June 20, 2002
There is no separation between “in town” and “out of town”. It is a practical distinction (out of convenience I suppose), but it only goes so far. This no separation speaks of an ever-fluent experience that underlies surface observations, crisscrossing back and forth with no clear-cut lines of border. Language is an attempt to play in these areas of no-distinction, no-borders, or no-nature. As I’m sitting here on my summer porch, the 12 miles between here and Houlton expand and collapse like two dogs chasing squirrels back and forth between woodpiles. Walking down the sidewalk in Market Square looking at storefront windows is just as natural, in this sense, as walking a trail in the backwoods. There is no escaping nature. There is no escaping human nature. It is always what we are and where we are, regardless of the mileage. Here is something else from Gary Snyder. This appeared in the preface of his 1992 collection of new and selected poems No Nature, which was nominated for the National Book Award that year.
No Nature. Human societies each have their own nutty fads, mass delusions, and enabling mythologies. Daily life still gets done. Wild nature is probably equally goofy, with a stunning variety of creatures somehow getting by in all these landscapes. Nature also means the physical universe, including the urban, industrial, and toxic. But we do not easily know nature, or even ourselves. Whatever it actually is, it will not fulfil our conceptions or assumptions. It will dodge our expectations and theoretical models. There is no single or set "nature" either as "the natural world" or "the nature of things." The greatest respect we can pay to nature is not to trap it, but to acknowledge that it eludes us and that our own nature is also fluid, open, and conditional. Language is an open space to move in, with the whole body, the whole mind. My gesture has been with language.