What Are People For?

Wendell Berry
North Point Press, 1990

I’ve been to a Wendell Berry book signing where he talked to a crowd near a thousand people. I was naively surprised that he would have such a following in Salt Lake City. Berry does not write to the popular market or to a reader who won’t read deliberately and thoughtfully.

All twenty-two of the essays in this slim book are written with a moral authority and integrity that thinks deeply, doesn’t flinch during argument (and he does argue), and deeply roots himself in an academic, and some would say elite, background. Written in the 1980s, these essays on creativity, education, farming, quality of life, and related topics stand the test of time. His sources and supporting arguments are usually poets, writers, the Bible, and obscure historical documents he could only find through deliberate, painstaking research. The flaw some would find could be Berry’s lack of acceptance of modernity or current research data at the time of writing.

He is a philosopher farmer in Kentucky whose first essay, Damage, is a four-page review of a farming mistake he made by trying to build a pond on his farm. When it becomes evident he hurt the land, he explains how he feels related to his mistake, the natural world, and art. It ends with, “But a man with a machine and inadequate culture–such as I was when I made my pond–is a pestilence. He shakes more than he can hold.” The book has now established Berry as a seeker of knowledge who knows he is mortal.

From that point he continues his Thoreau-type essays perfect for reading while sitting under a large oak tree with essays on Edward Abbey, his teacher Wallace Stegner, criticisms of Hemingway and Mark Twain, the need for diversity farming, responsible eating, and importance of community and culture. A near final essay covers his reasons for not buying a computer, and was first printed in New England Review and Bread Loaf Quarterly and then in Harper’s.

His first reason is superficially correct, “The new tool should be cheaper than the one it replaces,” which is a pencil. Then he went on to write, “My wife types my work on a Royal standard typewriter bought new in 1956 and is as good now as it was then.” Oh my, did he ever hit a nerve in those early computer days. The reader response shook his usual tranquility.

Harper’s allowed him to respond to the pillory from men and women who were clear about his sexism and fear of technology. The resulting nineteen-page essay that follows entitled, “Feminism, the Body, and the Machine,” is his answer.

Wendell Berry is a poetic man of the soil who ponders the universe, God, and his place in it. His writing is thoughtful and dense, certainly not easy beach reading. Since the book signing with near a thousand people, I’ve respected his strength and following as he guides readers as a powerful undercurrent in popular media.

Utah to Arizona #15, Evil Is Searching For Freedom?

So last night I read: Evil is a distortion caused by friction between two souls both striving to pursue their own freedom. Why do I time and time again gravitate to books like this? I’m going to buy Rita Moreno’s new biography, Rita Moreno, A Memoir. I’ll bet she doesn’t write like that.

Irma, my aggravating, niggling, little inside self latches on to stuff like this until the saner, calmer me feels like I’ve been biting a dog toy six days straight. Here’s my brain at work.

Two souls striving to pursue their own freedom is the phrase that caught

My Salt Lake City winter backyard.

me. Irma pops up with: Me, the Divided Two-Soul. Moving to Arizona included a notion of “freedom.” Freedom to redefine life from the gainfully employed community activist (of sorts) still defined by the remnants of childhood, to the new face in town bohemian writer wearing colorful skirts. Freedom from the land of my ancestors to the land that beckoned from the underground of my childhood. Irma pointed out a full elephant circle of spirit life.

But wait a minute. Before I get too dramatic here, at best those Utah roots are only as deep as 1848. Before that I’ve got documented records of Switzerland, Denmark, Wales, and Britain. European roots would be a

During a trip to Britain, my ancestral homeland said my hair would not be happy if I returned.

lot deeper and the truth is Utah is a land that really belongs to the Utes, Piutes, and Navajo. My ancestors were marauding usurpers who gave up their ancestral lands when they left Europe. Following that thinking, Irma and I have always been lost spirits without land. And I doubt Europe wants us back.

The quote Irma and I argued is from The Laws of the Sun by Ryuho Okawa. Okawa has published more books than I’ve read in the last two years and is the founder of the Japanese “Happy Science,” movement. I picked up the book at the Los Angeles Book Festival last summer when I was visiting my son. Okawa’s got some intriguing ideas and a lot of followers, but credentials, followers, and books published make a person neither right nor wrong, they simply provide information to explore. Similar to just because iphones exist and some people think they are godlike, doesn’t mean we have to buy one.

Some people are currently mistaking this for holy scripture. Do you think messiah Jobs will return?

Back to Okawa’s idea. Two souls in distortion caused by friction. A next argument of Me: Half of Two Souls in Friction. The friction has not been enough to start a fire and burn the house down, but it heats collars, and results in heavy-lidded glances at the “other.” My husband/partner in all this has had his own input, priorities, budget concerns, and opinions. Sometimes we agree like raspberry and chocolate on choosing a pair of bedside lamps, other times the choice of drapes is well, elusive.

Do we have capability of causing real evil to each other? Why yes, I believe we do. But so far we’ve just used each other as burnishing sticks, making each other gleam with new understanding, patience, and appreciation on all matters. Or something like that.

Okawa’s next issue is: Me: A Bumbling Search for Freedom. A defining first memory is my fourth birthday. My parents and I were living in

My Arizona backyard in its current state.

Wellton, Arizona, twenty miles from the Mexico border. I had a new pair of white sandals I was expressly told by my mother to only wear on special occasions. She went in the kitchen and I wasted no time putting them on and stepping outside to see my friends who were playing in the sandbox in the courtyard we all shared with our half dozen semi-circled apartments.

While I was parading and showing off my shoes to admiring four-year-olds, my mother came from behind and untimidly took my arm above the wrist and forthwith took me back to our apartment. I still remember that as a moment of feeling human anger that in the decades since has been duplicated in intensity, but never surpassed.

Freedom. I am now imagining since that moment of humiliation I have worked without rest to attain a freedom to wear whatever shoes I want! Follow me? Maybe I’m losing me a little bit here, too, but here’s my take. Okawa’s sentence is: Evil is a distortion caused by friction between two souls both striving to pursue their own freedom. My editorial changes: Evil (unhappiness, meanness, cruelty) is a distortion caused by friction between two souls both striving to understand themselves better (because Irma and I agree that we are all free, but we don’t know it and don’t know how to use it).

Pope Joan

Donna Woolfolk Cross
Ballantine, 1996

Girl born. Girl works hard. Girl has mentor. Girl meets boy. Girl becomes CEO of biggest company in the world. Girl deposed. “How dry is all that?” it might be asked. Except the girl is masquerading as a boy and becomes pope of the Catholic Church. Evidence points to existence of a female pope in the mid 800s, though the Church denies it. Cross took evidence that is widely, though not universally, accepted and wrote a story of possibility.

The prologue starts the story with Joan’s birth on the twenty-eighth day of Wintarmanoth in 814. While the midwife walks through a winter storm to attend the birth, background of history and place begin and then continues through the birth. By the time the infant is named Joan by her parish minister father minutes after her birth, the obstacles Joan must overcome are established. Church teachings forbid her education, her father considers her a useless, evil female, she is born in the backwoods away from Rome, and her mother is an outsider with blonde hair from Saxony. Then the story opens with Chapter One when she is a small child.

Cross knew her fictionalized history would end with the discovery of Pope John Anglicus’s true gender. She also was familiar with the accepted history of Europe at that time with Charlemagne’s conquests and what was recorded by the Catholic Church. The seventh century is poorly documented and inconsistent on many details, which gave Cross tremendous story freedom. To her credit, she weaves a believable self-contained tale that wraps up all the loose ends.

What was true in 800 about growing up is also true in 2000. For a child from disadvantaged conditions to find a better way in the world, a mentor is essential. Her mother educated her with tales of Nordic gods, but it was mentoring by a local male teacher who versed her in Latin and the Greek traditions of logic and evidence. He ignited her life-long quest for learning that continued until a precipitous event that provided her with an opportunity to sequester herself within the church, disguised as a male.

Oh yes, and about the man in the lady pope’s life. Meet Gerold. Gerold is the dashing, red-haired knight who supports her education and enjoys bantering with the precocious girl child. What else is there to do, but fall in love? Too bad Gerold is married with two daughters and Joan is too honorable to use feminine wiles. Though the beautiful, cold-hearted wife is not too honorable to send Joan away to be married while Gerold is away leading military campaigns for King Lothar, grandson of Charlemagne. But true love cannot be extinguished because of a mere wife, so an infatuation deepens into a life-long attachment with consequences.

I read historical fiction as candy with the medicine. Some of the words on the page are fanciful story and some documented history, but once they are combined they’re difficult to tell apart. Cross managed her story’s intrigue and told it with directness that is easy to read.

My Bras Are Bar Room Fighters

Courtesy Wikipedia

It’s my mother’s fault. I observed from action rather than words that underwear should match outerwear, and it is a pleasure of being feminine. Watching her dress in lace and hearing the soft brush of satin as she smoothed her skirt over a slip, pointed me to a mental future. When she carefully did it on a Saturday night before her date came, the door of the future was opened and my little girl imagination knew I would someday walk there. Her fashion standard has resulted in my abundance of underwear. My panties, bras, camisoles and nightwear, however, are not friends. They fight for top girl dominance in the washer and dryer. Something I never saw in my mother’s laundry.

Lingerie washing directions seldom say machine wash just like mothers seldom tell us to frequent beer bars, though we (I) do (did). Only the blue-blood silk that insists on martinis, gets hand washed. It still lasts only as long as a bottle of nail polish. What remains is the underwear that’s seen expensive restaurants, but its also seen real living in bars and boardrooms. When there’s a pile of lace, nylon, satin and ribbons from sorting laundry, I put it in the washer.

Several years ago there was a showdown in the dryer between everything else and the bras. When I opened the door nighties and panties were twisted, tangled and nearly breathless in the death grip of half a dozen bras. A camisole I wore as a blouse when fashion demanded it was attacked by a barracuda green bra with polka dots. Maybe it was jealous it was never shown publicly. In the far back were two nighties who escaped the bra attack. Their straps were entangled in an undecipherable clutch of passion or united fear to keep away from the brawl they must have witnessed.

It took half an hour to lovingly and patiently untie, unwrap and untangle all participants. I felt like a nurse in ER trying to save lives, but I only wanted to save my wardrobe essentials. A few panties were hidden entirely in the skirts of nighties or bodice of camisoles and twisted tight as bread packages with bra hardware. Those little hooks fight not only sixteen year old boys, they’ll go to the mat with their cousins from the lower neighborhood.

Panties, camisoles, and nighties lost to the vicious dog bras but I could tell it was a worthy fight. A few filmy panties protected their lace by allowing a death squeeze from bra straps only on the unfrillied middle. A camisole with a front button had unmercifully twisted another bra strap round and round till it was a licorice twizzler. Luckily, everything recovered with a bit of nursing and gentle unraveling, but I learned my lesson.

From then on I sent the children who could play together to the washer and began hand washing the bras. Hanging over the tub from the shower head, they drip and leave spots on the faucets and spout but they entertain my husband and tickle his artist mind in a mix of color as he lies in the tub.

But yesterday eight bras accumulated and I decided to throw them in a gentle quick cycle. Without an outside enemy, they did each other in.

Two blues attacked the magenta. They had it wrapped on both back ends and only one arm strap was free. I think they were jealous. Actually, they’re prettier with their lace but they have to settle for the real me while the magenta “lifts and separates” for maximum illusion before outright lie.

Three whites held down a black and had bitten lace right on the nipple. Tweezers had to gently pry the hooks up to release the luckily undamaged lace. One white is nearing the end of its appreciated lifecycle of personal romantic fantasies. It is also the least equipped to battle with only a front slide attachment. But I can see by the twisting it led the march on the tony Victoria’s Secret black bought during an emotional self-assessment of my declining desirability. I’m not proud to retell I’ve felt that way around younger females. A bit old, a bit weaponless, and not liking myself for feeling it, as I tell myself I’m richer from experience. I’m surprised how I understand, and maybe need to watch, these inner feminine brawls.

Only one bra escaped the fight. It also is one I’ve had a long time. It’s a delicate thing of see through lavender and slim satin double straps. I picked it up and looked it over. It has hooks and could have easily clutched into the others. But it didn’t. It just went its merry little way of gracefully and quietly getting older, ever ready to provide its support and talents where possible.

I relearned my lesson. Manufacturers have their reasons to recommend hand washing. I think they’re trying to protect us from seeing ourselves and learning what’s really there. It’s a different protective illusion, but I like my mother’s idea better.