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Mountains and
Rivers Without End
DAN BELLM
Copyright ©
2000 Poetry Flash
Gary Snyder, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet,
environmental activist, Zen Buddhist, and UC Davis
professor, read his epic myth-poem Mountains and
Rivers Without End (Counterpoint, 1996) for the
first time in its entirety in a six-hour
performance on Friday, August 11, 2000 with
musicians Ludi Hinrichs, Sean Kerrigan, Daniel
Flanigan, and Azriel Getz in the outdoor
amphitheater of the North Columbia Schoolhouse on
San Juan Ridge. Snyder began work on the long poem
on April 8, 1956. Inspired by East Asian landscape
painting and his own experience within "a chaotic
universe where everything is in place," his vision
flows from its origins in Western tradition, from
Whitman, Pound, and Williams, ranging across Asian
art and drama, Native American story, Zen Buddhist
practice, geologic and planetary history and
prehistory, and the landscapes of Japan,
California, Alaska, Australia, China, and Taiwan.
His most recent book, The Gary Snyder Reader
(1999), gathers excerpts from his fifteen books,
including Mountains and Rivers Without End.
This poem-review is San Francisco poet Dan Bellm's
spontaneous impression of the historic event.
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THE POEM BEGINS WITH THE BLOWING OF CONCHES --
little chambers, little creature houses fitted to
the mouth, the whorls of the ear: when emptied and
dried, when the creatures in them have gone from
home, they become a call of awakening attention,
new time. We gather behind the schoolhouse, under
the trees, to learn. The call becomes a slide
trombone, a shofar, a reed whistle summoning
the spirits of the air, the wizards of the realm of
vibration, a didgeridoo interstellar weird
animal hum and cry, a trick Coyote invocation: Now
the sticks and drums enter, the handclaps, the
skin: Now the strings, the gut, the sinew, the
entwining thread, the line -- tamboura and mountain
dulcimer and guitar, and one chanting moaning
ayyyyy of the human throat. Cricket calls and
echoes, dog barks, undercarpet of sound, stream of
stories, night-falling time: some creatures going
off to sleep and others stirring, other spirits
calling. The eyes of the eyes open, that see in the
dark. The poet enters in white, bows and sits --
white shirt so new it has all the un-ironed folds
in it: mountains and rivers without end. Old poet
chants an Old Bones song for the ancestors "out
there walking around, looking out for food" -- the
hungering bones -- the bones of my father hungering
home I think -- "the dust of the old bones, / old
songs and tales."
Long songs of artific'd Nature -- long Beatific
harmonica blues night voyagings Highway 99 -- an
all-nighter, east Asian style, no test at the end.
"Go ahead nurse babies make noise let children run
around -- get excited get bored take a walk take a
nap come back sit down again." Three hundred people
from up and down these roads -- three young
musicians and a dancer Gary found on his own home
ground. First time ever his whole 40-year-long song
is coming all at once to life. And old Lila
Wallace, good soul, who gave her money for the
night to happen, wouldn't you know, there they
suddenly appear, in the Sourdough Mountain forest
service lookout 1953 deep inside Washington State
in the poem: "old Reader's Digests left
behind."
An intermission -- The Blue Sky. "the
lapis lazuli realm of / Medicine Old Man Buddha."
Night of shooting stars, invisible, behind the
near-full moon. Crowd walking the schoolhouse
grounds in the dark, eating and talking. Inside,
Tom Killion woodblock pictures of mountains and
rivers. Golden aspen. The mind wanders. --
Tom's engraving of Gary's poem Piute Creek on the
wall -- A million / Summers, night air still and
the rocks / Warm. Sky over endless mountains. / All
the junk that goes with being human / Drops
away. Dogen teaching, When it is said that
mountains are mountains, this does not mean that
mountains are mountains. It means that mountains
are mountains. Molly beside me, That's what
pisses me off about Buddhism, saying things like
that. Drink a cup of that Zinfandel
wine….and doesn't Sean in the middle, guitar
guy, look like a younger me, a confident one? Be 48
next week, how that happen -- same nose, same
smile-and-grin. ("us and our stuff, just covering
the ground.") Near halfway through, I'm lying down
on the bench on my back, near halfway dozing --
Hump-backed Flute Player -- Gary reads a
line about Kokop'ele lying down on his back, a
painted flute player on a rock wall, centuries old.
Face up to the blue tarp, blue lightning-bug sky,
incense cedars, Ponderosa pine &emdash; "The
ringing in your ears / is the cricket in the
stars."
"Dharani for Removing Disasters" -- a charm and
vow -- circumambulation Mt. Tamalpais with Philip
Whalen Allen Ginsberg 1965 -- and what if I paid
attention for an entire journey, heard words as
music, saw things -- was freed -- selected, chose
things, let them go, set them down. The length of a
walk the length of a day. Clearing -- the mind --
"These songs that are here and gone, / here and
gone, / to purify our ears."
Midnight, or past -- up all night like Torah
scholars pondering and hearing words until they
blur and we sleep, snoring dream Enlightenment. Up
& stretch, dream & walk, (having come this
far): "I spaced out for some stretch awhile there,"
guy says, "so I walked out to look at the stars,
which woke me up." Each one a character, a mark, a
figure, a personage: year Ought Zero human time,
high-summer Yuba River watershed, measure-less
Earth time, small figures pilgrim-walking in a
hidden corner of the stream and mountain scroll,
painter unknown, date unknown, poems added to it
over centuries at its end, small i, Earth being the
main character. Molly asleep, under the blue
blankets, under the trees; her dead mother curled
up in the dream beside her. Guardians: mummy forms
in sleeping bags all around the edges of the
clearing -- still listening through the night --
sentient beings, no suffering --
Fourth set past one in the morning -- the
shofar and conch call again -- Maimonides
reminding, each new year, Sleepers awake there
is so little time -- Gary chanting, tamboura
vibration upholding him, woodblocks and one bell
make a world all around. "Old Woodrat's Stinky
House": Ludi makes trombone farts. The spirits of
the dead -- "always new, same stuff / life after
life." And up in the mountains -- "where the oldest
living beings / thrive on rock and air" -- the
bristlecone pine -- late enough at night, get worn
down worn out wide awake enough, the Spirit of the
Mountain will appear -- Daniel wailing, instruments
wailing, scared out of our wits? -- a
tattered-kimono'd Noh dancer with twigs in her
squirrel-gray hair will stamp her root-foot down,
fold arms, listen what you have to say. Just so: a
praise song to Artemisia, sagebrush of our Great
Basin -- dry ancient lake Lahontan, dried ancient
bones and scats at its western shore -- ends with a
pledge, Homeric, to the goddess. Hail,
Artemisia, / aromatic in the rain, / I will think
of you in my other poems. Just so: hearing the
wordriver pass, I make a tribute, a tributary, I
set it down.
Now later, late -- so late it's not late anymore
-- carlights in a chain on the mountain road --
conches still calling -- and there was evening
and morning, one day -- wisps of the communal
fire scattering -- carbon -- and fossil smoke -- we
travel home.
Dan Bellm is the author of One Hand on the
Wheel, which was the first volume published in
the California Poetry Series, and Buried
Treasure, winner of the 1998 Cleveland State
University Poetry Center Prize.
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