I'm sitting in a cabin in northern Michigan, where summer feels like summer—warm and windless, even at 3 am—and the small light beside me is the only one for at least a mile or two. I’m reading a book of essays called "Back on the Fire" by poet and translator Gary Snyder, and I’m thinking about environment: how it feeds one’s art, how it makes art possible. It’s been about six months since I’ve ventured outside of the cool, foggy, urban wilds of San Francisco, and I’m struck by how a geographical shift can produce a shift in thought, poetry, and a general sense of what’s possible.
Perhaps I’m more attuned to land, landscapes, and environments because of my time working and teaching here at CIIS. Perhaps this is my ecological awakening—not unlike the political one I went through as an undergraduate across the bay. I’ve never considered myself a “nature poet,” (a term that always connoted, for me, a certain quiet detachment), but if nature is another name for the flux of the wild, then I might reconsider. Or perhaps I’d aspire to be a “mind/nature” poet—a term Gary Synder uses to describe the Chinese wilderness and Japanese haiku poets, a term that he hopes will capture the “axis that reaches deeply into our interior wildness” as well. That’s it—wildness. For a writer like Snyder, the wildness of nature and the wild of the mind are deeply interconnected.
“Wild” is a word I’m warming up to. It connotes the natural wild: that highly ordered, self-organizing place, that is also full of spontaneity, danger, and death. “Ecology” is another word I’ve taken to using, in both thinking about nature and thinking about art. Ecology, writes Snyder, “is a valuable shorthand term for complexity in motion.” If this is the case, then we can begin to speak about an ecology of the imagination, or an ecology of the mind. Gregory Bateson takes this a step further and advocates for the recycling of one’s own “mind-compost.” Art-making, in this view, means taking the time to turn inward to “review memories, blocks of stored inner energies, the flux of dreams, the detritus of day-to-day consciousness” and then mine this material to create something new. Where does that leave us? Well, Snyder says this: “Our work as writers and scholars is not just ‘about’ the environment, not just ‘speaking for’ nature, but manifesting in ourselves and our work the integrity of the wild.”
Tonight I will fall asleep to the shushing of forest wind as it weaves through the birches keeping watch over the cabin. And tomorrow I will wake, and leave the natural wild for an urban one: I’ll board a plane for New York City, where the matrix of bodies, cars, sidewalks, buildings, sirens, subways, and sweat will comprise its own ordered (yet dangerous) ecological system, one that will influence me on some core, unconscious level. And later, back in my home in the windy, sun-swept neighborhoods of San Francisco, I’ll mine (and manifest) all of the various landscapes and experiences for the sake of new poems, stories, and art.