can do that will really work for them. But circumambulating stupas is one of them. And so their owners take them around to improve their karma.
JH: The culture that introduced empathy and compassion: that might be what distinguishes us from the nonhuman, but not totally—because I’ve noticed that, when a dog in a dog family dies, the other animals in the family are really quite distraught and uncomfortable and they keep looking around for the other animal for about a month or so. And then they let go. Do they feel the acute loss that humans do?
My dog Zilpha was distraught this afternoon. I’m not sure why. She was trying to communicate. Now, is that language or an expression of feeling?
GS: We don’t know.
JH: Zilpha’s brave enough to be a bit of a coward. She once saw a big male javelina, which are dangerous animals to dogs, and she looked up at me and looked at the javelina and started to bristle up, pretending she’s going to chase it, but she’s just running in place—she hasn’t moved an inch. It’s really like, “Let me have him! Hold me back!” Very comic, huh?
GS: I love being at that point when I write poems.
JH: Are poems themselves expressions of wildness? Because it seems a poem is an example almost of measured chaos.
GS: You raise the most difficult question of all right there, which is, what is the nature of art in relationship to the wild? It’s interesting and complicated.
JH: I think of that extraordinary Shakespeare quote, “We are nature too.”
GS: Which is true. But what you have to go after is, what is it that is not wild? And start at that end.
People often think of art as being the most highly cultured, the most disciplined, the most organized of human productions, but at the same time that it requires a lot of training, it doesn’t happen unless you let the wild in.
I’m reminded of what Robert Duncan said: “To be poetry it has to have both music and magic.” And magic is the entry of the wild.
Turn off the calculating mind!
Life is not just a diurnal property of large interesting vertebrates; it is also nocturnal, anaerobic, cannibalistic, microscopic, digestive, fermentative: cooking away in the warm dark.
Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild, “Blue Mountains Constantly Walking”
GS: The little series of poems that I wrote with the title “How Poetry Comes to Me,” I wrote them thinking about the ways that I perceive poetry as being there, or being accessible, and one particular poem, I think, was “It stays frightened outside the circle of our campfire. I go to meet it at the edge of the light.”
JH: Yeah. I go to meet it—
GS : I go to meet it.
JH: It’s coming out of the darkness.
GS: But you have to meet it halfway.
JH: And who knows what causes the opening and closing of the door. In terms of poetry you are in the ring of the firelight and you go to meet the arriving poem at the edge of the darkness.
GS: And so the suggestion is that the dark is very rich too.
JH: True—fecund.
GS: That came to me, actually, camping one night in the Northern Sierra. It happened the night that I went up that peak on the boundary line—the Matterhorn.
Our “soul” is our dream of the other.
Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild, “Survival and Sacrament”
GS: I started getting my woods training when I was only six or seven years old, and like you I was going into the thickets and finding ways through the swamps in Washington, and then finding my own campsites, and fixing them up a little bit, and then I would go back to it in order to learn to see where I was and to get around.
JH: Have you ever been lost?
GS: I have been in situations where I didn’t know where I was for a while, but I didn’t think I was lost. I knew that I would get out of it sooner or later and figure out where I was.
JH: The interesting thing about being lost is, suddenly everything is in question, including your own nature. It’s that dramatic.
GS: If you have reached a point where nothing looks familiar and you can’t figure out how to reassemble it . . .
JH: I like it.
GS: The only time I have ever been that lost was in the city of Katmandu. I got lost in some back alleys.
JH: I’ve often thought being lost is like a sesshin when you sit for a long time and then a gong goes off and you get up and the world looks completely different.
GS: Well, that is like enlightenment.
I was hiking in the Sierra high country on scree and talus fields one time, you know, looking at my feet. And I noticed then every rock was different—no two little rocks the same. Maybe there is no identity in the whole universe. No two things are actually totally alike.
Every year, in the fall, a certain small number of ponderosa pines in the forest that surrounds my place start dying of western bark beetle. It’s never too many, it’s a certain number—but why are they dying and why aren’t the others?
JH: One wonders.
GS: It’s in their nature. Gradually the ponderosa pines that are resistant to western bark beetles are becoming the established trees of the forest. But genetically there’s always going to be a few that are vulnerable. What a curious idea.
JH: Sometimes we as liberal Democrats get discomfited by the inequalities of nature.
GS: Well, to go back for a second to The Practice of the Wild—many people, including environmentalists, have not taken well to the distinctions I tried to make there between nature, wild, and wilderness. And I want to say again, the way I want to use the word “nature” would mean the whole physical universe—like in physics. So, not “the outdoors.”
JH: Not a dualism.
GS: Nature is what we are in. Now, if you want to try and figure out what is supernatural, you can do that too. But you don’t have to.
Then “the wild” really refers to process—a process that has been going on for eons or however long. And finally, “wilderness” is simply topos—it is areas where the process is dominant. Not 100 percent dominant, but a big percentage.
JH: But what you run into, in promoting this schema, is people very much preferring things to be fuzzy.
GS: Well, it is fuzzy. So one of the terms I find myself using more now is the term “working landscapes,” to be distinguished from the idea of totally pristine wilderness landscapes. And that’s what
