The Peace of Wild Things by Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

The American poet Wendell Berry passed away yesterday at the age of 92. I always liked his work for its gentle wisdom, plain lyrical language, and common touch that, I think, derives from working on the land. Berry was a farmer in Kentucky. I would say that he was in the mold of Robert Frost, except that unlike Frost, who was born and grew up in San Francisco, Berry was the real deal. 

He was also a bit of a throwback to an earlier time. The vast majority of the poetry that was published and became popular in the post-war era was largely urban-based and cosmopolitan in sensibility. Berry's poetry stayed stubbornly close to his agrarian roots. 

This is not to say that he didn't write about pressing issues over his many many volumes. He did. In a poem called Against The War In Vietnam he wrote: Believe the automatic righteousness of whoever holds an office. Believe the officials who see without doubt that peace is assured by war, freedom by oppression. The truth preserved by lying becomes a lie. Believe or die. 

Berry's poetry often carried a strong political edge and social critique. With the social, political and economic upheaval of modern technology, and environmental degradation brought on by climate change - these "despair for the world" provoking times -  his poetry feels more necessary today than ever. 

I love this one too. Especially the lines:

make a poem that does not disturb / the silence from which it came.

How to Be a Poet

By Wendell Berry

(to remind myself)

i   

Make a place to sit down.   

Sit down. Be quiet.   

You must depend upon   

affection, reading, knowledge,   

skill—more of each   

than you have—inspiration,   

work, growing older, patience,   

for patience joins time   

to eternity. Any readers   

who like your poems,   

doubt their judgment.   

ii   

Breathe with unconditional breath   

the unconditioned air.   

Shun electric wire.   

Communicate slowly. Live   

a three-dimensioned life;   

stay away from screens.   

Stay away from anything   

that obscures the place it is in.   

There are no unsacred places;   

there are only sacred places   

and desecrated places.   

iii   

Accept what comes from silence.   

Make the best you can of it.   

Of the little words that come   

out of the silence, like prayers   

prayed back to the one who prays,   

make a poem that does not disturb   

the silence from which it came.

Who Are We, Really?

I think a lot of people are scared to be who they really are.

That simple statement raises some complex questions. For one thing, is anybody really anything?

I think there is a 'real' person inside each of us. Another way of saying it is the 'authentic' person. In the nature-versus-nurture debate, the 'authentic' person is the one closest to our unique individual nature and character. It is primarily determined by the particular mixture of genetics and biochemistry we are born with. These express themselves in our physical and emotional traits: our dispositions, capacities and abilities.

We are complex life forms. But if you think of it in plant terms — at the risk of oversimplifying — it's essentially everything that is already in the seed. A package of potential that will grow into the flower it is capable of becoming. And every flower is a little different.

Obviously, the environment plays an enormous role in determining how close the plant comes to realizing the potential contained in its seed. For plants, that environment is relatively easy to manipulate to achieve good results: water, light, nutrient-rich soil and so on. But there are environmental factors that are harder to control: climate, weather, disease, predatory insects.

And plants have virtually no means of effecting their environment to optimize their potentiality. No agency. Whereas we do. We have the ability to extensively shape our environment.

That, essentially, seems to be one of the purposes of consciousness. We don't merely respond to our environment; we can reflect upon it, alter it, and create new environments in which we can live.

And this is where education comes in.

I once had a teacher explain to our classroom that the reason it was important for us to learn the skills we were being taught was so that we could make a living. It was possibly the most jaded and reductive explanation for education I had ever heard. I remember him saying something like, "I am teaching you how to spell like the bankers spell."

Of course, learning the skills necessary to earn a living is important. But that isn't the reason for education.

The Latin root of the word education is educare, meaning to rear, nurture, nourish or bring up. Nowhere in its meaning is the idea of earning money.

The reason for education, in my view, is to nourish the sense of self: to learn how we think, how we learn, what interests us, what we are capable of, and ultimately what we might become.

In that sense, education is really an expansion of consciousness.

Early education should certainly focus on thinking skills and the basic abilities needed to function within society. But during those formative years, children should also be learning something equally important: that what comes naturally to them has value, and that part of growing up is learning how to recognize, develop and trust what they already possess inside themselves.

Instead, we often teach them to distrust it.

We teach them to look outward for the standards by which they should measure themselves. We teach them to adapt to the demands of an external, constructed world, even when those demands conflict with their own inclinations and capacities.

This is isn't accidental.

The modern education system developed alongside the Industrial Revolution, and it inherited an industrial conception of human value. It established a hierarchy of abilities based largely on their economic usefulness. Mathematics and science were highly valued because they produced measurable, practical results. Technical competence was rewarded. Standardization, efficiency and conformity became virtues.

The arts and humanities, meanwhile, were increasingly treated as secondary — worthwhile, perhaps, as a sideline, but not essential or critical.

There is a great irony in what is happening now.

The very abilities our society has spent generations telling us are the most valuable — calculation, pattern recognition, information processing, technical analysis — are precisely the abilities that machines excel at.

And so, strangely enough, the AI revolution may be forcing us to reconsider the very hierarchy of human abilities that helped produce it.

We aren't particularly alarmed when AI is used to perform scientific calculations or analyze enormous quantities of data. But when it begins writing poetry, composing music, creating images or producing human-like conversation, something feels wrong, even threatening. Because those activities were never merely useful to us.

They were how we recognized ourselves.

The AI debate is therefore ultimately a debate about how we define ourselves — about who we really are.

For many decades, we have increasingly thought of human beings as wealth-generating factors of production. We have measured ourselves by what we can produce, how efficiently we can produce it, and how much economic value we can generate.

Perhaps AI will finally force us to confront the poverty of that definition.

Because if a machine can perform more and more of the things we once considered evidence of human intelligence, then what remains uniquely human cannot simply be our ability to calculate, process information or even produce things.

Maybe the answer lies somewhere closer to the seed. Our individual nature. Our particular sensitivities and dispositions. Our capacity for experience, meaning, love, imagination, curiosity and creation. The strange and unpredictable combination of qualities that makes one person different from another.

We spent centuries reshaping our environment in order to make life better, only to begin reshaping ourselves to fit the technological environment we created. We were on track to do more than reshape nature. We were beginning to replace it altogether with a technological alternative.

And now we're starting to freak out about a full-scale takeover.

But perhaps what we're really afraid of isn't that machines will become too much like us. Perhaps we're afraid that, after generations of teaching ourselves to become more useful, more efficient and more productive, we may finally have to confront the possibility that those were never the things that made us human in the first place.

AI isn't just challenging what humans can do. It's challenging us to remember who we really are.

Choosing the Right Frame

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A painting bought cheap at the thrift store,

The cloth matting soiled with oil and grime,

Stains of another place, from another time,

By others who beheld and loved it before. 

A Montreal winterscape when life was hard,

Painted in ‘38 by an artist long-ignored,

The gathering sorrow of Europe is fore- 

Shadowed, our city rendered in graveyard

Tones; rust, muted blues, greens and greys,

Rooftops swathed in thick chimney smoke,

Ramshackle wooden balconies bent and broke,

Tenements of sacrifice and malaise. 

Today our preoccupation is decor,

Choosing from an assortment of frames,

Columns of hung parentheses, many the same,

Initial thoughts of matching walls and floor. 

Then a word surfaces about what the artist meant,

His travails, a certain responsibility moves us

To deeper levels, we begin to discuss

Other dimensions—take of ourselves a measurement.

The framer waits impatiently as we mull our choice.

I lean in, share with my wife our sweet secret,

She smiles, the framer fails to interpret.

She tells him to make us an invoice.

The Monetization of Life

There used to be something we did called work.

Work was how you made money to pay for life’s expenses.

These days, work is increasingly being replaced by the concept of monetization. The reason is simple: almost anything can be monetized. The things we used to call work, but also the things we used to call leisure, entertainment, friendship, attention, personal expression—and increasingly, even our bodies.

In fact, monetization is gradually taking over more and more aspects of our lives. It is encroaching on everything.

I started thinking about this because my brother sent me an Instagram link that disturbed me to my core. It was a man talking about the blood-products industry, particularly plasma.

The United States is the global powerhouse in the supply of blood plasma and plasma-derived products. It supplies a huge proportion of the world’s plasma, up to 70%, in large part because people in the United States are permitted to sell their plasma, unlike in most other countries. Blood plasma is a commodity in the United States.

There are more than a thousand commercial plasma-collection centres across the country, many of them operated by for-profit companies. Studies have found that these centres are disproportionately located in economically disadvantaged communities, where the financial incentive to sell plasma is presumably greatest.

The point of the Instagram poster was that capitalism is an exploitative and inhumane economic system. When it is done with your labour, it takes your time (and your soul). When it can’t suck anything more out of you, it comes for your blood. And it relentlessly seeks out those who are most economically vulnerable.

It is an important perspective. And it raises many more complicated moral and ethical questions.

How can we condemn the commercialization of blood products when the need for them is so great and the demand is not being met by voluntary donations? If people need plasma to survive, and there isn’t enough of it, then paying people to provide it does solve a real problem. But it also means that one person’s economic desperation can become another person’s medical supply.

As a Canadian, currently feeling angry about the economic pressure being brought to bear on our sovereignty by the Trump administration, I was particularly shocked to learn just how dependent Canada is on the United States for plasma-derived products. We important 83% of our blood product from the US. 

Canadian law does not permit the commercial sale of human blood and plasma in the same way that it is permitted in the United States. The underlying concern is that once we begin treating parts of the human body as commodities, where do we draw the line?

And yet we import American plasma products to meet our needs.

Isn’t that hypocritical? More importantly, isn’t it a national-security vulnerability?

A country should probably think carefully about depending on another country for something as fundamental as the biological material required for its own health-care system—particularly when relations between the two countries have become as unpredictable as they are today.

But the larger point is more instructive.

The story of modern life is, to a considerable extent, the story of the monetization of everything.

Our labour was monetized long ago. Now our attention is monetized. Our preferences are monetized. Our personal data are monetized. Our identities are monetized. Our relationships increasingly become content. Our private lives become brands.

The monetization of our bodies and blood seems to be a logical extension. The separation between the personal and the marketable has gradually disappeared.

There used to be boundaries around what we considered appropriate to buy and sell. Some things were simply not supposed to be commodities. Human organs, for example. Intimacy. Friendship. Personal identity. Perhaps even leisure.

But those boundaries have been under relentless pressure.

Remember leisure time?

Since the Industrial Revolution, it has gradually been squeezed out of our lives. One of the great labour debates of the past century has been about reducing the working week—from six days to five, and now, increasingly, from five to four.

How quaint.

What if I told you that medieval Europeans had something like 140 religious feast days and holidays every year, according to the nineteenth-century historian Pierre Émile Levasseur? That is an astonishing proportion of the calendar devoted, at least officially, to celebration, worship and communal life.

The picture gets even stranger when we go further back.

This comes from an interesting essay by Ted Gioia, who cites the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins’s argument that some hunter-gatherer societies spent only around 15 to 20 hours a week obtaining food and meeting their basic material needs.

There are obvious qualifications to this comparison. Life expectancy was brutally low, infant mortality was extraordinarily high, and “work” is not necessarily an easy thing to define across radically different societies.

Still, the broader point is worth considering.

For most of human history, the objective of economic activity was not necessarily to maximize economic activity.

The Industrial Revolution changed that.

We made extraordinary gains in sanitation, medicine, food production and life expectancy. We became wealthier and, on average, lived much longer.

But somewhere along the way, we developed the strange idea that the additional time we had been given should be spent producing more wealth, consuming more, and growing the economy.

In the age of tech, that has transformed into the invasive and ubiquitous concept of monetization.

The new technologies ensure that virtually everything can be monetized, even leisure.

We go on vacation and take photographs for Instagram. We exercise and post the results. We have hobbies that become side hustles. We turn our opinions into content. We monetize our attention by watching advertisements and monetize our creativity by building personal brands.

The Industrial Revolution gave us more time alive. The modern market has spent much of the intervening period figuring out how to put a price on that time.

And perhaps that is the real paradox of modern life.

We conquered scarcity, increased our life expectancy and acquired more leisure than almost any generation before us. And then we built an economic system that taught us to regard all of it as an opportunity cost.

The question is no longer simply whether we work too much. It is whether there is anything left in our lives that we are allowed to do for no economic reason at all.

Two Gut Punches

Two gut punches this week: the passing of two cultural icons, Dolly Parton and Tim Curry. Both died at the age of 80, and that's about all they had in common on paper.

Dolly was the daughter of a sharecropper, born in a small cabin in the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee, the fourth child of twelve.

Tim was born in Grappenhall, Cheshire, UK, the second child of a naval chaplain and a school secretary. He was boarding-school educated.

I wasn't going to post about Dolly. I mean, everybody—literally everybody—is mourning her passing publicly. I didn't think I had much to add until the news of Tim Curry's passing came the same week.

What's the connection? The trans community loved them both.

And so did most everybody else. The phrase I've been hearing about Dolly this week is that she was beloved from NASCAR to drag queens.

Of course, Tim Curry rocketed to stardom in the mid-1970s playing the "Sweet Transvestite," Dr. Frank-N-Furter, in the cult-classic film The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

When I was growing up, Dolly confounded me. The big dumb blonde hair, the big curves, the enormous chest, and the outlandish costumes, which always accentuated her chest. And that was contrasted by a sweet singing voice and an "aw shucks" innocence. She was sort of country music's version of Marilyn Monroe (or Jayne Mansfield), but with a glam-rock taste for fashion, minus the drugs and pretension. I didn't know what to make of it.

She always seemed like a bit of a joke during an era when pretty much every performer took themselves way too seriously. She was the butt of untold numbers of comedy routines. But here's the thing that made her different: she seemed to be in on the joke. She didn't seem to take herself seriously at all.

And yet she was very serious about her craft, her career and her business acumen. Look up Dollywood—one of the most profitable and high-yielding regional theme park resorts in the United States—if you want to get a sense of what I mean. It turned out the joke was actually on us.

She successfully made the transition from country star to the mainstream with her appearance in the comedy film 9 to 5, for which she also wrote and sang the smash-hit theme song. Now everyone was taking Dolly seriously.

Dolly was always a tireless worker. She cemented her status as a cultural icon with her philanthropic work. She's donated and raised hundreds of millions of dollars for various causes, from literacy programs to disaster relief to medical research.

And what everyone saw in Dolly—beyond the crazy appearance, the makeup, the glitter and rhinestones, the plastic surgery—was a huge heart. Dolly clearly loved people. All people. Republican and Democrat. Urban and rural. Gay, trans and straight. She made no distinctions. That was no performance. And they all knew it and loved her back.

Admittedly, Dolly was not my cup of tea growing up. But The Rocky Horror Picture Show was a cultural touchstone in my upbringing. I might argue that Dolly's appeal across gender, socioeconomic and cultural boundaries was made possible, at least in part, by Tim Curry playing a bustier-wearing, sex-obsessed alien.

Rocky Horror is a lot of things. It's a spoof of the science-fiction and schlocky B horror movies of the 1950s, the gothic novels of the 19th century, and it also draws on Broadway musicals, rock-and-roll youth culture, and even the theatrical revues of the Ziegfeld Follies and the so-called aqua-musicals of Esther Williams.

And people from all walks of life responded to it. So much so that they came back over and over again, and didn't just want to sit in the movie theatre passively watching. They wanted to be it. They learned all the lines and lyrics, dressed up as the characters, brought props, and interacted with what was happening onscreen.

They took literally the title of the final musical number: "Don't Dream It, Be It."

Rocky Horror is a wonderful cultural hodge-podge of outlandishness and joy. But at its core, the message is one of love and acceptance.

Exactly like Dolly.

The Sea Glass Collectors

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Sea Glass 

The sea glass collectors of Inverness,

Pace the sandy shoreline of Cape Breton,

Like musing philosophers hoping to express,

A sentiment in words they chance upon.

Their aim is to glean some shining moment,

From the detritus coughed up by the Atlantic tide,

The mounds of smooth pebbles and seashell fragments,

Washed-up seaweed and kelp, slimy or dry.

To find a sun-caught shard, clear or creamy white,

Lantern green, cola brown, or rare azure blue,

They scrutinize the beach with granular sight,

And bend as if gathering drops of crystallized dew.

They are women absorbed in walking meditation—

A practice known to Buddhists for centuries;

Measured breath, measured step and contemplation,

Unacknowledged members of an ancient sorority.

They walk to leave behind, for a time, chores,

Their men, children, the world; and return to themselves,

The treasure they comb from the ocean shore,

Lies beyond jars of colour displayed on kitchen shelves.

Sea glass is as much imagined as it is real,

A product of the spirit and nature’s artful way,

To beautify used bottles from the town’s old landfill,

Polished and palmed like beads for praying.

An Online Reputational Lynching

As we increasingly substitute virtual lives for real lives, we have to reassess and reevaluate how we are being changed—not just our sense of what is real and what isn’t, but also the way it exploits the dark recesses of our hearts.

As we know by now, online activity tends to bring out the worst in us. Algorithms are designed to encourage outrageous behaviour and pander to all our biases and prejudices. We can respond unthinkingly to our worst impulses, with minimal consequences.

And sometimes we find out how others pay the price for that.

I think that’s something we can learn from the tragic death of Jason Arday.

If you don’t know who he is by now, I’d be surprised. I didn’t until two days ago. Now it seems everyone wants to have a go at him, at Cambridge University, at diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), and to promote their own political agenda and demonstrate their own moral superiority.

What I see is a tragic story of an online reputational lynching, in which the media and a million random commentators are only too willing to join in. Villagers with torches and pitchforks, banging on Dr. Frankenstein’s door.

If you don’t know the story, Jason Arday was a professor at Cambridge University, the youngest ever appointed in the prestigious university’s history. He was also Black. He was also severely neurodivergent and apparently didn’t speak until he was 11 years old and didn’t read or write until he was 18. His story is pretty incredible.

And it has come to light that quite a bit of it was untrue, or at least exaggerated. Not the neurodivergent stuff. But, starting a couple of years ago, the work that earned him his academic position and reputation came under scrutiny for plagiarism.

I don’t want to get into the details. You can look it up for yourself, because there’s plenty about it online. What there isn’t plenty of is compassion.

The accusations and online kerfuffle resulted in Arday resigning his Cambridge position and, a week later, apparently taking his own life.

First I felt deeply sad. Then I took some time to process the sadness. It is not the time to react, especially not to prove a point.

Upon some reflection, I came to realize that I couldn’t care less that Cambridge hired him, for whatever reason. That’s their business. If they screwed up, that’s their problem to deal with. If they fail, too bad for them. They will lose out. Let’s not exaggerate the ramifications for the rest of us.

Let’s presume Cambridge hired him because they wanted to virtue signal. They wanted to make him the poster boy for their enlightened policies.

How is the irony lost on people that the online piling-on is motivated by precisely the same virtue signalling they are accusing Cambridge of engaging in? Diminish Arday and Cambridge to elevate themselves.

I don’t want to say anything more about Arday at this juncture. Probably not ever, actually. I can imagine how devastated his wife and loved ones are and how brutalized they must feel by all the exploitation of their tragedy and vitriol.

It feels appropriate simply to say that this is a moment for reflection on how social media has scrambled our collective moral compass.