Where the Road Ends – At West End Gallery
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives might be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
–Wendell Berry, The Peace of Wild Things (1968)
I wrote yesterday about my utter disdain for the month of August, about how it raises dark associations to a thread of death and grimness that runs back to my childhood. I expressed the great relief that September was finally here and August was un the rearview mirror.
My mistake. I wasn’t aware early yesterday that August wasn’t done with its cruelty.
Minutes after I pushed the publish button for the post I checked the news and discovered that August claimed yet another good soul. Wendell Berry died at the age of 92 on that last day of August in the rural Kentucky that was the basis for much of his writing. Wendell Berry is listed in Wikipedia as an American novelist, poet, essayist, environmental activist, cultural critic and farmer.
Much of his writing dealt with our relationship to the land, something that resonated with me. The poem above, The Peace of Wild Things, is his most famous poem, reminding that us that there is relief from our despair of the modern world in quietly observing and resting in the nature around us. It has appeared here before as have many of his poems and passages from his essays that dealt our struggle with an ever increasing technological and corporatized future.
Like Dolly Parton, Berry represented not only the rural middle south of this country from which they came, but all of this country and all people with a plain-spoken nobleness that emphasized a moral character based in kindness, altruism, and honesty. Qualities to which we should all aspire.
A cruel August claimed two of our finest. We move into September a bit sadder with the loss of two moral beacons.
The song below felt right for me this morning. It’s Billy Bragg & Wilco doing another song based on Woody Guthrie lyrics. This is Another Man’s Done Gone.
Below the song are several of my favorite Wendell Berry poems that have appeared here over the years. The post finishes with a passage from a Berry essay that is extremely relevant in this time when we are being promised a rosy future of ease and prosperity if we allow technology a free hand to rule supreme over every aspect of our lives. We are fed the assumption that advanced technology will be our servant without being told that we may instead end up being the servant.
On to September…
To Know the Dark (1970)
To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.
HOW TO BE A POET
(to remind myself) (1999)
Make a place to sit down.
Sit down. Be quiet.
You must depend upon
affection, reading, knowledge,
skill — more of each
than you have — inspiration,
work, growing older, patience,
for patience joins time
to eternity. Any readers
who like your poems,
doubt their judgment.
Breathe with unconditional breath
the unconditioned air.
Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly. Live
a three-dimensioned life;
stay away from screens.
Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.
Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of the silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came.
Our Real Work (1983)
It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.
“We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. And this has been based on the even flimsier assumption that we could know with any certainty what was good even for us. We have fulfilled the danger of this by making our personal pride and greed the standard of our behavior toward the world – to the incalculable disadvantage of the world and every living thing in it. And now, perhaps very close to too late, our great error has become clear. It is not only our own creativity – our own capacity for life – that is stifled by our arrogant assumption; the creation itself is stifled.
We have been wrong. We must change our lives, so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and to learn what is good for it. We must learn to cooperate in its processes, and to yield to its limits. But even more important, we must learn to acknowledge that the creation is full of mystery; we will never entirely understand it. We must abandon arrogance and stand in awe. We must recover the sense of the majesty of creation, and the ability to be worshipful in its presence. For I do not doubt that it is only on the condition of humility and reverence before the world that our species will be able to remain in it.”
― Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays (2002)
