Passage Through India by Gary Snyder (review)

172 Western American Literature Now it was dark, there was manifest Tsingdao, Though I could go no farther now it was dark. What do you really see in that streak of light over the ridge? I asked Walter. Your west, he said. The West is lucky to have a poet as talented as Josephine Miles. This collec­ tion of poetry is a tribute to her and a gift to her readers. CYNTHIA H. TAYLOR University of Minnesota Passage Through India. By Gary Snyder. (San Francisco: Grey Fox Press, 1983. 100 pages, $6.95.) Gary Snyder refers to “Turtle Island” as “the old/new name” for the North American continent; in Passage Through India, we get an old/new name for an old/new book about the Indian subcontinent. This combination of journal, travel notes, and poetry-workbook began as Snyder’s letter to his sister Thea about his travels through India with his second wife, the poet Joanne Kyger, in the winter and spring of 1962. (For a strikingly different perspective on the journey, see Kyger’s The Japan and India Journals 19601964 [Tombouctou, 1981].) Originally published in 1972 in Caterpillar, it bore the title “Now India.” One short section, “A Journey to Rishikesh and Hardwar” — covering part of the journey when Snyder and Kyger were joined by Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky — was printed in slightly dif­ ferent form in Earth House Hold (1969). This is an important work to have in print, accessible in its entirety; Snyder’s journey to India was a spiritual journey, a serious search for origins, but while there he faced some of the most threatening images of life that he would encounter anywhere (“Deformed people and deformed animals, India”). He also approached ancient sustain­ ing sources of thought. So his tone ranges far and wide, from discussing meditative postures with the Dalai Lama to bemoaning the lack of toilet paper. His ambivalence toward India — its filth, its wisdom, its “ecological degradation,” its “philosophy of carefulness with life,” its erotic traditions and its killing caste systems — engendered one of the most powerful and dark sequences in all of Snyder’s poetry: the “Kali” section of The Back Country (1968), based in part on this journey to India. Passage Through India offers us the raw experiential narrative of the experiences that lie behind those poems, poems that would lead directly to Snyder’s imaginative joining of India’s Indians with North American Indians as he came to meld the Far East with America’s Far West, the backward country with the back country, Tantrie celebrations of the fleshly divine with Amerindian animistic rituals. So, the title: Passage Through India. Like India itself, the title echoes through receding layers of significance. Walt Whitman, of course, is invoked, Reviews 173 and his “Passage to India” prophecy of easy international brotherhood is undercut here, though Snyder’s tone is somewhat Whitmanic, cataloguing the cosmic in the commonplace, wandering the “Hindu-Disneyland garden,” observing the “colors ofDisneyland heaven,” negotiating the distance between and odd intertwinings of sublime spirit and gaudy vulgarity (“the vulgarity of modern Indian religious iconography does not really detract from its seriousness”), cataloguing the erotic bas-reliefs on ancient temples that suggest “total enlightenment . . . at the moment of orgasm.” And the title resonates with E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India, where Forster evokes the same mixture of mystery, fascination, fear, disgust, and admiration that Snyder experiences; like Forster’s character Fielding, Snyder recognizes the impossibilities of comprehending Indian ways, of feeling at home in India, and after he experiences the inexplicable and disorienting riotous festivals, dark caves, unclean masses of starving humanity, he is relieved to emerge from it alive: “Now we are about to leave India, and feeling very lucky to have come through it all intact, with nothing worse than diarrhea a few times, quite elated really. And glad to be leaving, then, because India is not comfortable. . . .” He has sniffed the origin, and has found it threatening and dark in its fecundity. The title echoes, too, with Snyder’s own “Passage to More Than India,” an essay in Earth House Hold, where he explores ways to join the various traditions that...