Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

"And what there is to conquer...
has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate..."

One of these men is Wendell Berry. His words follow.


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 millennium. 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 giving birth?
Go with your love to the fields.
Lie easy in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and 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.

In Gratitude

To my brothers and sisters
Of brittle bones and fallible flesh
Who,
Despite the nay-sayers,
the wish-scoffers,
the sunshine-blockers,
the song-stiflers,
the witch-hunters,
the better-days-doubters,
Grow their roots deep
In ancient soil solemnly tilled, generation upon generation, by the
sky-kissers,
the earth-listeners,
the freedom-ponderers,
the new-flavor-makers,
the fear-scatterers,
the masterpiece-inspirers:

Thank you for making me brave.

Untitled

Weathered old man, I study his type:
The Automaton.

Creaking and clicking into his seat within the chanting Mass.
But no – his soul decries his context.

Don’t waste your sympathetic smiles;
What need has he for your instruction, Voltaire?
What unfamiliar lesson could you teach him, Diderot?
Gaia is teacher and muse.
What you have detailed in sundry volumes of high and mighty word,
He inauspiciously gives living form, under her discerning eye.

At your invitation to the perfumed salon, a polite declination:
“No, thank you, I ought to get back. Horses ha’int been fed.”

He sees his smallness, taught him by a life wrestling the earth.
He knows his fallibility, taught him by solitary, dawn-lit walks home after weary nights spent by the side of a dying calf.
He understands life, its instrumental purpose, taught him by solemn slaughterings and his own broken body.

He sees his smallness; I see a crown of humility.
He knows his fallibility, and so keeps his sword of judgment sheathed.
He understands the instrumental purpose of life, and so mocks the approaching dragon,
Death.

He touches my arm and tells me my skin is beautiful and brown like my mother’s
And that my heart knows best,
And I remember blackberries so ripe they could be gathered with concentrated breath;
I remember the tulips, my compass, every spring returning to spell out our heritage;
I remember racing -- downy legs on hot horseflesh -- through tobacco fields toward the place where copper clouds meet Kentucky bluegrass;
I remember the land, something so secure – something that will outlast us both,
Enduring despite our limitations, our forgetfulness.
Line by line, I see the impression of his soil-stained hands on my heart.
I see us on different sides of the semantic chasm, bridge-building, plank by tender plank.
As we cry together, understanding the misunderstood.

The Massacre One Morning Of The Ancestors

We arrive on our spaceships
Highest of hopes and good intentions
We plant our gardens vast and green
Harvest our grapes and olives and corn
We build our cities tall and white
Stretch out the road, through land and space
Pointing -- "Hark, the promise of it!"

The monuments we raise, tempting fate,
We scrawl our names over them,
Condemning ourselves.

Here comes the army now
The angry, quill and brush wielding legions
Remembering us hateful, our own children
They paint our gardens and cities and roads
with their ever-growing palettes of words and colors,
But we recognize none of it.
Were not our sylvan-scapes pleasing?
Were not our Babylons and Romes pleasing?
Were they not the fruit of honest toil and imaginations as bright as any's?
Were not our hopes and intentions high and good?

I am old now, I am your mother and father
Baffled by your condemnation
Head on the chopping block, but
Was I not yesterday a promise, a hero?

Go and see!:
My name,
the now-ashen monument, still standing, if bowed and melancholy, in the center of town
bears it!

Alas, and at that, the ax falls:
"It is your fault, these miseries: these ill-conceived cities, these poorly managed gardens, these inefficient roads. One must pay for errors in judgement and deficiencies in information."

It's a bloodbath to make Robespierre blush --
The baby-faced victors, they arrogantly brandish their advantages, youth and no damned Congressional Record.
To be something other than the tormented practitioner, living in the gray,
Was not our lot.
God forgive us for our ignorance, we suppose, but
We stand proudly by our lives --
Even as we damaged, we repaired
And even as we destroyed, we created,
Which is the story of our race, the young ones will soon see.
- - -
Ah! How can I?
Defame the wombs and truncate the loins
Of teachers, explorers, innovators, and artists?
How can I bear their shamed confusion as they are led to slaughter,
the Old Guards, which were, one must remember, at one moment, the New Guards?

"Did I not yearn and strive," they ask me,
"Much as you. Did I not ponder stars and with a butterfly net, chase them, much as you?
Did I not encounter puzzles in new places, puzzles without a key, that I struggled to answer, but likely failed to understand, much as you?"

As they set to us these questions,
Which we answer with silent, stony piety and a finger toward the history books, the verdict,
Our own children look on.

They are sharpening their pencils and wetting their brushes,
Already conspiring against us and our endeavors.
They know, as we knew, that the battle has already been taken.
They will prevail.
With their vigor and technologies from on high and lessons learnt at a tender age from our own missteps,
They will prevail.

Growth and Subsistence

I've been in Madagascar for two weeks and two days now.

I was encouraged, before I left, to "absorb now, process later". It's impossible. 'To process,' for me, is synonymous with creation. We absorb and then create -- using different media, of course -- I use language to create an image of the personal evolution I sense transpiring as I see (the sunsets at Acouba, the sand at Libanouna, the street vendors, the port at dusk, and the sunken ships), feel (moist heat, hands on my waist at L'Hotel Gina, mosquitos, the trade winds, my burning lungs at the summit of Pic St. Louis, a new cockroach friend down my shirt), smell (mofo akondro, her sweat, his sweat, my own sweat, the outhouse, ylang ylang blossoms, aloe), hear (Tay be!, incontrollable laughter, zebu, roosters at 5am -- Transylvania should invest in a couple and let them run around back circle...fewer students would miss class -- Salame vahaza!), and taste (zebu, rice, rice, rice, brown rice, rice water, lentils, dust, hint of mint -- not my own). I become despondent when I can't enjoy my process, enjoy my creation. I become despondent when my words cannot make known to you the effect of these miracles, all around, that are seeping into me, that I am photosynthesizing, like the peeling trees, through the skin and into the unknown places, changing the composition of my head and heart.

For this reason, I'm finding it incredibly difficult to transition into exclusively speaking French and Malagasy. My desperate and battered words can't evoke anything but laughter...they don't draw pictures...they do not synthesize subtle, nuanced sentiment...they turn my heart into something almost vulgar and incoherent. I cannot focus on theme; I must focus on conjugations and articles and sentence structure. I cannot create with these words...I can only cling-for-my-life. I can subsist but I cannot grow.

And that hints to a more fundamental problem, perhaps. I become despondent when I feel I am not growing.

But I know that stillness is not stagnation...I talk about it all the time. One can certainly experience a swelling of the spirit within physical subsistence. Have I told you of the marriage of two halfs, yin and yang, the arrow and the orb? Have I told you how much I want to realize this union in my person? Have I described a picture of God, balanced and whole, fully empowered and how I want to understand?

Ironically, Madagascar is, both for logistical and cultural reasons, forcing me to be still. It's forcing me to spend a lot of time in my head. I have not been able to hide from things that I hoped would remain stateside. And it is clear that those things from which I'd hoped to hide are hands-down the most critical to explaining who I am.

I didn't leave bad habits or insecurities. I must have hid them, subconsciously, in a invisible zippered pocket in my enormous internal frame backpack. My security blankets.

I didn't "leave my past behind". I am the product of twenty years of roll-with-the-punches "past"...and I couldn't very well leave me behind. So along the past came.

No conclusion here. Only a final observation: I am both growing and subsisting. I don't understand it entirely -- a clever trick that the Divine can pull -- but I have faith. Specifically, I have faith that subsistence isn't a punishment and that the growth it stimulates is of an unfamiliar type. I have not experienced this type of growth, and I feel the pains of it (remember when we would wake up howling, clutching our legs when we were eleven?), the pains of mind and body shifting and grinding into new positions, shooting through my whole body. I am malformed, I fear, because I haven't known growth through subsistence. Not malformed forever though. I'm confident my body can correct itself. Our bodies are all so resilient, you know.