In the last MFA class I took online from UA Monticello, Creative Non-Fiction, each student had to "teach" one of the essays in the text, Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Non-Fiction. This is my lesson:
I chose this essay because I own and have read Selected Poems of Wendell Berry. Also, because I must get along with nature to keep privet, sawbriars, English ivy, hackberry shoots and blackberry vines from inching, like kudzu, closer and closer to my house.
Berry’s first thesis is that neither
pure nature nor purely human estates are livable for very long; there must be a
shared condition. I agree with poet Edmund Spenser that nature is a “sort of
earthly lieutenant of God. . .”
[Required discussion question for
class: Describe one of your battles with nature.]
Berry comes to see that nature and
human culture—wildness and domesticity—are not opposed but are interdependent.”
Do you agree? Why or why not?
The example he gives about what
happened to the bird sanctuary after the Papago Indians left shows the need for
collaboration. I fight, verbally through the open window, the squirrels eating
the bird seed when they seem to disdain the faux corn I attach to the maple
tree. Share another example of the cross purposes of nature and humans.
Berry’s face-to-beak experience
with the hawk elicited smiles. Have you ever experienced a close-up
stand-off with an animal or bird not counting your pets? I have. Twice—with
a neighbor’s dog resulting in a bite each time. I finally learned NOT to go
over there!
His final paragraph describes the
difference between animals with primarily physical appetites, and humans, who
also have mental appetites that can be “more gross and capacious than physical
ones.”
On page 24, he refers to scale—“If
the human economy is to be fitted into the natural economy in such a way that
both may thrive, the human economy must be built to scale.” Can you give
examples in your area where this is lacking? Mine is the packed subdivision
on my north—all houses, small yards, newly-planted trees. But still . . .
Page 25 is what I want to emphasize:
“Every farm (in my case, an acre), should have . . . places where nature is
given a free hand, where no human work is done. . .” I’ve decided the southwest
corner is the spot that I’ll leave as is. Birds live there. Vines live there.
Crape myrtles live there. Do you have a place in your grounds that could be
left alone to nature?
[Text:
Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Non Fiction: Work from 1970 to
the Present, edited by Lex Williford & Michael Martone, Simon &
Schuster, 2007.]
With the spring rains and warmer
weather after the long spell of cold and snow, trees, bushes, grasses and
perennials have reacted accordingly. Except for the apparently-frozen gardenias’
brown-leafed limbs, nothing else seems to be affected. Even the loropetalum
that I thought had frozen, revived. Even the hydrangeas have put on new
foliage, though they may not bloom this year. Thankfully, the lows are
predicted to be in the 50s and 60s at night. After that, it should be safe to
take any indoor plants (except African violets?) outside for the rest of spring
and until October.
Happy gardening, and enjoy nature. After
all, it has the final word, doesn’t it?
c 2021, PL, dba lovepat press, Benton AR 72-19 USA
