MANIFESTO: THE MAD FARMER’S LIBERATION FRONT

Wendell Berry

    Love the quick profit, the annual raise, vacation with pay.

     Want more of everything 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 to 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.

1st Ammendment

To be sane in a mad time

is bad for the brain, worse

for the heart. The world

is a holy vision, had we clarity

to see it -a clarity that men

depend on men to make

Consolation

by Wislawa Szyborska

Darwin.

They say he read novels to relax,

but only certain kinds:

nothing that ended unhappily.

If anything like that turned up,

enraged he flung the book

into the fire

True or not,

I am ready to believe it.

Scanning in his mind so many times and places,

he’d had enough of dying species,

the triumph of the strong over the weak,

the endless struggles to survive,

all doomed sooner or late.

He’d earned the right to happy endings,

at least in fiction

with its diminutions.

Hence the indispensable

silver lining,

the lovers reunited, the families reconciled,

the doubts dispelled, fidelity rewarded,

fortunes regained, treasures uncovered,

stiff-necked neighbors mending their ways

good names restored, greed daunted,

old maids married off to worthy parsons,

troublemakers vanished to other hemispheres,

forgers of documents tossed down the stairs,

seducers scurrying to the altar,

orphans sheltered, widows comforted,

pride humbled, wounds healed over,

prodigal sons summoned home,

cups of sorrow thrown into the ocean,

hankies drenched with tears of reconciliation,

general merriment and celebration,

and the dog Fido,

gone astray in the first chapter,

turns up barking gladly

in the last.

One must imagine Darwin happy .....

(apologies to Camus)

To be an island (fragment)

Sarah Lindsay

To be an island, you have to stand back from the others,

drawbridge up. That way you get

to have your own ideas, you can share

-send out your bats, your golden midges (D. wiederhoefti),

certain waterproof seeds;

let the whiskerfish come over, and Owen’s gull

with it raucous trombone honk, even

a couple of stubborn elephants, strong swimmers,

if their children agree to stay small,

eat less, give up their favorite foods.

But be wary of gifts.

Gary Nabhan gave me this poem years ago. It contains a recipe for intellectual independence.

Pied Beauty

Gerald Manley Hopkins

GLORY be to God for dappled things-

For skies of couple-colour as a brindled cow;

For  rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut falls; finches’ wings;

Landscape plotted and pieced -fold, fallow, and plough;

And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare and strange;

Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

With swift, slow; sweet, sour;  adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change;

Praise him

Arthur Middleton introduced me to Hopkins’ poems. I am very fond of this one.

Kate Northrop

Unfinished Landscape with a Dog

Not much of a dog yet,

 that smudge in the distance, beyond the reach

of focus. It's just an impressionist

gesture, a guess. From the edge of the clearing, the farmhouse

materializes, settles

into wall and stone. The water,

making the surface

of the stream, makes

reflections. So why shouldn't the dog

accept limits, become

a figure? Is he like the girl who sits

in the hall closet and says she's not

hiding? She's inside—

listening without the burden

of sight, letting locations

release hold. Out of body,

they seem lighter: her parents' voices no longer

hooked to their mouths. They seem

cleaner. Even the electric can opener;

the sounds of the children

that rise from the yard, and fall; the opening

window, these are no longer

effects, things expected

of a subject and verb. The world anyhow is too

straightforward.

Maybe the dog

does not want to be a dog, does not want

to be turned into landscape

but to remain in the beginning, placeless: with the wind opening, the wind

a vowel, and the stars and waters

that flash, recoil, and retch

unnamed as yet, unformed, unfound.