EARTH HOUSEHOLD

EARTH HOUSE HOLD

A new book: EARTH HOUSE HOLD, by Gary Snyder, New Directions, 143 pp. $1.95 paper.

Gary Snyder’s first volume of mostly prose arrives at a good time.

We have been bombarded this spring with varieties of information indicating we’ve so damaged the planetary ecosystem that quite possibly we’ve extincted ourselves.

Gary.’s book reminds us that for at least seventeen: years he’s been urging onto us— again and again— the kind of ecological consciousness/conscience that vastly increases chances of future fiourishings.

Way back in June of ’52 Gary wrote a journal-poem which begins:

Blackie Burns:

“28 years ago you could find a good place to fish. GREEDY & SELFISH

NO RESPECT FOR THE LAND

tin cans, beer bottles, dirty dishes a shit within a foot of the bed one sunuvabitch out of fifty fishguts in the creek the door left open for the bear.

Multiply a-shit-within-a-foot-of-the-bed by fifty Rockefellers plus fifty industrially-revolting capitalist/communist national regimes to the fiftieth power and you’ve maybe got the size of the thing facing us.

Gary’s title comes from the pristine meaning of ‘ecology’: “ ‘eco’ (oikos meaning ‘house’ (cf. ‘ecumenical’): Housekeeping on Earth. Economics, which is merely the housekeeping of various social orders—taking out more than it puts back— must learn the rules of the greater realm. Ancient and primitive cultures had this knowledge more surely

and with almost as much empirical precision...as the most concerned biologist today.”

Early sections of the book deal with his months as mountain lookout (’52-’53), beginning Zen student in Japan (’56-’57) and fireman on an almost-round-the-world tanker (’57-’58):

“Caruso: ‘It’s a long way to Suez’

Duperont: ‘It ain’t a long way man, it’s just you got a short mind.’

I’ve spent quite some time leafing through the book for quotable snippets to stand as summary of this or that. Trouble is, the book is mostly quotable and mostly summary. You start to quote something-but then you see the quote really should continue right through several pages indefinitely. Probably because the book is the product not so much of long thought as of long meditation.

Gary returned to the U.S. five months ago after having spent almost a decade in Japan studying/meditating mostly Buddhism but also a lot of Hinduism and a lot of other things including, especially, the “coming revolution.”

His sense of what the revolution really must be makes most of the views rampant in the Movement seem less than radical—that is, less than “root”.

In a recent poetry-reading tour of a dozen American campuses he has urged students to demand not only black studies but also “green studies” in order to learn and implement “the non-negotiable demands of nature.” He sees the thing coming down on us so fast—through a combination of political repression/chaos and ecological disaster-that “we owe it to our children to teach them how to subsist in forest and mountain and back-country situations. “He thinks it imperative that American blacks and whites alike become, symbolically, Indians in order to survive the next decades on this soil.

Cont. on Page 27

Cont. from Page 19

Certainly these perspectives are helpful—even liberating—when viewed within the present brink-of-civil-war context: the black thing vigorous and courageous yet not really strong because packed into the central cities surrounded by armed surburban whites and also too easily controlled from the air—just a tiny step for the regime to graduate from the 1966 surveillance helicopters over Hough to helicopter gunships spurting death; the white militant thing too often ego-ridden, faction-ridden,media-ridden.

What if the Pentagon had to deal with thousands of small tribes scattered across the American landscape? Tribes interiorly gentle but exteriorly capable of good offense and good defense. Knowing Indian survival techniques and capable of Indian-mobility The surburban . whites thus themselves surrounded-in fact opposed simultaneously front and rear. The strategic situation changes so much that possibly few shots will have to be fired.

Probably Gary’s essay “Why Tribe” is the most important in the book--or at least for most of us at this particular time.

The first half of it is an incredibly compact consciousness-history of the west since World War I -and of Gary’s own development since ’48 when he played guitar in support of Henry Wallace: “The suspicion grew that perhaps the whole Western tradition, of which Marxism is but a (Millenial Protestant) part, is off the track. This led many people to study other major civilizations-Tndia and China--to see what they could learn.

“It’s an easy step from the dialectic of Marx and Hegel to an interest in the dialectic of early Taoism, the I Ching and the yin-yang theories. From Taoism it is another easy step to the philosophies and mythologies of India --vast, touching the deepest areas of the mind.

“Next comes a concern with deepening one's understanding in an experiential way: abstract philisophical understanding is simply not enough. At this point many, myself included, found in the Bedda-Dharma a practical method for clearing one’s mind of the trivia, prejudices and false values that out conditioning had laid on us--and more important, an approach to the basic problem of how to penetrate to the deepest non-self Self. Today we have many who are exploring the Ways of Zen, Vajrayana, Yoga Shamanism, Psychedelics...

“In the course of these studies it became clear that ‘Hinduism’ and ‘Buddhism’ as social institutions had long been accomplices of the State in burdening and binding people, rather than serving to liberate them. Just like other Great Religions.

“At this point, looking once more quite closely at history both East and West, some of us noticed the similarities in certain small but influential heretical and esoteric movements. These schools of thought and practice were usually suppressed, or diluted and made harmless, in whatever society they appeared. Peasant witchcraft in Europe, Tantrism in Bengal, Quakers in England, Tachikawa-ryu in Japan, Ch’an in China. These are all outcroppings of the Great Subculture which runs underground all through history...

“The Great Subculture has been attached in part to the official religions but is different in that it transmits a community style of life, with an ecstatically positive vision of spiritual and physical love; and is opposed for very fundamental reasons to the Civilization Establishment.

“It has taught that man’s natural being is to be trusted and followed; that we need not look to a model or rule imposed from outside in searching for the center; and that in following the grain, one is being truly “moral”. ”

“All this is subversive to civilization: for civilization is built on hierarchy and specialization. A ruling class, to survive, must propose a Law: a law to work must have a hook into thesocial psyche - and the most effective way to achieve this is to make people doubt their natural worth and instinct, especially sexual. To make ‘human nature’ suspect is also to make Nature -the wilderness - the adversary. Hence the ecological crisis of todary.

“. . . The Tribe, it seems, is the newest development in the Great Subculture. . .

“The modern Tribesman, rather than being old-fashioned in his criticism of civilization, is the most relevant type in contemporary society. Nationalism, warfare, heavy industry and consumership are already outdated and useless. The next great step of mankind is to step into the nature of his own mind. . .

“The Revolution has ceased to be an ideological concern. Instead, people are trying it out right now -communism in small communities, new family organization. A million people in America and another million in England and Europe. A vast underground in Russia, which will come out in the open four or five years hence, in now biding. . . Men, women and children - all of whom together, hope to follow the timeless path of love and wisdom, in affectionate company with the sky, winds, clouds, trees, waters, animals and grasses -this is the tribe.”

Yeah, you get quoting and you can’t stop. Gary wrote that two years ago.

Gary himself places special importance on the final essay in the book, “Suwa-No-Se Island and the Banyam Ashram,” because it deals with an “actual concrete realization” of many of the ideas in the earlier writings.

The essay describes closely a summer (1967) he spent on a tiny island -eight households, forty people - between Kyushu and the Ryukyus. Getting down to the bone: “Daily work was clearing a new field for sweet-potato planting. We had to get all the bamboo root runners out, turning it over with hoes and grubbing the roots. Backbreaking work, and very slow. Because of midday heat it could only be done before 10:30 or after 4. In midday we napped in the shade of the banyan, or in the Bamboo House. Other work was fuel-gathering (dead pine underbranches; dead bamboo; or driftwood from the beaches leaded in a carrying basket and toted with a tumpline on the forehead) and cooking; done by turn in pairs in an open kitchen-shed with a thatch roof on an old brick campfire stove. Chinese style. (Our diet was basically brown rice and miso soup with potatoes and occasional watermelons or local bananas.) Also a lot of carpentry and construction work was continually going on, and a few hands every few days down to the village to join in on a village project, community trail-repair, or helping gut and flay an extra-large flying fish catch before it could spoil. . .

“In spearfishing we learned you must never choose a specific fish for a quarry: you must let the fish choose you, and be prepared to shoot the fish that will come into range. For some fish you must be one with the sea and consider yourself a fish among fish. But there was one large and unpredictable variety (cobalt with a crescent-shaped tail) that digs the strange. When one of those was around I would change my mind and consider myself a freak and be out of place; in which case he will come to look at you out of curiosity.

“When you go down with the fishes minus your spear they treat you differently too. . .”

Georgia Straight