Gary Snyder, born May 8, 1930

Gary Snyder at home near Nevada City (photo by Dan Chung, Guardian UK, 2008)

Old Bones
Gary Snyder

Out there walking round, looking out for food,
a rootstock, a birdcall, a seed that you can crack
plucking, digging, snaring, snagging,
barely getting by,

no food out there on dusty slopes of scree—
carry some—look for some,
go for a hungry dream.
Deer bone, Dall sheep,
bones hunger home.

Out there somewhere
a shrine for the old ones,
the dust of the old bones,
old songs and tales.

What we ate—who ate what—
how we all prevailed.

"A Pasolini Anthology" (2011): the traps we make for ourselves

Even in the anything-goes decade of the 1970s the work of film-maker, author and playwright Pier Paolo Pasolini appeared over-the-top. His art was too much for some, who found his open homosexuality too challenging, and yet his Communist politics didn't go far enough for others. His life and work didn't hew to perceived boundaries, and his polemics challenged even revolutionary ideologues to the point of anger.

In Danger: A Pasolini Anthology presents the first translations of much of Pasolini's work in English, and although the book covers a dizzying amount of ground from poetry to polemics, it's a valuable resource toward an understanding of the Italian multi-media artist, who relished confronting realism with firebrand idealism and constantly questioned the effect of mainstream culture on human values.

This constant shift toward extremes of thought kept even his admirers off balance, and it may not be unrelated that his murder at the age of 53 remains a mystery of unresolved motive, an un-captured assailant, and a creative life cut short just at the point of a robust middle-age. Many point to his final essay, "What Is This Coup? I Know," as a cause of his final confrontation between art and life in a polarized and very politicized Italy.

These personal politics make Pasolini's inscrutable creativity a great source of intellectual challenge and interest for his translators and others interested in Pasolini's creative process. He was willing to consider many ideas in his desire to understand the simple thing that art creates: a reaction, no matter how inexplicable or iinescapable. Jack Hirschman, himself a multi-faceted artist, has edited these translations not so much with an eye toward easy comprehension (which Pasolini himself would likely abhor) but with a depth of feeling in the language, a sorting-out of ideas.

Class-consciousness, to get into the head of an American, needs a long, twisting road, an immensely complex operation: it needs the mediation of idealism, let’s say the bourgeois or petty-bourgeois variety, which for every American gives meaning to his entire life and which he absolutely cannot disregard. There they call it spiritualism. But both idealism in our interpretation and spiritualism in theirs are two ambiguous and incorrect words. Better, perhaps, it’s about the moralism (Anglo-Saxon in origin and naively adopted by the other Americans) that rules and shapes the facts of life, and that, in literature for instance — even the popular kind — is exactly the opposite of realism. Americans always need to idealize in the arts (especially at the level of average taste; for instance, the “illustrative” representation of their lives and their cities in their popular movies are forms of an immediate need to idealize).

The poems, essays and reviews feature an array of translators. Pasolini's earliest poetry -- strong, declarative, youthful -- is translated from the Friulian by Lucia Gazzino ("I leave my image to the conscience of the rich ... Long live the courage and the sorrow and the innocence of the poor!"). A growing disillusionment in a poem from 1960, "The Rage," is captured by musician Jonathan Richman ("I can't pretend now that I don't know the world / or that I don't know how it wants me.") Because he was also a film-maker much of Pasolini's writing is visually evocative: this is especially so of autobiographical poems that circle about ideas of youth and vulnerability but also the enthusiasm of the young ("I'm insatiable about our life / because something unique in the world can never be exhausted," he writes to one lover.)

I know, because I wake up with so much strength in my head:

the strength to suck up the new, sweet

power of daylight woken ahead of me,

and to express the absolute, already attained in secret and

in peace, with the most naked words: it's grief, my pain

that always has a reason, is never without an object,

is not neuroses, it's anger, disappointment,

it's fear, it's fury that physically bleeds

in my chest and throat.

Ah, morning! I know it, it's summertime, steady

as a sea, in it's freshness

the city's ready for an entire day,

and its noises are sheer and deeply grieving

like human beings become cool

doves, gentle elephants ... animals in life ...

(Summer, 1961)

As his poetry -- and world-view -- matures to a kind of wary disenchantment in the political upheavals that never really seem to change anything, he attaches a deepening mistrust of the right wing in politics. But he also faulted the hippie culture for losing its energy as it spread into a bourgeois mainstream of "hipness" and "cool" ideas that were co-opted into advertising and the culture at large.

Yet he held fast to his cantankerous heroes for their indomitable spirit: Ezra Pound, for one, even though he had ardently supported Fascism during the war -- and after it, as well. This is, after reading several of the essays here, a provocative stance meant as a pin-prick to easy categorization. Many of his more blatantly acid judgements ("Neruda is a bad poet") read as asides to a larger arguments rather than generalities by themselves.

Reading the twisting and ideological essays in translation, one might understand the difficulty in determining Pasolini's intent and his expression. Philosophical word-play and semantics can spring their own traps in any language. Since the writer himself was walking an ideological balance-beam of ideas it is uncertain whether the often complex result is Pasolini's thought, or the individual translator's effect of the phrasing he chooses. This is less so in the poetry, which offers itself a wider field of meaning.

The individual concerns of Pasolini's essays -- fascism, racism, intolerance, poverty -- remain universal though his targets are specific: the very first essay included, "Civil War," is a Pasolini blast aimed at racism of all kinds: "It is racist hatred -- that is, nothing less than the exterior aspect of the deep aberration of every conservatism and every fascism." It would be more than interesting to read what the agent-provocateur would make of recent political uprisings, as well as the latest outrages by Silvio Berlusconi in Italy, and what's about to happen as we peer with one eye covered into the future. A reader has a pretty firm idea it would be best to keep our wits about us.

His last observation -- "we're all in danger" -- was made in a final interview hours before he died in a mysterious assault, and it acts as an ultimate warning and a final lesson to watch out for all the traps, to be wary of the comfortable solutions that seem not to threaten us, but to enfold us in their easy choices. In our own creative life, and in our culture of affluence, many times these are traps we make for ourselves.

The art and ethnography of Miguel Covarrubias: "Mexico South" (1946)

A map of Mexico, as illustrated by Miguel Covarrubias

The history of Mexico is a surprising story to most Americans, if they are aware of any events beyond the American defense of the Alamo. Today's holiday, Cinco de Mayo, commemorates the Mexican military surprise victory over French occupying forces at the battle of Puebla on May 5, 1862. It's not even considered the most important national patriotic holiday in Mexico, which occurs on September 16th, celebrating the country's declaration of Independence from Spain in 1810. Mexico's large history, like many of its artists, remains primarily an unexplored story north of the Rio Grande.

Mexico South is one of those truly rare finds at a library book sale. For fifty cents I discovered in this lavish, out-of-print volume the ancient pre-Columbian culture of Mexico's Isthmus of Tehuantepec -- the area shared by the states of Oaxaca and Chiapas -- in the writing of a witty and charming guide, Miguel Covarrubias, one of Mexico's premier twentieth-century artists.

Covarrubias in his various careers was also a filmmaker, ethnographer, linguist, and commercial artist who created covers for many magazines. He spent years researching the ancient Olmec culture, documenting the land and the people of Tehuantepec, as well as its seven languages. And this was only one of his cultural studies; his 1936 book, The Island of Bali, is still in print, and was just republished in 2008.

Young tehunas carrying flowers, illustration by M. Covarrubias

Mexico South is filled with Covarrubias's own colorful paintings and detailed photographs. It's a travel book of the researched, historical past and the busy, daily life in the area stretching the 117 miles at Mexico's narrowest point between Juchitan on the west and Coatzacoalcos on the east. He illustrates the region's ancient history and details the peoples' complex relationship with the Spanish conquistadores who transformed the culture in the 16th century.

These ideas are part of a larger Covarrubias theme, which he developed over years: that the Indian cultures of Mexico became a dynamic force on Pacific Ocean civilizations as far away as Easter Island.

Chiapas (detail), by M. Covarrubias

While some of his speculations have been described as the ideas of one who "talked too much, knew too much, and felt too deeply about his subject," some of Covarrubias's ideas have since been proven to have some basis in fact. In Mexico South, the study of the Tehuantepec festivals show how much the ancient religious beliefs melded with the Catholic, Spanish rituals of holy days and the role of the saints in daily life.

"It is difficult to understand the religious outlook of the people, and, for that matter, of most Mexicans, if measured from the orthodox Catholic point of view. The Indians first became Catholics at the point of a sword and they ended by sincerely believing in and loving the saints, not only because they found moral comfort and spiritual glamour in them, but also because the religious ceremonial provided an outlet for drama and fun.

... the Indians had a sumptuous and intensely dramatic ceremonial of their own before the coming of the Spaniards, with much music and dancing, with luxurious pageants and awesome rites staged in an outdoor setting of ample plazas, platforms, pyramids and pennants. ... Esoteric mysticism was one of their strongest traits, and in many instances their religious concepts coincided with those of their conquerors."

Miguel Covarrubias

Although Spanish Catholics discontinued the festival of Mardi Gras for a time during the 1700s in New Orleans, in Tehuantepec the spring festivals surrounding an area's patron saint took on some of the trappings familiar to anyone on Bourbon Street: brass bands, parades of colorful, decorated floats, food and trinkets tossed from a great height to a waiting -- and mostly drunk -- crowd below. Here's a description of the end of the Spring festival in Jucatan, which the author witnessed:

"The climax came when the clarinets announced the regional tune of Tehuantepec, the Zandunga. Cymbals clashed; the saxophone and trumpet and four clarinets played as if each man was playing for himself, a pandemonium of flowery variations punctuated by the stately, awkward beats on the bass drum. The band then played a diana to announce the culmination of the entire feast; the time had come for the Tirada de Fruta, the fruit-throwing ...

A group of handsome girls appeared at the end of the street. They bore on their heads brightly-colored xicalpextles, lacquered gourds full of fruit, cakes, and clay toys, topped by a monumental arrangement of tissue-paper flags cut into lacy patterns. It was a luscious spectacle of reds, yellows, black and gold , the little flags fluttering overhead.

The girls climbed the church steps to the roof, the bells tolled rapidly, firecrackers exploded, ragamuffins took positions. The flute and drum played an exciting "war" theme, and fruits of all sorts -- mangoes, bananas, large pineapples -- and toys began to fly down from the roof. ...

Bowl after bowl of fruit was emptied into the mostly-drunk crowd; coconuts and pineapples added a touch of danger to the sport. The excitement lasted until the last xicalpextle of fruit and toys was emptied. Then everybody went home to rest, some with bruises and bumps but proud of their prizes, not because of their intrinsic value, but because they were captured so dangerously."

Covarrubias ends Mexico South on a somber note. When he was traveling and writing after World War II, Covarrubias was aware that extremism could easily take root in the unsettled politics of Mexico and its poverty. "Fascism lies defeated and broken in Europe, but it survives in the New World. The native variety is run on a more modest scale ... its ideal of society remains the pattern of a docile and serviceable lower class of pious, ignorant, and contented peasants ruled by that privileged triumverate: the Church, the Military, and the Landlord -- or his modern counterpart, the business executive." More than sixty years later, the threat of Fascism has receded while the poverty remains, even as American corporations find in Mexico a labor market -- and a troubled economy -- expanding with the ever-increasing speed of the 21st century.