GARY SNYDER’S EYE FOR THE REAL WORLD 349anxiety, opens perception for Snyder: glowing fir-cones, new flies swarming,
fresh water chilling a tin cup. Call it mindfulness, immersion until the surround-
ing wildness finds a kindred ecosystem in us, in the cup of our own wild mind.
“Shall I not have intelligence with the earth?”—Snyder was reading Thoreau’s
Walden in 1953. His journal for 14 August says, “Don’t be a mountaineer, be
a mountain,” though he hadn’t yet come across Aldo Leopold ’s land ethic in
Sand County Almanac (1949), “Thinking Like a Mountain.”
That autumn Snyder met Kenneth Rexroth, a generation older and long since
primed for California’s high country by the classical Chinese and Japanese poets.
Holding salons at his home, Rexroth spotted a poet in the making. Snyder,
pursuing his way within a tradition, began studying East Asian languages at
Berkeley. He translated the Cold Mountain poems of Han-shan, a seventh-
century T’ang dynasty hermit and his Chinese alter ego, smacking also of the
American Indian Coyote trickster, scratching poems on bamboo, wood, stones,
cliffs, house walls.
Cold Mountain has many hidden wonders,
People who climb here are always getting scared.
When the moon shines, water sparkles clear
When wind blows, grass swishes and rattles.Islands, Mountains, Houses, Bridge, detail, Guan Huai, eighteenth century.
Seattle Art Museum, Eugene Fuller Memorial Collection.