Last night I read a small section of "Native Hill" out of the collection of agrarian essays called The Art of the Commonplace. Wendell wrote "Native Hill" in 1969 and the essay is, in the creative labeling of the editor, geobiographical. It's an introduction to the person and place of Wendell Berry and one soon realizes that to Wendell these two things are one and the same. I'm sure I'll spend the next few weeks trying to understand this excellent essay. It's a shotgun blast of thoughts that lays a foundation for his work. It expresses the personhood of Wendell Berry, telling the story of how he came to his thinking, and what influences were there to begin his path and it forms the place that he began and how it cultivated him as he cultivated it.
This is important to me because I'm very different from Wendell. This is obvious just from sentence structure alone, but it's important to recognize because when I read his works and compare their message with my own life I'm often left disgusted with myself. He's just so damned irritating in how right he is and how wrong I am. I seem wrong by my very nature. Its not as if I came of age and chose the wide road of pleasure and excess as opposed to the narrow, true path of an agrarian mind. I was born on that highway. Wired I came and wired I'll go. I may not have been shot into the fast lane like an 8 lb wailing cannonball as many kids were and are but I've at least been walking the superhighway barrowpit for as long as I can remember. This is not the life of Berry. The man grew up in a land still farmed with horses. By his own admittion, if he'd been born five years later he'd have never understood the old ways. Try 45 years later and see how well you fare. This blessing of being the last of a doomed generation gives him the insight that I now have to struggle with to understand. I'm of generation X - X being a polite symbol meaning: entitled, rootless, narcisistic, little f#$%s. I'm of a generation that didn't even have to work hard to screw up the world. We just did it de facto, the very essence of our existence. They handed it to us in scoop shovel fulls.
I'm not excusing myself. I'm just pointing out a very loud difference between the poet and the pupil. My one ace in the bag is Montana. I would be such a puke if it wasn't for this state and the people here. But of course, as I've so ineloquently pointed out, this state is also the hardest part of living off the land when the land could kill you in a moment or a season and I'm quite frequently reminded of that. Still I have hope. If there's a land that can still reason in terms of place and person its here. Thats not, however, my point today.
I want to address community. This will be an ongoing concern and one which will challenge me greatly. Wendell said something in Native Hill that peaked my interest.
When I have thought of kindness or cruelty, weariness or exuberance, devotion or betrayal, carelessness or care, doggedness or awkwardness or grace, I have had in my mind's eye the men and women of this place, their faces and gestures and movements.
Not I. This idea of having the people of your community form your abstract concepts is mind-blowing to me. It's the purest form of story. When I think of grace I think in definitions and abstract metaphysics. When I think of doggedness I think in metaphor and personal experience. When I think of weariness I am. When I have thought of these things and others like them I can't move beyond my self and it hasn't ever occured to me to think otherwise. Having people form your concepts of the world is simple and bizarre. It's bizarre because, for goodness sakes, how could I ever know enough people or know them well enough to establish something as complicated as this. I can't remember their freaking birthdays much less the essence of their character. Perhaps this is just a Wendellian miracle, born from a man with supernatural abilities of perception, or perhaps I'm just an insensitive jerk without consideration for others. I think its much more basic though. I'm sure Wendell has a depth of perception that is unique and sharpened and I'm sure I'm a dick at times but what it really boils down to is community.
This is not the gag-me form of intentional community that well meaning believers of all sorts trumpet. This is a basic neighborly togetherness formed out of need, place, common beliefs, struggle, and help. This is formed by hammering nails together and netting each other's fish some of which are bigger than others. When I think of my friends I'm sad to say that I could easily think of the fifty icons on my facebook account. Even sadder is that I could have a few hundred icons to look at but I'm an ass and I like to keep my friends limited to fifty. But what does it really matter. They're nothing but text and quizes and videos and statuses. I can't imagine why I couldn't associate them with any kind of concrete reality like cruelty or devotion. So you say, get rid of that damned devil if you don't like it. That wouldn't change anything. I'm sure in the near future I will leave facebook to the virtual world from which it was spawned and strike out on my own but until I'm willing to look at people in a different way then I'm just farting in the wind to no purpose. So my goal for this week is to study a friend, to learn them. Don't take that wrong. I'd like, when I'm done to be able to associate something real with their gestures and movements and face. I've a particular person in mind whom I'll give the title Experiment Q. They'll never know I'm onto them. Till then.
I can't be the only one who is really uncomfortable with idealization of previous generations/earlier times. I do think that there are some things that we can learn from what has come before. It's also important to remember that women have not always had the ability to vote and that African Americans were not always free. We need to cast just as critical eye on the past as we do on the present.
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