Читать книгу The Etiquette of Freedom - Jim Harrison - Страница 8

Trans-Species Erotics

Going out—fasting—singing alone—talking across the species boundaries—praying—giving thanks—coming back.

Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild, “Survival and Sacrament”

JIM HARRISON: The bishop of Lyon in the eighth century determined that animals couldn’t go to heaven, because they didn’t contribute to the church—which is ghastly, although at the same time they all decided that hell was a place without birds.

GARY SNYDER: Speaking of birds, you said you went to the Platte River sometimes to watch the sandhill cranes.

JH: Oh sure, and I’ve seen them dance in these great open areas in Northern Michigan, and they start that dance, it’s totally heraldic—

GS: Flutter up, come down, flutter up.—There are Korean folk dances that copy that. They call them crane dances.

JH: It’s a small-god thing: poetry’s very much involved with the spirits of our imagined deities, which have such a natural place—

GS : Small and drab, even.

GS: There’s a stupa—a big round dome cenotaph memorializing the Buddha—in the city of Katmandu, just on the outskirts. These are found here and there all over East Asia, with a kind of round, soft dome and then a spiral on top, and a railing all around it. People always walk clockwise, sun-wise, circumambulating these stupas, reciting little mantras, and it’s all very good for your karma to do that. And these are herders and peasants and lamas and ordinary people going around it, with little candles and oil lamps going twenty-four hours, and lots of horses and yaks being led around as well. Because the view is that there are not too many spiritual exercises that animals 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 we have here along the California coast—a lot of working landscapes. The wild works on all scales.

JH: Yeah. Some of the wildest places in England are the old Roman cart trails that have eroded. They’re called “hollow ways,” twenty feet deep; they’ve become these preposterously dense thickets.

GS: And that’s part of it—the wild can be a wood lot. Even the vacant lot in the city can be wild.

GS: The word “wilderness” is commonly interpreted nowadays by the media and by a lot of environmentalists in terms of the language of the Wilderness Act, which made a particular kind of definition of wilderness that was equable to its use on American public lands. And we realize in hindsight that they went a little too far in declaring that wilderness was totally pristine, showing no sign of the hands of man. It’s just language, is all.

When I was younger, working for the Forest Service, we were called on to take out an old sheepherder’s structure, dating back to the nineteenth century when the Basques actually drove the sheep into the high country meadows. But, well, you know, this has to be pristine now; we’ve got to take that shelter down. This is supposed to be pristine and this old shelter looks inappropriate.

But now that whole mentality has been reversed, too—now you have to have some different vocabulary, so it’s declared of “historical value,” and they leave it be. This is an ongoing thing. There are people who say that there have always been human beings around, so therefore nothing is wilderness. But the presence of human beings does not negate wilderness. It’s a matter of how much wildness as process is left intact.

WILL HEARST: The Mississippi of the environmental movement, as I understand it, was the Blue Planet movement—here’s this whole fragile planet . . . Whereas when I hear you talk, you don’t talk so much in these cosmic terms. You talk about nature outside my door, ten feet from where I’m sitting, a mile from my house, and that nature ought to be approached first in this region that is smaller and more local and more human-scaled.

GS: The Blue Planet image came from satellite photography. Stewart Brand picked it up and put it on the cover of the first Whole Earth Catalog and said, “Our whole sense of the planet has changed because we now have this picture of the planet Earth from outer space; this is one Earth; this is where we live.” And I said to Stewart, “Sure, that’s good, but people still don’t know or learn much, if that’s all you say.” People say they love nature. What they mean is they love what they see with their eyes and smell with their senses: the plant or animal life in their back-yard or the nearby creek or down by the park. For exactly those reasons, we might start getting to know our nonhuman neighbors, and it would be a help to understand which direction the water is running and where it might have come from. In other words, what are the lineaments of the place we’re in? It’s hands-on, ground-based nature learning that you can start teaching in grade school. Why is it that the salmon stocks are declining? You can know this.

The point is, “nature” always happens in a place, and generally, whatever you see and learn, you do so in a small place. You learn the mushroom, you learn the flower, you learn a bird, a slope, a canyon, a gulch, a grove of trees—as place. And we all live in a place.

JH: We live in particular.

GS: Even if you’re only there for a few months, you’re in a place. So why not look around and see where you are?

The lessons we learn from the wild become the etiquette of freedom.

Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild, “The Etiquette of Freedom”

GS: I don’t know if this is true or not—that a hen’s nest egg nearing the age at which a chick can peck its way out—that if a hawk’s shadow moves over the egg, the little chick inside will tremble.

JH: Ah, the intelligence is there.

GS: It’s the sort of intelligence that human beings aren’t always willing to acknowledge.

I had always sort of stupidly, ideologically excluded domestic animals from my curiosity, thinking, Oh, that’s too bad, they’ve been taken over by human beings, they’ve been colonized.

JH: But the colonization was very incomplete.

GS: And an animal is an animal. It’s another kind of organism, and it’s been fascinating to be with her [Emi] and really be forced to live in a world of nonverbal communication, and then to get better at it—both of us.

JH: I’ve been around Mexican ravens for seventeen years, and I finally passed muster with them last spring. For a long time they’d hide in the bushes and, you know, ambush my dog—but last spring, they started taking the walk with me. I was now accepted by this clan of ravens. Look how long it took to get there.

GS: So you know what we’re talking about again is that human/ nonhuman interaction. I have a falconer friend who catches and releases different kinds of raptors. He released a young male goshawk about three years ago, and after a little bit of training the hawk settled into the territory, which is a pine forest. And every morning, when he goes for a walk, the goshawk comes out and flies around above him.

JH: Yeah, paying a leisurely visit. You know, any creature that has an easy time making a living and getting their food, like porpoises or otters—they really spend a great deal of time just screwing around. I remember once after a snowstorm, I went out and tracked the haphazard paths of animals, which were going this way and that for no observable reason.

GS: So fooling around has great survival value, really. Evolution’s fueled by fooling around. So don’t call all of it intelligent design—some of it’s goofy design.

JH: Measured chaos, goofy design—marvelous. Is that why our perceptions are so adventurous? In the springtime where I live, on the U.S.-Mexico border, I might see thirty-four varieties of birds all at once. So how do I look to each of those species of birds?

GS: Okay—

JH: And then you can sense the craziness of the genome, or that each cell of that willow tree has nineteen thousand determinates. In each cell of what that willow tree is, everything becomes vivid, you know? The birds, my brain, the birds looking at me, me looking at the birds. Nature becomes totally holographic that way.

GS: Now you can write haiku.

JH: It just enlarges the conception of life. If you know that a teaspoon of soil has a billion bacteria in it, for example—

GS: So how do we put that into a poem?