The watcher is not alone
Another Day: Sabbath Poems 2013-2023 by Wendell Berry. Counterpoint Press, 2024. 224 pp., $27.00
To the Lowdown Man: If you read what follows you will say, “Those are my words, my phrases, my images—even whole sentences!” Any other poet would add, “and you have not given the conventional signs of attribution!” But you are the one poet who might understand that after spending many weeks sitting in the room that is your book, all I want to do is speak your words after you and try to think your thoughts without slicing them with dozens of little knives in the form of quotation marks. Thank you for providing a room with so many windows for watching the world and waiting for the moment when a hidden bird fills the woods with invisible song.
The lowdown man sits in his room and looks out the window, watching for signs that reveal the passings of this passing place. He is a poet of the lands the river slowly carries away. He knows people see him as a poet of a backwater. Perhaps he is that; but he is also a tree rooted in the dark earth the river gnaws. He depends on this dark earth for life; indeed, he is a lowman of the deepest depths, but all the while he aspires upward, seeking the light on which he also depends.
Sometimes he must leave his room, his home, his work, and set out on a pathless journey without a guide. He takes with him a handful of words. He tries to balance one word upon another as if they are small stones which together might stand firm in the swift flow until he comes again into a presentiment of the Real—that grand composure that stands in relation to the activity of the river and his own anxious thoughts. In this intuitive experience of the Real, no word can suffice. Has he encountered a lucky happenstance? A moment of divine grace? Will he in the end find the rest he has sought for all his life? Sometimes he fails to find that rest, try as he will. But then by luck or grace he is given another day to try again.
He gathers what are necessarily fragments and cobbles them together, seeking to make the pieces fit. This effort generates the poet’s central question: How are all the pieces fitted together? That is, how do the words fit the poem? How does the poem fit the place? How does the place fit the world? Do all things fit together? Can the poet give any final answer to these questions? No. Sometimes he can fit the parts of a poem together, but the discernment of reality ultimately requires a prayerful life.
Wendell Berry begins his new collection of poems, Another Day, with Edmund Spenser’s prayer, asking about the relationship between change and “stedfast rest.” Change, Berry reflects, can appear to be a domineering constant, Mutabilitie the final word. But that is a logical impossibility! There must be something beyond change, something “firmely stayd / Vpon the pillour of Eternity”: “o thou great Sabbaoth God, graunt me that Sabaoths sight.” Thus in Another Day, the poet presents himself primarily as the watcher.
If he watches carefully, he sees the gray flycatcher and the yellow butterfly, the green dragonfly and the white violet, and in their presence he cannot imagine himself as larger or more graceful than he is. He watches so as not to miss the beauty upon which Everything delightful and joyful depends. The Aphrodite butterfly might open her wings, and the light might come to meet her, opening a welcome into the beauty of all things. What might a poet be able to write out of the moment the fritillary Aphrodite lights on his hand? He will have to write a poem that transcends any utilitarian need we know. He will have to enter the Sabbath rest. He will have to pray without ceasing, especially “Help me. Help me.”
Meanwhile, he watches as the earth is burned, blown, and washed away, as the air and water lose their cleanness. Poisons and trash flow by the little room on the shore. The ubiquitous machines, while truly dead, provide the false hope of happiness or at the very least wealth. Always there are the screens, the gateways to disembodiment, a place without presence, a place without love. That place is Hell.
Ironically, this disembodied life is also a prayerful life, one filled with awe and hope in the Big Brain, our chosen almighty. We try to enter the narrow gate, narrow to us unholy creatures who try to pass through loaded down with rotting fruit, but all our works burn up in the profitable fire. We await our robotic savior. Meanwhile, we see and have nothing for which to be truly thankful. Besides, to whom would we offer thanks? We have disbelieved and dismissed “the transcendent.”
Where can one go to escape hell? For the watcher, it is the woods. There, a troubled mind can enter a quiet which comes down from the highest morning. It is a place that calls forth prayer for admittance to God’s holy silence; there one can hope to find forgiveness, mercy, and love. Though long years of watching have been required, the lowdown man can sense the presence of the one life, the coherence of each thing within itself and the coherence of the whole. The watcher cannot produce this coherence or explain it, but he knows it.
The woods is the Sabbath place, the place of genuine peace and rest. It is a refuge from the machines and poisons, the noises and fires. It is the place where the watcher can let go of the willful destruction, receive the Sabbath peace, and offer his thanks. In autumn the woods show forth heavenly love, the beauty of God, the author of a changing world where the leaves open and then fall, and the author of the holy wholeness. We humans have no power to arrive at wholeness. We cannot bring anything into a completed form—not our stories, not our work. Only the undying Christ-life, perpetually given and received, can say to Change: You are not the final word. There is an enduring Sabbath of measureless delight.
It can be hard as aging takes its toll to hold onto this reality, to remain right-minded, to pray the right prayers, to keep on writing. Self-consuming, self-righteous anger threatens. But the watcher is not alone: He has a proven companion. She steadies him in space. Any song he sings for her seems inextricably about himself. Together they have made a welcoming room of love with its window which looks out onto the world. In that room of love with her, his love makes him a better man than he knows he is. As Christ came forth from the grave, she drew the watcher forth into a world not made with mortal hands. He dreams and is warm because she was born. Now that he is old, he no longer has the same joy in the flesh of his own waking. But he knows that this world was made by love because a young girl, now a great-grandmother, came to him.
Not all his dreams are pleasant. The watcher’s final thoughts are of a fear-filled nightmare. It begins happily enough: He is coming home. A familiar voice calls him forth. What he sees is not the land he loves but that land filled with ugly mansions and factories, a land where both the rich and poor have become useless. Iron and fire have passed over the land. Everything he has loved is gone.
The voice claims that the watcher’s virtue is his desire for everything good. He had learned that the lustful desire to take what he wanted was a truly fearful, deadly desire. Despite his pursuit of the good, he could not escape his complicity in all he opposed. Still, he argued constantly against the conflagration—maybe too pleasurably lusting for justice.
This appears to be Judgment Day. What can he say in his own defense? He did not give up his desire for the good of every day for the sake of Heaven or for the sake of modern detachment. He held on to his desire as a way to love, to be present. He learned that the world was good and beloved of God. Despite many warning sermons, desire led him to praise this world and to preserve its beauty. Desire helped him to see a lighted world through the sight of a woman present and graceful, through the blue blossom that lasts a day, and through the rounds of mowing. To rest he walked a Sabbath path under the trees. Even so he dreamed a place of utter ruin, all that he has feared. His restless fear has pushed him toward work that would make for a new world, orderly, graceful, beautiful, good, and true. Such work is beyond his power, but this inability made him seek the world completed.
Is the dream a punishment for his fear? No, says the voice. This is your dream. I have been with you at other times when you were quiet enough. I am here to say that you were wrong to think only of judgment, especially your judgment of others. You didn’t dare to think that above judgment is truth, mercy, and love. I have brought you back to dream of the ruin of all you have loved so that you can understand the extent of your love and the greater love that made heaven and earth.
Highest
and whole, that love is the Sabbath morning
where you at last may come to rest.
Shirley Kilpatrick is Professor Emerita of English and Humanities at Geneva College.