Gary Snyder: Photo Arya Degenhardt: Mono Lake Community
Who can leap the world ties/and sit with me amongst the white clouds
Han Shan,a Tang Dynasty poet.
Almost half a century ago, I was walking back to Camp 4 in the Yosemite Valley, accompanied by the legendary US climber, Chuck Pratt, when we met up with another outdoor enthusiast walking in our opposite direction. This stranger, unknown to me, was known to Chuck, and they exchanged greetings, and I was introduced in that off hand way that climbers think of as sufficient, and we went on our way, eager to reach camp and slake our thirst after a day, climbing in the intense heat of August.
Once back in camp, I ventured to ask Chuck who the guy we had met earlier was, ‘Oh he is from California University. Many years ago he worked here in the Park trail-building. So he knows a lot about Yosemite and Its history’. I had only heard that his name was Gary in our introduction, and it was some time later that I realised that this was Snyder, one of the most famous writers in the States, already with a legendary back story, and a mountaineer of some experience beginning with a very youthful initiation into the sport.
I had been introduced to his writings by one of my own mentors also when young, the late Harold Drasdo. Who in one of our discussions bivouacking under Castle Rock in the Lake District, had enthused about an essay he had recently read by Gary Snyder about hitch-hiking. As it was at that date our own mode of transport, this was what had caused him to take up on this work, and he opined that ‘it was the best such piece of writing he had ever read about the activity and he recommended me to read it!’ High praise indeed for Harold had a keen critical eye for such literature.
He was born in the San Francisco area in 1930, but moved as a schoolboy to Oregon at the break-up of his Parents marriage; whence he started with other school friends travelling out into the countryside, and then as a young teenager he started to climb. He joined the Mazamas mountaineering club, based in Portland where he went to school and eventually college and over the next immediate years he ascended many of the major peaks in the Cascade Mountains, Mounts Hood, Baker, Rainier, Shasta, Adams, and St Helens.
Descending off the last as a 15 year old he learnt with some horror of the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. By the time he was 20 years old he was a highly experienced mountaineer, but his ascents were accomplished with a brio where he wished ‘to develop a fresh mountaineering mind-set that was totally opposed to the notion of conquest. I and the circle I climbed with were extremely critical of what we saw as the hostile Jock, occidental mind-set which was to conquer it…… I always thought of mountaineering not as a matter of conquering the mountain, but as a matter of self-knowledge’. He went on to also note ‘that my first interest in writing poetry came from the experience of mountaineering. I couldn’t find any other way to talk about it’. Only someone who has climbed could write a poem like the following;
After scanning its face again and again
I began to scale it, picking my holds
With intense caution. About half-way
To the top, I was suddenly brought to
A dead stop, with arms outspread
Clinging close to the face of the rock
Unable to move hand or foot
Either up or down. My doom
Appeared fixed. I must fall
Descending off the last as a 15 year old he learnt with some horror of the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. By the time he was 20 years old he was a highly experienced mountaineer, but his ascents were accomplished with a brio where he wished ‘to develop a fresh mountaineering mind-set that was totally opposed to the notion of conquest. I and the circle I climbed with were extremely critical of what we saw as the hostile Jock, occidental mind-set which was to conquer it…… I always thought of mountaineering not as a matter of conquering the mountain, but as a matter of self-knowledge’. He went on to also note ‘that my first interest in writing poetry came from the experience of mountaineering. I couldn’t find any other way to talk about it’. Only someone who has climbed could write a poem like the following;
After scanning its face again and again
I began to scale it, picking my holds
With intense caution. About half-way
To the top, I was suddenly brought to
A dead stop, with arms outspread
Clinging close to the face of the rock
Unable to move hand or foot
Either up or down. My doom
Appeared fixed. I must fall
(An extract from a longer poem, ‘John Muir on Mount Ritter’)
Snyder studied Literature and Anthropology at College, and became interested in folk lore research, and spent some time at the Warm Springs Indian Reservation in Central Oregon. This experience was to be a major influence upon him, drawing on their songs and poems and feelings about nature and mountain scenery. This was also the beginning of an interest in Buddhism, particularly because of its attitudes pro nature, and each winter there was also mountain skiing. He ran around with a group of older ex-ski troopers, who called themselves ‘The Wolken-Schiebers’.
Spring water in the green creek is clear
Moonlight on Cold Mountain is white
Silent knowledge-The spirit is enlightened of itself
Contemplate the void: This world exceeds stillness.
I the poet Gary Snyder
Stayed six weeks in fifty-three
On this ridge and on this rock
And saw what every Lookout sees
Saw these mountains shift about
And end up on the ocean floor
Saw the wind and waters break
The branched deer, the eagle eye
And when pray tell, shall the Lookouts die.
Amazingly now Snyder’s activities as a poet interested in Chinese studies, and working as a lookout in the summer months, brought him to the attention of the infamous senator Joe McCarthy, head of The House, un-American activities committee. And he was blackballed for not being patriotic enough to work any longer for the US government as a Lookout. At least he was in good company over this for many of the most outstanding artists and writers of that era suffered a similar fate, everyone from the playwright Arthur Miller to Charlie Chaplin.Stayed six weeks in fifty-three
On this ridge and on this rock
And saw what every Lookout sees
Saw these mountains shift about
And end up on the ocean floor
Saw the wind and waters break
The branched deer, the eagle eye
And when pray tell, shall the Lookouts die.
I never was so broke and down
Got fired that day by the USA
(The district ranger up at Packwood
Thought the wobblies had been dead for forty years
But the FBI smelled treason-my red beard
The literary fame of the Beat poets was launched in October 1955 at a reading in the 6 Gallery in San Francisco, and whilst it is Ginsberg’s long poem ‘Howl’ that is best remembered, Snyder’s follow on contribution ‘The Berry Feast’ has also stood the test of time. Most of the Beats were enamored of Eastern religion and psychedelia (way ahead of groups like The Beatles and other popular artists of the ‘sixties) and for Snyder it was Zen Buddhism that was to be his spiritual muse. Zen is a fusion of Mahayana Buddhism and Taoism. This latter a purely Chinese construct as is Zen which is known in China as Chan. Bidding goodbye to the Beat poets, he took off in 1956 for Japan, where he enrolled at a monastery in Kyoto to study Zen, but also to continue his writing and translating poetry. His 1957 collection of poems ‘The Back Country’ also includes translations by him of the now famous Japanese poet Kenji (1896-1933). He stayed in Japan until 1964, and then returned home to the USA as a crew member on an oil freighter.
It comes blundering over the
Boulders at night, it stays
Frightened outside the
Range of my camp fire
I go to meet it at the
Edge of the light.
A short finishing poem perhaps sums up best how he feels about the wilderness experience:
For All.
‘Ah to be aliveOn a mid-September morn
Fording a stream
Barefoot, pants rolled up
Holding boots, pack on
Sunshine, ice in the shallows
Northern Rockies.’
Dennis Gray:2015
