Tawny Grammar: Essays

"Gary Snyder, still going strong at age 89, is often referred to as a member of the Beat Generation, which he was, but his work transcends that association. He’s had a long engagement with Zen Buddhism as well as with the natural world, what he might call ‘the wild.’ It’s a little bit perverse of me to include this little pamphlet of two essays in a roundup of the best books of 2019, because they were first published in 1990, but I guess wanted to make the point that we can learn new things from old writings. It’s my way of pushing back a little against the news cycle. Clearly the publisher thought it was worth doing as well! “How can we be at home with nature? How can we find ways to stop harming nature and live with it?” Snyder is best known as a poet, but he’s a powerful essayist as well. These two essays are irreducible in a way that reminds me of poetry: you can’t extract a simple message from them. He manages to do that with what’s—I don’t want to say simple prose in the sense of simplistic—but it’s not overly poetic. Somehow he manages to combine quite impressionistic accounts of his visits to the Far North, for example, with descriptions of Indian dances and his memories of his own childhood. It coheres without immediately giving you a simple answer to the overarching question, which is, ‘How can we be at home with nature? How can we find ways to stop harming nature and live with it?” He has this line: “Philosophy is a place-based exercise.” He’s again making the case that we need to think in place. There’s a kind of travel memoir in these short essays that look similar to Lopez’s much longer work. He links memories of his first dance with a girl—this really visceral memory of what it felt like to hold a woman’s body for the first time, on the edge of adolescence—with traditional dances of other cultures. He’s trying to use his own experience to leap across time and culture to make deeper connections. And I think what Snyder does really well is demonstrate what it is to be humble in the face of other forms of knowing, without being self-dramatizing in that search. The title of the book and of one of the essays is ‘Tawny Grammar.’ It’s a beautiful phrase. It comes from Henry David Thoreau , who cites a Spanish term for what he calls wild and dusky knowledge, which is ‘grammatica parda.’ Thoreau refers to nature as a mother leopard from whom we humans have been weaned too early. As a result, we’ve lost the tawny grammar that was ours by birthright. It’s a powerful image of a shared heritage, not just among peoples, but among all natural beings, that somehow is still within us and recoverable if only we attend to it."