{"id":9986,"date":"2025-02-04T14:27:48","date_gmt":"2025-02-04T18:27:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/gary-snyder-on-how-to-unbreak-the-world-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2025-02-04T14:27:48","modified_gmt":"2025-02-04T18:27:48","slug":"gary-snyder-on-how-to-unbreak-the-world-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/gary-snyder-on-how-to-unbreak-the-world-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"Gary Snyder on How to Unbreak the World \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Profit<\/a>
\n<\/p>\n

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\"Gary<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cThe universe is made of stories, not atoms,\u201d Muriel Rukeyser<\/a> wrote in her poem \u201cThe Speed of Darkness\u201d not long after James Baldwin told an audience of writers<\/a> that \u201cwe made the world we\u2019re living in and we have to make it over.\u201d We make the world not with our ballots \u2014 though they do, oh they do matter \u2014 but with the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and what we are capable of, the stories we believe to be true. Politics, after all, is just the weaponized business of belief. And it may be that the only real antidote to the insanity of our times, to this planet-wide storm system of helplessness and disorientation, is to resist with everything we\u2019ve got the belief that our story is finished, that we and our organizing principles are the final word of this universe, dragging behind us the fourteen-billion-year comet tail that blazed from the first atoms<\/a> to the atomic bomb. <\/p>\n

I know no mightier or more mellifluous voice of resistance to this dangerous belief than the poet, anthropologist, and ecological steward Gary Snyder<\/strong> (b. May 8, 1930), who would surely resist being called a philosopher, but who for nearly a century has been teaching us with his writing and his living how to live and how to die \u2014 and what else is philosophy?<\/p>\n

Born into a family that survived by subsistence farming after the Great Depression hurled them into poverty, Snyder was seven when an accident left him bedridden for months. He spent them devouring book after book from the public library, so that by the time he was back on his feet, he had read more than a college freshman. Reading, of course, teaches us that there are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives<\/a> \u2014 it complicates our story of what it means to be alive, it opens our eyes and our hearts to how other people and peoples in other times and other places have lived, how their ways of being might deepen and broaden and elevate our own. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Art by Ofra Amit from A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader<\/em><\/a>. Available as a print<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

By the time he was a young man, Snyder was determined to bend his gaze beyond his era\u2019s horizon of possibility. <\/p>\n

He took a job as a seaman to better understand other cultures and enrolled in a graduate program for Asian languages at Berkeley. <\/p>\n

He worked as a vagabond laborer up and down the West Coast, a trail-builder in Yosemite, a crewman in the engine room of an oil tanker, a fire lookout in the North Cascades, and a timber scaler on the Warm Springs Indian Reservation. <\/p>\n

He roomed for a while with Jack Kerouac, studied for a while with Alan Watts, and climbed Glacier Peak with Allen Ginsberg at the belay. <\/p>\n

He discovered Zen through D.T. Suzuki<\/a> and learned ink and watercolor painting from Chiura Obata<\/a>. <\/p>\n

He spent fifteen years living in Buddhist communities after boarding a marine freighter to study Zen Buddhism in Japan. <\/p>\n

And all the while, he wrote poetry, thought deeply about the nature of the mind and the substance of the spirit, and paid tender attention to the living world, to the relational nature of being, to the meaning and making of freedom. <\/p>\n

<\/a>
Art by Icinori from Thank You, Everything<\/em><\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Snyder\u2019s increasingly urgent and clarifying vision for remaking the world by rewriting our stories of the possible comes alive in Earth House Hold<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>) \u2014 the 1969 collection of his journal entries and poem fragments. <\/p>\n

Long before Doris Lessing urged us to examine the prisons we choose to live inside<\/a>, Snyder makes a piercing parenthetical observation in a diary entry penned after \u201ctwo days contemplating ecology, food-chains and sex\u201d: <\/p>\n

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Three-fourths of philosophy and literature is the talk of people trying to convince themselves that they really like the cage they were tricked into entering.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

He considers the cages of our cultural ideologies:<\/p>\n

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There is nothing in human nature or the requirements of human social organization which intrinsically requires that a culture be contradictory, repressive and productive of violent and frustrated personalities\u2026 The mercy of the West has been social revolution; the mercy of the East has been individual insight into the basic self\/void. We need both.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The most merciless danger of our present world order is that we have turned these \u201cviolent and frustrated personalities\u201d into leaders, largely because the power structures of secular life, which we call politics, are modeled on the power structures of large organized religions. But there are other organizing principles to be drawn from other, older spiritual traditions that may better address the problem of being alive in this time and place, of managing the superorganism we have become and the inner life of the spirit in each of us cells. In Distant Neighbors<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>) \u2014 the absolutely wonderful record of his epistolary friendship with Wendell Berry<\/a> \u2014 Snyder (whose poetically titled graduate thesis \u201cHe Who Hunted Birds in His Father\u2019s Village\u201d explored the wisdom of indigenous traditions) reflects:<\/p>\n

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Whereas \u201cworld religions\u201d tend to have great charismatic human leader-founders, the natural religions, the old ways, take their teachings direct from the human mind, the collective unconscious, the ground of being. Rather than theology, they have mythology and visionary practice\u2026 The two levels, of course, are (1) acting as social glue and intensifying the bonds of the culture and the coherence of it; the other is liberating and transcendent, of freeing one from the bonds of ego and conditioning. It\u2019s fascinating to see the dialectic of these two roles as they work out in different times and places. Some traditions within great traditions tend toward total mysticism, others ground themselves entirely in secular affairs. All religions are one at the point where life is given to the spirit, and real breakthrough is achieved. I doubt that any of the world religions ever have or could achieve a fusion of the two levels; I like to believe that some ancient religions \u2014 Old Ways \u2014 did achieve it: like perhaps the Hopi. The thing is, \u201cworld religions\u201d are always a bad deal: they are evoked by the contradictions and problems of civilization, and they make compromises from the beginning to be allowed to live. The Great Fact of the last 8,000 years is civilization; the power of which has been and remains greater than the power of any religion within that time span.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

<\/a>
One of Hildegard\u2019s ecological cosmology<\/a> paintings.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Some mystics, Snyder observes, have always found ways to \u201ccrack through dogma\u201d \u2014 he names Meister Eckhart among them, and I would add Hildegard of Bingen<\/a> and Simone Weil<\/a> \u2014 but he laments that Christianity, the dominant religion of the capitalist West, has become more and more of \u201ca centralist teaching.\u201d In most Eastern spiritual traditions, on the other hand, \u201cthe center of being is everywhere.\u201d He writes:<\/p>\n

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Zen, as the arm of Buddhism most given to the life of the spirit, really doesn\u2019t care about theology or dogma; it takes people where the spirit leads, and has a complete authenticity of its own, one must adjust this authenticity to whatever received teachings one started from on one\u2019s own.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Echoing Nietzsche\u2019s eternal admonition that \u201cno one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life,\u201d<\/a> he writes elsewhere:<\/p>\n

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Nobody else can do it for you; the Buddha is only the teacher.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Drawing on his life in Zen, he considers what he made for himself of the ancient teachings:<\/p>\n

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Wisdom is intuitive knowledge of the mind of love and clarity that lies beneath one\u2019s ego-driven anxieties and aggressions\u2026 Morality is bringing it back out in the way you live, through personal example and responsible action, ultimately toward the true community (sangha) of \u201call beings.\u201d This last aspect means, for me, supporting any cultural and economic revolution that moves clearly toward a free, international, classless world. It means using such means as civil disobedience, outspoken criticism, protest, pacifism, voluntary poverty and even gentle violence if it comes to a matter of restraining some impetuous redneck. It means affirming the widest possible spectrum of non-harmful individual behavior \u2014 defending the right of individuals to smoke hemp, eat peyote, be polygynous, polyandrous or homosexual. Worlds of behavior and custom long banned by the Judaeo-Capitalist-Christian-Marxist West. It means respecting intelligence and learning, but not as greed or means to personal power. Working on one\u2019s own responsibility, but willing to work with a group.<\/p>\n

[\u2026]<\/p>\n

The traditional cultures are in any case doomed\u2026 The coming revolution will close the circle and link us in many ways with the most creative aspects of our archaic past. If we are lucky we may eventually arrive at a totally integrated world culture with matrilineal descent, free-form marriage, natural-credit communist economy, less industry, far less population and lots more national parks.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

<\/a>
Art by Beatrice Alemagna from We Go to the Park<\/em><\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The story the \u201cJudaeo-Capitalist-Christian-Marxist West\u201d has sold us is that self-interest is the only path to growth \u2014 there goes Silicon Valley lining up with the fault line that is Donald Trump \u2014 and that parasitism the only way of securing resources for oneself. Snyder\u2019s vision for this coming revolution of consciousness is not against growth but for symbiosis rather than parasitism, for interdependence rather than selfing, as the path to growth. In Turtle Island<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>) \u2014 his 1974 book of poems and essays, titled after the Native American term for North America \u2014 he reflects:<\/p>\n

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The longing for growth is not wrong. The nub of the problem now is how to flip over, as in jujitsu, the magnificent growth-energy of modern civilization into a nonacquisitive search for deeper knowledge of self and nature\u2026 If people come to realize that there are many nonmaterial, nondestructive paths of growth \u2014 of the highest and most fascinating order \u2014 it would help dampen the common fear that a steady state economy would mean deadly stagnation.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In The Real Work<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>) \u2014 the collection of interviews and talks he gave in the 1960s and 1970s \u2014 he elaborates on this idea, considering what those alternative paths to growth look like and what they ask of us. Just as Rachel Carson was signing her untimely farewell to the world with her haunting instruction for how to save it<\/a>, he writes:<\/p>\n

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The danger and hope politically is that Western civilization has reached the end of its ecological rope. Right now there is the potential for the growth of a real people\u2019s consciousness.<\/p>\n

[\u2026]<\/p>\n

All of industrial\/technological civilization is really on the wrong track, because its drive and energy are purely mechanical and self-serving \u2014 real values are someplace else. The real values are within nature, family, mind, and into liberation\u2026 And how do we make the choices in our national economic policy that take into account that kind of cost accounting \u2014 that ask, \u201cWhat is the natural-spiritual price we pay for this particular piece of affluence, comfort, pleasure, or labor saving?\u201d<\/p>\n

[\u2026]<\/p>\n

The only hope for a society ultimately hell-bent on self-destructive growth is not to deny growth as a mode of being, but to translate it to another level, another dimension\u2026 The change can be hastened, but there are preconditions to doing that\u2026 Nobody can move from [one] to [the other] in a vacuum as a solitary individual\u2026. What have to be built are community networks\u2026 When people, in a very modest way, are able to define a certain unity of being together, a commitment to staying together for a while, they can begin to correct their use of energy and find a way to be mutually employed. And this, of course, brings a commitment to the place, which means right relation to nature.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

<\/a>
Art by Icinori from Thank You, Everything<\/em><\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A decade later, Snyder would distill the essence of this orientation in a talk he delivered to an audience of college students:<\/p>\n

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What we\u2019d hope for on the planet is creativity and sanity, conviviality, the real work of our hands and minds.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

And while it is true that no one else can walk the path and do the real work for us, it is also true that we can be helped and guided, that we especially need the help and guidance in such times of helplessness and disorientation. Snyder writes:<\/p>\n

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True teachers are called into being by the contradictions generated by civilization\u2026 We need them.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Who are the true teachers of our time?<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Profit<\/a>
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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