Why Wendell Berry is the Modern-Day Thoreau

FARMER, ACTIVIST, ECONOMIST, SEER:

Why Wendell Berry is the Modern-Day Thoreau

https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2017/01/farmer-activist-economist-seer-why-wendell-berry-modern-day-thoreau

by Andrew Marr

January 28, 2017

In the age of Donald Trump, we should all be

reading this radical American nature writer

Without topsoil, the thin layer between the Earth’s scores-of-miles-deep crust, and the atmosphere we breathe, we could not exist. The historian J R McNeill describes topsoil thus: 

“It consists of mineral particles, organic matter, gases and a swarm of tiny living things. It is a thin skin, rarely more than a hip deep, and usually much less. Soil takes centuries or millennia to form. Eventually it all ends up in the sea through erosion. In the interval between formation and erosion, it is basic to human survival.”

The subject of topsoil is only for cranks. A serious political and literary journal such as this one knows it’s the kind of thing that balding, warty old chaps in tweed jackets like to bore on about; a Duke of Cornwall kind of thing. But turn to Ali Smith’s new novel, Autumn – which I take to be about our human autumn and not simply the seasonal one – and you find this epigraph, taken from a Guardian article published last July: “At current rates of soil erosion, Britain has just 100 harvests left.”

~ ~ ~ ~

This is the essential starting point for the introduction of Wendell Berry to a British audience. A Kentucky tobacco farmer, environmental activist, novelist, poet, essayist and economist, he is unlike anybody else writing today. He annoys the left because he is a socially quite conservative Christian and he infuriates the right with his lifelong opposition to the economic and political system of modern America.

[Berry's] best work is contained in his frequent salvos of essays, which I have been collecting during trips to America for much of my adult life. I first came across his work in a bookshop in Devon, where I was struck by a slim volume with the brutal title What Are People For?. It’s impossible not to wonder about the answer, so I read on and slowly accumulated a small library of books with names such as Standing by Words, The Long-Legged House and Another Turn of the Crank (Berry is drily aware of his reputation).

He writes at least as well as George Orwell and has an urgent message for modern industrial capitalism, which he considers to be a machine based on greed and short-termism that produces grotesque unfairness and waste – and will lead us, before long, to disaster. It is an apocalyptic message but conveyed with a gentle humour and defiant belief in the possibility of social reform that keep you turning the pages. Yet he can be a difficult sod, fiercely independent and, as the Americans would say, ornery. Back in the 1990s, I wrote to Berry asking him to allow me to edit a selection of his writing to be published for a British audience, preferably by Penguin. He said no. For one thing, he did not want to be published by any of the big houses – he had a strong loyalty to the small, independent San Francisco publisher North Point Press. And there was no question of him coming here to do interviews or publicity or anything like that: he won’t travel by aircraft.

The project died. And now, with Berry in his vigorous eighties, the writer and environmentalist Paul Kingsnorth has finally teamed up with a Penguin imprint to produce an excellent selection of his essays, The World-Ending Fire.

So here, from that book, is Berry on topsoil, first from an essay titled “The Work of Local Culture”. He has come across an old bucket hanging from a fence, and inside it there are leaves.

Rain and snow have fallen into it, and the fallen leaves have held the moisture and so have rotted. Nuts have fallen into it, or been carried into it by squirrels; mice and squirrels have eaten the meat of the nuts and left the shells; they and other animals have left their droppings; insects have flown into the bucket and died and decayed; birds have scratched it and left their droppings or perhaps a feather or two. This slow work of growth and death, gravity and decay, which is the chief work of the world, has by now produced in the bottom of the bucket several inches of black humus. I look into that bucket with fascination because I am a farmer of sorts and an artist of sorts, and I recognise there an artistry and a farming far superior to mine, or to that of any human.

Berry is an attentive, close-watching writer whose rhythms are slow, seasonal and patient. In an essay about his native land, he walks and meditates on his death – and yes, talks about topsoil as well, this time calling it “Christlike” in its beneficence and the penetrating energy that issues out of it:

“It increases by experience, by the passage of seasons over it, growth rising out of it and returning to it, not by ambition or aggressiveness. It is enriched by all things that die and enter into it. It keeps the past, not as history or as memory, but as richness, new possibility. Its fertility is always building up out of death into promise. Death is the bridge or the tunnel by which its past enters its future.”

As a farmer, he observes the terrifying speed at which soil across America – as across Europe and Asia – is being washed into the ocean and lost. The crucial thing about Berry is that he didn’t move. As a young man, he had the opportunity to relocate to New York or one of the other big cities and become an academic writer. That would have been the “sensible” thing to do, as moving away is the “sensible” thing for all country people to do. (Remember that the biggest migration in human history is going on now and it is the migration from rural parts of the planet to the cities.) Instead, he returned to north-eastern Kentucky, where his family had lived for generations, reading and writing and farming.

The conclusion of his life, as well as of his essays, is that we must return to cherish and look after the soil we depend on. The scale of the devastation all around us is such that his cause must seem impossible. To which he replies:

“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.”

Berry is a radical, even an extremist. In one notorious essay, he wrote that he would never buy a computer (notorious because his wife, it turned out, did the typing for him); he is a militant critic of US wars; and he farms using horses, not tractors. In some ways, he is like a modern Thoreau and although he mistrusts movements and any violent threat to systems, he vigorously defends civil disobedience. Like John Berger, he has championed the cause of migrant workers, and he is one of the most compelling writers on racism in America.

Yet [Berry] is the least joyless of writers, a great celebrator of poetry in general and Shakespeare and T S Eliot in particular; a luminous lover of nature and a man of robust appetites. His essay on the pleasures of eating is a rare example of political writing that makes you salivate.

After Donald Trump’s election, we urgently need to rediscover the best of radical America – that of Mark Twain, Gary Snyder and Edward Abbey. An essential part of that story is Wendell Berry. It is axiomatic that such a bold and questioning writer should be an uncomfortable writer and difficult to swallow whole. Few of us can live, or even aspire to, his kind of life. But nobody can risk ignoring him.

Amazon Link

 The World-Ending Fire by Wendell Berry

Introduced by Paul Kingsnorth | Published by Allen Lane

"America's greatest philosopher on sustainable life and living." ―Chicago Tribune

In a time when our relationship to the natural world is ruled by the violence and greed of unbridled consumerism, Wendell Berry speaks out in these prescient essays, drawn from his fifty-year campaign on behalf of American lands and communities.

The writings gathered in The World-Ending Fire are the unique product of a life spent farming the fields of rural Kentucky with mules and horses, and of the rich, intimate knowledge of the land cultivated by this work. These are essays written in defiance of the false call to progress and in defense of local landscapes, essays that celebrate our cultural heritage, our history, and our home.

With grace and conviction, Wendell Berry shows that we simply cannot afford to succumb to the mass-produced madness that drives our global economy―the natural world will not allow it.

Yet he also shares with us a vision of consolation and of hope. We may be locked in an uneven struggle, but we can and must begin to treat our land, our neighbors, and ourselves with respect and care. As Berry urges, we must abandon arrogance and stand in awe.

Wendell Berry - For Want of Silence

For Want of Silence - re slater

Accept what comes from silence.

Make the best you can of it.

Of what little words that come

out of the silence, like prayers

prayed back to the one who prays,

make a poem that does not disturb

the silence from which it came.


- Wendell Berry



* * * * * * * * * * *

“It is maybe most of all... silence... that they are so intent to guard themselves against.

And there is indeed a potential terror in it. It raises, still, all the old answerless questions

of origins and ends. It asks a man what is the use and the worth of his life.”

- Wendell Berry

* * * * * * * * * * *

Amazon Link

By the end, Nathan begins a long silence that will last the rest of his life... 

Nathan Coulter, Wendell Berry’s first book, was published in 1960 when he was twenty-seven. In his first novel, the author presents his readers with their first introduction to what would become Berry’s life’s work, chronicling through fiction a place where the inhabitants of Port William form what is more than community, but rather a “membership” in interrelatedness, a spiritual community, united by duty and bonds of affection for one another and for the land upon which they make their livelihood.

When young Nathan loses his grandfather, Berry guides readers through the process of Nathan's grief, endearing the reader to the simple humanity through which Nathan views the world. Echoing Berry's own strongly held beliefs, Nathan tells us that his grandfather's life "couldn't be divided from the days he'd spent at work in his fields." Berry has long been compared to Faulkner for his ability to erect entire communities in his fiction, and his heart and soul have always lived in Port William, Kentucky. In this eloquent novel about duty, community, and a sweeping love of the land, Berry gives readers a classic book that takes them to that storied place.

* * * * * * * * * * *

The Silence by Wendell Berry

https://www.mindfulnessassociation.net/words-of-wonder/the-silence-wendell-berry/

Essay by Kristine Janson

Wendell Berry has worked as a farmer for over 40 years on his own land using horses and organic methods – he is also an author of over 50 books and writes poems, essays, novels, and he’s been an important voice in the environmental movement. (The Poetry Foundation has given a good size overview of his life). I find myself a bit fascinated by him, whether listening to an interview with him or reading about his life – or stumbling upon a (to me) new poem from his hand.

[Berry's poem on Silence] particularly resonated with me after I’d ventured into the Pentland hills for the first time since lockdown for a midsummer solo adventure of wandering through its hills and valleys, with the simple intention to find my way there as well as in my life. There are many sounds in the Pentlands in summer: bleating of sheep, crows playing on the wind, the wind (and frequent rain) flapping about my ears, as well as one of my favourite sounds in all the world: the jubilant songbursts of skylarks. And in between, ‘my head is loud with the labor of words’ as Wendell says here… Like in any retreat setting, the absence of words around me give such volume to the ones inside. And at the same time, every moment is the invitation to turn out, to hear the ‘song whose lines I cannot make or sing’, to rest in the bigness of the moment, of space.

And after a while, the loudness in my head gets a bit quieter, my attention again and again drawn into the richness of the world around me and as the space between my thoughts increases, so does the clarity, the knowing. Such a gift… and as silence in my day to day life of family and work is confined to patches, the benefits of a retreat day here and there are all the greater, whether it’s a sitting or a walking one.

Solstice blessings to you, and may the harvest of the seeds planted in the first half of the year ‘be rich with fruit’!

- Kristine Janson

The Silence

by Wendell Berry

Though the air is full of singing

my head is loud

with the labor of words.

Though the season is rich

with fruit, my tongue

hungers for the sweet of speech.

Though the beech is golden

I cannot stand beside it

mute, but must say

'It is golden,' while the leaves

stir and fall with a sound

that is not a name.

It is in the silence

that my hope is, and my aim.

A song whose lines

I cannot make or sing

sounds men's silence

like a root. Let me say

and not mourn: the world

lives in the death of speech

and sings there.

Wendell Berry

* * * * * * * * * * *

Thomas Merton

Wendell Berry

     

Work and Prayer: The Brief Friendship of

Thomas Merton and Wendell Berry

https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2020/06/work-and-prayer-the-brief-friendship-of-thomas-merton-and-wendell-berry/

by Dan Rattelle

June 19, 20205

Leeds, MA. In 1965 Thomas Merton, after long waiting, moved into his hermitage on the grounds of Our Lady of Gethsemani monastery near Bardstown, Kentucky, where he had lived since 1942. A few months earlier and eighty miles north, Wendell Berry took apart a cabin that had belonged to his uncle and rebuilt it as his writing place, a kind of hermitage of his own, which James Baker Hall describes as “not just a quiet place, it was a place of quiet.”

Merton and Berry met, it seems, at least once—on December 10, 1967, exactly one year before Merton’s death. Wendell and his wife Tanya, poet Denise Levertov, the photographer Ralph Eugene Meatyard, and his wife Madelyn all met at Gethsemani for lunch. The meeting seems to have been pleasant but exhausting for Merton, who wrote in his journal for that day “I am hoping this next week will be quiet—a time of fasting and retreat. Too many people here lately.” It is possible that they met before this, as their letters display a certain familiarity—Berry mentions that he had his publisher send a copy of one of his books (possibly Openings) to the hermitage. Berry addresses his first letter to Fr. Louis, Merton’s religious name, which suggests any earlier meeting may have been under more formal circumstances.

The other letters are mostly to do with Merton’s magazine Monk’s Pond, which Berry had sent some poems to. “Maybe I am losing all my friends by failure to answer about Monks Pond. . . .” Merton writes in his journal, “Must write Jonathan Greene, Wendell Berry, etc. etc. Will try to get the second number lined up today. First is stalled in Cassian’s printshop. Liturgy choking every press.” He dates Berry’s letter a day earlier, saying he’d run most of the poems in the next two issues and had done some toggling with others. “This is probably a hell of a way to edit a magazine,” he says. A picnic at Gethsemani is suggested for around Easter—Merton, by the way, had been looking forward to the solitude of that Lent. Berry, however, would be on the West Coast, he says, and can’t make it. They would never meet again.

Berry wrote in one of his letters to Merton that “you are one of the few whose awareness of what I’m doing here would be of value to me.” He is acknowledging that he and Merton lead lives of similar mission, lives shaped by work and silence. Given the enormous development in Merton between The Seven Story Mountain and Zen and The Birds of Appetite (which he was finishing when he met Berry) who knows how he would have changed further if he had lived longer. Throughout the 1960s, though, he and Berry were truly co-laborers. The work of both writers narrates the problem of "Man in Mass Society," which Merton describes in Marxist terms as a problem of alienation. Man is alienated from his work. He works for others and does not get or even see the product of his labor. Instead of revolution, Merton gives this solution:

"Work that is productive, properly organized, and remains in contact with nature, work that is truly physical and manual outdoor work, work that is properly managed and well done, work that is managed and taught on a human and monastic level, and not carried out like factory-type drudgery or office routines— such work can do much to help the young monk find his identity and grow in Christ, by teaching him to accept himself, work in harmony with others, and feel himself fully part of a world made by a loving father in which his own work has a redemptive and sanctifying quality because it is united with the labor and sacrifice of the Incarnate Son of God."

Though seldom invoking dogma in this way, you can find this kind of thing on almost every page of Berry. In one instance, in his book on William Carlos Williams, he criticizes those “numerous people to whom ‘the Word was made flesh’ was no more than an idea.” Recall also how anti-platonic the Merton of Seven Story Mountain is. This resistance to abstraction is partly what led Merton to Zen in the first place. We live abstracted lives. We flip a switch and we have light. We open a package and we have dinner. We cast our images onto the internet. We look at other people’s bodies through a screen. Think of how companies like Zoom have abstracted and commodified basic human interaction. In his hermitage, Merton felt he was encountering real life and was therefore capable of giving himself to God more fully. This privileging of the concrete world of disembodied ideas, for both Merton and Berry, is rooted in the incarnation. Because the word has been made flesh “there are no unsacred places.” Berry illustrates this point well in “A Native Hill” from 1969: “A path is little more than a habit that comes with knowledge of a place.” A path is the incarnation of a people’s idea of the place, while the road is almost pure abstraction whose “tendency is to translate place into space in order to traverse it with the least effort.” Elsewhere, Berry describes his commute from Lexington, where he taught, to the long-legged house as a journey from the abstract into the concrete:

"It was always a journey from the sound of public voices to the sound of a private quiet voice rising falteringly out of the roots of my mind, that I listened carefully in the silence to hear. It was a journey from the abstract collective life of the university and the city into the intimate country of my own life. It is only a country that is well known, full of familiar names and places, full of life that is always changing, that the mind goes free of abstractions, and renews itself in the presence of the creation, that so persistently eludes human comprehension and human law."

Merton describes the hermitage in similar terms, saying that the hermit’s life “should bear witness to the fact that certain basic claims about solitude and peace are in fact true. And in doing this, it will restore people’s confidence, first in their own humanity and beyond that in the grace of God.”

Merton makes this point, that grace is not opposed to nature, in an attempt to redefine the monk’s position toward the world. For him, the point of the monastic life is not a rigid turning away from ‘the world,’ an escape from the flesh but an opportunity to get more in touch with what it means to be fully human in a world that dehumanizes us. The monk works with his body and seeks silence and solitude so that “his mind and heart can relax and expand . . . there too he can hear the word of God and meditate on it more quietly, without strain, without forcing himself, without being carried away in useless speculations.”

Silence, apart from farming, is Berry’s other major preoccupation. Think of how Burley keeps reminding Nathan that “It doesn’t pay to talk too much about your business” in Nathan Coulter, how the novel’s would-be climax of the huge catfish is spoiled for Burley by too much chatter, and how, by the end, Nathan begins a long silence that will last the rest of his life. Encouraging the reader to get rid of the television set, Berry says “the ensuing silence is an invitation to our homes, to our own places and lives, to come into being.”

On finding one’s own place Merton writes “this implies a kind of mysterious awakening to the fact that where we actually are is where we belong.” This means that I belong at this desk, in this room, on this acre of woods at the edge of a much larger forest, and not anywhere the computer that is on my desk can take me. Silence for Merton, as a monk, is of course connected to prayer. So it seems with Berry:

"Accept what comes from silence.

Make the best you can of it.

Of what little words that come

out of the silence, like prayers

prayed back to the one who prays,

make a poem that does not disturb

the silence from which it came."

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Thomas Merton

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Wendell Berry - The Mad Farmer

The Contrarian-Agrarian

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

by Wendell Berry

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,

vacation with pay. Want more

of everything ready-made. Be afraid

to know your neighbors and to die.

And you will have a window in your head.

Not even your future will be a mystery

any more. Your mind will be punched in a card

and shut away in a little drawer.

The Mad Farmer 1

When they want you to buy something

they will call you. When they want you

to die for profit they will let you know.

So, friends, every day do something

that won’t compute. Love the Lord.

Love the world. Work for nothing.

Take all that you have and be poor.

Love someone who does not deserve it.

Denounce the government and embrace

the flag. Hope to live in that free

republic for which it stands.

Give your approval to all you cannot

understand. Praise ignorance, for what man

has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.

The Mad Farmer 2

Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.

Say that your main crop is the forest

that you did not plant,

that you will not live to harvest.

Say that the leaves are harvested

when they have rotted into the mold.

Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.

Put your faith in the two inches of humus

that will build under the trees

every thousand years.

Listen to carrion — put your ear

close, and hear the faint chattering

of the songs that are to come.

Expect the end of the world. Laugh.

Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful

though you have considered all the facts.

The Mad Farmer 3

So long as women do not go cheap

for power, please women more than men.

Ask yourself: Will this satisfy

a woman satisfied to bear a child?

Will this disturb the sleep

of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.

Lie easy in the shade. Rest your head

in her lap. Swear allegiance

to what is nighest your thoughts.

As soon as the generals and the politicos

can predict the motions of your mind,

lose it. Leave it as a sign

to mark the false trail, the way

you didn’t go. Be like the fox

who makes more tracks than necessary,

some in the wrong direction.

Practice resurrection.

“Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” from The Country of Marriage, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. 1973. Also published by Counterpoint Press in The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry, 1999; The Mad Farmer Poems, 2008; New Collected Poems, 2012.

Amazon Blurb

During the otherwise quiet course of his life as a poet, Wendell Berry has become “mad” at what contemporary society has made of its land, its communities, and its past. This anger reaches its peak in the poems of the Mad Farmer, an open-ended sequence he's found himself impelled to continue against his better instincts. These poems can take the shape of manifestos, meditations, insults, Whitmanic fits and ravings-these are often funny in spite of themselves. The Mad Farmer is a character as necessary, perhaps, as he is regrettable.

We have here gathered the individual poems from Berry's various collections to offer the teachings and bitcheries of this amazing American voice. After the great success of the lovely Window Poems, Bob Baris of the Press on Scroll Road, returns to design and produce an edition illustrated with etchings by Abigail Rover. His hand-press pages will be off-set for our trade edition.

Ed McClanahan offers an introduction wherein he clears up the inspiration behind the Mad Farmer himself. McClanahan also manages to take more credit than he is clearly due. Then Berry weighs in with an apology-and characteristic exaggeration. James Baker Hall and William Kloefkorn offer poems here that also show how the Mad Farmer has escaped into the work of others.

The whole is a wonderful testimony to the power of anger and humor to bring even the most terrible consequences into a focus otherwise impossible to obtain.

Wendell Berry - A Timbered Choir

A Timbered Choir

by Wendell Berry

Even while I dreamed I prayed that what I saw was only fear and no foretelling,

for I saw the last known landscape destroyed for the sake

of the objective, the soil bludgeoned, the rock blasted.

Those who had wanted to go home would never get there now.

I visited the offices where for the sake of the objective the planners planned

at blank desks set in rows. I visited the loud factories

where the machines were made that would drive ever forward

toward the objective. I saw the forest reduced to stumps and gullies; I saw

the poisoned river, the mountain cast into the valley;

I came to the city that nobody recognized because it looked like every other city.

I saw the passages worn by the unnumbered

footfalls of those whose eyes were fixed upon the objective.

Their passing had obliterated the graves and the monuments

of those who had died in pursuit of the objective

and who had long ago forever been forgotten, according

to the inevitable rule that those who have forgotten forget

that they have forgotten. Men, women, and children now pursued the objective

as if nobody ever had pursued it before.





The races and the sexes now intermingled perfectly in pursuit of the objective.

the once-enslaved, the once-oppressed were now free

to sell themselves to the highest bidder

and to enter the best paying prisons

in pursuit of the objective, which was the destruction of all enemies,

which was the destruction of all obstacles, which was the destruction of all objects,

which was to clear the way to victory, which was to clear the way to promotion, to salvation, 

to progress,

to the completed sale, to the signature

on the contract, which was to clear the way

to self-realization, to self-creation, from which nobody who ever wanted to go home

would ever get there now, for every remembered place

had been displaced; the signposts had been bent to the ground and covered over.





Every place had been displaced, every love

unloved, every vow unsworn, every word unmeant

to make way for the passage of the crowd

of the individuated, the autonomous, the self-actuated, the homeless

with their many eyes opened toward the objective

which they did not yet perceive in the far distance,

having never known where they were going,

having never known where they came from.

Amazon link

Amazon Blurb

Berry’s Sabbath poems embrace much that is elemental to human life--beauty, death, peace, and hope.In his preface to the collection, Berry writes about the growing audience for public poetry readings. While he sees poetry in the public eye as a good thing, Berry asks us to recognize the private life of the poem. These Sabbath poems were written "in silence, in solitude, and mainly out of doors," and tell us about "moments when heart and mind are open and aware."Many years of writing have won Wendell Berry the affection of a broad public. He is beloved for his quiet, steady explorations of nature, his emphasis on finding good work to do in the world, and his faith in the solace of family, memory, and community. His poetry is assured and unceasingly spiritual; its power lies in the strength of the truths revealed.