The Plowboy Interview
(Page 16 of 18)
Instead, we do the things we do as moral and aesthetic
exercises in our own time, to satisfy our own need for
thinking about the world clearly. But we have to realize
that we're not making the world any better. It's part of my
meditation, in a sense, to be able to say, "I live in the
actual range of Douglas fir." I don't do that to make the
future better; I do it to live in the present more clearly.
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And if enough people in a given bioregion did that, the
area would be more like a natural nation. But
we're not going to do it in the courts or in Congress.
PLOWBOY: I guess living one's beliefs is
the best form of social action, really.
SNYDER: Well, to do so means drawing
the line, to use the title of one of Paul Goodman's
books. If you're going to try to live in the here and now
as if you were in a natural nation, there are certain
things that you won't do. And so you do draw a line. It
becomes a moral and ethical choice.
You manifest what you believe in your own life-not as an
isolated, pure, rebellious entity, either ...but together
with others. It should be a joint enterprise.
PLOWBOY: How do you see your role as a
poet in this?
SNYDER: The poet has two roles. One is to
be very much alert to his own times and to be willing to
speak up and out on immediate issues, as well as to be so
totally in his literal own kind as to be as a poet
outside of his kind-to speak for raccoons and
birds and horses. Of course, as a poet you never look for
issues to write about: You only write about what comes to
you. So you might not write any political or ecologically
aware poems for decades. And that would be OK, too.
The creative person-the artist working as artist-is
responsible first and foremost to the voice that comes from
within. And if people, artists or not, will do their work
well and it doesn't happen to address the issues of this
decade, that's OK too. The real impact of poetry on
politics, though, is its impact on culture. And the impact
of a poetically manifested life of images and archetypes on
culture is a cumulative, slow process that takes centuries.
But, like glaciers, it cannot be stopped.
Poets and artists are involved in the politics of-as Jung
would say-the unconscious. But you can't see the fruit of
that work for many years, sometimes. It's been a century
and a half since William Blake wrote, and we just now begin
to see the force of William Blake's work.
PLOWBOY: Right.
SNYDER: It's glacially slow, and
implacable. And the general trend of the direction that
this gradual shift of archetypal insights is following, I
think, is that we are seeing the emergence of a gradual
shift from a world framed by God the Father toward a vision
of the interacting, interdependent world under the
universe, the cosmos, the Mother. And a shift from a
hierarchical and competitive view of the structure to an
interacting, nonhierarchical, ecological vision of the way
the world is structured ... not foolishly
cooperative (wolves will still eat caribou), but
interacting in an ecological model, rather than in a
competitive model.
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