Kitkitdizze • 1988
JULIA MARTIN: I’d like to start by talking about origins and influences. You’ve spoken about your childhood before, but what I’m interested in is your experience of growing up in a politically conscious environment: your family was involved in Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) politics. Can you say something about that?
GARY SNYDER: Well, it was a Washington State thirties Depression household, as many households were, in the rural territory just north of Seattle, predominantly settled by Scandinavians with a few Japanese-American households doing truck farming. Our family tradition was radical politics on both sides, particularly on my father’s side because my grandfather was an active IWW and socialist speaker and thinker. Then my father was active during the thirties with the League of Unemployed Voters and other left-wing, labor-oriented groups of the time. My mother was sympathetic with those ideas, had essentially the same politics, and was for her time very much a feminist.
The effect of that was for there to be a certain kind of political conversation around the house, certain opinions about the Depression and the economy that I grew up with, a high degree of critical attitude toward some of the more unthinking aspects of the society, and a very critical attitude toward Christianity and the Church. My mother is a militant atheist, my father was a nonmilitant atheist. That, combined with the fact of our poverty and the fact that we worked very hard to keep things going, gave me what you might call a kind of working-class left-wing outlook, from an early age. It involved a certain literary outlook too, because my mother was a student in writing at the University of Washington, and when she was younger she read quite a bit. She wasn’t reading during the Depression—I don’t think we had any books. So we started going to the public libraries.
MARTIN: Does that background have a significant influence on the way you’ve constructed your life here at Kitkitdizze, which seems to be a political choice of a kind?
SNYDER: In some sense it certainly feeds into it. Growing up in a rural situation where we kept chickens and cows, cut a little firewood, had an outhouse makes this kind of life very comfortable for me. That is to say, I had many of the skills and attitudes already. I don’t think this is an exceptional life, in other words. This is just another way that people live. I like living in the city, and I like living this way too. I don’t do it for ideological reasons, or because I think the world is going to come to an end, or civilization is going to collapse and we ought to be self-sufficient.
MARTIN: So you do it because . . .?
SNYDER: I do it because I like to live this way! I’d live this way even if civilization were going to last. But there is a little difference in attitude that I and my present neighbors bring to it from my father’s generation, I think. This generation of back-to-the-land people is very clear on wanting to establish a long-range relationship to a place, and not take it as such an easy thing to move on to another place; to slow down that traditional white-American mobility, which is also rural mobility in many cases, and take the idea of commitment to a place more seriously. So there’s a difference in attitude there. That could be said to be somewhat political.
MARTIN: In what respects is this way of living affected by the wider context of capitalist America that you’re situated in?
SNYDER: It’s affected in absolutely every detail, like everything else is. We live in the same economy, we use the same monetary system, we have to make our living however we can. Being a rural person in America—or anywhere else in the developed world—is in no way to be out of the economy. It’s true that there’s a small amount of income that comes through what you might call subsistence, through foraging, through gathering, that is nontaxable, which is not counted as income. All of a hunter-gatherer’s income is nontaxable, so to speak. So we are to a tiny extent growers and foragers. We could be much more than we are, but it’s economically not feasible. There’s a higher degree of efficiency to be part of the economy than to opt out of it. In other words, growing food costs you more than buying food at the market. It’s a peculiar feature of a more complex economy that there are economic strategies by which you can live in a rural situation without being engaged in rural production. You just happen to do your work in a rural location, rather than an urban location. But there’s very little difference from doing your work in a suburb of New York. It’s just a matter of where you choose to live.
MARTIN: You are talking about a First World economy, though. Many of the “alternative lifestyles” that are possible here in the United States simply aren’t an option where I come from.
SNYDER: I’m sure they are possible where you come from. I’m sure somebody who was skilled in writing and computer programming could live just as well away from town as in town, because of decentralization of the information economy.
MARTIN: But that presupposes a high degree of skill and privilege . . .
SNYDER: I’m sure there are writers in South Africa who don’t live right in the middle of downtown, who live out in the country. It requires a little more ingenuity sometimes, but people all over the developed world are doing it—in Scandinavia, England, Wales, Scotland, and many other places. You have to spend more time thinking about tools and maintenance, but it’s never accurate to say, “You can do this, but other people can’t.” I run into that periodically. That is actually not a sensible way of putting it. The fact is, you can if you want to. Anyone can live like this if they’re willing to put out the time and the energy. But it’s also a matter of what the nature of your work is. There are a lot of people who opt for a lower income to be able to live here. They could make better money if they lived in the city.
MARTIN: Would you say that the way you teach is affected by your attitudes towards authoritarian structures?
SNYDER: I don’t think it is. I just teach in as directly communicative a way as I can. I also expect a lot from students. As a teacher I’m authoritarian. . . . You have to be.
MARTIN: That’s what a teacher is?
SNYDER: Sure. It’s great work—make people get the idea that there are higher standards than what they’ve been accustomed to, and that improves their sense of what can be done. I think of that as being part of the older milieu, the milieu of student and teacher.
MARTIN: Which models do you have in mind? Where do they come from?
SNYDER: From Buddhist teaching, kiva instruction, from apprenticeship rituals, from my own appreciation of that approach in teachers, and from my understanding of learning. How people learn.
MARTIN: The sort of literature teaching you’re doing now must be very different from your own literature training in the fifties, which would have meant New Criticism.
SNYDER: Everything has gone through a lot of changes since then. That was one side of my literary training. The other side was anthropological, where I was exposed to other literary traditions, and to the sense of nonelite cultural features, understanding that all cultures have literature, and that it is not at all necessarily dominated by an elite class: folklore, mythology, folk song.
MARTIN: That position obviously informs your discussion of the Haida myth, “He Who Hunted Bird in His Father’s Village,” in your BA thesis. Several critics have seen the thesis as a sort of storehouse of ideas and images that have been basic to your later writing. Do you see it like that?
SNYDER: Yes. What I brought together in the thesis were a lot of interests that I’d been exploring. It was a way of trying to synthesize a lot of diverse interests, some of which I’m still exploring. There are other things that are not particularly part of me these days. Obviously, it gave me a good push.
MARTIN: So what stays with you now? Which things are you still exploring?
SNYDER: Well, I’m still interested in the question of the role of myth and nonmyth, the play between direct understanding and perception as against the point of view shaped by cultural structures, direct experience, and any kind of experience mediated by opinion or ideology or preconditions. Unmediated experience—it’s an interesting thing. That’s what Zen is pointing to: unmediated experience.
MARTIN: So your Zen practice and your interest in anthropology are going in the same direction. On the subject of myth and nonmyth, you wrote at that time that “The function mythology serves in primitive culture is desperately needed in contemporary society.” That was the early fifties. Would you still put it like that?
SNYDER: You see, you have to say two things at once. This is the interesting part. We have to say that you need myth. And then you also have to say that you need to get to the end of myth. Myth can be understood as a kind of provisional ordering of the situation to get the territory at least clear enough so you can begin to work on it. In a so-called primitive culture, myth works to give a shape and a wholeness to a wide range of behaviors and institutions. Sometimes it’s extraordinarily shapely and very well constructed in some way: one symbol informs another symbol, and such a society has tremendous strength. However, the way mythologies work is by no means always benign. And so we have another way of speaking about myth, which is to speak of it as superstition, prejudice, preconceptions, blinders on the eyes, blinders on the mind, views and opinions that trap people. So mythology, images, can be used in more ways than one. We need to be able to discriminate between visions that liberate and visions that enslave, myths that liberate and myths that do not.
MARTIN: In your thesis you emphasized the mytheme of the supernatural wife and stressed the idea of “Woman” as mythic image of “the totality which can be known.” Can you comment on what this view of a mythic Woman has involved in your work?
SNYDER: Yes, there are a number of feminine images that overlap in there. The phenomenal world as female, as illusion, is one.
MARTIN: Maya.
SNYDER: Yes. The phenomenal world as totality of that which may be known, as a magna mater, or a goddess of nature, is another. The two are one and the same, though. The phenomenal world is either illusion or it’s not illusion, depending on how you look at it. Either way, it is given in some traditions a feminine imagery.
Those are images, I’m quite sure, that are projected by men. The phenomenal world, as both what can be known and what cannot be known, can be seen in a nongendered way as the Tao. In Vajrayana and Hindu symbolic metaphysics they actually switch the genders back and forth, and in Hinduism the masculine is seen as the quiescent and the feminine as the active. In some schools of Buddhism, the universe as illusion is seen as the feminine and the universe as insight or wisdom is seen as the masculine, and sometimes that’s switched. The more you get into it, the less important the gender imagery becomes. In Zen, the terminology is “host and guest”—it doesn’t matter which gender you’re talking about. You’re talking about the interplay of the apparently dichotomous nature of the universe and the fact that it’s actually not dichotomous. It’s one. And yet it plays back and forth between emptiness and phenomena, in time and out of time, the karmic fabric and the essential position, without time.
So I’m not as much interested in the genderization of those things. But I see the use of gender imagery in India in its poetic mythology and Tibet in its poetic mythology as charming—and sometimes useful. You might say that in a bhakti tradition, they tend to concretize their imagery into gender and have goddesses and gods. And in a gnostic tradition, a jnana tradition, a wisdom tradition, they would prefer not to see it as a gender-tied imagery.
MARTIN: In terms of your own work, would you see yourself as making use of both traditions, bhakti and jnana? There’s a lot of goddess mythology in your poems.
SNYDER: Certainly.
MARTIN: I’m thinking particularly of the goddess Gaia. When you write about Gaia, it seems to indicate some sort of identification with those ecofeminists and deep ecologists who have been using the term in the last decade or so.
SNYDER: I took Gaia from the beginning as a very useful, charming way of giving a word to the biosphere. Gaia is not all of the phenomenal universe, nor does it refer to an illusory realm. It refers to something very limited and very specific: the biosphere on Planet Earth. So it’s not talking about matter or nature, but about one particular organism and its history.
MARTIN: Is the use of a goddess as image for the biosphere a strategic choice, a counter to patriarchal mythologies?
SNYDER: It’s historical. Because the ge is what we have for geology. I wouldn’t support it for too long, because you get into trouble as soon as you ask. “Now what’s the opposite of Gaia?” or “What’s the male of Gaia?”
MARTIN: And then?
SNYDER: Solar energy? Okay . . . now solar energy is coming in and doing all this stuff with chemicals and making life. That’s okay, but you don’t want to pursue those images very long. It gets too literal. So I take it as a nonliteral image, and I wrote a few poems called “Songs for Gaia,” more interested in developing the scale of the image than anything literal. You know, “How large an organism can you imagine?” But I really get bored with all these New Age types that go around holding Gaia conferences all the time now, as though they were talking about something real.
MARTIN: You would see the term as a provisional myth, in other words.
SNYDER: Yes. And also it’s an interesting scientific fact, or possibly scientific fact.
MARTIN: That’s Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis.
SNYDER: Yes. Better that people should not get too carried away with talking about archetypes and stuff when they’re talking about Gaia, and should stay with the interesting question of “How large an organism is life?” and “How does an organism of that scale work if it works? What is the chemistry of it?” That’s much more interesting. Too many of these people want to jump over the details of biology right back into mythology before they’ve got themselves grounded in it. So I backed off from the use of the term Gaia, except as an interesting metaphor. I presume the hypothesis to have some use as a hypothesis. But talking about the planet as Gaia per se will not do the planet a lot of good. You still have to find a course of action, a program. Do something active: “Where do we go from here?”
MARTIN: What about the more general connection of “woman” and “nature”?
SNYDER: That’s a good question. Carolyn Merchant (who wrote The Death of Nature) and I were talking about that. There are definitely two schools of feminist thought about it. Ynestra King, for example, wants to eliminate all gendered references to nature. She says that doesn’t help women. It just makes them look fecund and Great Mothery, and it keeps them in the kitchen. Then there’s another imagery that is certainly very deeply established in thought and lore: metaphors drawn from some obvious observations of seeds being planted and sprouting, birth processes in nature, which suggest an analogy with women’s bodies and their roles in culture. I don’t know if hunter-gathering people ever got so deeply fertility- and goddess-oriented as did agrarian people. In agriculture there is the very clear metaphor of scratching the ground, poking a hole, and then dropping a seed in it, covering it up and watching it sprout. It becomes very easy to see the sun and the sky as some kind of fertilizing forces, and the earth as a womb which holds the seed and then brings it out. Hunter-gathering people do not genderize nature in the way that early agrarian cultures do.
MARTIN: How useful can that sort of early agrarian metaphor be for the late-twentieth-century people?
SNYDER: Well, you can take “woman” to mean “generative force,” assigning more of the reproductive role to the female than the male, which is the way that some people might see it. (There is some biological truth in this. In some animals the female has a more nurturing capacity than the male.) And then you can continue the image and say “our mother Earth,” and say “We shouldn’t destroy our mother Earth.” So it becomes ecological language. To be more precise, “We shouldn’t destroy our mother Earth and our father—whatever the father is.” If there are forces at work, and there are two of them, we need both of them. So . . . I’m just playing with these things still myself. We should respect the wholeness of the enterprise, the familiarity, the complementarity of the whole organic process.
MARTIN: You referred to two trends in feminist thought about the metaphoric association of “woman” and “nature.” Would you agree that it is precisely that association that has legitimized the oppression of women?
SNYDER: Clearly, in some cases.
MARTIN: You also spoke of a “male projection.”
SNYDER: For some of it . . .
MARTIN: I’m interested in the differences between the way, say, radical feminists might write about “woman and nature,” and their responses to the use of similar terminology by male writers. Someone like Adrienne Rich has been very critical of the celebration by male writers of what they might call “the feminine.” Any comments? To what extent is your use of such terminology conditioned by your gender?
SNYDER: Well, I’m sure it is. I think it’s tedious to get too involved in trying to figure out those arguments. I mean, everyone has an agenda.
MARTIN: As well as a gender. . . . Would you call yourself a feminist?
SNYDER: I don’t think it would be appropriate for a man to call himself a feminist. There are many women who wouldn’t call themselves feminists. So it’s a role that’s appropriate for women, and I support feminists, although I don’t support all feminists. I don’t support feminists who are just out there to buy into the capitalist system and become managers. That seems like a very revisionary form of feminism. I don’t necessarily support a feminism of women’s uniqueness, either. I do feel that the force of feminism in, for example, Japanese culture is very important, is in some ways truly revolutionary, and is more unsettling to the culture than industrialization and modernization have been.
MARTIN: What about the questions feminism raises for Zen Buddhism, which has traditionally been very much a male line?
SNYDER: Zen teaching seems to be able to incorporate women easily, as in a lot of places in the States. What’s interesting is to hear what Zen women who practice Buddhism have to say, their views toward Buddhist practice and toward feminism. There are some women who will say (having come from a feminist background) that they came to Buddhism because they needed a study of who they really were, without preconceptions, without a feminist or an antifeminist agenda. To ask yourself “What is my nature really like?” without the presumption that it’s going to be particularly female or male: to go beyond the gender side of the question and just look at what it is, to observe what your mind and psyche does. So they found Buddhism very refreshing in its freedom from preconceptions about the way the mind is. Buddhism teaches that the mind is the mind, and that the difference between a woman’s mind and a man’s mind at deeper levels is absolutely zero. So when Buddhism is doing what it should be doing, it helps us all equally, before race or gender, in establishing an insight into our own nature. And it may be that that insight includes some understanding of this part of me, this component which you might call feminine. That calls for some acknowledgment, and I need not be afraid of it or ashamed of it. And the same for men too—there has to be a place where they can acknowledge what part of their makeup is generated by their gender.
MARTIN: By their socialization into that gender?
SNYDER: Prior to socialization. Well, socialization into gender, but also, you know, there are forces at work that are prior to socialization. You see it in the difference between different girls and different boys. Some girls will be frilly and feminine from the very beginning. Some won’t. And I see it around here, we all see it: we’ve seen mothers who are handling chain saws and driving trucks, whose daughters won’t touch them. They simply won’t do that. There is a character that you’re born with, and there are tendencies that are prior to what your parents have socialized you into. There are definitely tendencies among girls to do certain things in certain ways, and there are tendencies in boys to do certain things, prior to socialization. Then socialization can enforce certain things or play down certain things. But you’re not dealing with a totally blank slate.
MARTIN: With regard to gender, Buddhism would seem then to reject the idea that differences such as “male” and “female” indicate fixed essences, fixed givens.
SNYDER: Buddhism would say that the male / female differences are real enough, but on a fairly illusory level, and that our essential nature is free of that. After all, our essential nature is the nature of rocks and trees, and there are no men and women there. So gender has very little to do with the essential insight, and in koan study, and the primary awakening called satori, or with the subsequent insights that people have. The way women grasp koans and the way men grasp koans is absolutely the same—there’s no difference at all. There’s no gender difference. There are some sides of Buddhist mythology that do put women down, it’s true. And in some traditions those lines may be quoted from time to time, and in other traditions they won’t. Zen has always held that there’s no difference between men and women with respect to practice.
MARTIN: But historically, that’s not how monasteries have been run.
SNYDER: No, because the society has not supported that. The Buddhists say that women and men are equal in their capacity for achieving enlightenment. But the society is not sending them equal numbers of men and women—for other reasons, for reasons that are already established in the society at large.
MARTIN: As I understand it, the version of Buddhist practice that you’re developing at the Ring of Bone Zendo emphasizes this place, this experience. You don’t want it to be an Asian import.
SNYDER: Yes, North American. The other thing we’re trying to do is to keep ourselves, so to speak, local. In that sense we’re more orthodox, more Asian, than many of the Zen centers that have been established, in the usual modern mode of establishing a center that caters to rootless and alienated people that come and go, and bring their problems, who are sampling the smorgasbord of therapies and possibilities for themselves in modern urban life. Most Zen centers draw on the alienated, educated members of the upper middle class. They also tend to carry on traditional Japanese Buddhist forms without any critical thought. That is the way that new cults worked in Rome.
MARTIN: In Rome?
SNYDER: That’s the way that new religions functioned in Rome in the second and third century AD, as symptomatic of the breakdown of the fabric of society; contending alien cults in a collapsing society. That’s not a very interesting place to be. What’s more interesting to me is something that is quite a bit deeper. First of all, what happens when you begin to have something a little more like a real community, and you can look at the possibilities of a sort of “postrevolutionary socialism,” or what Paul Goodman calls “a natural society.”
MARTIN: What does that mean in particular? Can you give some examples?
SNYDER: It means a society in which people live in one place for a good number of years; it means that they know each other personally on a first-name basis; it means that they know a considerable amount of the personal history of the individuals concerned; it means that they know their own family history and that they keep in touch with their parents; it means that they are engaged in their community in one or another ways by serving on committees, formal and informal committees; it means that they do not expect everybody to do what they do—a community in its own nature cannot be homogenous.
MARTIN: As would be the case in an intentional community.
SNYDER: We’re talking about a natural community.
MARTIN: And you’d see an intentional community as being artificial.
SNYDER: An intentional community can enforce a point of view. A natural community is a culture. Consequently, points of view are formed almost subliminally, over the long run, by the totality of the experiences that people go through and by the songs and the stories that they tell each other. So on many levels such a place is, so to speak, self-motivating. So that’s a natural community, a symptom of a natural society.
I don’t think Buddhism can function in a way that’s truly beautiful, truly interesting, until it has a natural society as its ground. Then the truly existential problems become the problems you’re dealing with. You get the politics out of the way by having a sane society. Then you can begin to work on the really refined study of the mind. This is what I’ve understood from working in Asia, that that is what Buddhism was doing at its best. We are in an era of tremendous social and political breakdown. Buddhism is not the cure for that, although it may be of help. But it can only be one of the kinds of measures.
So that’s why I divide my time between what you may call culture-building, or community-building, and Buddhist teaching. It would be really easy to live in the city and teach at a Zen center and do nothing but Buddhist teaching. I wouldn’t want to do it that way. I’d rather go out and start working in the neighborhoods as much as I could because I think you have to work the ground for a Buddhist society first. You can’t just leave your society the way it is and say “We offer this as one of the teachings.” You’ve got to help the society get its feet on the ground before those teachings can begin to flourish.
MARTIN: You’ve talked about “getting politics out of the way,” and yet that seems to be premised on an idea of radical social transformation, at the local level at least. You also used the term “postrevolutionary.” Would you call yourself a revolutionary?
SNYDER: I’d call myself a postrevolutionary! I guess I’d call myself a revolutionary in the sense that I can clearly envision situations, actually practical social structures, that are well beyond and after the kinds of conditions that people are living under now. And I can recognize that those possibilities are real, not impractical, not utopian. But it will take some drastic changes before we can get there. I’m not sure that deliberately applied drastic changes will necessarily get you where you want to go. So I’m a little bit cautious about proposing programs. There are a few things I propose.
MARTIN: Such as?
SNYDER: Don’t move. That’s very revolutionary. That’s why it catches people by surprise. They can’t figure out why it’s revolutionary for a long time. It takes a while to start seeing that it is.
MARTIN: I suppose my questions make it clear that I see your work as often being explicitly ideological, political. Would you agree?
SNYDER: I imagine that my work is political in the sense of its engagement in issues of import regarding the manner of the directions of our societies and issues of import in the manner of fundamental ethical attitudes. That’s where it is political, like Blake was political. And I don’t expect some of the things that I propose poetically, so to speak, to make sense, maybe, for decades. So that’s poetic politics, where what you launch are challenges and suggestions that don’t make sense or don’t begin to add up for a long, long time.
Politics is also just drama. I know people who do politics as their art form, who are actually very clear about that: “I could write poetry, I could be a painter. I like to do street theater, I like to do politics as theater. This is my theater.” There are a lot of people who do that. So it’s not interesting, really, to separate art and politics: politics is a kind of theater in which the stage is your own society, as you go back and forth on it. So ecological politics is mountains-and-fields theater. It’s a large-scale theater of the surface of the planet. Gaia is a theatrical device. The mother goddess is another mask of theater.
MARTIN: To be used for as long as it serves its purpose?
SNYDER: Yes, as long as it plays. And how it plays, and what happens when it plays, is fun to watch. And the stakes are real. The stakes are real. The stakes have to do with a kind of sustained viability in its diversity, without utopian or perfectionistic expectations. It would just be nice if we could keep going.
MARTIN: You made a comment in Turtle Island that has stuck with me as a puzzle: “Knowing that nothing need be done, is where we begin to move from.” What did you mean, exactly?
SNYDER: Yes, that’s a Buddhist point. Lots of people have asked me about that. In the larger scale, things will take care of themselves. It’s obviously human hubris to think we can destroy the planet, can destroy life. It’s just another exaggeration of ourselves. Actually we can’t. We’re far too small.
MARTIN: Really?
SNYDER: The time scale is far too large, and the resistance of cellular life is far too great. Lovelock is very interesting on this, on the extraordinary resilience of cells. But that’s no excuse. That would be no excuse for doing things poorly. A kind of bottom line is that all human activity is as trivial as anything else. We can humbly acknowledge that and excuse ourselves from exaggerating our importance, even as a threat, and also recognize the scale and the beauty of things. And then go to work. Don’t imagine that we’re doing ecological politics to save the world. We’re doing ecological politics to save ourselves, to save our souls. It’s a personal exercise in character and in manners. It’s a matter of etiquette. It’s a matter of living right. It’s not that the planet requires us to be good to it. It’s that we must do it because it’s an aesthetic and ethical choice.
MARTIN: Would you say, then, that there’s a lot of hysteria out there? What about the ozone hole?
SNYDER: Those issues are all real. Those issues are all real, but they’re not total. And the power of the universe far surpasses any damage we can do to it.
MARTIN: One response to the ecological crisis that you have been associated with is the deep ecology movement, or what you have referred to as “depth ecology.” Can you say something about this?
SNYDER: “Deep ecology” is not my term, it’s Arne Naess’s term. It just means, to my notion, people who are serious about ecology and aware of the larger-scale importance of the whole array of creatures and processes in the biosphere and don’t rate human beings as being necessarily the most interesting or the most important part of that. So that’s where they are: nonanthropocentric, and they call it biological egalitarianism. I don’t think that there is any shame in being a human being, and being pro-human. I think we should take that as being part of the turf. We’re not forced to practice human guilt, feel guilty about being a human being, any more than you need to have any other guilt about who you are. But still they have a lot of good points to make: that rough distinction of resource management ecology as shallow and long-term, life-respecting strategies for the benefit of all as deep ecology is important.
“Depth ecology” is a term that I’m working with now. I developed it when I started trying to do an ecological and etymological myth analysis of the widely distributed sub-Arctic study of the girl who married a bear. My method of analysis of that story came out of what I would call depth ecology, which is going to be in my book [The Practice of the Wild]. The term would refer to a territory where myth or folklore or shamanic constructions have to do with the way you treat creatures, whether or not you kill them or don’t kill them. How do you kill a bear? What do you do with a bear when you’ve killed it? Who eats it, who doesn’t eat it? What part of the bear do women and children eat, what part of the bear do old men eat? That’s . . . depth ecology.
MARTIN: So your understanding of ecological work is something very different from environmentalism.
SNYDER: One would do environmentalist work in the sense of dealing with little issues as they came up—we all do that—whereas the ecological view is a larger-scale view, one that is more biological. You can be an environmentalist without knowing anything about biology, just as you can be a politician without any knowledge of anthropology.
MARTIN: I’m thinking particularly of Murray Bookchin’s critique of what he calls “mere environmentalism.”
SNYDER: Yes, I know pretty much what Murray would say. Part of it is just exercises in terminologies. I don’t put people down for working on issues, especially if they win something. Whether or not they understand the larger picture, we have to be grateful for people who get out there and save a marsh. The same would be true of any political affairs. So what’s the use of putting them down? They’re working within their abilities . . . and that’s wonderful.
MARTIN: You mentioned earlier that your upbringing led you to be critical towards Christianity, and you’ve often written about the connection you see between Western metaphysics and the current ecological crisis. Can you see any ways that the work you’re involved in, in Buddhism particularly, might benefit from Christian or Occidental religious traditions?
SNYDER: That’s an interesting question. Of course Western Buddhists, coming out of Western culture and being probably from Christian or Jewish backgrounds, are already bringing those things into Buddhism, by virtue of their personalities and their background. So there’s already some kind of exchange there, I’m sure.
My own view is that Buddhism can profit from, but wouldn’t necessarily want to emulate, an understanding of the Christian concern for history—and the historical fact of the Christian concern for personality—as a kind of leavening factor in the evolution of Buddhist thought. I think that the Buddhists also have to admire the commitment of certain Christian sects, such as Quakers, to peace, and the Christian idea of witness and bearing witness as a matter of conscience. It has pitfalls from a Buddhist standpoint, pitfalls of over ego-stimulation. But that side of Christian engagement is admirable. It certainly can be learned from. Buddhists can learn from, or at least take note of, the section of the Church that is doing liberation theology. Buddhism has been quiescent, socially, for much of its history, and what and how it becomes more active in the social sphere is going to be very interesting. I’m sure it will, because in the West everybody gets more social. And also the power makes a difference: political action, political involvement, makes a difference in a pluralistic democracy, whereas in a traditional Asian culture, there’s very little direct political action possible.
MARTIN: Would you see your work as a counter to that traditional quiescence?
SNYDER: Yes, well what I see is . . . an interesting vision proposed by Mahayana Buddhism that hasn’t been acted out much, hasn’t been actualized much. I think that it may be the destiny for Western Buddhists to try to make the effort of actualizing what Buddhists say they can do in terms of actual life in society.
MARTIN: Can you be more specific?
SNYDER: Part of the actualization of Buddhist ethics is, in a sense, to be a deep ecologist. The actualization of Buddhist insights gives us a Buddhist economics not based on greed but on need, an ethic of adequacy but simplicity, a valuation of personal insight and personal experience over possessions. What I like most about Buddhism really is its fearlessness. So much of what warps people is fear of death and fear of impermanence. So much of what we do is simply strategies to try and hold back death, trying to buy time with material things. So at its best Buddhism provides people with a way of seeing their own frailty: you need less in the way of material objects and fortresses around yourself.
MARTIN: I’d like to talk about what you meant in Turtle Island by the phrase “bringing a voice from the Wilderness, my constituency.” What does this say about your role as Buddhist, ecologist, poet? You’ve written elsewhere about correspondences between “wilderness” and “the unconscious.”
SNYDER: I think I’d just like to leave that because as an image it generates enough as it is. It’s something that is quite adequate, once suggested.
MARTIN: It finds its own way? Okay. Perhaps we can just talk about “voice.” In Regarding Wave, the central metaphors, as I see it, derive from images associated with the goddess Vak, or Voice. Is the concept of Vak as “the voice of Dharma” still useful to you now?
SNYDER: Vak is just another way of referring to speech. I haven’t done anything further with Sanskrit language theory or mantra theory. In Buddhism, though, they say the sense of hearing, the vehicle of sound, is the clearest and easiest and most appropriate vehicle for enlightenment. We proceed to learn from the sense of sound better than from any other sense, in the very specific terms of Zen enlightenment. So that’s why Kuan Yin’s name means “observe the sounds.” That’s very clearly stated in Vajrayana mythology. It also says that the present kalpa is presided over by Amitabha, whose color is red and who resides in the West. Amitabha’s active compassion emanation in the material universe is Avalokiteshvara, “observe the sound, learn by hearing.” And that’s exactly what happens: sound is essentially your path in.
It’s a different point, although it’s related, that literature and poetry are fundamentally oral, because language is oral, and writing is secondary. I understand that some French intelligentsia don’t believe that, but they really have it backwards. In fact, one of Derrida’s biggest weaknesses is his insistence on theorizing from written texts. A whole lot of what he’s trying to say falls apart if you go back to orality. There’s a Jesuit teacher who’s written on this. . . .
MARTIN: Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy? He does mention deconstruction near the end.
SNYDER: Yes, that’s it.
MARTIN: Sound is the way in. But then, if, as Taoism at least proposes, “The Way which can be spoken is not the Way,” how (or why) write poems (or even sing them)? Can you say something about what seems to be the paradox of composing a Zen poem: how to give expression to an experience that is presymbolic, preverbal?
SNYDER: What you quoted was the first line of the first chapter of the Tao te Ching, which is often translated as “The Way that can be spoken of is not the true Way.” That may not be the only translation. The translation I prefer treats the second “Tao” as a verb, and would translate as “The Way that can be followed is not the true or correct Way,” which puts a different twist to it. Anyway, I don’t think it’s correct that “that which can be said” is automatically not true. To the contrary, in Zen we find that that which cannot be said is not complete. If you have an understanding and cannot express it, then your understanding is not yet complete. The act of expressing clarifies your understanding of it. However, the nature of that expression may not be clear and transparent to everybody, which is why Zen literature is not easy to follow. But that’s what it is. So the person who has a Zen eye can understand it.
I think in general it’s dangerous to propose . . . there’s been a lot of mischief that has proceeded from the idea that the truth cannot be said. It gets people off the hook too easily.
MARTIN: Inscrutable silences?
SNYDER: Exactly. A Zen teacher won’t accept that, absolutely won’t accept it. You go before a Zen teacher and he says, “Well, what is mu? What is the nondual essence of the mind?” And you just sit there and smile beatifically. He’ll say, “Come on, get off it.”
MARTIN: How does this idea of “the Way that can be followed” relate to what you said earlier about teachers, the value of an authoritarian teaching tradition?
SNYDER: Well, you have to learn how to go on a way before you quit following it.
MARTIN: Charles Olson wrote in the sixties about the need for poetry to get rid of “the lyrical interference of the ego, of the subject and his soul.” Would this describe what you’re attempting to do?
SNYDER: Yes, I’m not interested in being a consistent poet speaking voice, speaking for my own sentiments and sensibilities.
MARTIN: Because?
SNYDER: Because it’s not interesting. It’s like talking about yourself.
MARTIN: And what is interesting?
SNYDER: Talking about your nonself! When a bird flies across from one tree to another tree, you can be the bird flying across from one tree to another tree. You don’t have to think about the bird, how you feel about the bird. No difference between self and universe. So just shortcut that illusion.
MARTIN: But “self” informs the way you read the bird.
SNYDER: But you don’t have to encourage it. Which isn’t to say that sometimes poems aren’t written in the first person. The point is not to let yourself be the main character of what you’re thinking. If the sense of self is too narrowly located, then people sound like they’re talking about themselves all the time.
MARTIN: Do you evolve conscious strategies other than your formal Zen practice for developing this sort of attitude?
SNYDER: Zen practice is not limited to sitting on a cushion in a zendo. That becomes a habit of life, that’s true.
MARTIN: In the poem “What Have I Learned” you describe a lifetime’s knowledge of how to use certain “tools.” It’s clear that the term means many things in this context. “What have I learned / but the proper use for several tools . . .” Can you say more about this?
SNYDER: I was thinking of such tools as language, the library . . .
MARTIN: Your word processor?
SNYDER: No, more general: the whole fact of the stored body of information that is accessible to us at any time—you go up to the library—which means all the referencing and information research skills.
MARTIN: The poem refers to “passing it on.” Is that what you see yourself passing on?
SNYDER: Not exactly. What one hopes to pass along is the living experience of being in each moment.
MARTIN: You’ve spoken about the oral roots of literature and Vak as speech. How important is oral performance for your poetry?
SNYDER: I enjoy reading my own and others’ poems aloud. If somebody other than myself did it, that would be okay. I feel that the primary mode of existence of poetry is in speech and performance, and that writing is a secondary mode of existence. That’s where it’s been put down, where it’s been kept. Just like a play: you know when you read a play that its full mode of existence would be in performance. Still, you know that you can get something out of it by reading the script. So a poem is a kind of script—at least it can sometimes be that way; I think of a poem in that way. By thinking that way and by practicing that way I do make a connection in my own poetics with a very broad tradition of poems, the preliterate and oral traditions.
MARTIN: To what extent does the sort of poetics you have in mind imply a rejection of the dominant Western literary tradition?
SNYDER: It doesn’t reject the poems. There’s some excellent poetry there. It rejects the limitations that it has imposed on us: the elitist limitations, transforming itself into an academic discipline, where its works are kept in libraries.
MARTIN: Do you have any suggestions for people who are working in a primarily literate culture and want to access oral tradition so as to incorporate some of its features in their own poetry?
SNYDER: That is something that we’ve been just making up as we went along, and there’s been a lot of exchange back and forth between people in drama, storytellers, and some traditional Native people, and the artists who’ve been doing it. It’s very lively now. Performance poetry is being done all the time in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. You go to a lot of theater and performance and get a sense of what’s happening, of what can be done. You try things out. Try things out in your living room.
MARTIN: More specifically, do you have any advice for writers who are experimenting with forms that don’t reproduce the old relation between reader and writer?
SNYDER: We did an event at Green Gulch Farm, a branch of San Francisco Zen Center, a year ago last April, where we had a poetry creation right in the zendo, with a great deal of randomness and unpredictability, à la John Cage. It’s fun, but it’s not memorable. The writer-reader is the singer-hearer relationship. Traditionally, you break down the line between the singer and the hearers with responses or choruses where people join in the chorus, sing together. There’s a play that goes back and forth between the singer and the hearers, with the singer or singers who occupy the central territory invading the territory of the audience, including the audience in their territory, and then backing out again. I have no problem with that, I have no problem with the singer-hearer, reader-writer relationship. It’s a voluntary association. Nobody is forced to be a reader or a hearer, and so I would not call it a model of oppression. You can walk out if you want to. In fact, it has a good free-market analogy. It’s the market: pay and enjoy, or don’t buy. You go down the alleys and lanes of a fair, and you go in to find which jugglers you want to see. The writer or the artist has no complaint. People either come to hear their wares or they don’t.
MARTIN: With the free-market analogy in mind, how would you respond to the criticism that your work tends to be too esoteric, too dependent on allusions that most readers will not get?
SNYDER: Some does, some doesn’t. Some of my writing is more esoteric, some is less. I try to put in something for everybody.
MARTIN: And who is your audience?
SNYDER: The primary audience is people born since 1925, living in California, Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, and Alaska.
MARTIN: That’s pretty regional.
SNYDER: That’s primary. That’s where people live who can get a sense of what the inside levels are. People can read it in other places, but they’ll miss some.
MARTIN: Why that date?
SNYDER: Because that’s when the zeitgeist becomes . . . the zeitgeist of this particular zeit . . . that’s this zeit, this time frame.
MARTIN: I was recently reading the poem “Front Lines” with some of my students in South Africa, most of whom were born in the late sixties. I told them I was going to be seeing you, and asked if I should pass on any questions. So after a highly charged account of ecosocial exploitation, the poem ends with the words, “And here we must draw / our line.” The students’ response was “That’s fine. But if we accept your critique, what do we do?”
SNYDER: Well the bioregional program is very good. That is the one that says “First, don’t move, and second, find out what that teaches you.” It means you have to learn local history, local economics; not just in the abstract, but as it affects you locally. You’re asking, “How are we related to the economy exactly, detail by detail?” I know exactly how much gravel is worth. I know how the price of timber has fluctuated over the last fifteen years. There are a lot of instructive things you learn about how you’re related to the economy. I can’t know what South African students are faced with, but if they feel they have a right to be where they are at all, then they should be there and they should take it on as a serious obligation. They should think up where they want to raise their children, and then they should provide a place for their children. That doesn’t necessarily mean in the country.
A few things, then: one is a place, one is your mind. That means meditation in one form or another, as a non-stressful, nonhysterical lifetime process, just a habit of life. A third thing is to have a craft, have a skill, have one thing that you can do. If it’s something you can do with your hands, all the better. Have a real skill, for the sake of yourself, and for the sake of others. Those are very fundamental. I would say that political sanity and engagement can in part come out of a curriculum like that. Not 100 percent. If a person as a matter of career has chosen the life of a political warrior, then that involves some other kinds of action.
MARTIN: We were speaking this morning before the interview about pressure on writers to conform to ideological positions that are considered to be “politically correct.” Would you mind repeating what you said?
SNYDER: It seems to me, by my (by no means thoroughly researched) historical information, that putting a high degree of importance on the fine points of doctrine, and on the idea of the correct line, the correct doctrine, comes into Occidental culture in a big way with the Catholic Church and its various councils in which it declared certain positions heretical or false. The importance that they placed on that and the inability to accept these poetically different versions, or different aspects of the same truth, and the continual seeking-out, arguing-out of doctrinal points has dominated much of Christian thought. This means that the possession of, or the adherence to, a correct line now seems to take precedence over action or meditation or prayer, in a big way. I see it continuing right into the old Communist Party’s paranoid obsession with the correct line, and you know radical movements today for which there can be no diversity regarding the line. It’s what is going on right now with the feminists and deep ecologists and Murray Bookchin, all arguing about what’s the vanguard and what’s the right line. Murray Bookchin’s main complaint is that he’s not the vanguard. He wants to be the vanguard and he’s mad because Earth First! is the vanguard, and so he has to criticize Earth First! all the time. That is elevating the theory over the practice, and it need not be done that way. There are other ways to accomplish clarification of doctrine without being so intellectual or abstract about it. The whole thing is an Occidental neurosis.
MARTIN: At the same time, there is surely a place for vigilance. Having grown up in South Africa, I’m aware of the possibilities for unwittingly internalizing the dominant ideology while attempting to articulate something that is an alternative to it, which is outside it. Are you conscious of that in your work? Do you deliberately work against it?
SNYDER: Yes, I certainly try to watch out for it. It’s a danger on the Buddhist level—I mean, that really is on the level of understanding what it is that’s affecting you, understanding how you are shaped, understanding what the deeper levels of your opinions and thoughts and feelings are. Those things are so unconscious. You also have to find out what the dominant ideology is, and how it changes. That’s tricky. It isn’t just that you set yourself against it, because if you set yourself too totally against it, you can’t talk to it. If you don’t understand how indoctrinated you are, then there’s no communication possible. That takes a certain coyote-mind.
MARTIN: Trickster?
SNYDER: Yes, coyote-mind can understand both sides of a question anytime. Really understand them.
MARTIN: Is that a way of approaching Zen’s nondualism?
SNYDER: Yes.
MARTIN: And how would these questions relate to the problems of a program focused on celebrating “woman as nature”?
SNYDER: Okay. Let’s see how a program celebrating woman as nature is unwittingly buying into the dominant ideology. For one thing, it might involve organizing a group of people to be an audience to celebrate something that is given an authority above them. Structurally it’s no different from celebrating the flag. So instead of looking to content you look at form, and form is the form of masses elevating authority. That’s acting with the dominant ideology.
MARTIN: And yet you’ve written poems that could be described as celebrating woman as nature?
SNYDER: Oh, I might have done that once or twice, as an exercise, and as I felt like it. But I can also look back and say, “Well, maybe I was just reproducing . . . the Fourth of July or something,” reproducing a form that is more insidious than one might have thought. Those are interesting questions.