http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/s_z/snyder/selby.htmBeginning with a story that leads to a consideration of impermanence and the role mythology in the creation of culture, Snyder invites us to contemplate the use, definitions, history, application and potential re-inscription of certain terms.
Wild and Free: “To be truly free one must take on the basic conditions as they are – painful, impermanent, open, imperfect – and then be grateful for the impermanence and the freedom it grants us.” (168) He hereby bridges two of the main influences on his view, Native American and Buddhist.
Nature, Wilderness, Wildness…how does Snyder refer to these terms and what does he see as their function/presence in today’s world? This piece also makes references that we might well link to our prior reading of Lopez’s The Rediscovery of North America. Both writers ask us to reconstitute our view, approach and habits vis-à-vis the world in which we live, the land that we inhabit. Offering that “place-based stories the people tell, and the naming they’ve done, is their archeology, architecture, and title to the land” Snyder emphasizes the importance of reading cultures through the connections they have made with their places of residence. Therefore, the analysis of language and language use becomes vital as a tool of survival.
Nature, Wild, Wilderness…
What is wild? How do we define wild? Mostly by what something is not…pg. 171.
Snyder inverts the patter to propose wild through a positive reading of what things might be, which further expands the other terms addressed, including and particularly FREE.
Wild=Free when defined as not cultivated, ruled, tamed.
Culture…Language…
“To be well educated is to have learned the songs, proverbs, stories, sayings, myths (and technologies) that come with this experiencing of the nonhuman members of the local ecological community. Practice in the open field, “open country”, is foremost. Walking is the great adventure, the first meditation, a practice of heartiness and soul primary to humankind. Waling is the exact balance of spirit and humility. Out walking, one notices where there is food. And there are firsthand true stories of “Your ass is somebody else’s meal” – a blunt way of saying interdependence, interconnection, “ecology”, on the level where it counts, also a teach of mindfulness and preparedness. There is an extraordinary teaching of specific plants and animals and their uses, empirical and impeccable, that never reduces them to objects and commodities.” (178)
“The lessons we learn from the wild become the etiquette of freedom.” (182)
