Pasja i odpowiedzialność. Gary Snyder o Dymiącej Górze

Miłosz Markiewicz

The paper discusses the "Mount Saint Helens" sections from Gary Snyder's Danger on Peaks (2004) with regards to the poet's first snowpeak climb and Native American beliefs that relate to the Pacific Northwest. The volcano, seen as the vehicle for one's closer and careful look at the terrain, becomes a poetic and intimate center of the world, where the poet correlates his vision, recollections, and language with those left by the Native peoples of the land. The mountain is rendered a point of intersection, where divergent cultural and religious trails meet in order to re-create the view of Loowit, as well as to arouse the hidden human emotions of fear, remarkable elation, admiration and awe when the human faces the forces of nature. The elemental and the human, disasters and catastrophes, are here to bring forth the seeds of awareness of the fragile, momentary feeling of interdependence as well as responsibility between the human and nature.