the buzoku style
“we are the primitives
of an unknown culture —”
—Gary Snyder (27 October 1991 GSJ)*
* Paraphrase of a 1911 statement by the Italian Futurist sculptor, Umberto Boccioni. Buzoku means “the Tribe,” a loose-knit group in Japan in the 1960s and ’70s. Nanao Sakaki (1923–2008) was a founder and Gary Snyder a member who carried knowledge of countercultural movements between Turtle Island and Yaponesia. See Katsunori Yamazato, “Snyder, Sakaki, and the Tribe,” in Gary Snyder: Dimensions of a Life, ed. Jon Halper (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1991), 93–106.
In The Practice of the Wild, Gary Snyder writes about the prospect of a “sophisticated post industrial ‘future primitive’ agriculture” that will “go with rather than against nature’s tendency” (PW 90). Movement with rather than against nature (自然 [zi-ran, the self-so]) is a distinctive feature—a basic intention—of future primitive life. In my years of reading Gary Snyder, I have come to regard the future primitive as a Snyderian ideal type.
The future primitive appreciates high quality information. Hence, dot info. This site aims to encourage and inform the community of inquiry that has grown up around Gary Snyder’s art and song.
High Quality Information
A life spent seeking it
Like a worm in the earth,
Like a hawk. Catching threads
Sketching bones
Guessing where the road goes.
Lao-tzu says
To forget what you knew is best.
That’s what I want:
To get these sights down,
Clear, right to the place
Where they fade
Back into the mind of my times.
The same old circuitry
But some paths color-coded
Empty
And we’re free to go.
—Gary Snyder (LOITR, 130)