The Beginning

It’s January 5, 2010. The temperature outside dropped to 20 below this morning. I’m concerned about this temperature. I’m disturbed, not just because it freezes the very marrow of my soul into a coagulated lump of spite and bitterness, but because it makes me doubt Wendell Berry.

I’m warmly enjoying a bit of fiction by the old poet and mad farmer this day but I can’t help but question his viability. There are many who would agree wholeheartedly with my lack of enthusiasm for if there is any common thread among pure stock Montanan’s it is this: we think getting back to nature is bullshit. Back to nature is a vast and uncomplicated stamp we use to simplify all thinking that smacks of mother earth, nature hikes, environmentalism, bear bells, organic granola, and sandal toting, buffalo humping ideas that arrive along immigration routes from the farthest bastard infested reaches of the continent.  I admit it’s a bias and one that, if I could have my say, would not stain the venerable Mr. Berry's visage. But without the study and thought which Berry requires of us, one bangs the stamp down and moves on.  I would doubt his viability as well; and do on a God forsaken day such as this. For day’s such as this, as well as most other days in this state, make you realize that nature, given its dithers, would eat you up and crap you out quicker than a bear in a berry patch. I'll let you know, that’s pretty damn quick: quick and messy.

Homesteaders in this country went mad with its emptiness. They froze and boiled and starved and scraped at an unmerciful earth. This is a far walk from the Garden of Eden. And yet… we love it. Like a spurned lover we can’t seem to tear ourselves from its clutches. The mountains, the rivers, the emptiness calls back like a siren, leading us on to certain doom smashed among the crags and washed up on the prairie sea.  There is a consensus, unspoken, that nature here was once a mean bull with a bucking strap that needed rode and broke and there's those that came and were broke themselves against it and those that came and made this a place to live.  This leaves a lingering worry in the back of one's mind whether such a bull is ever really broke and need we test its congeniality unnecessarily.

For those of us who live here, it has been noted and stated and argued that Wendell Berry is an idealist with no bearing on reality. This is the gut reaction of most natives when I read his essays aloud in the hopes of a profound discussion. “He doesn’t live here."  And I realized that this is true, (not in an obvious sense but in a profound one). This place and this time are different than the place and time of Berry’s thinking and living. But this does not make him wrong. If anything it makes him right. I’m positive that the thinking is good but has to be placed in context to time and place. Thus…

At some point you stand up and ask what the hell this means and go out and find it.  Enough philosophy.  I will find Wendell Berry here in my place, amongst my own lineage and understand and possibly change.  No idealism.  I won't tolerate it.  Or not exactly.  It will be kilned.  My guess is I'll be an abject failure at most things Berry.  But if I believe he talks rightly then I have to attempt life in a manner condusive to that truth, whenever it be manifest and however difficult.  Truly, I think this project will suck on too many levels to imagine.  But so be it. In the coming year I'll read and think and talk and criticize and mock and live Wendell Berry.  Maybe in the end I'll find him.