by Dana Nichols

A region so often described as Christ-haunted and guilt-chastened has regularly produced writers and intellectuals who are concerned with more than sentimental portrayals of the South or chauvinistic myth-making.[1] Many literary figures of the South have looked, over the years with eyes clear of fear and nostalgia, regarding their region's past and future. They have sought to illuminate pressing issues that trouble the region, not only violence and racial prejudice but also pollution and the exploitation of the natural world. Leading the way is Kentuckian Wendell Berry who has struggled with issues of land, race, and poverty, the South's endemic and enduring qualities, and in commencement speeches, he encourages the new generation to take up the fight.

By the time Centre College in Danville, Kentucky invited him to speak at its June 1978 commencement, Wendell Berry had already published fourteen poetry collections, six non-fiction books, and three novels,[2] an impressive body of work that earned him a reputation for defending rural farm culture and for eloquently warning of the moral and spiritual consequences of alienation from this culture. When he took the podium, he acknowledged the trite tradition of commencement remarks but also recognized the benefits of such a custom, saying, "the same truths are told in one form or another to every generation. Inexperience doubts them as it must, as perhaps it should, and experience proves them true; the benefits being that the old truths thus remain fresh, and each new generation thus learns something about humility." The "old truth" that Berry conveys in this brief speech at Centre College's 1978 graduation is "the inescapability of connections and of dependences," emphasizing that we are all part of a divine order "that we did not make, that we cannot finally comprehend, that includes and sustains our lives, and that we cannot too radically change without destroying ourselves" (Centre Speech 1).

This notion of an interconnected and ordered community has long appeared in Berry's poetry. As Morris Grubbs and David Abner explain in their article "Helping Us to See: Wendell Berry and the Community of Creation," Berry's canon "is concerned with the local and far-reaching effects of humanity's increasing attempts to divorce itself from the natural world" (44). "The Farmer among the Tombs" (1970), for instance, suggests that, according to the natural cycle, death should beget life: "I am oppressed by all the room taken up by the dead,/ their headstones standing shoulder to shoulder,/ the bones imprisoned under them./ Plow up the graveyards! Haul off the monuments!/ Pry open the vaults and the coffins/ so the dead may nourish their graves/ and go free, their acres traversed all summer/ by crop rows and cattle and foraging bees" (Collected Poems 105). The same sentiment is echoed in "Enriching the Earth" (1970), in which Berry describes plowing "in the seeds/ of winter grains and of various legumes,/ their growth to be plowed in to enrich the earth," and the farmer stirred "into the ground the offal/ and the decay of the growth of past seasons/ and so mended the earth and made its yield increase" (Collected Poems 110). The poem ends with the assertion that "after death, willing or not, the body serves,/ entering the earth. And so what was heaviest/ and most mute is at last raised up into song" (Collected Poems 110). In these poems, as in his commencement talk, Berry's message is that any interference with nature's birth-growth-death-decay-rebirth cycle will negatively impact the environment, and by extension, the human life that exists within it.  

Speaking near the end of a decade of unprecedented waste and profit-minded exploitation,[3] Wendell Berry specifically stresses the human aspect of interconnectedness in this commencement address. He contends:

So great is the magnitude of the order of Creation that no one ever understands the ultimate cause or foresees the ultimate consequence of any act. The human meaning of this is that we are not, have never been, can never be, alone. There is clearly some comfort in that. But I hope I am making equally clear the difficulty and even the fearfulness that also are in it. No one can act simply in his or her own behalf. (Centre Speech 2)

As Thomas Strawman has pointed out, Berry's written works also demonstrate "how modern technology's ability to place the individual outside the natural cycles and responsibilities of life may actually work to vitiate the highest goal of the humanistic tradition, namely individual freedom and the fulfillment of each person's highest potential" (56). In an essay entitled "The Tyranny of Charity," published in The Long-Legged House (1969), Berry had approached this same issue through an intimate look at a poverty-stricken furniture maker living in "the coal country of East Kentucky in the summer of 1965" (4). Though incredibly gifted in his craft and a successful farmer to boot, the furniture maker lives on "the most meager home site imaginable, starkly and heavily ugly, sterile and coal-stained and raw" (4). Coming upon the dismal scene, Berry reacts in such a way as to suggest that humanity, like the flora and fauna of the natural world, is inextricably connected, one to another: "Getting out of the car there at the edge of the road, standing up to face that black yard and the bitter shambles of a house, you are inclined to forget the good you know of the place, and to be overcome by a foreboding of hopelessness that by being theirs is also mysteriously yours" (5).

In this essay, too, Berry suggests that the furniture maker's plight is the result of the modern American way of life, that his wares are rejected because they do not bear traditional marks of machine mass-produced distinction, such as "Broyhill," "La-Z-Boy," or "Chippendales." In spite of their non-designer status, the furniture maker's chairs are certainly the strongest and best-made of their kind I  know of. They are beautifully proportioned and balanced. Such ornamentation as is used is modest, and tasteful in a way that transcends fashionableness. They are made to last a lifetime and more, and their strength is achieved without expense of grace. It is hard to think of a room, rich or poor, that would not be dignified by the presence of one of them. (7)

And yet the Kentucky craftsman cannot sell enough chairs to afford to send his daughter to school with ice cream money. Thus, "The Tyranny of Charity" attacks the gluttonous appetite for machine-produced goods - for MORE of everything - driving the consumers of this time period.

In his remarks to Centre College graduates, Berry speaks to the evils of gluttony. Near the end of his speech, Berry states,

Gluttony is not sinful merely because it consumes too much and leaves too little for others; it is also sinful because it belittles what it consumes, and belittles the source: ‘. . . swinish gluttony/ Ne'er looks to Heaven amidst his gorgeous feast . . .' That is John Milton, writing in 1634 a perfectly apt criticism of the ‘consumer society' of the 1970's. Gluttony gives only the soon-jaded pleasure of the little we can consume; temperance gives the joy of inconsumable abundance. (Centre Speech 3)

The belittling nature of gluttony included in Berry's commencement remarks is addressed also in the beginning of Remembering (1988). In this short novel, Andy Catlett has a nightmare in which a great causeway had been built across the creek valley where he lives, the heavy roadbed and its supports a materialized obliviousness to his house and barn that stood belittled nearby, as if great Distance itself had come to occupy that place. Bulldozers pushed and trampled the loosened, disformed, denuded earth, working it like dough toward some new shape entirely human-conceived. The place was already unrecognizable except for the small house and barn destined to be enrubbled with all the rest that had been there. Watching, Andy knew that all the last remnants of old forest, the chief beauty and dignity of that place, were now fallen and gone. (122)

And worse still, Andy comes face to face with "swinish gluttony" personified: "a fat man sat behind a desk, eating the living flesh of his own forearm, all the while making a speech in a tone of pleading reasonableness. ‘I have to do this, I am starving. Three meals a day are not enough'" (122-123). Berry's message, whether delivered in a fictional tale or a matter-of-fact oratory, warns of turning good farm land and green spaces into wastelands stripped of beauty and fertility by wastefulness or overindulgence of profit-seekers like the fat man of Andy's subconscious. Reducing the problem to a simple but valid equation, the poem "We Live by Mercy if we Live" sums up the situation as Berry sees it: "Cost + greed - fear = price" (Timbered Choir 191).

With a statement that links him to his audience, Wendell Berry concludes his brief remarks to the Centre College graduates: "And so, as it has been for many another graduating class, the old is news for this one of 1978, of which I am honored to count myself a member" (Centre Speech).

Eleven years later when he speaks at the College of the Atlantic[4] (COA) in Bar Harbor, Maine, Wendell Berry seeks again to link himself and members of his generation with the young graduates. He explains the purpose of his remarks:

It is conventional at graduation exercises to congratulate the graduates. Though I am honored beyond expression by your invitation to speak to you today, and though my good wishes for your future could not be more fervent, I think I will refrain from congratulations. This, after all, is your commencement, and a beginning is the wrong time for congratulations. Also I know enough by now of the performance of my own generation that I look at your generation with some skepticism and some anxiety. I hope that in fifty years, having looked back at the lives that you are now commencing, your children and grandchildren will congratulate you. What I want to attempt today is to say something useful about the problems and opportunities that lie ahead of your generation and mine. (COA Speech)

And again he stresses the interdependent nature of the world, saying "no place on earth can be completely healthy until all places are" (COA Speech).

With a few omissions for brevity's sake and some noteworthy additions, Berry's words in 1989 are virtually a verbatim rendering of an essay entitled "Word and Flesh" that would be published in What Are People for? (1990). In this essay as well as his 1989 graduation remarks, Berry argues that esoteric rhetoric and abstractions fail at provoking any substantial and valuable change. He tells the College of the Atlantic graduates, for instance, to beware the word "planetary," the latest buzzword of the environmental movement: "Nobody can do anything to heal a planet. The suggestion that anybody could do so is preposterous. The heroes of abstraction keep galloping in on their white horses to save the planet - and they keep falling off in front of the grandstand" (COA Speech). The same warning, in fact the same image of the ineffectual white knight, appears in "Word and Flesh."

In addition, this essay laments the fact that years of rhetoric have inspired few positives: "Though we have been talking about most of our problems for decades, we are still mainly talking. The civil rights movement has not given us better communities. The women's movement has not given us better marriages or better households. The environment movement has not changed our parasitic relationship to nature" (199). For the 1989 graduation speech, Berry includes a sentence missing from the published essay. It further accentuates the failure of mere rhetoric: "Though we have been talking about most of our problems for decades, we are still mainly talking about them. We have failed to produce the necessary examples of better ways [my italics].The civil rights movement has not given us better communities. The women's movement has not given us better marriages or better households. The environment movement has not changed our parasitic relationship to nature" (COA Speech).

Most importantly, in both the speech and the essay, Berry makes it clear that Nature will exact her own revenge if we fail to heed her signs. Interpreting for Gaia, the name applied to a once unified mother earth, Berry states: "Now she is plainly saying to us: ‘If you put the fates of whole communities or cities or regions or ecosystems at risk in single ships or factories or power plants, then I will furnish the drunk[5] or the fool or the imbecile who will make the necessary small mistake.'" Berry's published essay concludes on this ominous note, but the College of the Atlantic graduation talk continues with some advice that is deceptively simple and devoid of the esoteric rhetoric that Berry deems ineffective. Hoping to provoke change through responsible action and awareness, Berry winds up his remarks:

And so, graduates, my advice to you is simply my hope for us all: Beware the justice of Nature; Understand that there can be no successful human economy apart from Nature, or in defiance of Nature; Understand that no amount of education can overcome the innate limits of human intelligence and responsibility. We humans are not smart enough or conscious enough or alert enough to work responsibly on a gigantic scale; Make a home; Help to make a community; Be loyal to what you have made; Put the interest of the community first; Love your neighbors - not the neighbors you pick out, but the ones you have; Love this miraculous world that we did not make, that is a gift to us; So far as you are able, make your lives independent of the industrial economy, which thrives by damage; Find work, if you can, that does no damage; Enjoy your work; Work well. (COA Speech)

Though he arms his audience for an uncertain future with this advice, Wendell Berry's messages at Centre College in 1978 and at the College of the Atlantic in 1989 recall the cheerless opening lines of his 1995 poem "Now You Know the Worst:" "Now you know the worst/ we humans have to know/ about ourselves, and I am sorry,/ for I know that you will be afraid" (Timbered Choir 192).

In his entire body of work, Wendell Berry seeks to dispel the myth of existence. For him, the most dangerous myth of existence is that one region may be exploited and given up to harm without causing harm to befall other people and places. Berry speaks against fear - the fear of giving up abusive environmental behavior. Fear makes needless enemies, stifles dissent, and retards empathy for others and thus true understanding of ourselves and the world. Odd sentiments, perhaps, from a loyal son of the land behind the "Magnolia Curtain." 

NOTES

[1] Chapter title quote is taken from Wendell Berry's Timbered Choir (192).

[2] Novels published prior to 1978 are Nathan Coulter (1960, reissued 1985); A Place on Earth (1967, revised 1983); The Memory of Old Jack (1974, revised 2001). Poetry collections published prior to 1978 are November twenty six nineteen hundred sixty three (1964); The Broken Ground (1964); Findings (1968); Openings (1968); Farming: A Hand Book (1970); The Country of Marriage (1973); An Eastward Look (1974); Horses (1974); Sayings and Doings (1975); To What Listens (1975); The Kentucky River (1976); There Is Singing Around Me (1976); Clearing (1977); Three Memorial Poems (1977). Berry non-fiction essay collections published prior to 1978 are The Rise (1968); The Long-Legged House (1969, 2004); The Hidden Wound (1970); The Unforeseen Wilderness: Kentucky's Red River Gorge (1971, revised 1991); A Continuous Harmony: Essays Cultural & Agricultural (1972, 2004); The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture (1977, 1978, 1986).

[3] Although both the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration were established by President Nixon in 1970, their recommendations and legislations proved toothless, failing to rein in profit-seekers who disregarded environmental health. Throughout the decade, for instance, Brazilian rain forests are decimated, and negligent strip mining in the Virginias and Kentucky leave lands pocked and depleted. And in the name of profit, several damaging oil accidents marred the late-1970s. In 1976, for example, a significant oil spill occurs off the coast of Spain, and a Liberian tanker crashes only 27 miles off Nantucket Island, leaking nine million gallons of oil. The Amoco Cadiz wrecks in 1978 off the coast of France, losing 68 million gallons of oil (six times the amount of the Exxon Valdez spill) and producing an oil slick that ultimately covers 110 miles of coastline. And most frightening of all, an investigation of some unusual health problems in children living in the Love Canal neighborhood of Niagara Falls, New York reveals that the children's ailments are the direct result of exposure to toxic waste dumped on site in the 1940s and 1950s.

[4] On its web page, COA boasts its "curriculum with a conscience," and declares that "COA is geared to understanding the relationships between humans and our environ-ments. Even more important, students and faculty expect to do something to improve those relationships - in policy, in art, in science, and in a multitude of fields that defy categorization. We call this quest Human Ecology. It is the one degree that all COA graduates receive" (http://www.coa.edu/html/about.htm). With this in mind, Wendell Berry seems a particularly inspired choice for commencement speaker; however, it should be noted, too, that Berry did not shape his remarks to match COA's curriculum goals, but rather had spoken of human-environment relationships as early as 1978.

[5] Berry alludes here to Joseph Hazelwood, the captain of the Exxon Valdez who admitted to consuming three alcoholic beverages before boarding ship and striking a reef in Prince William Sound in March 1989. This accident dumped 11,000,000 gallons of crude oil into the Sound, costing over $2 billion in clean-up and uncountable wildlife death. Speaking in June 1989, Berry no doubt had this catastrophe fresh in his mind.

Works Cited

Berry, Wendell.  A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems, 1979-1997.  New York: Counterpoint,  1998.

---.  Another Turn of the Crank.  New York:  Counterpoint,  1996.

---.  "Centre College Commencement Address."  Personal Copy.  Danville, KY.  June 1978.

---. Collected Poems, 1957-1982.  New York:  North Point P,  1987.

---.  "College of the Atlantic Commencement Address."  Personal Copy.  Bar Harbor, ME,  June 1989.

---.  The Long-Legged House.  Washington, D.C.:  Shoemaker Hoard,  2004.

---.  Remembering.  New York:  North Point,  1988.

---.  What Are People For?.  New York:  North Point,  1990.

Grubbs, Morris and David Abner.  "Helping Us to See: Wendell Berry and the Community" of Creation.  Kentucky English Bulletin  45:1.  1995:  43-59. 

Strawman, Thomas.  "‘Futurology' and the Fruit of Industrialism in Bellamy, Schiller, and Wendell Berry: Physical Comfort, Spiritual Regression?"  Midwestern Quarterly 32  (1990):  44-65.

Whited, Stephen.  "On Devotion to the ‘Communal Order': Wendell Berry's Record of Fidelity, Interdependence, and Love." Studies in the Literary Imagination  27.2 (Fall 1994): 9-28.