September 2022 Print

By Jonathan Wanner

What I stand for is what I stand on.
                            ~Wendell Berry

To most folks at most times, dirt is a dirty word. Pigsties and sinners find in it a common stain; housewives lose by it their peace of mind; and it is the very emblem of evil’s corruption (Gen 3:19). When it is not a playpit for boys, it is a harbor of the dead. For poet Wendell Berry, however, our livelier way forward is downward. To him, this grime is opposed to the grim. Dirt is anything but “cheap as dirt” since by it the farmer “practices resurrection”:¹

The grower of trees, the gardener, the man born to farming,
whose hands reach into the ground and sprout,
to him the soil is a divine drug. He enters into death
yearly, and comes back rejoicing. He has seen the light lie down
in the dung heap, and rise again in the corn.²

As the medium through which life and death endlessly cycle, soil is resurrective: the sun-fed corn dies to feed the livestock; the animals translate the plant decay into a “dung heap”; and by the farmer’s calloused hands, the manure fertilizes the newborn crop. Miraculously, the same solar energy that first warmed the corn from above feeds its progeny from below. Sunbeams, in this sense, figuratively “lie down in the dung heap” because life remnants remain in the decay so that plants have a light-lineage just as humans have bloodlines. Profoundly, the soil is, at once, both tomb and womb.

Yet, there is a secret buried beneath Berry’s paradox: sacrifice alone sets this death-life cycle in motion. Even before a crop dies, its life is full of many little deaths, or as Berry calls them, “breakings.” Seeds break into shoots; shoots break into flowers; flowers break into fruit; fruits break into seeds… and so the spokes turn. Yet the breaking begins even before the seed, with the farmer who plows the ground:

The opening out and out,
body yielding body:
the breaking
through which the new
comes, perching
above its shadow
on the piling up
darkened broken old
husks of itself:
bud opening to flower
opening to fruit opening
to the sweet marrow
of the seed—³

Animals too “open out and out” as they mature. Breaking through egg, through womb, newborns pile up their “broken old husks” as their bodies continually regenerate, shedding fur and feather, budding forth talon, tusk, and tooth. Humans follow in like pattern: at birth, the mother “opens” to the infant, from whose body teeth—and eventually puberty—erupt. This cycle of sacrifice and renewal happens even on a microscopic level: to strengthen our muscles, we must first rupture their fibers; we shed our outer skin every 2-4 weeks;⁴ and we are, in a small way, remade when, every day, our body regenerates roughly 330 billion cells.⁵ Repeatedly, the lesser and former must die to give way to a greater prime. Nor does the pattern stop after death since decay is the umbilical cord for new life. A rotting corpse, in fact, cannot escape the agrarian cycle of rebirth:

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.⁶

The involuntary “deaths” and “rebirths” of tooth and tissue, of course, are hardly free-willed martyrdoms, but they are nonetheless a natural analogue of the supernatural renewal for which we are bound. In this poetic sense, the sacraments are crop-like: Christ’s wounded side, as much as it appears a loss, is the harvest-place of souls. Through His “broken ground” we “break away” from the lesser parts of ourselves and mature into our eternal prime. As time-bound as the agrarian cycle is, then, its endless repetition tends toward timelessness:

All times are one
if hearts delight
in work, if hands
join the world right.⁷
                   Here in time
we are added to one another forever.⁸

The beauty of Berry’s analogy is its universality. Even if most Americans don’t practice husbandry, everyone can “practice resurrection” because everyone eats. Eating, after all, “is an agricultural act” since it “ends the annual drama of the food economy that begins with planting and birth.”⁹ The kitchen table, in these terms, is a crossroad where life and death intersect. Our lives, after all, only go on when other living bodies are sacrificed for us. You can’t keep breathing unless plants and animals die for you. At the very least we ought to revere crops and livestock as our daily bread. As low as they are on the “chain of being,” they sustain our bodies so the Eucharist can sustain our souls, and their sacrifice prefigures our more rational self-gifts. We might take an extra minute to set the table rightfully, to consider our humble place on time’s cosmic wheel, and to praise God before and after our meal:

      Prayer after Eating

I have taken in the light
that quickened eye and leaf.
May my brain be bright with praise
of what I eat, in the brief blaze
of motion and of thought.
May I be worthy of my meat.¹⁰

To the farmer, eating is an awe-worthy grace. Certainly we don’t deserve to live, even “in the brief blaze” of a mortal span, yet God endows us with continuous warmth through the creative refreshments of art, earth, and sky. We need only look with plain eyes to find gratitude, since effects eventually lead to causes: as vessels of solar radiance, plants enrich our bodies with clear minds so we can properly thank God for the sun’s clarity. We may be “bright with praise” as well for the farmer and the cook who transpose the sunlight into solid edibles. Thankfulness, after all, is chain-like, and food finds its origins in the dependency we might call “community”:

We must thank God to thank the cook.
To thank the cook we must thank the farmer.
To thank the farmer, we must thank the plants.
To thank the plants, we must thank the sun.
To thank the sun, we must thank God.

Even when we are alone, eating is a communal act since God passes every plate through the many “hands” of man and nature.

Of course, Berry has an upper edge: as a farmer, he has seen grace, time, and his hands work a seed into a candlelit dinner. When the food comes from you, you know it comes from beyond you. Thankfulness is written in a farmer’s bones. We need not wonder, then, how Americans became so ungrateful and unwise with food. There are fewer farmers now than ever, and the food industry does its utmost to convince us that our meals were never alive. In the words of Berry,

“The passive American consumer, sitting down to a meal of pre-prepared or fast food, confronts a platter covered with inert, anonymous substances that have been processed, dyed, breaded, sauced, gravied, ground, pulped, strained, blended, prettified, and sanitized beyond resemblance to any part of any creature that ever lived.”¹¹

For most consumers, food is an “abstract idea” until it “appears on the grocery shelf or on the table.”¹² I must own that I have fallen into this thicket many times, despite the fact that my parents grew up on farms (and my father, as Berry would say, is a man “born to farming”). My mother always tended a vegetable garden, but it wasn’t until I groomed a plot of my own that I “practiced resurrection” in the dirt. It is one thing to know that eggs come from chickens or that tomatoes come from seeds; it is another thing to grow a specific variety, to experience a specific breed, to see a life cycle in all its roundness, to consider what calcium-rich foods produce thick-shelled eggs, to mind the elemental conditions in which tomatoes germinate best. I remember when I first sowed lettuce indoors. My vaulting ambition told me to get an early start before spring poked its head out of the horizon. Surely the task would be as easy as blowing my nose. The problem was that I never took the middle ground: the window light was not enough, and my watering schedule was excessive. The seeds grew “leggy,” or “dampened off,” or scorched unacclimated to the sun. Once, after sowing another batch of mixed vegetables, I set the trays outside only to find a passing storm had tossed them about. From the chaos of dirt, I forked out what seedlings I could and for the next few weeks played plant roulette. The “seed leaves” eventually gave way to “true leaves,” so that by the time I transplanted them into the garden, I had successfully paired like with like—that is, except for the lone zucchini I had clownishly put in the cucumber row. What a resurrection I had on my plate when, with tossed salad, I finally forked that storm-tossed zucchini. As much as harvest time, the misfortunes make us squint more than we ever would: the sunflower leaning in the sandy loam; the knob-warped potato, the aphid-ridden melon, the mildewed squash, the striations of peppers “corking”…

Gardening is never quite as simple as sticking a seed in the mud. It forces you to know a place and to have a place in it. The difficulty is that you can never really see how a place is in one day. You could observe a plot for an entire year and only acquire a starting knowledge of how its soil behaves, how its creatures live and die. As Berry puts, a wise farmer needs a slow-paced mind:

Speed is everything now; just jump on the tractor and way across the field as if it’s a dirt-track. You see it when a farmer takes over a new farm: he goes in and plants straight-way, right out of the book. But if one of the old farmers took a new farm, and you walked round the land with him and asked him: “What are you going to plant here and here?” he’d look at you some queer; because he wouldn’t plant nothing much at first. He’d wait a bit and see what the land was like: he’d prove the land first… He’d walk on it and feel it through his boots and see if it was in good heart, before he planted anything: he’d sow only when he knew what the land was fit for.¹³

Slow, however, does not mean simple. There are many circles the farmer must consider across the seasons: the revolutions of light and shade, the weather’s rhythms, the life span of local insects, the eating habits of wild animals, and the back and forth of minerals and organic matter passing through the soil. You need to know where and when to plant, when and how to harvest, how far apart to space the seeds, how often to fertilize, how often to water, and how to build support structures when necessary. You must know what health looks like in each growing stage, and all the while the environment and the crop are in a constant flux. Under one hat, a farmer is a plant’s parent, doctor, butler, and grim reaper. Monk-like, he must play these parts slowly, and never with immediate gratification. Yet, when the reaping comes, it is always in abundance: the pot-bellied gourd, the beet in full blood, beans in swell, and carrots like a college of elders, their chin-hairs wise. It is the kind of knowledge that stains the fingertips and sweetens the mouth-buds, the kind that trains you to live more alive.

As slow as farming is, it is the quickest way to see what a place is about. A place, after all, is made meaningful not just by what creatures live and die in it, but how they do so. How, then, does a farmer live? Always sacrificially, with a stability of place, and with the kind of self-sufficiency that teaches him how to depend upon beings both greater and lesser than himself. Paradoxically, the “Man Born to Farming” cultivates to be cultivated:

What miraculous seed has he swallowed
that the unending sentence of his love
flows out of his mouth like a vine clinging in the sunlight, and like water
descending in the dark?¹⁴

Let our hands be trowels. Let our souls be dirt-clean.

Endnotes

¹ Wendell Berry, “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front,” The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry (Berkley: Counterpoint, 1998), 88.

² Ibid., “The Man Born to Farming,” 67.

³ Ibid., “The Broken Ground,” 8.

⁴ Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care, “How Does Skin Work?,” National Library of Medicine, September 28, 2009 [Updated Apr 11, 2019], https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK279255/.

⁵ See “Revised Estimates for the Number of Human and Bacteria Cells in the Body” by Ron Sender, Shai Fuchs and Ron Milo in PLOS Biology, Vol. 14; August 2016 (total cell data), and “The Distribution of Cellular Turnover in the Human Body” by Ron Sender and Ron Milo in Nature Medicine, Vol. 27; January 2021 (cell turnover data).

⁶ Wendell Berry, The Selected Poems, “Enriching the Earth,” 83.

⁷ Ibid., “From the Distance,” 138.

⁸ Ibid., “Epitaph,” 149.

⁹ Wendell Berry, “The Pleasures of Eating,” Wendell Berry: Essays 1969-1990 (New York: The Library of America, 2019), 739.

¹⁰ Wendell Berry, The Selected Poems, “Prayer After Eating,” 83.

¹¹ Wendell Berry, Wendell Berry: Essays 1969-1990, “The Pleasures of Eating,” 705.

¹² Ibid., 703.

¹³ Ibid., “Horse-Drawn Tools,” 475.

¹⁴ Wendell Berry, The Selected Poems, “The Man Born to Farming,” 67.

TITLE IMAGE: Joseph Vorst, Rural Arkansas (mural study, Paris, Arkansas Post Office), ca. 1939-1940, colors modified.