Mountains, Waters, Walking: Gary Snyder’s reticulate meshwork of trails

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Notes

¹ Snyder, Mountains and Rivers Without End, 154.

² In citing from Snyder’s work, I use the following abbreviations to indicate the different collections: RR—Riprap (1959), EHH—Earth House Hold (1969) -AH—Ax Handles (1983), POW—The Practice of the Wild (1990), NN—No Nature (1992), MR—Mountains and Rivers Without End (1996), DP—Danger on Peaks (2004).

³ Ingold, Lines: A Brief History, 83–4.

⁴ Snyder, POW, 103.

⁵ Snyder, DP, 7.

⁶ Ibid., 9.

⁷ The extent of Snyder’s transnational “reach” has not been documented. But it can be said that his writing has been translated into more than twenty languages and is taught in literature classrooms around the world and that the environmental focus of his work contributed to the international ecology movement from the late 1960s (beginning in versions of ecologism in the so-called Counterculture, but extending more widely into discussions of Bioregionalism), and the development of ecocriticism from the late 1980s. In South Africa, specifically, his response to environmental justice issues contributed to our discussions in the Cape Town Ecology Group and Eco-Programme in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

⁸ This discussion is in the genre of literary essay. For a different sort of dialog with Snyder’s work (an actual dialog, taking place over thirty years), see Nobody Home: Writing, Buddhism, and Living in Places, our recently published collection of interviews and letters.

⁹ Snyder, POW, 9.

¹⁰ Ibid., 10.

¹¹ Ibid.

¹² Ibid., 15.

¹³ Ibid., 101.

¹⁴ Snyder, The Gary Snyder Reader, 400.

¹⁵ Snyder, MR, 143.

¹⁶ In a note at the end of Mountains and Rivers Without End, he comments, “This poem somewhat follows the Nō play Yamamba (Old Mountain Woman), a play of the ‘supernatural being’ class, written in the ‘aged style’ of ‘quiet heart and distant eye’” (Snyder, MR, 162).

¹⁷ Snyder, MR, 9 & 152.

¹⁸ Ibid., 146.

¹⁹ Snyder writes a direct response to this key Zen text in “Blue Mountains Constantly Walking” (PW 97–115). For a translation of the full text, see “Mountains and Waters Sutra,” in ed. Kazuaki Tanahashi, 97–107.

²⁰ Snyder, MR, 148.

²¹ Ibid., 149.

²² Anthony Hunt has suggested that “The Mountain Spirit” embodies the entire work of Mountains and Rivers Without End “in miniature,” and that reading it “reveals at once one aspect of the fractal nature of Snyder’s design throughout his long poem” (249).

²³ Snyder, EHH, 129.

²⁴ See for example, Badiner, ed. Dharma Gaia: A Harvest of Essays in Buddhism and Ecology (1990), and Martin, ed. Ecological Responsibility: A Dialogue with Buddhism (1997).

²⁵ Snyder, POW, 102.

²⁶ Snyder, MR, 132–3.

²⁷ I tend to see the image of the tiny skin boat in relation to Buddhist paradigms, but for a detailed reading of the poem that foregrounds Snyder’s indebtedness to Native American mythology, see Anthony Hunt’s analysis (Hunt, Genesis, Structure and Meaning in Gary Snyder’s Mountains and Rivers Without End, 233–7).

²⁸ Snyder, POW, 101.

²⁹ Snyder, AH, 71.

³⁰ Snyder, M&R, 101.

³¹ Snyder, NN, 381.

³² Snyder, POW, 102.

³³ Ibid., 103.

³⁴ Ibid.

³⁵ The phrase “slow violence” is Rob Nixon’s useful term for “calamities that are slow and long lasting: calamities that patiently dispense their devastation while remaining outside our flickering attention spans—and outside the purview of a spectacle-driven corporate media” (Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, 6).

³⁶ Snyder, DP, 103.

³⁷ Ibid.

³⁸ Snyder, POW, 103.

³⁹ Snyder, DP, 18.