American poet, novelist, essayist and social activist Wendell Berry (1934 – )
from Sabbath Poems
2007, V
Those who use the world assuming
their knowledge is sufficient
destroy the world. The forest
is mangled for the sale
of a few sticks, or is bulldozed
into a stream and covered over
with the earth it once stood
upon. The stream turns foul,
killing the creatures that once
lived from it. Industrial humanity,
an alien species, lives by death.
In the clutter of facts, the destroyers
leave behind them one big story
of the world and the world’s end
that they don’t know. They know
names and little stories. But the names
of everything are not everything.
The story of everything, told
is only a little story. They don’t know
the languages of the birds
who pass northward, feeding
through the treetops early
in May, kept alive by knowledge
never to be said in words.
Hang down your head. This
is our hope. Words emerge
from silence, the silence remains.
Wendell Berry from Leavings, Counterpoint, 2010
Thanks to Kate Cayley’s recent guest blog post that featured a poem of Wendell Berry, the great American novelist, essayist, poet and environmental activist I wandered back into my collection of his books – lots of them! The first book I grabbed was Leavings, a collection of his so-called Sabbath poems, written, as you might expect on Sunday’s to acknowledge that day as something for rest, for the out-of-the-ordinary.
And there from entries written in 2007 were two poems, back to back, that pulled me up short. The first one, above, about the utter importance of what we don’t know. The tyranny often that comes from what we think we know. I remember a developer telling me a precious coastal area was just rock, trees and dirt. Oh, how those names are not everything! What did he know then of Merlin Sheldrake’s work on fungal pathways underground that critically support trees or Suzanne Simard’s work on the intelligence of trees?
And the startle I had from these tender lines:
They don’t know
the languages of the birds
who pass northward, feeding
through the treetops early
in May, kept alive by knowledge
never to be said in words.
And how these lines reminded me of these lines from poem # 53 by e.e. cummings:
may my heart always be open to little
birds who are the secrets of living
whatever they sing is better than to know
and if men should not hear them men are old
Oh, the hubris when I and others are not curious about what we don’t know or can’t hear. And how the last lines of Wendell’s poem resonate for me:
Hang down your head. This
is our hope. Words emerge
from silence, the silence remains.
For me, where I put this to the test is in poems. What I don’t know before they write me and then go back to silence. The time I was desperate, trying to revise a poem on rape, my hatred for that act, and an image came out of no where: the image of a young boy in a shower. My rapist when he was still innocent. From this place, the poem found its new beginning.
I am so aware that some of Wendell’s poems feel didactic, rhetorical. Perhaps appropriate for poems written on a Sunday! But the poetry stays alive inside them. Like in this longer poem below that ends so surprisingly:
When the people make
dark the light within them, the world darkens.
from Sabbath Poems
2007, VI
It is hard to have hope. It is harder as you grow old,
for hope must not depend on feeling good
and there is the dream of loneliness at absolute midnight.
You also have withdrawn belief in the present reality
of the future, which surely will surprise us,
and hope is harder when it cannot come by prediction
any more than by wishing. But stop dithering.
The young ask the old to hope. What will you tell them?
Tell them at least what you say to yourself.
Because we have not made our lives to fit
our places, the forests are ruined, the fields eroded,
the streams polluted, the mountains overturned. Hope
then to belong to your place by your own knowledge
of what it is that no other place is, and by
your caring for it as you care for no other place, this
place that you belong to though it is not yours,
for it was from the beginning and will be to the end.
Belong to your place by knowledge of the others who are
your neighbors in it: the old man, sick and poor,
who comes like a heron to fish in the creek,
and the fish in the creek, and the heron who manlike
fishes for the fish in the creek, and the birds who sing
in the trees in the silence of the fisherman
and the heron, and the trees that keep the land
they stand upon as we too must keep it, or die.
This knowledge cannot be taken from you by power
or by wealth. It will stop your ears to the powerful
when they ask for your faith, and to the wealthy
when they ask for your land and your work.
Answer with knowledge of the others who are here
and how to be here with them. By this knowledge
make the sense you need to make. By it stand
in the dignity of good sense, whatever may follow.
Speak to your fellow humans as your place
has taught you to speak, as it has spoken to you.
Speak its dialect as your old compatriots spoke it
before they had heard a radio. Speak
publicly what cannot be taught or learned in public.
Listen privately, silently to the voices that rise up
from the pages of books and from your own heart.
Be still and listen to the voices that belong
to the streambanks and the trees and the open fields.
There are songs and sayings that belong to this place,
by which it speaks for itself and no other.
Found your hope, then, on the ground under your feet.
Your hope of Heaven, let it rest on the ground
underfoot. Be it lighted by the light that falls
freely upon it after the darkness of the nights
and the darkness of our ignorance and madness.
Let it be lighted also by the light that is within you,
which is the light of imagination. By it you see
the likeness of people in other places to yourself
in your place. It lights invariably the need for care
toward other people, other creatures, in other places
as you would ask them for care toward your place and you.
No place at last is better than the world. The world
is no better than its places. Its places at last
are no better than their people while their people
continue in them. When the people make
dark the light within them, the world darkens.
Wendell Berry from Leavings, Counterpoint, 2010
I am carried on stanza by stanza by the gentle wisdom of Wendell’s words. The utter preciousness of this earth. And each place meant to be precious to those of us that live there. And how we can effect these places for ill or for good. And by all the coonections that we ignore at our peril. Not just connections that we can’t see like the fungal network underground but our connections to all that is around us. This stanza:
Found your hope, then, on the ground under your feet.
Your hope of Heaven, let it rest on the ground
underfoot. Be it lighted by the light that falls
freely upon it after the darkness of the nights
and the darkness of our ignorance and madness.
Let it be lighted also by the light that is within you,
which is the light of imagination. By it you see
the likeness of people in other places to yourself
in your place. It lights invariably the need for care
toward other people, other creatures, in other places
as you would ask them for care toward your place and you.
Wendell Berry is now eighty eight. Still active as far as I know. A lovely feature article in a February 2022 issue of the New Yorker gives a sense of a man still so deeply engaged in the world. And in October and November of last year he released two new books: How It Went, a collection of short stories and the other, The Need To Be Whole, a collection of essays.
I am grateful for the conscience and words of Wendell Berry. How no matter the dark his words touch, how they remind me to keep my light burning inside me.