Flowchart of Allen Ginsberg's Howl (Part III)

Check out my flowchart of Ginsberg's poem (click on the image or follow the link below):

http://9gag.com/gag/aKwQvXO

Reading Gary Snyder and Nature; Attaining Zen.

From the Desk of Ashish Shrestha: Reading Gary Snyder and Nature; Attaining Zen.

"'Tis a good reader that makes a good book." — Ralph Waldo Emerson (Also in image: The Luckless Age by Steve Kistulentz). So, writers, let's read today.

GARY SNYDER is one of my favorite essayists. His views on Nature are much different, for me, than several of his friends from the Beats Generation. Kirby Olson writes, "A lot of people — Ginsberg, Kerouac had started to find these books [books on Zen]. Everybody was reading about this Zen and Gary [Snyder] was the only one who had figured out how to meditate [...]."(http://www.corpse.org/archives/issue_9/critiques/olson.htm).

Bellow is my blog-essay on why you should read his work, "Ancient Forests Of The Far West." Here is a link to the essay: Gary Snyder, Ancient Forests Of The Far West (Source: WordPress)

Bonus: Here is a link to my favorite poem by him: "Why Log Truck Drivers Rise Earlier Than Students of Zen" 

Gary Snyder — Ancients Forest Of The Far West

"After the Clear-cut"

Perchance Gary Snyder’s idea of Nature tolls in the advice his father gave him when he was just 10 years old. Snyder was cutting a tree using a two-person saw with his father when the latter advised, “don’t ride the saw […] don’t push, only pull.” The act of pushing, to me, implies intrusion of Nature, perhaps ravishing it for monetary gains. On the other hand, pulling implies taking in from Nature. Perhaps this is his philosophy. Handiwork helps one in taking from Nature — its ancient, virginal (to each person) knowledge.

Handiwork — enveloped in Nature, working with it and in it — provides Snyder a feeling of being one with Nature — Zen, he calls it. He recalls the harmonious saw-work with his father saying, “I loved the clean swish and ring of the blade, the rhythm, the comradeship.” It is interesting that while he is “in tune” with Nature, he is also seemingly destroying it by cutting it down. This may seem paradoxical, however, perhaps he is not destroying Nature but rather, unlike mass cutting and devastation caused by money hungry companies, he is calculatingly cutting only a selective few trees in order to “pull” from it its knowledge. Causing Nature discomfort is far different than causing its extinction. His descriptions of his feeling in cutting the tree, intriguingly, captures only the sounds made by the blade of his saw and the curling of the wood, and not the sounds or even a hint of the presence of any human being — except, of course, the advice of his father, which also relates to Nature. Perhaps, therefore, the “comradeship” he mentions is not with a person, but that with Nature.

Snyder does not just immerse himself in Nature, but rather personifies it and, more so, feels it advises him. By doing so, he is humbly accepting that Nature is larger, grander than a person. This is not the belief of money hungry companies; they perhaps don’t even consider Nature as a living organism, but rather just a means, an instrument of profit.

Snyder’s personification of Nature is particularly interesting as it is a window into his mind, his source of inspiration. He talks of having climbed a red cedar tree, which advised him about Nature, showing him the “second-growth Douglas fir, western hemlock, and cedar forest beyond the cow pasture.” The term “second-growth,” of course, stands out as it emphasizes Snyder’s philosophy of sustainable and renewable interaction with Nature, particularly in logging. “Second-growth” suggests a selective cutting of trees, of old trees, while letting the younger trees stand erect and grow tall, forming the second generation of trees. Scientifically, we know that not all trees grow to the same height, since some trees absorb more light, and in cases, even destroy and cannibalize on other trees. Snyder’s selective logging helps in the growth of all trees — a more utilitarian idea, perhaps one that allows all trees to grow fully.

Snyder further recalls waking up at 3 A.M. only so he could break camp on a glacier and, thus, be able to witness the majestic sight of Nature at sunrise. He says, “These are some of the esoteric delights of mountaineering. To be immersed in ice and rock and cold and upper space is to undergo an eery [sic], rigorous initiation and transformation.” The word that stands out to me is “initiation.” It implies a ceremonial or ritualistic welcome of him by Nature unto itself. 

— Ashish Shrestha (ashesshrestha.blogspot.com)

Ashish Shrestha's Recommended Reading List

Ashish Shrestha’s Guide Into The Rabbit Hole (Reading List)

N.B. There are a lot of works that I have cut out for now, but will be adding soon.

Selected Poetry

Charles Baudelaire — all his works

Frank Bidart — “Herbert White,” “To The Dead”

Tomaz Salamun — “To Have a Friend”

Percy Shelley — “Ozymandias”

Javed Akhtar — http://www.poemhunter.com/i/ebooks/pdf/javed_akhtar_2012_4.pdf

Emily Dickinson — “Because I could not Stop for Death”

John Donne — “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning”

Langston Hughes — “Merry Go Round,” “I, Too”

Lord Tennyson — “In Memoriam,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade”

A.E. Housman — “Terence, this is stupid stuff”

Jonathan Swift — “The Progress of Beauty,” “The Lady’s Dressing Room”

Ted Hughes — “Portraits,” “Red”

Mary Leader — ”Her Door”

Selected Essays

John Burroughs — ”In Mammoth Cave” (must read)

Gary Snyder — “Ancient Forest of the Far West”

Immanuel Kant — “What is Enlightenment?”

Edmund Burke — “A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful”

Edward Said — “Orientalism”

Virginia Woolf — “A Room of One’s Own”

Jonathan Swift — ”A Modest Proposal”

John Donne — “Meditation XVII” (MUST READ)

Interesting Wiki “Things to Know”

Kristeva — “Abjection” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abjection) (Better yet, you could read the essay)

Notable Books of Theories/Essays

George Haggarty — Queer Gothic

Terry Eagleton — Why Marx was Right (Or any other title, he’s my favorite writer of our period)

Stephen Greenblatt — any of his works on Shakespeare (especially, the Henry series)

Jean E. Howard — Marxist Shakespeare

Selected Fiction

Ernest Hemingway — ”Snows of Kilimanjaro”

Flannery O’Connor — “A Good Man is Hard to Find”

Franz Kafka — “In The Penal Colony”

Nikolai Gogol — “The Nose”

Jhumpa Lahiri — Unaccustomed Earth (collection of stories)

Sadat Hassan Manto — Mottled Dawn (collection) (Please read this if you can. Moving.)

Jess Walter — The Financial Lives of the Poets

Oscar Wilde — “The Birthday of the Infanta”

Emma Donoghue — The Room (highly interesting narrative style; a must read for fictioneers)

Catherine O’Flynn — What Was Lost

Sheridan Le Fanu — “Carmilla”

Selected Artists

Alex Grey

Joel-Peter Witkin

Novellas

H.G. Wells — The Island of Dr. Moreau

Ngugi wa Thiong’o — The River Between

Joseph Conrad — Heart of Darkness

Kate Chopin — The Awakening

Willa Cather — A Lost Lady

Plays

William Shakespeare — 1 Henry IV; Titus Andronicus

Christopher Marlowe — The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus

Arthur Miller — Death of a Salesman

Aphra Behn — The Rover

Bertolt Brecht — Mother Courage and Her Children

Longer Poems

John Milton — of course, Paradise Lost

Alexander Pope — Rape of the Lock

Operas

John Gay — The Beggar’s Opera

Non-fiction

Ed. Davy Rothbart — Requiem for a Paper Bag. (must read)

— Ashish Shrestha (http://ashesshrestha.blogspot.com/)