Tag Archives: wendell berry

by

Sabbath

I’ve taken a few walks this week. This shaggy little fawn, along with his mother and sibling, greeted us on one of them.

I worked hard to photograph these little birds in the brush, and this is the best I could do. “It looks like a chipping sparrow, but that can’t be, this time of year,” I said.

“It’s a tree sparrow! It has a spot on the breast!” said Older Daughter. Like me, she’s never seen a tree sparrow. But unlike me, who sees a new bird and goes home to look it up in the bird book, she reads the bird book and actually remembers details like that before seeing the bird. It’s amazing to me.

Tree sparrow

We also discovered a beaver lodge at one of the ponds we visit. I don’t think it’s inhabited now, but the beavers had been extremely active at some point. I like this photo of the various chewed-off trees leading down to the lodge at the pond’s edge.

Beaver Lane

We saw some other neat things too — logs decorated with all kinds of interesting moss and lichen patterns, bracket fungus, woodpecker holes, geese, a kingfisher, nests. On the way out, I heard a chorus of strident little birds. The girls went ahead and saw a Cooper’s hawk sitting in a low branch, surrounded by tattling chickadees and titmice. (It must be akin to having all the french fries on your plate rise up and start scolding!) He took one look at us and gave up, flying off to find better prospects.

But what strikes me most today is how often I only hear, or half-see, or wonder. This morning, for instance. I had to be home and ready to head out for a family activity at 9:00, so at 7:00 I went back to where the girls and I saw the coyote the other day.

That’s the bridge we were standing on when the coyote tore past us. I knew I probably wouldn’t see it again, but I wanted to go back when I could be quiet.

I saw no coyotes. But in the bushes on the way there, I heard a heavy deer startle and gallop away before I saw it. I was resoundingly scolded by a red squirrel who couldn’t seem to find enough curses to convey his displeasure from a hiding place somewhere to the left. As I got closer to my destination, a large raptor of some kind launched just above me and flew off, low, into the evergreens a little ways away, quickly enough that all I caught was a glimpse of mottled brown and white. Its tail wasn’t red. An owl? A hawk? In the distance, I glimpsed a dark, blackish, feline-looking animal melting away behind some trees. And over the course of the whole walk, I heard (but failed to see) a pileated woodpecker laughing no less than three times.

It was frustrating. There is still a pleasure in being in the woods; I enjoy the sense of insignificance of being surrounded by all kinds of purposeful activity that has nothing to do with me. But there is always a frustration too. Every walk reveals one new discovery, but far more mysteries and questions and fleeting almost-sights. When I have the right perspective, I see this as a good thing. But today I was just disappointed.

I think, actually, it means I need to take a sabbath rest from the camera, at least a short one. It’s a wonderful instrument that has opened my eyes and started an adventure of sorts for our family. But today I noticed the pressure it generates. Instead of enjoying the world, I was looking for a picture. I think in the end I missed more than a photo-op. I missed the real pleasure I could have had from starting the day the way I did.

This Wendell Berry poem is about the tyranny of words, but it could just as easily describe the tyranny of the camera, or anything else that gets hold of us and makes us miss the marrow:

Though the air is full of singing
my head is loud
with the labor of words.

Though the season is rich
with fruit, my tongue
hungers for the sweet of speech.

Though the beech is golden
I cannot stand beside it
mute, but must say

“It is golden,” while the leaves
stir and fall with a sound
that is not a name.

It is in the silence
that my hope is, and my aim.

The rest of “The Silence” is here.

Think I’ll put the camera in its case for awhile and just… look around.

by

Lovely, dark and deep

Actually, the woods my daughters and I walked through yesterday were anything but dark. The sun was so bright I could hardly even see this robin in the trees above, much less determine what kind of bird it was.

When we reached this point in the trail, my youngest exclaimed, “I want to go into that tree tunnel!”

We paused beside a stream…

and thought…

…and the girls waded…

…and we listened. We “came into the presence of still water,” as Wendell Berry says:

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.

The rest of “The Peace of Wild Things” is here.

When we started out, I despaired of seeing any critters because of the noise my two small companions made (and the often louder noise I made with my piercing “SHHH!!”). But the quietness of the woods seemed to seep inwards and we all came under the spell. We heard a woodpecker drumming and calling, songbirds letting loose as they got used to our being there, chipmunks scurrying in the undergrowth. I’m not sure how long we were there, but it was long enough to satisfy. Truly.

Then we went home.

Poetry Friday is at Jama Rattigan’s Alphabet Soup today. Enjoy the poetry feast over there!

by

The Boundary

“The Boundary” is one of the short stories in Wendell Berry’s The Wild Birds. I reread it this week and found it as extraordinarily powerful as I did the first time over 15 years ago. It’s about Mat Feltner, a figure well-known to those familiar with the Port William community of Berry’s fiction. In this story, Mat is 80 years old and physically weak. One day Mat goes to check on a fenceline he’s worried may not be in good repair.

That boundary turns out to be in good shape, solid and well maintained by Nathan Coulter, who has shouldered much of the hard labor of the Feltner farm in Mat’s declining health. But the other boundaries Mat encounters on his afternoon walk into the woods are more permeable: the boundaries between past and present, between time and eternity, between life and death. His pleasant walk down the creek, and the labor to return, turn into a life and death struggle.

One of the themes of the tale is the presentness of the past. It’s a recurring idea in Berry’s writing, and here it’s manifest through Mat’s journey through a woods populated with ghosts, people who have worked with him along the creek and left their memory and their mark on the land. The effect is to collapse all times together, and the suggestion of an eternity released from linear time becomes even more significant when Mat thinks, time and again, “I could stay here.” But what keeps him going in the effort to get back home is his love for Margaret, waiting and worrying, he knows, at home.

I always marvel at the prescience with which Berry writes about old age. He is someone who has listened, like Andy Catlett in The Memory of Old Jack, to the stories of the elderly, and he’s learned well the paths they travel from past to present and back again. Part of the power of this story is in Berry’s ability to bring the reader into the same experience of empathy. I have the sense when I read that this tale is a commemoration of stories Berry has listened to, whether in the exact details or simply in the perfect recreation of the mind of someone inhabiting that boundary between present and past.

by

Revisiting Wendell Berry’s “Fidelity”

Yesterday, we buried my daughter’s hamster. She was injured a week ago, then endured a trip to the vet and a week of pain medication before quietly slipping away.

Did she die of her injuries — or of starvation because the medications so drugged her that she couldn’t eat? Did we help her feel more comfortable, as we so longed to do — or did we increase her pain? Did the trip to the vet help or hurt? Bad enough that she was injured. Worse still if in the longing to help, we were complicit in further injury.

I don’t mean to trivialize the many large tragedies of the world, but the truth is there are no small deaths. Death, especially where any degree of love is involved, always brings us face to face with difficulties and mysteries.

For the Christian, this is a week when the questions of suffering and death and mystery are in the air anyway. I wish I could say that my reading of the Bible has been enough, but this year my threadbare imagination has needed help weaving together the different strands that trouble my mind and heart with the familiar yet enduring mystery of the gospel story. I remembered that Wendell Berry’s short story “Fidelity,” from the collection of the same title, dealt with some of the things I’m thinking about, so I returned to it yesterday.

There will be spoilers here, so, fair warning.

“Fidelity” concerns the last days of Burley Coulter, a beloved member of the Port William community of Berry’s fiction. He is 82 years old and failing, and all those who love him are troubled with the feeling that they need to do something to help. So they take him to a doctor, who checks him into a hospital. Before long Burley is an unrecognizable wraith on a hospital bed, hooked up to needles and tubes under the glare of the institutional lights. How truly Berry writes the response of Burley’s friends and family:

When they returned on yet another visit and found the old body still as it had been, a mere passive addition to the complicated machines that kept it minimally alive, they saw finally that in their attempt to help they had not helped but only complicated his disease beyond their power to help. And they thought with regret of the time when the thing that had been wrong with him had been simply unknown, and there had been only it and him and him and them in the place they had known together. Loving him, wanting to help him, they had given him over to “the best of modern medical care” — which meant, as they now saw, that they had abandoned him.

So Danny Branch, Burley’s son, stages a rescue. I’m not sure why they don’t simply check him out of the hospital, but within the fictional situation Berry creates they are completely powerless. Danny goes to the hospital in the dead of night and takes Burley away with him to a place he knows, and the two spend his final hours together. Meanwhile, a detective questions Danny’s wife Lyda, lawyers Wheeler and Henry Catlett, and eventually the whole Port William membership as they gather in the Catlett offices — a conversation that lays bare the contrasts between the world of technology and organization and institution, and the world of Port William.

The plot borrows some of the ingredients of the Easter story, but made more immanent and less theological. There are several allusions, such as when the janitors at the hospital, watching as Danny wheels Burley away on a gurney, are “as stupefied, apparently, as the soldiers at the Tomb.” There are also two resurrections. Danny, who has hidden the unconscious Burley in a barn while he prepares to dig his grave, returns to check on Burley and is startled to find him awake, eyes open, looking at him. The second resurrection takes place just after Burley dies. As Danny goes back to digging the grave,

Burley returned to his mind, and he knew him again as he had been when his life was full. He saw again the stance and demeanor of the man, the amused eyes, the lips pressed together while speech waited upon thought, an almost inviolable patience in the set of his shoulders. It was as though Burley stood in full view nearby, at ease and well at home — as though Danny could see him, but only on condition that he not look.

One other notable reminder to me of the story’s resonance with Easter is the way Burley’s friends come together in Wheeler’s offices. It’s an upper room experience like those of the disciples after Jesus’ death, first when the Lord himself appears to them, then when the Holy Spirit comes. In this story, it’s Danny who comes into the assembly, bringing with him a spirit of peace: “The room was all ashimmer now with its quiet.” (This scene is beautiful for its contrast to the funeral scene in The Memory of Old Jack too. But I can’t write about everything…)

I love so many things about this story. I love the way Berry weaves his tale in with this larger one. I love the way he works out themes about the right purposes of law and medicine and technology (a theme that’s always percolating in my own thoughts). I love the characters he draws with such exact detail and affection.

Most of all I love the tenderness with which he writes of death and loss and love. Somehow at Easter we can get so focused on the theological import of what Christ has done that we miss the very human story of death and loss and love and confusion. “Fidelity” comforted me without tearing the veil from any of the mysteries, affirming the essential goodness of my longings for understanding and fellowship and meaning. It underlines not only the bewilderments and sorrows of our earthly experience, but the joys. It manages to weave together the strands of so many things I struggle with and hope for.

Sometimes we need the coherence that only poetry can provide. “Fidelity,” as well as the other stories in this collection, lends us the eyes of a poet who can glimpse an underlying unity, and capture in words those shimmers of meaning that go far beyond words.

by

Life onscreen

I wanted to pause in my reading of The Next Story and reflect on this passage, where Tim Challies speaks of

our insistence that the Internet is there, that it is a place. We never referred to the space between my mailbox and my friend’s mailbox as a place (letterspace?). Letters were in transit. They were in trucks or on trains, but they were not in a place. When I wrote a letter, I was not entering “letter world.” Similarly, when I watched TV, an inherently non-participatory act, I was still in my living room, not in some strange place between my home and the cable company. But when it comes to the Internet, we talk about entering cyberspace, a place that is really no “place” at all… We take our sense of self, our sense of presence, and transport it into the ethereal world of bits and bytes. Suddenly we are here and there, at a desk in body but in soul or spirit somehow present in cyberspace. And this is new to the human experience. When we venture into this world, this mediated world, we leave our bodies behind. And more and more of us are finding that we actually like it this way, that being able to experience a space free from the limitations of real presence brings a kind of joy.

(I’d cite a page number here, but I’m reading the book on my Kindle. :-/ Yes, I appreciate the irony…)

Even though my screen time is more limited than some, I feel the truth of these words. As I read them, I think about some of the contrasts:

Offline, I make sure I’m showered and groomed before I go out the door and into the world of (non-family) people. Online, I often blog in my bathrobe, typing with one hand, holding the coffee cup in the other.

Offline, I am self-conscious. Am I talking too much? Do I look fat in these jeans? What are they thinking of me? “They” are present and visible. Online, I feel more freedom. “They” (or “you”?) are invisible, though I feel a real acquaintance through their (your) writing voice. I don’t worry about how I look with them (you).

Offline, I often feel disconnected. A conversation may be going on around me, and I may put in my oar here and there. But most of me is still beneath the surface. Only a small percentage of what I think and feel about something ever gets out of my mouth. Online this is probably just as true, but if I write a post about something it feels somehow more complete — maybe because it’s self-originating rather than responsive?

Oh yeah. Self. Offline, it’s not all about me. Online, it can be.

Offline I fumble for words and speak in fragments. Online, I revise.

Offline I often feel like the outsider in the group. Online the walls between cliques aren’t as defined. (It’s weird that I feel this way, because things like “friend connect” and friend counts seem designed to broadcast cliques a person is in. Why don’t these things have the same impact on me as offline cliques?)

There are probably so many more things I could write, but my offline life is calling. So I’ll just leave the question open. How do you experience this contrast between offscreen and onscreen life?