“Stay Together. Learn the Flowers. Go Light”
A review of
The Etiquette of Freedom.
By Gary Snyder and Jim Harrison.
Reviewed by R. Dean Hudgens.
The Etiquette of Freedom.
Gary Snyder and Jim Harrison.
Edited by Paul Ebenkamp.
Hardcover: Counterpoint, 2010.
Includes DVD “The Practice of the Wild”,
Directed by John J Healey. San Simeon Films, 2010.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]
If Gary Snyder is not yet an elder and guide for the readers of ERB he should be. A new DVD “The Practice of the Wild” and the accompanying book The Etiquette of Freedom provide an ideal introduction for those as yet unacquainted with the work of this significant American author. In this documentary Snyder, still physically and intellectually vigorous in his eighties, comes across as the same engaging and insightful personality that his readers have met in his poems and essays these past fifty years.
Snyder grew up in the Pacific northwest (born in 1930) immersed in the natural world that shaped his personality and vision. He learned from his leftist, politically active mother that society was a mess. But Snyder wanted something more than a life of protest and organizing. It seems he was initially attracted to Native American culture as a repository for a lost human wisdom that might address society’s ills. But a short stint at Reed College studying anthropology and an even briefer time at Indiana University studying linguistics convinced him that Buddhism was the path he was looking for. East Asian history revealed at least the possibility of “being highly civilized and still respecting the nonhuman” (29).
Snyder emerged on the public scene during the same period as the intellectual core of the Beat generation: Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs. The Beats were the shadow side of the complacent Eisenhower era in the States, providing the first seismic indicators of what would become the wider and more intense tremors and shocks of the 1960s. Some say that the Beats have little enduring social significance except as a cultural and literary phenomenon. What were they actually for?
Snyder himself says, “I was a shadow” during this time period. In 1958 he had risen to public consciousness as the character Japhy Ryder in Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums. And in this documentary poet Michael McClure tells us that on the night when Allen Ginsberg debuted Howl at the Six Gallery Reading in 1955, it was actually Snyder’s reading of his poem “The Berry Feast” (page 118 in The Etiquette of Freedom) that impressed most of the people present even more. (McClure asserts that Snyder’s poem was the first public expression of what would later be termed “deep ecology”). Snyder was an inspiration for Kerouac and a working colleague of Ginsberg, but his identification as a Beat is perhaps overemphasized. He left for Asia in 1956 to live in a zen monastery and he did not return for twelve years.
Snyder has expressed little appreciation for Christianity. A childhood query to a priest about a possible afterlife for animals demonstrated to him that Christianity had no regard for the nonhuman. Snyder’s mother was an atheist and expressed scepticism at his interest in Buddhism. “What will that do to help the people?” she asked him. Snyder seems to have been working out an answer to that question. Reincarnation he says in the film is a “charming metaphor” but no more. However, if true it would teach us that we have experienced everything in life already and therefore we should be content and focus on the present rather than longing for a different life or a different world.
Snyder has articulated a coherent social agenda and a deep spirituality in a way that the Beats never did and few Christians (or even Buddhists) ever have. In an early essay “Buddhism and the Possibilities of a Planetary Culture” (later retitled “Buddhist Anarchism”) he talked about the traditional three aspects of the Dharma path: wisdom, meditation, and morality. Wisdom is the intuitive knowledge we all possess of love and clarity. Meditation is the going inside to discover that wisdom. Morality is the bringing of that wisdom out again towards community. Community, human and nonhuman, has always been central to Snyder’s life and work.
Bioregionalism and “reinhabitation” becomes the way in which we ground human community in the community of all living things. Our relation to nature must happen in a particular place. It is in this relationship to nature and place that we build community and come into our own wholeness. It is in seeking wholeness that we resolve the tensions between civilization and ecology. In one of his most well know poems (one of several he reads aloud in this documentary) Snyder summarizes this path: “stay together / learn the flowers / go light.”
Snyder’s reflection on “wild” and “wildness” are highlights of this film and book. The wild is found everywhere and though often repressed can never obliterated. The wild exists even in our own unconscious, of which human art often gives expression. “The difference between wild mind and cultivated mind is the difference between art and accounting” Snyder says. Humanity is a wild species and our wholeness will be found in rediscovering that true wild nature. “The lessons we learn from the wild become the etiquette of freedom.”
In all of his work Snyder articulates an ontology of trust. His “zen anarchism” affirms that the natural world would actually work in our favor if only we would let it. Alienation results from our lack of self-sufficiency and will be healed by meditation and conscious work in community with others. Not recognizing this and attempting to engineer artificial wholeness only diminishes and distorts our ability to restore original wholeness.
Snyder once wrote: “As a poet I hold the most archaic values on earth . . . the fertility of the soil, the magic of animals, the power-vision in solitude, the terrifying initiation and rebirth, the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe. I try to hold both history and the wilderness in mind, that my poems may approach the true measure of things and stand against the unbalance and ignorance of our times.”
John Healey and author Jim Harrison produced this beautiful film. Rancho Piedra Blanca along California’s central coast provides the scenic backdrop for these familiar but insightful conversations between Snyder and Jim Harrison as they walk along the ridge or sit around a table after dinner. The documentary is about thirty minutes long and contains some wonderful black and white film footage from an earlier 1960s profile. We see the younger Snyder in Zen garments riding his motorcycle, presumably in San Francisco, and then earnestly reading some of the his poetry to the camera. There are the standard “extras” with interviews with the producers and director.
The book, edited by Paul Ebenkamp, contains a transcript of the film and another hour of outtakes, comments by some of Snyder’s friends and acquaintances, and a small sampling of his poems. There is a nice selection of photographs from Snyder’s life, a bibliography and reading list, and a wonderful essay entitled “Grace”, which is one of the best essays on the spirituality of food that you will ever read.
Together the DVD and book provide a delightful path into Snyder’s work. I would recommend moving on from here to his essay collection The Practice of the Wild (reissued with a new preface by Snyder in 2010 and having the same title as the DVD) and The Gary Snyder Reader (1999). Snyder will have much to teach all of us for many years to come.
C. Christopher Smith is the founding editor of The Englewood Review of Books. He is also author of a number of books, including most recently How the Body of Christ Talks: Recovering the Practice of Conversation in the Church (Brazos Press, 2019). Connect with him online at: C-Christopher-Smith.com
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It seems as though I’ve been missing out on Mr. Snyder…thanks for the great review and heads up!