Conversations with Gary Snyder

David Stephen Calonne

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781496811639
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

Gary Snyder (b. 1930) is one of the most distinguished American poets, remarkable both for his long and productive career and for his equal contributions to literature and environmental thought. His childhood in the Pacific Northwest profoundly shaped his sensibility due to his contact with Native American culture and his early awareness of the destruction of the environment by corporations. Although he emerged from the San Francisco Renaissance with writers such as Kenneth Rexroth, Robert Duncan, and William Everson, he became associated with the Beats due to his friendships with Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, who included a portrait of Snyder as Japhy Ryder in his novel The Dharma Bums. After graduating from Reed College, Snyder became deeply involved with Zen Buddhism, and he spent twelve years in Japan immersed in study. Conversations with Gary Snyder collects interviews from 1961 to 2015 and charts his developing environmental philosophy and his wide-ranging interests in ecology, Buddhism, Native American studies, history, and mythology. The book also demonstrates the ways Snyder has returned throughout his career to key ideas such as the extended family, shamanism, poetics, visionary experience, and caring for the environment as well as his relationship to the Beat movement. Because the book contains interviews spanning more than fifty years, the reader witnesses how Snyder has evolved and grown both as a poet and philosopher of humanity's proper relationship to the cosmos while remaining committed to the issues that preoccupied him as a young man.

The Houseboat Summit: Changes

Alan Watts, Gary Snyder, Timothy Leary, and Allen Ginsberg / 1967

San Francisco Oracle 1, no. 7, (April, 1967), from San Francisco Oracle Facsimile Edition, 150–51, 154–56, 160–61, 163–65, 177. Reprinted by permission of Ann Cohen.

Alan Watts: … Look then, we’re going to discuss where it’s going … the whole problem of whether to drop out or take over.

Timothy Leary: Or anything in between, sure.

Watts: Or anything in between, sure.

Leary: Cop out … drop in …

Gary Snyder: I see it as the problem about whether or not to throw all your energies to the subculture or try to maintain some communication within the main culture.

Watts: Yes. All right. Now look … I would like to make a preliminary announcement so that it has a certain coherence. This is Alan Watts speaking, and I’m this evening, on my ferry boat, the host to a fascinating party sponsored by the San Francisco Oracle, which is our new underground paper, far-outer than any far-out that has yet been seen. And we have here, members of the staff of the Oracle. We have Allen Ginsberg, poet, and rabbinic sadhu. We have Timothy Leary, about whom nothing needs to be said (laughs). And Gary Snyder, also poet, Zen monk, and old friend of many years.

Allen Ginsberg: This swami wants you to introduce him in Berkeley. He’s going to have a Kirtan to sanctify the peace movement. So what I said is, he ought to invite Jerry Rubin and Mario Savio, and his co-horts. And he said: “Great, great, great!” So I said, “Why don’t you invite the Hell’s Angels, too?” And he said: “Great, great, great! When are we gonna get hold of them?” So I think that’s one next feature …

Watts: You know, what is being said here, isn’t it: To sanctify the peace movement is to take the violence out of it.

Ginsberg: Well, to point attention to its root nature, which is desire for peace, which is equivalent to the goals of all the wisdom schools and all the Saddhanas.

Watts: Yes, but it isn’t so until sanctified. That is to say, I have found in practice that nothing is more violent than peace movements. You know, when you get a pacifist on the rampage, nobody can be more emotionally bound and intolerant and full of hatred.

And I think this is the thing that many of us understand in common, that we are trying to take moral violence out of all those efforts that are being made to bring human beings into a harmonious relationship.

Ginsberg: Now, how much of that did the peace movement people in Berkeley realize?

Watts: I don’t think they realize it at all. I think they’re still working on the basis of moral violence, just as Gandhi was.

Ginsberg: Yeah … I went last night and turned on with Mario Savio. Two nights ago … aafter I finished and was talking with him, and he doesn’t turn on very much … this was maybe the third or fourth time. He was describing his efforts in terms of the motive power for large mass movements. He felt one of the things that move large crowds was righteousness, moral outrage, and ANGER … righteous anger.

Leary: Well, let’s stop right here. The implication of that statement is: we want a mass movement. Mass movements make no sense to me, and I want no part of mass movements. I think this is the error that the leftist activists are making. I see them as young men with menopausal minds. They are repeating the same dreary quarrels and conflicts for power of the thirties and forties, of the trade union movement, of Trotskyism and so forth. I think they should be sanctified, drop out, find their own center, turn on, and above all avoid mass movements, mass leadership, mass followers. I see that there is a great difference—I see complete incompatible difference—between the leftist activist movement and the psychedelic religious movement.

In the first place, the psychedelic movement, I think, is much more numerous. But it doesn’t express itself as noisily. I think there are different goals. I think that the activists want power. They talk about student power. This shocks me, and alienates my spiritual sensitivities. Of course, there is a great deal of difference in method. The psychedelic movement, the spiritual seeker movement, or whatever you want to call it, expresses itself … as the Haight-Ashbury group had done … with flowers and chants and pictures and beads and acts of beauty and harmony … sweeping the streets. That sort of thing.

Watts: And giving away free food.

Leary: Yes … I think this point must be made straight away, but because we are both looked upon with disfavor by the Establishment, this tendency to group the two together … I think that such confusion can only lead to disillusion and hard feelings on someone’s part. So, I’d like to lay this down as a premise right at the beginning.

Ginsberg: Well, of course, that’s the same premise they lay down, that there is an irreconcilable split. Only, their stereotype of the psychedelic movement is that it’s just sort of like the opposite … I think you’re presenting a stereotype of them.

Snyder: I think that you have to look at this historically, and there’s no doubt that the historical roots of the revolutionary movements and the historical roots of this spiritual movement are identical. This is something that has been going on since the Neolithic as a strain in human history, and one which has been consistently, on one level or another, opposed to the collectivism of civilization toward the rigidities of the city states and city temples. Christian utopianism is behind Marxism.

Leary: They’re outs and they want in.

Snyder: … but historically it arrives from a utopian and essentially religious drive. The early revolutionary political movements in Europe have this utopian strain in them. Then Marxism finally becomes a separate, non-religious movement, but only very late. That utopian strain runs right through it all along. So that we do share this …

Ginsberg: What are the early utopian texts? What are the early mystical utopian political texts?

Snyder: Political?

Ginsberg: Yeah. Are you running your mind back through Bakunin or something?

Snyder: I’m running it back to earlier people. To Fourier, and stuff.

Watts: Well, it goes back to the seventeenth century and the movements in Flemish and German mysticism, which started up the whole idea of democracy in England in the seventeenth century. You have the Anabaptists, the Levellers, the Brothers of the Free Spirit …

Snyder: The Diggers!

Watts: The Diggers, and all those people, and then eventually the Quakers. This was the source. It was, in a way, a secularization of mysticism.

In other words, the mystical doctrine that all men are equal in the sight of God, for the simple reason that they ARE God. They’re all God’s incarnations.

When that doctrine is secularized, it becomes a parody … that all men are equally inferior. And therefore may be evil-treated by the bureaucrats and the police, with no manners.

The whole tendency of this equalization of man in the nineteenth century is a result, in a way, of Freud. But the absolute recipe for writing a best seller biography was to take some person who was renowned for his virtue and probity, and to show, after all, that everything was scurrilous and low down.

You see? This became the parody. Because the point that I am making—this may seem to be a little bit of a diversion, but the actual point is this: Whenever the insights one derives from mystical vision become politically active, they always create their own opposite. They create a parody.

Wouldn’t you agree with that, Tim? I mean, this is the point I think you’re saying: that when we try to force a vision upon the world, and say that everybody ought to have this, and it’s GOOD for you, then a parody of it is set up. As it was historically when this vision was forced upon the West, that all men are equal in the sight of God and so on and so forth … it became bureaucratic democracy, which is that all people are equally inferior.

Snyder: Well, my answer to what Tim was saying there is that, it seems to me at least, in left-wing politics there are certain elements, and there are always going to be certain people who are motivated by the same thing I’m motivated by.

And I don’t want to reject the history, or the sacrifices of the people in that movement … if they can be brought around to what I would consider a more profound vision of themselves, and a more profound vision of themselves and society …

Leary: I think we should get them to drop out, turn on, and tune in.

Ginsberg: Yeah, but they don’t know what that means even.

Leary: I know it. No politician, left or right, young or old, knows what we mean by that.

Ginsberg: Precisely what do you mean by drop-out, then … again, for the millionth time?

Snyder: Drop out throws me a little bit, Tim. Because it’s assumed we’re dropping out. The next step is, now what are we doing where we’re in something else? We’re in a new society. We’re in the seeds of a new society.

Ginsberg: For instance, you haven’t dropped out, Tim. You dropped out of your job as a psychology teacher in Harvard. Now, what you’ve dropped into is, one: a highly complicated series of arrangements for lecturing and for putting on the festival …

Leary: Well, I’m dropped out of that.

Ginsberg: But you’re not dropped out of the very highly complicated legal constitutional appeal, which you feel a sentimental regard for, as I do. You haven’t dropped out of being the financial provider for Millbrook, and you haven’t dropped out of planning and conducting community organization and participating in it.

And that community organization is related to the national community, too. Either through the Supreme Court, or through the very existence of the dollar that is exchanged for you to pay your lawyers, or to take money to pay your lawyers in the theatre. So you can’t drop out, like DROP OUT, ‘cause you haven’t.

Leary: Well, let me explain …

Ginsberg: So they think you mean like, drop out, like go live on Haight-Ashbury Street and do nothing at all. Even if you can do something like build furniture and sell it, or give it away in barter with somebody else.

Leary: You have to drop out in a group. You drop out in a small tribal group.

Snyder: Well, you drop out one by one, but … you know, you can join the sub-culture.

Ginsberg: Maybe it’s: “Drop out of what?”

Watts: Gary, I think that you have something to say here. Because you, to me, are one of the most fantastically capable drop-out people I have ever met. I think, at this point, you should say a word or two about your own experience of how to live on nothing. How to get by in life economically.

This is the nitty-gritty. This is where it really comes down to in many people’s minds. Where’s the bread going to come from if everybody drops out? Now, you know expertly where it’s gonna come ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chronology
• Visit with a Fellaheen Man
• He’s Living a Life of Zen and Poetry
• Interview with Gary Snyder
• The Houseboat Summit: Changes
• Gary Snyder
• From Anthropologist to Informant: A Field Record of Gary Snyder
• Interview with Gary Snyder
• An Interview with Gary Snyder
• An Interview with Gary Snyder
• An Interview with Gary Snyder
• Gary Snyder: Centerless Universe: An Interview
• Gary Snyder: On Biocentric Wisdom
• An Interview with Gary Snyder: “Language is Wild”
• Interview: Gary Snyder
• The Wild Mind of Gary Snyder
• Living Landscape: An Interview with Gary Snyder
• A Conversation with Gary Snyder
• Grasping the Natural: A Conversation with Gary Snyder
• An Interview with Gary Snyder
• Interview with Gary Snyder
• A Sense of the Land: An Interview with Gary Snyder
• Index