appropriation of the land, are expressed as anxieties about the obliteration of the self.
From its very beginnings, the writing of America has sought to transfer issues of the
working of the land onto issues of selfhood. An early example of this is John Smith’s
dictum of 1608, directed to the first Jamestown settlers, ‘he who doesn’t work,
doesn’t eat’. The real process of the colonial working of the land is here disguised, in
Smith’s work ethic, as a discourse of pragmatic self-preservation. For both Smith and
Emerson the land is not real, it is a blank mythic space, a tabula rasa, upon which are
written the struggles of American selfhood. The typically American, and romantic, gesture
encoded in their work, then, seems to be the turning of the land into a text, moreover an
American text.
Emerson makes this explicit in his 1844 essay
‘The Poet’. Once again the exchange between poem and land is visionary, a matter of
seeing: ‘America’, he writes, ‘is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography
dazzles the imagination’ (emphases mine). This vision of America, its geography, is
dazzling to the imagination because any real sense of the land is subsumed by the desire
to see that land as a site of cultural exchange, as the ground upon which the work of
literary nationalism can take place. But such a transformation of the natural environment
into a cultural and textual one effectively displaces the kind of troubled concern with
language’s representative power that, as I shall argue, becomes evident in the work of
reading Snyder’s poetry. For this reason, reading Snyder through Emersonian models of
visionary transcendence, models that ultimately fail to read the land, is to unread him,
to assume the poem is the land and not a site for a working of the land.
A more useful model for reading Snyder’s poetry
is Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854), a text, moreover, that Snyder read during
his time as firewatcher at Sourdough mountain in 1953. Both Snyder and Thoreau trace the
working of the land in an attempt to critique American ideology, to reground its work
ethic. I shall argue, however, that, in the case of Snyder, to see the poem as a
work-place is to disclose the extent to which his poetics is as much a product of deeply
ingrained American concerns as it is a challenge to them. In fact, it is as a work-place
that the poem becomes a site for the production of a specifically American — though not
Emersonian — reading of ‘the natural’. What Thoreau and Snyder share, in such an act
of reading, is a troubled sense of the gap between word and world that stems from deep
seated anxieties about the turning of the American land into a text.
For Thoreau such anxieties are expressed in his
mistrust of the process of exchange by which American culture of the mid-nineteenth
century was increasingly implicated in the demands of the market-place. His hostility to
the discourses of capital emerging at this time results from his romantic sense that any
true and meaningful relationship to the natural is obliterated by an economy of symbolic
representation:
I have … learned that trade curses everything
it handles; and though you trade in messages from heaven, the whole curse of trade
attaches to the business.
The ‘curse of trade’ is that it mediates the
real, replacing it with a system of exchange that clouds our vision of the land we
inhabit:
I perceive that we inhabitants of New England
live this mean life that we do because our vision does not penetrate the surface of
things. We think that that is which appears to be. If a man should walk through this town
and see only the reality, where, think you, would the "Mill-Dam" go to?
The central business section of Concord, the
Mill-dam, is thus, according to Thoreau, a fiction of exchange that displaces the real by
the symbolic. Though Thoreau may attempt to ‘live deliberately’ at Walden Pond in
order ‘to front only the essential facts of life’, this attempt is underscored by an
anxiety that arises from the recognition that such ‘facts’ are accessible only
through the system of symbolic representation that is language. Thus the settling of the
land becomes, itself, a trope for the struggle to apprehend reality. ‘Let us settle
ourselves,’ Thoreau writes
and work and wedge our feet downward through the
mud and slush of opinion … till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we
can call reality, and say, This is, and no mistake.
Snyder’s attempt to render the (work) environment
as a mythical space means that his poetic attention is similarly cast onto the
problematics of textual representation. This can be seen in the following passage from
‘Piute Creek’, another poem from the Riprap collection. Though this poem offers an
apparently unmediated description of the landscape, it is controlled by a sense of the gap
between word and world. The poem is thus haunted by loss, by the way in which the actual
land is obliterated by the text that seeks to represent it:
All the junk that goes with being human Drops
away, hard rock wavers Even the heavy present seems to fail This bubble of a heart. Words
and books Like a small creek off a high ledge Gone in the dry air. (Riprap, p. 8)
As the poem continues, it envisages such a
dropping away of human junk to be part of the process described by Thoreau of setting
‘rocks in place’, of struggling towards a sense of grounded reality. But the clarity
of selfhood and the attentiveness of mind that seem to be produced by this process are,
however, less the result of an apprehension of reality, than the product of a
mystification of the relationship between the human and the natural. The poem presents
this relationship as part of a mutual and visionary system of exchange whereby the self
and the land read each other
A clear, attentive mind Has no meaning but that
Which sees is truly seen. No one loves rock, yet we are here. (Riprap, p. 8)
The difficulty of these lines lies in their
dramatising of the problematics of representing the land in/as a poem. Just where
‘here’ may be is subject to the slipperiness of a poetic language that struggles to
negotiate between the literal and the metaphorical. Here, in this poetic landscape that is
also a place of the mind, where even ‘hard rock wavers’, the difficulty of settling
ourselves and not mistaking reality becomes insurmountable.
Myths and Texts is generated from a
similar sense of the precipitousness of linguistic exchange, wherein ‘words and
books’ become symbolic tokens of an object world of ‘small creek[s]‘ and ‘high
ledge[s]‘. Its opening line — ‘The morning star is not a star’ — is troubled by the
same disjunction between appearance and reality that troubled Thoreau’s attempt to see
beneath the surface of Concord’s business centre. As an explicit reference to Walden’s
closing sentence ‘The sun is but a morning-star’, the line introduces a text that,
like Thoreau’s, mythicises the American land as a workplace. Whilst, in so doing, Myths
and Texts describes how the work of logging destroys the land, it also effaces that
very land by exchanging it for the symbolic economy of a text. The text has no meaning but
that which is generated from its relationship, not to the land, but to other texts. Thus,
in ‘Logging’, the first section of Myths and Texts, the destruction of the
‘woods around Seattle’ by ‘San Francisco 2?4s’ (Myths and Texts, p. 4)
comes to signify a wider anxiety about American culture itself as destructive because it
is framed by two other accounts of how exploitation of the land leads to cultural
annihilation.
The first of these texts, a biblical quotation
from the book of Exodus 34:13, seems here to depict the destruction of the forest as an
act of sacrilege: ‘But ye shall destroy their altars, / break their images, and cut
down their groves’ (Myths and Texts, p. 3). Snyder’s irony, though, is acute. In
its original context the words are an injunction forming part of God’s covenant with Moses
and His chosen people: if the land is to be a promised land then its original inhabitants,
their rituals, and their culture must be destroyed. This formative myth of the West, which
resonates so strongly with Anglocentric myths of America as the promised land, is followed
in the poem by a description of the destructive effects of working the land in the ancient
East: ‘The ancient forests of China logged / and the hills slipped into the Yellow
Sea’ (Myths and Texts, p. 3). The work of logging thus becomes significant, an
image for the precariousness of American culture as a whole, because through it the land
is mythicised as a text of loss:
San Francisco 2?4s
were the woods around
Seattle:
Someone killed and someone built, a house,
a forest, wrecked or raised
All America hung on a hook
& burned by men, in their
own praise.
Such an inscription of the land betrays the
desire to turn the land into that which it is not, a text. Thus, the preservation of the
land as a text, as a critique of an economic system based on the commodification of that
land, means that the land itself is obliterated within the text’s own symbolic economy.
The ecological disaster upon which all America hangs like a hook, and out of which
Snyder’s poetics is generated, is, paradoxically, one that can be apprehended only through
metaphor, the exchange of text for land, word for world. Here, then, Snyder’s poetics
forces a confrontation with loss as the condition of language itself whereby the sign is
substituted, exchanged, for an object already lost.
That Myths and Texts is acutely aware of
language’s lateness, of what Jacques Derrida has described as the way in which ‘the
sign is … put in place of the thing itself’, is apparent in the closing passage of the
‘Logging’ section. The gap, Derrida’s l’?cart, between the world and its
representation is here anticipated by an imagery of splitting and rupture in which the
bifurcation of the natural and the manufactured is predicated upon loss, a loss of the
land that also witnesses the loss of an empire:
Pine sleeps, cedar splits straight
Flowers crack the pavement.
Pa-ta Shan-jen
(A painter who watched the Ming fall)
Lived in a tree:
"The brush
May paint the mountains and streams
Though the territory is lost"
(‘Logging 15,’ Myths and
Texts, p. 16)
The poem’s recognition of this gap leads to the
attempt, in its second section ‘Hunting’, to reconnect with the earth through the
description and poetic enactment of the ritualized observances of the hunter and the
shaman. Though this recalls Thoreau’s description of hunters as displaying a
‘peculiar sense [of being] a part of Nature themselves’, it also envisages the
integration of self and other, the human within Nature, through a shamanistic
reinhabitation of the land which the poem describes as the ‘Hatching [of] a new myth’
(Myths and Texts, p. 19). Again, the land is mythicised as a text of otherness
and loss, a site in which the colonial imperative underpinning American culture is played
out. This is felt starkly in the following passage with the poem’s attempt to name, and
thereby consume, the things of the land:
Now I’ll also tell what food
we lived on then:
Mescal, yucca fruit, pinyon, acorns,
prickly pear, sumac berry, cactus,
spurge, dropseed, lip fern, corn,
mountain plants, wild potatoes, mesquite,
stems of yucca, tree-yucca flowers, chokecherries,
pitahaya cactus, honey of the ground-bee,
honey, honey of the bumblebee,
mulberries, angle-pod, salt, berries,
berries of the one-seeded juniper,
berries of the alligator-bark juniper,
wild cattle, mule deer, antelopes,
white-tailed deer, wild turkeys, doves, quail,
squirrels, robins, slate-colored juncoes,
song sparrows, wood rats, prairie dogs,
rabbits, peccaries, burros, mules, horses,
buffaloes, mountain sheep, and turtles.
(‘Hunting 13′, Myths and
Texts, p. 31)
Not only does this push Snyder’s poetics to the
limits of its metonymic economy, its representative power, but it also engages an Adamic
myth of naming, the sort of myth that has commonly been seen as central to American
cultural identity. This textual working of the land, reminiscent of colonial descriptions
of the New World, thus struggles to close the gap between myth and text in an attempt to
integrate self and land, to see them in a relationship of productive exchange. Rather than
providing a poetics of integration, the final poem of the sequence actually marks the
fissure between myth and text, word and world. With its two sections entitled,
respectively, ‘the text’ and ‘the myth’, this poem sees the identity of the land
as something that can never come back to itself, something that is always subject to
disfigurement, even as it is traced in the text. Thus, in the poem’s first section, the
land as text is a workplace, and the poet (again) a firewatcher: ‘Sourdough mountain
called a fire in: / Up Thunder Creek, high on a ridge’ (‘Burning 17,’ Myths and
Texts, p. 53). In the poem’s second section the reading of that land appropriates it
to myth, and it is thus disfigured, becoming a property of mind, and not of solid reality:
‘Fire up Thunder Creek and the mountain — troy’s burning! / The cloud mutters / The
mountains are your mind.’ (‘Burning 17,’ Myths and Texts, p. 53).
To conclude I want to return, briefly, to the Riprap
collection, and, finally, to its title poem. Throughout this paper I have been suggesting
that to read Snyder’s poetics as one striving for a visionary integration with the land
is, necessarily, to mark the divorce between nature and culture, land and text and thus to
expose a faultline in American culture. Riprapcannot simply be read (as it often is) as a
text of universal interconnectedness. It is a text shot through with a sense of fissure,
and breakage, of the act of sundering that is at the heart of the act of working the land,
whether that be in the cleavage between land and self from which the structure and imagery
of ‘Mid-August at Sourdough Mountain Lookout’ is generated; or in the figure of the
‘single-jack miner, who can sense / The vein and cleavage / In the very guts of rock’
in the poem ‘Milton by Firelight’ (Riprap, p. 9); or in the split between word and
world that is exposed in our work of reading these poems, and which can be read as a
product of a capitalist economy of exchange.
In his ‘Afterword’ to the North Point Press
edition of Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems Snyder explicitly aligns the work poems
of Riprap with Chinese and Japanese poetic models by noting how they strive to
read the world without being affected by language’s mediation. The poems in Riprap perform,
he asserts, ‘… the work of seeing the world withoutany prism of language, and bring
that seeing into language’. In its ‘work of seeing the world’ the title poem of the
collection, I would argue, confirms an anxiety at the heart of American culture, one not
so easily dismissed as the book’s ‘Afterword’ implies, namely, that the land is
unknowable except through the prism of language, but to bring the land into language, is
to obliterate it.
This poem (‘Riprap’) opens with this
paradox, with its laying down of words before us becoming a metaphorical path for a
sensing of the vein and cleavage between word and rock, idea and thing, America and its
land:
Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
placed solid, by hands
In choice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
in space and time:
Solidity of bark, leaf, or wall
riprap of things:
The work of the poem is not, therefore, its overt
attempt to integrate the environments of land and poem. Rather, the poem asserts that
‘rocks’ are not ‘words’, only ‘like’ one another, and that romantic
transcendence, that which sees the poem as a riprap, a cobbled path leading up a mountain,
is only a metaphor, moreover a metaphor of working the land. To see the poem as work-place
is to expose the workings of language, and to make fraught our relationship to the object
world. The ecological lesson of Snyder’s poetics lies, finally, in an attending to the
fracture in the very guts of the real:
In the thin loam, each rock a word
a creek-washed stone
Granite: ingrained
with torment of fire and
weight
Crystal and sediment linked hot
all change, in thoughts,
As well as things.
It is in recognizing the deeply ingrained
patterns of America’s acculturation of the land that the real work of ecological reading
can begin.
From Sycamore 1:4 (Winter 1997). Copyright ? 1997 by Sycamore. Online Source