When we no longer know

I think I'm a bit late in coming to Wendell Berry. An article about him in Christianity Today five years ago declared that he was growing in popularity amongst evangelicals of my temperament - and I only really got into him last night. But never mind. There's no such thing as "too late" for these things.

I decided to read him primarily because I knew he had written about economics, and I've decided that I care too much about things like fair trade to pretend that I don't care about economics. Separating the two hardly makes sense any more. That said, I can't read economics without a soul. So instead I go to a Southern farmer-poet economist, because that's just about as soulful as it gets.

Of course, if you approach Wendell Berry in this manner, you will almost certainly become sidetracked. You will start listening to the lilt in his voice perhaps a little more than his words, and when you discover his poetry - well, then, economics will be far from your mind.

Here's a little something from him to bring some peace and beauty into whatever kind of day you are having:

The Real Work (Wendell Berry)

It may be that when we no longer know what to do

we have come to our real work,

and that when we no longer know which way to go

we have come to our real journey.

The mind that is not baffled is not employed.

The impeded stream is the one that sings.

Changing Windows

The picture that you see as the header of this blog is from my window in East Brunswick. That won't be my window for much longer. As a matter of fact, I'm in Sydney now and when I return to Melbourne I will be moving on the same day, to Kensington, another one of Melbourne's beautiful inner-north(west)ern suburbs, and the view from my window there will, no doubt, be different.

Change, however, has been something of a constant in my life in the past couple of years. In fact, I've worked out that this will be my tenth house in two years. Ridiculous, I know. All this change certainly hasn't made for much stability, though there are some benefits. Moving so much has made me more adaptable, and helped me learn how to pack quicker - who knows when those skills might be useful in life. But it's time, I think, to settle down, at least more than I have of late. This is not easy to do. In going to Malaysia, I had to change altogether how I thought about much of life. I chose to be uprooted, to give up many of my expectations about living standards, comfort, relationships. When I returned, I was ready to go back whenever I needed to. Moving and moving and moving again has enabled me, I suspect, to avoid having to readjust to life in Australia. Now that I'm planning to sit still - I'm staying at the same workplace next year, and even choosing to move closer to work (hence the move) - I will need to slow down, to take more things out of boxes...It will take some effort, I suspect. It will also take some time.

So expect to see some of this adjustment documented here. The window I look out will be different, but watch this space to see the perspective - I pray - settle, and find focus. That, at the very least, is the aim.

What it is to be human...

I have three stories for you.

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The first is about an ageing German film-maker, who is allowed entry to a cave filled with ancient paintings and bones of now extinct species. Gazing at the paintings - so vivid he is moved to comment that one looks like it could have been painted yesterday - the film-maker, Werner Herzog, ponders the nature of what he calls "modern man", a species he distinguishes from Neanderthal man primarily on his inclination to create, to draw, to represent. What yearnings in the human soul, he questions, do these paintings indicate?

Interviewing one of the many scientists involved in the project, Herzog asks the question of what makes a human. His interviewee cites the ability to adapt well to one's environment and to interact effectively with other beings (he is French, so the latter word is pronounced "be-eengs" - an awkward, double vowel sound that gives it greater emphasis than usual). Herzog does not seem satisfied with this answer. Surely humanity involves something more? A quest for meaning? A quest for beauty and truth?

Another one of his interviewees seems to agree, noting at another point in the film that the name homo sapiens - the man who knows - is grossly inadequate as a description of our species. He offers instead the name homo spiritualis. The sacred choral film score in the background resonates in agreement.

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The second story is of an ageing French illusionist, who finds himself in Edinburgh attempting to make a living for himself plying his craft at a run-down music hall and renting a room in a hotel he shares with acrobats, a washed-up clown and an equally washed-up ventriloquist. He is accompanied by a young girl, Alice, who believes in the magic that he only fakes. Alice becomes enthralled by the world that he brings her into, but it never satisfies him. He wanders through it all with the same baffled nonchalance that his creator, Jacques Tati, epitomised. Few of the characters speak the same language. Those that speak English are rarely coherent, and there are never subtitles when French or Gaelic are spoken. Yet the characters - all animated - are magnificently real and vivid. The film so often pauses on pathos-laden images of desolation: of the drunken ventriloquist sleeping in the street, his dummy going for an ever-decreasing price at a local antique store; a clown drinking alone while vaudeville tunes play on a faltering old gramophone.

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The third and final story is on a Lygon Street tram returning from the cinema, a local homeless man who I recognise from years spent on this street entering the tram near me. Somehow he has acquired a slab of beers, one of which he is drinking now, lying back on the plastic concertina wall that unites the two halves of the tram, glassy-eyed, not quite tranquil. I pray for him until he exits the tram. As he gets off, a man helps him zip his backpack up again to avoid losing all the beers stored in there. I'm not quite sure it is an act of kindness. When I get off the tram, the troubled and troubling lady who frequents my tram stop stands at the lights on the corner of Lygon and Stewart Streets, howling at the wind and the traffic and the rain.

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How long, O Lord, how long?