Solitude and Reverence– At Principle Gallery
You can best serve civilization by being against what usually passes for it.
~ Wendell Berry, A Continuous Harmony: Essays Cultural and Agricultural (1972)
According to Google AI (whose info I trust as much I would a monkey with a hatchet) citing the National Geographic Society as a primary source, historians and anthropologists typically identify a civilization by several core features:
Now bear in mind that I am just mulling this over this morning and probably can’t and won’t offer a full-throated defense of whatever the hell I might say here on dull-witted Monday morning. It just seems to me, after a quick read of the definition of civilization they offer, that the same core features, as they describe them, could be applied to a prison.
Is that the ultimate definition of civilization–a highly controlled environment where the individual is reduced to a number and an assigned cell and job?
I don’t know but it sure sounds like it could be hidden somewhere there in the details of how civilization is presented to us.
The quote at the top from the great essayist/poet Wendell Berry was written in 1968 as a journal entry during a return drive to his Kentucky home after an extended stay in California. Here is that whole short journal entry:
The relief of mountains and deserts after the over-populated, overmechanized regions. The oppression of driving mile after mile under a veil of poison. Now it is only in the wild places that man can sense the rarity of being a man. In the crowded places he is more and more closed in by the feeling that he is ordinary–and that he is, on the average, expendable.
You can best serve civilization by being against what usually passes for it.
That little bit says so much about how civilization, in many ways, moves us away from our humanity and the individuality that comes with it.
Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy many of the perks of civilization. I am writing this on a computer and sending it out on the interweb tubes– that’s what it’s called, right? I sometimes enjoy the anonymity that comes in a crowded city.
But it doesn’t take long for that feeling of being a blank, nameless face to realize that it is also the same feeling, as Berry put it, of being ordinary and expendable. It is counter to what I believe as the individuality that defines our humanity. To me, civilization, using the definition above, seems more intent on controlling than expanding humanity and its spirit.
I have tried, without knowing, to adhere to Berry’s admonition that we best serve civilization by being against what usually passes for it. I think it is the responsibility of artists of all sorts– through our writings, our music, our dance, our poetry, and so on– to remind others that while we are part of civilization, we are first and foremost humans.
Individuals with feelings, emotions, and dreams for which civilization often gives little comfort or aid as that offered by art.
Art frees us from civilization. And prisons of all kinds.
I really wasn’t planning on an anti-civilization post this morning. Actually, had no idea what I would write when I sat down. But I had that line at the top in my files for some time and, though it nagged at me a little, wasn’t sure what to do with it.
Now I know, for better or worse.
Take it for what it’s worth from an unshaven, unbathed, groggy, half-witted older guy sitting in the woods on a Monday morning in June. If you feel like arguing the points made, do it with yourself.
I am civilization today and I ain’t listening.
Here’s a song that might well sum up the rest of the day.