the fractal nature of gary snyder's mountains and rivers without end rod romesburg.pdf
TRANSCRIPT
-
8/14/2019 The Fractal Nature of Gary Snyder's Mountains and Rivers Without End Rod Romesburg.pdf
1/26
The Fractal Nature of Gary Snyder's Mountains and Rivers Without
End
Rod Romesburg
College Literature, Volume 37, Number 3, Summer 2010, pp. 1-25 (Article)
Published by West Chester University
DOI: 10.1353/lit.0.0129
For additional information about this article
Access provided by University of Leeds (4 Nov 2013 11:50 GMT)
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/lit/summary/v037/37.3.romesburg.html
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/lit/summary/v037/37.3.romesburg.htmlhttp://muse.jhu.edu/journals/lit/summary/v037/37.3.romesburg.html -
8/14/2019 The Fractal Nature of Gary Snyder's Mountains and Rivers Without End Rod Romesburg.pdf
2/26
T
he Great Basin is a roughly heart-shaped
expanse that begins as far north as
Oregon and runs as far south as Mexico,nestled between the Sierra Nevada and
Rocky Mountains. In the northwest section
of the Great Basin, roughly northwest
Nevada, lies the Black Rock Desert. 60,000
years ago 500 feet of water covered this land;
then the climate warmed and the waters
evaporated, leaving behind fine clay silt over
a mile deep in spots. Black Rock Desertlooks like a tipsy Y, at its peak 27 miles long
and 12 miles wide: a playa surrounded by
desert mountains. Elevations change only five
feet over its length, making it one of the flat-
test places anywhere.1
The small town of Gerlach perches on
the edge of the Black Rock Desert. A few
miles outside Gerlach a street sign readsGuru Rd. Legend has it DeWayne
DoobyWilliams was walking his dog along
this road and got inspired by nearby petro-
The Fractal Nature of Gary SnydersMountains and Rivers Without End
Rod Romesburg
Rod Romesburg teaches as a lec-
turer at Rollins College inWinter Park, FL. He has pub-
lished articles on Ernest
Hemingway, Ed Abbey, and
Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
-
8/14/2019 The Fractal Nature of Gary Snyder's Mountains and Rivers Without End Rod Romesburg.pdf
3/26
glyphs to leave his own mark. He carved a quotation and his name into a
black rock and set it upright for passers-by to see. Over time, he added more
engraved rocks, his work becoming a natural, witty version of the old
Burma-Shave signs lining country roads. One sequence of rocks, each sitting
in a circle of black gravel bordered by white stones, reads,The wonder road/ A story with no beginning and no end / Destination unknown. People
began calling it Dooby Lane and Guru Road, and eventually the town put
up a street sign to mark the outsider art. Gary Snyder happened upon it in
1988 and recorded what he saw. As he wrote later in a book celebrating
Williamss work,It was my luck to get to be his scribe (1996a).
If you go down on your stomach, body to the ground, nose to the rock,
each piece looks like a miniature version of the mountains standing like sen-
tinels over the Black Rock Desert.The jags of the stone resemble the curvesof the earth. InThe Practice of theWild, Gary Snyder writes,A place on earth
is a mosaic within larger mosaicsthe land is all small places, all precise tiny
realms replicating larger and smaller patterns (1990, 27). Doobys art makes
explicit this mosaic, merging into the landscape, so that the art becomes the
land and the land itself becomes art. Perhaps the most extensive piece, a stone
hut called the Imagination Station, has six windows made from old televi-
sion sets. Look into the screens and you see the form and emptiness of the
Great Basin wasteland stretching into the sky.In his notes ending Mountains and Rivers Without End,Snyder notes the
form and emptiness of the Great Basin taught him how to end his project,
begun forty years earlier. Readers of Jack Kerouacs Dharma Bums might
recall the character Japhy Ryder, based on Snyder, explaining his plan to
compose a long poem, and to
just write it on and on on a scroll and unfold on and on with new surprises
and always what went before forgotten, see, like a river, or like one of them
real long Chinese silk paintings that show two little men hiking in an end-
less landscape of gnarled old trees and mountains so high they merge with
the fog in the upper silk void. Ill spend three thousand years writing it, itll
be packed full of information on soil conservation, the Tennessee Valley
Authority, astronomy, geology, Hsuan Tsungs travels, Chinese painting the-
ory, reforestation, Oceanic ecology, and food chains (Kerouac 1958, 157)
Snyder did write on and on, publishing many other works, but always
keeping MRwhispering through his mind. In 1975, he told Bob Steuding
the work would be completed in two to three years (Steuding 1976, 93), and
through interviews done over the following twenty years Snyder continual-ly assures that MR is coming. Finally, in 1996, Gary Snyder completed his
epic poem, the work he intends as his masterpiece.
2 College Literature 37.3[Summer 2010]
-
8/14/2019 The Fractal Nature of Gary Snyder's Mountains and Rivers Without End Rod Romesburg.pdf
4/26
But what makes a masterpiece? One factor is complexity. Harriet
Hawkins suggests complex works of art mirror complex, self-similar forms of
nature, such that there are interactive effects within interactive effects, and
the whole is larger than the sum of its parts (1995, 22).This art intrigues us
because we continually uncover new elements with each encounter.Apparently orderly elements sit poised, ready to spring on us with unex-
pected uncertainty; fragments work with each other to form patterns at mul-
tiple levels. Complex art incorporates and evokes the complexities we rec-
ognize in nature, and even suggests if the obvious chaotic components in
art, in nature, and possibly in human psychology are themselves self-similar,
it could be called an entirely new way to see the mimetic (self-similar) rela-
tionship between all three (86). Such work, says Hawkins, reflects the com-
plex natural patterns we now call fractal.A fractal is a graph of chaotic behavior, a mapping of the hop-and-skip
movements of dynamic nonlinear systems. The fractal allows us to visually
observe the interactions of order and chaos, the Butterfly Effect played out
before our eyes. Like a lot of the science associated with chaos theory, as soon
as scientists learnedhowto see fractals, they found them everywhere.With the
zeal of the converted, Michael Barnsley writes,Fractal geometry will make
you see everything differently.You risk the loss of your childhood vision of
clouds, forests, galaxies, leaves, feathers, flowers, rocks, mountains, torrents ofwater, carpets, bricks, and much else besides. Never again will your interpre-
tation of these things be quite the same (1988, 1).
By combining Hawkinss aesthetic analysis and Barnsleys real-world
identification of fractal patterns, I argue applying fractal analysis to Gary
SnydersMRhelps us not merely understand the works complexity, but also
how Snyder evokes the fractal nature of nature. Others have touched upon
this quality ofMR (particularly Anthony Hunt), but I intend to focus pri-
marily on how Snyder uses one imagethe spiralas a fractal device to spin
self-similarity at all scales of his text. Even prior to his knowledge of chaos
theory, Snyder visualized MR as a scaling work, explaining to James Kraus
how it is a real biosphere poem. . . . [that] rises to leap from the local to the
planetary level and back again (Kraus 1986, 181-2). By the time he com-
pletes his masterpiece in 1996, Snyder knows something of chaos theory and
consciously builds MRaround a fractal structure that evokes his beliefs and
vision of nature.
FractalsTraditional, or Euclidean geometry, sufficiently describes many of the
shapes around usthe elliptical orbits of planets, the straight lines and
smooth curves supporting the frames of our homes. But as Benoit
3Rod Romesburg
-
8/14/2019 The Fractal Nature of Gary Snyder's Mountains and Rivers Without End Rod Romesburg.pdf
5/26
Mandelbrot notes, in nature these shapes do not always suffice: Clouds are
not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is
not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line (1977, 1).To more
accurately evoke the tangled, bumpy shapes of nature, Mandelbrot created
fractal geometry. Blending order and chaos, fractal geometry refines ourunderstanding of how nature operates, giving us a visual example of chaos
theory at work. Mandelbrot created the term fractal from the Latin adjective
fractus, meaning broken, because it connoted the idea of a fracture (like a
bifurcation point) and also described the fractional dimension (between the
integer first, second, or third dimensions) of the fractal (Gleick 1987, 98).
A fractal is an object that possesses the quality of self-similarity across
scale.2 In simpler terms, a fractal has recognizable features at different levels
of magnification, so that the object magnified ten times will bear a similari-ty to the original view. One popular example is a Russian doll. Each version
contained inside the previous is smaller than its container, but looks exactly
the same (Schroeder 1991). But fractals do not have to be self-replicating
only self-similar. Paul Addison provides an excellent model to help our
understanding. Picture a person. If we zoom in on the arm, that object looks
very different than the original image of the body. Zoom even further, on
the tip of one finger, and the close up view of the fingernail has a shape and
quality that bears no similarity to the previous two. Now imagine a coastline.From space, it looks jagged and twisting. Move in closer, and while the shape
has changed, we still see the same jagged and twisting qualities, echoing the
original view. Even under intense examination, belly to the earth, the line
marking the transition from land to sea follows the twists and jags of the indi-
vidual stones (Addison 1997, 2).A coastline is fractal because it is self-similar
at each degree of magnification.
Mandelbrot found by iterating even simple equations, like Z + C, where
C is a complex number and Z the result of the previous computation, an
amazingly complex shape would emerge as he graphed the resulting
Mandelbrot set, referred to as the most complex object in mathematics
(qtd. in Briggs and Peat 1989, 96).Visualized graphs like this are what most
people commonly associate as fractalthe gorgeous pictorials that make it
onto magazine covers or t-shirts.They usually follow a sequence, beginning
with a heart- or bug-shaped image. One section gets magnified, showing rip-
pling swirls branching into oblivion, with the bug-shapes lining the edges of
the swirls. The deeper we go into such graphs, the higher we increase the
magnification, the more levels of self-similarity we uncover, always withshapes arising that resemble figures viewed much earlier. It becomes easy to
forget that this astonishing complexity arises from the repeated iteration of a
simple equation.
4 College Literature 37.3[Summer 2010]
-
8/14/2019 The Fractal Nature of Gary Snyder's Mountains and Rivers Without End Rod Romesburg.pdf
6/26
Once you look for fractal patterns, you see them everywhere.
Mandelbrot identified the coastline as fractal, but others have noted that
mountains, clouds, and broccoli share the same qualities. Just as our bodies
need a chaotic heartbeat and brain pattern to maintain health, fractal design
also seems to be necessary in the development of the body. Our lungs, nerv-ous system, and circulatory system all have fractal geometry, with large
branches becoming smaller branches, becoming smaller branches, and so on,
yet with each level self-similar to those above (Briggs and Peat 1989, 95).
Michael Batty and Paul Longley have noted that while planners and archi-
tects have tried to impose smooth order, the regulated grid of streets, on the
chaotic growth of cities, what has seemed chaotic (random) actually bears a
fractal order (1994). Not surprisingly, since many have noted the marks of
chaos in financial markets, analysts like Dimitris Chofras have suggested frac-tals can be important tools in market modeling (1994, 117). Kenneth Hs has
even discovered fractal qualities of self-similarity across scales in the music of
Bach and Mozart (1993).Their forms embody chaos and order, and perhaps
it is this complexity that compels us. Structured messiness appeals, as Richard
Voss and James Wyatt suggest, because most of our evolutionary history was
spent in a natural world where fractal shapes far outnumbered the Euclidean
geometry that dominates our cities (Voss and Wyatt 1993, 181). In this argu-
ment, the fractal awakens us to a vision of nature that culture has striven toovercome. Fractal art conveys to us a sense of the patterns of nature and the
intermingling of chaos and order.
Fractals and Literature
Finding fractals in nature is so simple people often wonder how we man-
aged to describe as much as we did before fractal geometry.The translation
from natural fractals to the computer screen was a smooth transition, as the
iteration of simple equations spun out fantastical and appealing scenes. Other
visual media have been a favored searching ground for evidence of fractals in
artespecially painting. John Briggs invented the term reflectaphor to
describe a form or shape that recurs at various scales in a painting, like a base
unit we can search for at all scales. Briggs feels the recurrence of reflectaphors
provides the painting with a sense of unity, diversity, and wholeness as the
scene comes together in the viewers mind (1992, 173). The repetition of
similar forms placates us with regularity, but the forms are only similarnot
exactand those differences instill the tensions of the unexpected. Some
new aspect of the work continually surprises the viewer even as she connectsthe new with the old as part of a larger pattern.
Fractal scaling in literature may not be as immediately apparent. Unlike
a mountain scene or a painting, a work of literature is more difficult to hold
5Rod Romesburg
-
8/14/2019 The Fractal Nature of Gary Snyder's Mountains and Rivers Without End Rod Romesburg.pdf
7/26
in the mind. We can dissect the text into smaller components, and, indeed,
Briggs says poetic devices that depend on establishing an unresolvable ten-
sion of similarity and difference, such as irony, metaphor, simile, pun, para-
dox, synecdoche are reflectaphors (Briggs and Peat 1989, 196). But unless
the author magnifies this identifiable tension through larger scales through-out the work, such components would not in themselves qualify as fractal.
Alice Fulton provides direction for our literary needs. Fulton wants to
abandon the term free verse and designate irregular-form poetry fractal
verse. She decrees in fractal verse:
Any line when examined closely (or magnified) will reveal itself to be as
richly detailed as was the larger poem from which it was taken
The poem will contain an infinite regression of details, a nesting of pattern
within pattern (an endless imbedding of the shape unto itself, recallingTennysons idea of the inner infinity)
Digression, interruption, fragmentation, and lack of continuity will be
regarded as formal functions rather than lapses into formlessness
All directions of motion and rhythm will be equally probable (isotropy)
The past positions of motion, or the preceding metrical pattern, will not
necessarily affect the poems future evolution (independence). (Fulton
1990, 192)
Fulton believes that much contemporary poetry has at least some of these
qualities. Others find similar traits in older poets. For example, Lucy Pollard-
Gott reveals words or sounds in the poetry of Wallace Stevens that repeat in
patterns similar to common fractal dimensions. She concludes, like Briggs,
that a fractal structure helps explain the appeal of the authors poetry (1986).
More significantly for this study, Hugh Kenner sees fractal scaling at work in
Ezra PoundsCantos. Pound had a tremendous influence on Snyder, so find-
ing a fractal pattern at work in one should encourage us to look for similar
traits in the other (1988).As these examples demonstrate, poetry seems the most likely literary
genre to locate fractal structure because of its more-visual nature and its
extremely self-conscious design. Perhaps even more ideal, the book-length
long poems fractured form, allowing a scale and variety of form impossible
in shorter work, especially reverberates with fractal possibilities. But I find
Fultons identifiers impossibly ambitious, demanding every line be richly
detailed and that every poem must bear infinite regression when even
nature itself cannot display such qualities. Narrowing my explanation of frac-tal geometry, I find five main characteristics:
Self-similarity across scale
Blending of order and chaos
6 College Literature 37.3[Summer 2010]
-
8/14/2019 The Fractal Nature of Gary Snyder's Mountains and Rivers Without End Rod Romesburg.pdf
8/26
Complexity arising from simple origins
An effort to structurally echo the patterns of nature
Fragmentation revealed as wholeness
To qualify as fractal, a work will incorporate these elements into its structure.A fractal text will have a high degree of complexity, but identifying the
underlying structure will help simplify our understanding of the work.This
should in no way be interpreted as a reduction of the text, or the creative
process, to a few simple rules. Ideally, my analysis will have an effect equiva-
lent to that of Briggs and Peat when they discover the simple equation that
creates a complex fractal: Here the simple iteration in effect liberates the
complexity hidden within it, giving access to creative potential.The equation
isnt the plot of a shape as it is in Euclid. Rather, the equation provides thestarting point for evolvinga shape that emerges out of the equations feed-
back (1989, 104). Revealing a poems fractal basis reveals its evolving com-
plexity and connects the work with natural processes.
Applied specifically toMR, uncovering a fractal structure within the text
will help to clarify the works complexity. Structurally,MRmay be an ideal
form for searching for fractals in literature. Prose works can be broken into
chapters, chapters broken into sections and sections into paragraphs, but
those blocks of text, those black lines marching across the white page with
uniform regularity, fail to stick in the mind. But poetry, with its varieties ofform and distinctive use of space, provides a natural landscape for fractal
exploration at many levels.At its best, MRhas several specific scales of mag-
nification. First, there is the text as a whole, which is then broken up into
four sections. Each section consists of several individual poems, with their
own divisions into stanzas, lines, imagery within lines, and even sounds.This
cursory glance gives us six levels to look for self-similarity, wholeness emerg-
ing from fragmentation, order and chaos, and other traits of fractal geometry.
One way Snyder himself says he sought to structure MRis through thedramatic strategies of [Japanese] N theater (1996b, 137).The main struc-
turing device of N, what Monica Bethe and Karen Brazell term the basic
aesthetic principle underlying the N (Bethe and Brazell 1978, 6), is theJo-
Ha-Kyupattern, a pattern that the chief artist of N drama, Zeami Motokiyo,
found frequently occurring in nature (1974, 191). On the level of the entire
play, the Jo is an introduction; serene and somewhat slow.The Ha is marked
by agitated development. Finally, the Kyu brings the play to a fast close.The
structure provides an introduction, building tensions, and then a swift finish.Like a fractal, N structure is iterative. Unlike the traditional Western
model of dramatic structure, with a linear progression from complication to
climax, N feeds back on itselfthe Kyu component carries a reflection of
7Rod Romesburg
-
8/14/2019 The Fractal Nature of Gary Snyder's Mountains and Rivers Without End Rod Romesburg.pdf
9/26
all that has come previously. It does not, however, merely repeat the preced-
ing action, but presents previous action in an accelerated but recognizable
way.The audience focuses on not merely the quantitative repetition, but the
qualitative analysis of how the actions are repeated.Also like a fractal, we find
the same structuring device at all levels of N. Ideally, each component ofthe playmusic, chants, dance, stanzas, entire playcorrespond to the Jo-
Ha-Kyupattern (Bethe and Brazell 1978, 6). Each scene follows Jo-Ha-Kyu,
as do the segments of the scene (7).Actors sing each line to correspond with
the pattern, so that it begins powerfully, quickens, and then slows, drawing
out the last syllable (50). In each dance, every move echoesJo-Ha-Kyu(79).
The pattern is an ideal, and the play and its pieces do not always exactly cor-
respond with it, but the repeated embedding of pattern within pattern cre-
ates great complexity emerging from humble origins. Similar to the fractal,the deeper we magnify the N play and its components, the more we find
self-similarity.
As a graduate student at University of California, Davis, I had the great
good fortune to be in a seminar taught by Gary Snyder.We studied the long
poem, and the second half of the course focused on Snyders own soon-to-
be-published manuscript. In one class, Snyder explained howMRfollows the
Jo-Ha-Kyupattern of N drama, with the four sections dividing, respective-
ly, into a Jo, Ha, Ha, Kyu pattern, and then each section further envisionedaccording to the same structure. In his amazing and comprehensive tome on
MR, Anthony Hunt details how he was a guest at this very class period and
touches upon theJo-Ha-Kyupatterns influence at all levels of the text. Hunt
focuses, in particular, upon the poem The Mountain Spirit, which Snyder
built around the N play Yamamba. Hunt writes,While all ofMRmay be
seen as a cosmic No play, this section serves, fractally, as a mirror of the
dynamics of the larger poem (2004, 246). Hunt does not detail as specifi-
cally how the N structure contributes to the other levels ofMR, but rather
than rehash the excellent work he does on The Mountain Spirit, I will
instead pick a different and thematically more significant target for self-sim-
ilaritythe spiralto explore how Snyder gives MRits fractal nature.
Spirals in Mountains and Rivers Without End
In The Real Work, Gary Snyder tells an interviewer that he sees a poem
as a whorl, or knot, in the grain of existence.The poem provides a point of
turbulence, an intensification of the flow at a certain point that creates a tur-
bulence of its own which then as now sends out an energy of its own, butthen the flow continues again (1980, 44). Tom Lavazzi develops Snyders
metaphor, showing how Snyder uses the spiral image as a verbal, object, and
structural device in some of his early poetry. Lavazzi concludes that the spi-
8 College Literature 37.3[Summer 2010]
-
8/14/2019 The Fractal Nature of Gary Snyder's Mountains and Rivers Without End Rod Romesburg.pdf
10/26
ral eclipses symbolism; it works as a reenactment of unity,not imitations
of the things presented, but linguistic interpretations of and interpretations
with them (1989, 41). In this section, I will push even further the signifi-
cance of the spiral image. In MR, the spiral works as a reflectaphor that
reveals fractal qualities, behaving like an eddy in a riverspirals within spi-rals within spirals.
Importantly, MRopens with a structuring device that immediately intro-
duces the concept of the spiral. In Endless Streams and Mountains, the first
poem in the book, Snyder describes a handscroll depicting a scene from thir-
teenth-century Chinese life. He first saw it in the 1970s, although as Carole
Tonkinson says, Snyder had responded to East Asian landscape paintings since
encountering them as a boy in Washington state.These paintings, more than
other types, seemed to best evoke the mountains he loved (1995, 171). In abrief prose note to the poem, Snyder writes,The scroll unrolls to the left, a
section at a time, as you let the right side roll back in. Place by place unfurls
(1996b, 9).The poem, similarly, reads as we would view the scroll, describing
portions that follow a trail that spans the scene.As the scene ends,the scroll
continues on with seals and poems. It tells a further tale (7). Chinese paint-
ing has a tradition of adding colophons, a running commentary on the paint-
ing: the ideas it inspires, the places it was viewed, even commentary on ear-
lier comments. Snyder lists several of these colophons, then describes his ownexperience of viewing the scroll at the Cleveland Art Museum. Finally,
Snyder adds his own colophon, ending the poem.
The rest ofMRcan be read as both the scenes of the scroll passing before
us as we unfurl the text and as Snyders own colophon, his own commentary
on what he has seen. Additionally, however, because Snyder introduces MR
with the scroll analogy (which rolled-up forms a spiral) he immediately
invites us to look for spirals as a self-similar fractal image at all scales of the
work. If we imagine the texts structure as a series of concentric circles, so
that the first poem of Section One and the last poem of Section Four sit on
polar ends of the outermost circle, the second poem of Section One and the
second-to-last poem of Section Four in the next circle, etc., we find frequent
pairings between poems at similar spiral levels. For example, the first poem,
Endless Streams and Mountains, ends with,
grind the ink, wet the brush, unroll the
broad white space:
lead out and tip
the moist black line
9Rod Romesburg
-
8/14/2019 The Fractal Nature of Gary Snyder's Mountains and Rivers Without End Rod Romesburg.pdf
11/26
Walking on walking,
under foot earth turns.
Streams and mountains never stay the same.(Snyder 1996b, 9)The books final poem, Finding a Space in the Heart, concludes with an
inverted version of the lines,
Walking on walking,
under foot earth turns.
Streams and mountains never stay the same.
The space goes on.
But the wet black brush
tip drawn to a point,
lifts away. (Snyder 1996b, 152)
Obviously, this provides a sense of opening and closure to the workbrush/
space/ Walking becomes Walking/ space/ brush. Importantly, this pairing
issimilar, but not thesamea pattern Snyder repeats throughout, at multiplelevels.This technique not only echoes the self-similar quality of fractals, but
also prevents a book-ending effect in which there is a clear start and stop.
Rather than a linear quality, the self-similarity of the pairings allows Snyder
to structurally represent a spiral that neither begins nor ends.
Other examples abound at the text level.The second poem of Section
One, the short poem Old Bones, begins with hunting:Out there walking
round, looking out for food (Snyder 1996b,10).The narrator is barely get-
ting by, finding No food out there on dusty slopes of scree. Dim hope
appears at the end of the poem:
Out there somewhere
a shrine for the old ones,
the dust of the old bones,
Old songs and tales.
What we atewho ate what
How we all prevailed. (Snyder 1996b, 10)
The lines suggest that satisfaction of hunger comes only with knowledge of
place: the history tying a people to the land. Only the old songs and tales
can help us to prevail and overcome the hunger. But Old Bones contains
10 College Literature 37.3[Summer 2010]
-
8/14/2019 The Fractal Nature of Gary Snyder's Mountains and Rivers Without End Rod Romesburg.pdf
12/26
little sense of achieving satisfaction: the knowledge is Out there some-
where, but the narrator has not located it.
On the opposing end of the spiral, the second-to-last poem of Section
Four, orbits another short poem, Earth Verse. The entire poem is but six
lines:
Wide enough to keep you looking
Open enough to keep you moving
Dry enough to keep you honest
Prickly enough to make you tough
Green enough to go on living
Old enough to give you dreams (Snyder 1996b, 148)
This poem also begins with a theme of hunting:Wide enough to keep you
looking / Open enough to keep you moving. The tone is very different,
however, than in Old Bones.The sense of desperation has evaporated. Here,
hunting is an opportunity, a beneficial pushing, like a parent encouraging a
child toward an action of independence.The repetition of enough conveys
a sense of knowledge being imparted, that the narrator has found an end to
hunting and now reveals that what we need lies before uscaptured nicely
in the final lines of each poem, with humans who must prevail in the land
of Old Bones instead having the land give you dreams in Earth Verse(emphasis added).The land is not a threat in this poem, but our hope.
A last example, from the second and third sections, examines collisions
of nature and civilization. In the sixth poem of Section Two, Covers the
Ground, nature is buried under human cement culverts . . . mobile homes
. . . yards of tractors and other material (Snyder 1996b,65). Appropriate for
this darker section, the sense of loss emanates from the poems epigraph,
quoting John Muir: When California was wild, it was one sweet bee-gar-
den (65). Wild, here, is relegated to the past-tense. Contrastingly, on theopposite end of the spiral lies Walking the New York Bedrock, the sixth-
from-the-end poem of Section Three. Snyder opens this poem describing a
nature scene of trees, rocks, a squirrel, before revealing he is in a park in New
York Citya sequence that gives nature precedence over civilization.
Rambling the city streets, Snyder envisions the products of civilization not as
impositions upon nature but as extensions of nature, or mere symbols of the
real world.Thus, the city becomes a sea anemone / wide and waving in
the Sea of Economy (97), helicopters are bees, and skyscrapers are layered
stratigraphy cliffs (101). Snyder again uses the ordering of the poems to pro-
vide a mirrored-reaction on the orbit of his scrolling tome, this time to react
to civilization and nature, initially pessimistically and then increasingly open
to merging of the two worlds.
11Rod Romesburg
-
8/14/2019 The Fractal Nature of Gary Snyder's Mountains and Rivers Without End Rod Romesburg.pdf
13/26
At the section level, we see similar spiral pairings. In Section Three,
Snyder opens with The Circumambulation of Mt. Tamalpais, then closes
the section with Macaques in the Sky. Both poems involve the narrator
hiking and detailing observations. However, the first is more worldly and the
second more spiritual. In Circumambulation, Snyder, Philip Whalen, andAllen Ginsberg perform a walking meditation around the Bay Mountain
near San Francisco. The poem becomes a how-to guide, as Snyder details
each stop on the journey, along with the chants recited at each place. The
heavy emphasis on physical surroundings, along with the prose-emphasis in
which Snyder writes, grounds the poem. Contrastingly, while Snyder begins
Macaques in the Sky with a prose section describing where and with
whom he is walking the trail, the poem quickly breaks into more typical
poetic style. He describes several macaque monkeys nestled in the canopyabove, focusing last on a macaque mother who leaps into the air, baby cling-
ing to her belly. Unlike in the grounded Circumambulation, the mother
monkey becomes an explicit symbol:
mother of the heavens,
crossing realm to realm
full of stars
as we hang on beneath with all we have (Snyder 1996b, 115)
As before, Snyder uses the spiral to pair self-similar themes that also evoke
a sense of expansion, growth or progress in the differences between the first
and the second. Such concentric examples occur throughout Section
Three, but for brevitys sake, Ill merely list a couple without going into
detail: The Canyon Wren and The Bear Mother (creatures speak to
Snyder, first to purify then to share) (Snyder 1996b,91, 113); Walking
the New York Bedrock Alive in the Sea of Information and Haida Gwai
North Coast (ecological cycles: the first energy and information, the sec-
ond, food) (97, 103).
Magnifying to the poem level, staying within Section Three, we find the
spiral frequently as a specific image. Circumambulation presents a spiral
around Mt.Tamalpais, with Snyders trio circling and climbing in the first
line, and then, when theyve completed the circuit,standing in our little cir-
cle to complete their ritual (Snyder 1996b, 85, 89).The spiraled horns of the
dibe, or Dall sheep, appear twice in this section: once in An Offering for
Tr, where Wild sheep whose horns and skulls / make a woven roof-top
shrine (107); and more prominently in Arctic Midnight Twilight. In thispoem, Snyder calls attention to the dibes spiral horn and watches the
sheep run in circles (92, 93). More importantly, he also portrays thedibeas
creatures comfortable with the merging of sky-sea-earth cycles (94) and
12 College Literature 37.3[Summer 2010]
-
8/14/2019 The Fractal Nature of Gary Snyder's Mountains and Rivers Without End Rod Romesburg.pdf
14/26
represents cloud movements through the image of their horns:floods of ris-
ing, falling, / warmer, cooler, air-mass swirls / like the curls / of Dall Sheep
horns (94). In both poems, the spiral horns of the dibe serve as a reflec-
taphorwe see it at both scales, earthly and aerial, merging the ground with
the heavens in one larger spiral.Narrowing our search to Arctic Midnight Twilight, again we find the
spiral structure of the text and section levels. Snyder begins the poem with
Dibe / Song, and closes with the self-similar dibe/ a mountain sheep
(Snyder 1996b, 92, 95). The poem also opens and closes with the narrator
describing the physical location and the actions of the sheep, while the mid-
dle section of the poem broadens to the larger implications of the sheeps sig-
nificance as models for the human quest for Enlightenment.Throughout the
poem, Snyder emphasizes spirals/cyclesnot merely those mentioned abovebut also analogizing the sheep in the first section to constellations and
observing that they band together by the slow / rotation of their Order
(92). Bookending this, near the poems end, Snyder follows the sheep trail
until he loses them in a glaciers snow. He pauses to Rest awhile among the
rocks / arise to descend to unbuild it again (95), again providing a spiral
both in imagery and structure.The last line is particularly intriguing, provid-
ing within the single line two spirals arise to descend and to unbuild it
again (with the again signifying a continual process), that Snyder separateswith carefully placed empty space.
A final, looser, sound spiral comes with the frequent alliterative pairing
Snyder places throughout this (and most) of his poems. Snyder uses allitera-
tion heavily throughout his work, including what I call alliterative pairing
consecutive words repeating sounds, such as Pellet piles or sun swings
(Snyder 1996b,92, 93). In Arctic Midnight alone, Snyder uses twelve such
pairings within single lines of the poem and four others linking the end of
one line to the next.We could read this as a fractal pairing of sounds in a self-
similar way, with the same sound repeating, but not the entire word repeat-
ed. Sprinkled through the poem, they provide a sense of the whorls within
whorls, calling attention to themselves in a showier fashion than typical allit-
eration, but in a manner that echoes the very structure of the multiple spi-
ral levels of the work.A particularly rich example comes near the beginning
of the poem:
A broad bench, slate surfacing
six sheep break out of the gorge
skyline brisk trot scamper (Snyder 1996b, 92)
In this small section, the repetition ofb and s sounds binds the section into
an encapsulation of the scene that is nearly a haiku (7-7-6 syllables per line
rather than haikus proper 5-7-5).The voiced plosive b sounds slow the aural
13Rod Romesburg
-
8/14/2019 The Fractal Nature of Gary Snyder's Mountains and Rivers Without End Rod Romesburg.pdf
15/26
pacing, while the silibant s sounds accelerate the reading. In this section,
Snyder uses the alliterative pairings of the first line to introduce the main
sounds of the whole section. However, he also uses the speed of the two
sounds to encapsulate a larger idea. Both broad bench and slate surfacing
describe the mountainside upon which the sheep will scamper, but the bsounds slow nature provides a sense of stability to the mountain while the
quicker s sound, along with the verb surfacing applied to the seemingly
rigid slate, evokes a sense of motion.When we come to the final line, we
naturally read it as the sheep upon the skyline, performing their brisk trot
scamper.With skyline being the main noun of the line, though, it could
be the mountain itself scampering.
Which brings me to the dominant spiral of the entire work: mountains
and rivers. First, however, I need to establish a template of what mountainsand rivers means for Snyder. Readers of Annie Dillards Pilgrim at Tinker
Creek know the mountains-and-rivers image is also an important theme in
her book:I look to the mountains, and the mountains still slumber, blue and
mute and rapt. I say, it gathers; the world abides. But I look to the creek, and
I say: it scatters, it comes and goes (1990, 195). Dillard voices traditional
Western associations with the imagery of mountains and waters: mountains
are solid, waters flow.That which has stability is rock solid, but still waters
run deep demonstrates that even the appearance of stillness in water ismerely deception. Earth is continuous, rivers are in flux. The conceit
inevitably establishes duality and grants privilege to the orderly earth or the
chaotic waters.
Snyder approaches the image from a different perspective. His essay
Blue Mountains Constantly Walking explains his understanding of moun-
tains and waters. Heavily influenced by Chinese philosopher Dgen Kigens
Mountain and Waters Sutra, Snyder begins from the assumption that
Mountains and Waters are a dyad that together make wholeness possible
(1990, 101). Patrick Murphy tells us the Chinese characters for mountains
and waters together form the compound for landscape (1992, 66). Snyder
himself writes,Mountains and Waters is a way to refer to the totality of the
process of nature (1996b, 102).3 The components become the wholetwo
seemingly opposing forces twist and join, reverberating across broad scales,
embodying patterns we recognize. Such a position would not necessarily
contradict Western assumptions. After all, wholeness in the Western uni-
verse requires both stability and flow. But Buddhism proclaims all is samsara,
or cyclic existence.All things flow through a process of continual change, andthose who see earth as stable glimpse but a small portion of the whole
(Corless 1989, xix).4 Snyder says the cyclic Chinese sense of the land has
always avoided duality, instead incorporating a dialectic of rock and water,
14 College Literature 37.3[Summer 2010]
-
8/14/2019 The Fractal Nature of Gary Snyder's Mountains and Rivers Without End Rod Romesburg.pdf
16/26
of downward flow and rocky uplift, and of the dynamism and slow flowing
of earth-forms (1990, 102).
Faced with this argument,Westerners would quickly fall back, admitting
our scientists have long known that earth flows beneath us. Continents shift,
heaving mountains skyward, driving land into the sea. But this happens onsuch a lengthy geologic time scale that we do not perceive land flowingto
us, all appears mostly stable. But to create this fiction is to imagine human
time-scale is the time-scalethe accurate way to glimpse reality. Snyder cites
Dgens example that fish see water as a palace.They would be astonished if
informed their palace flows, as we are when reminded how mountains flow
(1990, 108-09). Buddhism recognizes we necessarily view reality though our
own filtered perception, but also always reminds us this is not reality.
Mountains flowing is just as real and of this moment as waters flowing.We could read the title Mountains and Rivers Without Endas a landscape
that stretches for eternity, but Snyder presents a more complex idea emerg-
ing from these simple words. In addition to presenting the scroll image in
the books first poem, Endless Streams and Mountains, Snyder also con-
siders the cyclical nature of mountains and rivers. One of the colophons he
quotes reads,The water holds up the mountains, / The mountains go down
in the water (1996b, 7). Later, he writes,mountains walking on the water,
/ water ripples every hill (8).The phrasing depicts a cycling between whatwe consider two oppositional forms: mountains and waters, solids and liq-
uids. We can depict the relationship between mountains and waters in each
instance as:
The first leads to the second, which cycles back to the first.Together, the two
form a whole, as the two ideograms together form the whole of landscape.
Additionally, Snyder reveals an impermanence of form, a fractal time scale in
which each element reflects the other at different
scales of time. Stability is an illusion as matter flows
continually from one frame to another.
Snyder refers to cycling and recycling between
mountains and rivers throughout MR. Sometimes he
will use those specific words, but often he employs
broader versions (the land and waters), smaller ver-
sions (hills and streams/creeks), or altered forms (boulders/rocks and
clouds/glaciers).This, of course, provides Snyder a broader set of tools with
which to build, but also mimics the fractal self-similarity across scales echoed
with the spiral, and that repetition gives the entire work a depth unforesee-able in just one poem. For example, Anthony Hunt explains how the dou-
ble-mirror image in Bubbs Creek Haircut represents the mind itself,
reflecting imagery back and forth, infinitely.We treat the images as real and
15Rod Romesburg
-
8/14/2019 The Fractal Nature of Gary Snyder's Mountains and Rivers Without End Rod Romesburg.pdf
17/26
whole instead of simply a flow we perceive as solid.The goal is to see reali-
ty without preconceptionsto dissolve the solidity of these illusions by
noting their place in a vast scheme of interrelated cause and effect and
achieve a state of mind only or mirror empty (1980, 165).5 In the poem,
Snyder uses the word reflections to link the mirrors with the reflections ofwaters, saying, the crazy web of wavelets makes sense / seen from high
above (1996b, 34). Similarly, the narrator imagines the barbers chair he sits
in as a boulder (The boulder in my minds eye is a chair), so that the chair
becomes a fractal/reflectaphor of mountains (34).Waters and mountains are
each associated with empty sky and empty sun respectively (34, 35). In
one of the last lines, then, when the chair turns and in the double mirror
waver / the old man cranks me down and cracks a chuckle, we find an
implanted idea of Emptiness, mountains, and rivers, despite the fact none areexplicitly mentioned. The crazy web of wavelets that have little meaning
on their own make sense if we look at these images through a fractal lens,
noting their self-similarity and recognizing them as reflectaphors. The sim-
plicity of the imagery encapsulates meaningful complexity that reverberates
through the poem and that we would not see if we did not have the per-
spective granted from the larger scope of the text.
Part of Snyders purpose may be to mimic the cyclical ideology of
Buddhism. Roger Corless says Buddhist cosmology has three realms: hell,heaven, and the intermediate states. We continuously die and are reborn in
different lives and different realms according to the karma of our previous
lives: if we lived a bad life, our next existence will be a torturous, painful life
in hell; if we lived a life doing good, we are reborn into heaven. But even
being in heaven is not ideal, because lives there last a very long time, and one
tends to get content with the easiness of existence, only to eventually die and
be reborn in some lower realm: over and over the wheel of existence turns,
never-ending. Enter the Buddhahe discovered how to break the cycle, to
escape from samsara and enternirvana, a blissful joining with the universe
outside of samsara. Only in human existence are conditions ideal to learn the
lessons necessary to escape samsara: our lives are short, but not too painful or
blissful, and our brains contain a lot of empty space we can fill with the
knowledge accompanying Enlightenment (Corless 1989, 5-6).
The most vital thing we can do in this life, then, is work to awaken our-
selves (and others) from our deceptions; to realize existence in samsara is suf-
fering; to relinquish desire, desirelessness, and indifference; and to reach
Enlightenment. From the structural level ofMR, outward to the cosmos ofBuddhism and inward to specific imagery, we consistently find representation
of cycles.Whorls within whorls, the spiral assumes a fractal quality, showing
up in different but recognizable ways. Bob Steuding says in the N play
16 College Literature 37.3[Summer 2010]
-
8/14/2019 The Fractal Nature of Gary Snyder's Mountains and Rivers Without End Rod Romesburg.pdf
18/26
Yamamba, which Snyder mimics in The Mountain Spirit, hills, meaning
mountains, represent life; and ones travels in these hills, in terms of the
Buddhist Wheel of Life, are the endless round of reincarnations (Steuding
1976, 95-96). Yamamba (the old mountain woman), circling through the
mountains, cannot break the cycle of samsara and her own ignorant attach-ment binding her to the cycles. Unlike with spiritual matters, the cycles
underlying nature are not the curse of samsara but the blessing of life. The
interpretation of the cycles changes from the spiritual to the earthly, but the
reflectaphor remains. By incorporating a fractal spiral structure into MR,
Snyder both parallels the necessary, healthy cyclical patterns that guide nature
on the material level and reminds us of our own ability to escape these cycles
on the spiritual level.
The Importance of Being Fractal
In his book A Place in Space (published a year before MR), musing on
contemporary nature writing, Snyder declares, At root the real question is
how we understand the concept of order, freedom, and chaos (1995, 168).
Understanding why the fractal model works well in analyzing MRnecessi-
tates uncovering Snyders own understanding of these concepts. Going back
toThe Real Work, a collection of interviews, Snyder refers many times to the
climax concept in ecology: that an ecosystem will evolve toward a certain cli-max state at which there is a high degree of diversity, maximizing the stabil-
ity of the system (1980). The theory implies a definite, continual order in
nature, a system of laws that consistently guide nature with an optimal plan.
Chaos can be read only as disturbance, a disruptive and harmful hiccup in
the order.6 Snyder continues to hover around this concept throughout his
writings, but we do find him altering his terminology as he becomes more
aware of shifts in science.
Looking at the concepts of wild and free in his earlier book The
Practice of theWild, Snyder writes,To be truly free one must take on the basic
conditions as they arepainful, impermanent, open, imperfectand then be
grateful for impermanence and the freedom it grants us. For in a fixed uni-
verse there would be no freedom (1990, 5).Wild he notes, is often incor-
rectly associated with unruliness, disorder, and violence (5). Our cultural
tradition assumes the State has created order in the sea of chaos; therefore,
that which is not the State, i.e., the wilderness, must be chaotic and disor-
derly. But Snyder insists,Nature is orderly.That which appears to be chaot-
ic in nature is only a more complex kind of order (92-93).There seems to be a contradiction, or at least tension, in Snyders think-
ing. He espouses impermanence, openness, and imperfectioncharacteris-
tics most often linked with disorderas qualities of freedom and the wild.
17Rod Romesburg
-
8/14/2019 The Fractal Nature of Gary Snyder's Mountains and Rivers Without End Rod Romesburg.pdf
19/26
But he also demands stability and orderliness in nature. Snyders difficulty is
his hesitancy to link chaos with wild.We see him trying to distance the
two terms when he says the wild is not unruliness, disorder, and violence,
terms traditionally associated with chaos. As Western culture has tradition-
ally used it, chaos is negative.To assign the term to the process of nature,then, would be antithetical to Snyder. In Snyders ideology, the wild is a base
value for the way nature works when all participants behave properly. Since
order is positive and chaos is negative, nature and the wild must be orderly.
Likewise, freedom is a positive quality, so although he implicitly associates it
with characteristics we might more readily acquaint with chaos, Snyder con-
sciously works to bind it with his more complex kind of order.
We see Snyder further struggling with his terminology when he mocks
the scientific and ideological lineage of Descartes, Newton, and Hobbes forbeing hysterical about chaos (1990, 19).These thinkers initiated and strat-
ified the mechanical view of the universe, in which all matter and life are
bound by titanium laws governing motion and possibility. Everything in their
universe is perfectly orderly, perfectly deterministic, and perfect in terms of
prescribable outcomes, if we can only garner enough information. Chaos and
order are dichotomiesthere can be only one or the other. Snyder wants to
distance himself from this worldview because it allows for no freedom, no
uncertainty. But because of cultural connotations of chaos and order, hecannot labelnature chaotic, though he will give nature many qualities asso-
ciated with chaos. At this point, Snyder is just as hysterical about chaos, in
name if not in belief.
However, by the time he asks the opening root question about how we
understand the concepts of order, freedom, and chaos, Snyder, like chaos
theory, for the most part has abandoned traditional associations of chaos.7
He writes,
I will argue that consciousness, mind, imagination, and language are funda-
mentally wild.Wild as in wild ecosystemsrichly interconnected, interde-
pendent and incredibly complex. Diverse, ancient, and full of information.
At root the real question is how we understand the concept of order, free-
dom, and chaos. Is art an imposition of order on chaotic nature, or is art (also
read language) a matter of discovering the grain of things, of uncovering
the measured chaos that structures the natural world? Observation, reflec-
tion, and practice show artistic process to be the latter. (Snyder 1995, 168)
The first expansion of the question asks if art is an imposition of order on
chaotic nature. This reading carries the same overbearing tones as theassumption that the State brings order to nature. In contrast, the second
expansion more gently looks to uncover the measured chaos that structures
the natural world. Snyder still speaks of underlying rules in nature, the same
18 College Literature 37.3[Summer 2010]
-
8/14/2019 The Fractal Nature of Gary Snyder's Mountains and Rivers Without End Rod Romesburg.pdf
20/26
more complex kind of order he found in The Practice of the Wild. But his
terminology has changed.This measured chaos is akin to the chaos of chaos
theory, with its blending of order and chaos, determinism and unpredictabil-
ity. He has a different, less dichotomized understanding of the concepts of
order, freedom, and chaos.Measured chaos can now have positive associa-tions and be freely linked with the wild.
In addition, the role of the artist is uncovering the measured chaos, or
discovering the grain of things. The artist does not impose order on a
chaotic world, as many conceive of it, but reveals the deterministic chaos of
nature through his/her art.8 InEarth House HoldSnyder writes,The prim-
itive worldview, far-out scientific knowledge and the poetic imagination are
related forces (Snyder 1969, 128). Rather than reinforcing battles of science
versus myth in a struggle for truth, Snyder finds similarities in both campssearch for knowledge. In Practice, he cites the second law of thermodynam-
ics, the inevitable slide of the universe towards entropy, as evidence that the
world will realign its cultures according to bioregions (1990, 43).9 In his
Points for a New Nature Poetics, Snyder advises artists to fear not science.
Gobeyondnature literacy into the emergent new territories in science: land-
scape ecology, conservation biology, charming chaos, complicated systems
theory (1995, 172). Most clearly, Snyder writes,
Some of us would hope to resume, reevaluate, re-create, and bring into linewith complex science that old view that holds the whole phenomenal world
to be our own being: multicentered, alive in its own manner, and effort-
lessly self-organizing in its own chaotic way. Elements of this view are found
in a wide range of ancient vernacular philosophies, and it turns up in a vari-
ety of more sophisticated but still tentative forms in recent thought. It offers
a third way, not caught up in the dualisms of body and mind, spirit and mat-
ter, or culture and nature. It is a noninstrumentalist view that extends intrin-
sic value to the nonhuman natural world. (Snyder 1995, 240-41)
Science, when done properly, tells us what we have long known. For Snyder,the evidence has always been therewe just had the wrong interpretations.
Science distanced itself from myth and held itself as a lamp, guiding the way
toward objective, unbiased Truth. But twentieth-century science has frac-
tured the idea of objectivity, and chaos theory questions dichotomies of order
and chaos.
Note that Snyder designates consciousness, mind, imagination,andlan-
guage as wild, tying them not just to measured chaos but also to wild
ecosystems. The processes of nature, the whirling mix of chaos and orderboth deterministic and unpredictable, become fractal patterns repeated at
levels of scale from the universe to the mind and tongue. For Snyder, identi-
ty, language, and nature are one force. In Practice, Snyder writes, when
19Rod Romesburg
-
8/14/2019 The Fractal Nature of Gary Snyder's Mountains and Rivers Without End Rod Romesburg.pdf
21/26
Occidental logos-oriented philosophers uncritically advance language as a
unique human gift which serves as the organizer of the chaotic universeit
is a delusion.The subtle and many-layered cosms of the universe have found
their own way into symbolic structure and have given us thousands of tawny
human-language grammars (1990, 76-77). Language evolved as we evolved,a connection between body, mind, and environment (17). Distinctions gener-
ated between identity, language, and nature, are made to distinguish ourselves
from nature, a process destroying both nature and ourselves.
Snyder clearly feels the origins and importance of language is vital. Many
times in A Place in Space he raises the issue, most clearly in his essay
Language Goes Two Ways:
Languages were not the intellectual inventions of archaic schoolteachers,
but are naturally evolved wild systems whose complexity eludes thedescriptive attempts of the rational mind.
Wild alludes to a process of self-organization that generates systems and
organisms, all of which are within the constraints ofand constitute com-
ponents oflarger systems that again are wild, such as major ecosystems or
the water cycle in the biosphere. Wildness can be said to be the essential
nature of nature. As reflected in consciousness, it can be seen as a kind of
open awarenessfull of imagination but also the source of alert survival
intelligence.The workings of the human mind at its very richest reflect thisself-organizing wildness. So language does not impose order on a chaotic
universe, but reflects its own wildness back. (Snyder 1995, 174-75)
For Snyder,wildness is the common constituent for all thingsthe simple
pattern that generates the complexity of the universe. The language he
employs in this passage, the systems that are within the constraints ofand
constitute components oflarger systems that again are wild, sounds much
like the fractal notion of whorls within whorls.The systems are all different,
yet share the self-similar component of wildness that Snyder has equated with
measured chaos. He repeats this again in the last sentence of the passage:
language does not impose order on a chaotic universe, but reflects its own
wildness back. Language is a system, just like the mind/consciousness (iden-
tity) and like the ecosystem (nature), so it is not orderly orchaotic, but both.
Ideally, then, art is wild, or bearing the same patterns that produce the
complexity of our surroundings and our interiors. Art and reality become
not a duality, but a whole. Returning to the fractal organization of N
drama, Zeami Motokiyo felt the structure of N mirrored nature:All forms
of creationgood and bad, large and small, sentient and insentienteachand every one possesses its own jo-ha-kyu. Even within the chirping of birds,
the cries of insects, each call has its own allotted pattern, which is jo-ha-kyu
(Omote 1974, 191).10 Completion of the sequence in a performance signals
20 College Literature 37.3[Summer 2010]
-
8/14/2019 The Fractal Nature of Gary Snyder's Mountains and Rivers Without End Rod Romesburg.pdf
22/26
a psychological event within the minds of the audience, bringing a
moment of recognition which the audience identifies as mimicking the
process of consciousness (Thornhill 1993, 73).The fractal patterning of N,
in Snyders terms its wildness, rings true because we recognize the repeti-
tion of patterns at several scales.We must also keep in mind Snyders goal to spread the Buddhas teach-
ings (1996b, 139). One component of reaching Buddhist Enlightenment is
recognizing the non-duality of the universe.We need a sense of non-duality
to accept the cyclical concept of mountains flowing into rivers flowing into
mountains, but that idea at least leaves matter as solid material merely shift-
ing forms.What to think, then, when the Heart of the Perfection of Great
Wisdom Sutra tells us,form is no other than emptiness, emptiness no other
than form; form is exactly emptiness, emptiness exactly form (from Snydersunpublished translation)? Sunyata pushes us beyond the cycles of the universe
and tells us the Whole, symbolized by mountains and rivers, is actually
Emptiness. Snyder prepares us for this by introducing MR with a quote in
which Dgen discusses the saying, A painted rice cake does not satisfy
hunger. Dgen posits,If you say the painting is not real, then the material
phenomenal world is not real, the Dharma is not real. He concludes,there
is no remedy for satisfying hunger other than a painted rice cake. Without
painted hunger you never become a true person (2).The painted rice cake(art), seems in apparent opposition to hunger (the real/nature). But Dgen
concludes that the two need each other and compliment each other. He
rejects the duality between art and nature, moving outside logic to explain
that what is not real is actually real.Without Emptiness, or painted hunger,
you never become a true person.
In his concluding remarks toMR, Snyder says,The form and emptiness
of the Great Basin showed me how to close the long poem begun 40 years
earlier (1996b, 158). The last poem in the book, Finding a Space in the
Heart, closes Snyders quest. In Finding, Snyder visits the Great Basin four
times over four decades, from the sixties to the nineties, the same time hes
been composing his work. In his third visit, Snyder describes a trip past the
Black Rock Desert where he
discovered a path
of carved stone inscriptions tucked into the sagebrush
Stomp out greed.
The best things in life are not things.words placed by an old desert sage. (Snyder 1996b, 150)
Its Snyders discovery of Dooby Lane, DeWayne Williamss outdoor art that
merges form and emptiness, art and landscape. Snyder learns from this sage,
21Rod Romesburg
-
8/14/2019 The Fractal Nature of Gary Snyder's Mountains and Rivers Without End Rod Romesburg.pdf
23/26
seeing how in this heart-shaped land, he finds all equal, far reaches, no
bounds. / Sound swallowed away, / no waters, no mountains (151). And so
Snyder reaches journeys end: the reflectaphor of mountains and waters is no
longer necessary as form and emptiness merge.The Great Basin becomes his
art, his heart, and his art becomes the Great Basin.When we look at MR through the template of the fractal, we seek a
means of organizing, or better yet, evoking the patterns of nature.The frac-
tal functions like a mandala, a tool of meditation that focuses the mind in a
step toward realizing Emptiness. In The Practice of the Wild, Snyder links
wild to the Tao, declaring each is Both empty and real at the same time
(1990, 10). Fractal structure shows us how Snyder incorporates the wild into
MR, so that the work, like the universe, is both empty and real.Working from
a fractal epistemology, looking at scales of myth, science, and poetics, Snyderfinds self-similar ideas of chaos and order, of structure and understanding. As
myth and science intertwine through his poetry, Snyder echoes fractal pat-
terns of nature and uncovers the grain of things: the empty and the real
and the wild.
Notes
1 Information about the Black Rock Desert can be found at http://www.
nv.blm.gov/Winnemucca/recreation/Black_Rock_Desert.htm2 My discussion of fractals is indebted to the lucid and accessible explanation of
Briggs and Peats Turbulent Mirror. Other good primers on fractals are Clifford
Pickovers The Pattern Book: Fractals, Art, and Nature(ed. Clifford A. Pickover. River
Edge, NJ: World Scientific, 1995) and Michael McGuires An Eye for Fractals: A
Graphic and Photographic Essay (Redwood City, CA: Addison-Wesley, 1991).3 Dorothy Nielsen writes,Snyders scientific/anthropological model of speak-
ing in the voice of nature assumes that the poet is not creating a subjective projection
ontononhuman nature but rather is repeating biological information that originates in
nature (Nielsen 1993, 696). I argue Snyders use of the fractal model strives for the
same goal.4 Unless otherwise indicated, my knowledge of Buddhism comes from Roger
Corless marvelous introduction,The Vision of Buddhism:The Space Under the Tree.5 In a nice bit of symmetry, James Gleick uses the double-mirror image in an
explanation of fractals:Self-similarity is symmetry across scale. It implies recursion,
pattern inside of pattern. . . . Self-similarity is an easily recognizable quality. Its images
are everywhere in the culture: in the infinitely deep reflection of a person standing
between two mirrors, or in the cartoon notion of a fish eating a smaller fish eating
a smaller fish (Gleick 1987, 103).6 In his essay, Is Nature Real? Snyder writes, Heraclitus, the Stoics, the
Buddhists, scientists, and your average alert older person all know that everything in
this world is ephemeral and unpredictable. Even the earlier ecologists who worked
with Clementsian succession theory knew this! Yet now a generation of resource
22 College Literature 37.3[Summer 2010]
-
8/14/2019 The Fractal Nature of Gary Snyder's Mountains and Rivers Without End Rod Romesburg.pdf
24/26
biologists, inspired by the thin milk of Daniel Botkins theorizing, are promoting
what they think is a new paradigm that relegates the concept of climax to the
dustheap of ideas. Surely none of the earlier scientific ecologists ever doubted that
disturbances come and go. It looks like this particular bit of bullying also comes just
in time to support the corporate clear-cutters and land-developers (Snyder 2002,196-197). But as Donald Worster (The Ecology of Order and Chaos. Environmental
History ReviewSpring/Summer, 1990: 1-18) and Michael Barbour (Barbour, Michael
G. Ecological Fragmentation in the Fifties. Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the
Human Place in Nature. ed William Cronon. NY:W.W. Norton & Co., 1995. pp. 233-
55) have shown, Clementsian ecology demands a strict, nearly Utopian progression
from empty land to climax state. Further, if we accept Clemenstian theory as fact,
chaos is necessarily viewed as the enemy.7 We know, because he cites it in a footnote to his poem The Dance in MR,
that Snyder has read at least some of James Gleicks Chaos.8 Bob Steuding says Snyder differs from poets of the first half of the twentieth-
century because, unlike figures such as T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens, Snyder does
not try to coordinate his poetics with modern science (Steuding 1976, 35-37). He
says Snyder strives to evoke a pre-existing, organic order (37) by liberating, not
creating, the ideas inherent in things themselves.While I agree that Snyders main
concern is speaking the voice of nature rather than imprinting his ego upon the
land, I think Snyder has always used science in an attempt to buttress his personal
philosophies.
9 Sometimes, as in this case, Snyders application of an aspect of science is a bitquestionable, but I am more interested in his attempt than his accuracy.The applica-
tion of scientific ideas to literature is always a tricky business.10 Interestingly, Kenneth J. Hs finds fractal qualities like self-similarity across
scale in the music of Bach and Mozart, but not most bird songs.
Works Cited
Addison, Paul S. 1997. Fractals and Chaos:An Illustrated Course. Philadelphia: Institute
of Physics Publishing.
Barnsley, Michael. F. 1988.Fractals Everywhere. Boston: Academic Press.Batty, Michael, and Paul Longley. 1994. Fractal Cities:A Geometry of Form and Function.
San Diego:Academic Press.
Bethe, Monica, and Karen Brazell. 1978. N as Performance: An Analysis of the Kuse
Scene of Yamamba. Ithaca, NY:The Cornell East Asia Papers.
Briggs, John. 1992. Fractals:The Patterns of Chaos: Discovering a New Aesthetic of Art,
Science, and Nature. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Briggs, John, and F. David Peat. 1989.Turbulent Mirror: An Illustrated Guide to Chaos
Theory and the Science of Wholeness. San Francisco: Harper and Row.
Chorafas, Dimitris N. 1994. Chaos Theory in the Financial Markets: Applying Fractals,Fuzzy Logic, Genetic Algorithms, Swarm Simulation, and the Monte Carlo Method to
Manage Market Chaos and Volatility. Chicago, Ill: Probus Publishing Company.
23Rod Romesburg
-
8/14/2019 The Fractal Nature of Gary Snyder's Mountains and Rivers Without End Rod Romesburg.pdf
25/26
Corless, Roger J. 1989. The Vision of Buddhism:The Space Under the Tree. New York:
Paragon House.
Dillard, Annie. 1990.Three by Annie Dillard. New York: HarperPerennial.
Fulton, Alice. 1990. Of Formal, Free, and Fractal Verse: Singing the Body Eclectic.
InConversant Essays: Contemporary Poets on Poetry, ed. James McCorkle. Detroit:Wayne State University Press.
Gleick, James. 1987.Chaos: Making a New Science. New York: Penguin Books.
Hawkins, Harriet. 1995.Strange Attractors: Literature, Culture, and Chaos Theory. New
York: Prentice Hall.
Hunt, Anthony. 1980. Bubbs Creek Haircut: Gary Snyders Great Departure in
Mountains and Rivers Without End.Western American Literature15: 163-75.
. 2004. Genesis, Structure, and Meaning in Gary Snyders Mountains and Rivers
Without End.Reno: University of Nevada Press.
Hs, Kenneth J. 1993. Fractal Geometry of Music: From Bird Songs to Bach. InApplications of Fractals and Chaos: The Shape of Things, ed. A.J. Crilly, R.A.
Earnshaw, H. Jones. New York: SpringerVerlag.
Kenner, Hugh. 1988. Self-Similarity, Fractals, Cantos.ELH55.3: 721-30.
Kerouac, Jack. 1958.Dharma Bums. New York:Viking Press.
Kraus, James W. 1986. Appendix A, Interview I: June 15, 1983. Gary Snyders
Biopoetics: A Study of the Poet as Ecologist. Ph.D. Dissertation, Univ. of
Hawaii.
Lavazzi, Tom. 1989. Pattern of Flux: The Torsion Form in Gary Snyders Poetry.
The American Poetry Review18.4: 41-47.Mandlebrot, Benoit B. 1977. The Fractal Geometry of Nature. San Francisco: W.H.
Freeman and Co.
Murphy, Patrick. 1992.Understanding Gary Snyder. Columbia: University. of South
Carolina Press.
Nielsen, Dorothy M. 1993.Prosopopoeia and the Ethics of Ecological Advocacy in
the Poetry of Denise Levertov and Gary Snyder. Contemporary Literature 34.4:
691-713.
Omote, Akira, and Kato Shuichi, eds. 1974. Zeami, Zenchiku. NST. Vol 24. Tokyo:
Iwanami shoten.Pollard-Gott, Lucy. 1986. Fractal Repetition Structures in the Poetry of Wallace
Stevens.Language and Style:An International Journal19.3: 233-49.
Schroeder, Manfred. 1991. Fractals, Chaos, Power Laws: Minutes from an Infinite Paradise.
New York: W.H. Freeman.
Snyder, Gary. 1969. Earth House Hold:Technical Notes and Queries to Fellow Dharma
Revolutionaries. New York: New Directions.
. 1980. The Real Work: Interviews and Talks, 1964-1979. New York: New
Directions Books.
. 1990. The Practice of the Wild. New York: North Point Press.. 1995. A Place in Space: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Watersheds. Washington, D.C.:
Counterpoint Press.
. 1996a. Descriptive text of Dooby Lane: A Testament Inscribed in Stone Tablets
by DeWayne Williams. Reno, NV: Black Rock Press.
24 College Literature 37.3[Summer 2010]
-
8/14/2019 The Fractal Nature of Gary Snyder's Mountains and Rivers Without End Rod Romesburg.pdf
26/26
. 1996b.Mountains and Rivers Without End.Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint.
. 2002. Is Nature Real? In Wild Earth:Wild Ideas for a World Out of Balance.
ed.Tom Butler. New York: New York Academy of Sciences.
Steuding, Bob. 1976.Gary Snyder. Boston: Twayne.
Thornhill, Arthur H., III. 1993.Six Circles, One Dewdrop:The Religio-Aesthetic Worldof Komparu Zenchiku. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Tonkinson, Carole. 1995. Big Sky Mind: Buddhism and the Beat Generation. NewYork:
Riverhead Books.
Voss, Richard F. and James C.Y.Wyatt. 1993.Multifractals and the Local Connected
Fractal Dimension: Classification of Early Chinese Landscape Paintings. In
Applications of Fractals and Chaos: The Shape of Things, ed. A.J. Crilly, R.A.
Earnshaw, H. Jones. New York: Springer-Verlag.
25Rod Romesburg