A Tribute to Wendell Berry
Wendell Berry, a truly wise man, died at age 92 on August 26. Let’s let him speak for himself on the topic of death right off. The following 4 part poem is from his book The Country of Marriage:
Testament by Wendell Berry –
Dear relatives and friends, when my last breath
Grows large and free in air, don’t call it death —
A word to enrich the undertaker and inspire
His surly art of imitating life; conspire
Against him. Say that my body cannot now
Be improved upon; it has no fault to show
To the sly cosmetician. Say that my flesh
Has a perfect compliance with the grass
Truer than any it could have striven for.
You will recognize the earth in me, as before
I wished to know it in myself: my earth
That has been my care and faithful charge from birth,
And toward which all my sorrows were surely bound,
And all my hopes. Say that I have found
A good solution, and am on my way
To the roots. And say I have left my native clay
At last, to be a traveler; that too will be so.
Traveler to where? Say you don’t know.
2.
But do not let your ignorance
Of my spirit’s whereabouts dismay
You, or overwhelm your thoughts.
Be careful not to say
Anything too final. Whatever
Is unsure is possible, and life is bigger
Than flesh. Beyond reach of thought
Let imagination figure
Your hope. That will be generous
To me and to yourselves. Why settle
For some know-it-all’s despair
When the dead may dance to the fiddle
Hereafter, for all anybody knows?
And remember that the Heavenly soil
Need not be too rich to please
One who was happy in Port Royal.
I may be already heading back,
A new and better man, toward
That town. The thought’s unreasonable,
But so is life, thank the Lord!
3.
So treat me, even dead,
As a man who has a place
To go, and something to do.
Don’t muck up my face
With wax and powder and rouge
As one would prettify
An unalterable fact
To give bitterness the lie.
Admit the native earth
My body is and will be,
Admit its freedom and
Its changeability.
Dress me in the clothes
I wore in the day’s round.
Lay me in a wooden box.
Put the box in the ground.
4.
Beneath this stone a Berry is planted
In his home land, as he wanted.
He has come to the gathering of his kin,
Among whom some were worthy men,
Farmers mostly, who lived by hand,
But one was a cobbler from Ireland,
Another played the eternal fool
By riding on a circus mule
To be remembered in grateful laughter
Longer than the rest. After
Doing that they had to do
They are at ease here. Let all of you
Who yet for pain find force and voice
Look on their peace, and rejoice.
________________________________________
Take in (admit) this quote from Wendell’s book of essays, The Long-Legged House:
“We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. … 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. . . We must recover the sense of the majesty of the creation and the ability to be worshipful in its presence. For it is only on the condition of humility and reverence before the world that our species will be able to remain in it.”
What have been some of your most memorable experiences of the majesty of creation?
How have you lived according to”the contrary assumption that what is good for the world is good for us” rather than vice versa?
We have to love the earth in order to care enough to want to help preserve the earth.
________________________________________
Here are 3 life-and-death-drenched Berry poems. The first is from his book A Part:
A MEETING
In a dream I meet
my dead friend. He has,
I know, gone long and far,
and yet he is the same
for the dead are changeless.
They grow no older.
It is I who have changed,
grown strange to what I was.
Yet I, the changed one,
ask: “How you been?”
He grins and looks at me.
“I been eating peaches
off some mighty fine trees.”
Here’s a very grounding poem from Farming: A Handbook:
THE CURRENT
Having once put his hand into the ground,
seeding there what he hopes will outlast him,
a man has made a marriage with his place,
and if he leaves it his flesh will ache to go back.
His hand has given up its birdlife in the air.
It has reached into the dark like a root
and begun to wake, quick and mortal, in timelessness.
a flickering sap coursing upward into his head
so that he sees the old tribespeople bend
in the sun, digging with sticks, the forest opening
to receive their hills of corn, squash, and beans,
their lodges and graves, and closing again.
He is made their descendant, what they left
in the earth rising into him like a seasonal juice.
And he sees the hearers of his own blood arriving,
the forest burrowing into the earth as they come,
their hands gathering the stones up into walls,
and relaxing, the stones crawling back into the ground
to lie still under the black wheels of machines.
The current flowing to him through the earth
flows past him, and he sees one descended from him,
a young man who has reached into the ground,
his hand held in the dark as by a hand.
Berry writes often of quiet, of the living silence. This from the Collected Poems:
THE SILENCE
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.
A song whose lines
I cannot make or sing
sounds men’s silence
like a root. Let me say
and not mourn: the world
lives in the death of speech
and sings there.
My favorite Berry poem involving death and the afterlife is the incredible ( to my mind right up there with Virgil and Dante) long 8 part poem about visitations from dead friends, “Elegy” from his book The Wheel. I can’t find it to copy and paste from online. It’s in the Collected Poems, too.
Mr. Berry’s reverent writings are profoundly beautiful and crucial to the nth degree if you believe like I do that we MUST ALL find healthy ways to further conform our daily lives, and our agriculture, and our means of energy production to the changing reality of our natural ecosystems.
I am deeply grateful to have lived in the time of Wendell Berry—for his poems, for his life, and for the integrity with which his work turns our attention toward the living world.
In 1979, I read about Berry’s book of essays The Unsettling of America in the Whole Earth Catalogue, and got it delivered to the rural mailbox of our 40 acre homestead in Madison County, Arkansas. I’ve been reading his work— novels, stories, essays and poetry— ever since.
On Meeting the Great Man
In 2010 a friend and I drove 6 and 1/2 hours from where we live in NW Arkansas to hear Wendell and his daughter Mary speak at the annual Prairie Festival at the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas. He was joined by other speakers at the event, including Land Institute founder Wes Jackson.
Wes and his successors at the Land Institute have collaborated with other visionary agronomists, environmentalists, eco-activists, philosophers, historians, and photographers, artists and writers like Berry over the past 5 decades on a massive research-demonstration project, the central practical focus of which is the gradual development of hardy, drought and insect resistant, soil-enhancing, erosion-preventive, high-yield perennial grains to replace more labor intensive, less soil-protective annual crops.
This work is not being done via the same kind of genetic modification that Monsanto and other eco-thieves are so recklessly pursing, but by slow, patient observation of the growth patterns and productivity of many, many generations of carefully interbred varieties of naturally occurring grains. The Land Institute’s research and development has spread to over 36 countries now. For instance, Chinese agronomists have developed perennial rice varieties in recent years. If you’d like to know about the Land Institute and its essential work, you can go to http:// www.landinstitute.org
Now, to my meeting with the great man: In his A Place on Earth, a novel originally published in 1967, Berry included a brief poem which one of the novel’s characters recites over the grave of a fellow citizen in the close-knit farming community in Kentucky he’s written about again and again in his semi-autobiographical fiction. A few years earlier, I had put that poem to music and had played it a few times at gigs on harmonium, and prayed it at times silently, or sang it quietly and privately, after a death.
As I considered what I might say to Mr. Berry if I got an opportunity to meet him, I decided that I’d sing him my setting of his poem, as well as thanking him for his irreplaceable work. All of which I did, and I can yet see his eyes so alive and close to mine as l ululated the tune to him there on the dusky prairie at the end of his long day as a speaker and honored participant at the 2010 Land Institute gathering.
Then we shook hands, I offered Wendell a heartfelt “thank you,” and we we went on our ways.
Here is Jayber Crow’s graveside poem/chant from WB’s novel A Place on Earth:
Water into water Earth into earth
Breath into breath Light into light
Singing into singing Birth into birth
Thought into thought Sight into sight
May this man’s makings be unmade
May stillness be Let peace come
To this place that was a man
“He has come into a wakefulness as quiet as sleep.”
― Wendell Berry, A Place on Earth
Thank you, Wendell.
Geoffrey Oelsner