Backwoods Blog

WENDELL BERRY

The Isolation Blues;

reflections during covid-19

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front
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.
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 doesn’t 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.
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…
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.


The Cold
Wendell Berry

How exactly good it is
to know myself
in the solitude of winter,

my body containing its own
warmth, divided from all
by the cold; and to go

separate and sure
among the trees cleanly
divided, thinking of you

perfect too in your solitude,
your life withdrawn into
your own keeping

- to be clear, poised
in perfect self-suspension
toward you, as though frozen.

And having known fully the
goodness of that, it will be
good also to melt.

When I tire of the evening news and relentless babble of advertisers, pundits and social media l walk away and find respite in the hard substance of what’s right outside the back door. Oftentimes it’s a good idea to take a dog along with you. They have little interest in anything found on a computer screen or in a newspaper (if we still read those). It is the actual movement and scent of whatever happens to be in front of them that registers. When I allow the pressing issues of the day to briefly recede I find that slight opening to be advantageous and lends itself to an improved outlook, even if I’m just looking at the ground four feet in front of me. The fir tree standing in the snow, the wood pile in the shed and the gray pink pastel sky overhead are all natural markers of my day as I go about my business.

Wendell Berry is one of America’s great writers, now in his late eighties. For most of his career he taught English at the University of Kentucky in Lexington and he lives on a tobacco farm in Lane’s Landing in Henry County, Kentucky. His writings encourage people to find their geographical place in the world, align oneself with nature, seek a sustainable lifestyle, build community, engage politically and question everything. He was also good friends with fellow-Kentuckian Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk at Our Lady of Gethsemani Abbey.  While Merton wrote from his hermitage at the monastery Berry wrote from his Kentucky farm writer’s shed. Wendell Berry was a guest lecturer at the University of Maine Presque Isle sometime back in the 1990s. Somehow I didn’t hear about it at the time (or I wouldn’t have missed it), and I still hear people talking about Wendell Berry’s trip to potato country. As of 2018 Berry did not own a computer or a cell phone, and his landline was not connected to an answering machine and he is still actively farming using work horses and simple low-tech implements*. Berry considers himself to be contrarian by nature, the mad farmer, or one who doesn’t go along with current or popular practices. The way things are going these days in Washington and around the world perhaps a little contrariness isn’t such a bad thing. Think for yourself. Live an authentic life.

* If you happen to look for Wendell Berry’s website or Facebook page, you will not find one. You will have to purchase one of his books.

In the woods,

Dave

February 10, 2022