SB Favorite Author: Wendell Berry

The below quote from Wendell Berry of Kentucky hung on my refrigerator from right after the start of the Iraq War and all through the real Axis of Evil (Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld). I found it strangely comforting. I was not alone.

"To be sane in a mad time is bad for the brain, worse for the heart."

I consider Wendell Berry the Emerson of our time. Mr. Berry is a gentleman farmer, conservationist, and a religious poet in the best possible sense. And I think sense is the key word. Wendell Berry is, of all things, a sensible man.

Here is a short poem that Mr. Berry wrote that comforts me when I worry about the world as it is today, with the economy and the threat of swine flu looming. This poem also hangs on my refrigerator.

Bless you, Mr. Berry, for your uncommon decency and good sense in a time when a lot of our society's elders weren't so decent or wise.

The Peace of Wild Things

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.


— Wendell Berry

In a Never-Ending Attempt To Educate Your Dumb Asses

This is one of SB's favorite poems by one of SB's favorite authors. Read this shit, and don't your asses be skimming either! Get some damn education. Educated motherfuckers are employed motherfuckers!

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 millenium. 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 down 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.

David Foster Wallace and a New Direction

There are four primary writers who have become touchstones for me. I don't just read them, I learn something about myself and life by coming in contact with their words and intelligences. These four writers are: Samuel Clemens, Kurt Vonnegut, Wendell Berry, and David Foster Wallace.

I must admit that I have only recently discovered David Foster Wallace (DFW), due to the news of his suicide and the upset that his death caused the literary community. Like many, I find DFW's suicide particularly troubling. He was considered perhaps the most important, intelligent, promising writer of my generation and for good reason. The more I read David's work, the more I understand the huge hit we all took with his passing. I am in awe of his fine intelligence, his humanity, his wit, and his plain humility and decency as a writer and as a person. I can do no justice to him by trying to describe him further, so I'll stop trying and instead post a commencement speech that he once gave in a separate post today. The speech encapsulates and illustrates the qualities that I just pointed to.

I think it says something highly troubling that one of the finest and celebrated minds of my generation chose suicide as an out. I know that he struggled valiantly and long against making that choice.

When I read DFW, many times his writing perfectly reflects feelings and struggles that I have had personally. I think most of us can agree that's what good writers do. He nails it on the head, so to speak. I recognize myself and my own struggles in his words. Lately, I have been having a sort of depressing struggle with the direction of this blog.

At one point, I seriously considered abandoning Sarcastic Bastard and letting it become a ghost blog. I even considered starting a second more serious blog, but I frankly don't have the energy or the inclination to maintain two separate blogs.

When I started the blog, I only wanted to make people laugh in these bleak, kind of horrible times, but I have been feeling sort of shallow and like a sham because sarcasm is, by its nature, shallow and mean and unsubstantive. Let me point out that I'm not talking about removing humor as a major element of this blog. I would just like to bring something more to it.

I ran across this DFW quote yesterday that perfectly explains what I am writing multiple paragraphs here trying to get at, especially if you swap the word sarcasm for the word irony.

"Irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function. It’s critical and destructive, a ground-clearing. Surely this is the way our postmodern fathers saw it. But irony’s singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks…. It is unmeaty . . . I find gifted ironists sort of wickedly fun to listen to at parties, but I always walk away feeling like I’ve had several radical surgical procedures…one ends up feeling not only empty but somehow… oppressed."

As a result of this insight and the struggle I have been having over the content of this blog, I am changing the direction of Sarcastic Bastard. I'm still going to do humorous posts, because I don't think I could survive day-to-day without laughing, but I am also going to post on more meaningful, substantive things.

If I lose some readers, that's okay. I'm willing to pay that price because the blog is something that is representative of me, and I would like to continue to be proud of the work and to feel like it's not just entertainment, but sometimes meaningful, and that maybe it might help someone to feel less alone as a human being.

David Foster Wallace was a professor who expected his students to work hard and to grow in their potential as writers. I refuse to expect less of myself.