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More personal poems: To his wife, whose legs were trained "by the/danger on peaks,"(74) to his Japanese mother-in-law, "needing no poem,"(66) and "To All the Girls Whose Ears I Pierced Back Then."(64) He travels from the Mibu River, "Four hours from Tokyo."(83) back to the Yuba River, "where it enters the Sacramento valley flatlands,"(85) to "the soaring Parthenon, sacred to gray-eyed Athena." Bivouacking there, he "Dreamed of a gray-eyed girl/on this rocky hill/no buildings/then."(88)
There's also a haibun for his sister, Anthea, who was "struck by a speedy car, an instant death."
White egrets standing there
always standing there
there at the crossingon the Petaluma River.(96)
All paths lead to the mystery of one's existence; yet we love the material arts, the liturgical words, the robes of spiritual office, an incense burner's perfumed clouds. I reached Rytakuji in the autumn of 1968. A Zen monastery built in the 18th Century in view of Mt. Fuji, its peaceful ambience, national treasures, and brilliant abbot, Soen Nakagawa, moved me to write to Snyder, who was in Kyoto preparing to leave for America, something like, "Now that I've found Paradise, what do I do with it?" He replied, "Beware of the fox inside." Japanese trickster, who in the Western USA is Coyote, would "say 'that's just what I thought too'/And do it. And go his way."(59)
In Kyoto, "the great bell of Gion/one hundred eight times/deeply booms through town."(97), while through my open windows today, a church bell's deep throat opens twelve times, unwittingly tolling the destruction of Bamiyan.
On November 13, 2001, the BBC News reported that Islamic fundamentalists had dynamited the giant Buddhist sculptures that were carved into the Hindu Kush mountains of Afghanistan, "claiming that all statues were false idols and the quality of the religious experience was such that the entirety of the path followed by the pilgrim was seen to be sacred. The process involved in the pilgrimage were complex and had to become the basis for a complete change in the pilgrim’s consciousness and perspective on the universe. The pilgrimage was an exercise in rebirth and magical transformation contrary to their Islamic beliefs." First mentioned in 5th Century A.D. by the Chinese traveler, Fa-hsien, 200 years later, the Buddhist pilgrim monk, Hsüan-tsang, saw the figures decorated with jewels and gold. In Mountains and Rivers Without End, Snyder included the lovely lyrical poem, "The Hump-backed Flute Player." First published in 1971, with a flawed finish he later rewrote but still rings false, the poem begins in Canyon de Chelly, where, "on the south wall, the pecked-out pictures of some mountain sheep with curling horns," join a humpbacked flute-player, a solitary and mysterious flute-playing creature known to the Hopi as Kokopelli, who "may have been as important to the Southwestern Indians as Abraham is to Jews or Paul to Christians." To Snyder, Kokopelli's "hump is a pack," which he associates with Hsüan-tsang, who walked to India and returned to China sixteen years later with the Buddhist teachings of emptiness, of "mind-only," vijñaptimātra.
In the last section of Danger on Peaks, Hsüan-tsang appears again, as Snyder laments the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan "by woman-and-nature-denying authoritarian worldviews that go back much farther than Abraham."(101) "And yet," he replies to a letter "from a man who writes about Buddhism," "'and yet' is our perennial practice. And maybe the root of the Dharma."(102) A stubbornly compassionate vision—"walking the pilgrim path,/climbing the steps to/Avalokiteshava, Bodhisattva of Compassion/asking: please guide us through samsara"(105-6)—in midst of Gaia and her children being sacrificed to Power & Greed. "What was that?/storms of flying glass/& billowing flames...better than burning, hold hands.(104)
Backpacked into this century by tens of thousands of readers, Gary Snyder remains a unique presence. As exemplar of a sustainable planet, his is a life lived large and, more often than not, the original papyrus documents, discovered in an ancient rubbish dump in central Egypt, are often meaningless to the naked eye – decayed, worm-eaten and blackened by the passage of time. But scientists using the new photographic technique, developed from satellite imaging, are bringing the original writing back into view. Academics have hailed it as a development writ brilliantly—
For all beings
living or not, beings or not,inside or outside of time (106)
