Floundering
An’ here I sit so patiently
Waiting to find out what price
You have to pay to get out of
Going through all these things twice.
Oh, Mama, can this really be the end,
To be stuck inside of Mobile
With the Memphis blues again.
Last night I haphazardly caught the image of two flounder swimming on the television I was turning off. It was tuned to PBS and evidently the show was some variant on the standard “beauty of the natural world” model that must do well with advertisers.
For some reason, the visual of two flounders interacting struck a deep and unnatural cord in me that caused one of those late-night exhaustion-induced epiphanies. A Jerry Maguire bad-pizza experience.
Now, transformed on the Jabbok with a limp, I want to be a vegetarian (again), wear clothes without brands on them, get away from Google having complete control of all of my data, start composing emails in plain text, teach my students how to observe, read more Wendell Berry and drink my coffee without sugar.
In other words, Bring It All Back Home.
Or, in other words…
“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear, nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. For most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil or of God, and have somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to “glorify God and enjoy him forever.”
Or back to Wendell Berry (via a fantastic post and educational spin from Borderland):
In this often discouraging time of CommonCor(porat)e educational standards, Wendell Berry finds hope in what he calls The Agrarian Standard, which elevates sustainability and community as values that supercede growth and competition:
What we have undertaken to defend is the complex accomplishment of knowledge, cultural memory, skill, self-mastery, good sense, and fundamental decency—the high and indispensable art—for which we probably can find no better name than “good farming.” I mean farming as defined by agrarianism as opposed to farming as defined by industrialism: farming as the proper use and care of an immeasurable gift.
I believe that this contest between industrialism and agrarianism now defines the most fundamental human difference, for it divides not just two nearly opposite concepts of agriculture and land use, but also two nearly opposite ways of understanding ourselves, our fellow creatures, and our world.
The same could be said of good teaching.
I used to include an out-of-context snippet (we survivors called them “embeds” in the days of web2.0) of Berry’s Manifesto: The Mad Cow Liberation Front as my email signature:
So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.
I was an optimistic naive grad student studying ancient cities and poetry at a winter-cold Yale when my mentor, Larry McGehee, introduced me formally to Berry. I’d heard of his work, but this was the hook that has caused me to dig deeper and move behind shallow approval into the type of literary-agricultural cultivation that results in the best crops years later than when the seeds was planted.
Larry was a wise farmer, indeed.
I’ve learned more and more from him (them?) recently. He’s (They are) physically gone, but the atoms and energy that made him (them) up are still very much in my memory, which is the best afterlife any of us can really hope for.
He’d approve of my floundering, I think. He’d tell me to push on to the next curve that I can’t see past yet. He stood on the mountaintop once and saw it all.
So, I must keep limping down the path of all of this towards the type of person that I want to be.
Nevertheless, notice the bitter irony of me using a Google Books link to both Berry and Thoreau’s Walden above.
I’ve already failed.
Time to limp on.