I learned a startling fact the other day while listening to Fresh Air’s Terry Gross interviewing Dr. Nathan Wolfe, author of The Viral Storm, a disconcerting account of his research into pandemics like avian flu and AIDS that leap from animals to humans. Although the interview contained plenty of startling information, the statement that made me jump out of my skin was this:

If we were to count the number of cells between the top of your head and the socks on your feet, we would find that 90 percent of those cells are not human cells. Ninety percent of those cells belong to various microorganisms that exist, primarily in your gut and on your skin but also in many, many parts of your body. There’s tons and tons of microbes out there.

The vast majority of these inner-space invaders are vitally necessary to our health. In a story about the Human Microbiome Project in the New York Times, one Stanford microbiologist described individual humans as being like coral, “an assemblage of life-forms living together.” Another microbiologist commented that from the
standpoint of an individual microbiome, the “I” could be considered “mostly packaging.” So if 90 percent of “me” is actually not “me” at all, who am I? I feel as if my nice empty 100-percent-paid-for house suddenly belongs almost entirely to an unknown corporation, the enormous staff of which has moved in and begun leaving its clothes and coffee mugs all over the place. How am I supposed to relax in a predicament like this, where my “house” is no longer mine? Where’s my place in this in this mess?

Right in the middle, according to the eighteenth-century British poet Alexander Pope: in between God and beasts, on “this isthmus of a middle state/A being darkly wise and rudely great… Created half to rise, and half to fall;/Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all;/Sole judge of Truth, in endless Error hurl’d:/ The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!” Right in the middle of the mess.

I recently reread Pope’s An Essay on Man, published in 1734, and was struck by two things: I was a really bad reader in grad school and, despite the dyspepsia caused by ingesting hundreds of heroic couplets in a row, I found him to be a humane and delicate thinker. I first read his Essay just as the trend of blaming all modern injustices on Enlightenment philosophies was building steam. In rereading it, I fully expected to find evidence of thought—crimes against women, people of color, and the environment—and I came back to it ready to haul Pope and his entire extended family to prison and lock them up until they could see just where colonialism got us. What I found instead was an overwhelming sense of awe for the complexities of the natural world and a deep humility in the face of humanity’s capacity to see these complexities only partially, imperfectly, and at times buffoonishly. To scientists he says with asperity:

Go wond’rous creature! Mount where science guides,
Go, measure earth, weigh air, and state the tides;
Instruct the planets in what orbs to run,

Correct old Time, and regulate the Sun….
Superior beings [angels], when of late they saw
A mortal man unfold all Nature’s law,
Admir’d such wisdom in an earthly shape,
And shew’d a NEWTON as we shew an Ape….
Trace Science then, with Modesty thy guide….

What Pope wants is to put human giftedness in its place, which is in every way reliant on and secondary to what he calls Eternal Wisdom. He wants to give us a place from which to view ourselves, especially when we think we’re masters of the universe. We can’t know who we are unless we also know where we are. Of course,
Pope the poet could himself be accused of overreaching in making his immodest pronouncements, but he nips that accusation in the bud by placing his perspective firmly on the earth with his fellows. In the poem’s introduction, he pokes fun at John Milton’s Paradise Lost, published seventy years earlier, with its lofty, near-heretical goal to “justify the ways of God to men” from the wings of the Holy Spirit. Nope, Pope knows his place, and it’s right in the middle of what he calls the “vast chain of being,” headed by God, that links all things to each other. One of the loveliest passages:

Look round our World; behold the chain of Love
Combining all below and all above….
See Matter… with various Life endu’d,
Press to one center still, the gen’ral Good.
See dying vegetables life sustain,
See life dissolving vegetate again:
All forms that perish other forms supply
(By turns we catch the vital breath and die)
Like bubbles in the sea of Matter born,
They rise, they break, and to that sea return.
Nothing is foreign: Parts relate to whole;
One all-extending, all preserving Soul
Connects each being, greatest with the least;
Made Beast in aid of Man, and Man of Beast;
All serv’d, all serving! Nothing stands alone;
The chain holds on, and where it ends, unknown.

With their wide, inclusive vision of the workings of nature, these could be Wendell Berry’s words. (In fact, Berry much admires Pope’s Essay.) We have been given a singular place in this great chain, and our work is to learn, through careful observation of the natural world, how to become a blessing to it, to our fellows, and to ourselves. Pope places the primal disruption of the fall not in Eve’s disobedience but in the violence—beginning with Cain and Abel—that we inflict on one another both individually and corporately. Not a bad vision for one of the Dead White Guys of whom I was so suspicious in school.

Despite its plasticity, however, the great chain, as Pope envisions it, is quite fragile—alarmingly so. “The least confusion but in one, not all/ That system only, but the whole must fall.” One little thing out of place, and the whole shebang comes tumbling down. It’s hard to imagine living abundantly in such a universe, hard not
to imagine a creeping paralysis arising out of fear of disruption, like someone with a slipping disc in her spine, afraid each thoughtless move might bring on a core collapse. Despite its beauty and humility, there’s a caged, claustrophobic quality in Pope’s place for us—one that might never have discovered that each one of us is
quite literally a world, perhaps a galaxy, in and of ourselves, as the mappers of the Human Microbiome Project suggest.

In a recent lecture, Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, gave another account of where it is that human beings have a place. He talks about the need to distinguish between being an individual—someone identifiable by the facts about him and the center of his own universe—and being a person, a “more frustrating,
more elusive, and yet more adequate” way of describing who and where we are.

Primary to a definition of personhood is the reality that each one of us exists at the center of a vast network of relationships, “the point where the lines cross.” That point is never static: every encounter with every person, every creature, every historical reality, every memory, every word—indeed, with every moment—provides an opportunity for re-configuring those intersecting lines. At any given time, a person is the sum total of her myriad, shifting relationships, irreducible to one thing or to a list of attributes. Something about the human person is fundamentally mysterious and inaccessible. For Christians, this messy, elusive intersection of relationships is where the revelatory work of God has its place.

Williams asserts that because “each of us has a presence or a meaning in someone else’s existence,” a sense of personhood is impossible outside of relationship. When I think of myself as an individual, I am the center of the facts about me. When I consider myself as a person, as constituted by an ever-changing intersection of
relationships, I must acknowledge my presence in other people’s lives and other people’s presences in my own. I can’t extricate myself from this web and stand alone, withdrawing from the world. Knowing that I’m fundamentally mysterious even to myself, a creation of these innumerable, ever-accruing intersections, I must
acknowledge that this messy, sacred bundle exists within every person and that we are environments for each other. We’re in some way located outside of ourselves, a situation that calls for a very different social order than one based on the rights of discrete individuals, an order that devolves into competing, isolated, uncooperative selves.

Pope, the literary king of the British Enlightenment, articulated a profound shift in understanding of humanity’s place: he saw an interconnectedness, a democratic necessity for each link in the chain, where before, whole groups—whole races and nations—were accounted as disposable. From thinkers like Pope came the founding fathers of the United States and their insistence on the natural rights of its (white male) citizens. In order to function as it should, this chain of interconnectedness that Pope saw and that the founding fathers used as the struts and joists of a new political system had to rest not only on personal rights: it needed one more thing.

For Forms of Government let fools contest;
Whate’er is best administer’d is best:
For Modes of Faith, let graceless zealots fight;
His can’t be wrong whose life is in the right:
In Faith and Hope the world will disagree,
But all Mankind’s concern is Charity:
All must be false that thwart this One great End,
And all of God, that bless Mankind or mend.

Without the cushioning of generosity, the assertion of one’s rights can become a mere excuse to claim supremacy over another, the chain shatters, and the discrete links become disposable. It’s arguable that we’re in the midst of this shattering, and I find Williams’s elastic and eccentric network a compelling place to set up
housekeeping. His call is to look at our individual selves and find, as in a different sense did Nathan Wolf, that they’re not really “ours” at all.

What we’re reading
Heather: Robert Alter, The Wisdom Books: Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes: A Translation with Commentary
Martin: Patti Smith, Just Kids

Last week I started rowing again after an eight-month hiatus. It has been pure pleasure, despite the inevitable price of blisters on my baby-soft hands. First, the pleasure of seeing my friends at the dock, including the ducks and C.J. the chocolate Lab, who howled and wagged when he saw me; next, the pleasure of reestablishing a relationship with a boat in the water, negotiating the jostling demands of wind, current, oars, river geography, swans, kayakers, and my own stiff body; finally, the pleasure of being on the river itself, of seeing what has changed and what remains the same. The water changes quite literally with each breath; despite the dams, it’s still a living river. Trees and boulders have grown or fallen. Purple martins have replaced cormorants. And yet something persists, apparently unmoved by the passage of time. I’ve missed being on the river.

In the meantime, I was seeing another river, or at least imagining it. Martin has just finished reading Wendell Berry’s novel Jayber Crow aloud to me, also pure pleasure. As have my rowing muscles, my reading-to-myself muscles have atrophied, and Martin reads with accents tailored to the characters and inflections appropriate to the plot. We’ve read like this for about a year now, usually at bedtime. Sometimes we can’t help but sneak-read in the daytime, wanting to be swept downstream by the whorls and eddies of words, characters, and plot like river-rafting thrill seekers.

One of the main characters of Jayber Crow is the river that runs through the valley in which the story is set. Jayber, the narrator of the novel and the barber of Port William, Kentucky, is a river-watcher as well. Late in his life and in the novel he asks:

How many hours have I spent watching the reflections on the water? When the air is still, then so is the surface of the water. Then it holds a perfectly silent image of the world that seems not to exist in this world. Where, I have asked myself, is this reflection? It is not on the top of the water, for if there is a little current the river can slide frictionlessly and freely beneath the reflection and the reflection does not move. Nor can you think of it as resting on the bottom of the air. The reflection itself seems a plane of no substance, neither water nor air. It rests, I think, upon quietness. Things may rise from the water or fall from the air, and, without touching the reflection, break it. It disappears. Without going anywhere, it disappears.

For Jayber, the reflection is an image, so to speak, of the divine, of how divinity is in this world and how it thwarts any logic that would fix that divinity in one place or locate it. It rests upon a condition rather than a location, on a “how” rather than a “where.” How can this condition be in the world? In quietness, says Jayber—a quietness that I think is born when the worlds outside and inside a person are married together. The natural world always carries its own quietness as it moves through time, but we humans need to practice marriage to know this quietness.

Honestly, I’m not sure what I’m trying to say by pulling marriage into this already multi-tentacled discussion, but having just made it to the other side of our twenty-seventh wedding anniversary, and given the national discussion on what makes a marriage, I’ve been thinking. (Those three words always fill Martin with foreboding.) If you take Jewish and Christian scripture seriously, marriage is that process by which two people become one flesh. This process requires rending; each must leave his or her parents and cling to the other in order to become one flesh. After this rending and clinging, they stand before each other naked and are not ashamed.

As a youngster I thought that becoming one flesh was merely a reference to sexual congress, the least generative and generous level of meaning in this most profound of texts. As an older-ster, I know that becoming one flesh can include sexual encounter but that the two are very distinct realities. Becoming one flesh may, in fact, begin with the self, with learning to bridge the slippery banks of individual consciousness and the physical body, so often at odds with each other. I’ve come to see cancer as an icon of this struggle, our stuttering inability to conjugate the distinctive languages of consciousness and its endless mysteries and of body and its appetitive requirements. To live as one flesh in the river of the self seems to require an awareness of the reflection that Jayber noticed, the reflection that rests on quietness—a sort of third party that allows the hands of consciousness and bodiness to hold each other, to mingle and flow into the river between them. Of course, to live as one flesh within a single body—to be married to yourself, and thus whole—is a work that flows as endlessly as a river, but that allows those glancing moments of standing naked and unashamed.

To include someone else in the work to become one flesh… well. It requires an endless series of rendings and cleavings from the past, from what has been, to create something new, the way a river changes every day and yet is still the same river. Sex can be a sign of one-fleshness, but is just as likely to be a hindrance. Only when that third party of quietness, that generous generative flow between the banks of two bodies that reflects something beyond itself—only when the three are present can there be one flesh. When the possibility of being one flesh reveals itself—within the self, within the couple—that body begins to grow, including within itself children, friends, strangers, enemies, the world itself. The capacity for stepping off the banks of the self into the river, beckoning those on the other side to join in, might manifest itself just a few times in a person’s life, or never, or every day. A few people barely towel off before they jump back in, married to the whole world and all that’s in it, no time for messing with clothes or shame.

So practicing marriage is not the same as being married. One training ground I’ve found for the practice of marriage has been reading aloud. It’s something children know immediately, that a story read or told aloud is an opportunity for teller and listener to jump into a river of words and ride them together, making a net of meaning that holds them even when they scramble up their different banks at the end of the story. That’s why the practice of reading scripture aloud is so important; it allows people to jump together off the banks and into its great narrative flow.

It’s been instructive to be a child again as Martin reads aloud and I listen, creating for us a net of meaning through both rough and placid rides. Even if we spend the day ignoring the other across the bank, or throwing rocks, we climb together into that river of words, emerging refreshed (or sometimes asleep) or even naked, when one of us is moved to tears or left helpless by laughter.

That’s why, with so many figurative rivers running, I’m happy to be back on (if not in) a literal river: yet another chance to practice marriage.

What we’re reading
Heather: Charles Dickens, Bleak House
Martin: Charles Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (still)

Jesus said to them… “But in those days, after that suffering, the sun will be darkened and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken.” (Mark 13:24–25)

These were among the words that greeted the Christian New Year a couple of Sundays ago, the beginning of the Advent season. Well, dang, commented some of us who meet after the 9 a.m. service at All Saints’ Episcopal Church to discuss the readings. We might as well fold up our tents and go home if this is what the season’s bringing.

By the end of the discussion, we surprised ourselves by agreeing that there’s something oddly reassuring about the passage in which these verses are embedded, despite the Episcopalian squeamishness often evoked by the apocalyptic Jesus. All this talk about judgment and suffering is fine coming from John the Baptist—what can you expect from someone who eats locusts? When Jesus talks about judgment and end times, however, I get linear, literal, and cross. The world didn’t end. Jesus was wrong. Untrustworthy. Oh, forget it. I’ll just sit here alone in the dark.

But eventually I have to note the quotation marks around the darkness-coming passage, which means that Jesus is not just throwing wild predictions around. He’s quoting scripture, from the times when other prophets saw God’s people careening off toward the wilderness without so much as a water bottle. The world did not come to an end after Isaiah used this imagery eight centuries before Jesus used it, something Jesus probably noticed. Nor did it come to an end after Ezekiel or Joel used it in the interim centuries. It was (and is) poetic language used to jolt people out of their open-eyed, daylight sleepwalking. Wake up! There is darkness around and within us, but it’s not what we think it is. There is light as well, and it too is often not what we think it is.

In Ciudad Juárez, Mexico’s most violent border city, angels have taken to landing at crime scenes, at busy intersections, even on the International Bridge. They stand about ten feet tall, with wide feathered wings, and carry signs that say things like “Murderers, Believe and Repent.” The fact that these angels are actually teenaged members of Salmo 100 (Psalm 100), a tiny evangelical church, doesn’t make them any less impressive: in fact, I think it makes them even more so. Frustrated with the lethal violence that flays their city and with the flabby ineffectiveness of public policy, these young people persuaded the city to donate old office curtains that they turned into robes, raised money for make-up and feathers, and began their work of shocking people awake—particularly those who continue to perpetrate and permit the demonic activities that so plague the city. Their performances are beautiful and dangerous: they stand without speaking, without means of defense, in places where they are very likely to encounter the demonic forces unraveling their world.

They have seen the sun and the moon cease to give light, seen the stars fall from the sky. They have seen the signs that their world is charged with darkness, but they have chosen an energy source beyond the darkness.

Most of us have seen the skies go dark on at one time or another; most of us have had times when it seemed that the world is going to end. What our little discussion group decided that Jesus was saying was that that there are times when the skies go dark and the world seems torn from its course. These times are unavoidable. But don’t think that darkness defines the whole nature of reality, or you’ll pull from a limited energy source, see from a restricted field of vision. Sometimes it takes darkness to remind you that there is light, and that you want to see it.

It’s easy to think about the darkness simplistically. I do it myself, noting the physical and spiritual relief that the pre-solstice days bring from the scorching Texas sun. I’ve noted that most things, including us, need darkness in which to grow. But I also hearken to Wendell Berry’s pithy distillation of the full power of the dark:

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings
and is traveled by dark feet and wings.

Most of us—used to light, to a particular, merely visual way of seeing—have definitions of darkness that are inadequate to its full reality. Although there is blooming in the darkness, there are also things fully worthy of terror. Because we can’t see in the darkness the way we’re used to seeing in the light, we often have trouble discerning what blooms from what bites. And sometimes it’s the same thing.

In his book The Blessing: A Memoir, the poet Gregory Orr recounts the stunning journey of his life into the darkness, beginning when, at the age of twelve, he killed his brother in a hunting accident. His brilliant, erratic, meth-addicted physician father and his depressed mother, who died in surgery a couple of years later, were not able to help lead him through the dark, in which he lived persistently until an incident after he returned to the upstate New York village he called home after a shocking experience with Mississippi state police in a civil rights protest in 1965. When he got back, he found that many of the people he’d known all his life wouldn’t speak to him because of his civil rights work. The darkness he’d lived in deepened; he wore the mark of Cain.

At the end of the summer, before he left to go back to college, one of his high school English teachers invited him on a drive. She took him to the property of a sculptor who had died earlier that year. Ignoring the “No Trespassing” sign on a barbed wire fence, they climbed into a field filled with metal figures, suggestive of but not restricted by human form. He and his teacher wandered for an hour through the field. Thought Orr:

… these were soldiers of art. They brought no mayhem—only a longing to rise up and stand inside meaning as a man might stand in armor. There would be no violent struggles here. This was a field of blessing. A field where the mortal and fallen rose up, transformed…. Here in this field, arrayed in long lines, was an army of art. This army was engaged in a war against the nothingness and indifference of the universe. It wasn’t the kind of war history fought, where timing was everything and the clocks ran on blood. This was a war outside of time. It was a war where you didn’t fight, or march, or do violence to anyone…. Somewhere in this field was a rendering of each agony and exultation [the sculptor] had ever felt. And I could feel them, too. I knew that somewhere in this field Cain stood; somewhere else, his slain brother.

Our discussion group came to an equivalent conclusion about the disturbing, apocalyptic words of Jesus. (At least, I think we did.) He was offering his soon-to-be-tested disciples consolation: do not think that the coming darkness is all there is. His advice to them: stay awake. Stay awake to the angels that land in front of you, insisting that there is a way toward meaning. Stay awake to the power behind love, beauty, forgiveness, and mercy that moves in the dark and beyond it. Do not let the darkness consign you to indifference or despair. Stay awake.

What we’re reading
Heather: Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers
Martin: Calvin Trillin, Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin: Forty Years of Funny Stuff

I’m a lousy housewife, which, in my initial phase of housewifery, is exactly what I aspired to be. Not for me the bourgeois passion for clean baseboards and orderly closets, especially after graduate school in literature in the mid-1980s, in the wake of second-wave feminism. Not for me the fate of the American suburban woman as Betty Friedan described it:

freed by science and labor-saving appliances from the drudgery, the dangers of childbirth and the illnesses of her grandmother. She was healthy, beautiful, educated, concerned only about her husband, her children, her home. She had found true feminine fulfillment. As a housewife and mother, she was respected as a full and equal partner to man in his world. She was free to choose automobiles, clothes, appliances, supermarkets; she had everything that women ever dreamed of.

Nope, I was going to be an independent, defiant, equal-rights-demanding sort of woman who kept her mind on higher things and never, ever got a pedicure—which is why I completely fell in love with Dorothea Brooke, one of the main characters in George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life. So complete was my admiration for Dorothea that our younger daughter Thea is named for her.

In re-reading Middlemarch for the first time in many years, I find that my self-identification with Dorothea’s high-minded knuckleheadedness was spot-on. What my younger self missed, of course, was the author’s attitude toward it. In the first chapter, Dorothea and her much more practical younger sister Celia are looking through their dead mother’s jewelry. Dorothea, fond of renouncing things, at first tells Celia to take all “the trinkets” for herself. Says the narrator: “Celia felt a little hurt. There was a strong assumption of superiority in this Puritanic toleration, hardly less trying to the blond flesh of an unenthusiastic sister than a Puritanic persecution.” A few lines later, they find an emerald ring and bracelet they hadn’t known about before, and Dorothea’s eye is caught by their beauty, “[a]ll the while her thought was trying to justify her delight in the colours by merging them in her mystic religious joy.” And we’re only on page nine of 766; the buds of Dorothea’s knuckleheadedness blossom in a leisurely and luxuriant way, flower after flower bursting into a gaudy and most unpuritanic riot in the course of the first 250 pages.

Needless to say, Dorothea doesn’t aspire to housewifery (nor, because of her gentle birth, does she much need to), but one of the minor heroes of the novel is, in fact a housewife. Susan Garth is wife to Caleb, a kind and financially inept land surveyor and agent. Before marrying, she was a governess, and after marrying she runs the farm, raises their six children, and continues to take in pupils, earning money for her sons’ formal educations. She makes her students “follow her about in the kitchen with their book or slate. She thought it good for them to see that she could make an excellent lather while she corrected their blunders, ‘without looking,’—that a woman with her sleeves tucked above her elbows might know all about the Subjunctive Mood or the Torrid Zone—that in short, she might possess ‘education,’ and other good things ending in ‘tion,’ and worthy to be pronounced emphatically, without being a useless doll.” Like everyone else in the novel, Mrs. Garth has her weaknesses, but her creator clearly admires her independence, intelligence, hard work and excellent housewifery skills, which include planning ahead and refusing to let anything, material or emotional, go to waste. When her son begins to snack on the peels from the apple pie she is making, she says, in between pronouncements on grammar: “That apple peel is to be eaten by the pigs, Ben; if you eat it, I must give them your piece of pastry.”

One of the most notable differences between Mrs. Garth and Betty Friedan’s housewife is that one is an independent producer in a local economy and one is a consumer in a transnational economy. Mrs. Garth’s life is the one from which science and labor-saving devices have freed Betty Friedan’s housewife, as they free her to choose whatever she liked in consumer goods. I want to make one thing clear: I’m not made of stern enough stuff to lead Mrs. Garth’s life, but along with the narrator of Middlemarch, I’ve come to see the unexpected power and vital importance of the place she and her spiritual sisters (many of whom are still around) occupy.

Speaking with an urban farmer friend the other day, I heard about the persistent policy roadblocks in the way of small farmers and the bureaucratic tactics that restrain and even stifle connectivity among local food producers. Although no complaints have ever been raised by customers of this farm in the twenty years of its operation, no sicknesses reported, the assumption of the Texas Department of State Health Services—and apparently of most governmental agencies that deal with food—is that non-factory produced foods are inherently riskier than factory-produced ones, even though the evidence is overwhelming that the reverse is true. My friend’s glum assessment was that the real issue, masked by the apparent anxiety over health concerns, is Big Ag’s desire to stomp out competition posed by small, organic farmers and farmers’ markets, which have grown at a remarkable pace in the last few years.

In “Feminism, the Body, and the Machine,” an essay that infuriated me when I first (mis- or under-)read it years ago, Wendell Berry muses on the responses he got from another essay published in Harper’s, many of which expressed outrage over his revelation that his wife types his manuscripts after he finishes handwriting them and accused him of exploiting her. He responded that the feminist outrage ignored two possibilities: that marriage can exist as “a state of mutual help,” and that households can operates as economies. The marriage and home that he has in mind looks very much like the Garths’ and

makes around itself a household economy that involves the work of both the wife and the husband, that gives them a measure of economic independence and self-protection, a measure of self-employment, a measure of freedom, as well as a common ground and a common satisfaction. Such a household economy may employ the disciplines and skills of housewifery, of carpentry and other trades of building and maintenance, of gardening and other branches of subsistence agriculture…. It may even [he says slyly] involve a ‘cottage industry’ of some kind, such as a small literary enterprise.”

He hastens to add that what he says about this kind of marriage applies to men and women equally, and then calls for “a broader, deeper criticism…. The problem is not just the exploitation of women by men. A greater problem is that woman and men alike are consenting to an economy that exploits women and men and everything else,” particularly as it is practiced by global and “sentimental” capitalism, which operates a lot like sentimental communism: they both demand the sacrifice of “everything small, local, private, personal, natural, good, and beautiful” for the sake of security and happiness for “the many” at some unspecified future time. In freeing transnational corporations from the responsibilities practiced in local economies—knowledge of the needs and capacities of a particular place—our economy produces an astonishing number of products under the condition that consumers “agree to be totally ignorant, totally passive, and totally dependent on distant supplies and self-interested suppliers.”

To be honest, I can’t really assess Berry’s pronouncements: my assumption is that, at least to some extent, he paints with broad strokes and tars good and bad alike. I’m pretty sure that there are big businesses with a profound sense of civic involvement and responsibility. Even so, I take very seriously my farmer friend’s assessment that Big Ag is out to crush competition, even if Big Ag would never admit that such is its goal. Even if it’s not, the policies Big Ag’s political muscle put into place have that effect. If the free market is the natural force we’re so often told it is, then, like a natural force, it requires a polyculture for true health, a carefully maintained balance of local, national, and international business. Just as humans can’t thrive when they destroy the delicate intricacies of topsoil or the webs of interdependency in particular ecosystems, so businesses—even big transnational businesses—will eventually cease to thrive if they undermine the necessary balance in which local economies can thrive.

Which brings me back to the unlikely power of Mrs. Garth and all those household economies that produce goods and services, those households that are not just centers of consumption, like the one described by Betty Friedan. These little centers of independence and self-reliance are beacons in the dark described by Wendell Berry and my farmer friend, revolutionaries in a war that most of us barely know is being waged. Who knew that excellent, productive housewifery could be an aspiration for high-minded knuckleheads? If Dorothea Brooke were to appear today, she might very well be a local organic farmer or some other tough-minded local entrepreneur. She might look a lot like Mrs. Garth.

What we’re reading
Heather: George Eliot, Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life
Martin: James S. Hirsch, Willie Mays: The Life, the Legend

Watching the bats from the kitchen stoop at Madroño Ranch the other morning was a little like watching my own thoughts. They swooped in and out of my line of vision, limited by the dawn darkness, more audible than visible.

Actually, my comparison is disrespectful of the bats; their flight is only apparently erratic, driven by the ever-changing location of the insects they were chasing. My thoughts are actually erratic. As the promise of light bloomed into dawn, the bats settled into the bat house, a feat of precision flying and landing almost like none I’ve seen, and I noticed the pile of guano under the house and thought that soon it would be time to collect it and put it into the compost pile.

And so began my musings on shit and the difference between good shit and bad shit. My apologies to the bats become ever more profound.

One of our current projects at the ranch is figuring out how to use the abundant quantities of manure the residents of the Chicken Palace produce. Currently, it’s just collected and dumped onto the compost pile, but we’re working on a plan to get the chickens more fresh greenery to eat, in part self-fertilized (by the chickens, that is). We’re planning to cordon their pasture off into sections and seed the sections with cover crops, alfalfa, rye—whatever the season will grow. We’ll soon have a rainwater collection system in place and will be able to irrigate with it (assuming it ever rains again). Using a portable fence, we’ll be able to rotate the chickens from section to section. We have no idea if this will work, but it seems like a good idea and a fine, closed-loop use of all that poop. We’re also looking to collect buffalo leavings (summer “interns”: consider yourselves warned!) and use them as well.

Perhaps you’ve noticed that I used all sorts of synonyms for shit in the previous paragraph; one of the few I didn’t use is “waste,” because in natural systems, or systems that mimic natural systems, shit isn’t waste, it’s integral and beneficial. Paraphrasing Our Hero Wendell Berry, Michael Pollan notes in The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Mealsthat industrial agriculture has taken an elegant solution—crops feed animals, whose manure in turn fertilizes crops—and “divide[d] it into two new problems: a fertility problem on the farm… and a pollution problem on the feedlot.” Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs), the current source of most of America’s meat, produce mountains of manure that becomes toxic to the animals and to the communities around them, and the monoculture farming that produces most of America’s grains and vegetables doesn’t use animals to fertilize the soil, requiring farmers to use chemicals instead. That’s the difference between good and bad shit: when something that could be beneficial becomes useless, even toxic, waste.

In fact, I’m beginning to wonder if a community’s or even a culture’s capacity to endure might not be assessed by how effectively it mimics nature in dealing with its own discharge. I’ve just been rereading T. C. Boyle’s darkly comic Drop City, which begins at a northern California commune of the same name in 1970. The commune’s stated raison d’etre is to provide its residents with a place to escape the confines of bourgeois America and get back to the land and basic values by expanding their consciousness with meditation and drugs.

Of course the place is utter chaos, overflowing with the metaphoric excrescences of abusive sexual practices, racism, child neglect, and rampant narcissism, along with literal shit. The septic system is overloaded and the two characters who concern themselves with the problem get no help at all from the community. Eventually, the county government threaten to raze the buildings because the commune constitutes a health hazard. Because they can’t deal with their own shit on any level, the residents of Drop City abandon what was once beautiful land and move their chaos to the bush country of Alaska just as summer is waning. When they get there, most of them realize that they need to leave or get their shit together so they don’t die.

The problem is that getting your shit together necessitates acknowledging that you are, in fact, going to die. (It’s still Lent, after all. You knew we’d get to this.) Ernest Becker, in his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Denial of Death, identifies the human dilemma in scatological terms: we are the “god[s] who shit.”

Look at man [sic], the impossible creature! Here nature… [has] created an animal who has no defense against full perception of the external world, an animal completely open to experience…. He not only lives in this moment, but expands his inner self to yesterday, his curiosity to centuries ago, his fears to five billion years from now when the sun will cool, his hopes to eternity from now. He lives not only on a tiny territory, not even on an entire planet, but in a galaxy, in a universe, and in dimensions beyond visible universes. It is appalling, the burden man bears, the experiential burden…. Each thing is a problem and man can shut out nothing. As Maslow has well said, “It is precisely the god-like in ourselves that we are ambivalent about, fascinated by and fearful of, motivated to and defensive against. This is one aspect of the basic human predicament, that we are simultaneously worms and gods.” There it is again: gods with anuses.

Human civilization, says Becker, is built on this unease, which encourages us to throw our energies into an “immortality project” by which we deny our smelly mortality; those who confront it with none of the filters an immortality project provides wither into mental illness. Becker doesn’t attempt to solve this conundrum but rather to set some boundaries within which we can wrestle with it with “the courage to be.” He writes in his conclusion: “We need the boldest creative myths, not only to urge men on but also and perhaps especially to help men see the reality of their condition. We have to be as hard-headed as possible about reality and possibility.”

So it was with interest that I watched the video produced by a Japanese media artist to explain to Japanese children why everyone was so worried about the Fukushima nuclear reactor after it was damaged by the tsunami and earthquake on March 3. The video compares the damaged nuclear reactor to a boy with an upset stomach who needs to poop. So far the boy has just farted—smelly enough for everyone around him—but the video assures us that a team of selfless doctors are doing all they can to prevent Nuclear Boy from pushing out his stinky poop.

The video says that the Fukushima reactor is more like Three Mile Island Boy—who just farted—than like Chernobyl Boy, who not only pooped but had diarrhea that went everywhere, likening nuclear waste to a dirty diaper. My first thought after watching it was that Japanese doctors would be overwhelmed by waves of constipated children, convinced that evacuating their bowels might bring their struggling nation to even deeper depths. My next thought moved me to images in last Sunday’s New York Times of the city of Chernobyl in its abandoned state and the interview with one of the guardians of “the sarcophagus,” the concrete structure built to contain Reactor No. 4, and that can’t come in contact with water without risking the escape of highly radioactive fumes. Scientists estimate that an area around the reactor the size of Switzerland will remain affected for up to 300 years. The aftermath of a nuclear meltdown “is a problem that does not exist on a human time frame.” The guardian figures that the work he does will be available to his children and grandchildren.

Using my heavily truncated recapitulation of Becker’s thought, it seems that proponents of nuclear power (which I have sometimes been) are refusing to be “as hard headed as possible about reality and possibility,” are as unwilling to get our shit together as the drug-addled utopians of Drop City. We are as schizophrenic as the video artist who proposes that we just not poop. A few pages away from the article about Chernobyl was a piece by a Japanese astrophysicist who wrote in reference to the Fukushima reactor crisis:

Until a few years ago, power usage in Japan was such that during the summer Obon holidays, when people typically return to their ancestral homes, it would have been possible to meet demand even if all nuclear power plants were turned off. Now, nuclear energy has come to be indispensable for both industry and for our daily lives. Our excessive consumption of energy has somehow become part of our very character; it is something we no longer think twice about.

Now that I’m trying to tie together all these thematic threads, I have to swoop back to my bat-intensive stoop, to the manure-heavy compost pile in the pasture outside the Chicken Palace. May we humans be as useful as Madroño’s bats and chickens as we consider our energy future; may we refuse to resort to the narcissistic chaos of Drop City’s residents, who left their spiritual and literal bad shit for someone else to deal with.

What we’re reading
Heather: Karen Armstrong, Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life
Martin: Nicholson Baker, The Anthologist

Fittingly, this Ash Wednesday began with a vigorous north wind, the kind that knocks dead branches out of trees and can make you a little leery about walking outdoors. It blew me back to the moment that I first got a glimpse into the meaning of Lent.

I had vaguely thought of “giving something up for Lent” as an opportunity to practice self-discipline and to display a sense of commitment to a “good” life, a sort of spiritual calisthenics that made you feel better, especially when you stopped. The events I recalled weren’t, on the surface, particularly interesting or dramatic, but they allowed me to see myself from a previously undiscovered vantage point; for the first time, I could see I was like a tree filled with dead branches that needed some serious pruning in order to keep growing. Observing Lent wasn’t a way to prove how strong I was; it was a space offered in which I might look at all my dead branches and wonder how I, with the north wind’s help, might clear some of them out, while trusting that I wouldn’t get knocked out by falling timber.

A time for submission—no wonder Lent gets a bad rap. Who wants to submit, especially after a look at the roots of the word: “sub-” is from the Latin for “under,” and “-mit” is from “mittere,” to send or throw or hurl. To submit to something is to hurl yourself under it—“it” presumably being a force much greater than your itty-bitty self, a force like, say, a speeding F350 pick-up. In fact, it might even take some courage to submit to the scouring blast of Lent.

In last week’s post, Martin considered some of the complexities of being from a particular place, ending with a beautifully expressed desire to be here, rooted in this rocky Hill Country soil. Imagine his exasperation when I said last night that I felt like I needed a vacation. My desire to run away (presumably temporary) probably has several sources, but one of them may be an awareness that the idea of Madroño Ranch is taking on heft and weight, leaving behind the dreamy elasticity of fantasy.

I’m reminded of my reaction to our daughter Elizabeth’s first vision test. It had been suggested by her third grade teacher, who had never had a student make so many arithmetic mistakes, especially in copying problems from the chalkboard onto paper. The test results were normal; Elizabeth wasn’t nearsighted, just math-impaired. First I mourned that she would never be an astronaut or an engineer or a mathematician, but then I realized that we now knew more about who she really was; she was beginning to take on her own form, independent of my fantasies for her.

In a lovely essay entitled “Poetry and Marriage: The Use of Old Forms,” Wendell Berry (of course) unearths the kinship between marriage and formal poetry: both begin in “the giving of words,” and live out their time standing by those words:

In marriage as in poetry, the given word implies the acceptance of a form that is never entirely of one’s own making. When understood seriously enough, a form is a way of accepting and living within the limits of creaturely life. We live only one life and die only one death. A marriage cannot include everybody, because the reach of responsibility is short. A poem cannot be about everything, for the reach of attention and insight is short.

Choosing a form implies the setting of limits, limits that appear arbitrary from the outside or at the outset, but that can open into generosity and possibility as they are practiced. Even as they limit, these old forms point their practitioners to a way through self-delusion toward truth, through loneliness toward community. Individual failures are certainly possible, but they aren’t necessarily arguments against the forms themselves. In fact,

“[i]t may be… that form serves us best when it works as an obstruction to baffle us and deflect our intended course. It may be that when we no longer know what to do we have come to our real work and that we no longer know which way to go we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.”

This past weekend we hosted “Hog School” at the ranch, the second in an ongoing series of sustainable hunting/butchering/cooking/eating extravaganzas put on by Jesse Griffith of Austin’s Dai Due supper club. I spent much of the weekend baffled (and not in a good way) by rifle-toting guests scattered across the property hunting feral hogs, by the seemingly effortless magic with which chef Morgan Angelone produced gorgeous and delicious treats from the kitchen (my kitchen, mind you, my philandering kitchen purring in someone else’s hands), by my own mental contortions.

I finally decided to go for a walk where I was unlikely to be mistaken for a hog. Marching through the field by the lake and muttering imprecations against the wind (no birds to watch), the lack of rain (no grass coming up), and the hunters (no long walks available), I decided to climb to the base of the cliffs above me and head back to the house by a new route.

Though they can be steep, the Hill Country hills aren’t exactly the Alps; climbing to the base of the cliffs only takes a few minutes and a lot of grabs at branches to keep from sliding back down in the loose mulch and rocks that just barely hold the hills up. Once I got into the still-leafless trees, I began lurching across the perpetually shifting terrain and found that it was impossible to walk and look at the same time; if I wanted to walk, I had to watch my feet carefully, and if I wanted to look, I had to stop and make sure I was balanced before I shifted my gaze. It made for slow going because, unexpectedly, there was a lot to see that I hadn’t noticed from below.

I found a fine moss-covered boulder that allowed me a new vantage point from which to look down and into the trees and brush I normally looked up at, a posture that causes the painful condition among birders known as “warbler neck.” I quickly misidentified several sparrows, and with an un-aching neck, was able to track down some raucous spotted towhees making rude observations from a clump of yaupons and to lecture them briefly. Staring at my feet as I staggered across the hillside, I found that grasses, indeed, were beginning to sprout, despite the drought. Skidding onto my derriere—it always happens off-roading on these hills—I was able to observe the first blush of blooming redbud tree, closely guarded by the great daggered yucca beside it. And then, as the wind picked up again, the rich thick smell of honey clogged the air. The source? Tiny yellow blossoms nestled under agarita spines—tiny and extravagantly generous and impossible to pick without getting pricked. The wind blew my hat off, and, setting off multiple rockslides, I chased it gracelessly down the hill.

Limits: from dust you were made and to dust you shall return. Bafflement: unexpected forms arising, unforeseen paths opening. Submission: throwing the deadwood of the ego into the flames of the Unnamable One. That’s a lot to wrestle with for the mere forty days of Lent.

What we’re reading
Heather: Adam Gopnick, Angels and Ages: A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life
Martin: Donovan Hohn, Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them

One of the many notable gatherings Martin and I participated in this past weekend was the opening of my sister Isa Catto Shaw’s show at the Harvey/Meadows Gallery in Aspen, Colorado. In a series of watercolors and collages, she took the dark, mute burden of grief over the death of our mother and worked it into beautifully articulate packages, in some ways (perhaps) making that grief more easily borne because it is shared with a community of unknown mourners who see the paintings, with the community of artists from whom she has drawn inspiration, and from the community in which she and her family live. As far as I could tell, the opening was a wonderful success, the gallery full to overflowing as Isa and the ceramicist Doug Casebeer, with whom she shared the show, each spoke movingly about the impetus behind their individual efforts.

Knowing that she had been working like a madman for several months, I was glad (and deeply moved) to see the results of her labors. And aggravated. We’ve been talking since our mother died about a collaboration of my poetry and Isa’s art to be entitled “Blessings of a Mother.” Isa’s done her part, and it’s intimidatingly beautiful.

I, on the other hand, have done squat. This doesn’t mean I haven’t thought obsessively about the project or that I haven’t written multiple lists of topics and scraps of lines and stillborn poems. It does mean that I’ve been willing to be endlessly distracted and grumpy about it. I’ve developed all sorts of hypotheses about why I’m not writing and what I might do about it, most of them ultimately involving running away from home. My favorite defense against the terrorism of the blank page is to read, figuring that in doing so I’m in the company of someone else who has faced, at least temporarily, the tyranny of That Which Demands Expression And Remains Unexpressed. Plus, if I’m reading, I can’t write.

So here’s what I’m currently reading to fend off—and perhaps eventually to outsmart—the intimidation tactics of the blank page: Standing by Words, a collection of essays by Wendell Berry, in particular the title essay and its assertion that the primary obligation of language is to connect the idiom of the internal self with the multivalent tongues the self encounters in community, both human and otherwise. When language loses that capacity—a loss currently encouraged by the forces of industrial technology—both the self and its community languish in their isolation, succumbing eventually to a fatal disconnection from the web of love and life.

As always, Berry is defiantly unfashionable, insisting on the possibility of “fidelity between words and speakers or words and things or words and acts.” He believes that genuine communication is possible, even if its processes are ultimately mysterious and unavailable for dissection by specialists. The life of language is rooted in community and by the precision that life in community necessitates: “It sounds like this: ‘How about letting me borrow your tall jack?’ Or: ‘The old hollow beech blew down last night.’ Or, beginning a story, ‘Do you remember that time…?’ I would call this community speech. Its words have the power of pointing to things visible either to eyesight or to memory.” Community speech doesn’t imagine abstract futures; rather, it deals with what IS. It creates a walkway between internal, personal systems and external, public systems. Community speech registers the need to include both objective and subjective experience; it deflects the argot of specialists; it recognizes spheres of being beyond its domain. Says Berry:

If one wishes to promote the life of language, one must promote the life of the community—a discipline many times more trying, difficult, and long than that of linguistics, but having at least the virtue of hopefulness. It escapes the despair always implicit in specializations: the cultivation of discrete parts without respect or responsibility for the whole…. [Community speech] is limited by responsibility on the on the one hand and by humility on the other, or in Milton’s terms, by magnanimity and devotion.

Although I would argue with Berry’s assertion that all specialists are without awareness of their place in the “whole household in which life is lived” and thereby exclude themselves from the liveliness of community speech, I hearken to the limits he sets on speech, limits that protect the tender shoots of hopefulness, a crop that can be distressingly rare in an often grief-stricken world.

Forgive me. For an essay that aims, in part, to wrestle with ways to express the specificity and universality of grief, my language is so far distressingly abstract, a symptom, I suspect, of my current stuckness. I just received a note from an acquaintance who recently lost her husband to pancreatic cancer; she wrote that although she and her daughter have prepared for his death for a year, “it is like the bad dream where you show up for an exam without having read the book, in your PJs, totally unprepared.” I was struck by the generosity of the image, by her assumption that, though I have not experienced her particular and devastating sorrow, I could somehow imaginatively engage with it, and that we both belonged to the same community, despite the fact that we’ve only met twice before.

Writing is usually perceived to be a solitary pursuit, and in a very literal way it is. I’m trying to remember, however, that when I stare at the blank page or screen I’m seldom alone. (I’m not referring to the cats who often take naps behind me on my chair.) Trying to remember: trying to listen for the cloud of witnesses, the dead and the unborn, that root us in the past and impel us toward the future. I found Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies compelling after my mother’s death, in part because their language is so rich and their meaning so elusive, like a whispered conversation from another plane of being. In the translation by J. B. Leishman and Stephen Spender, they begin with this lament:

Although Rilke refuses to call on the angels, they soar in and out of the poems, weaving them together, helping create a complex whole from parts threatening to hurtle toward meaninglessness and isolation.

I’m usually suspicious of angel-talk, but Wendell Berry and my widowed acquaintance and my sister all remind me that I am—we are all— surrounded by angels, by community, even when we don’t sense its presence. When we are deaf to its song, we are deaf to our own.

Now if they’d only settle down and write those poems for me. Or at least recommend some nice writer’s residency where I could get them started.

What we’re reading
Heather: Wendell Berry, Standing by Words: Essays
Martin: Rebecca Solnit, Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas

The relentless sunshine of the current weather here in Austin might make those in the Midwest or on the East Coast sigh with envy. A photo on the front page of Tuesday’s New York Times shows an Ohio man ineffectually fending off the great whorls of snow around him with an umbrella. His head is bent, his shoulders hunched, his attention presumably forced inward. Strangely, as I bask in the sunshine, I’m the one who’s a little envious.

Not of the cold, certainly—I start getting chilly when the temperature drops below eighty degrees. But what I see in the picture is someone forced by the world to withdraw his attention from it, to shift his focus inward, even if it’s just to check in and notice that he’s cold. He won’t be able to stay out for long; he must retreat inside.

In one of her typically wonderful blogs, our friend Joy recently wrote an homage to darkness, to the gestational, inward gaze of the season of Advent. The punch line is, of course, that great discipline is required to move inside at this time of year, when a blizzard of parties, shopping, and end-of-year scrambling—or of loneliness and loss—assaults us. Frequently, we just sit out there in the cold, not realizing that we can go inside. Another friend of mine, prone to good works, told me that when she was pregnant and people called asking her to do something, she would look at her waxing belly and say, “Sorry, I’m busy,” and then go back to sitting quietly. Even as we attend to the frenetic tempo of this singular season, something beckons us, at least occasionally, to go inside and sit, maybe in the dark.

And what awaits us inside, in the dark? Well, any child can you tell that: scary stuff! Chupacabras (that’s one in the picture at the top of this page, by the way)! Things with too many legs and too many teeth and not enough eyes! With too much hair or not enough, with horns and scales and long dirty nails! The list of monsters gets less imaginative but no less scary as we get older: past humiliations and failures, anxieties about money, relationships, reputation, health, death. All those things wait for us in the dark. (Of course, sometimes they wait for us in broad daylight as well.)

But that’s not all that waits there. Wendell Berry, my favorite grumpy sage, has advice on how to get by the monsters:

I go among the trees and sit still.
All my stirring becomes quiet
around me like circles on water.
My tasks lie asleep in their places
where I left them, like cattle.

Then what is afraid of me comes
and lives in my sight.
What it fears in me leaves me,
and the fear of me leaves it.
It sings, and I hear its song.

Then what I am afraid of comes.
I live for a while in its sight.
What I fear in it leaves it,
and the fear of it leaves me.
It sings, and I hear its song.

Those things we fear, according to Berry, have their own songs if we sit still and listen for them. In this particular collection of poems, A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979–1997, the forest is his place of Sunday worship, where he brings his deepest questions and listens to the forest’s exhalations, to the words made of branch rustle and river rush and birdsong, iterations of the original Word spoken by God in the beginning. Berry is not alone when what he is afraid of approaches him; he’s in the midst of a community he knows intimately.

This kind of trope can dissolve into rank sentimentality and cruelty when those in the midst of the light and bustle use it to admonish those sitting in the sight of what they fear to buck up. But Berry’s language in this collection is rooted in an ancient warrant for the practice of sitting in the company of chaos and darkness: when, as God began creating, God shared space with the tohu-bohu, the formless void, with the darkness, and with the deep. Through them came the words: Let there be. And what came to be was good. It sang.

The fears don’t have the last word in the poem: Here’s the final verse:

After days of labor,
Mute in my consternations,
I hear my song at last,
and I sing it. As we sing,
the day turns, the tree moves.

Only after he labors and rests from his labors, after he sits quietly and listens to the songs of what fears him and what he himself fears, does Berry hear his own song. Only then is he able to join the singing already in progress, a singing that harmonizes with a wider reality (the turning of the day) and the immediate reality (the moving of the trees).

Whether or not you’re observing Advent, the deepening shadows of the season encourage most of us to move inside and prepare ourselves for this inexorable guest, darkness. Some of us will cook, some of us will shop, some of us will wrestle with monsters and despair, some will not pause from our labors or notice anything at all. If possible, go sit quietly among the bare trees. Or sit hospitably at home with whatever invisible reality is leavening within you and tell everyone you’re busy. Then go find your community and sing.

What we’re reading
Heather: C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
Martin: John le Carré, Our Kind of Traitor