flARIN COUNTY FREE LIBRARY 31111015681487 Place in Space Ethics, Aesthetics, and Watersheds $25.00 A Place in Sp Ethics, Aesthetics, and Vv o. ieds New and Selected Prose by Gary Snyder In his introductory note, Pulitzer Prize- winning poet Gary Snyder writes, The ancient Buddhist precept "Cause the least pos- sible harm " and the implicit ecological call to "Let natureflourish"join in a reverencefor human life and then go beyond that to include the rest ofcivi- lization. These essays are Buddhist, poetic, and environmental calls to complex moral thought and action. .. Art, beauty, and craft have always drawn on the self-organizing "wild" side oflan- guage and mind. This new collection brings together twenty-nine essays spanning nearly forty years of Snyder's career, with thirteen essays written since the publication of The Practice ofthe Wild in 1990. Displaying his playful and subtle intellect, these pieces explore our place on earth. Snyder argues that nature is not something apart from us, but intrinsic: our societies and civilizations are "nat- ural constructs." Whether through common language or shared geographical watershed, we are united in community. We must go beyond racial, ethnic, and religious identities to find a shared concern for the same ground that bene- fits humans and nonhumans alike. Snyder argues that this thinking will not make people provincial, but will lead to a new kind of plane- tary and ecological cosmopolir- 'sm. Twenty-five years ago st Earth Day, Gary Snyder's speech in C nd his mani- festo "Four Changes," inch with a new postscript, helped set tru our (CONTIN CK FLAP) f CIVIC CENTER YO DATE DUE 1996 APR 1 9 i i » "iiii l|9b tfBB M ? lifg fr- tDEC l 2 iofr £ '» . FE B I 3 m i MAR 2 6 1998 APR 161008 ?- tOGT 22 1998 WOV 10 188 1 MAY 1 8 1999 pr.T i fl 1999 A Place in Space also by Gary Snyder No Nature: New and Selected Poems The Practice ofthe Wild Left Out in the Rain: New Poems 1947-1985 Passage Through India Axe Handles The Real Worf{: Interviews and Tal/(s 1964-1979 He Who Hunted Birds in His Father's Village Turtle Island Regarding Wave Earth House Hold The Back^ Country Myths and Texts Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems A Place in Space A-* *r \f ^ Ethics, Aedtheticd, and Waterdhedd New and Selected Prode Gary Snyder COUNTERPOINT WASHINGTON, D.C. Copyright © 1995 by Gary Snyder All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the Publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. The author wishes to thank and acknowledge the editors and publishers who first published many of these essays in earlier drafts and incarnations: American Poetry, Audubon, Casa de America, City Lights Books, Empty Bowl Press, Library Perspective, Mesechabe, New Directions Publishing, North Point Press, San Francisco Examiner, Shambhala Publications, Sulfur, Ten Directions, Tree Rings, Upriver Downriver, Weatherhill, Inc., and ZYZZYVA. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Snyder, Gary, 1930- A place in space: ethics, aesthetics, and watersheds: new and selected prose / Gary Snyder. I. Title. PS3569.N88P57 1995 814'. 54— dc20 95"3 23°5 ISBN 1-887178-02-3 (alk. paper) FIRST PRINTING Book design by David Bullen Composition by Wilsted & Taylor Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper that meets the American National Standards Institute Z39-48 Standard. COUNTERPOINT P.O. Box 65793 Washington, D.C. 20035-5793 Distributed by Publishers Group West Contents vii Note I. ETHICS 3 North Beach 7 "Notes on the Beat Generation" and "The New Wind" 19 A Virus Runs Through It 25 Smokey the Bear Sutra 32 Four Changes, with a Postscript 47 The Yogin and the Philosopher 52 "Energy Is Eternal Delight" 56 Earth Day and the War Against the Imagination 65 Nets of Beads, Webs of Cells 74 A Village Council of All Beings II. AESTHETICS 85 Goddess of Mountains and Rivers 91 What Poetry Did in China 74 94 Amazing Grace 99 The Old Masters and the Old Women 109 A Single Breath 1 the 1 Energy from Moon 121 Walked into Existence 1 26 The Politics of Ethnopoetics 148 The Incredible Survival of Coyote 163 Unnatural Writing 1 73 Language Goes Two Ways III. WATERSHEDS 183 Reinhabitation 192 The Porous World 199 The Forest in the Library 205 Exhortations for Baby Tigers 2 Walt Whitman's World" 1 Old "New 219 Coming into the Watershed 236 The Rediscovery of Turtle Island 252 Kitkitdizze: A Node in the Net vi **« Contents Note Th,his collection draws on some forty years of thinking and writing. It can be considered a further exploration of what the "practice of the wild" would be. The ancient Buddhist precept "Cause the least possible harm" and the implicit ecological call to "Let nature flour- ish" join in a reverence for human life and then go beyond that to include the rest of creation. These essays are Buddhist, poetic, and environmental calls to complex moral thought and action —metaphoric, oblique, and mythopoetic, but also I hope practical. Ethics and aesthetics are deeply inter- twined. Art, beauty, and craft have always drawn on the self- organizing "wild" side of language and mind. Human ideas of place and space, our contemporary focus on watersheds, become both model and metaphor. Our hope would be to see the interacting realms, learn where we are, and thereby move toward a style of planetary and ecological cosmopoli- tanism. Meanwhile, be lean, compassionate, and virtuously fero- cious, living in the self-disciplined elegance of "wild mind." 'W *r 1 "W >r Ethl C<J — ^r "W ^ *W ^ "Vf North Beach Ln the spiritual and political loneliness of America of the fif- ties you'd hitch a thousand miles to meet a friend. Whatever lives needs a habitat, a culture of warmth and moisture to grow. West Coast of those days, San Francisco was the only city; and of San Francisco, our home port was North Beach. Why? Because partly, totally non- Anglo. First, the Costa- noan native peoples—peoples living around the Bay for five thousand-plus years. Sergeant Jose Ortega crossed sand dunes and thickets to climb a hill (Telegraph) there around the first of November, 1769. Later, Irish on the hill (prior to quake and fire) and tales of goats grazing those rocks Tellygraft hill, Tellygraft hill, Knobby old, slobby old, Tellygraft hill —then Italian, Sicilian, Portuguese (fishermen), Chinese (Kuang-tung and Hakka), and even Basque sheepherders down from Nevada on vacation. When we of the fifties and after walked into it, wall^ was the key word. Maybe no place else in urban America has such a feel of on-foot: narrow streets, high blank walls, and stair- step steeps of alleys and white-wood houses cheap to rent; laundry flapping in the foggy wind from flat-topped roofs. Like Morocco, or ancient terraced fertile-crescent pueblos. A tiny watershed divide is at the corner of Green and Co- lumbus. Northward a creek flowed, the mouth of which, on the little alley called Water Street (now some blocks up from the Fisherman's Wharf coast— all fill), is under the basement of a friend's apartment. The easterly stream went down by what was the Barbary Coast strip of clubs once, and on underneath the present Coast and Geodetic Survey offices on Battery. Storms come out of a place in the North Pacific, high latitudes, pulse after pulse of weather (storms deflected north in summer). San Francisco, North Beach, like living on the bow of a ship. Over the dark running seas, from No- vember on, breaking in rains and flying cloud bits on the sharp edges of Telegraph Hill. A habitat, midway between two other summer and win- ter ranges, Berkeley and Marin County. Who would not, en route, stop off in North Beach? To buy duck eggs, drop into Vesuvio's, City Lights, get sesame oil or wine, walk up Grant to this or that Place. Or living there: the hum of cable- car cables under the street—lit-up ships down on the docks working all night—the predawn crashes of the Scavengers' trucks. Spanning years from a time when young women would get arrested for walking barefoot, to the barebottom clubs of Broadway now tending tourist tastes from afar. A habitat. The Transamerica Pyramid, a strikingly wasteful and arrogant building, stands square on what was once called Montgomery Block, a building that housed the 4 "V- North Beach artists and revolutionaries of the thirties and forties. Ken- neth Rexroth, many others, lived there; foundations of post- war libertarianism; movements that became publicly known as "beat" in the middle fifties. This emphasis often neglected the deeply dug-in and committed thinkers and artists of the era who never got or needed much media fame; who were the culture that nourished so much. Many people risking all —following sometimes the path of excess and not always going beyond folly to the hoped-for wisdom. Yet, like the sub-Aleutian storms, pulse after pulse came out of North Beach from the fifties forward that touched the lives of people around the world. I worked the docks in those days. Down to Pier 23 to wor\. Smith-Rice cranes, and Friday a white egret thatfluttered down on the pier, dwarfing the seagulls, riffled its wings and feathers delicately a few times then flew off bac\ in the direction from which it came. —23. XI.