The Philosophy of the Beats

Being-at-Home

47 BeIng-at-home Gary Snyder and the Poetics of Place Josh Michael Hayes Nature is not a place to visit, it is home. —Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild What does it mean to be at home in a place? Is the home a psychic space we project upon the places we inhabit, or does it possess a specific geographical location that defines our identity as human beings? Moreover, can we ever really be at home? These are all questions that might be uniquely attributed to the poetry and prose of Gary Snyder as a participant in the Beat Generation . While Snyder has acknowledged that he does not easily identify with the popular cultural history of this generation, I hope to provide a series of preliminary gestures that might at least lessen Snyder’s uneasy relation to the Beats. First, I shall begin by investigating the poetic significance of “being-at-home” in his own practice as a Zen Buddhist and as a student of primitive cultures. Second, I will turn to how this sense of place is reflected in his concrete ethical and political commitments, specifically his avowed pragmatism as an environmentalist. I will conclude with his reflections upon language that warrant a radical paradigm shift in how we might begin to speak about the “nature” of place. The poetic significance of “being-at-home” throughout Snyder’s writings is intimately tied to his earliest reflections upon the Beats. How does Snyder find himself in relation to the Beats, particularly if he is historically considered to be among the first and last representatives of this generation? What does “being-at-home” mean for Snyder and what does it mean for the Beats? In an early article entitled “Notes on the Beat Generation,” published in 1960 in the Japanese journal Chuo-koron, Snyder presents his first candid 48 Josh Michael Hayes assessment of the international significance of the Beats: “The beat generation is particularly interesting because it is not an intellectual movement, but a creative one: people who have cut their ties with respectable society in order to live an independent way of life writing poems, painting pictures, making mistakes, and taking chances—but finding no room for apathy or discouragement. They are going somewhere.”1 While Snyder identifies with their distinctive brand of antibourgeois intellectualism as “some of the only truly proletarian literature in recent history” (Snyder 1995, 10), it is much more difficult to assess whether the other aspects of Snyder’s personal biography as a poet, teacher, scholar, and public intellectual resonate with the spirit of that generation. If one is to attempt to characterize Snyder’s creative contributions to the Beats, it would surely include his embrace of an intellectual cosmopolitanism responsible for bringing the Eastern tradition of Zen Buddhism into conversation with the American literary scene. Yet such a cosmopolitanism is already at work within the values of the beat generation itself: “In a way one can see the beat generation as another aspect of the perpetual ‘third force’ that has been moving through history with its own values of community, love, and freedom. It can be linked with the ancient Essene communities, primitive Christianity, Gnostic communities, and the free-spirit heresies of the Middle Ages; with Islamic Sufism, early Chinese Taoism, and both Zen and Shin Buddhism” (Snyder 1995, 12). Snyder’s earliest prose devoted to the phenomenon of the Beats also includes his resistance to being classified according to the more pervasive characteristics of the label. In a subsequent essay entitled “The New Wind,” Snyder advertently identifies himself as belonging not to the beat generation per se, but to an independent group of poets who share some affiliation with the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance, a series of loosely organized readings, publications, and meetings during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Following Don Allen’s preface to the New American Poetry, Snyder lists the American literary scene of his generation according to five classes: (1) The poets who first associated with Origen magazine and Black Mountain Review; (2) the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance; (3) the Beats, specifically Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and Peter Orlovsky; (4) New York poets; and (5) the last group, “a sort of miscellaneous collection of independent characters who cannot be fitted into any other class and who all have individual styles” (Snyder 1995, 17). Therefore, Snyder’s distinctive contribution as a poet to the philosophy of the Beats, if there is such a philosophy, remains an...