Sunday Sundries #36

Mulling over the Manifesto

Dear Friends,

I’m thinking that for the next few Sundays, I’m going to make my way through a very important poem for me, possibly the most important.  That is Wendell Berry’s quite-famous poem Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front. 

This poem has been transformative in my life.  When I first read it, I felt like I was reading a much-clearer version of my own faltering insights at that time. Discovering this poem, and Wendell Berry himself, was like discovering an older brother I never knew I had, or a mentor I really needed. I once took a weekend pilgrimage trip to Kentucky, just to spend one day being around Mr. Berry at an event that the Berry Center and Bookstore was having in his town.  I was so shy that I basically just hung around all day at a distance, listened to him read one long and beautiful poem, and then had a moment when I got to shake his hand, ask him to sign a couple book covers and exchanged a few words.  I have very few heroes, but he is certainly one of them.  I especially appreciate that he is the kind of hero that is completely and entirely human, too.  So I have no fear of discovering that he’s not all he’s cracked up to be. 

By now, this poem has become a kind of mantra for me. Poetry generally has become one of my most reliable windows into my understanding of reality.  The deeper I go into my personal explorations, and my writings on this Substack, the more I find myself relying on really good poetry to convey truths that defy understanding in other modalities.  Now that I’ve fully committed myself as an anti-materialist, I find the holistic approach of poetry to be far more compelling as a way to share insights with others than reductionist materialist science ever was.  I’ve always loved poetry, but now I understand poetry as not only an artistic modality, but also a window into the universal. It’s striking to me that poetry works in the worlds of imagination, feeling, metaphor and surprising lateral-and-apparently-incidental connections, and that these are precisely the elements that reductionist science eliminates to arrive at so-called “objective truth”.

My plan is to give you the whole poem this week, and then come back and work through it, section by section. I’ve added breaks in places that are not original to the poem, but are sections that, I think, belong to each other as distinct movements. That means that if I stick to my plan, we’ll be working on this for six additional Sundays! I think Mr. Berry’s word choice in every part of this poem is precise, provocative, resonant, and, perhaps surprisingly, entirely earthly and practical, and I would love to discuss it with you.  I want to work through it because I think it’s time I subjected this poem to more scrutiny. I think we begin by loving a poem on the feeling level, but then over time, if it’s a really good poem, the more we come back to it, the more we see the intent and the shape of the imaginative world the poem invokes. Given even more time and more vision and thought, we may start to argue with the poem a little. Did he really mean this or that? That’s what I want to do: I’d like to argue with this poem a bit, and thereby argue with myself, because I love this poem so much, and see what new insights might arise. Until next Sunday, if you like, spend some time with this poem if you haven’t before, or spend more time with it if, like me, you’ve read it hundreds of times, to the point where it voices in your heart and mind regularly!

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front
by Wendell Berry
 
Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.

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.
Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.

Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion — put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.

So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?
Go with your love to the fields.
Lie easy in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.

As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

Photo of print artwork on my mantlepiece from Watkahootee Print Shop