Many Lives

"I feel ancient, as though I had
Lived many lives.
And may never now know
If I am a fool
Or have done what my
karma demands."

— Gary Snyder, circulated by Poetic Outlaws, July 23, 2026.

1. A neighbour, first

Before he was a name in an anthology he was a neighbour — a fellow writer, a former professor, the one and only Gary Snyder. That ordering matters, and I want to keep it in that order. The poems came to me the way the weather did: from someone nearby who worked with his hands and his attention and did not make a performance of either. Proximity to a working writer teaches something that reading alone cannot. You learn that the line on the page is the residue of a great deal of unglamorous labour, and that the labour is the point.

Snyder's whole practice was a refusal of the shortcut. Trail crew, lookout, translation, zazen, the slow accretion of Riprap and, over four decades, Mountains and Rivers Without End. He built at the pace the material allowed. That is an unfashionable pace now, and it is exactly the pace the work in this library requires.

2. The six lines

What arrests me in the passage is not the ancientness. It is the second half — the honest admission that the verdict is not available. May never now know if I am a fool, or have done what my karma demands. A lesser writer would resolve that. Snyder leaves it open, because leaving it open is the accurate report.

That is a discipline, not a mood. It is the same discipline this project tries to hold when it marks a claim established, licensed, analogical, or asserted rather than flattening all four into confidence. The register block in What the Mathematics Licenses is doing, in prose about Riemann and GUE statistics, what Snyder does in six lines about a life: naming the boundary of what can be known from inside the work.

3. Ancient, as though many lives

The feeling of having lived many lives is not mysticism when you have spent years inside an archive. Reconstructing a lineage — names, wills, migrations, the ordinary and the remarkable side by side — does something to a person's sense of duration. You stop experiencing your own span as the unit of measure. You start experiencing it as one segment of a much longer line, most of which you will never see either end of.

The archive taught me that most of the people in it never learned how their part turned out. They made a decision at a crossing and the consequence resolved two or three generations downstream. They were, by Snyder's terms, fools or doing what karma demanded, and no one told them which. The line held anyway.

The work that matters most is usually the work whose verdict is not scheduled to arrive during your life.

4. Against the receipt

A sycophantic system exists to deliver the verdict immediately and favourably. The like, the metric, the agreeable reply — each is a small false receipt saying yes, this was worth it, we are certain, you may stop wondering. That is the mechanism examined at length in The Sycophantic Civilization: the substitution of instant confirmation for the slow, expensive kind.

Snyder's six lines are the antidote in miniature, and they cost nothing to hold. They say: the receipt is not coming, and the work is still obligatory. A practice that can survive that sentence is a practice with a spine. One that cannot will drift toward whatever returns applause fastest — which is precisely the decay this library keeps describing under other names.

5. Karma as ledger

I read "what my karma demands" less as cosmology than as bookkeeping — and this project is fond of ledgers. Karma in this reading is simply the accounting of consequence over a period longer than the actor's attention span. The metabolic and thermodynamic ledgers elsewhere in this work do the same thing with energy: they insist that a cost deferred is not a cost avoided, and that the entry falls due whether or not anyone is watching the book.

Held that way, the poem is a claim about time horizons, not about the afterlife. You cannot audit your own life because the ledger closes after you do. What you can do is keep the entries honest while you have the pen.

6. What I take from it

Three things, plainly.

• Work at the pace the material allows. Forty years for one long poem is not slowness; it is fidelity to a subject that would have been falsified by haste.
• Do not resolve what is unresolved. Mark the register. "Fool or karma, unknown" is a complete and rigorous sentence.
• Assume the audience is downstream. A relative once asked why bother with the archive — nobody will care after you die. The answer is in the poem: the caring is not the payment, and it was never scheduled for now.

He was a neighbour before he was a monument, and the lines read better for it. Someone nearby, with dirt on his boots, saying the thing nobody says: I have been at this a long time, I still do not know, and I am going to keep going.