, particularly the section "Journeys,~'' Snyder further develops the vision quest, increasingly presenting 7 it in terms of Zen enlightenment. ° Connected with this, Snyder tends to eschew Buddhist teleology in favor of the belief of Zen mysticism that "it's already all a Buddha right now, if you can just see it .... It's the eternal 71 moment. The key to the new culture lies in the stripping away of illusions, the achievement of enlightenment, rather than a long process of gaining merit through exemplary acts, as some Hindu and Buddhist sects believe, or the long process of penance for "the wages of history" that Berry believes in. This enlightenment will break down the arti­ ficial barriers that man imagines exist between him and nature, and that recognition will provide the basis for an accurate concept of place, Gaia's household, and the working out of a proper relationship to the land utilizing all the learning of the Great Subculture. The preserver and spokes­ man for that subculture in the present must be the poet­ shaman:

The shaman speaks for wild animals, the spirits of plants, the spirits of mountains, of watersheds .. •. In the shaman's world, wilderness and the unconscious become analogous: he who knows one and is at ease in one, will be at home in the other.(OW,12) 48

Jamake Highwater, in The Primal mind, states that "it is evident to thoughtful people ·that Western society no longer has a viable functioning myth. It therefore has no 72 basis to affirm life. Snyder and Berry would both agree with this claim. In the work of both poets, they have not only sought to represent their concepts of place and relationships to the land but also to imbue these with the power of myth. The degree to which Snyder has consciously approached this task can be evidenced by his intense concern with the cultural role of myth from the time of his bache­ lor's thesis on, the continuing concern demonstrated in his many interviews. Berry s consdi()usness·of mythopoeia does not come through as clearly as Snyder's, but his efforts in this direction are reflected throughout his poetry and prose. Also reflected there is a searching, an inconsisten­ cy, and an ambivalence toward the myths he was developing. In both cases the spiritual beliefs go beyond a relationship to the land, but their key elements bear heavily on the sense of that relationship. Berry believes that man lives in a postlapsarian world. "The Fall" exists as a central mythic element and outlines the character of man's historical fate. For Berry, man is separated from nature, as a result of this fall, and can only heal that rift through a long, slow process of resti­ tutive labor. Only by "the sweat of his face" can man achieve "at-one-ment" with nature again. The achievement of grace comes primarily through productive work that respects, replenishes, and rectifies the land. At the same time, man cannot merely allow the land to return to a climax state because he would have no means of doing penance. As Berry moves back into the Judaeo-Christian tradition entering into harmony with its essential concept of sin, he increasingly sees the Creation as an act of God rather than an entity unto itself, of which man is a part. Rather, man is also a creation of God, who has received the land as a 49

gift, and through properly working it can prove himself worthy of some grace, or perhaps even reward, by providing the Creator of both man and nature "the joys of recog­ nition." In "The Gift of Good Land," Berry has moved to the position of attempting not to create a new nature myth, but to revitalize the elements of the Judaeo-Christian tradition to be found within the Bible that can justify and provide the spiritual dimension for the relationship to the land he envisions for man. Snyder does not believe in any fall from grace that requires repentance or restitution. The function of labor,

of ex~~rience, is to plac;:=] him back into contact with the reality of the earth, .parficularly in its wilderness state, where he can recognize the interprenetrating unity that exists among all of nature's elements, including himself. The separation of man and nature exists only so long as man believes in it. Because he does not know himself he cannot know nature. To come to terms with either is to come to terms with both, since they are the same. In The Old Ways, Snyder quotes Chan-jan: "Who then is 'animate' and who 'inanimate?' Within the Assembly of the Lotus, all are present without division."(OW,9) Snyder early concluded that Western culture, all of it, needed to be replaced by the primitive cultures it has sought to destroy, but the Amerindian cultures and the ancient shaman cultures could not function on their own as inclusive philosophies. In studying Buddhism he found a religious traditrion of learning that was in basic harmony with primitive beliefs and could be synthesized into a new mythopoeia. To represent the proper relationship to the land he envisions, Snyder is attempting to revitalize a mythic tradition that will include the spiritual identities of man and nature, mind and matter which have existed in shamanistic practices and have been philosophically

~.· expounded in Buddhist metaphysics. i~:

. oc' . . .. ' ' ' l:- Man and Spirituality in Place

Art is a way of seeing, and what we see in art helps to define what we understand by the word "reality." We do not all see the same things .... The complex process by which the artist transforms the act of seeing into a vision of the world is one of the consummate mysteries of the arts--one of the reasons that art is inseparable from religion and philosophy for most tribal peoples. This act of envisioning and then engendering a work of ~rt represents an important and powerful ritual. 7 (Jamake Highwater)

Snyder and Berry share the belief that "art is insepa­ rable from religion and philosophy," even though they may not agree on its efficacy. Given that both poets unite philosophy and art, spirituality and action, life and place, a single poem may contain their basic beliefs, sufficient to explain their positions on man's relationship to the land-­ both in terms of conceptions of place and the necessary spirituality for inhabiting that place. Selections from Clearing provide a good set of poems for analyzing Berry's beliefs. He wrota these poems in the early 1970s based on his experience of reclaiming land adjacent to his own farm, land which he bought from a dis­ appointed developer. The book consists of seven long poems, three of which will be considered here: "The Clearing," "From the Crest," and "Reverdure." By the time of the writing of these poems, Berry had already committed himself to farming and so enters the poems autobiographically as a farmer actively changing the landscape (rather than as an

so 51

observer as in Openings), a persona consistently present in his last five books of poetry as well as a majority of his essays. As for Snyder, "Bubbs Creek Haircut," the opening poem of Six Sections from Mountains and Rivers Without End, con­ centrates his essential beliefs. This poem marks the begin­ ning of a still ongoing effort first conceived around 1956, although the first published sections did not appear until 74 1961. Bob Steuding's book, Gary Snyder, devotes a chapter to providing the history of Mountains and Rivers and some initial analysis, particularly in regard to the influence of Buddhism and Japanese art forms--especially haiku and the . . .. 75 ·· No··play. Yet, perhaps because the work remains unfinished and subject to ongoing revision--even the parts already 76 published--little critical analysis has been attempted. "Bubbs Creek Haircut" can be divided into five main parts: preparation, journey out, enlightenment, return, and epilogue. On the narrative level, the entire poem presents a series of flashbacks grouped around travelling, with the trip up Bubbs Creek providing the main action of the poem. Weaving events and recollections together in the poem, Snyder traces the stages of a vision quest. Through jour­ neying into the Sierras the traveller experiences a moment of enlightenment, "a point" of identity between man and nature. This awareness enables him to resolve the tensions which initially required him to make the journey. Place and spirituality figure prominently in "Bubbs Creek Haircut," the former in terms of an urban-wilderness dichotomy with the traveller leaving the city and entering the wilderness for purification, and the latter in terms of the experience as a vision quest celebrated in explicitly Hindu-Buddhist terms. The first two stanzas of the poem present the period ..k of preparation. "Bubbs Creek Haircut" begins

'" See Appendix A for the complete text of the poem. ,. k.'~t ,! :~

' ,,' 52 \!I

High ceilingd and the double mirrors, the calendar a splendid alpine scene--scab barber-­ in stained white barber gown, alone, sat down, old man A summer fog gray San Francisco day I walked right in. on Howard street haircut a dollar twenty-five. Just clip it close as it will go. "now why you want your hair cut back like that." --well I'm going to the Sierras for a while Bubbs Creek and on across to upper Kern. he wriggled clippers, "Well I been up there, I built the cabin up at Cedar Grove. In nineteen five." old haircut smell.

Snyder immediately intercwines Bubbs Creek, the traveller's destination, with the haircut. In this opening stanza the room comes first. The high ceiling connects in imagery with the calendar's picture suggesting a cathedral-like rever­ ence, not to be felt in the barber shop itself but in the awful grandeur of nature depicted by the calendar. Snyder describes the mountains at this point as only a distant abstract image, while he describes the shop and the barber as a concrete presence: "scab barber," not just a dirty and old man but a non-union loner; and the shop has a high ceiling, a calendar, and double mirrors, but is also empty. These double mirrors stand out as both a descriptive aspect and as a symbol. Snyder concerns himself with reflections, physical and mental, the first example being the traveller reflecting the old man's youth, as the reader learns in the second half of the stanza. Snyder emphasizes the barber's age, appearance, and aloneness. Then, in the following line he locates the scene: "A summer fog gray San Francisco day"--a far cry from the splendor of the mountains. The shop, the city, and the old man all heighten the contradiction between the present place and Cedar Grove and Bubbs Creek in the moun­ tains. The second half of the stanza begins with the traveller's demand for a haircut shaved down to the skull. 53

The old man questions him, and the two suddenly link: the younger and the older, strangers a moment ago, are now con­ nected through a common relationship with the wilderness of the mountains. As a mirror reflection, the barber, having been where the traveller wants to go and having built a cabin and participated in l{fe in the wilderness, has pre­ pared the way for the younger man's journey in a historical sense and a practical one. And now, through the act of barbering he will prepare him ritualistically for the journey itself. In this stanza, Snyder also concerns himself with dimensions of time. The present solidifies as a day when haircuts. cost $1. 25. '±tie calendar scene, though on a tablet of time, stands out as timeless in its representation of mountains without end. And the last two elements of the stanza focus on time: "'In nineteen five.'/ old haircut smell.'' The latter line remains vague and indefinite. It

does not nece~sarily describe the shop. It may describe one of the memories the poet has as he recollects its image for the purpose of the poem--near the very end, "out of the memory of smoking pine," implies that the entire poem is being recollected. Although the reference remains ambigu­ ous, it changes the import of "nineteen five," rendering it, like the smell, part of the near past and, like the smell's persistence, carrying over into the present. Other aspects of this near past enter the stanza in that the barber's remarks suggest that the cabin still exists and that the Sierras carry ,symbolic value for him as well as the travel­ ler, though not necessarily identical symbolism. However, the sharpness of the barber's memory and his choice of calendars suggest that he still identifies with the wilder­ ness to which the younger man is headed. F: ' In the second stanza, Goodwill becomes a key term. 77 The first two lines establish an ambiguity, goodwill being

both a second-hand shop and a feeling, the latter meanin~ heightened by the line, "where I came out." Where as 54 opposed to when serves to emphasize where as a state of mind (where his head's at, in Sixties slang). As the traveller moves through the Goodwill store, he begins identifying with and then personifying the objects within it. They become "emblems of the past--too close." This must refer to their weight upon the traveller's mind. The use of 1910 for dating the coffeepot places its "life" within the same period of time as the barber's building of the cabin, per­ haps implying that the near past that troubles him in the store dates back to the first decades of this century when America transformed itself from a predominantly rural popu­ lation to an urban population. This link also suggests that the obsolescence of things in modern society is not limited to inanimate objects, since the barber, like the coffeepot, waits alone for someone to make use of him but "people seldom buy." Snyder describes the Goodwill proprietor cryptically as "The Haster of the limbo drag-legged." he plays with the word limbo as dance and as a place of powerless waiting. A cripple can't dance and a crippled mind can't soar, can't climb the mountains. This master is also "King of Hell," reinforcing the Christian Limbo imagery. This "king" would render the "emblems of the past" merely objects with a price. The fetishism of commodities, symbol of the commer­ ciality of the cities, stands over the traveller attempting to hobble him from beginning his journey. This intensifies the tension building throughout the stanza. His entering the store begins as "A search for a sweater, and a stroll," ' but quickly becomes a painful experience of being assailed by these "things" left to rot because they no longer serve man's use. This treatment of the "things" of this "Good­ will" world reflect urban man's treatment of the land and the mentality of disposability. This "stroll" also inter­ twines the issue of spiritual development with the physical journey into the mountains through emphasizing the turmoil in the traveller's mind as he prepares 'to set out. 55

The traveller makes another connection in the Goodwill store: the chair. He says, "The sag ass't rocker will have to make it now. Alone." The barber stood in his shop alone and he made the journey into the wilderness; can the travel­ ler? The last line of the stanza states this as a neces­ sity. The traveller is struggling with understanding and decisions in this stanza. Mental reflection dominates the description of events; whereas, in the first stanza this relation was reversed with physical description dominating the narrative recollections. The symbol of double mirrors, introduced in the very beginning of the preparation part of the poem, foreshadows the role of reflection in the process of the traveller's journey. This mirror symbolism~also-c functions structurally, as Snyder indicated to Ekbert Faas, with the "master" as opposite to the barber, and the second stanza as opposite to the first in terms of which type of 78 reflection is emphasized. The second stanza provides other mirror reflections of the first in that the prepara­ tion for abandoning things signified by the head shaving is opposed by the traveller wanting to cling to the things in the shop, a clinging which would keep him in limbo. These opposites accumulate into a tension represented by the urban-wilderness dichotomy of the traveller's San Francisco, junk-surrounded location and his clean, Sierra destination, with the former vivid and concrete before him in the shop and the store, and the latter distant and abstract in the calendar and mere names for places. The journey out begins with stanza three but does not • divide up neatly into stanzas. It carries over through the fourth into the beginning of the fifth, which also contains the moment of enlightenment. Snyder organizes this part in relation to the entire poem by duplicating the juxtaposition of event and reflection seen in the first two stanzas. The third stanza describes the action of the trip into the moun­ tains, ~hile the fourth stanza and the first part of the fifth present recollections of other trips. He internally' 56

organizes the journey out by altitude with the traveller climbing from nearly sea level San Francisco to twelve thousand feet, camping at Cedar Grove on the way up. Snyder has the traveller, then, both going out to the wilderness and coming up into it--altitude providing vision as he rises . 79 a b ove t h e c~ty. The third stanza contrasts the increasing clearness of mountains to the fogginess of the city, the coughing car to the cedar groves. In the process the now barefoot traveller sloughs off the unnecessary just as he sloughed off his hair. Snyder's next stanza continues the contrasts by recollecting another haircut experience, after which the traveller also went- t"o~:c:f'~o'odwi:l~ store~ It, however, was tied up with St. Vincent de Paul and Salvation Army stores, with these three stores representing different religious ideologies. Also, the reference to racial segregation in the stanza speaks of the attempt by society to divide people by appearance: "Sat half an hour before they told me/ white men use the other side.'' Instead of establishing a communi­ cative connection as in the first haircut, the segregation involved with this one emphasizes the prevention of communi­ cation by civilization's erecting of artificial barriers based on racism and competing religious traditions. The long fifth stanza continues the discussion of clothes begun in the fourth. Out of the bad experience recollected in that stanza, the traveller ends up with some clothes, the last piece bloodstained, unclean. Recollection continues and another piece of clothing, a green hat, enters the narrative in contrast to the bloodstained jacket. This jacket's "birdblood stain" suggests a destructive alienation from nature, while the hat exemplifies small but essential connections between the traveller and other people-"--"Green hat got a ride (of that more later)"--and later serves the same role between the traveller and nature in the return part of the poem. The connections between people symbolized by the green hat stand in opposition to the separation of 57

people described in the previous stanza. The traveller finally arrives at Bubbs Creek, not a grove for rest but a trail, along which he hikes until he reaches "the trail crew tent in a scraggly.grove of creek­ side lodgepole pine." Once more the poem speaks of a grove, but this time a bare, sparse one providing only essential cover in the mountain wilderness--a wilderness very similar to the one described in Riprap as well as The Back 80 Country. The barber's Cedar Grove and the Bubbs Creek grove mirror each other in terms of resting places, but with an essential difference: the traveller has gained a higher altitude and with a tent instead of a cabin has moved farther -frortr'''any im:ft:atiori·of or connection with the city. Not the cedar but the lodgepole pine predominates here, the great survivor whose seedcones withstand fire, only opening in the heat of the ashes. Snyder's use of this recurring symbol in his poetry, as well as the symbol of the grove, strongly suggests that this concrete description also func­ tions as a symbol for spiritual rebirth. The traveller has arrived at a place of wilderness farther removed from the city than even Cedar Grove. He has traversed the extremes of the urban-wilderness dichoto­ my, leaving all vestiges of the city behind and come to a place where he could experience a vision such as that moment of understanding experienced in "Above Pate Valley" (RR,9)--a vision enabling him to resolve the tension and conflict expressed in the opening stanzas of the poem. Because of the natural sacredness of this location in the I wilderness, the potential for vision exists whether or not the traveller actively seeks it. But the trailcrew camp

is merely a way station on a continuing journey and, ~here­ fore~ he must further immerse himself in nature even re­ moved from so small a community as the trail crew. "If you see McCool on the other trailcrew over there/ ... -: tell him Moorehead says to go to hell." In his brief visit to the Bubbs Creek camp, the traveller becomes a messenger 58 between the two trailcrew communities. This event binds his destination to a return to community. As messenger he con­ tinues through switchbacks to a half-iced-over lake--a contradictory image combining motion and rest, frozen, dead, still water and lapping, living, flowing water. Snyder heightens the contradiction by contrasting dead boulders with living trout: "its sterile boulder bank/ but filled with leaping trout," followed by a colon. The concrete specific dialectic leads to an abstract recognition return­ ing to the double mirrors:

reflections wobble in the "m:lngJing c,:i,_rcles always spreading out the ciazy web of wavelets makes sense seen from high above. the realm of fallen rock. a deva world of sorts--it's high it is a view that few men see, a point

The lake forms one mirror reflecting the world above including man and "empty sky, and also reflecting in its "web of wavelets" the universe's cycle-of-life circles always in motion. The traveller's mind forms the other mirror reflecting the "sense" of the world, its unity and interdependence of sky and land, ice and fire, man and nature, through his recognition of "a view that few men see." The lake marks the turning point in this journey: the moment of recognition when the traveller brings the contra­ diction of the "too close past"--the world's, the culture's, • his own--into harmony with living his own life within the world, his individual path that has taken him up Bubbs Creek. Through his reflection on the lake's reflection, the traveller realizes an inner spiritual freedom through a loss of self-consciousness and a dropping away of the burden of man's brief history on the planet as a source of concern and guilt. Snyder then thrusts out 'a metaphor: "The boulder in 59 my mind's eye :ls a chair," returning the reader to the Good­ will and its Master-King of Hell, asking why the man is crippled. The obstacle to that man's unburdening, the same obstacle that confronted the traveller, lies within himself. A person's own mind is the chair, is the boulder, is the "sty" blinding the mind's eye. An eye never sees itself unless reflected in a mirror. The pattern of life dia­ grammed upon the water finally makes sense once the obstacle of self-consciousness and its attendant clinging to things is removed. Snyder follows this complex presentation of self­ realization with a definition of freedom:

or is it a paradise of sorts, thus freed From acting out the function of some creator/carpenter Thrust on a thing to think he made, himself, an object always "chair" sinister ritual histories

A chair does not become an object "made by a carpenter, rather, the carpenter enters into a relationship with the wood in which they mutually transform each other. 81 But this awareness of interconnectedness becomes lost in "sini­ ster ritual histories," referring back to the religious tangle of stores mentioned in the fourth stanza. And in this context, "creator/carpenter" certainly alludes to the Jehovah-Christ god of the Judaeo-Christian tradition. Here, as in Myths & Texts, Snyder feels compelled to not merely reject but to repudiate the Judaeo-Christian tradition in order to clear the way for man's renewed recognition of his identity with nature and the interdependence of all life in Gaia's household. To clarify this idea, Snyder juxtaposes the "creator/carpenter" misconception to "goodwill," that concept of communication and identity first introduced in relation to the barber, enriched through the purification of the journey out, and reinforced by the green hat truck ride story, the messenger role between trailcrews, and the rides 60 p '

with his friends. The next stanza celebrates the event of enlightenment through its imitation of flowing water, the life force of the lake that interrelates with the leaping trout, which by extension represent all living things. Snyder also intro- duces explicit references to Hindu-Buddhist mythology and spiritual concepts of the meaning of enlightenment, which will be discussed in detail separately. Following this stanza, Snyder returns the reader to the concrete by rein­ troducing the green hat. This signals the beginning of the return part o£ the traveller's journey. The green hat is used twice in this long stanza, first in the story of the truck ride in"which the driver remembers him because of the hat, and second in the story of the fifty

"------"me-s-E[u-i-~ee-s-G-1-Y-s-t-g_r-i-ng-on-the-br_im_. __'Ihe_t_w_o___e_o_nn_e_c t ions ,, ______between the traveller and other people and between the traveller and other creatures, mirror each other as essen-

tial relationships in the traveller~s new awareness of identity. Also in this process of return, the traveller fulfills his mission of communication between the trail crews. McCool, of course, replies to Moorehead, "KISS MY ASS," insuring an ongoing messenger role. The parenthetical at the end assures the reader of the traveller's spiritual success:

(on Whitney hair on end hail stinging barelegs in the blast of wind but yodel off the summit echoes clean)

The "hair on end" echoes an earlier line in the celebratory stanza, "hair tingling static as the lightning lashes," thus duplicating the same poetic technique used by Snyder in the conclusion of Myths & Texts. Section Seventeen of "Burning" has one stanza subtitled, "the text," which describes the actual event--a small forest fire; the next stanza, sub­ titled "the myth," describes the event symbolically and in- cludes the lines, "The cloud mutters/ The mountains are your 61 mind." (M&T, 53). In a later introduction to that volume Snyder explained the title: "it also means the two sources of human knowledge--symbols and sense-impressions."(M&T,vii) The parenthetical, then, concluding the return passage pro­ vides the sense-impressions of the traveller's realization of vision, while the celebratory stanza provides the symbolic representation of it in "Bubbs Creek Haircut." The two stanzas mirror each other as well as exist interdepen­ dently as two equally vaild summations of the same event. The parenthetical contains additional mirroring in that the yodel imitates with sound what the mirror does with sight. The yodel also represents a form of communication with the traveller singing to;;~the 'mountains and it being "clean" reflects both the purity of the wilderness and the travel-

1 er ' s own pur~. f"~cat~on. . 82 From the parenthetical, the poem enters into epilogue: "All this came after/ Purity of the mountains and good­ wills.'' The wilderness and the spiritual breakthrough are linked together, and the spirituality of goodwill requires the same kind of relationship among people as achieved by man among nature. Snyder reinforces this connection by images of the "diamond drill of racing icemelt waters" and "the garbage acres burning at the bay": mountain and city, wilderness and society indisputably connected in the travel­ ler's mind. He further reinforces this through the line, "the girl who was the skid-row/ Cripple's daughter." The only girl mentioned in the poem was Sarasvati, consort of Shiva, suggesting that the "King of Hell" and the god of the "lotus throne" also exist in identity. In other words, 83 .;tL ~s. a 11 one rea 1.~ t y. And, all of this came "out of the memory .... Chair turns and in the double mirror waver .... 'your Bubbs Creek haircut, boy.'" A 360-degree turn of the barber's chair, a double mirror reflection recognizes the ritual of preparation as essential to the initiation of the journey. The double mirror takes the traveller from the city to the mountains 62 and back again with his identity reversed in the first image of the barbers shop's imparting of goodwill, and then reversed again in the mirror of the lake imparting freedom from self-consciousness and attachment to things, thus enabling the traveller to now give goodwill.

While Snyder's concept of place reveals itself clearly enough in "Bubbs Creek Haircut," his spiritual beliefs may not seem so evident to the reader unfamiliar with basic con­ cepts of Buddhism, both in terms of the Hindu-Buddhist philosophical tradition and its manifestations in Oriental literature. Nevertheless, such beliefs are intrinsic to the poem and frequ~ently explicit, particularly in the stanza ,.,.,,,c celebrating enlightenment, though less accessible than his presentation of man's identity with nature. The poem's structure reveals basic Buddhist concepts, as well as shamanistic overtones, through presenting the journey as a vision quest, with the gaining of insight requiring the recipient to return to his people to share "goodwill" and fulfill the responsibilities that vision entails. One rep­ resentation of this latter aspect is the recounting of the entire poem before the fire of "smoking pine." The use of the "double mirrors" organizes the poem not only structurally but also philosophically: "Hutually reflected mirrors .•.. It's a key image in Avatamsaka philo­ sophy, Buddhist interdependence philosophy. Multiple reflections in multiple mirrors, that's what the universe is 84 like." Also, ,Snyder has remarked, and Steuding has analyzed in some detail, that the whole Mountains and Rivers is based on the Japanese No play's recounting of a moment in a journey, and these plays have become a part of 85 Buddhist ritua1. And finally, "Bubbs Creek Haircut" depicts the Buddhist experience of kinhin, walking medita­ tion, which Snyder discusses in "Buddhism and the Coming Revolution" in Earth House Hold. 86' The poem focuses on a few moments of a traveller's v:: ,, ' 63 f~~; journey, the importance of which does not reside in the des­ tination but in the experience of insight, and so aligns 87 itself with the Zen view of satori, sudden enlightenment. Such a view does not see enlightenment as being gained through a linear process o£ acquiring merit through deeds-­ prevalent in Hindu and Christian beliefs--but as a sudden recognition that the illusions of reality prevent man from realizing his identity with the world around him. The im­ portance of the wilderness lies in its being an environment that allows for the possibility of such enlightenment, be­ cause entering into a relationship with it requires the casting off of certain urban illusions and attitudes. The progress of the poem, defying chronology and con­ tinuity of narrative place, moving from very concrete description to deep abstraction, employs Zen methods to educate, not through a Western-logical development, but through a series of juxtapositions, paradoxes, and dialec­ tical leaps. The haiku-koan-like style of the poem seeks to attack the conscious mind--the mind that moralizes over the city, over the destructiveness of civilization, over the antithetical struggle between burning garbage and clean mountains; and conducts this attack not by dismissing moral­ ity or responsibility, but by freeing the mind from self­ 88 conscious doubt and false dichotomies. In the song of celebration following the moment of en­ lightenment, Snyder introduces Parvati, the Hindu goddess. She becomes the water--living, flowing, dancing--able to "entrance Shiva," the god of destruction and reproduction, , I her male counterpart. Parvati as water "entrances" Shiva, fascinating through her flowing dance, and "~trances" him, entering through becoming one with his cycle of life and death. The water is not a thing, static or isolate, but a dance, a process of flowing interconnection with all that it 89 embraces. Through this stanza Snyder chants a song of continuous cyclical movement; even as the water cuts back and destroys, it forms and nourishes life', forming the 64 organic.from the inorganic--since they are all one as rela­ 90 tions of energy--and so makes "of sand a tree." Snyder's use of mythological elements serves not only to make Buddhist philosophical-spiritual concepts explicitly present within the poem, but also serves to move the poem into the archetypal realm--a realm wh~ch has concerned him at least since He Who Hunted Birds in His Father's Village, and which he entered when writing Myths & Texts.(HWH,75-9) The first archetype which appears is also the most essential and basic: the wanderer, the traveller on a vision quest-­ Man with his psychic illness, emptiness, or missing spiri­ tuality. Here Snyder implicitly invokes the image of the shaman, who goes on a que-st'; wandering until his emptiness is filled or his alienation cured through a vision of spiri­ tual insight. Then, he returns with that unique inner vision to heal the community, to act as a messenger between the wilderness and its spirits and his civilization, as well 91 as t o serve as ~. t s cu ltura 1 v~s~onary. . . The "I" of the poem becomes shaman and bodhisattva--the enlightened one who refuses bliss until all creatures attain enlightenment; that is, until the universal recognition of 92 infinite mutability. the emphasis on change appears in the latter part of the celebratory stanza:

Soft is the dance that melts the mat-haired mountain sitter to leap in fire & make of sand a tree of tree a board, of board (ideas!) somebody's rocking chair. a room of empty sun of peaks and ridges beautiful spirits, rocking lotus throne: a universe of junk, all left alone.

The mountains and the Goodwill store become one, each part of the universe with man another part, all interconnected and interchanging. "Bubbs Creek Haircut," then, presents man finding his identity with nature through a journey in 65 the wild areas of Gaia's household, the wilderness as place essential to reach the wilderness within the mind buried beneath the illusions of civilization. The identity between man and nature and its corollaries, between man and other men and between man's conscious mind and his "wild" mind, exist if man will only recognize them, as Snyder observed in "Piute Creek": when man enters into wilderness, "All the junk that goes with being human/ Drops away."(RR,6)

When one turns to Wendell Berry's poems in Clearing, one finds, as compared to Snyder, a very different approach to place and spirituality, as well as a severe restriction of myth and ,,symbolism. 'The first two poems of the book provide a historical context delineating the concrete reality of the land under discussion and the autobiographi­ 93 cal character of the entire book. What is written has happened to Berry, and the vision described has not existed merely for contemplation but for enactment. The third poem of the book, "The Clearing," begins with the poet's vision of his action's meaning. The first stanza of "The Clearing" describes the field to be cleared as the poet sees it*:

Through elm, buckeye, thorn, box elder, redbud, whitehaw, locust thicket, all trees that follow man's neglect, through snarls and veils of honeysuckle, tangles of grape and bittersweet, sing, chainsaw, the hard song of vision cutting in.

The listing demonstrates the poet's knowledge of nature; his ability to identify each type of tree and vine places him as a man close to the soil. This knowledge gives him authority

* See Appendix B for the text of the poems from Clearing. 66 and suggests to the reader a trust that he knows what to spare and what to shear. The listing also defines the type of field: an abandoned one, previously cropland or pasture. This foliage, then, does not belong here, unlike the walnut trees mentioned later in the poem. "lv1an' s neglect" has caused this growth, and so the duty of the man with vision is to cut it back by wielding the chainsaw as a sword of salvation to free the field and return it to productivity. The last two lines establish that vision does not mean 94 contemplation or consideration, but action. The chainsaw will sing a song of "heroic" deeds. The second stanza con­ tinues this concept. "Vision must have severity/ at its edge'" demands· that the persona in the poem act by. chooRing .. which natural elements to preserve and which to oppose. The ones he chooses to oppose are the second growth foliage following the abandonment of the land, and so are the result of "false visions," other men's incorrect concepts of place. And like the farmer's vision, these false visions also take the form of action. Against the land developer's dismember­ ment of the farm, related in the previous poem (Cl,18), the farmer defends this land's integrity as farmland. He pro­ poses to rebuild the fences, repair the cistern, and cut back the second growth bushes and vines. He must also act against his own doubt about the power and correctness of his vision, against "weariness/ the dread of too much to do,/ the wish to make desire/ easy, the thought of rest." These last lines clarify that the farmer's action does not repre­ sent an individualistic, narrow vision, but represents some • greater destiny which has called on him to act even against his own fatigue. Stanza Three contrasts the farmer's vision to the irre­ sponsible actions of other who have come to the country but deny their bonds with the community and their responsibility 95 of labor to the land. The "old woman" of the stanza epi­ tomizes the malaise of urban civilization merely transported to the country-:_selfish individualism, irresponsible hedon- 67 ism, and self-alienation reflecting a social alienation:

"the frontier spirit," lost in the cities, returning now to be lost in the country, obscure desire floating like a cloud upon vision. To be free of labor, the predicament of other lives, not to be bothered.

Through detailing this "cloud upon vision," Berry indicates that what the old woman of the stanza denies he affirms. His labor of clearing demonstrates his concern with "the predicament of other lives" ar1d_his willingness t~ bother and be bothered in order to shape, through action, a new American vision. The fourth stanza returns to this new vision, describ­ ing its transforming view of the neglected fields and recog­ nizing the need to limit desires within that transformation. Here Berry tacitly admits that his vision does not seek to return the land to its "natural" state before man, or to allow nature to reclaim it in her own fashion, but seeks to render it productive to man without damaging it any further and to attempt to preserve that productivity in perpetuity. He seeks a limited displacement of the land:

Against nature, nature will serve well enough a man who does not ask too much.

I While the next stanza defines the terms of this service, which is reciprocal between man and the land, the following two stanzas focus on the issue of labor:

The farm is the proper destiny, here now and to come. Leave the body to die in its time, in the final dignity that knows no loss in the fallen high horse of the bones. 68

Man must labor and only through that labor can he come to understand the cycle of life and death and the role of the farm in that cyle. There man takes nourishment from the soil and in exchange returns to it both his labor and even­ tually his body. Through the concrete description of feeding animals and caring for the sick ones, Berry shows how man labors against and with death in the course of life, and that eventually death claims each life to feed the hunger of other lives to come. Stanza Eight moves out beyond the limits of the field to consider it in the context of man's unlimited destructive potential. He considers the possibility that what has ravaged this field wi']d:"' be extended until the entire earth has been rendered humanly uninhabitable. Berry raises the question of whether or not clearing this one small field is but a futile gesture. He answers this question by stating that it will help "make clear what was overgrown." The concrete task of clearing demonstrates the need for man to return to the land to undo and make restitution for his neglect, exploitation, and ravishing of nature. Through this action a new way of looking at the world may emerge: "take what is half ruined/ and make it clear, put it/ back in mind." And though doubt of labor's efficacy creates a tension, Berry resolves doubt by placing the actual work of clearing the field in February near the end of winter's "death sleep" of the seasons. The farmer labors through a day "foretell­ ing spring." The final stanzas continue with this mood of hope, emphasizing the rebirth imagery of spring. The poem closes: "the field clear behind us." The act of restitu­ tion, forever unfinished, has begun, and where it leads in terms of consciousness or as symbol for world rebirth remains secondary to the physical act itself. The chaotic second growth has been cleared away. The action stands as the only evidence of the power of the poem's vision in op­ posing the false visions of society. This action lead~ to a 69 clearing of the mind as well, erasing doubt by achieving results through restitutive labor: "You stand in a clearing whose cost/ you know in tendon and bone." "From the Crest" and "Reverdure" echo the basic posi­ tion set forth in "The Clearing," developing and reinforcing various aspects of it. The value of considering them in connection with the first poem resides precisely in their reinforcing role of demonstrating the consistency of the thematic stance in "The Clearing." Only by arguing that the entire volume represents a departure from Berry's themes in his other books could one dismiss the contention that this poem provides a representative indication of Berry's poetic themes, and tio' cri tt"c fycfu made such a claim. In "From the Crest," Berry describes the hunger of the farmer in the opening stanzas connecting him with the animals and feeding cycle presented in "The Clearing." This hunger drives the farmer on; and around this tangible rela­ tionship with nature and its cycles he shapes his desires. He focuses these desires on labor, the farm, and natural cycles:

I see how little avail one man is, and yet I would not be a man sitting still, no little song of desire traveling the mind's dark woods.

I am trying to teach my mind to bear the long, slow growth of the fields ....

The farm must be made a form, endlessly bringing together heaven and earth, light and rain building, dissolving, building back again the shapes and actions of the ground.

Not only does the activity of the farm encompass all of the farmer's desires here, but Berry also places man's labor in that environment on a higher plane than acts of contempla- 70 tion which focus on the inner self--"the mind's dark 96 woods." Here Berry suggests a metaphorical relationship between wild nature and the unconscious mind very similar to Snyder, but takes the opposite stance of rejecting entering such woods, belittling such a focus as a "little song of desire." Berry also introduces in this poem the contrast between the city and the farm, not merely the visions of the farmer and the city dweller, but the actual places. The farmer and farm married together travel as one into the city as an alien environment: "we must be seemly and quiet/ as becomes those who travel/ among strangers.'' Berry separates the farineF'from these strangers because they do not -share rn~-the' same "fellowship, the mystic order" to which the farmer and farm belong. Man's marriage to the land separates him from the rest of society. The farmer announces that he will write a poem to the city people, not to embrace them or to proselytize, but only to inform them of this fellowship in which they cannot participate. In contrast to Snyder's "Bubbs Creek Haircut," which seeks identity among all aspects of the world and so embraces both the mountains and the acres of garbage, the conscious mind and the "wild" mind, Berry's "From the Crest" draws lines of demarcation excluding those who do not share the marriage to the land and belittling concerns with the unconscious mind. In "Reverdure," which contains Berry's presentation of the creation of his sacred grove previously discussed, he reiterates the same subjects as the previous two poems. It too speaks of the natural renewal of spring. In the midst of describing this renevJal, Berry poses the question: "How to get in/ and out of your mind?/ The way in prepares/ the way out." He goes on to define "reverdure" as a calling. It is the mending of the scarred land, the returning of the neglected fields to productivity. Then he declares: "Good work done/ comes back into the mind,/ a free breath drawn." Again Berry emphasizes the outward oriented activity of 71 ,- !labor as the source of finding one's place. The way into I ithe mind is prepared through labor and the clarification of ~hat the mind understands is demonstrated through labor. This belief that action precedes consciousness is further developed in the discussion of creating the sacred grove, where a trail is cut through the trees: "I made my way/ into the woods, leaving an order/ that was mine." One must ask of'' this which predominates, the contact with nature and its cyclical order or the transformations of nature effected by the farmer in his relationship with it? Berry seems to hedge the question in "From the Crest" by asserting that the farm imitates the cycles of nature. And, here in "Reverdure" he declares that in the thicket at the t(;p''O:C :the hill the farm "finds its example" in the self-renewing character of the woods. Yet, in "The Clearing" he denied the same self-renewing existence to the second growth trees and vines which were slowly returning the cropland and pasture to forest. In these three poems, the lines in "The Clearing" seem the least ambiguous and unresolved in terms of harmonizing man's relation to the land. Those lines admit the contradiction inherent in man working the land and do not attempt to emphasize the naturalness of the farm so much as the necessity of using moderation in transforming nature in the course of clearing and developing the land. The last stanza of "Reverdure," which is also the last stanza in the book, takes up another contradiction that is implied but not previously expressed, and flows from the emphasis on action preceding consciousness: the writing of poetry and the farming of the land. In "From the Crest" the farmer speaks of writing a poem that reflects action already taken. This poem will not represent the idea of a proper relationship, but will describe an already existing one, which is the marriage of man and land already consummated. Such are the poems of this entire book. In the closing stanza of Clearing, poe.try is relegated to a secondary level as an activity of the winter months when nature and the farm w, ~ .. . 72 . , .

J"" '{.:: ~re hibernating. Poetry here can only describe the past of actions already accomplished or consider the future as desires yet to be fulfilled through action, but in the present there exists only labor, and only it is the source and the proof of vision:

I love this warm, light room where words have kept me through the cold days. But now song surrounds it, the fields around it are green, and I must turn away from books, put past and future behind, to come into the presence of this time.

These poems do not contain the mythological or symbol~ ical complexity of Snyder's long poem, but they do form part of a mythopoeia of which the key components are vision, labor, and farm. The labor Berry speaks of has been pre­ viously discussed in terms of restitution and atonement. "The Clearing" sings a song of praise to such labor and "Reverdure" enshrines it as the true calling of the farmer, who is none other than Berry himself. The vision which sets man on his quest to reinhabit nature and establish himself in harmony with the land does not take the shape of an inner quest for realization or awareness, but an outward active quest for results. This goal of reuniting man with the land requires the form of the farm with its attendant labor. The farm enables the realization of the vision, providing a place for attaining that goal, and in its agricultural success demonstrating the validity of that vision which views the farm as "infinite form" and '''proper destiny" for man. Although these poems do not explicitly discuss reli­ gious beliefs as his later poems and essays do, they do implicitly reveal Berry's deep spirituality through the concept of the quest presented here and his attitudes toward labor and the preservation of the land. it is a spiritual­ ity d~eply imbued with the tenets of the ~Jdaeo-Christian 73

I d• . ttra ~ t~on. The use of seasons and his statement in "From I ~he Crest'' that both the farmer and the land have experi- i ienced a Lazarus-~ike resurrection support an eschatological interpretation of the goal of his vision. This vision in many ways replicates the Christian romance quest of English poetic tradition, though that is not the structure of the poems: the land is healed through the sacrifices of the hero during the course of his quest, with the sacrifices rendering him worthy of the reward awaiting him at journey's 97 end. And like a true romance hero, the farmer learns humility through realizing that his worthiness lies in imi­ tation of the greater power which he. must serve:.

In snow I wait and sing of the braided song I only partly hear. Even in the rising year, even in the spring, the little can hope to sing only in praise of the great.

The "great" here is Creation. \\lith his concept of labor as a humble serving of a greater force, Berry needs to make the claim in "Reverdure" that in the thicket the farm finds its example. He declares his shaped "sacred grove" to be "a part/ of the farm not farmed" because the trees represent the eternal cycle of nature, and through making them a part of the farm he also makes the farm part of that great cycle. He thereby assures that the visionary farmer's labor con­ tributes both to the preservation of what is eternal--"the trees live in eternity/ and they live now"--and provides his own salvation so that, as he claims in "From the Crest": "At the final stroke/ I will be a finished man." By finished Berry certainly does not mean his work completed, but rather, in a very Christian sense, that he will have accomplished enough to have achieved the grace necessary to go to his reward. He would want others to say of him what he says of his friend Owen in "Elegy": 74

It was his passion to be true to the condition of the Fall-- to live by the sweat of his face, to eat his bread, assured that cost was paid.(Wh,9)

Little summary is required. The close reading of these poems reinforces what has been argued in previous chapters, and perhaps develops more fully some of the ideas originally presented in those pages, but does not actually introduce any new arguments into the discussion. What it does primar­ ily reveal is the great divergence between Snyder and Berry in terms of their approaches to the restoration of the land, man's relationship to that.~,,Jand, and finally, man's rela- ",-~:-~·'" tionship to himself. Perhaps the most striking comparison between "Bubbs Creek Haircut" and "The Clearing," "From the Crest," and "Reverdure"--even though comparison did not comprise the main purpose of this chapter--is the differing presentation of moments of enlightenment, in Snyder's case, and moments of grace, in Berry's case. Whether one terms it enlighten­ ment, which arises from the Buddhist tradition, or grace, which arises from the Judaeo-Christian tradition, these moments occur in very different ways. In "Bubbs Creek Hair­ cut" the traveller,journeys, but the destination remains clouded because from the outset the physical destination did not seem paramount. A tension exists within the travel­ ler as he prepares to leave the city, but clearly that tension cannot be relieved by merely taking a weekend off in the mountains. He needs a new understanding that will resolve that tension. So, he must journey until a moment occurs in which the illusions creating that tension are dispelled through recognizing that they are merely veils within the mind blocking vision. This moment could seeming­ ly occur anywhere above the ridgeline representing the Zen notion of wandering toward satori that denies the ability to accumulate merit so prevalent in many religious systems. True, there must occur a physical shedding, but this remains . (

' , 75 !·~· ~~· preparatory and ritualistic and cannot substitute for the !vision itself. In Berry's poems, the vision exists from the beginning, but the tension arises over the ability to realize the goals set by that vision, to accomplish the task that will physi­ cally validate that vision. The goal has a very definite geographical and physical dimension: clearing the neglected farmland where one lives and making it once more productive. - The process of the journey involves redemptive labor which confronts and overcomes the doubt and confusion within the mind. The work makes what is "half ruined" clear, and that clarit)LShapes the visi9n itself with the physical success rather than the farmer's understanding proving the vision's efficacy. Berry's conclusion to "The Clearing" conveys an image of the repentant sinner who, though never quite worthy, gratefully receives grace as a result of his cease­ less efforts:

An evening comes when we finish work and go, stumblers under the folding sky, the field clear behind us.

Accomplishment does not lie for Berry in the under­ standing of the one making the journey, but in the effect of the labor in the vision's struggle "against the coming of humbers." Only the physical accomplishment reassures the farmer of the power of his vision, and the vision is only proven through the degree to which the wielding of it imi­ tates the farmer's interpretation of nature. His identity, then, arises from his "proper" transformation of the land, unlike the Bubbs Creek traveller staring into the lake whose identity is transformed by the wilderness. These two dif­ ferent identities return one to Gaia and the sacred grove. Snyder accepts it all, first growth and second growth of nature's own processes; Berry accepts only the imitation of first growth nature within the boundaries of the farm. Sny- 76

der clarifies by identifying it all as part of the net of universal energy flow; Berry clarifies by cutting back what is overgrown on the land and displacing what is overgrown in the mind with the results of that labor on the land. Snyder's vision can encompass and embrace Berry's ac­ tivities because, even though they include limitations imposed on nature, they recognize the necessity of nature's preservation and seek the harmony of man's life with Gaia's life. But Berry's vision cannot embrace Snyder's inactivity

or his belief that mainly within1 the mind lies the first and only real step toward harmony of man and nature. Snyder's . embrace attempts total inclusiveness, whJJe Berry has said, "You cannot affirm everything and do anything." g~r Even in the last stanza of "Reverdure" Berry finds him­ self divided. Thomas Merton in his meditations on Chuang Tzu provides a basis for understanding this continued division, as well as a basis for understanding Snyder's unity. In summarizing Chuang Tzu's Taoist position, Merton states:

the hero of virtue and duty ultimately lands him­ self in the same ambiguities as the hedonist and utilitarian. Why? Because he aims at achieving "the good" as object. He engages in a self-con­ scious and deliberate campaign to "do his duty" in the belief that this is right and therefore pro­ ductive of happiness •... In so doing, he becomes involved in a division from which there is no escape: between the present, in which he is not yet in possession of what he seeks, and the futu§e in which he thinks he will have what he desires. 9 I

Snyder's position of the world as "rocking lotus throne:/ a universe of junk, all left alone" and his belief in the pos­ sibility of sudden enlightenment through eliminating the illusion of a contradiction between things and ideas, world and mind enable him to avoid this division that haunts Berry through viewing its parts as an inseparable unity.

,, ~·. .. " ' 1' Conclusion

Early in this essay it was, stated that Snyder and Berry are required by their own beliefs to propose in their art alternative ways to ~1-Jve. Beyond that, they" have not only proposed such alternatives for others but also have taken up the task of living such alternatives themselves, utiliz­ ing their art to not only project but also to represent those visions to the degree that they have already been realized. These visions and realizations not only differ, but also contradict each other. Such contradiction applies first and foremost to Snyder's and Berry's concepts of place and the spiritual traditions they embrace, as well as to the role of poetry in creating a new world in harmony with nature. Both Snyder and Berry seek to change the world, and in their efforts have tended to view poetry as a whole, though not necessarily each individual poem, as a means to 100 that end. In striving toward that end, however, they continue to contradict one another. To accomplish his goals, Snyder has developed as a poet, lyrical, meditative, but primarily mythopoeic. Berry has developed first as a poet, but then as a farmer and poet, two roles which often work against each other because of the way Berry works out their relationship. Even as Snyder was investigating American Indian culture, introduc­ ing himself to shamanism and primitive cultures, and looking 101 into Buddhism, he was writing poetry. As Nathaniel Tarn points out and Snyder readily concurs, within the fi~st year after writing He Who Hunted Birds in His Father's Village,

77 78

Snyder chose to give up his academic direction toward becom­ 102 ing an anthropologist to become an informant. Through poetry he intended to preserve, reveal, and invariably create the myths and rituals of the new culture that was needed in America. Of course, Snyder became not so much a preserver as a creator "hatching a new myth," as he states in Myths & Texts, for the new culture that would arise with its roots reaching deep into the subsoil of the "Great Subculture" to tap clear back to its paleolithic origins. While at first actively engaged in the anthropological debates of his college years, Snyder stepped out of academia

in order to fo_cus on_t.t!~ poe.tic path. Snyder's title poem from his first book, Riprap, expresses his concept of the poet's role. As Robert Kern argues, Riprap cleared the ground and laid down the first poems to shape the trail for Snyder's mythmaking journey in Myths & Texts, which continued along "Bubbs Creek," through The Back Country, and on to Turtle Island--all the while 103 working at "creating a new culture." Snyder says in "Riprap":

Lay down these words Before your mind like rocks. placed solid, by hands In choice of place, set Before the body of the mind in space and time:

In the thin loam, each rock a word a creek-washed stone Granite: ingrained with torment of fire and weight Crystal and sediment linked hot all change, in thoughts, As well as things.(RR,30)

This poem establishes the poet's role in the world and the function of his poetry, to serve as the solidly placed rocks forming a trail to enable the reader to journey--like the "Bubbs Creek" traveller--toward a new perception of life

'~\ . .. ~.. .1 :~. 79 with the recognition that "all change, in thoughts,/ As well as things." Man must learn to transform himself, just as nature continuously changes, and to realize that such a change occurs as much within as without because the two are "linked hot" in the unending circle of universal life. Snyder demonstrates this linking in his poetry through a presentation of man's identity with wilderness and its animals in his concept of place as Gaia's household, and through a presentation of true spirituality as holding all life sacred. He melds in his poetry those aspects of Eastern, American Indian, and primitive belief systems which establish a spirit1_1al ·a~r:J.d~~physicaJ · uqity of man and place; then, he lays this poetry down for others to follow if they choose. In Myths & Texts Snyder explicitly introduces the concept of poet as shaman. Here and in other collections-­ The Fudo Trilogy, sections of Mountains and Rivers, and 104 pieces in Turtle Island --Snyder creates shaman songs, power chants, and healing poems exemplary of the shaman's cultural role in primitive societies. And in his essays Snyder has explained modern poetry as a continuation of the shaman's role, leading some critics such as Bob Steuding to 105 refer to Snyder as a "poet-shaman." Though sympathetic to this term, I believe it may focus attention on the secondary aspect of Snyder's efforts toward man's reintegra­ tion with the world at the expense of understanding the primary aspect, his mythmaking. Until the "Great Subcul­ ture" has subverted a far larger following, the poet must focus on building a new culture through myth so that eventually the shaman may reappear in a culture that recognizes and utilizes his role. From Riprap through Turtle Island, Snyder has dis­ cussed in poetry and in prose his belief in the fundamental role of poetry as part of the transformation of the world. He begins the essay, "Four Changes," in Turtle Island with a remark from his Zen master: 80

--become one with the knot itself, til it dissolves away. --sweep the garden. --any size.(TI,91)

For Snyder poetry and its use to create. a new culture through myth that ties man to the land in a spiritual embrace forms a primary part of the garden that he chooses to sweep. The poet in Snyder's world links mind and matter, man and nature through his poetic "riprap" so that his readers--all human beings: "Poetry is for all men and women"(TI,114)--can break down the barriers of illusion which prevent them·-E~~;fl} s.eeing that ''Now, we are both in, and outside, the world at once" and that "The power within-­ the more you give, the more you have to give--will still be our source when coal and oil are gone, and atoms are left to spin in peace."(TI,114) Although Snyder does not limit himself to only using poetry to effect change, clearly he views it as a vital effective force. He wields its power in two main ways: first, as a vehicle for presenting his vision that man needs to change his world by recognizing and re-establishing his identity with Gaia; second, as a healing force helping man to return to wholeness by putting him back in touch with the spirit of the land. These two complementary purposes each take a variety of forms appearing as lyrics, medita­ tions, chants, manifestos, and mythopoeia, all working together toward a single goal. Like Snyder, Berry has also consciously developed himself in a specific direction, using poetry as a means to present his views and concerns, his beliefs and practices in seeking to create a new world. Unlike Snyder, he did not seem to face a contradiction between writing and an addi­ tional career teaching, but rather they seemed to support one another except for the academic positions taking him too far from "home." His position at Kentucky appeared to resolve that and Openings represented Berry's role as ,' '

'

' 81 rr observing critical poet calling for a return to rootedness in the land, especially one's own place, and a spiritual communion with nature. But a contradiction arose, not be­ tween poetry and academia so much as between observer and changer. He felt the need to plant himself more firmly in place through participating in a new agriculture as well as a new social culture.. He had to live his poetic vision through farming. Berry has continued to move toward physi­ cal action as the main form of bringing about his new culture. And within his recent volumes of poetry he has cast some doubt on the efficacy of poetic activity compared with the "real work" of farming. ,. ··-. ., --.c· ·-:'C-. In Cfearing,.Berry wonders in "Work Song" if his passion for clarifying the land through labor will take him

away from poetry~

Can it lead me away from books? Is it leading me away? What will I say to my fellow poets whose poems I do not read while this passion keeps me in the open? ...

I am curious and afraid one day my poems may pass through my mind unwritten, .... I am afraid, some days, that only vanity keeps me at my words.(Cl,33)

Here Berry not only doubts the importance of his own poetry, but also any poetry. He does not need to read it. Instead, he turns outward to the "open" suggesting that it may be sufficient for his life. In his previous book, Farming: A Handbook, Berry had already committed himself to becoming a farmer who would write, rather than a writer who would farm on the side. He has chosen his priority and these lines from Clearing explicitly express that choice, and are rein­ forced by the book's closing stanza in which he relegates 82 writing to the days of inactivity enforced by the seasonal cycle. In the last stanza he ponders within his fate his future as a poet: "It is time again I made an end to words/ for a while--for this time,/ or for all time. Any end may last."(Cl,52) As Berry moves more firmly into the Judaeo-Christian religious tradition, his spirituality focuses more on the image of a postlapsarian world, intensifying the need expressed in his poetry for man to engage in restitutive labor so that he may enter into grace. It does not appear by any available evidence that Berry considers the art of poetry to suffice as either a real activity or as a form of r~~titution. Berry does not consider poetry praCtical-­ being a mental activity rather than a physical one--and, perhaps, does not even consider it productive. In his letter to Willie Reader, Berry states:

I have spent my life struggling with problems-­ technical, historical, ethical--that I think a writer would have either to inherit authentic solutions for or to solve authentically himself before he could write work that I would consider in every sense good.106

It seems that he is arguing that for writing to be "good" it must follow and in some way represent "authentic" action. Such a notion would necessarily lead to a decrease in con­ cern with visionary poetry and an increased doubt of its efficacy. It would lead to the form of poetry particularly evident in Farming: A Handbook and Clearing, as well as in Berry's more recent work: narratives and lyrics that serve as summaries of complete actions, meditations on experiences and statements of faith which leave the future in greater hands and focus on grace-gaining labors in the present. Poetry, then, to be at all effective must "be built around an event, an action" because "Only action can address the question, Wh~t can be done?"107 The mind creating poetry functions as an observation post from which to record the 83 the physical journey of man through the fields, but not par­ ticularly as a source for the transformations needed to enable him to journey into a new culture of spiritual harmony with the land as steward rather than exploiter. Only man's actions will decide the difference and educate him as to which role he actually plays. Although Berry occasionally mentions the wilderness and even speaks of entering it, he does not focus attention on the wild aspects of nature and accordingly does not focus on the wild aspects_ of the mind, which he also disdains from entering. He believes that "the Creation is unified and orderly" and the farm imitates that order, and following c- ·-. ,, ~ 108 from this, apparently, the mind imitates the farm. Just as his concept of place focuses on the clarified farm, so too his spirituality focuses on externally based faith which orients him outward toward the "Creator" as the source of values rather than inward toward an identity of values mutually within man and nature. And as his concept of the "Creator" returns to that of the Judaeo-Christian tradition, so too he turns to its tenets, as revealed in scriptures, to provide the values and approach to a proper relationship to the land.

Such remarks on the beliefs of these two poets must remain merely tentative as long as both poets continue to write and so maintain the potential for change. But up to this point, the evidence leads toward the unity of Snyder's activity as mythmaking poet, a uni,ty that preserves and continues to promote his spiritual system and his particular view of man's relationship to the land expressed through poetry. He has a new book of poems due out in a few months, and it will provide fresh material for discussion and criti­ cism, but the poems and chapbooks that have appeared since Turtle Island, as well as interViews, do not indicate that this book will contain a drastic alteration in course. Instead, it will most likely reveal a 'new stretch of trail 84

on Snyder's continuing journey to create a new culture that will return man to the land through melding the philosophi­ cal tradition of Buddhism and the spiritual traditions of American Indian beliefs and primitive shamanism into a visionary mythmaking poetry. Berry has no immediately forthcoming book, but three have appeared in the last two years: A Part, The Wheel, and The Gift of Good Land. They continue his focus on the farm as the "infinite form" for man's relationship to the land. They also represent his movement back into the Judaeo­ Christian fold, but contain an ominous tone of self-righ­ teousness not previously heard in Berry's voice. The sense f'L«' "- of the poet as part of the ~lect ~hat surfaces in a poem such as "~ve tvho Prayed and Wept"(AP,32) suggests that Berry's beliefs may move further away from efforts at inclu­ siveness. The poems "No Thanks" and "Eight Below" in A Part reflect a willingness to sacrifice the wicked for the bene­ fit of those with grace: "Maybe the world is coming to an end./ Well, good riddance, anyhow, to part of it."(AP,54) One hopes that this does not mean that rather than contin­ uing the fight "against the coming of numbers" Berry is going to focus his attention on preparing to pass the "narrow gate" when the numbers come.

Much criticism remains to be done. There particularly exists a need to develop a more comprehensive criticism of Berry that will attempt to take into account all three areas of his writing: novels, essays, and poetry; and elaborate, the key recurring themes of all three. The work done here in poetry, with partial reference to his essays, provides initial discussion of his two most fundamental themes: man's relation to the creation and its attendant spiritual­ ity. Other areas that require attention include relation­ ships among people with a focus on the family unit and his view of women, his concepts of history, time, and space, and his place within the American literary tradition with an i 85 emphasis on his relation to Transcendentalism, the Southern Agrarians, and other Christian nature poets. While most of these areas have been mentioned in one article or another, little extended work has been done, and the bulk of this remains in unpublished dissertation form. As for Snyder, there have been some fairly lengthy analyses of his religious beliefs and his concern with the wilderness. But in these two essential areas much remains to be written, both in breaking new ground and in clearing away misconceptions. In terms of spiritual beliefs, far too little attention has been paid to the influence of American Indian cultures and to ST}yder's preoccupation with shaman- . 109 - -- ~sm. There needs to 'Be investigation into the influence of Japan on his concept of place, rather than only as a source of philosophical traditions. Also, the issue of the relation or contradiction between Zen "nonaction" and Snyder's view of the role of political action in "drawing the line" needs analysis. Considering specific works, little close reading of the published sections of Mountains and Rivers has so far taken place, and it would be a grave error to wait until the entire work is finshed to begin considering it. In the cases of both Snyder and Berry, the two major concerns of this thesis--relationship to the land and spiri­ tuality--are essential to any attempt toward comprehensive analysis of their poetry. Not only do these key aspects of their beliefs require further elaboration, clarification, and criticism, but also future critical undertakings must take these two factors into account in developing any argu­ ment pertaining to content and themes in Snyder's and Berry's poetry. As indicated in the introduction, much of the misinterpretation of these two poets stems from failures or refusals to properly analyze these two essential features of Snyder's and Berry's ethos. One hopes that the work con­ tained here will provide a foundation for a new round of criticism with a better grasp of place and spirituality in 86

each poet's work.

. .~ ...... ; .1 i' 87

Key to Abbreviations in the Text

Works by Wendell Berry BG The Broken Ground Cl Clearing 1 ~;:: FH Farming: A Handbook ~~ ~? Fdg Findings -It:

;.: GGL The Gift of Good Land Op Openings AP A Part RE Recollected Essays 1965-1980 \vh The Wheel

Works by Gary Snyder TBC The Back Country EHH Earth House Hold HWH He Who Hunted Birds in His Father's Village M&T Myths & Texts OW The Old Ways RWI The Real Work: Interviews & Talks, 1964-1979 RvJ Regarding Wave RR Riprap & Cold Mountain Poems SG Songs for Gaia TI Turtle Island 88

Notes

Introduction

1 John Haines, Living Off The Country (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1981), p. 7. 2 Bob Steuding, Gary Snyder (Boston: Twayne Publish­ ers, 1976); and Bert Almon, Gary Snyder, Boise State Univer­ sity Western Writers ~eri~s, 37 (Boise, Idaho: Boise State University, 1979). 3 Donald H. Tarbet, "Contemporary American Pastoral: A Poetic Faith," English Record, 23 (Winter 1972), 72-83. 4 Thomas Parkinson, "The Poetry of Gary Snyder," The Southern Review, 4 (1968), 616-32. 5 Lee Bartlett, "Gary Snyder's Myths & Texts and the Monomyth," Western American Literature, (August 1982), pp. 137-48. 6 William Everson, "Archetype West," in Regional Per­ spectives, ed. John Gordon Burke (Chicago: American Library Association, 1973), pp. 208-306. 7 Gary Snyder, Turtle Island (New York: New Directions, 1974). Hereafter cited in the text as TI. 8 Charles Altieri, "Gary Snyder's Turtle Island: The Problem of Reconciling the Roles of Seer and Prophet," Boundary, 2, 4 (1976),761-77. 9 Robert Hass, "Wendell Berry: Finding the, Land," Modern Poetry Studies, 2, 1 (1971), 15-38; and Speer Morgan, 11 \~endell Berry: A Fatal Singing," The Southern Review, 10, 4 (1974), 865-77. 10 Wendell Berry, The Country of Marriage (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973). Hereafter cited in the text as CJvl. 11 Dick Allen, "Comment," Poetry, (Jvlay 1974), pp. 106- 9; Edwin Fussell, "Review," Parnassus, (Spring/Summer 1974), pp. 26-8. ~. . 1.. 89

12 . John Ditsky, "Wendell Berry's Homage to the Apple Tree," Modern Poetry Studies, 2 (1971), 7-15; and Kenneth Fields, "The Hunter's Trail: Poems by Wendell Berry," Iowa Review, 1 (1970), 90-9. 13 Frederick 0. Waage, "Wendell Berry's History," Contemporary Poetry, 3 (1978), 21-46.

Convergence

14 Haines, p. 26. 15 Wendell Berry, Recollected Essays 1965-1980 (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981), p. 61. Hereafter cited in the text as RE. Berry's own essays provide the major source for biographi~al data, also the Dictionary of Literary Biography, pp. 62-66. 16 Wendell Berry, A Part (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1980), p. 3. Hereafter cited in the text asAP. 17 Gary Snyder, The Real Work: Interviews and Talks 1964-1979 (New York: New Directions, 1980), p. 93. Here­ after cited in the text as R\H. Also see Bob Steuding, Gary Snyder, for additional biographical information. 18 Gary Snyder, He Who Hunted Birds in His Father's Village (Bolinas, Ca.: Grey Fox Press, 1979. Hereafter cited in the text as HWH. 19 See Nathaniel Tarn, "By Way of a Preface," in HvJH, pp. xiii-xix. 20 Gary Snyder, Riprap & Cold Mountain Poems (1959; rpt. San Francisco: Grey Fox Press, 1965). Hereafter cited in the text as RR. And, Gary Snyder, Myths & Texts (1960; rpt. New York: New Directions, 197&). Hereafter cited in the text as M&T. 21 Wendell Berry, "The Reactor and the Garden," in The Gift of Good Land (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981), pp. 161-70. Hereafter cited in the text as GGL. 22 Wendell Berry, O~enings (1968; rpt. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovic , 1980), pp. 26 and 61-64. Here­ after cited in the text as Op. Gary Snyder, Regarding Wave (New York: New Directions, 1970), p. 9. Hereafter cited in the text as RW. Gary Snyder, The Back Countr~ (New York: New Directions, 1968), p. 37. Hereafter cite in the text as TBC. 90

Placing Man

23 Haines, pp. 107-8 and 95. ""' .. 24 u . 1 . B I • f d" ~vaage n~ce y summar~zes erry s v~ew o noma ~sm, see p. 23; Gary Snyder, The Old t-7ays (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1977), pp. 42 and 58. Hereafter cited in the text as OW. 25 Bert Almon, "Buddhism and Energy in the Recent Poetry of Gary Snyder," Mosaic, 11 (Fall 1977), 121.

26 For example, in "Milton by Firelight" in Riprap Snyder recognizes the planet's evolution will eventually produce a humanly inhabitable environment, unless man changes to match that environment. His point is that man needs nature,_but nature does not require man.

27 Charles Altieri, p. 770.

28 Julian Gitzen, "Gary Snyder and the Poetry of Compassion," The Critical Quarterly, 15 (Winter 1973), 349.

29 Charles Altieri, "Gary Snyder's Lyric Poetry: Dialectic as Ecology," The Far Point, 4 (Spring/Summer 1970)' 65. 30 Berry, Recollected Essays, p. 40, a large portion of The Long-Legged House is reprinted here, and it is to these exerpts to which I refer throughout the essay; "Diagon" appears in Wendell Berry, The Broken Ground (New York: Har­ court Brace and World, 1964), pp. 4-8. Hereafter cited in the text as BG.

31 Wendell Berry, Farming: A Handbook (New York: Har­ court Brace Jovanovich, 1970), p. 22. Hereafter cited in the text as FH. 32 See Ditsky, p. 8, and Fields, p. 91; Wendell Berry, Findings (Iowa City: The Prairie Press, 1969). Hereafter cited in the text as Fdg. 33 See Recollected Essays, pp. 40-1; and "A Secular Pilgrimage," The Hudson Review, 23, 3 (1970), 411-2. 34 Morgan, p. 870. 35 See Hass, p. 21: "The thing to be noted ... is that it does not recreate the lost wilderness but describes the mind recreating it. The difference is crucial, for to evoke the wilderness simply is to make an icon of it." "The ·Return," Openings, pp. 21-4. 36 Wendell Berry, Clearing (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977). Hereafter cited in the text as Cl. 37 "The Wages of History" in Farming: A Handbook, pp. 111-2. This poem begins: "Men's negligence and their/ fatuous ignorance and abuse/ have made·a hardship of this earth."

38 See Jack Hicks, "hlendell Berry's Husband to the World: A Place on Earth," American Literature, 51, 2 (1979), 241-2, for a discussion of this passage~ 39 Waage, pp. 22 and 38. 40 Berry quoted in Mary Dietrich, "Our Commitment to the Land," The Bluegrass Literary Review, 2, 1 (Fall/Winter 1980) ' 42. 41 Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America (New York: Avon Books, 1978), p. 30. Hereafter cited in the text as UA. 42 See Recollected Essays, pp. 339-40. I don't mean to suggest that Berry never places the river or the farm in the larger cycles of nature, but rather that his definition of an "infinite form" creates an ambivalence with a tendency to exclude extra-agricultural nature from his sense of place. 43 Haage, p. 22. 44 Robert Graves, particularly The White Goddess (1948; rpt. amended and enlarged edition, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966), has been noted as an important formative influerice. Also, re. Gaia specifically, see The Old Ways, pp. 39 and 93, and Snyder's most recent chapbook, Songs for Gaia (Port Townsend, Ha.: Copper Canyon Press, 1979). Hereafter cited in the text as SG. 45 See The Old Wa~s, pp. 28-9; Myths & Texts, p. 8; Turtle Island, pp., 78- 4; and The Real Hork pp. 116-7 and 173-4. 46 Bass, p. 23. See The Unsettling of America, pp. 27- 30, for Berry's argument. 4 7 Almon, "Buddhism and Energy," p. 121. 48 See "The Change," "October 10," and "Hhite-Throated Sparrow" in Openings. 49 Lee Bartlett, "Interview: Gary Snyder," California Quarterly, No. 9 (1975), p. 45. 92

50 Gary Snyder, Earth House Hold (New York: New Direc­ tions, 1969), p. 120. Hereafter cited in the text as EHH.

51 See Ditsky, p. 8; also, Recollected Essays, pp. 166- 7, and The Unsettling of America, Chapter Eight, "Jefferson, Morrill, and the Upper Crust." 52 Hicks, p. 241. 53 Dietrich, p. 43.

Placing Spirituality

54 Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology (New York: Penguin Books, 1981), pp. 461-2.

55 Berry uses the.. ··~··· term, . "right livelihood," in the be- ginning of "The Gift of Good Land," saying: "I want to see if there is not at least implitit in the Judaeo-Christian heritage a doctrine such as that the Buddhists call 'right livelihood' or 'right occupation.'" In The Gift of Good Land, p. 267. 56 Hicks, pp. 239-40; Waage, p. 43. Waage quotes both Snyder and Berry on this point. 57 Although Snyder declares himself a Buddhist and has studied in a Rinzai Zen temple, he has made it clear throughout his essays and interviews that he does not follow any one sect or doctrine. 58 Willie Reader, "A Correspondence with Hendell Berry," Poets In The South, 1 (1977-78), 31.

59 Bruce Williamson, "The Plowboy Interview: Wendell Berry," The Ivlother Earth News, 20 (March 1973), 9. 60 t.Vendell Berry, "Elegy," in The Wheel (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1982), p. 9. Hereafter cited in the text as Wh. ' 61 Berry, "A Secular Pilgrimage," p. 402. "Discipline and Hope'' was originally published in Berry's A Continuous Harmony (1972), I am quoting from the version reprinted in Recollected Essays. 62 Berry, "A Secular Pilgrimage," p. 408. 63 Lynn White, Jr., "The Historical Roots of Our Eco- logical Crisis," Science, 155, 3767 (10 March 1967), 1203-7. 93 l

64 See Alan W. Watts, The Way of Zen (New York: Vin­ I tage Books, 1957), pp. 115-33 for a detailed discussion of the Zen concept of identity of subject and object and the idea of "self" as an obstacle to awareness. Snyder's view of this will be discussed more thoroughly in the next chap-­ ter.

65 See Chapters Four, Five, and Six of Snyder's He Who Hunted Birds in His Father's Village. On page 98, he says: "I can only answer that the total view achieved by this method is my own doing, created by the selection of relevant concepts and implying no criticism of or assent to, any one point of view."

66 Nathaniel Tarn, "From Anthropologist to Informant: A Field Recc•rd of Gary Snyder," Alcheringa, 4 ( 1972), p. 110. 67 Gitzen, p. 356.

68 Sherman Paul, "From Lookout to Ashram: The Way of Gary Snyder," Part Two, Iowa Review, 1, 4 (Fall 1970), 74- 5. 69 Claude Levi-Strauss, Myth and Meaning (New York: Schocken Books, 1979), p. 24. 70 Gary Snyder, Six Sections from Mountains and Rivers without End Plus one (Bolinas, Ca.: Four Seasons Founda­ tion , 19 70 ) • 71 Snyder quoted in Ekbert Faas, Towards a New American Poetics: Essays & Interviews (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1979), p. 109. 72 Jamake Highwater, The Primal Mind (New York: New American Library, 1982), p. 41.

Man and Spirituality in Place

73 Highwater, p. 58. 74 David Kherdian, Six Poets of the San Francisco Renaissance: Portraits and Checklists (Fresno, Ca.: The Giligia Press, 1965). Contains bibliographical information on the poems in Mountains and Rivers without End. 75 Steuding, pp. 94-9. Steuding, however, does not discuss "Bubbs Creek Haircut" in any detail. 94

76 In reference to Mountains and Rivers without End, Almon states: "It would hardly be fair to evaluate it at this stage." Almon, Gary Snyder, p. 23. For Snyder's own comments on its unfinished condition, see Faas, pp. 134-7.

77 See Faas, p. 135, for Snyder's comments on "Good- will.'' Also it appears in other poems in the volume demon­ strating that it has symbolic importance beyond "Bubbs Creek Haircut" and may be a key concept for the entire work. 78 Faas, p. 135.

79 Faas, p. 133: "Faas: And how does Chinese poetry express that interconnectedness? Snyder: It expresses it in images, small images. 'A high tower on a white plane. If you climb up one floor, you'll see a thousand miles more.'" 80 See "Piute Creek" in particular in Riprap, p. 6, and "A Walk" in The Back Country, , p. 11.

81 See Watts, p. 120: "When we are no longer identi- fied with the idea of ourselves, the entire relationship be­ tween subject and object ... undergoes a sudden and revolu­ tionary change. It becomes a real relationship, a mutuality in which the subject creates the object just as much as the object creates the subject." Also see Chuan Tzu, "The Wood­ carver" in Thomas Merton, The Way of Chuang Tzu (New York: New Directions, 1965), pp. 110-1, for a poetic example of this concept. 82 In an interview with John Jacoby, Snyder discussed his concept of "singing the mountains" as part of learning the geological rhythms of the land a person lives in. Snyder, The Real Work, pp. 48-9. 83 Faas, p. 109. Snyder states: "Zen mysticism says: well, wait it's already all a Buddha right now, if you can just see it, so that's ahistorical. It's the eternal mo­ ment." 84 Faas, p. 135.

85 Donald M. Allen, ed., The New American Poetry (New York: Grove Press, 1960), p. 421. 86 Steuding, pp. 137-8. 87 Satori is the Japanese word for the Zen concept of sudden enlightenment or awakening. See Hatts, p. 83. 88 See Watts, Part Two, Chapter Three, "Za-zen and the Koan" for an explanation of this Zen teaching device. 95

89 See Gary Snyder, "The Flowing," Conjunctions I, 1 (1981), 20-3, for Snyder's further development of this metaphor in a more recently written section of Mountains and Rivers without End. 90 See heinrich Zimmer, Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization, ed. Joseph Campbell, Bollingen Series 6,(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), pp. 24-5, for a discussion of the cycle of life concept of Hinduism. This work also discusses Shiva and Parvati/Sarasvati at length. 91 For a discussion of shamanism, see Steuding, pp. 105-9, and Almon, Gary Snyder, pp. 17-9. Snyder comments directly in He Who Hunted Birds in His Father's Village, pp. 92-6, and Earth House Hold, pp. 117-30, as well as in Faas, pp. 116- . 92 For Snyder's concept of man as whorls of energy, see Bartlett, "Interview," pp. 48-9. 93 See Wendell Berry, "The Making of a Marginal Farm" in Recollected Essays, for his prose account of the land described in Clearing. 94 Reader, p. 30. 95 Williamson, p. 9. Berry's comments in this inter­ view reinforce the interpretation given here. 96 See Reader, p. 31, for Berry's remarks in this regard. 97 One suspects the influence of Spenser here. Berry has referred to him as an important influence and has described "Epithalamion" as a "standard" for his own poetry. Reader, p. 30. 98 Reader, p. 30. 99 Merton, p. 22.

Conclusion

10 ° For Snyder, see Faas, pp. 109-10, and "The Politics of Ethnopoetics" in The Old vJays; for Berry, see Williamson, pp. 6-12, Reader, pp. 29-31, as well as many of Berry's essays in Recollected Essays and The Gift of Good Land. 101 Robert Scott, "The Uncollected Early Poems of Gary Snyder," The North American Review, 262 (Fall 1977), pp. 80-

~.: ·. 1(" f

. ' , . .. 96 jj' ~1 3; Kherdian, p. 48; Steuding, p. 17. 102 Tarn, "Anthropologist to Informant"; Kherdian, pp. 48-9; Steuding, p. 18. 103 Robert Kern, "Clearing the Ground: Gary Snyder and the Modernist Imperative," Criticism, 19 (Spring 1977), 177; Parkinson, p. 617. 104 Gary Snyder, The Fudo Trilogy (Berkely: Shaman Drum, 1973); see "The Blue Sky" in Six Sections from fvloun­ tains and Rivers without End, Plus one; in Turtle Island see "Spel Against Demons," "Prayer for·the Great Family," and "0 Waters." Also Snyder discusses the relationship of poe­ try to sacred song in The Real Work, pp. 181-3. 105 s teud. lng, pp. 105 -9 . 106 Reader, p. 30. The term "authentic" remains highly ambiguous and Berry does nothing to clarify it. 107 Reader, p. 30. 108 Reader, p. 30. 109 A new dissertation addressing this issue has recently been published, but I did not have the opportunity to address it in this thesis. See, Rebecca A. Pickett, "Gary Snyder and the Mythological Present" (DAI. 1981 Oct.; 42(4): 1649A).

'}_

I' ' .: ' '

' ' ' 97 . . ,' ~~ r~·· ~

Bibliography

Primary Sources

~endell Berry: Poetry The Broken Ground. New York: Harcourt & Brace, 1966. Clearing. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977.

The Country of Marrtage. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovano­ vich, 1973.

Farmin~: A Handbook. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1 70. Findings. Iowa City: The Prairie Press, 1969.

Openings. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968. A Part. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1980. The Wheel. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1982. Wendell Berry: Essays The Gift of Good Land. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981.

I Recollected Essays 1965-1980. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981. "A Secular Pilgrimage." Hudson Review, 23 (1970), 401-24. "The Specialization of Poetry." Hudson Review, 28 (1975), 11-27. The Unsettling of America. New York: Avon Books, 1978.

Wendell Berry: Interviews and Letters Reader, Willie. "A Correspondence with Wendell Berry." 98

Poets in the South, 1 (1977-78), 27-31. Williamson, Bruce. "The Plowboy Interview: \\Tendell Berry." The Mother Earth News, 20 (March 1973), pp. 7-12. Gary Snyder: Poetry The Back Country. New York: New Directions, 1968. "The Flowing." Conjunctions, 1 (Winter 1981-82), 21-3. The Fudo Trilogy. Berkeley: Shaman Drum, 1973. Myths & Texts. New York: New Directions, 1978; rpt. Totem Press, 1960. Regarding Wave. New York: New Directions, 1970.

Riprap & Cold Mountain Poems~ San Francisco: Four Seasons Foundation, 1965. Six Sections from Mountains and Rivers without End Plus one. San Francisco: Four Seaons Foundation, 1970. Songs for Gaia. Port Townsend, Wa.: Copper Canyon Press, 1979. Turtle Island. New York: New Directions, 1974.

Gary Snyder: Essays Earth House Hold. New York: New Directions, 1969. He Who Hunted Birds in His Father's Village. Bolinas, Ca.: Grey Fox Press, 1979. The Old Ways. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1977. Gary Snyder: Interviews and Statements Allen, Donald, ed. On Bread and Poetry. Bolinas, Ca.: Grey Fox Press, 1977. ------, ed. The New American Poetry. New York: Grove Press, 1960. Bartlett, Lee. "Interview: Gary Snyder." California Quarterly, 9 (1975), 43-60. Faas, Ekbert. Towards A New American Poetics: Essays & Interviews. Santa Barbara, Ca.: Black Sparrow Press, 1979. Snyder, Gary. The Real Work: Interviews & Talks, 1964- 1979. New York: New Directions, 1980. 99

Wendell Berry: Secondary Sources Allen, Dick. "Comment." Poetry, 124 (May 1974), 106-9. Dietrich, Mary. "Our Commitment to the Land." Bluegrass Literary Review, 2, 1 (1980), 39-44.

Ditsky, John M. "Wendell Berry's Homage to the Apple Tree." Modern Poetry Studies, 2, 2 (1971), 7-15. Fields, Kenneth. "The Hunter's Trail: Poems by Wendell Berry." Iowa Review, 1 (1970), 90-9.

Fussell, Edwin. Review. Parnassus, 3, 2 (1974), 26-8. Hass, Robert. "Wendell Berry: Finding the Land." Modern Poetry Studies, 2, 1 (1971), 15-38.

Hicks, Jack. "Wendell Berry's Husband to the World: A-· Place on Earth." American_Literature, 51, 2 (197"9'), 238-54) . Kramer, lawrence. "In Quiet Language." Parnassus, 6, 2 (1977), 101-17. Moran, Ronald. Review. The Southern Review, 8, 1 (1972), 249-50. Morgan, Speer. "V.Jendell Berry: A Fatal Singing." The Southern Review, 10, 4 (1974), 865-77. Pritchard, William H. "Comment." Poetry, 121 (December 1971), 163.

Robinson, J.K. Review. The Southern Review, 11, 3 (1975), 668-80. Shaw, Robert B. "Comment." Poetry, 120 (November 1970), 112-3. Tarbet, Donald W. "Contemporary American Pastoral: A Poetic Faith." English Record, 23 (Winter 1972), 72- 83.

Waage, Frederick 0. "Wendell Berry's History." Contempo­ rary Poetry, 3 (1978), 21-46.

Weiland, Steven. "Wendell Berry: Culture and Fidelity." Iowa Review, 10 (1978), 99-104.

Young, T.D. Review. Sewanee Review, 86 (Fall 1978), 595- 604. 100

Gary Snyder: Secondary Sources Almon, Bert. "Buddhism and Energy in the Recent Poetry of Gary Snyder." Mosaic, 11 (Fall 1977), 117-25.

------Gary Snyder. Boise, Idaho: Boise State Uni­ versity, 1979. Altieri, Charles. "Gary Snyder's Lyric Poetry: Dialectic as Ecology.'"' The Far Point, 4 (Spring/Summer1970), 55-65.

------''Gary Snyder's Turtle Island: The Problem of Reconciling the Roles of Seer and Prophet.'' Boundary, 2, 4 (1976), 761-77. Baland, Timothy. "A Skipping Stone." New Republic, (April 4 & 11 ' 1 9 70 ) ' pp . 3 2-3 .

Bartlett, Lee. '.'Gary Snyder's Myths & Texts and the Mono­ myth." Western American Literature, 17 (August 1982), 137-48.

Berry~ Wendell. "A Secular Pilgrimage." Hudson Review, 23 ~1970), 401-24.

Bly, Robert. "The Work of Gary Snyder." The Sixties, 6 (Spring 1962), 25-42.

Everson, William. "Archetype West" in John Gordon Burke, ed., Regional Perspectives. Chicago: American Library Association, 1973, pp. 207-306. Faas, Ekbert. Towards A New American Poetics: Essays & Interviews. Santa Barbara, Ca.: Black Sparrow Press, 1979.

Gitzen, Julian. "Gary Snyder and the Poetry of Compassion." The Critical Quarterly, 15 (Winter 1973), 341-57.

Kern, Robert. "Clearing the Ground: Gary Snyder and the Modernist Impetrative." Criticism, 19 (Spring 1977) 158-77.

------"Recipes, Catalogues, Open Form Poetics: Gary Snyder's Archetypal Voice." Contemporary Literature, 18 (Spring 1977), 173-97.

------"Toward a· New Nature Poetry." Centennial Review, 19, 3 (1975), 212-6 ..

Kherdian, David. Six Poets of the San Francisco Renais­ sance: Portraits and Checklists. Fresno, Ca .. The Giligia Press, 1965. ,, 101

.~;" Lyon, Thomas J. "The Ecological Vision of Gary Snyder." Kansas Quarterly, 2 {1970), 117-24.

------"Gary Snyder, a Western Poet." Western Ameri­ can Literature, 3 {Fall 1968), 207-16. Parkinson, Thomas. "After the Beat Generation." Colorado Quarterly, {Summer 1968), 45-56.

------. "The Poetry of Gary Snyder." The Southern Review, 4 {1968), 616-32.

------"The Theory and Practice of Gary Snyder." Journal of Modern Literature, 2, 3 {1971-72), 448-52. Paul, Sherman. "From Lookout to Ashram: The Way of Gary Snyder." Iowa Review, 1, 3 and 4 {Summer and Fall 1970), 76-91 and 70-85.

Roszak, Theodore. "Technocracy: Despotism of Beneficent Experience." Nation, 1 September 1969, pp. 33-7. Rothberg, Abraham. "A Passage to More Than India: The Poetry of Gary Snyder." Southwest Review, 61 {Hinter 1976), 26-38.

Scott, Robert I. "The Uncollected Early Poetry of Gary Snyder." The North American Review, 262 (Fall 1977), 80-3.

Steuding, Bob. Gary Snyder. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1976. Sward, Robert W. "Poetry Chronicle." Poetry, 96 (July 1960), 244-6.

Tarbet, Donald W. "Contemporary American Pastoral: A Poetic Faith." English Record, 23 (Winter 1972), 72- 83.

Tarn, Nathaniel. "From Anthropologist·to Informant: A Field Record of Gary Snyder." Alch<£ringa: Journal of Ethno-Poetics, 4 (1972), 104-14. General Secondary Sources Campbell, Joseph. The Masks of God: Oriental Mythology. 1962; rpt. New York: Penguin Books, 1982.

------The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology. 1959; rpt. New York: Penguin Books, 1981. Graves, Robert. The White Goddess. Amended and Enlarged Edition. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966. 'I,_-' ' 102

Highwater, Jamake. The Primal Mind. New York: New American Library, 1981.

Levi-Strauss, Claude. M~th and Meaning. New York: Schocken Books, 197 . Merton, Thomas. The Way of Chuang Tzu. New York: New Directions, 1965. Watts, Alan W. The Way of Zen. New York: Vintage Books, 1957. White, Lynn T., Jr. "The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis.'' Science, 155, 3767 (10 March 1967), 1203-7._

Zimmer, Heinrich. M~ths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization, e . Joseph Campbell, Bollingen Series 6. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974. 103

Appendix A "Bubbs Creek Haircut" 104

Bubbs Creek Haircut for Locke McCorkle

High ceilingd and the double mirrors, the calendar a splendid alpine scene--scab barber-­ in stained white barber gown, alone, sat down, old man A summer fog gray San Francisco day I walked right in. on Howard street haircut a dollar twenty-five. Just clip it close as it will go. "now why you want your hair cut back like that." --well I'm going to the Sierras for a while Bubbs Creek and on across to upper Kern. he wriggled clippers, "Well I been up there, I built the cabin up at Cedar Grove. In---nineteen five." old haircut smell

Next door, Goodwill. where I came out. A search for sweater, and a stroll in the board & concrete room of unfixed junk downstair-- All emblems of the past--too close-- heaped up in chilly dust and bare bulb glare Of tables, wheelchairs, battered trunks & wheels & pots that boiled up coffee nineteen ten, things Swimming on their own & finally freed from human need. Or? waiting a final flicker of desire To tote them out once more. Some freakish use. The Master of the limbo drag-legged watches making prices to the people seldom buy The sag-asst rocker has to make it now. Alone.

A few weeks later drove with Locke down San Joaquin, us barefoot in the heat stopping for beer & melon on the way the Giant Orange, rubber shreds of cast truck retreads on the pebble shoulders, highway ninety-nine. Sierras marked by cumulus in the east. car coughing in the groves, six thousand feet; down to Kings River Canyon; camped at Cedar Grove. hard granite canyon walls that leave no scree 105

Once tried a haircut at the Barber College too-­ Sat half an hour before they told me white men use the other side. Goodwill, St. Vincent de Paul, Salvation Army, up the coast For mackinaws and boots and heavy socks --Seattle has the best for logger gear Once found a pair of good tricouni at the under-the-public market store, Mark Tobey's scene, torn down I hear-- & Filson jacket with a birdblood stain.

A.G. & me got winter clothes for almost nothing at Lake Union, telling the old gal we was Qn our way To work the .winter out up in .B.C. hitch-hiking home the Green hat got a ride (of that more later) hiking up Bubbs Creek saw the trail crew tent in a scraggly grove of creekside lodgepole pine talked to the guy, he says "If you see McCool on the other trailcrew over there tell him Moorehead says to go to hell." late snow that summer. Crossing the scarred bare shed of Forester Pass the winding rock-braced switchbacks dive in snowbanks, we climb on where pack trains have to dig or wait. a half-iced over lake, twelve thousand feet its sterile boulder bank but filled with leaping trout: reflections wobble in the mingling circles always spreading out the crazy web of wavelets makes sense seen from high above. the realm of fallen rock. a deva world of sorts--it's high it is a view that few men see, a point bare sunlight on the spaces empty sky moulding to fit the shape of what ice left of fire-thrust, or of tilted, twisted, faulted cast-out from this lav& belly globe.

The boulder in my mind's eye is a chair . . . . why was the man drag legg'd? King of Hell or is it a paradise of sorts,·thus freed From acting out the function some 106 I

creator/carpenter Thrust on a thing to think he made~ himself. an object always "chair" Sinister ritual histories. is the Mountain God a gimp? "le Roi Boeuf" and the ritual limp? Good Will?

Daughter of mountains, stoopd moon breast Parvati mountain thunder speaks hair tingling static as the lightning lashes is neither word of love or wisdom; though this be danger: hence thee fear. Some flowing girl whose slippery dance entrances Shiva --the valley spirit/ Anahita, Sarasvati, dark and female gate of all the world water that cuts back quartzflake sand Soft is the dance that melts the mat-haired mountain sitter to leap in fire & make of sand a tree of tree a board, of board (ideas!) somebody's rocking chair. a room of empty sun of peaks and ridges beautiful spirits, rocking lotus throne: a universe of junk, all left alone.

The hat I always take on mountains: When we came back down through Oregon (three years before) At nightfall in the Siskiyou few cars pass A big truck stopped a hundred yards above "Siskiyou Stoneware" on the side The driver said He recognized my old green hat. I'd had a ride with him two years before A whole state north when hitching down to Portland from Warm Springs. Allen in the rear on straw forgot salami and we went on south all night--in many cars--to Berkeley in the dawn.

upper Kern River country now after nine days walk it finally rain. 107

we ran on that other trail crew setting up new camp in the drizzly pine cussing & slapping bugs, 4 days from road, we saw McCool, & he said tell that Moorehead KISS MY ASS we squatted smoking by the fire. "I'll never get a green hat now" the foreman says fifty mosquitoes sitting on the brim they must like green. & two more days of thundershower and cold (on Whitney hair on end hail stinging barelegs in the blast of wind but yodel off the summit echoes clean)

all this came after: Purity of the mountains and goodwills. Thediamond drill of racing icemelt waters and bumming trucks & watching Buildings raze the garbage acres burning at the Bay the girl who was the skid-row Cripple's daughter--

out of the memory of smoking pine The lotion and the spittoon glitter rises Chair turns and in the double mirror waver The old man cranks me down and cracks a chuckle

"your Bubbs Creek haircut, boy."

20.IV.60 108

Appendix B "The Clearing" "From The Crest" "Reverdure" 109 I

The Clearing For Hayden Carruth

1. Through elm, buckeye, thorn, box elder, redbud, whitehaw, locust thicket, all trees that follow man's neglect, through snarls and veils of honeysuckle, tangles of grape and bittersweet, sing,-chainsaw, the hard song of vision cutting in.

2. Vision must have severity at its _edge;

against neglect, bushes grown over the pastures, vines riding down the fences, the cistern broken; against the false vision of the farm dismembered, sold in pieces on the condition of the buyer's ignorance, a disorderly town of nhouses in the country" inhabited by strangers; against indifference, the tracks of the bulldozer running to gulleys;

against weariness, the dread of too much to do, the wish to make desire easy, the thought of rest.

3. "We don't bother nobody, and we don't want nobody to bother us," the old woman declared fiercely over the fence. She stood in strange paradise: a shack built in the blast of sun on the river bank, a place under threat of flood, bought ignorantly, not to be bothered. And that \ 110 is what has come of it, "the frontier spirit," lost in the cities, returning now to be lost in the country, obscure desire floating like a cloud upon vision. To be free of labor, the predicament of other lives, not to be bothered. 4. Vision reaches the ground under sumac and thorn, under the honeysuckle, and begins its rise. It sees clear pasture, clover and grass, on the worn hillside going back to woodi; good cropland in the bottom gone to weeds. Through time, labor, the fret of effort, it sees cattle on the green slope adrift in the daily current of hunger. And vision moderates the saw blade, the intelligence and mercy of that power. Against nature, nature will serve well enough a man who does not ask too much. We leave the walnut trees, graces of the ground flourishing in the air. 5. A man who does not ask too much becomes the promise of his land.

His marriage married to his place, he waits and does not stray. He takes thought for the return of the dead to the ground that they may come to their last avail, for the rain that it stays long in reach of roots, for roots that they bind the living 111 to the dead, for sleep that it brings breath through the dark, for love in whose keeping bloom comes to light.

Singularity made him great in his sight.

This union makes him small, a part of what he would keep.

6. As the vision of labor grows grows the vision of rest. Weariness is work's shadow. Labor is no preparation but takes life as it goes and casts upon it death's shadow, which enough weariness may welcome. The body's death rises over its daily labor, a tree to rest beneath. But work clarifies the v~s~on of rest. In rest the vision of rest is lost.

The farm is the proper destiny, here now and to come. Leave the body to die in its time, in the final dignity that knows no loss in the fallen high horse of the bones.

7. In the predicament of other lives we become mothers of calves, teaching them, against nature, to suck a bucket's valved nipple, caring for them like life · itself to make them complete animals, independent of the tit. Fidelity reaches through the night to the triumph of their lives, bawling in the cold barn before daylight--to become, eaten, the triumph of other lives perhaps not worthy of them, eaters who will recognize only their own lives 112 in their daily meat.

But no matter. Life must be served. Get up, leave the bed, dress in the cold room, go under stars to the barn, come to the greetings of hunger, the breath a pale awning in the dark. Feed the lives that feed lives.

When one sickens do not let him die. Hold out against the simple flesh-·'2"""' that would let its life go in the cold night. While he lives a thought belongs to him that will not rest. And then accept the relief of death. Drag the heedless carcass out of the stall, fling it in the bushes, let it lie. Hunger will find it, the bones divide by stealth, the black head with its star drift into the hill. 8. Streets, guns, machines, quicker fortunes, quicker deaths bear down on these hills whose winter trees keep like memories the nests of birds. The arrival may be complete in my time, and I will see the end of names: Tingle and Berry and Lanes. The history of lives will end then, the building and wearing away of earth and flesh will end, and the history of numbers will begin. Then why clear yet again an old farm scarred by the lack of sight that scars our souls? The struggle is on, no mistake, and I take the side of' life's history against the coming of numbers. 113

Make clear what was overgrown. Cut the brush, drag it through sumac and briars, pile it, clear the old fence rows, the trash dump, stop the washes, mend the galls, fence and sow the fields, bring cattle back to graze the slopes, bring crops back to the bottomland. Here where the time of rain is kept take what is half ruined and make it clear, put it back in mind.

9. February. A cloudy day foretel;liRg spring by its warmth though snow will follow. You are at work in the worn field returning now to thought. The sorrel mare eager to the burde~, you are dragging cut brush to the pile, moving in ancestral motions of axe-stroke, bending to log chain and trace, speaking immemorial bidding and praise to the mare's fine ears. And you pause to rest in the quiet day while the mare's sweated flanks steam. You stand in a clearing whose cost you know in tendon and bone. A kingfisher utters his harsh cry, rising from the leafless river. Again, again, the old is newly come. 10. We pile the brush high, a pyre of cut trees, not to burn as the way once was, but to rot and cover an old scar of the ground.

The dead elm, its stump and great trunk too heavy to move, we give to the riddance of fire. Two days, two nights it burns, white ash falling from it light as snow. It goes into the air. 114

What bore the wind the wind will bear.

11. An evening comes when we finish work and go, stumblers under the folding sky, the field clear behind us.

From the Crest

1. What we leave behind to sleep is ahead of us when we awake. Cleared, the field must be kept,cllear. There are more clariti'es to make. The farm is an infinite form. Thinking of what may come, I wake up in the night and cannot go back to sleep. The future swells in the dark, too large a room for one man to sleep well in. I think of the work at hand. Before spring comes again there is another pasture to clear and sow, for an end I desire but cannot know. Now in the silent keep of stars and of my work I lay me down to sleep.

2. The deepest sleep holds us to something immutable. We have fallen into place, and harmony surrounds us. We are carried in the world, in the company of stars. But as the dawn approaches, I feel shaping in my belly, for another day, my hunger, harder than bone, keener than fire, and I weave round it again the kindling tapestry of desire. 3. My life's wave is at its crest. The thought of work becomes a friend of the thought of rest. 115

I see how little avail one man is, and yet I would not be a man sitting still, no little song of desire traveling the mind's dark woods.

I am trying to teach my mind to bear the long, slow growth of the fields, and to sing of its passing while it waits.

The farm must be made a form, endlessly bringing together heaven and earth, light and rain building, dissolving, building back again the shapes and actions of the ground.

If it is to be done, not of the body, not of the will the strength will come, but of delight that moves lovers in their loves, that moves the sun and stars, that stirs the leaf, and lifts the hawk in flight.

From the crest of the wave the grave is in sight, the soul's last deep track in the known. Past there it gives up roof and fire, board, bed, and word. It returns to the wild, where nothing is done by hand.

I am trying to teach my mind to accept the finish that all good work must have: of hands touching me, days and weathers passing over me, the smooth of love, the wearing of the earth. At the final stroke I will be a finished man. 4. Little farm, motherland, made, like an abused wife, by what has nearly been your ruin, when I speak to you, I speak to myself, for we are one body. When I speak to you, I speak to wife, daughter, son, 116 whom you have fleshed in your flesh. And speaking to you, I speak to all that brotherhood that rises daily in your substance and walks, burrows, flies, stands: plants and beasts whose lives loop like dolphins through your sod. 5. Going into the city, coming home again, I keep you always in my mind. Who knows me who does no knriw you? The crowds of the streets do not know that you are passing among them with me. They think I am simply a _cwan, made of a job and clcithe~ and education. They do not see who is with me, or know the resurrection by which we have come from the dead. In the city we must be seemly and quiet as becomes those who travel among strangers. But do not on that account believe that I am ashamed to acknowledge you, my friend. We will write them a poem to tell them of the great fellowship, the mystic order, to which both of us belong. 6. When I think of death I see that you are but a passing thought poised upon the ground, held in place by vision, love, and work, all as ,passing as a thought. 7. Beginning and end thread these fields like a net. Nosing and shouldering, the field mouse pats his anxious routes through the grass, the mole his cool ones among the roots; the air is tensely woven of bird flight, fluttery at night with bats; the mind of the honeybee is the map of bloom. I 117 f

Like a man, the farm is headed for the woods. The wild is already veined in it everywhere, its thriving. To love these things one did not intend is to be a friend to the beginning and the end. 8. And when we speak together, love, our words rise like leaves, out of our fallen words. What we have said becomes an earth we live on like two trees, whose sheddings enrich each other, making both the source of each. * When we love, the green stalks and downturned bells of lilies grow from our flesh. Dreams and visions flower from these beds our bodies are. 9. The farm travels in snow, a little world flying through the Milky Way. The flakes all fall into place. But already the mind begins to shift its light, clearing space to receive anew the old fate of spring. In all the fields and woods, old work calls to new. The dead and living prepare again to mate. 10. Let the great son come , that sways the branches, that weaves the nest of the vireo, that the ground squirrel dreams in his deep sleep, and wakes, that the fish hear, that pipes the minnows over the shoals. In snow I wait and sing of the braided song I only partly hear. Even in the ristng year, even in the spr~ng, the little can hope to sing only in praise of the great. 118

Reverdure

1. You never know what you are going to learn. 2. The wintering mind turns inward, like the earth wintering. Beneath frost it keeps future and past alive. In spring it rises from its deeps, folds out again to light. Mind and leaf unflex in shine.

3'~ How to get in and out of your mind? The way in prepares the way out.

The groundhog, who turned his tail to the cold, now sticks out his face. 4. In the first warm morning the black calf walks down to the river, the light irised in his hair. Over his back leap the shadows of willows leafing. The good sun makes him go easy. 5. The phoebes have come back.

The drums of the woodpeckers ask and answer.

The blue of the bluebird is in the leafless apple tree, new breath.

The redbird sings 0 let it come, 0 let it, let it.

6. An old grandmother 119 a little surprised to be waking up again, the ground slowly remembers the shapes of grassblades, stems, leaves, birds, cattle, people, songs.

7. The slopes whose scars I mend turns green now. Healing becomes health. Reverdure is my calling.

8. One thing work gives is the joy of not working, a minute here or there when I stand and only breathe, receiving the good of the air. It comes back. Good work done comes back into the mind, a free breath drawn.

9. ,. Though I came here ' by history's ruin, reverdure is my calling: to make these scars grow grass. I survive this fate and labor by fascination.

10. I want to fence the thicket-ridden field unused all my life, and turn in the calves to browse the vines and leaves in May. They will begin to open it, eating the low growth~ letting vision find its way in among the close-standing trunks. And then in the winters, as I need, I will thin the trees, leaving the walnuts, poplars, ashes, oaks, burning what I cut to heat the house. Springs, on the frozen mornings of early March, I will sow the opened land. Slowly good pasture will widen over the slope in the shade of scattered tall trees, change doing the ground no harm. 11. And so, in the first wamrth of the year, I went up with saw and axe to cut a way in. I made a road. I made a thought-way under the trees, up the slope, and that was ancient work. 120

In rhyme of flesh with flesh, time with time, act with act, I made my way into the woods, leaving an order that was mine, a way opening behind me by which I came out again. 12. Above that thicket growth the hillside steepens, the trees are old. The farm reaches one of its limits there, and finds its example. No leaf falls there that is lost; all that falls rises, opens, sings; what was, is. And this steep woods will be left standing, a part~ of the farm not farrne'a, its sacred grove, where we will have nothing to do. The trees live in eternity and they live now. Their roots are in life and death. They have the earthly health whose signature is song. 13. And there are ways the deer walk in darkness that are clear. It is not by will I know this, but by willingness, by being here. 14. It is time again I made an end to words for a while--for this time, or for all time. Any end may last. I love this warm light room, where words have kept me through the cold days. But now song surrounds it, the fields around it are green, and I must turn away from books, put past and future behind, to come into the presence of this time.