January 07th, 2019

Gary Snyder:  "consciousness, mind, imagination, and language are fundamentally wild.  'Wild' as in wild ecosystems—richly interconnected, interdependent, and incredibly complex.  Diverse, ancient and full of information. At root the real question is how we understand the concepts of order, freedom, and chaos.  Is art an imposition of order on chaotic nature, or is art  . . . a matter of discovering the grain of things, of uncovering the measured chaos that structures the natural world? . . . The 'art of the wild' is to see art in the context of the process of nature—nature as process rather than as product or commodity—because 'wild' is a name for the way that phenomena continually actualize themselves.  Seeing this also serves to acknowledge the autonomy and integrity of the nonhuman part of the world, an 'Other' that we are barely beginning to be able to know . . . The art of the wild can well be irreverent, inharmonious, ugly, frazzled, unpredictable, simple, and clear—or virtually inaccessible."