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Overview
Long rumored to exist, The Great Clod collects more than a dozen chapters, several published in The Coevolution Quarterly almost forty years ago when Snyder briefly described this work as "The China Book," and several others, the majority, never before published in any form. "Summer in Hokkaido," "Wild in China," "Ink and Charcoal, " "Stories to Save the World," "Walking the Great Ridge," these essays turn from being memoirs of travel to prolonged considerations of art, culture, natural history and religion. Filled with Snyder's remarkable insights and briskly beautiful descriptions, this collection adds enormously to the major corpus of his work, certain to delight and instruct his readers now and forever.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781619026636 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Catapult |
| Publication date: | 05/01/2016 |
| Sold by: | Penguin Random House Publisher Services |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 208 |
| File size: | 740 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Summer in Hokkaido
For some years I lived in Japan, in the old capital of Kyoto. I had come to study Buddhism, but I couldn't break myself of walking in the forests and mountains and learning the names and habits of birds, animals, and plants. I also got to know a little about the farmers, the carpenters, and the fishermen; and the way they saw the mountains and rivers of their land. From them I learned there were deep feelings about the land that went below, and from before, the teachings of Buddhism. I was drawn to worship from time to time at Shinto shrines — at the foot of a mountain; by a waterfall; where two rivers come together; at the headwaters of a drainage. Doing this made me feel more at home in Japan, and for the first time I could relate to the forests of sugi and hinoki and pine almost as well as I could to the fir forest of my native Pacific Northwest. In other ways this drawing near to the gods of the earth and waters of Japan only added to my confusion. I was witnessing the accelerating modern Japanese economy, and the incredible transformation of the life of the people, and the landscape that this brought. I had just begun to absorb the deep sense of place and reverence for the forces of nature this fine old civilization had maintained, to see it then turn and begin to devour itself. My literary peers, the avant-garde poets and artists of Tokyo, had no concern for either nature or the Buddha's teaching; but our minds met when we talked of the exploitation of the People, and sang radical folksongs. The young monks and laymen I meditated with in the temples of Kyoto were marvelous students of Buddhism and true bearers of the fine old manners of earlier Japan, but their sense of nature was restricted to tiny gardens, and they did not wish to speak about the exploitation of the masses at all. When I finally did, by good chance, meet a man I could speak with, about these things, he was neither a monk nor a marxist, but a propertyless vagabond Japanese Air Force veteran of World War II who spent his life walking with the mountains and rivers and farmers and working people of Japan.
We soon realized the questions we were raising about nature, human nature, and Far Eastern civilization have ramifications on a planetary scale. Here I have limited myself to working through the Buddhist teachings, the pre-Buddhist almost universal "old ways," the information of history, and my own experience of the natural world. Working in this book, with the question, how did the old civilization of Japan end up becoming so resolutely growth and profit oriented? There will be no answer here, but there will be many angles of vision and something about civilization and ourselves. I was with this question that I found myself, one midsummer, in Sapporo, a city of over a million with wide straight streets — in Hokkaido — the northernmost island of Japan; the one place still considered somewhat wild.
The first time I had set foot in Japan was almost twenty years before, straight off the ship Arita Mara; two weeks churning across the Pacific watching the Laysan Albatrosses weave back and forth in its wake. There was a truckload of caged seals on the way through Customs in Kobe, snaking their small heads about. What I saw was the tightness of space: the crowded narrow-gauge commuter train, tens of thousands of tiny tile-roof houses along the track, little patches of vegetable gardens that shake every twenty minutes with the Special Express. Living then in Kyoto, I saw Hokkaido as the picture of cows and silo on a cheese box; I heard it was a sub-arctic wilderness, and my Japanese friends said "it's a lot like America," so for years I never went there. Will Petersen had been stationed as a soldier up north after the war; he loved it, he raved about the beautiful walls of snow the trains ran through, like tunnels, in the dead of winter.
But now it's summer in Hokkaido and really hot and I'm going through the swinging glass doors of the fourteen story Hokkaido circuit-government office building, into the wide lobby with elevators at several ends and sides. Across two walls, taking a right angle bend, is a mural. About eighty feet long, low relief on stone, "Hokkaido's hundred years." It starts, as such murals do, with a native person sailing a little boat through great waves; with woods and deer; and then come the early explorers. It goes on to axe men, toppling trees and stumps; then expert advisors arriving on horses (these happened to be Americans), and soon there's an agricultural experiment station, cows and sheep, a college with a clock tower, a city laid out, a brewery, a pulp mill, a railroad train, and finally — men with air hammers blasting rocks.
One hundred years: since Japan moved in with finality and authority to this island — one fifth the size of all the rest of the country — and decided to leave it no longer to hunters and fisherfolk but to "put it to work" economically.
Through the ground floor lobby, across the back street and down the block is the entrance to the Botanical Gardens, where I am to meet Dr. Misao Tatewaki, a little mustache, big open smile, ponderous walk, suspenders. A large, handsome, friendly, dignified old man. He takes me upstairs in the wood-frame office building of the gardens, a semi-occidental 19th-century house with creaky stairs and fluttering curtains, to an empty meeting-room with an oiled plank floor. At the head of the stairs on the wall is an oil portrait of a Japanese gentleman in the high collar of the Victorian era. Dr. Tatewaki stopped and made a little bow. "Dr. Miyabe, my teacher of Botany," he says, and, "Dr. Miyabe was a disciple of Asa Gray." Lineages. Dr. Tatewaki asks for tea to be sent up. I open out two folding chairs and place them side by side at one end of the large table. I tell him only a little of what I hope to do and he leans back, sighs, looks at me and says, "Japan has a sickness. It is a sightseeing sickness. That means people don't come to see or learn of nature or beauty, but for fad." And he speaks long and sorrowfully of what has already happened to the mountains and forests of the main island of Honshu, and of what little hope he sees for Hokkaido.
So then we go for a stroll in the wild-looking garden, which is in part a swampy remnant of the original plant community in the heart of the city, with towering virgin birch and elm. "Sapporo" from the Ainu, meaning "Large Plain."
Later I meet Dr. Tatewaki at his office in the dark cement corridors of the building of the Faculty of Agriculture at Hokkaido University. Books to the ceiling, books in heaps. Cases of boxes of color slides of plants. Hulten, Arctic Flora, Kihara's three volumes on Nepal, the U.S.F.S. Atlas of U.S. Trees, an old Shanghai Commercial Press book on forestry in China ... Russian books ... and he shows me the famous study, Crabs of Sagami Bay by the Showa Emperor himself, with superb color plates. Dr. Toyama, his former student, shows slides and Dr. Tatewaki names off the bushes and plants in Latin. "Those scholars in Tokyo don't understand the actual state of Hokkaido, they think it's one with maritime Siberia and east Manchuria ... it's right in between warm-temperate Japan and the Siberian sub-arctic ..."
Age nineteen, he came north hoping to study the plants of Sakhalin and the Kuriles. He has been here ever since. And browsing about the bookshelves, I find a little book of poems by Dr. Tatewaki, published in the late twenties. They are w a k a, the thirty-one-syllable poetic form one size up from haiku. The collection is called Oka, "hill"— and there's one on the Siberian people called Gilyaks who had a settlement in Hokkaido:
"The misery of the Gilyaks and the Gilyaks — not knowing their misery — today they laugh"
CHAPTER 2All He Sees Is Blue: Basic Far East
When the P'eng bird journeys to the southern darkness the waters are roiled for three thousand li. He beats the whirlwind and rises ninety thousand lim setting off on the sixth-month gale. Wavering heat, bits of dust, living things blowing each other about — the sky looks very blue. Is that its real color, or is it because it is so far away and has no end? When the bird looks down, all he sees is blue too.
CHUANG-TZU
I guess Dr. Tatewaki must have run into Gilyak people in Sakhalin; or perhaps the little colony in Abashiri on Hokkaido; I never asked him. This corner of the world; this place to live. Another human habitat. Eastern Manchuria, Maritime Siberia, North China drainages of the China Sea, Sakhalin, the Kuriles out as far as the end of Kamchatka, all the Japanese islands and the Ryukyus. The whole area, if you go by the grids on maps, roughly between 25 degrees and 50 degrees of latitude, 110 degrees to 160 degrees longitude. All of it more southerly than it feels: Hokkaido itself, in latitude, is level with Oregon. The Ryukyus will take you through Mexico and Bombay. Straight through the globe you'd find yourself somewhere around the Rio Grand Rise and the Argentine Basin, on the bottom of the South Atlantic, east of Uruguay and Argentina.
Tenki, the Japanese word for weather, means spirit / breath / energy: of Heaven. You don't see the stars so much in this part of the world, there's a swirl of cloud mist-moisture always going. Before I went to Asia, I had heard that Japan would be like the Pacific Northwest. Northwest Pacific is not like Pacific Northwest, and the difference most obvious is summer rains, warm slow drizzles through June, sharp cooler downpours in July and August with some thunderstorms; windy typhoon-carried rains in September. Summer rains make for wet-rice agriculture, bamboo, and a different forest. It means that grasses have a harder time, with a great scramble of weeds and vines every spring, so that natural pastureland is scarce, only found in northern Japan uplands and in SE Hokkaido.
The coast of Asia and these offshore islands is the playground of ocean and continent forces that spiral and swirl — a yin and yang dance of cold and warm, wet and dry. Through the winter months the cold polar-continental air masses, "Siberian Air," centered over Lake Baikal, send dry chilly winds toward the oceans, giving the west side of the Japanese islands colder temperatures, clouds, and heavy snows. In late spring, moist air from the Okhotsk Sea brings the "plum rain" month of drizzles, with mould on the books, rust on the sewing needles, and soggy tobacco. Most of the rest of the summer "Ogasawara Air" from the Pacific streams northwest, sliding along tropical continental fronts, and culminating in whiplashes of typhoons in late August and September. Hokkaido gets less "plum rain" and fewer typhoons; much colder air in winter. Though not so far north as most of Europe, on the east side of Eurasia it has a climate like the maritime provinces of Canada, or New England.
Japan as a whole doesn't have as many thunderstorms as the American Southeast, but what it gets is strong — especially the winter storms. Only about 1 percent of all lightning bolts in the world are superbolts, which release 1 trillion watts of visible energy in 1/1000 of a second. Winter storms over Japan get considerably more than their share of globally observed superbolts. Some sort of dragons abound.
From the bottom up, too, energy and tension. The islands rise from a deep ocean — as much as seven miles from the top to bottom. (The average depth of the Pacific is two and a half miles.) The Ramapo Deep to the east is 34,448 feet. Even the Japan Sea, between Japan and the continent, is over 10,000 feet deep in spots. Five hundred volcanoes, with sixty eruptions known to history. Arcs and nodes of mountains: Hokkaido has at its center a rolling mass of mountains called Daisetsu, "Great Snowy Mountains," and this is the node of three arcs: one down from Saghalien, another arc which is the anchor point of the Kurile Islands, and a third arc which connects south with the mountains of Honshu.
Around these islands, and along the Asian coast, a system of currents is also swirling. The warm Kuroshio, Black Current (or "black tide") flowing north from near Taiwan, splits and the west part, Tsushima Current, flows on north through the Japan Sea and east through Tsugaru Strait between Honshu and Hokkaido; both branches meet the cold Oyashio, or Kurile current, moving down from the northeast, and at about latitude 38 degrees it slides below the warm current and weaves its way on south, undersea. The warm current, Kuroshio, is clear and salty, not so nutritious, indigo-blue. Tuna (maguro) and bonito (katsuo) ride with this current — the bonito loves water with 20 m transparency, not below 18 degrees C. The Japanese anchovy (katakuchi iwashi) and Pacific sardine (iwashi) are also found in the Kuroshio. The Oyashio is rich in phosphates and full of plankton, and greenish-blue. The cold current gives eastern Hokkaido and Honshu coasts their fog and cold summers. Pacific herring (nishui), Pacific cod (tara), masu salmon, and especially the mackerel pike, sanma, follow the cold current. The meeting place — interface — current rip — is off the island of Kinka-san on the NE coast of Honshu. It's a rich and famous fishing ground.
For most of Japan rain averages more than sixty inches a year. Hokkaido gets between forty and forty-five, with less in the area northeast of the Daisetsu mountains, the side facing toward the Okhotsh Sea.
Temperatures, and the amounts and patterns of rainfall, watershed by watershed, from sea-level to headwaters, make up the main terms that plants, animals, and finally humans respond to. Establish, first, the conditions of the plant communities: and everything flows from that. Temperature: the cherry comes into bloom when average daytime temperature reaches 50 degrees F. Thus blooming in Kyushu in late March, Tokyo in early April, Hokkaido in mid-May.
The realm of life is this place where air and ground, air and ocean surface meet, and down some depths more into the water. Living beings are down into the soil a yard or so, and into caves or cracks wherever water goes, and up into the sky as high as spiders ride on threads. On snowfields in the highest mountains are populations of mites that feed entirely on wind-blown pollen. A Barheaded goose was once seen flying over the summit of Mt. Everest.
Great areas of Asia, particularly lowland China, no longer have their original/potential natural vegetation, and are missing much of their original fauna, but what was and what might be are still the basic terms of even human life in a place. Take away the farmers and the woodcutters and in a few centuries those excellently adapted beings, the life-forms of, say, the Yellow River Basin, will come back, ultimately to a climax forest. Not that in actual fact it will be exactly what it was three thousand years ago for some soils have moved away and some hills eroded bare. But given the chance, the forest will reconstitute.
The hills and valleys of the Pacific drainages of East Asia and the string of islands on the continental shelf were covered with a diverse and extensive forest. It was a direct descendant of Miocene plant communities, having undergone virtually no ice-age disturbance. Thus it had many affinities with the great hardwood forests of eastern North America (Great Smoky National Park). South China and Japan (southwest of Tokyo) were an evergreen broadleaf forest of laurels, evergreen oaks, and other trees with hard glossy leaves. The Yangtze basin, central Japan, and most of Korea were a broadleaf deciduous forest. In the Yellow River lowlands this forest became predominantly oak. The mixed hardwood forest of Northeast Manchuria, north Korea and southwest Hokkaido (maple, tulip-tree, birch, and walnut slightly dominant out of forty or so commonly found species) gave way to conifer forests in the higher elevations and to the north. The Daisetsu mountains of Hokkaido are a rainfall line, and the beginning of a boreal coniferous forest, or taiga that covers the rest of the island. A taiga flourishes where the annual average temperature is below 43 degrees.
At the peak of the Würm glaciation, about 45,000 years ago, sea level was much lower and Hokkaido was simply part of Siberia; the land bridge eastward to Alaska was a thousand miles wide. Southern Japan was connected to China, via what is now the shallow Yellow Sea. Glaciers themselves were not so vast, just a few touches in the highest mountains. Glacial traces can be seen in the Hidaka range of Hokkaido, but ice was mainly in Siberia in the mountains north of the Lena River. The land bridge to the New World was ice-free and relatively level. Taiga and steppe moved south a few hundred miles and East Asia was if anything more hospitable to paleolithic hunters than Europe at the same time. In the final glaciation, about 18,000 years ago, Hokkaido was again connected with Siberia, and southwestern Japan was separated from Korea by about twenty miles of water. Human beings moved in at this time, if not before. The oldest known site in Hokkaido is 20,000 years old; Japan about the same. We don't have more and earlier sites and human remains probably because the people and their homes along the coast and at the mouths of rivers have been buried under risen sea waters since the end of the last ice-age.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Great Clod"
by .
Copyright © 2016 Gary Snyder.
Excerpted by permission of Counterpoint.
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Table of Contents
Introduction,
Summer in Hokkaido,
All He Sees Is Blue,
The Great Clod,
"Wild" in China,
Ink and Charcoal,
Walls Within Walls,
Beyond Cathay,
Wolf-Hair Brush,