The 3rd Sabbath of August

The Gardener

by Ken Weisner

You get down on your knees in the dark earth--alone

for hours in hot sun, yanking weed roots, staking trellises,

burning your shoulders, swatting gnats; you strain your muscled

midwestern neck and back, callous your pianist's hands.

You cut roses back so they won't fruit, rip out and replace

spent annuals. You fill your garden dense with roots and vines.

And when a humble sprout climbs like a worm up out of death,

you are there to bless it, in your green patch, all spring and summer long,

hose like a scepter, a reliquary vessel; you hum

through the dreamy wilderness--no one to judge, absolve,

or be absolved--purified by labor, confessed by its whisperings,

connected to its innocence. So when you heft a woody, brushy tangle, or stumble

inside grimy, spent by earth, I see all the sacraments in place--

and the redeemed world never smelled so sweet.

On Good Workmanship and Materialism

"To me, this means simply that we are not safe in assuming that we can preserve wildness by making wilderness preserves. Those of us who see that wildness and wilderness need to be preserved are going to have to understand the dependence of these things upon our domestic economy and our domestic behavior. If we do not have an economy capable of valuing in particular terms the durable good of localities and communities, then we are not going to be able to preserve anything. We are going to have to see that, if we want our forests to last, then we must make wood products that last, for our forests are more threatened by shoddy workmanship than by clear-cutting or by fire. Good workmanship--that is, careful, considerate, and loving work--requires us to think considerately of the whole process, natural and cultural, involved in the making of wooden artifacts, because the good worker does not share the industrial contempt for 'raw material.' The good worker loves the board before it becomes a table, loves the tree before it yields the board, loves the forest before it gives up the tree. The good worker understands that a badly made artifact is both an insult to its user and a danger to its source. We could say, then, that good forestry begins with the respectful husbanding of the forest that we call stewardship and ends with well-made tables and chairs and houses, just as good agriculture begins with stewardship of the fields and ends with good meals."

"...Our present economy, by contrast, does not account for affection at all, which is to say that it does not account for value. It is simply a description of the career of money as it preys upon both nature and human society. Apparently because our age is so manifestly unconcerned for the life of the spirit, many people conclude that it places an undue value on material things. But that cannot be so, for people who valued material things would take care of them and would care for the sources of them. We could argue that an age that properly valued and cared for material things would be an age properly spiritual. In my part of the country, the Shakers, "unworldly" as they were, were the true materialists, for they truly valued materials. And they valued them in the only way that such things can be valued in practice: by good workmanship, both elegant and sound. The so-called materialism of our own time is, by contrast, at once indifferent to spiritual concerns and insatiably destructive of the material world. And I would call our economy, not materialistic, but abstract, intent upon the subversion of both spirit and matter by abstractions of value and of power. In such an economy, it is impossible to value anything that one has. What one has (house or job, spouse or car) is only valuable insofar as it can be exchanged for what one believes that one wants - a limitless economic process based upon boundless dissatisfaction."

Wendell Berry - "Preserving Wildness" from Home Economics.

This thinking I can vouch for wholeheartedly.  The connection implicit with good work, locally done is undeniable.  Not only for the reason that good craftsmanship lasts but for the reason that there is a spiritual value in the work as accomplished by neighbor, brother, or self that is absent in the partical board, screw job at Walmart.  I throw it in and I throw it out.  Perhaps to the chagrin of some, I will never throw out my dining room table, my bed frame, nor my bookshelf.  These are things crafted from my own hand, invested in and carefully made.  The thought of replacing them is painful.  It would be as if I replaced a part of myself. 

"...For human beings the spiritual and the practical are, and should be, inseparable.  Alone, practicality becomes dangerous; spirituality, alone, becomes feeble and pointless.  Alone, either becomes dull.  Each is the other's discipline, in a sense, and in good work the two are joined."

Wendell Berry - Preserving Wildness from Home Economics

The 2nd Sabbath of August

Sentimental Education

by Tony Hoagland

And when we were eight, or nine,

our father took us back into the Alabama woods,

found a rotten log, and with his hunting knife

pried off a slab of bark

to show the hundred kinds of bugs and grubs

that we would have to eat in a time of war.

"The ones who will survive," he told us,

looking at us hard,

"are the ones who are willing to do anything."

Then he popped one of those pale slugs

into his mouth and started chewing.

And that was Lesson Number 4

in The Green Beret Book of Childrearing.

I looked at my pale, scrawny, knock-kneed, bug-eyed brother,

who was identical to me,

and saw that, in a world that ate the weak,

we didn't have a prayer,

and next thing I remember, I'm working for a living

at a boring job

that I'm afraid of losing,

with a wife whose lack of love for me

is like a lack of oxygen,

and this dead thing in my chest

that used to be my heart.

Oh, if he were alive, I would tell him, "Dad,

you were right! I ate a lot of stuff

far worse than bugs."

And I was eaten, I was eaten,

I was picked up

and chewed

and swallowed

down into the belly of the world.

On Cigars

From And Now, After Dinner, The Cigar.

"Biblical scholars hotly contest a question to which there is no obvious or certain answer: on which day did God create cigars?

Why this problem should be the object of such heated debate, especially given the paucity of textual evidence, is anyone’s guess. It is clear that, absent anything definitive in the textus receptus, Right Reason alone (that is to say, reason informed by caritas) must be our guide.

Now I’m not going to say anything more about the originary problem—for that is not my concern here—than that I would place the creation of cigars somewhere near The Beginning for the simple reason that it’s hard to imagine the fiat lux echoing more than a couple of times before someone thought to touch the lux to some really fine, cured and carefully rolled tobacco.

So: light, then men, then vegetation. Cigars almost certainly followed fast upon these three.

The problem is, so did women, which is why in the fullness of time Chesterton was obliged to say, “most of us have heard the voice in which the hostess tells her husband not to sit too long over the cigars. It is the dreadful voice of Love seeking to destroy Comradeship.”

Notwithstanding the small number of women who willingly suffer their men to linger over the cigars (Mom! They don’t make ‘em like you anymore!), and indeed the even smaller number of women who actually smoke them (I’m not sure where I stand on this—for obvious reasons), it is generally the case, near as I can tell, that women were created mainly to keep men from enjoying themselves too much over the cigars.

...Whereupon the men will adjourn. They won’t fully enjoy themselves, of course, because they know that what they’re about to do will set them back a bit, but they’ll adjourn nonetheless. Consequence is something they’ve learned to suffer willingly.

Now if you’re going to risk the consequences, there are three things you must keep in mind as you buy your three or four nights in the doghouse: the third is the kind of cigar itself; the second is what to put in the snifter; the first is where to go.

As for the third: if you’re rich, buy good cigars. Really really good ones. I have no experience of them, so my advice is limited to this: ask someone who knows.

But if you are not rich, find a middling cigar that won’t scorch your tongue or send you reeling. On these two commands hang all the law and the prophets. And truth be told you don’t actually need the kind of cigar you find between the hairy knuckles and gaudy rings of some fat cat golf hack. A Churchill reject will do the job just fine. Occasionally you’ll get one that won’t smoke, so you might want to get two just in case, but don’t break the bank just because someone in some magazine has said disparaging things about all us cheap bastards. We cheap bastards are doing just fine.

But of course you don’t want an over-the-counter cigar that comes in a little three-quarter box with cellophane over it. That’s beneath human dignity. It’s for bait fishermen who have never wielded a fly rod..."

Jason Peters - Front Porch Republic

On Sunday Reading and Wildness

Sunday mornings are my Wendell time.  The boy's are putzing around the house and there's a warm easy atmosphere with nothing to do before church.  I pick up Wendell and sit for a couple hours.  I usually leave the chair both inspired and depressed.  There's so much wrong and I've so little will power and opportunity.  But I also leave with a better understanding of things albeit with little I can hope to achieve.  At least the change of architecture in my thinking has value even though the change is hard and labored.  I just finished Berry's "Preserving Wildness."  Fantastic essay that I had to read twice.  Actually I have to read all of Wendell's stuff twice.  That's a confession I suppose. 

. . If I had to choose, I would join the nature extremists against the technology extremists, but this choice seems poor, even assuming that it is possible. I would prefer to stay in the middle, not to avoid taking sides, but because I think the middle is a side, as well as the real location of the problem.

The middle, of course, is always rather roomy and bewildering territory, and so I should state plainly the assumptions that define the ground on which I intend to stand:

1. We live in a wilderness, in which we and our works occupy a tiny space and play a tiny part. We exist under its dispensation and by its tolerance.

2. This wilderness, the universe, is somewhat hospitable to us, but it is also absolutely dangerous to us (it is going to kill us, sooner or later), and we are absolutely dependent upon it.

3. That we depend upon what we are endangered by is a problem not solvable by "problem solving." It does not have what the nature romantic or the technocrat would regard as a solution. We are not going back to the Garden of Eden, nor are we going to manufacture an Industrial Paradise.

4. There does exist a possibility that we can live more or less in harmony with our native wilderness; I am betting my life that such a harmony is possible. But I do not believe that it can be achieved simply or easily or that it can ever be perfect, and I am certain that it can never be made, once and for all, but is the forever unfinished lifework of our species.

5. It is not possible (at least, not for very long) for humans to intend their own good specifically or exclusively. We cannot intend our good, in the long run, without intending the good of our place-which means, ultimately, the good of the world.

6. To use or not to use nature is not a choice that is available to us; we can live only at the expense of other lives. Our choice has rather to do with how and how much to use. This is not a choice that can be decided satisfactorily in principle or in theory; it is a choice intransigently impractical. That is, it must be worked out in local practice because, by necessity, the practice will vary somewhat from one locality to another. There is, thus, no practical way that we can intend the good of the world; practice can only be local.

7. If there is no escape from the human use of nature, then human good cannot be simply synonymous with natural good.

What these assumptions describe, of course, is the human predicament. It is a spiritual predicament, for it requires us to be properly humble and grateful; time and again, it asks us to be still and wait. But it is also a practical problem, for it requires us to do things. 

Wendell Berry - "Preserving Wildness" in Home Economics.

The First Sabbath of August

Why I am Not a Vegetarian

by David Oliveira

It's not that I love animals less,

a case could be made I love them more--

and it's not that I love vegetables less, I love them rare, nothing more savory than raw celery clawing and kicking its way down the gullet.

What I find hard to stomach is vegetarians.

If there is a vegetarian at the table, we all get called in to be witnesses at a police lineup.

Cheese, eggs, fish,

each suspect paraded for identification-- pronounced innocent, guilty, please take two steps forward.

And it's not like there is just one canon for the good host to worry about.

Each vegetarian comes with a different menu.

Most won't eat anything that had legs,

though many eat fish, a fin nothing like a leg, And eat shrimp, that have legs which count as fins since they come from the sea and taste so good in a Newburg sauce.

Oysters are problematic, without legs and from the sea, but mostly eaten alive, like carrots.

A few pass on eggs because of the latent leg potential, though pasta is usually okay, the potential hard to realize under the marinara.

One friend doesn't drink milk

but asks for extra au jus

for his mashed potatoes. I haven't the heart to explain what kind of vegetable the "au" is or how many get squeezed to make a cup of "jus."

Don't misunderstand,

I admire those who stand on principle,

however vague, who doesn't admire

the resolve of, say, a Jerry Falwell,

to bear the weight of so much conviction he can hardly walk to church.

Praise the Lord for limousines.

As my mother would say,

"Live and let live--

Just keep the details to yourself,

And pass the ketchup, please."

On Building my Dream Home

This is a home in Wales that a guy built in three months for next to nothing.  Check it out here.  It's a reciprocal framed roof on a timber frame with straw walls rendered with lime and a turf roof.  I will build a house like this.  I just have to find the land and convince Sara that a compost toilet is the wave of the future.  Crapping in a bag of sawdust here I come.

Off Sabbatical

I've been on sabbatical.  There's much to talk about.  I've not found Wendell in my absence.  I've been depressed and hopeful both in the same breath.  I've had slugs and weeds, sink holes and plumbing nightmares, tornados, floods and hail storms.  I've questioned community, dug holes, wandered in the wilderness and watched my boys grow tan and wild.  I've eaten from the garden, watched it wither in parts and bloom in others.  What the hell has been the question of the summer.  Who knew finding Wendell would be such a damned load of work.  Where to begin?

The 4th Sabbath of July

Failing and Flying

by Jack Gilbert

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.

It's the same when love comes to an end,

or the marriage fails and people say

they knew it was a mistake, that everybody

said it would never work. That she was

old enough to know better. But anything

worth doing is worth doing badly.

Like being there by that summer ocean

on the other side of the island while

love was fading out of her, the stars

burning so extravagantly those nights that

anyone could tell you they would never last.

Every morning she was asleep in my bed

like a visitation, the gentleness in her

like antelope standing in the dawn mist.

Each afternoon I watched her coming back

through the hot stony field after swimming,

the sea light behind her and the huge sky

on the other side of that. Listened to her

while we ate lunch. How can they say

the marriage failed? Like the people who

came back from Provence (when it was Provence)

and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.

I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,

but just coming to the end of his triumph.