From Word To Word

The Dinner and a Doc group met on Saturday night to watch The Real Dirt on Famer John, which is directed by Taggart Siegel.  We accompanied it with homemade mushroom soup, with a beautiful sourdough bread that I bought from a new vendor at the market, with apple cider from a farmer for whom I used to work, and with some desserts that people brought despite my explicit instructions that they bring nothing at all.

This was the first time I have screened a film that I have never seen before.  I chose it because it connects well with the discussion group that my wife will be running in a few weeks, because it has been recommended to me by many people, and because I wanted to see it myself.  I had intended to preview it so that I would have some idea of what I was going to inflict on people, but, as is usually the case, other things were more pressing.  So, as we sat down to watch, I was truly in the position of a viewer, as I very seldom am any more, and enjoyed the experience very much.

Among other things, I began to realize the amount of knowledge that has been lost, not only the general population’s loss of knowledge about working the earth in any way, but the farm community’s loss of knowledge about how to work the earth apart from the chemical and industrial techniques that are gradually destroying the earth itself.  Though he was a farmer all of his life, John had to relearn almost everything in order to begin farming organically.  So completely had the previous generations accepted the superiority of chemical farming that they had not modeled any other approach to working the earth, leaving their descendants almost completely ignorant of the farming practices that had been universal only several generations before them.

It seems to me that this same loss of knowledge is a fundamental problem facing many of those who would seek to live differently in their homes and their communities.  It is not only a matter of identifying the areas where we would like to live differently, and it is not only a matter of finding the will and the resources to make real changes in these areas, but it is also a matter of recovering knowledge that would have been commonplace to our great-grandparents but that is almost completely lost to us now.  I have not the least idea of how to grow an organic backyard vegetable garden, for example.  I am beyond my expertise at every step, relying on books, on friends, on google, and often, when these things fail, on my own experimentation.  This knowledge is no longer commonplace, and there is much else that has similarly passed from the common knowledge of our communities, to their detriment.

The second idea that I appreciated in the film was its insistence on the role of the dirt, of the land, of the earth itself.  In the initial few scenes of the film, Farmer John takes a handful of dirt, eats a sizable mouthful, and declares, “The earth is good today.”  John is obviously playing to the camera, as he loves to do, but the gesture reminds me of my own impulse to do just that while planting my apple trees.  The words ‘good’ and ‘earth’ in such close conjunction also remind me of a book I have just read, Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth, which represents the earth in ways that are often similar to the film.  This second connection was further reinforced by a later scene, where John’s elderly uncle approaches tears as he describes how the new housing developments have “poured concrete over all that good earth.”

It occurs to me, watching these moments in the context of my own recent experience and reading, that our culture has lost, and has long been losing, this almost spiritual sense of the earth.  Distanced as we are from working the soil, manic as we are about cleanliness, we are unable to conceive of soil as something living, as something that we might put into our mouths and eat, as something good and wholesome and even spiritual.  In The Good Earth, Buck several times depicts the earth as healing farmer Wang emotionally and psychologically.  Whether he is suffering from the lust for a woman or from the anxieties of his family, the remedy is always to walk barefoot behind his plow, to turn the earth in his hands, to lie along the freshly plowed furrows and sleep in the sun.  He is always cleansed by this connection with the land.

It is not, as the examples of both farmer Wang and farmer John show clearly, that this connection with the earth is easy, for working the land is always a great and never ending labour.  It is only that this labour is wholesome and good in a way that cannot be replicated in any other way.  There is no substitute for real dirt, for real labour in the earth.  Not that this precludes other sorts of labour, of course, but that the other labours need to reconnect themselves to the labour of the land.

I am reminded of C. S. Lewis’s Surprised by Joy, when he is staying with a tutor, preparing for his university entrance examinations.  Lewis relates how he would go to his tutor in the garden and how his tutor would take the book in his dirt covered hands and guide Lewis through whatever difficulty he was having.  Lewis is horrified at this disrespect of his books, buti I always saw something apt in this story.  The intellectual, at least in this instance and in my ideal, is not someone whose hands stay clean, literally or figuratively, but someone whose hands are as used to working with earth or with food or with wood as they are used to working with the word.  If our books are too clean, our hands are probably too clean also, and we have failed to make our thinking a real part of our living.