Something Silly About Poetry and Nature

            Two competing desires struggle within me. There is the desire to carve out a place in space of my own, where I am aware of all things as they are and as they change. This would be the place from which I drew my sustenance. And then there is the desire to be a constant nomad, physically and intellectually, to draw inspiration from the myriad peoples and nations of the world. I could synthesize a culture endemic to only myself, amalgamating and adopting the fragments I could glean.

I want to ride on the roof of a train, a stowaway, as some new scrubland unfolds before me, caravan lines running parallel somewhere off near the horizon, and know that I am looking their way as they look mine. This is my nomad aspect. It scours the land for nutrients, amino acids, fuel to burn, parts for the machine. At the same time I want to know a singular piece of nature, carve out a habitat for myself, where I can observe the subtle changes that take place from day to day and year to year. This is my farmer aspect. It harnesses natural processes to subtly refine matter into a form which will sustain me. This distinction, I have found, is reflected in the poetry of two writers who champion reverence for the earth, Wendell Berry and Gary Snyder, Snyder representing the nomad aspect and Berry representing the farmer aspect. Of course, this is not simply because one was a bit of a nomad and one farmed for a living.

Wendellberry Cobbler

Berry is the farmer, basing his life and livelihood on a single patch of land and working it, becoming intimately acquainted with its character, with every hill and valley, and even the soil itself. The land is comfort, and the slow rhythms of nature provide stability, respite from the chaotic rhythms of civilization. Berry’s poem “February 2, 1968” reflects the stability and isolation of being tied to the land: “In the dark of the moon, in flying snow, in the dead of winter, / war spreading, families dying, the world in danger, / I walk the rocky hillside, sowing clover.” There is a sense that Berry feels entirely content in the presence of the land he has chosen to remain on, feeling a satisfaction with being in a place that few can feel in a post-agrarian society. In fact, one gets the impression that this connection with a specific piece of land is itself something that very few do feel. In his poem “On the Hill Late at Night,” he writes:

I am wholly willing to be here

between the bright silent thousands of stars

and the life of the grass pouring out of the ground.

The hill has grown to me like a foot.

Until I lift the earth I cannot move. (129)

It is isolation, but a liberating isolation. While the world changes around him, Berry is content to foster a connection with the land he knows, and the land he works.

            Berry’s reverence for the land grows from his understanding of the particular patch of land he has chosen to call his own. Salman Rushdie quipped in order to understand one life, one must swallow the whole world. But Berry’s life seems to suggest the opposite, at least in terms of understanding the natural world. The soil of Northern Kentucky is the soil of the whole Earth in its cycles of growth and death, freezing and thawing, nourishing and decomposing. His poem “Enriching the Earth” begins:

To enrich the earth I have sowed clover and grass

to grow and die. I have plowed in the seeds

of winter grains and various legumes,

their growth to be plowed in to enrich the earth.

There is a cyclical nature in these four lines, beginning and ending with the phrase “to enrich the earth,” evoking the circular nature of time for a farmer. (It has been documented in ethnographies of traditional farming societies that time is not perceived as proceeding linearly, as is common in Western culture, but instead moving in a circle.) This evokes a fact of nature that often does not play out in human time: that everything organic grows from and returns to the soil countless times over. Berry’s observance of the soil, both its ecological properties and philosophical implications, extends to all soils of the world. And he recognizes that he is himself part of this process. “After death, willing or not, the body serves, / entering the earth. And so what was heaviest / and most mute is at last raised up into song.” In this model of perpetual decomposition and regeneration, it is entailed that all living things are made from the same matter, and therefore are in communion with all other living things, united by the soil. Cultivating a piece of land results in Berry cultivating all of nature.

The Pacific Northwest Bushman

            Snyder possesses this same reverence for the soil, but in his worldview it may be more dirt than soil, emphasizing the vibrancy without the decay and consuming aspect. His is the hunter-gatherer’s earth where Berry’s is the farmer’s. Being nourished by the land does not come from careful cultivation, but from vigorous exploration. This sheer joy in discovering nature through furtive exploration – akin to a forager happening upon a patch of nourishing tubers – is reflected in “Meeting the Mountains.” In this poem, a man is discovering nature through furtive exploration.

He crawls to the edge of the foaming creek

He backs up the slab ledge

He puts a finger in the water

He turns to a trapped pool

Puts both hands in the water

Puts one foot in the pool

Drops pebbles in the pool

He slaps the water surface with both hands

He cries out, rises up and stands

Facing toward the torrent and the mountain

Raises up both hands and shouts three times!

This discovery is not made by careful cultivation of the soil, maintaining a small patch of land to learn the universal truths of Nature. Nature must be encountered in as many places with as many senses and appendages as possible.

            Yet the realization of the near-eternal scope of natural time is there in Snyder’s poetry as well. Snyder is preoccupied with the impermanence of nature on geological time rather than the cyclical properties driven by the seasons. This understanding of the beauty in the changing landscape is brought to life in “Poem Left in Sourdough Mountain Lookout.”

I the poet Gary Snyder

Stayed six weeks in fity-three

On this ridge and on its rock

& saw what every Lookout sees,

Saw these mountains shift about & end up on the ocean floor

Saw the wind and waters break

The branchéd deer, the Eagle’s eye

& when pray tell, shall Lookouts die?

The recognition of nature’s constant flux no doubt dovetails with Snyder’s studies in Buddhism, particularly with the notion of impermanence. Snyder’s conception of Nature as encompassing all physical phenomena could them be said to apply to Karmic cause and effect. This isn’t the Western pseudo-karma, a kind of moral causality that is invoked only when something very fortunate or unfortunate happens. This is the true Buddhist philosophical Karma, a force natural as gravity, which shapes the illusion that is the world through linear cause and effect. In this worldview, everything was once everything else in the scope of eternal time, and so man is tied to Nature through its intrinsic properties. In “By Frazier Creek Falls,” he writes “This living flowing land / is all there is, forever // We are it / it sings through us” (477).

Despite this blissful (again, in the true Buddhist sense) erosion the boundaries of the self, Snyder still seems to be conscious to define himself in relation to nature, keeping himself as a separate “I.” He maintains his role as an experiencer of nature while himself being tied to it in the appropriately named poem “Nature: Green Shit.” Notice the italics when recognizing his identity as something fleshy rather than a structure of cellulose:

The brittle hollow stalks of sunflower

            heads broke over full of dusty seed

            peeld, it tastes good, small

Why should dirt be dirty when you can clean up.

            stop to like the dead or dying plants,

            twisted witherd grass

Picking the last peppers

Soft and wrinkld; bright green, cool

            what a lump of red flesh I am!

What was soil for Berry is dirt for Snyder; it is medium rather than resource. Both authors are reverent of the stuff. To Snyder it is as much a part of nature as are the majestic peaks surrounding Kitkidizzi. And in fact, to Snyder, every part of nature may be nothing more than equal parts. But there is a sense that Berry’s soil is something sacred. It is his to cultivate and it is what sustains him.

The Mad Farmer's Sanity

            A restless mind can never reconcile its competing desires. It may be that there are simply too many places in the world to experience in a human lifetime, and countless more when accounting for the places in space where we will one day settle. But never the less, I feel this extreme restlessness, a feeling of being incomplete without having known intimately every city, culture, landscape, and biome that can be experienced. The term, which seems to be prevalent in the communal lexicon thanks to its being integrated into tumblr graphics and facebook cover photos, is wanderlust. Of course a term doesn’t any legitimacy when it is appropriated by popular culture, and my compulsive need for exploring and learning is a shared trait of humanity. Snyder encourages this. Between the lines he is nodding at me, encouraging me to act on these mad impulses. And I know he is right, this is what I must do.

            But then there is Berry to temper what I will call my wanderlust, for lack of any more appropriate term. In Berry’s worldview, to work the land is to become acquainted with the whole world, because the whole world is present in the working of the land. I could be that Siberian woodsman, to whom Berry says “the forest / whose ways, strange to me, are well known to you as the sound of your own voice.” Whatever form that forest may take, be it a city or a field of study, I will know that an enlightened man has spoken with reverence of this kind of exclusive familiarity. I may not settle some place for long, the nomad aspect may be too much of me. And I know that both aspects, the nomad and the farmer, are meaningful, productive futures to carry out. There are many ways to know the whole of the Earth.

I write about this sometimes. Deal with it.