by Gary Snyder
from Mountains and Rivers Without End, Counterpoint, 1996
On April 8, 1956, Gary Snyder began work on a long poem entitled Mountains and Rivers Without End. Initially inspired by East Asian landscape painting and his own experience within "a chaotic universe where everything is in place," Snyder's vision was further stimulated by Asian art and drama, Gaia history, Native American performance and storytelling, the practice of Zen Buddhism, and the varied landscapes of Japan, California, Alaska, Australia, China, and Taiwan.
While a few individual sections of the poem have been published in literary magazines and seven poems in a chapbook, Snyder's ardent fans have waited patiently through the past forty years for the completion of Mountains and Rivers Without End. The entire work appears for the first time in this volume.
Traveling beyond its origins in the Western tradition of Whitman, Pound, and Williams, Mountains and Rivers is an epic of geology, prehistory, and planetary mythologies. It is a poem about land and its processes, a book about wisdom, compassion, and myth, and a narrative work that is not quite like anything else. It will stand as a masterpiece of the long poem in American English.—From the flyleaf of the Counterpoint edition of Mountains and Rivers Without End.
Copyright © 1996 Counterpoint
On a hot spring Saturday, May 11, 1996, Gary Snyder and David Robertson, both faculty
members at the University of California at Davis,
along with Bob Greensfelder and Matthew Davis, led a group of students and others
on a circumambulation of Mt. Tamalpais in Marin County, California, following the course
that inspired Gary Snyder's poem, "The Circumambulation of Mt. Tamalpais."
The group left the Muir Woods parking lot at 8:00 am and arrived back at approximately
7:00 pm.
The photographs, taken by Rod Bauer, are from that trip.
Walking up and around the long ridge of Tamalpais, "Bay Mountain,"
circling and climbing—chanting—to show respect and to clarify the
mind. Philip Whalen, Allen Ginsberg, and I learned this practice in
Asia. So we opened a route around Tam. It takes a day.
Muir Woods: the bed of Redwood Creek just where the Dipsea trail crosses it.
Even in the dryest season of this year some running water. Mountains make
springs.
Splash across the creek and head up the Dipsea Trail, the steep wooded slope
and into meadows. Gold dry grass. Cows—a huge pissing, her ears out, looking
around with large eyes and mottled nose. As we laugh. "—Excuse us for
laughing at you." Hazy day, butterflies tan as grass that sit on silver-weathered
fenceposts, a gang of crows. "I can smell fried chicken" Allen says—only
the simmering California laurel leaves. The trail winds crossed and intertwining
with a dirt jeep road.
A tiny chörten before this tree.
A ring of outcropped rocks. A natural little dolmen-circle right where the Dipsea
crests on the ridge. Looking down a canyon to the ocean—not so far.
And on to Pan Toll, across the road, and up the Old Mine Trail. A doe and a
fawn, silvery gray. More crows.
Rock springs. A trickle even now—
Inspiration Point.
Looking down on Lagunitas. The gleam of water storage in the brushy hills.
All that smog—and Mt. St. Helena faintly in the north. The houses of San
Anselmo and San Rafael, once large estates…"Peacock Gap Country
Club"—Rocky brush climb up the North Ridge Trail.
Summit of Mt. Tamalpais. A ring of rock pinnacles around the lookout.
Hari Krishna Mantra
Parking lot of Mountain Home. Cars whiz by, sun glare from the west.
Then, across from the California Alpine Club, the Ocean View Trail goes down.
Some yellow broom flowers still out. The long descending trail into shadowy
giant redwood trees.
The bed of Redwood creek again.
"The Circumambulation of Mt. Tamalpais" Copyright ©
1996 by Gary Snyder. All rights reserved.
Prajñâpâramitâ-hridaya-sûtra
Dhâranî for Removing Disasters
Four Vows
A small twisted ancient interior live oak splitting a rock outcrop an hour up
the trail.
Dhâranî for Removing Disasters
The Heat Mantra
Into the woods. Maze fence gate. Young douglas fir, redwood, a new state of
being. Sun on madrone: to the bare meadow knoll. (Last spring a bed of wild
iris about here and this time too, a lazuli bunting.)
Dhâranî for Removing Disasters
Hari Om Namo Shiva
The Sarasvatî Mantra
Dhâranî for Removing Disasters
bits of wood and parts of old crates; roofed with shakes and black plastic. A book
called Harmony left there. Lunch by the stream, too tiny a trickle, we
drink
water from our bota. The food offerings are swiss cheese sandwiches, swede
bread with liverwurst, salami, jack cheese, olives, gomoku-no-moto from a
can, grapes, panettoni with apple-currant jelly and sweet butter, oranges, and
soujouki—greek walnuts in grape-juice paste. All in the shade, at Rifle Camp.
A notable serpentine outcropping not far after Rifle Camp.
Om Shri Maitreya
Dhâranî for Removing Disasters
Collier spring—in a redwood grove—water trickling out a pipe.
Dhâranî of the Great Compassionate One
California nutmeg, golden chinquapin the fruit with burrs, the chaparral.
Following the North Side Trail.
Dhâranî for Removing Disasters
Mantra for Târâ
Prajñâpâramitâ-hridaya-sûtra
Dhâranî for Removing Disasters
Dhâranî of the Great Compassionate One
Om Shri Maitreya
Hari Om Namo Shiva
All about the bay, such smog and sense of heat. May the whole planet not get
like this.
Start the descent down the Throckmorton Hogback Trail. (Fern Canyon an
alternative.)
NINE
Dhâranî for Removing Disasters
Gopala Mantra.
—standing in our little circle, blowing the conch, shaking the staff rings, right in
the parking lot.
Prajñâpâramitâ-hridaya-sûtra
Dhâranî for Removing Disasters
Hari Om Namo Shiva
Hari Krishna Mantra
Four Vows
Photographs Copyright © 1996 by Rod Bauer. All rights reserved.
Notes about the author.
You are invited to send comments on the above work to the author.
