Thank You/"Silence of Need"/More Wendell Berry

(I apologize in advance for the length of this post)

This blog has been up and running a relatively short time. I am amazed, humbled...very gratified at the number of subscriptions, daily visit stats, and regular commenters that come here to Forest Wisdom and read my musings here and engage in discussion in the comments box. Thank you. Thank you all so much.

Many times these last few months I have been amazed at the comments that many regular readers post. And many times I have been made to stop, think...ponder. Thank you again. If you know me, you know how much I value being made to think and examine my ideas and opinions in the light of others' perspective....

From time to time I have lifted excerpts out of the comments from a previous post because I felt that the thoughts and ideas expressed were too good to leave buried in the comments box but rather needed to be brought into the light of another post. So here once again.... Below is an exchange that took place in the comments of yesterday's post about Wendell Berry between myself and "The Grizzled But Still Incorrigible Scribe Himself!" This exchange in turn prompted me to post for you the videos of Mr. Berry at the bottom of this post.

Grizzled:
"I do think Wendell Berry the man is different from Wendell Berry the writer; I think within his act of writing he often preaches one thing while practicing the other. For example, in the quote which appears at the top of your blog…"I dream of a quiet man who explains nothing and defends nothing…” I see both isolationist and contrarian, when I doubt Berry is either. Does a man who will neither defend nor explain therefore lack passion? If not, is nothing worth defending? Or sharing. How does that square with freedom, caring, a willingness to try and make our self, our home, or life, the life of others, and our planet better? Does he lack belief? I’d say Berry’s writing proves otherwise.

Sure, he might be saying “I wish it were that no man ever needed to explain and defend…” expressing the hope that everyone were always on the same page, identical in their beliefs, members of a Utopian race in a Utopian world. But we’re not…no matter your political leanings or spiritual foundations—or lack of either. And no one knows and understands this better than a farmer, which Berry certainly is in a real get-your-hands dirty way.

His philosophy of writing, too, doesn’t quite square up with the end result. Writing is both art and process. Any reasonably intelligent person can learn to write competently, just as a they can learn to paint a landscape or play a tune on the piano. There are a lot of competent practitioners...making a living...out there.... Then there are the artists—the ones with real, genuine, God-given, born-in-the-genes talent. Some with so much talent they’re scary.

....True art carries within in it real soul. It comes from that mysterious process, the alchemy of talent and work, of finding your unique “voice,” your soul, and rendering it unto your creation. Yes, a writer needs to have something to say (we’re talking writer in the artistic sense, not the commercial wordslinger) but you also have to reach, to learn, to master the process…and I know for a fact it is hard, hard work. I also know Wendell Berry is a fine writer. The process may come easier for him because of talent, age (he’s simply written a lot over the years) and mastery of his instrument.

No one “needs” to create poetry. It springs, in its best forms, from deep within—not due necessarily to the notion of sharing, but in order to give tongue and life to that emotion, that thought, that experience which resonated inside your spirit and needed birthing in material form. Berry is too much the poet not to write from need, and too much the writer not to need to do it well."

Me:
"I can neither explain nor defend Berry here. ;) But I will agree with you that there has to be a little more to Berry's artistic process than he let's on. :)

Also, Berry was once on the academic track--he taught English at NYU--but left it to return to his Kentucky home turf and to farm, and has stayed there ever since. His writing is certainly informed and permeated by his intentional rural life.... But Berry has certainly studied his craft thoroughly, no matter what he says, there's no doubt.

And he is indeed a man of action not merely words and quietude in the Kentucky countryside. But here again, I've no doubt that this, like his writing, springs from his person and the life he lives. If Berry were not the contemplative farmer and poet/essayist/novelist that he is, he could neither be the environmental activist that he is.... I think what we may have here is horses before carts (and not vice versa) and identifying source...source of his writing and source of his life. That source is to be found deep in the Kentucky countryside and in the man "who explains nothing and defends nothing but only knows where the wildflowers bloom." I do not think we are dealing with contradiction here.

Hmmm, I guess I did end up trying to explain and defend a bit after all, didn't I? ;)"

Grizzled:
"You're right about all this, I'm sure. In a way, Berry has already answered much of this for us, putting himself as farmer first, then writer…and trying to make us believe that the latter shouldn't come about until the former is taken care of momentarily, farming be a rather constant process.

That I don't quite believe him is because I understand—as you do—the quality and sheer quantity of Berry's work. And make no mistake, writing at Berry's level is work, regardless of talent, which Berry has by the barnful. I suspect he's being much like those British Upper Class novelists who offhandedly discount their writings as "just a little something I knocked out while on holiday," though the rest of us know it will become a bestseller (no measure of literary quality, of course) and be taught in English Literature classes a hundred years hence.

Maybe Berry's lucky days of silence refer to a silence not of sound, but of need—of things which need to be addressed and defended and worried over…and possibly written about."

Grizzled's mention of a "silence of need" made me do a lot of thinking. I love the concept, especially as Grizzled begins to describe it. And truly, I think it--as I am understanding it--comes close to approximating what I am driving at and for in my appropriation of the Berry quotation in my profile that Grizzled briefly took slight issue with: "I dream of a quiet man who explains nothing and defends nothing, but only knows where the rarest wildflowers are blooming, and who goes, and finds that he is smiling not by his own will." --Wendell Berry, from II, Sabbaths 1999, in "Given"

I have previously shown you (through posting his poems and through commentary about him) the contemplative Wendell Berry. Here is below is Wendell Berry the activist. In the videos below Berry speaks out against Mountaintop Removal mining and environmental destruction on the capitol steps in Frankfort, KY, at the February 14, 2008 demonstration, part of annual I Love Mountains Day. These videos are worth watching for Berry's language alone, Berry is as eloquent in public speech as in print.

"You cannot regulate an abomination, you have to stop it."

"I've been patient for 43 years.... If you, my friends, are wiling to stand in the way of this destruction until it is stopped, then I too am ready."

(Both quotations from Part 2)

Part 1:


Part 2: