One
A Selection from Wendell Berry
A Cycle Through Nature
Wendell Berry We have reached a point at which we must either consciously desire and choose and determine the future of the earth or submit to such an involvement in our destructiveness that the earth, and ourselves with it, must certainly be destroyed. And we have come to this at a time when it is hard, if not impossible, to foresee a future that is not terrifying. (46) Berry’s work is an ongoing exploration of man’s use of and relationship to the land, and his writing constitutes, as Gary Tolliver has said, one man’s “continuing search for avenues of reentry into a proper state of harmony with the natural world” (13). To proponents of modern “progress,” Berry’s ideas must seem regressive, unrealistic, radical. But no advice could be more needed and more practical, if we are to progress.
Meditation in the Spring Rain
In the April rain I climed up to drink the virgin forest standing here, the amplitude of the lives water leaping off the hill, of our beginning, of which no speech white over the rocks. Where the mossy root remains. Out of the town’s lost history, of a sycamore cups the flow, I drank buried in minds long buried, she has come, and saw the branches feathered with green. brought back by a memory near death. I see her The thickets, I said, send up their praise in her dusky clothes, hair uncombed, the children at dawn. Was that what I meant I meant into the turning and changing my words to have the heft and grace, the flight circle of all lovers. On this height and weight of the very hill, its life our labor changes into flight. rising-or was it some old exultation that abides with me? We’ll not soon escape the faith of our fathers no more than crazy old Mrs. Gaines, whom my grandmother remembers standing balanced wighty years ago atop a fence in Port Royal, Kentucky, singin: “One Lord, one Faith, and one Cornbread.” They had a cage built for her in a room, “nearly as big as the room, not cramped up,” and when she grew wild they kept her there. But mostly she went free in the town, and they allowed the children to go for walks with her. She strayed once beyond where they thought she went, was lost to them, “and they had an aweful time finding her.” For her, to be free was only to be lost. What is it about her that draws me on, so that my mind becomes a child to follow after her? An old woman when my grandmother was a girl, she must have seen
The Supplanting Where the road came, no longer bearing men, but briars, honeysuckle, buckbush and wild grape, the house fell to ruin, and only the old wife’s daffodils rose in spring among the wild vines to be domestic and to keep the faith, and her peonies drenched the tangle with white bloom. For a while in the years ofits wilderness a wayfaring drunk slept clinched to the floor there in the cold nights. And then I came, and set fire to the remnants ofhouse and shed, and let time hurry in the flame. I fired it so that all would burn, and watched the blaze settle on the waste like a shawl. I knew those old ones departed then, and I arrived. As the fire fed, I felt rise in me something that would not bear my name-something that bears us through the flame, and is lightened of us, and is glad.
One
Sowing In the stilled place that once was a road going down from the town to the river, and where the lives of marriages grew a house, cistern and barn, flowers, the tilted stone of borders, and the deeds of their lives ran to neglect, and honeysuckle and then the fire overgrew it all, I walk heavy with seed, spreading on the cleared hill the beginnings of green, clover and grass to be pasture. Between history’s death upon the place and the trees that would have come I claim, and act, and am mingled in the fate of the world.
Season
One Day
One Day
AAJonquil Jonquilfor forMary MaryPenn Penn (Selection) (Selection)
Mary Mary Penn Penn waswas sick, sick, though though sheshe saidsaid nothing nothing about about it when it when sheshe heard heard Elton Elton getget up up andand light light thethe lamp lamp andand renew renew thethe fires. fires. HeHe dressed dressed andand went went outout with with thethe lantern lantern to to milk milk andand feed feed andand harness harness thethe team. team. It It waswas early early March, March, andand sheshe could could hear hear thethe wind wind blowing, blowing, rattling rattling things. things. SheShe threw threw thethe covers covers offoff andand satsat up up onon thethe side side of the of the bed, bed, feeling feeling as as sheshe diddid how how easy easy it would it would be be to to let let herher head head lean lean down down again again onto onto herher knees. knees. ButBut sheshe gotgot up,up, putput onon herher dress dress andand sweater, sweater, andand went went to to thethe kitchen. kitchen. Nor Nor diddid sheshe mention mention it when it when Elton Elton came came back back in, in, bringing bringing thethe milk, milk, with with thethe smell smell of the of the barn barn cold cold in in
One Day
“How’re you this morning?” he asked her, giving her a pat as she strained the milk. And she said, not looking at him, for she did not want him to know how she felt, “Just fine.”
“You’re not hungry?” he asked. “Not very. I’ll eat something after while.” He started out the door and then turned back. “Don’t worry about the chores. I’ll be back in time to do everything.” She was sick. At first it was a consolation to her to have the whole day to herself to be sick in. But by the time she got the kitchen straightened up, even that small happiness had left her. She had a fever, she guessed, for every motion she made seemed to carry her uneasily beyond the vertical. She had a floaty feeling that made her unreal to herself. And
“She was sick and alone.”
One Day
finally, when she put the broom away, When she woke, the room was warm. A teakettle on the heating she let herself sag down into one of the chairs at the table. She ached. stove was muttering and steaming. Though the wind was still blowing She was overpoweringly tired. hard, the room was full of sunlight. She was sick and alone. And perhaps The lamp on the narrow mantelshelf behind the stove was filled and clean, the sorrow that she felt for herself its chimney gleaming, and so was the was not altogether unjustified. one on the stand by the bed. Josie The fire had burned low in the stove. Tom was sitting in the rocker by the window, sunlight flowing in on the Though she still wore her coat, she unfinished long embroidery she had was chilled again and shaking. For draped over her lap. a long time, perhaps, she had been thinking of nothing, and now misery And so Mary knew all the story of alerted her again to the room. The her day. Elton, going by Josie Tom’s in wind ranted and sucked at the the half-light, had stopped and called. house’s comers. She could hear its billows and shocks, as if somebody She could hear his voice, raised to off in the distance were shaking a carry through the wind: great rug. She felt, not a draft, but the whole atmosphere of the room moving coldly against her. She went “Mrs. Hardy, Mary’s sick, and I have to go over to Walter’s to plow.” into the other room, but the fire there also needed building up. She So he had known. He had thought of could not bring herself to do it. She her. He had told Josie Tom. was shaking, she ached, she could think only of lying down. Standing Feeling herself looked at, Josie Tom near the stove, she undressed, put raised her head and smiled. “Well, on her nightgown again, and went are you awake? Are you all right?” to bed.
One Day
One Day
One World
Contempt for Small Places:
Newspaper editorials deplore such human-caused degradations of the oceans as the Gulf of Mexico’s “dead zone,” and reporters describe practices like “mountain removal” mining in eastern Kentucky. Some day we may finally understand the connections. The health of the oceans depends on the health of rivers; the health of rivers depends on the health of small streams; the health ofsmall streams depends on the health of their watersheds. The health of the water is exactly the same as the health of the land; the health ofsmall places is exactly the same as the health of large places. As we know, disease is hard to confine. Because natural law is in force everywhere, infections move. We cannot immunize the continents and the oceans against our contempt for small places and small streams. Small destructions add up, and finally they are understood collectively as large destructions. Excessive nutrient run off from farms and animal factories in the Mississippi watershed has caused, in the Gulf of Mexico, a hypoxic or “dead zone” of five or six thousand square miles. In forty-odd years, strip mining in the Appalachian coal fields, culminating in mountain removal, has gone far toward the destruction ofa whole region, with untold damage to the region’s people, to watersheds, and to the waters downstream. There is not a more exemplary history ofour contempt for small places than that of Eastern Kentucky coal mining, which has enriched many absentee corporate shareholders
and left the region impoverished and defaced. Coal industry representatives are now defending mountain removal and its attendant damage to forests, streams, wells, dwellings, roads, and community life by saying that in “10, 15, 20 years” the land will be restored, and that such mining has “created the [level] land” needed for further industrial development. But when you remove a mountain you also remove the topsoil and the forest, and you do immeasurable violence to the ecosystem and the watershed. These things are not to be restored in ten or twenty years, or in ten or twenty hundred years. As for the manufacture of level places for industrial development, the supply has already far exceeded any foreseeable demand. And the devastation continues. The contradictions in the state’s effort “to balance the competing interests” were stated as follows by Ewell Balltrip, director of the Kentucky Appalachian Commission: “If you don’t have mining, you don’t have an economy, and if you don’t have an economy you don’t have a way for the people to live. But ifyou don’t have environmental quality, you won’t create the kind of place where people want to live.” Yes. And if the clearly foreseeable result is a region of flat industrial sites where nobody wants to live, we need a better economy.
Rain It is a day of the earth’s renewing without making any man’s doing or help. Though I have fields I do not go out to work in them. Though I have crops standing in rows I do not go out to ook st them or gather what has ripened or how the weeds from the balks. Though I have animals I stay dry in the house while they graze in the wet. Though I have buildings they stand closed under their roofs. Though I have fences they go without me. My life stands in place, covered, like a hayrick or a mushroom.
One
Song (4) for Guy Davenport Within the circles of our lives we dance the circles of the years, the circles of the seasons within the circles of the years, the cycles ofthe moon within the circles of the seasons, the circles of our reasons within the cycles of the moon. Again, again we come and go, changed, changing. Hands join, unjoin in love and fear, grief and joy. The circles turn, each giving into each, into all. Only music keeps us here, each by all the others held. In the hold of hands and eyes we turn in pairs, that joining joining each to all again. And then we turn aside, alone, out of the sunlight gone into the darker circles of return.
Bibliography Berry, Wendell. Fidelity Five Stories. New York and San Francisco: Pantheon Books, 1992 Berry, Wendell. Collected Poems 1957-1982. New York: North Point Press; Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1987 Berry, Wendell. The Way of Ignorance and Other Essays. Berkeley: Counter Point, 2005
Designed by Lauren Blackburn Washington University in St. Louis Sam Fox School of Art and Design