Wendell
Berry
I MET WENDELL BERRY I shook his hand. I may or may not had
squeed a bit. Allow me to back up.
Earlier in November I went to the South Atlantic Modern
Languages Association (SAMLA) Conference on Sustainability in the Humanities. I
was presenting a paper on Wendell Berry. He was the keynote speaker. Conditions
were perfect.
Who is Wendell Berry, you ask? Well, Wendell Berry lives in
Kentucky. That’s the most important thing you need to know. He is a
poet/novelist/essayist/activist that has spent his career urging others to pay
attention to what is around them, his pages at times SHOUTING.
The writers that I study (the original Locavores: Gary Paul
Nabhan, Barbara Kingsolver, Alisa Smith and J.B. McKinnon, and Michael Pollan)
credit him as one of the most important writers for building agri-thinkery in
America (my word, not theirs). He’s in the holy-trinity, with Thoreau and
Rodale.
Locavores tend to return to Berry’s quote from “The
Pleasures of Eating,” that “eating is an agricultural act.” He’s right. And
that’s a big reason for many of our big problems.
After Berry’s talk I got in line to shake his hand. I told
him I come from an agricultural family, that they were excited for me to come
to this conference, and to see him. I explained I was a part of the next
session discussing his work.
My paper, “What Are
People For?. And “The Problem That
Has No Name”: Wendell Berry, Feminism and Spatial Justice,” compares the
ideas of spatial justice in Berry’s writing and Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique. “The Problem that has no name,” is what Friedan called
the problem of the Housewife, and Women more generally in white, suburban
America.
With a grand canyon-sized smile he drawled, “Yeah, I saw
that. Now this ‘problem with no name,’ that scares me a bit. I’m not sure I
want to stick around for that to find out what you mean.” It must be horrible,
no matter what your station in life, to sit and listen to a bunch of gidgits
talk about your work.
For Berry, Kentucky is in everything he writes, thinks and
believes. I can only imagine how many papers he’s sat through where Kentucky
doesn’t matter at all. That must be like taking caster-oil, to feel like the
point is being missed for “smart-assery” (his term for unnecessary academic
language).
His keynote included a story about a family where the land
was as much a character as any of the other humans. I will admit I zoned out
during the keynote. I was trying to turn my brain backwards to my own memories
of Kentucky. I lived there as a young thing. True story, I think.
In an interview, somewhere, Rainn Wilson offered a question
from his SoulPancake project: “What do you miss most about being five years
old?” I think I was four when I was in Kentucky. I’m not sure how many of my
Kentucky memories are false implants from my family’s stories. An apple tree,
My dad’s hat.
Being on a step-stool and doing dishes with the sun punching
through the window, most likely just getting in my mother’s way. My dad
coughing up moon-sized phlegm balls. I miss getting underfoot under the hazy
Kentucky sky.
It’s the kind of story Berry would write. It’s the kind of
story I would love to go all smart-assery on.
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