The other day I read an essay by Wendell Berry. He said this:
“I want, and I think in my farming poems I have been consciously working toward, a poetry that would not be incompatible with barns and gardens and fields and woodlands. The mind, carrying such poetry into such places, would be freed and eased in the presence of what is there.” – Wendell Berry, A Continuous Harmony, p.37
We might think — I have certainly thought — of poetry, or art, or music, as a thing that exists as the object of our experience; that we experience something while reading, or hearing, or viewing, and that something is of value.
Wendell says to look elsewhere too; that poetry can be a lens through which the world takes on a different appearance, a kaleidoscope through which reality orders itself in a slightly different way, or an accessory for clearer observation, like a ruler, or a magnifying glass, or a pair of binoculars. A poem can be part of the subject.
My speculation is that any true art changes something in the one who experiences it. We carry that change, and use it, along with all the other natural and nurtured facets of our personal multi-faceted glasses, to see and interpret the world.
Good poetry, or art, or philosophy frees us to see the world as both true and beautiful and — though I hesitate to say it — good. Bad poetry, or art, or philosophy, can make us see one part of this triad, but not the others.
The three are intimately and mysteriously connected: Mathematical beauty leads to truer theorems; Nature’s creation of productive and resilient ecosystems is also the creation of the splendour of biological diversity; the pursuit of rational truth leads, eventually and slowly, to the goodness of wholism, cooperation, positive psychology, and the immanence of mysteries that transcend even the most ambitious of minds.
If we seek the greatest good, we need truth and beauty guiding us on either side (otherwise we may end up with the scourge of communist architecture and all that went with it); if we seek the greatest beauty, we need truth and goodness guiding us on either side, or we can fall into the eventual ugliness and terror that has consumed so many of those revered as great artists in the past two centuries; if we seek the greatest truth, we need goodness and beauty guiding us because within the range of what is “true” we are free to chose what to look at and where to view it from, and the unwise use of this freedom can lead to a nihilism that ultimately enables the destruction of both the subject and object of its own analysis.
Art without philosophy is grotesque; philosophy without art is inhuman; either one without the presence of a human spirit who’s striving — perhaps against the odds — to make both sense and beauty out of life, is dead.
Beauty, truth, or goodness do not have to be explicit. Knowing of pain, I can appreciate its absence; knowing of poverty, I can appreciate the wealth of blessings I have heaped upon me each and every day; feeling the shortness of life, I can experience how long life is, one moment coming miraculously after the last, like pearls on an infinite necklace.
Wendell Berry — poet, essayist, and farmer — can teach us plenty about how to let the good true and beautiful guide us. In the end, we are all and each both poems assembled from the raw materials of our lives and experience, and poets who with every action leave a brush stroke on the canvas of the world, ready to be picked up and added to the poem of another human soul.
So, my friends, let us be poets, and let us be poems that — with all sincerity, with all honesty, with all authenticity — make the world beautiful.