Cantando las montañas

In his interview with Jacoby, Snyder explains his "evolving ability to visualize the whole of the landscape of the Sierra Nevada, to sort of feel it all moving underneath me." He speaks of the "periodicity of ridge, gorge, ridge, gorge, ridge . . . an interlacing network of, oh, 115-million-year-old geological formation rhythms."²⁹ When Jacoby asks Snyder how to do that in poetry, Snyder asks him if he has "ever tried singing a range of mountains" and then proceeds to tell him how to do so:

Well, you sit down somewhere where you're looking at a long mountain horizon. Then you sing it up and down all the way along like that. . . . I tried it on the mountains up above Death Valley, the Panamint range, one time. I tried it many times until I got it right. You know, until I got to know that skyline so well that I knew when I was following the melody that the mountains were making. At first it was hit or miss kind of. And then you get closer. Then you begin to feel it. Then you get so that it's a kind of source of form, right?³⁰

Evidently, Snyder is able to sing the rhythm of actual mountains as well as those that exist on silk or on paper. It is as Dgen says, "if you say the painting is not real, then the material phenomenal world is not real . . ." (p. ix). The sung rhythms of the Sierra may be heard just as surely as the periodicity of the ridges and gorges of the Cleveland scroll; the sections of Mountains and Rivers Without End also lead toward an observable rhythm. Some sections are short; some are of average length; some are extended. Some sections are prosaic; others are intensely poetic; others combine these modes of presentation. Some sections seem flat; others rise to moments of heightened emotion. However one chooses to measure the beat, it is clear that a cadence does exist and that it exists on several levels. The rhythm of the eye corresponds to the rhythm of the ear, and both are grounded in actuality. Tracing the measure in the units of the poem develops one's sense of the "longer" form, yet stepping back to observe the totality also serves to underscore the periodicity of the units. Any way one looks at it or hears it, rhythm is a "way in" to the poem.

Anthony Hunt, "Singing the Dyads: The Chinese Landscape Scroll and Gary Snyder's Mountains and Rivers Without End," Journal of Modern Literature, XXIII, 1 (Fall 1999), pp. 7-34. ©Foundation for Modern Literature, 2000.