What was read this week: Jan 12-18

“The world is watching: one cannot walk through a meadow or forest without a ripple of report spreading out from one’s passage.”
—Gary Snyder The Etiquette of Freedom

Why Ignoring Poetry Could Be Hurting Your Personal Growth

Always tugging at the back of one’s mind is the question of what this all means, quickly followed by how should I live?

A central concern of our species, perhaps a failure of consciousness or perhaps the divine imperative or the outgrowth of the ability to ask after life itself, this has been with us since the beginning.

I know that even the Neanderthal carried on ritual observances for their dead, so it isn’t something exclusive to us but seems a component to our phylogenetic heritage, something central to any species with consciousness.

Creation stories and cosmology itself carry the seeds of the ethical, and any ontological or existential exploration will inevitably bring ethical exploration. How we approach these questions surely each of us must come to terms with in our own ways.

I saw two different approaches in my reading this week but somehow they cohere because somehow it all coheres.

Even if the center cannot hold and the falcon cannot hear the falconer, it all coheres because it must.

Gary Snyder’s Wisdom: How Nature and Language Shape Our Lives

But where does one find that faith?

For Gary Snyder in The Practice of the Wild, it is in the backcountry forests, in living close to the lands as the indigenous peoples, it is place becoming home, and it is in the myriad of religious, cultural, linguistic and ethical universes springing from the land.

I had read this collection of essays originally when I was around 19 and really had no ability to appreciate the complexity with which Snyder contemplates the world.

Here is a man who seems completely fine with the unanswered “big” questions, perhaps growing out of the Zen tradition of which he has been a student for most of his 90-plus years.

How Language Defines Your Reality

Here is a man who can appreciate the Zen koan, its ability to provoke thought and the immediacy of experience in the sudden onslaught of enlightenment or provoke the trappings of trying to grasp after meanings of the infinite reality with the finite mind.

And the writing in these collections of essays leaves one with this experience of feeling in awe of his vast experience in life.

The essays range across time and space; sometimes Snyder is in the Outback of Australia contemplating the difference in the experience of time and creation story as one travels by foot or by car between the sacred landmarks and sites of the indigenous peoples.

Other essays find him in Japan or India or the isolated tundras of Alaska as a tribe fights between preserving its heritage and language and the need for its children to earn an income so that there might be a tribe left to preserve the heritage for.

But always for Snyder, the idea of language as a carrier of everything—cultural, religious, ethical, etc.—is the central preoccupation. How does our language interact with the world and how does the world shape our language?

And always in these essays, whether tracing the forgotten Buddhist paths between mountaintop shrines or examining what exactly is the word wilderness or wild, Snyder returns to the ethical.

These essays become a book of instructions in how to be in the world.

Instructions which I know I fail to carry out, instructions with which I’m not totally sure I can even hear in my experience of the world.

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The Powerful Role of Poetry in Building Emotional Resilience

But for Snyder, we must rise to the asking after these questions, we must even if we cannot hope to answer them, because they are made explicit in our experience of the world.

They must be acknowledged even if they cannot be answered or even said.

What really struck me with Snyder on this revisit is the vastness of his thought.

Even having read this collection because of an assignment from my first mentor in poetry, the great Nathan Hauke, I always felt like Snyder was a poet first and foremost, but what I’ve found is that he is a connoisseur of the world.

Myth or song or dance or idea becomes just as important for him as poetry.

This is something you usually don’t see from a poet; usually, the poetry becomes the ultimate in expression—it is the source for that particular viewpoint in the world prioritized above all else.

Think of any Harold Bloom book. Snyder could never write that type of book because the experience of walking or of a dog sled or a sacred dance has no more hierarchical importance than poetry.

Because for Snyder, there is no hierarchy; everything is as it is.

This is something to strive for in our own lives. Where can we replace a perhaps primary mode of experience with the world with something underdeveloped or perhaps unexplored?

And how does that change both us and the world we encounter?

Wittgenstein and Poetry

In a wilderness of his own is Wittgenstein, a wilderness of language where we’ve lost the ordinary everyday understanding of words, which has given rise to these deep questions.

In Wittgenstein’s thinking, if we could recover language, we’d be able to free ourselves from philosophy.

I am still on my Wittgenstein kick of the last few weeks. In fact, it seems like 2025 has so far been dominated by him.

This week I made my way through a very short, and yet densely constructed, secondary source on his philosophy called How to Read Wittgenstein.

I love this little series of books edited by the English philosopher Simon Critchley. I own a few of them. They are very short introductions to the major thinking of a philosopher, and they have proved to be valuable for grappling with these heavy thinkers.

Ray Monk is the author of this edition on Wittgenstein. He was the author of the biography of the thinker which I had read a few weeks ago.

His work really helped me understand what I had tried to comprehend in Tractatus, which forms the basis from which Wittgenstein’s philosophy springs from for the rest of his life.

He has an idea of a pictorial quality of language that eventually becomes a barb in his thinking and undoes his philosophy. But what comes to replace it, this idea of a language game, begins to dominate his later philosophy.

A language game is how Wittgenstein sees language operating in the everyday as an activity within this larger thing called life. He senses that a lot of the problems in traditional philosophy are this misuse of language, where the everyday activity of language in use gets subbed in for these highly specialized terms like ‘being’ or ‘existence’.

A language game is the composition of the word in use.

It is the rules of the game that determine what a word ultimately means.

Ray Monk does a great job illustrating it with a simple one-word sentence: “Fire.”

Now, depending on the context or the rules of the language game, this one word could mean a lot of different things.

It could be a warning that there is a fire, or it could be a command to shoot in a war setting.

This goes to show how language is dependent on the context it is used and cannot be freed from it; it is bound up in it.

How to Read

But more than anything regarding Wittgenstein, I’ve come to be really drawn to his ideas that art, or poetry, or music has just as much to teach us about life as science or psychology can.

Increasingly it seems, towards the end of his life, a lot of the frustration he felt in society was the prominence on science or therapy to teach us the meaning of life, where he felt like a poem was a better teacher.

I’m not sure about how he would feel about it, but even those terms themselves become slippery—where is a poem a poem and not a piece of prose, and where is a science just a science and not an art?

Like all categories, when they are pushed on, they seem to buckle under the pressure.

Further, who defines the categories? If an artist says this is art, how can I argue against him?

Who am I? Who is he?

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