Tawny Grammar by Gary Snyder

Author:Gary Snyder [Snyder, Gary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781640091764
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2019-07-25T00:00:00+00:00

TO SPEAK OF an “ecology of language” might start with recognizing the common coexistence of levels, codes, slangs, dialects, whole languages, and languages even of different families—in one speaker. John Gumperz (1964) describes the situation of a village in North India where “local dialects serve as vernaculars for most villagers. There may also be some untouchable groups with distinct vernaculars of their own. In addition to the vernaculars there will be several argots. One form of the subregional dialect is used with traders from nearby bazaar towns. Other different forms may be employed with wandering performers or religious ascetics . . . wandering ascetics of the Krishna cult might use Braj Bhasa while worshipers of Ram would use Avadhi. Standard Hindi is the norm for intercourse with educated outsiders. . . . In business transactions or when talking to educated Muslims, Urdu is called for. Furthermore the educated people know English and there are others who have at least some knowledge of Sanskrit” (p. 420).

So we are back in the villages. The local mix of dialects and standard languages is unique to the place. All are rooted in nature; but their vines and creepers reach worldwide. (But tonight the people out in the Alaskan bush, in McGrath, Kobuk, or Kiana, are watching TV off the satellite, maybe the same program that’s playing down at the end of the bar.)

That’s where the classics might come in. The Classic provides a kind of norm. Not the statistical norm of behaviorism but a norm that is proved by staying power and informed consensus. Staying power through history is related to the degree of intentionality, intensity, mindfulness, playfulness, and incorporation of previous strategies and standards within the medium—plus creative reuse or reinterpretation of the received forms, plus intellectual coherence, time-transcending long-term human relevance, plus resonances with the deep images of the unconscious. To achieve this status a text or tale must be enacted across many nations and a few millennia and must have received multiple translations.

The immediate time frame of human experience is the climates and ecologies of the Holocene—the “present moment,” the ten or eleven thousand years since the latest ice age. Within the traditional literatures there are probably a few complete tales that are that old, as well as a huge quantity of later literature composed of elements borrowed from the oldest tradition. For most of this time, human populations were relatively small and travel took place on foot, by horse, or by sail. Whether Greece, Germania, or Han China, there were always nearby areas of forest, and wild animals, migratory waterfowl, seas full of fish and whales, and these were part of the experience of every active person. Animals as characters in literature and as universal presences in the imagination and in the archetypes of religion are there because they were there. Ideas and images of wastelands, tempests, wildernesses, and mountains are born not of abstraction but of experience: cisalpine, hyperboreal, circumpolar, transpacific, or beyond the pale. This is the world people lived in up until the late nineteenth century.

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