Category: Quotes

An ode to soil

Who knew a description of soil could be so beautiful and inspiring?

The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of it all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life. Without proper care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life.

It is alive itself. It is a grave, too, of course. Or a healthy soil is. It is full of dead animals and plants, bodies that have passed through other bodies. For except for some humans – with their sealed coffins and vaults, their pathological fear of the earth – the only way into the soil is through other bodies. But no matter how finely the dead are broken down, or how many times they are eaten, they yet give into other life. If a healthy soil is full of death it is also full of life: worms, fungi, microorganisms of all kinds, for which, as for us humans, the dead bodies of the once living are a feast. Eventually this dead matter becomes soluble, available as food for plants, and life begins to rise up again, out of the soil into the light. Given only the health of the soil, nothing that dies is dead for very long. Within this powerful economy, it seems that death occurs only for the good of life. And having followed the cycle around, we see that we have not only a description of the fundamental biological process, but also a metaphor of great beauty and power. It is impossible to contemplate the life of the soil for very long without seeing it as analogous to the life of the spirit. No less than the faithful of religion is the good farmer mindful of the persistence of life through death, the passage of energy through changing forms.

Wendell Berry, “The Use of Energy” in The Unsettling of America

Kingsnorth and Berry

On Friday, in my final post on Wendell Berry and Huck Finn, I wrote these words:

So, too, our acceptance of these Territories in our own lives is a rejection of our own growth, as people with a place, with a purpose, and with a telos to our lives. Those things – place, purpose, meaning – all require an acceptance of reality as it is, a choice to live in this world, with love and feeling and pathos and tragedy. To escape to a Territory – to despair, or practice self-righteousness, or to abstract all around us – is to refuse reality, to refuse to be a mature people. And this has consequences – for our ability to form relationships and love properly, for our world and our environment, for our cultural and societal structures. To quote again from this essay, a passage I quoted on its own last week: “We want to be free; we want to have rights; we want to have power; we do not yet want much to do with responsibility.”

This is the point of this last week, and why I found this passage in Berry’s essay so interesting, but perhaps I would turn his image on it’s head. I think we are all mostly in the Territories; we need to escape back home. Our lives together and our world depend on us growing up, and not giving in to despair, to self-righteousness, to the tendency to abstract our places and meaning. A key element of life in post-modernity is a crumbling social awareness, and I think Berry identified why that’s happening, more than thirty years ago in an essay about Huck Finn.

Then, earlier this week, I read Paul Kingsnorth’s most recent essay on his excellent Abbey of Misrule newsletter, where he wrote this:

This left hemisphere culture: this is what we call ‘the West’, and the whole of this ‘West’, since at least the eighteenth century, has been a state of permanent revolution. Was this forged by that left hemisphere way of seeing, or was it the other way round? Who knows, but from France to Russia, Germany to America, Marx to Rand, 1789 to 1969, the aim has been the same: bring it all down. Break it all up. Pull it apart, examine the parts, put them back together in a better, more equal, more profitable, more human order. This is the left hemisphere’s way of relating to the world. In the words of Ezra Pound, Modernist poet turned Fascist propagandist (the distance between those stances was always very small) the modern West has always had one purpose: make it new, make it new.

[…]

This is what we do, here in ‘the West’: we break things. We break systems and traditions, cultures and forests. We split atoms and bust through the upper atmosphere. We break the bounds between species and sexes, we blur the lines between life and death. Our great revolution has unleashed untold energy and created miracles, but now we can see where it is going. The modern revolution, the Machine revolution, is the left hemisphere’s work. There is a kind of greatness to it, and a certain tragedy. Most of today’s ‘defenders of the West’ are defending aspects of this revolution. They will defend empire, science, rationality, progress and nuclear fission until the cows come home. They are revolutionaries themselves, even if they call themselves conservatives. But the West’s left-brain revolution will end up destroying us, and the world, if we let it.

This is first another plug by me for Paul’s excellent newsletter, which you should subscribed to and reading regularly if you too are concerned with the culture wars all around us.

But, second, I see so many parallels between the work Wendell Berry was doing in this essay I’ve been reflecting on, and the work Paul is doing in his newsletter. In fact, at several points in this essay, Paul refers to the map we live on, a map of a territory we struggle to see clearly. Both have identified the fact that not only have we done great damage to the world and the society we live in, but that we have created a massive illusion in order to shield ourselves from the damage we are doing to our world and ourselves. For Berry, these are the Territories. For Kingsnorth, it is the Machine. They are the same.

Again, read Paul Kingsnorth if you haven’t, the work he is doing is critically important at this moment.

‘What worlds are at hand, for me to conquer?’

Early in The Mirror and The Light, the third part of her excellent Thomas Cromwell trilogy, the late Hilary Mantel presents a remembered conversation between Cromwell and the soon-to-be-executed George Boleyn, brother of the erstwhile Queen Anne Boleyn, herself on the way to the executioner’s block. A short exchange between the two men stood out to me, for all that it has to say about out own power-mad world:

‘I have read the gospel, but not followed it,’ George said. ‘I think I have hardly understood it. If I had done so, I would be a living man as you are. I should have lived quiet, away from court. And disdained the world, its flatteries. I should have eschewed all vanities, and laid aside ambition.

‘Yes,’ he said ‘but we never do it. None of us. We have all read the sermons. We could write them ourselves. But we are vain and ambitious all the same, and we never do live quiet, because we rise in the morning and we feel the blood coursing in our veins and we think, by the Holy Trinity, whose head can I stamp on today? What worlds are at hand, for me to conquer? Or at the least we think, if God made me a crewman on his ship of fools, how can I murder the drunken captain, and steer it to port and not be wrecked?