THE CENTER AND PERIPHERY A WENDELL BERRY READER
POEMS, ESSAY, AND FICTION BY WENDELL BERRY
THEY MUST KN TRUTH INTERDEPEND MUST KNOW W OWE TO
NOW THE H OF THEIR DENCE; THEY WHAT THEY EACH OTHER.
LOCAL KNOWLEDGE IN THE AGE OF INFORMATION In 1983, reviewing a book of agricultural essays by Wes Jackson and one by me, Lewis Hyde suggested that our two books were part of an effort of the periphery to be heard by the center. This has stayed in my mind as perhaps the most useful thing that has been said about my agricultural writing and that of my allies. It is useful because the dichotomy between center and periphery does in fact exist, as does the tendency of the center to be ignorant of the periphery. These terms appear to be plain enough, but as I am going to use them here they may need a little clarification. We can say, for example, that a land grant university is a center with a designated periphery which it is supposed to maintain and improve. Or an industrial city is a center with a periphery which it is bound to influence and which, according to its politics and its power, it may either conserve or damage. Or a national or a state government is a center solemnly entrusted with responsibility for peripheral places, but in general it extends its protections and favors to the commercial centers, which outvote or out-“contribute� the periphery.
But above all, now, as a sort of center of centers, is the global “free market� economy of the great corporations, the periphery of which is everywhere, and for its periphery this center expresses no concern and acknowledges no responsibility. The global economy is a development-it is intended apparently as the culmination-of the technological and commercial colonialist orthodoxy that has dominated the world increasingly since the Renaissance, the principle of the orthodoxy being that any commercial entity is entitled to wealth according to its power. A center, then, as I will use the term, is wherever the wealth, power, and knowledge of this overbearing economy have accumulated. Modern technology, as it has developed from oceanic navigation to the World Wide Web, has been increasingly a centralizing force, enabling ever larger accumulations of wealth, power, and knowledge in an ever smaller number of centers. Since my concern here is with the need for communication-or, as I would prefer to say, conversation-between periphery and center, I must begin with the center’s characteristic ignorance of the periphery. This, I suppose, must always have been so, even of the market towns of the world before the Renaissance. But in that older world, the cities and towns mostly (though with significant exceptions) could take for granted that their tributary landscapes were populated by established rural communities that knew both how to make the land produce and how to take care of it. It is still true that the center is supported by the periphery. All human economy is still land-based.
To the extent that we must eat and drink and be clothed, sheltered, and warmed, we live from the land. The idea that we have now progressed from a land-based economy to an economy based on information is a fantasy. It is still true also that the people of the center believe that the people of the periphery will always supply their needs from the land and will always keep the land productive: There will always be an abundance of food, fiber, timber, and fuel. This too is a fantasy. It is not known, but is simply taken for granted. As its power of attraction increases, the center becomes more ignorant of the periphery. And under the pervasive influence of the center, the economic landscapes of the periphery have fewer and fewer inhabitants who know them well and know how to care properly for them. Many rural areas are now populated mostly by urban people.
WINTER NIGHT POEM FOR MARY As I started home after dark I looked into the sky and saw the new moon, an old man with a basket on his arm. He walked among the cedars in the bare woods. They stood like guardians, dark as he passed. He might have been singing, or he might not. He might have been sowing the spring flowers, or he might not. But I saw him with his basket, going along the hilltop.
THEY STOOD LIKE GUARDIANS, DARK/ AS HE PASSED.
POWER WEALTH AND KNOWLEDGE
D E.
forestry. Our great politicians seem only dimly aware that an actual country lies out there beyond the places of power, wealth, and knowledge. The ultimate official word on agriculture seems to have been spoken by Dwight Eisenhower’s secretary of agriculture, Ezra Taft Benson, who told the farmers to “Get big or get out.”
Insofar as the center is utterly dependent upon the periphery, its ignorance of the periphery is not natural or necessary, but is merely dangerous. The danger is increased when this ignorance protects itself by contempt for the people who know. If the most intimate knowledge of the land from which you live belongs to people whom you consider to be provincials or field niggers or hillbillies or hicks or rednecks, then you are not likely ever to learn very much. Furthermore, the danger increases as the periphery is enlarged; the vulnerability of long supply lines is well understood. To give the most obvious example, the United States has chosen (if that is the right word) to become an import-dependent society rather than to live principally from its own land and the work of its own people, as if dependence on imported goods and labor can be consistent with political independence and self-determination. This inconsistency is making us, willy-nilly, an imperial power, which perhaps increases “business opportunities” for our government’s corporate sponsors, but certainly increases our fragility and our peril. The economic independence of families, communities, and even regions has now been almost completely destroyed. Far from caring for our land and our rural people, as we would do if we understood our dependence on them, we have not, as a nation, given them so much as a serious thought for half a century. I read, I believe, my full share of commentary on politics and economics by accredited experts, and I can assure you that you will rarely find in any of them even a passing reference to agriculture or
A predominantly urban population that is contemptuous of the working people of the farms and forests cannot know enough about the country to exercise a proper responsibility for its good use. And ignorance in the center promotes ignorance on the periphery. Knowledge that is not properly valued decreases in value, and so finally is lost. It is not possible to uproot virtually the whole agricultural population by economic adversity, replacing it with machines and chemicals, and still keep local knowledge of the land and land use at a high level of competence. We still know how to make the land produce, but only temporarily, for we are losing the knowledge of how to keep it productive. Wes Jackson has written and often said that when the ratio of eyes to acres in agricultural landscapes becomes too wide, when the number of caretakers declines below a level that varies from place to place but is reckonable for everyplace, then good husbandry of the land becomes impossible.
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.
THE FARMER AMONG THE TOMBS I am oppressed by all the room taken up by the dead, their headstones standing shoulder to shoulder, the bones imprisoned under them. Plow up the graveyards! Haul off the monuments! Pry open the vaults and the coffins so the dead may nourish their graves and go free, their acres traversed all summer by crop rows and cattle and foraging bees.
YOU CAN’T LEA BY READING A
ARN TO FARM A BOOK
ARE YOU ALRIGHT?
The spring work had started, and I needed a long night's rest, or that was my opinion, and I was about to go to bed, but then the telephone rang. It was Elton. He had been getting ready for bed, too, I think, and it had occurred to him then that he was worried. “Andy, when did you see the Rowanberrys?” I knew what he had on his mind. The river was in flood. The backwater was over the bottoms, and Art and Mart would not be able to get out except by boat or on foot. “Not since the river came up.” “Well, neither have I. And their phone's out. Mary, when did Mart call up here?” I heard Mary telling him,“Monday night,” and then,“It was Monday night,” Elton said to me.“I've tried to call every day since, and I can't get anybody. That's four days.” “Well, surely they're all right.” “Well, that's what Mary and I have been saying. Surely they are. They've been taking care of themselves a long time. But, then, you never know.” “The thing is, we don't know.” We knew what we were doing, and both of us were a little embarrassed about it. The Rowanberry Place had carried that name since the first deeds were recorded in the log cabin that was the first courthouse at Har-
grave. Rowanberrys had been taking care of themselves there for the better part of two hundred years. We knew that Arthur and Martin Rowanberry required as little worrying about as anybody alive. But now, in venturing to worry about them, we had put them, so to speak, under the sign of mortality. They were, after all, the last of the Rowanberrys, and they were getting old. We were uneasy in being divided from them by the risen water and out of touch. It caused us to think of things that could happen. Elton said, “It's not hard, you know, to think of things that could happen.” “Well,” I said, “do you think we'd better go see about them?” He laughed.“Well, we've thought, haven't we? I guess we'd better go.” “All right. I'll meet you at the mailbox.” I hung up and went to get my cap and jacket. “Nobody's heard from Art and Mart for four days,” I said to Flora. “Their phone's out.” “And you and Elton are going to see about them,” Flora said. She had been eavesdropping. “I guess we are.”
IT FORMS ITS CURVES/ A NERVED GHOSTLY ANATOMY IN THE AIR.
THE FAMILIAR The hand is risen from the earth, the sap risen, leaf come back to branch, bird to nest crotch. Beans lift their heads up in the row. The known returns to be known again. Going and coming back, it forms its curves, a nerved ghostly anatomy in the air.
WE ARE LOSING THE USE OF LOCAL MINDS AT WORK ON LOCAL PROBLEMS.
A PRAISE His memories lived in the place like fingers locked in the rock ledges like roots. When he died and his influence entered the air I said, Let my mind be the earth of his thought, let his kindness go ahead of me. Though I do not escape the history barbed in my flesh, certain wise movements of his hands, the turns of his speech keep with me. His hope of peace keeps with me in harsh days, the shell of his breath dimming away three summers in the earth.
As farmers never tire of repeating, you can’t learn to farm by reading a book, and you can’t tell somebody how to farm. Older farmers I knew used to be fond of saying, “I can’t tell you how to do that, but I can put you where you can learn.” There is such a thing, then, as incommunicable knowledge, knowledge that comes only by experience and by association. There is in addition for us humans, always, the unknown, things perhaps that we need to know that we do not know and are never going to know. There is mystery. Obvious as it is, we easily forget that beyond our sciences and our arts, beyond our technology and our language, is the irreducible reality of our precious world that somehow, so far, has withstood our demands and accommodated our life, and of which we will always be dangerously ignorant. Our great modern powers of science, technology, and industry are always offering themselves to us with the suggestion that we know enough to use them well, that we are intelligent enough to act without limit in our own behalf. But the evidence is now rapidly mounting against us. By living as we do, in our ignorance and our pride,we are diminishing our world and the possibility of life.
THIS IS A PLEA FOR HUMILITY.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR 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).
SELECTED WORKS Are You Alright? Local Knowledge in the age of Information Poems The Familiar A Praise The Farmer Among the Tombs To Know the Dark Winter Nigh Poem for Mary
COLOPHON This book was designed by Noah Jodice, a Junior at Washington University in St. Louis studying communication design.