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The World According to Wendell
October 6, 2002
. . .The care of the earth is our most ancient and worthy and, after all, our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal, is our only hope.The road from Hanska to Lamberton, Minnesota heads mostly due west, as roads in prairie country generally do, laid out in grids to compass points more than a hundred years ago. It turns only occasionally to avoid a lake or "slough." One grows used to straight lines: beside arrow straight roads, crop rows stretch straight on every hand. This time of year, the corn stands golden and ripe, eight feet tall. The soybeans are dried upon the stalk. Harvest will begin soon, combines moving through day and night until all the crops are in, huge machines attacking the straight rows of fields almost flat, often a mile long. At night during harvest, the headlights of combines give the impression of a population that isn't there.--Wendell Berry
In places on the road to Lamberton you can see for twenty miles in all directions. Everything is under cultivation. The openness of land and sky has a peculiar beauty, an eternal aspect. One passes through small prairie towns like Godhal and Comfrey and Jeffers, where the prehistoric Indian petroglyphs are carved in eerie mystery atop a ridge of exposed, red rock and time stands still. A couple of miles north on Route 71, then west again on County Road 10, brings you to the corner where stands the High Water Lutheran Church. There you turn north toward Lamberton until the first gravel road, then west about three miles to Eureka Farm.
This is where the Iversons lived, two brothers and two sisters, all past middle age, none married. Three generations of Iversons had farmed this place since coming over from Norway. Their home was rich with memories of the pioneer past, books and pictures and furniture. A visit there was a trip back in time. The past was present there,--difficult to explain, but palpably real. This was archetypal home: a sense of the way things ought to be, of proper relationship, of safety, even of sacredness.
The Iverson brothers, Marlow and Vernon, were both typical and a-typical of modern American agriculture. Together, these two brothers farmed 700 acres, and had a reputation for being excellent at what they did. In attitude and being, they exuded a simpler, more modest time, a time when farm life was the life of most Americans. Yet, they were part of modern agri-business. Huge, dinosaur-like tractors lay parked in machine sheds near by. There was no longer any livestock on Eureka Farm, no pastures or fencerows. The small, seemingly idyllic, diversified farm is no more. Corn and soybeans are the only crops, far as the eye can see.
It is a style of farming with which Wendell Berry, the farmer poet, is familiar, just as he is familiar with that sense of "home" and "household" which had managed to survive among the surviving Iversons. If Berry had his way, agribusiness--a dirty word--would be replaced by the small family farms of yesterday.
It is not simply nostalgia that moves him, but an unbending belief that the small, diversified farm is not only more environmentally friendly, but just as "economical," which word Berry equates with "health." The small farm, he believes, is healthier for our country, and the older style of farm-life is a better, cleaner, and saner way of life. Paradoxically, I suspect that the Iversons and most of the other farmers I knew in Minnesota would have preferred to return to something like that way of life, difficult though it often was. But like so many American farmers today, they are trapped in a growing spiral of credit and production costs out of which they would probably find it difficult if not impossible to extricate themselves.
Modern agriculture, as I experienced it close-up in Minnesota, is a strange mix of nostalgia for a simpler past, awe at the dramatic potential and real productivity of modern, technological and chemical agriculture, and a usually unspoken fear about the consequences to themselves and the land of using so much herbicide, insecticide, and fertilizer. There is growing concern--but little being done--about increasing soil erosion, which is evident everywhere, even to outsiders, where brown hillocks show through the thick, gummy, black native soil, and where ugly eroded rivulets mark the spaces between beanrows which should have been set in contours.
Farm places stand abandoned everywhere, indication of the dramatic decrease in farmers (from 1946 to 1976, farm population dropped from 30 million to 9 million, and has been dropping ever since). Many have been bulldozed to create more land for cultivation, making inhabited houses more isolated than they used to be. "The whole landscape is snaggletoothed with abandoned farms," writes Berry. In country where the price of an acre soared to $3000 in the 70's, every inch must be kept under cultivation in order to produce the maximum yield in order to meet the massive debt.
Even at that, for those who purchased land at those prices, in combination with steadily declining crop prices, there wasn't enough produce from an acre even to pay the interest. Thousands of farmers have gone under in the last fifteen years. And with them is going a way of life which Berry believes is central to our understanding of ourselves as Americans, and essential to the health of our farmland and ourselves. Agribusiness, he says, has created a surplus of everything except farmers.
During my time in Minnesota, I observed the farm crisis at first hand. Farmers in our area were doing somewhat better than in other areas and states, but farm foreclosures had become increasingly common. The consequences of there being fewer farmers is evident in the decay of small rural communities, the presence of more expensive and larger machinery, bigger but not necessarily better farms, and less care in farming practice. Perhaps more important, there has been a decline in the quality of life epitomized for me by the Iversons.
I'm not sure how familiar or remote this may seem here in Newburyport--unless we pause to give thought to our utter dependence upon agriculture--but in the Midwest it is an all consuming problem. You hear about it daily on the TV and read about it on the front page of the Minneapolis Star and Tribune. The farm crisis destroys families. All is not well out on the farm.
Wendell Berry is a prophet on this subject, but who is listening? He says there are two obstacles to better farming. One is that the word "farmer' is a derogatory term: farming is not high on the list of valued, "successful" occupations. And listen to what he says about the other obstacle:
After a half century of industrial agriculture, farmers of any kind have become a tiny minority, and good farmers are rare. To farm our land in the best way, to conserve and keep it permanently productive, we need many more farmers than we have. Given the best of conditions, it would take a long time to get them. The best way to get farmers is to raise them on farms, but the seed stock has been drastically depleted. And for those who wish to come into farming from the outside, there are critical educational problems and few teachers. But conditions for going into farming now are discouraging if not prohibitive even for young people who know how to farm. At speculator's prices land can hardly be made to pay for itself by farming. And on top of that, the young farmer must pay usury to lenders, and buy equipment and supplies at costs rising much faster than the value of farm produce. It is a farmer-killing and land-killing economy. Because the price of land is so disproportionate to the price of anything that can be grown on it, farmers who own their own land are worth more dead than alive. That is a joke now among farmers, and it is true.Part of the problem is in our interpretation of what constitutes a good economy. If money is the only answer, then we shall probably reap what we sow (unfortunately, we can't eat money). As Berry puts it, "Money is a dangerous determinant of national health." Meanwhile, our farmland--the source of our survival--continues to suffer the damaging effects of agribusiness, with all that it implies. For Berry, our preoccupation with monetary success is a "crisis of character," shown most clearly by our willingness to put off indefinitely the responsibility for our actions.
One of the key words in Berry's essays in the word "connection," and it is this concern for connection which makes him a quintessentially "religious" writer (religion means, we remember, "to rebind together"). His essays, novels, stories, and poems are concerned with the inter-relatedness--even the sacredness--of people and things. One of his finest essays, and the title of one of his early books, "The Gift of Good Land," is a convincing biblical argument for a return to better farming practice.
From his father, Berry gained a powerful Jeffersonian sense of community, a sense as Robert Marquand writes, "that for democracy to work, people must be bound to each other by far more than economic ties. In Berry's view, they must be joined also by values of hard work, devotion, memory, and association that come with membership in a community."
As Berry himself puts it, "The basic issue is love--loving things, loving people, not in this abstract 'love of humanity' we hear so much about, but loving particular people." To the charge that he is trying to return to the past, Berry once said, "Nonsense! All the people I love are in the 20th century."
Berry believes that we have blinded ourselves, in Robert Marquand's words, to the "invisible and intangible moral order that underlies community. We also fail to see the 'gift' that good land represents. In a sense, America itself--the land, its history--is a gift, a good gift." One of his recurring themes is the inseparability of agriculture and culture. Without a good relationship with the earth, he asks, how can we have a good relationship to each other?
Berry has many ideas for helping us to improve the quality of our lives, something that we as religious people have a direct stake in. His essays are full of suggestions for escaping from our present predicament, but they all begin with a simple insight from Confucius: "Wanting good government in their states, they first established order in their families; wanting order in the home, they first disciplined themselves. . . ."
The world according to Wendell begins to be reformed when we begin to reform ourselves, our individual lives. It's an idea near and dear to our liberal religious faith in "salvation by character." But we have to take it seriously. Berry cites the duplicity of so much that we do as exemplified by the discovery, in 1975, that the Sierra Club, full of good and concerned people, owned stock in oil wells and strip mines which were destroying the very land they were trying to save. Our crisis is one of character; we give lip service to ideals that we are not fully prepared to live up to. Berry wants to help us live more unified lives, a religious ideal which is close to my own heart.
The ways of escape are hinted at in such simple concepts as "restraint": restraint in assessing our needs, restraint in our relationships, and restraint in sexual relations: he is as concerned by the machines and chemicals by which we control our own fertility as he is by those with which we are mutilating our land. He is concerned about "fidelity" both to the land and to those whom we love and with whom we live, and with what he calls "householding," the ordering of our households (the original meaning of "economy," and still the best one).
He is concerned about the trials and tribulations of marriage and family life in a way that is refreshingly free of conservative "family values" rhetoric, writing in one of his poems that "Love changes, and in change is true." Of marriage he writes in a poem of that title,
It is to be"Healing" is another key word for Berry, as is "health," which, he points out, is related to the concepts of wholeness and holiness. He wants to heal our brokenness. He wants us to be nurturers all, men as well as women, and he searches for our secret exploitations. He would like us to be generalists, as the small farmer he admires so much was a generalist, instead of specializing, and failing to see the forest for the trees.
torn open. It is not to be
reached and come to rest in
ever. I turn against you,
I break from you, I turn to you.
We hurt, and are hurt,
and have each other for healing.
It is healing. It is never whole.
Finally. he is concerned, especially in his stories and novels such as A Place on Earth and the more recent Jayber Crow, with the notion of "membership," in the sense that each of us, regardless of our faults and foibles, should have a valued place in world, in the communities to which we belong and in which we live our lives.
What Berry offers, and what makes him attractive to me, is a religious approach toward life, an approach which recognizes, in his words, that
It is [our] time's discipline to thinkan approach which yet treats seriously the wholeness and holiness of our existence, of our oneness with all other people and creatures and with the earth from which we come.
of the death of all living, and yet live,
In was precisely in the values of community and memory, of family and friendship and care, that the Iversons were so rich. They were people who knew who they were, where they had come from, who had a respect and appreciation for the parents who brought them up, and for the farm as a sacred inheritance, a "gift of good land." (Eureka Farm, incidentally, was recently left by the Iversons to the American Cancer Society.)
The rift comes when such values are in opposition to the aims of big-business agriculture, with its demands for greater and greater productivity, regardless of the cost to the land or to the lives of human beings. Wendell Berry wants to put us back together again, to restore our happiness and our good relation to all that is.
If his essays can sound the warning note so clearly, his novels and poems as often focus on our sources of hope. Nor is his response to the attitudes and slogans of the day without humor, as in his famous poem "Manifesto: the Mad Farmer Liberation Front," which I read to you this morning. In another Mad Farmer poem, "The Mad Farmer's Love Song," Berry writes,
O when the world's at peaceIn "To My Children, Fearing for Them," he captures what has to be every parent's ambivalence in a world perched on the brink of violence and nuclear destruction:
and every man is free
then will I go down unto my love
O and I may go down
several times before that.
Terrors are to come. The earthBerry's poem "Testament" is his own epitaph:
is poisoned with narrow lives.
I think of you. What you will
live through, or perish by, eats
at my heart. What have I done? I
need better answers than there are
to the pain of coming to see
what was done in blindness,
loving what I cannot save. Nor,
your eyes turning toward me,
can I wish your lives unmade
though the pain of them is on me.
1.Amen.
Dear relatives and friends, when my last breath
Grows large and free in air, don't call it death--
A word to enrich the undertaker and inspire
His surly art of imitating life; conspire
Against him. Say that my body cannot now
Be improved upon; it has not fault to show
To the sly cosmetician. Say that my flesh
Has a perfection in compliance with the grass
Truer than any it could have striven for.
You will recognize the earth in me, as before
I wished to know it in myself: my earth
That has been my care and faithful charge from birth,
And toward which all my sorrows were surely bound,
And all my hopes. Say that I have found
A good solution, and am on my way
To the roots. And say that I have left my native clay
At last, to be a traveler; that too will be so.
Traveler to where? Say you don't know.
2.
But do not let your ignorance
Of my spirit's whereabouts dismay
You, or overwhelm your thoughts.
Be careful not to say
Anything too final. Whatever
Is unsure is possible, and life is bigger
Than flesh. Beyond reach of thought
Let imagination figure
Your hope. That will be generous
To me and to yourselves. Why settle
For some know-it-all's despair
When the dead may dance to the fiddle
Hereafter, for all anybody knows?
And remember that the Heavenly soil
Need not be too rich to please
One who was happy in Port Royal [Berry's hometown].
I may be already heading back,
A new and better man, toward
That town. The thought's unreasonable,
But so is life, thank the Lord!
3.
So treat me, even dead,
As a man who has a place
To go, and something to do.
Don't muck up my face
With wax and powder and rouge
As one would prettify
An unalterable fact
To give bitterness the lie.
Admit the native earth
My body is and will be,
Admit its freedom and
Its changeability.
Dress me in the clothes
I wore in the day's round.
Lay me in a wooden box.
Put the box in the ground.
4.
Beneath this stone a Berry is planted
In his home land, as he wanted.
He has come to the gathering of his kin,
Among whom some were worthy men,
Farmers mostly, who lived by hand,
But one was a cobbler from Ireland,
Another played the eternal fool
By riding on a circus mule
To be remembered in grateful laughter
Longer than the rest. After
Doing what they had to do,
They are at ease here. Let all of you
Who yet for pain find force and voice
Look on their peace, and rejoice.
The Rev. Harold E. Babcock
Some suggested reading:
Novels: A Place on Earth, Remembering, Jayber Crow.
Short Stories: The Wild Birds.
Essays: The Gift of Good Land, The Unsettling of America, Home Economics, What Are People For?
Poems: Collected Poems, The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry.
A new collection of Berry's essays has just been published (2002).
