M MONDAY, ONDAY, DECEMBER DECEMBER 7TH, 7TH, 2015 2015
The Morning’s News THE COLLECTED ESSAYS, POETRY & SHORT STORIES OF WENDELL BERRY
CONTENTS ESSAY
8
COMPROMISE, HELL! We are destroying our country—I mean our country itself, our land. This is a terrible thing to know, but it is not a reason for despair unless we decide to continue the destruction. If we decide to continue the destruction, that will not be because we have no other choice. This destruction is not necessary. It is not inevitable, except that by our submissiveness we make it so. We Americans are not usually thought to be a submissive people, but of course we are. Why else would we allow our country to be destroyed?
CONTENTS
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20
THE MORNING’S NEWS
THE SUPPLANTING
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24
26
AWAKE AT NIGHT
A WET TIME
TO KNOW THE DARK
POETRY
STORY
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A JONQUIL FOR MARY PENN It was a different world, a new world to her, that she came into then—a world of poverty and community. They were in a neighborhood of six households, counting their own, all within half a mile of one another. Besides themselves there were Braymer and Josie Hardy and their children; Tom Hardy and his wife, also named Josie; Walter and Thelma Cotman and their daughter, Irene; Jonah and Daisy Hample and their children; and Uncle Isham and Aunt Frances Quail, who were Thelma Cotman’s and Daisy Hample’s parents.
BIOGRAPHY
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WENDELL BERRY: PEOPLE, LAND AND FIDELITY 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.
SOURCES
38 3
WENDELL BERRY COLLECTED
The ten commands at the heart of Berry’s work, given in an address at the College of the Atlantic.
COMMAND
Compr Hell! 4
ESSAY
romise, W
e are destroying our country— I mean our country itself, our land. This is a terrible thing to know, but it is not a reason for despair unless we decide to continue the destruction. If we decide to continue the destruction, that will not be because we have no other choice. This destruction is not necessary. It is not inevitable, except that by our submissiveness we make it so. We Americans are not usually thought to be a submissive people, but of course we are. Why else would we allow our country to be destroyed? Why else would we be rewarding its destroyers? Why else would we all—by proxies we have given to greedy corporations and corrupt politicians—be participating in its destruction? Most of us are still too sane to piss in our own cistern, but we allow others to do so, and we reward them for it. We reward them so well, in fact, that those who piss in our cistern are wealthier than the rest of us. How do we submit? By not being radical enough. Or by not being thorough enough, which is the same thing. 5
COMPROMISE, HELL!
WENDELL BERRY COLLECTED
The ten commands at the heart of Berry’s work, given in an address at the College of the Atlantic.
COMMAND
01
COMPROMISE, HELL! 8
Beware the justice of Nature.
Since the beginning of the conservation effort in our country, conservationists have too often believed that we could protect the land without protecting the people. This has begun to change, but for a while yet we will have to reckon with the old assumption that we can preserve the natural world by protecting wilderness areas while we neglect or destroy the economic landscapes—the farms and ranches and working forests—and the people who use them. That assumption is understandable in view of the worsening threats to wilderness areas, but it is wrong. If conservationists hope to save even the wild lands and wild creatures, they are going to have to address issues of economy, which is to say issues of the health of the landscapes and the towns and cities where we do our work, and the quality of that work, and the wellbeing of the people who do the work. Governments seem to be making the opposite error, believing that the people can be adequately protected without protecting the land. And here I am not talking about parties or party doctrines, but about the dominant political assumption. Sooner or later, governments will have to recognize that if the land does not prosper, nothing else can prosper for very long. We can have no industry or trade or wealth or security if we don’t uphold the health of the land and the people and the people’s work. It is merely a fact that the land, here and everywhere, is suffering. We have the “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico and undrinkable
ESSAY
THE CORPORATE OUTSKIRTS WERE BUILT BY PEOPLE WHO MANIFESTLY TAKE NO PRIDE IN THE PLACE, SEE NO VALUE IN LIVES LIVED THERE, AND RECOGNIZE NO NEIGHBORS.
water to attest to the toxicity of our agriculture. We know that we are carelessly and wastefully logging our forests. We know that soil erosion, air and water pollution, urban sprawl, the proliferation of highways and garbage are making our lives always less pleasant, less healthful, less sustainable, and our dwelling places more ugly. Nearly forty years ago my state of Kentucky, like other coal-producing states, began an effort to regulate strip mining. While that effort has continued, and has imposed certain requirements of “reclamation,” strip mining has become steadily more destructive of the land and the land’s future. We are now permitting the destruction of entire mountains and entire watersheds.
No war, so far, has done such extensive or such permanent damage. If we know that coal is an exhaustible resource, where as the forests over it are with proper use inexhaustible, and that strip mining destroys the forest virtually forever, how can we permit this destruction? If we honor at all that fragile creature the topsoil, so long in the making, so miraculously made, so indispensable to all life, how can we destroy it? If we believe, as so many of us profess to do, that the Earth is God’s property and is full of His glory, how can we do harm to any part of it?
WENDELL BERRY COLLECTED COMMAND
02
The ten commands at the heart of Berry’s work, given in an address at the College of the Atlantic.
Understand that there can be no successful human economy apart from Nature or in defiance of Nature.
The old buildings look good because they were built by people who respected themselves and wanted the respect of their neighbors. 10
ESSAY
In Kentucky, as in other unfortunate states, and again at great public cost, we have allowed—in fact we have officially encouraged—the establishment of the confined animal-feeding industry, which exploits and abuses everything involved: the land, its people, the animals, and the consumers. If we love our country, as so many of us profess to do, how can we so desecrate it?
COMPROMISE, HELL!
But the economic damage is not confined just to our farms and forests. For the sake of “job creation” in Kentucky, and in other backward states, we have lavished public money on corporations that come in and stay only so long as they can exploit people here more cheaply than elsewhere. The general purpose of the present economy is to exploit, not to foster or conserve. Look carefully, if you doubt me, at the centers of the larger towns in virtually every
part of our country. You will find that they are economically dead or dying. Good buildings that used to house needful, useful, locally owned small businesses of all kinds are now empty or have evolved into junk stores or antique shops. But look at the houses, the churches, the commercial buildings, the courthouse, and you will see that more often tan not they are comely and well-made. And then go look at the corporate outskirts: the chain stores, the fast-food joints, the food and fuel stores that no longer can be called service stations, the motels. Try to find something comely or well made there. What is the difference? The difference is that the old town centers were built by people who were proud of their place and who realized a particular value in living there. The old buildings look good because they were built by people who respected themselves and wanted the respect of their neighbors. The corporate outskirts, on the contrary, were built by people who manifestly take no pride in the place, see no value in lives lived there, and recognize no neighbors. The only value they see in the place is the money that can be siphoned out of it to more fortunate places—that is, to the wealthier suburbs of the larger cities. We have failed to acknowledge this threat and to act in our own defense. As a result, our once-beautiful and bountiful countryside has long been a colony of the coal, timber, and agribusiness corporations, yielding an immense wealth of energy and raw materails at an immense cost to our land and our land’s people. Because of that failure also, our towns and cities have been gutted by the likes of Wal-Mart, which have had the permitted luxury of destroying locally owned small businesses by means of volume discounts. Because as individuals or even as communities we cannot protect ourselves against these aggressions, we need our state and
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WENDELL BERRY COLLECTED COMMAND
03
The ten commands at the heart of Berry’s work, given in an address at the College of the Atlantic.
Understand that no amount of education can overcome the innate limits of human intelligence and responsibility. We are not smart enough or conscious enough or alert enough to work responsibly on a gigantic scale.
national governments to protect us. As the poor deserve as much justice from our courts as the rich, so the small farmer and the small merchant deserve the same economic justice, the same freedom in the market, as big farmers and chain stores. They should not suffer ruin merely because their rich competitors can afford (for a while) to undersell them.
AN EARTH-DESTROYING ECONOMY IS JUSTIFIED BY FREEDOM AND PROFIT.
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COMPROMISE, HELL!
Furthermore, to permit the smaller enterprises always to be ruined by false advantages, either at home or in the global economy, is ultimately to destroy local, regional, and even national capabilities of producing vital supplies such as food and textiles. It is impossible to understand, let alone justify, a government’s willingness to allow the human sources of necessary goods to be destroyed by the “freedom” of this corporate anarchy. It is equally impossible to understand how a government can permit and even subsidize, the destruction of the land or of the land’s productivity. Somehow we have lost or discarded any controlling sense of the interdependence of the Earth and the human capacity to use it well. The governmental obligation to protect these economic resources, inseparably human and natural, is the same as the obligation to protect us from hunger or from foreign invaders. In result, there is no difference between a domestic threat to the sources of our life and a foreign one.
ESSAY
It appears that we have fallen into the habit of compromising on issues that should not, and in fact cannot, be compromised. I have an idea that a large number of us, including even a large number of politicians, believe that it is wrong to destroy the Earth. But we have powerful political opponents who insist that an Earth-destroying economy is justified by freedom and profit. And so we compromise by agreeing to permit the destruction only of parts of the Earth, or to permit the Earth to be destroyed a little at a time—like the famous three-legged pig that was too well loved to be eaten all at once. The logic of this sort of compromising is clear, and it is clearly fatal. If we continue to be economically dependednt on destroying parts of the Earth then eventually we will destroy it all. So long a complaint accumulates a debt to hope, and I would like to end with hope. To do so I need only repeat something I said at the beginning: Our destructiveness has not been, and it is not, inevitable. People who use that excuse are morally incompetent, they are cowardly, and they are lazy. Humans
don’t have to live by destroying the sources of their life. People can change; they can learn to do better. All of us, regardless of party, can be moved by love of our land to rise above the greed and contempt of our land’s exploiters. This of course leads to practical
SO LONG A COMPLAINT ACCUMULATES A DEBT TO HOPE, AND I WOULD LIKE TO END WITH HOPE. problems, and I will offer a short list of practical suggestions. We have got to learn better to respect ourselves and our dwelling places. We need to quit thinking of rural America as a colony. Too much of the economic history of our land has been that of the export of fuel, food and raw materials that have been destructively 13
and too cheaply produced. We must reaffirm the economic value of good stewardship and good work. For that we will need better accounting than we have had so far. We need to reconsider the idea of solving our economic problems by “bringing in industry.” Every state government appears to be scheming to lure in a large corporation
BIGNESS PROMOTES GREED, INDIFFERENCE, AND DAMAGE, AND OFTEN BIGNESS IS NOT NECESSARY. from somewhere else by “tax incentives” and other squanderings of the people’s money. We ought to suspend that practice until we are sure that in every state we have made the most and the best of what is already there. We need to build the local economies of our communities and regions by adding value to local prodcuts and marketing them locally before we seek markets elsewhere. We need to confront honestly the issue of scale. Bigness has a charm and a drama that are seductive, especially to politicians and financiers; but bigness promotes greed, indifference, and damage, and often bigness is not necessary. You may need a large corporation to run an airline or to manufacture cars, but you don’t need a large corporation to raise a chicken or a hog. You don’t need a large corporation to process local food or local timber and market it locally.
And, finally, we need to give an absolute priority to caring well for our land—for every bit of it. There should be no compromise with the destruction of the land or of anything else that we cannot replace. We have been too tolerant of politicians who, entrusted with our country’s defense, become the agents of our country’s destroyers, compromising on its ruin. And so I will end this by quoting my fellow Kentuckian, a great patriot and an indomitable foe of strip mining, the late Joe Begley of Blackey:
“Compromise, Hell!”
WENDELL BERRY COLLECTED COMMAND
04
16
The ten commands at the heart of Berry’s work, given in an address at the College of the Atlantic.
In making things always bigger and more centralized, we make them both more vulnerable in themselves and more dangerous to everything else. Learn, therefore, to prefer small-scale elegance and generosity to large-scale greed, crudity, and glamour.
Berry Po
y’s oetry
POETRY
WENDELL BERRY COLLECTED
The ten commands at the heart of Berry’s work, given in an address at the College of the Atlantic.
COMMAND
05
Make a home. Help to make a community. Be loyal to what you have made.
THE MORNING’S NEWS To moralize the state, they drag out a man, and bind his hands, and darken his eyes with a black rag to be free of the light in them, and tie him to a post, and kill him. And I am sickened by complicity in my race. To kill in hot savagery like a beast is understandable. It is forgivable and curable. But to kill by design, deliberately, without wrath, that is the sullen labor that perfects Hell. The serpent is gentle, compared to man. It is man, the inventor of cold violence, death as waste, who has made himself lonely among the creatures, and set himself aside, so that he cannot work in the sun with hope, or sit at peace in the shade of any tree. The morning’s news drives sleep out of the head at night. Uselessness and horror hold the eyes open to the dark. Weary, we lie awake in the agony of the old giving birth to the new without any assurance that the new will be better. I look at my son, whose eyes are like a young god’s, they are so open to the world. I look at my sloping fields now turning green with the young grass of April. What must I do to go free? I think I must put on a deathlier knowledge, and prepare to die rather than enter into the design of man’s hate. I will purge my mind of the airy claims of church and state. I will serve the earth and not pretend my life could better serve. Another morning comes with its strange cure. The earth is news. Though the river floods and the spring is cold, my heart goes on, faithful to a mystery in a cloud, and the summer’s garden continues its descent through me, toward the ground.
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POETRY
WENDELL BERRY COLLECTED
The ten commands at the heart of Berry’s work, given in an address at the College of the Atlantic.
COMMAND
06
Put the interest of the community first.
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 of its wilderness a wayfaring drunk slept clinched to the floor there in the cold nights. And then I came, and set fire to the remnants of house 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.
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POETRY
set fire to the remnants of house and shed, and let time hurry in the flame.
Late in the night I pay
POETRY
AWAKE AT NIGHT Late in the night I pay the unrest lowe to the life that has never lived and cannot live now. What the world could be is my good dream and my agony when, dreaming it I lie awake and turn and look into the dark. I think of a luxury in the sturdiness and grace of necessary things, not in frivolity. That would heal the earth, and heal men. But the end, too, is part of the pattern, the last labor of the heart: to learn to lie still, one with the earth again, and let the world go.
WENDELL BERRY COLLECTED
The ten commands att the heart of Berry’s work, given College in an address at the C ollege of the Atlantic.
COMMAND
07
Love your neighbors--not the neighbors you pick out, but the on ones nes you have.
A WET TIME The land is an ark, full of things waiting. Underfoot it goes temporary and soft, tracks filling with water as the foot is raised. The fields, sodden, go free of plans. Hands become obscure in their use, prehistoric. The mind passes over changed surfaces like a oat, drawn to the thought of roofs and to the thought of swimming and wading birds. Along the river croplands and gardens are buried in the flood, airy places grown dark and silent beneath it. Under the slender branch holding the new nest of the hummingbird the river flows heavy with earth, the water turned the color of broken slopes. I stand deep in the mud of the shore, a stake planted to measure the rise, the water rising, the earth falling to meet it. A great cottonwood passes down, the leaves shivering as the roots drag the bottom. I was not ready for this parting, my native land putting out to sea.
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POETRY
the water turned the color of broken slopes
TO KNOW THE DARK To go in the dark with a light is to know the light. To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight, and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings, and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.
WENDELL BERRY COLLECTED
The ten commands at the heart of Berry’s work, given in an address at the College of the Atlantic.
COMMAND
08
Love this miraculous world that we did not make, that is a gift to us.
A Jonquil for Mary Penn (EXCERPTED)
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STORY
…It was a different world, a new world to her, that she came into then—a world of poverty and community. They were in a neighborhood of six households, counting their own, all within half a mile of one another. Besides themselves there wre Braymer and Josie Hardy and their children; Tom Hardy and his wife, also named Josie; Walter and Thelma Cotman and their daughter, Irene; Jonah and Daisy Hample and their children; and Uncle Isham and Aunt Frances Quail, who were Thelma Cotman’s and Daisy Hample’s parents. The two Josies, to save confusion, were called Josie Braymer and Josie Tom. Josie Tom was Walter Cotman’s sister. In the world that Mary Penn had given up, a place of far larger and richer farms, work was sometimes exchanged, but the families were conscious of themselves in a way that set them apart from one another. Here, in this new world, neighbors were always working together. “Many hands make light work,” Uncle Isham Quail loved to say, though his own old hands were no longer able to work much. Some work only the men did together, like haying and harvesting the corn. Some work only the women did together: sewing or quilting or wallpapering or housecleaning; and whenever the men were together working, the women would be together cooking. Some work the men and women did together: harvesting tobacco or killing hogs or any other job that needed many hands. It was an old community. They all had worked together a long time. They all knew what each one was good at. When they worked together, not much needed to be explained. when they went down to the little weatherboarded church at Goforth on Sunday morning, they were glad to see one another and had much to say, though they had seen each other almost daily during the week.
This neighborhood opened to Mary and Elton and took them in with a warmth that answered her parents’ rejection. The men, without asking or being asked, included Elton in whatever they were doing. They told him when and where they needed him. They came to him when he needed them. He was an apt and able hand, and they were glad to have his help. He learned from them all but liked best to work with Walter Coltman, who was a fine farmer. He and Walter were, up to a point, two of a kind; both were impatient of disorder—“I can’t stand a damned mess,” said Walter and he made none—and both loved the employment of their minds in their work.
HERE, IN THIS NEW WORLD NEIGHBORS WERE ALWAYS WORKING TOGETHER. They were unlike in that Walter was satisfied within the boundaries of his little farm, but Elton could not have been. Nonetheless, Elton loved his growing understanding of Walter’s character and his ways. Though he was a quiet man and gave neither instruction nor advice, Walter was Elton’s teacher, and Elton was consciously his student. Once, when they had killed hogs and Elton and Mary had stayed at home to finish rendering their lard, the boiling fat had foamed up and begun to run over the sides of the kettle. Mary ran to the house and called Walter on the party line. “Tell him to throw the fire to it, “ Walter said. “Tell him to dip out some lard and throw it on the fire.” 29
WENDELL BERRY COLLECTED COMMAND
09
As far as you are able make your lives dependent upon your local place, neighborhood, and household—which thrive by care and generosity—and independent of the industrial economy, which thrives by damage.
Elton did so, unbelieving, but the fire flared, grew hotter, the foaming lard subsided in the kettle, and Elton’s face relaxed from anxiety and self-accusation into a grin. “Well,” he said, quoting Walter in Walter’s voice, “it’s all in knowing how.” Mary, who had more to learn than Elton, became a daughter to every woman in the community. She came knowing little, barely enough to begin, and they taught her much. Thelma, Daisy, and the two Josies taught her their ways of cooking, cleaning, and sewing; they taught her to can, pickle, and preserve; they taught her to do the women’s jobs in the hog killing. They took her on their expeditions to one another’s houses to cook harvest meals or to houseclean or to gather corn from the fields and can it. One day they all walked down to Goforth to do some wallpapering for Josie Tom’s mother. They papered two rooms, had a good time, and Josie Tom’s mother fixed them a dinner of fried chicken, creamed new potatoes and peas, hot biscuits, and cherry cobbler. In cold weather they sat all afternoon in one another’s houses, quilting or sewing or embroidering. Josie Tom was the best at needlework. Everything she made was a wonder. From spring to fall, for a Christmas present for someone, she always embroidered a long cloth that began with the earliest flowers of spring and ended with the last flowers of fall. She drew the flowers on the cloth with a pencil and worked them in with her needle and colored threads. She included the flowers of the woods and fields, the dooryards and gardens. She loved to point to the penciled outlines and name the flowers as if calling them up in their beauty into her imagination. “Looka- there,” she would say. “I even put in a jimsonweed.” “And a bull thistle,” said Tom Hardy, who had his doubts about weeds and thistles but was proud of her for leaving nothing out. 30
The ten commands at the heart of Berry’s work, given in an address at the College of the Atlantic.
Josie Tom was a plump, pretty, happy woman, childless but the mother of any child in reach. Mary Penn loved her the best, perhaps, but she loved them all. They were only in their late thirties or early forties, but to Mary they seemed to belong to the ageless, eternal generation of mothers, unimaginably older and more experienced than herself. She called them Miss Josie,
THEY SEEMED TO BELONG TO THE AGELESS, ETERNAL GENERATION OF MOTHERS, UNIMAGINABLY OLDER AND MORE EXPERIENCED THAN HERSELF. Miss Daisy, and Miss Thelma. They warmed and sheltered her. Sometimes she could just have tossed herself at them like a little girl to be hugged. They were capable, unasking, generous, humorous women, and sometimes, among themselves, they were raucous and free, unlike the other women she had known. On their way home from picking blackberries one afternoon, they had to get through a new barbed wire fence. Josie Tom held two wires apart while the other four gathered their skirts, leaned down, and straddled through. Josie Tom handed their filled buckets over. And then Josie Braymer held the wires apart, and Josie Tom, stooping through, got the back of her dress hung on the top wire.
STORY
A JONQUIL FOR MARY PENN
“I knew it!” she said, and she began to laugh. They all laughed, and nobody laughed more than Josie Tom, who was standing spraddled and stooped, helpless to move without tearing her dress. “Josie Braymer,” she said, “are you going to just stand there, or are you going to unhook me from this shitten fence?” And there on the ridgetop in the low sunlight they danced the dance of women laughing, bending and straightening, raising and lowering their hands, swaying and stepping with their heads back.
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WENDELL BERRY COLLECTED
The ten commands at the heart of Berry’s work, given in an address at the College of the Atlantic.
COMMAND
10
Find work, if you can, that does no damage. Enjoy your work. Work well.
Wendell Berry: People, Land and Fidelity M.A. GRUBBS, UNIVERSITY OF KENTUCKY
Wendell Berry lives and farms with his family in Henry County, Kentucky, and is the author of more than thirty books of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. Among his novels (set in the fictional community of Port William Kentucky) are Nathan Coulter (1960), A Place on Earth (1967), and The Memory of Old Jack (1974); short story collections include The Wild Birds (1986), Remembering (1988), Fidelity (1993), and Watch With Me (1994); collections of essays include, among many others, A Continuous Harmony (1972), The Unsettling of America (1977), Recollected Essays (1981), and Sex, Economy, Freedom, & Community (1993); and among his many volumes of poetry are A Part (1980), The Wheel (1982), Collected Poems (1985) and Entries (1984).
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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. 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”. 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.
BIOGRAPHY
A COMMUNITY IS THE MENTAL AND SPIRITUAL CONDITION OF KNOWING THAT THE PLACE IS SHARED. Berry’s life, his farm work, his writing and teaching, his home and family, and all that each involves are extraordinarily integrated. He understands his writing as an attempt to elucidate certain connections, primarily the interrelationships and interdependencies of man and the natural world. One of his premises in The Unsettling of America at once evinces his notion of cultural and natural interdependency:
“Everything in the Creation is related to everything else and dependent on everything else”. The Unsettling of America is about connections and thus ramifications. Arnold Ehrlich has called the book “a cool, reasoned, lucid and at times poetic explanation of what agribusiness and the mechanization of farming are doing to destroy the American fabric, the community, the household, even the sexual love that is at the basis of communities”. The traditional community is one of Berry’s central metaphors for cultural and natural harmony. Such a community is a highly intricate alliance in which individuals function as “parts” of a membership, each depending on and affecting all the others. The traditional community, like the traditional farms within it, is a model of interdependency. Berry explains, “A community is the mental and spiritual condition of knowing that the place is shared, and that the people who share the place define and limit the possibilities of each other’s lives”. Such an intertwinement of lives is a way of describing a traditional community dance, which is usually circular and cyclic and involves several couples, each partner relying on the other, each couple relying on other couples. The result of this interdependence among the dancers, if each dancer has learned the motions, is harmony. Gurney Norman, a friend of Berry’s, has explained that “something basic to people’s welfare is present in this sort of community dancing; it has to do with people knowing how to affirm one another and to cooperate, and how to have a good time.” The dancers move to the music through the intricacies of the dance, and as each sequence is completed, the cycle begins again. In “People, Land, and Community,” an essay in Standing by Words, Berry speaks of the analogy between an interweaving dance and the traditional community. While elucidating this
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THE
10
COMMANDS
Viewed in the context of Berry’s canon, this sequence represents far more than a neo-romantic or agrarian appeal to return to “simplicity.” To think of his advice in this way is to misinterpret it, for it is more of an oracular warning; either rethink our attitudes toward each other and the natural world, Berry implores, or continue on a path toward natural, cultural, and self-annihilation.
metaphor for cultural and natural harmony, he brings together his cyclic ideas of traditional work, apprenticeship, and the dead as an intricate part of the living: People at work in communities three generations old would know that their bodies renewed, time and again, the movements of other bodies, living and dead, known and loved, remembered and loved, in the same shops, houses, and fields. That, of course, is a kind of community dance. And such a dance is perhaps the best way we have to describe harmony. Berry uses the dance metaphor throughout his poetry to describe harmony between humans and nature, between the living and the deadof a community, and between members of the living. The music accompanying the dancers is sometimes the music of the spheres (the notes of which are so drawn out they can be heard only over years, decades, even centuries). Other sources of the music are farmers working or whistling a work song in a field, people working together harmoniously in communities, water running in a stream, and rain. The modern agricultural crisis, as Berry sees it, is a consequence of widening the gap between the way nature farms and the way man farms. Many modern agricultural theories and practices assume universal applications. But such attitudes and practices constitute an affront to Nature--that is, the particular Nature of a particular place. Traditional farmers are sensitive to the particular needs of their farms; through the years and generations they have looked to the Nature of their place to judge which practices, plants, and animals work and thrive the best, given the farm’s conditions: “A man ought to study the wilderness of a place”. He explains in The Unsettling of America that “the land is too various in its kinds, climates, conditions, declivities, aspects, and histories to
conform to any generalized understanding or to prosper under generalized treatment...To treat every field, or every part of every field, with the same consideration is not farming but industry”. Farmers, he says in a later essay, “must tend to farms that they know and love, farms small enough to know and love, using tools and methods that they know and love, in the company of neighbors that they know and love”. Berry believes that a “place” has its own ruling Nature. Thus, Berry stresses that a traditional farmer will always consider and adapt his practices to the needs of the land’s primal character. Successful and sustainable agriculture, then, as Berry understands it, is possible only by maintaining a cyclic vision, one attuned with Nature, rather than a linear vision, one seeking conquest of Nature. Berry’s artistic vision of agricultural work, then, is diametrically opposed to the industrial vision which maximizes agricultural mechanization in order to minimize human interaction with and care of the land. Separating humans as far as possible from Nature in practice has created a character-killing and “community-killing agriculture, with its monomania of bigness”. The modern linear view of progress not only has destroyed many of America’s farmlands; it also has been the driving force behind strip mining, deforestation, pollution, and has widened the gap between culture and nature. The current natural resource crisis, in Berry’s view, is a direct consequence of our character, and thus the only real hope lies in the change of attitudes. But for such a change to occur and be effective, Berry contends, it must begin on the local level, not under the guise of national “movements.” Berry says in “The Futility of Global Thinking” that “the civil rights movement has not given us better communities. The women’s movement has not given us better
BIOGRAPHY
PEOPLE, LAND AND FIDELITY
marriages or better house-holds. The environment movement has not changed our parasitic relationship to nature”. Berry’s canon constitutes an urgent call to reevaluate both our use of Nature’s “gifts” and our view of ourselves. And it is a plea to redirect our environmental concerns from the abstract notion of our “planet” to the more grounded, familiar notion of our “place”—our homes and our communities. In his address, Berry asked the Bar Harbor graduates, “How, after all, can anybody—any particular body—do anything to heal a planet?” and he answered, “Nobody can do anything to heal a planet. The suggestion that anybody could do so is preposterous. The heroes of abstraction keep galloping in on their white horses to save the planet—and they keep falling off in front of the grandstand”. Berry’s premise, implicit, often explicit, in almost all of his work, is that we must have a particular place, must identify with it, must learn from it, must love it, must care for it. And only by living in this place long enough, and by attending to the knowledge of those who have lived there before us, will we fully realize the consequences of our presence there: “We may deeply affect a place we own for good or ill,” Berry has written, “but our lives are nevertheless included in its life; it will survive us, bearing the results”.
WORKS CITED Berry, Wendell. A Continuous Harmony: Essays Cultural and Agricultural. (CH) New York: Harcourt, 1972. —. “The Futility of Global Thinking.” Harper’s Magazine Sept. 1989: 16-22. (Adapted from “Word and Flesh, an essay in What Are People For?) —. The Long-Legged House. (LLH) New York: Harcourt, 1969. —. Standing by Words. (SBW) San Francisco: North Point, 1983. —. The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture. (UA) 1977. San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1986. —. What Are People For?? (WPF) San Francisco: North Point, 1990. Ditsky, John. “Wendell Berry: Homage to the Apple Tree.” Modern Poetry Studies 2.1 (1971): 7-15. Driskell, Leon V. “Wendell Berry.” Dictionary of Literary Biography 5: 62-66. Ehrlich, Arnold W. “Wendell Berry” (An interview with Wendell Berry). Publishers Weekly 5 Sept. 1977: 10-11. Norman, Gurney. From This Valley. Kentucky Educational Television Video. Prunty, Wyatt. “Myth, History, and Myth Again.” The Southern Review 20 (1984): 958-68. Tolliver, Gary. “Wendell Berry.” Dictionary of Literary Biography 6: 9-14.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Selected Works FICTION Fidelity: Five Stories, 1992 Hannah Coulter, 2004 Jayber Crow, 2000 The Memory of Old Jack, 1974 Nathan Coulter, 1960 A Place on Earth, 1967 Remembering, 1988 That Distant Land: The Collected Stories, 2004 Watch with Me and Six Other Stories of the Yet-Remembered Ptolemy Proudfoot and His Wife, Miss Minnie, Née Quinch, 1994 The Wild Birds: Six Stories of the Port William Membership, 1986 A World Lost, 1996
POETRY The Broken Ground, 1964 Clearing, 1977 Collected Poems: 1951-1982, 1982 The Country of Marriage, 1973 Entries, 1994 Farming: A Hand Book, 1970 Given: New Poems, 2005 Openings, 1968 A Part, 1980 Sabbaths: Poems, 1987 Sayings and Doings, 1975 The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry, 1999 A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997, 1998 The Wheel, 1982
ESSAYS “Another Turn of the Cran Crank”, ank”, 1996 Commonplace: “The Art of the Common nplace: The Agrarian Berry”, Essays of Wendell Berry ry”, 2002 “Citizenship Papers”, 2003 “A Continuous Harmony: Essays Culturall & Agricultural”, 1972 “The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays Cultural & Agricultural”, 1981 “Harlan Hubbard: Life and Work”, 1990 “The Hidden Wound”, 1970 “Home Economics: Fourteen Essays”, 1987 “Life Is a Miracle”, 2000 “The Long-Legged House”, 2004 “Recollected Essays: 1965-1980”, 1981 “Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community”, 1992 “Standing by Words”, 1983 “The Unforeseen Wilderness: Kentucky’s Red River Gorge”, 1971 “The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture”, 1977 “What Are People For?”, 1990
Sources 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
SOURCES
Credits & Type Austin Granger, Charles Henry and Matt Bower created and own the images used in this project. Visit their flickr portfolios online to see more of their breathtaking work. The large titles and callouts were set in Matthew Carter’s Big Caslon, a modern reinterpretation of the highest-contrast letterforms in William Caslon’s original group of typefaces. Variations of Caslon are some of the most used faces in print history. Titles of poetry and other callouts throughout were set in Franklin Gothic No. 2 Roman and Franklin Gothic Extra Condensed. Franklin Gothic was designed by Morris Fuller Benton in the early 20th century, and captures its period in American history effectively as well as evoking newspaper headlines and billboards with its strength and readability. The main body text of The Morning’s News was set in Grad, designed by Mark Simonson and Phil Martin. Grad evokes Century Schoolbook and other highly readable serif body typefaces. Elements of the header were set in MT Bodoni as well as Tobias Frere-Jones’ Interstate.
THE MORNING’S NEWS was edited and designed by Noah Baker at Washington University in St. Louis
WENDELL BERRY