the fractal nature of gary snyder's mountains and rivers without end rod romesburg.pdf

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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
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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.


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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]


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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

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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.



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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


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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



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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


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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-



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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


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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



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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


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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



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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


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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,



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


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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



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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.

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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



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

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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



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


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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



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.

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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.

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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

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