miller's crossing

Sticking with my New Year's resolution to read more poetry and fiction, I picked up Gary Snyder's Earth House Hold. The first part is called "Lookout's Journal." It's a collection of journal entries from 1952 when he was apparently a lookout in Mt. Baker National Forest. He's in the back country and it's mostly simple observations of nature and of other humans -- voices over the 2-way radio, in diners, etc.

I can't help but wonder whether someone could even experience the same kind of remoteness and the world falling away like Snyder writes about in today's America. How much of the wilderness has been wired and photographed. What's left for a poet to discover?

Snyder writes on 31 July:

This morning: / floating face down in the water bucket / a drowned mouse.

"Were it not for Kuan Chung, we should be wearing our hair unbound and our clothes buttoning on the left side"

A man should stir himself with poetry / Stand firm in ritual / Complete himself in music / -- lun yu

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Comparing the panoramic Lookout View photo dated 8 August 1935: with the present view. Same snowpatches; same shapes. Year after year; snow piling up and melting.

"By God" quod he, "for pleynly, at a word / Thy drasty ryming is not worth a tord."

And later on 6 August he writes:

Clouds above and below, but I can see Kulshan, Mt. Terror, Shuksan; they blow over the ridge between here and Three-fingered Jack, fill up the valleys. The Buckner Boston Peak ridge is clear.

What happens all winter; the wind driving snow; clouds -- wind, and mountains -- repeating

this is what always happens here,

and the photograph of a young female torso hung in the lookout window, in the foreground. Natural against natural, beauty.

two butterflies / a chilly clump of mountain / flowers.

zazen non-life. An art: mountain-watching.

leaning in the doorway whistling / a chipmunk popped out / listening

Snyder seems to take comfort in the timelessness of things. Yet -- and as a student of Buddhism he knows this too -- thing in this illusary world are impermanent.... Unless you count on the timeless process of change itself. ... And now I feel like I'm coming up to the brink of the true nature of reality. And there is no time to go there today.

What is sad is that 50 years later, due to human created emissions, I'm willing to bet that the paroramic view has changed. The snowfields are smaller or gone. And what else has been added or subtracted? I've got to leave this for now -- time to work. And I apologize for I've not formatted it very true to the printed page. More later....

I edited this page a few hours after it was posted for typos and a few word changes.-la