Both Sides Now: On Gary Snyder’s This Present Moment

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Notes

1. “I grew up in terms of planetary normal, which is to say growing up in close contact with the fabric of nature, rather than removed from it. I had a normal childhood” (Snyder in O’Connell 308).

2. Kai was born in Kyoto in 1968, Gen on Turtle Island in 1969. Snyder married Masa Uehara in Japan in 1967. See “Burning Island,” an epithalamion published by Snyder in Regarding Wave in 1970 (23–24). On this marriage poem and Regarding Wave, see Murphy 96–107. “Turtle Island” is, as Snyder writes, “the old/new name for the continent, based on many creation myths of the people who have been living here for millennia, and reapplied by some of them to ‘North America’ in recent years” (Turtle Island, n.p.).

3. On the poem “Go Now,” see Schelling.

4. The Gary Snyder Reader comes to the same epigrammatic conclusion, though in black ink on white paper and punctuated as follows: “This present moment: / / /That lives on, / / /To become / / / /Long ago” (608).

5. Snyder writes of a “perpetual present” found in “a way of life attuned to the slower and steadier processes of nature” in The Practice of the Wild (14). He goes on in the same book to discuss this endless gift in these terms: “One should not dwell in the specialness of the extraordinary experience nor hope to leave the political quagg [sic] behind to enter a perpetual state of heightened insight. The best purpose of such studies and hikes is to be able to come back to the lowlands and see all the land about us, agricultural, suburban, urban, as part of the same territory—never totally ruined, never completely unnatural. It can be restored, and humans could live in considerable numbers on much of it. Great Brown Bear is walking with us, Salmon swimming upstream with us, as we stroll a city street” (94). For Snyder’s poetic expression of this idea, see “Walking the New York Bedrock Alive in the Sea of Information” in Mountains and Rivers Without End (97–102). And see the commentary on this by Anthony Hunt in Genesis Structure and Meaning in Gary Snyder’s Mountains and Rivers Without End (182–88).

6. In a conversation with Dom Aelred Graham in 1967, Snyder makes the following observation: “I have a hunch now that the beginning of Zazen and all yogic practice is hunting. Agricultural magic and agricultural life produce ritual. Look at what happens when you switch over from hunting to agriculture. It’s a completely different exercise of the intelligence. The hunter has to learn samadhi; he has to practice identification with his quarry. As somebody said, the only way you ever get into the mind of another creature is by wanting to make love to it or wanting to kill it. The two are very close. The hunter learns to know his quarry like a lover. Hunting magic is, as an Indian friend of mine explained, not going out and hunting the animal, but making the animal want to come to you to be killed. A real hunter goes out and he sings his song and he picks his place and then the deer comes, and he shoots it. Anyone who has ever hunted knows that what you have to do is still your mind and sit still. Hunters have to be able to sit still for hours. They have to go out for weeks at a time sometimes. There is a whole practice of mind and body, which belongs to the late paleolithic period” (77–78).

7. Compare William James: “The great point is to notice that the oneness and the manyness are absolutely co-ordinate here. Neither is primordial or more essential or excellent than the other” (68).