Gary Snyder's "Cold Mountain Poems" By Kelly Moody

After reading "Turtle Island" I became pretty infatuated with Gary Snyder and bought "Back Country" as well as looked up many more of his poems online. I went to New Hampshire over Spring Break to stay with a bunch of beatniks, artists, crazy hippies where The Frog was present for awhile and I was tossing around Gary Snyder and Zen literature when someone lent me "Rip Rap and Cold Mountain Poems" by Gary Snyder, which i had not read yet. I read it in a day and in that context it was amazing. I was in the snowy mountains, in the middle of nowhere, and i felt that I could relate to the poetry so much better in that environment. I would have never understood it quite the same reading it in Newport News. Nonetheless I became pretty obsessed with Gary Snyder's "Cold Mountain Poems" which are really remakes of another poet's verses he had written while living alone on a mountain around 627-650 A D. His name was Han-Shan. He wrote these poems in caves and random places that people found over the years. It was interesting to see the kind of world he noticed, the kind of reality that may have been revealed to him while he was living there alone, and without the same kind of social constructs that shape our world outside of solitary nature. The person that gave me "Rip Rap and Cold Mountain Poems" actually told me that he had tried living out on a mountain alone for a few weeks and was unsuccessful because of the monotonous that world gained, and the overwhelming lonliness he began to feel from transitioning from our world based on social interactions with other human beings as a basis for our own individual meaning and value to a world of a completely different order. It scares me how much we depend on each other to stay sane. How Han-Shan lasted out there(at least 30 years, and he died there too) baffles me. I feel as though he had to have had some kind of realization about the world around him that made him feel not so alone and that he belonged there. Me and my friend from New Hampshire who gave me Rip Rap began to talk about the communication you can gain with nature when being sumerged in it. You feel so alone but you realize you're not. He talked about from his own experience, a bird, nearby in a tree that was feeling the same heartache he was, for other people, for interaction, that the bird called out to its mate every day and from that they gained a bond. Looking at it from retrospect, realizing that you are not alone, that all creatures (trees, birds, fish, squirrels, whatever) share the same basis condition of procreation, just in differnt forms, therefore we must care about some of the same things. Realizing that shared emotion allows you to understand that you are never alone. Maybe we all need that kind of submersion into the wild at least once in our lives to realize so many things that we wouldn't realize otherwise in the world we can be so blinded by with structure and money and other people. The Native Americans do it, many other cultures do it too. "Cold Mountain Poems" has greatly affected me and Gary Snyder rewrites them very well for a Western mind to relate to. I just bought a big Gary Snyder Reader and I have been neglecting work for the rest of Spring Break reading all of the different things he has written.

A few exerpts:
"In my 1st thirty years of life
I roamed hundreds and thousands of miles.
walked by rivers through deep green grass
entered cities of boiling red dust
tried drugs, but couldn't make immortal;
read books and wrote poems on history.
today i'm back at Cold Mountain:
I'll sleep by the creek and purify my ears.

--

I settled at Cold Mountain long ago,
Already it seems like years and years.
Freely drifting, I prowl the woods and streams
and linger watching things themselves.
Men don't get this far into the mountains,
White clouds gather and billow.
Thin grass does for a mattress,
The blue sky makes a good quilt.
Happy with a stone underhead
Let heaven and earth go about their changes.