Mary Panttaja

I was reading the latest Gary Snyder book last night: “Back on the Fire”. It contains a series of recent essays on a variety of topics relating to nature, art, writing, and the preservation of our world. (Snyder has always been one of my favorite thinkers and important resources. I discovered once that a close friend and I were two young adults who actually wanted to be Gary Snyder. Strange. But then again not every young poet has a famous novel written about his life: “The Dharma Bums” by Jack Kerouac is actually about Gary Snyder. So we actually wanted to be the hero of a story.)

In his essay, “Ecology, Literature, and the New World Disorder”, Snyder talks about poetry and literature in relation to the language and patterns of the natural world: ecology, environment, nature.

We speak of the ‘ecology of the imagination’ or even of ‘language’, with justification: ‘ecology’ is a valuable shorthand term for complexity in motion.

He quotes a wonderful passage from “The Compost: Ecological Imperatives in American Poetry” by Jed Rasula which develops a metaphor for the artistic process, but which can also be used to understand the creative process in all its forms.

Detritus cycle energy is liberated by funghi and lots of insects. I would then suggest: as climax forest is to biome, and fungus is to the recycling of energy, so ‘enlightened mind’ is to daily ego mind, and Art to the recycling of neglected inner potential. When we deepen ourselves, looking within, understanding ourselves, we come closer to being like mature ecosystems. turning away from grazing on the ‘immediate biomass’ of perception, sensation, and thrill; and reviewing memory…blocks of stored inner energies, the flux of dreams, the detritus of day-to-day consciousness, liberates the energy of our own mind-compost. Art is an assimilator for unfelt experience, perception, sensation, and memory for the whole society. It comes not as a flower, but—to complete the metaphor—as a mushroom: the fruiting body of the buried threads of mycella that run widely through the soil, intricately married to the root hairs of all the trees. ‘Fruiting’—at that point—is the completion of the work of the poet, and the point where the artist reenters the cycle: gives what she or he has re-created through reflection, returning a ‘thought of enlightenment’ to community.

The concept of recycling and liberating neglected inner potential really resonates with me, that inner potential really being an updraft of our own lives (or in the life of our societies) with which we have not really connected.