Greetings Friends and Neighbors,
Snow falls audibly today. No, that’s not quite right. Snow falls silently but lands loudly today. Working with Arianna to collect rolls of Sheep fencing from the pasture, we pause our conversation to listen. Tiny compact pellets—not exactly snow or hail or sleet—tap where they make contact with horizontal tree branches and the flat of my shoulder. The day is remarkably calm. Snow falls directly downward. Absent Wind, I hear only the percussive sound of snow landing, or tapping. The Ewes and Lambs graze nearby, diligently sorting the green from the brown with nimble lips, finding the calories that will keep them alive through the long night ahead. Even this noisy Snow lands silently on their soft, oily wool. The ability of Sheep to live outdoors from sunlight seems even more miraculous than usual here on this hill where Summer’s growth fades from green to brown to white. Snow begins to accumulate, on insulated Sheep backs and bent-over Orchard Grass leaves. It looks like we are going to get more than just a noisy dusting. I have invited friends and neighbors to the Farm today to help with Fall cleanup projects. Maple leaves lying in heavy frozen mats on the front lawn of the old farmhouse now insulate beds of sprouted Garlic. Raking leaves in the Snow seems to articulate the seasonal transition. The folks who gather are some of the loveliest people you might ever choose to spend an afternoon with. And yet I notice that the steady hum of human speech renders my ears far less permeable to the more-subtle murmurings of the place itself—the crackle of frozen leaves as they are pried from the ground or the distant caw of Crow, or the guttural cluck of Raven. Think about how a radio left on in the background can easily elbow its way to the foreground of our awareness. This is how it goes for me on this work day. I just can’t sustain the quality of attention that I am used to on days where I am the only human here. And it strikes me that what I am longing for—the capacity to keep track of multiple overlaid human and non-human conversations—amounts to a sort of multilingual fluency.
I am reading a fascinating book by Ivan Illich, called Shadow Work, in which he tracks the emergence of formally taught language and the steady loss of what he calls vernacular speech. The vernacular, in his usage, describes not only the patterns of speech but also “Sustenance derived from reciprocity patterns imbedded in every aspect of life, as distinguished from….exchange or vertical distribution.” (p. 57) He argues that monolingualism is largely a modern phenomenon, emerging alongside the nation-state. Illich wrote the book in 1981, the year after I was born. Modernity has proven hard on the vernacular over the past forty years. In a globalizing time, modern English amounts to a mono-cultural crusader. Illich writes, “Traditional cultures subsisted on sunshine, which was captured mostly thought agriculture. The hoe, the ditch, the yoke, were basic means to harness the sun.” Illich does not include hunting or foraging in this depiction, but it seems that he could and his insight would hold. He continues:
These cultures that lived mostly from the sun subsisted basically on vernacular values. In such societies, tools were essentially the prolongation of arms, fingers, and legs. There was no need for the production of power in centralized plants and its distant distribution to clients. Equally, in the these essentially sun-powered cultures, there was no need for language production. Language was drawn by each one from the cultural environment, learned from the encounter with people whom the learner could smell and touch, love or hate. (p. 66)
Illich lived for long periods in Southeast Asia and South America. In regards to his time spent visiting American Colleges, he writes,
I feel sorrow for those students whom education has made tone deaf; they have lost the faculty for hearing the difference between the desiccated utterance of standard television English and the living speech of the unschooled….Language exempt from rational tutorship is a different kind of social phenomenon from language that is purposefully taught. (p. 67)
Language that emerges from the ongoing conversation between people and their home place—a conversation that we might call a culture of subsistence—describes different patterns of social and ecological relations than the modern English taught initially by a well-meaning English teacher and then ongoingly by the onslaught of digital media. For Illich’s “vernacular” peoples, the surrounding landscape was, calorically speaking, the place where human life came from. This caloric dependency necessarily kept one’s ear tuned to the Ground, open to the messages blowing on the Wind or carried by the sudden influx of birdsong. The language served as to a tool for survival, not unlike the hoe, the ditch or the yoke. When I was born—in the year before Illich wrote this challenging critique—my people had outgrown subsistence by several generations. The local landscape was no longer calorically significant to my survival. But the grocery store and the shopping mall and the bank were, and so my listening ear and my speaking tongue leaned in their direction. I was raised in a time where the conversation between a people and their home place had been replaced by a conversation between a people and their market. Local culture supplanted by global economy. Given the degree of formal schooling I received, imagining that the landscape has anything to say amounts to a project of adult language learning. We have the commonly known acronym ESL, for English taught as a second language. But what about the other way around? Who teaches classes in LSL, or Landscape as a Second Language for the modern, market-English monolingual?
Experiments in Vernacular Speech
John has arrived early for the work day and he is already raking leaves as I walk up the old road from my house toward the Farm. Getting to know John and his wife Peggy over the past couple of months has been surprisingly joyful. The large orchards here in this region lean heavily on seasonal labor from Jamaica. John and Peggy are part of a small handful of Jamaicans who have decided to stay in the area year-round. For the past six weeks, John has kept a few Goats here at the Farm, for which he pays no rental monies. He stops by daily on his way home from work at the orchard to feed and water the four Goats, and on some days he is the only other human I interact with. When he sees me working, he always wants to help. As my work usually involves lifting and carrying things, he says to me in his deep voice, “Whoa, hold on now.” He then picks up the other end of the board or barrel that I am attempting to lift and then says, “Okay now, let’s go.” My initial impulse is always to turn down his offer of help. He surely has other things to do. But I have been learning, slowly, that refusing the offered gift can be the most ungenerous move of all.
I greet John, his leaf rake in hand. Peggy leaves tomorrow for a 6-week visit to Jamaica, and so he won’t be able to stay long. That’s why he wanted to get started early on the leaves. He says, “Peggy, she made you a Christmas present. It’s on the front seat of the van. Take a look.” Opening the door, I am greeted by the smell of Peggy’s famous fried chicken. She made some for me once before, and I told her how much I enjoyed it. This time she made a whole tray. Later in the day, after the leaves have all been raked and the gardens put to bed, I pull Peggy’s fried chicken from the oven and pass it, hot and crispy, to the circle of friends gathered around the fire in the snow. Some of them have tasted Peggy’s fried chicken before, some are experiencing it for the first time. Their mostly-wordless pleasure mingles audibly with the gentle crackling of the burning brush pile.
When John first inquired about keeping his Goats here, we barely knew one another. At that time, I found it very difficult to understand him. One day I even asked what language they speak in Jamaica. “English,” he answered. And yet the lilt of his speaking rendered his English sentences nearly un-hearable to my ears. I would ask him to repeat himself three or four times before resigning to a low-grade confusion as to the nuance of his statement. John was proposing that we enter into an informal landlord-tenant relationship. As much as I might prefer to see myself as a servant to this place rather than its owner, my name is currently on the deed and so John was asking me if I would be willing to afford him a spot to raise a few animals. Ever since I stopped selling anything three and a half years ago, I have been learning that practicing reciprocity outside market interactions requires vigorous communication. In this relationship with John, the likelihood for misunderstanding coupled with our power dynamics and skin color markers made me nervous at best. Tentatively, I said yes. Illich writes, “The vernacular spread just as most things and services were shared, namely by multiple forms of mutual reciprocity.” I hadn’t read this yet when John and I began to work together to figure out how to share the place, but this is exactly what happened. I don’t think it is so much that my English became Jamaicanized, or his Anglicized, but rather something more local emerged from our untracked gift exchange. Learning to hear one another amounted to courtship across a language barrier, and that learning leaned heavily on eye contact, gesture, generosity. As we worked together to modify the barn here for his Goats, I noticed that I was steadily acquiring a capacity to discern the meaning in his speech. One day I noticed that we were laughing whenever we were in conversation. Peggy will be back home in Jamaica through Christmas, and so John has agreed to come for Christmas dinner with my family while they are up visiting. I have wondered how well they will be able to understand one another, and whether I will be called upon for translation.
Speaking to the Landscape
I notice that Mao has closed his eyes and appears to be squeezing his face in concentration. I have asked him to describe the small family temple and cemetery in the village where he grew up in Inner Mongolia, a province of China. Mao’s wife Sydney sits to his right, watching him intently. She had the opportunity to visit that place with Mao once, and as he struggles to find the appropriate English words, he does look over to her a few times for translation. She helps him find the word ancestors. “It is a temple to the ancestors,” he says. Mao and Sydney met in Beijing while she lived there teaching English. After they married, they moved to the States and eventually settled on a Farm near me in New York, a few hours from Sydney’s parents’ house. I have gotten to know one of the owners of that Farm, and thus the invitation to dinner at Mao and Sydney’s house. Over the course of the evening, as the conversation deepens, I notice that I am increasingly able to discern Mao’s English words through his thick accent.
“What do you do when you go there to that temple?” I ask.
“We bring food for them and we speak to them.” By “them,” Mao means his ancestors.
“And what do you say to them?”
This question causes Mao to furrow his brow and stay silent for a long time. It looks like he is searching for words. Finally, he opens his eyes again. “Simple things, like what we did today, or how the other family members are doing. We say those things and leave the food for them on a flat stone bench there in the temple.”
Mao tells us that his trips to the temple with his father grew farther apart once he moved to Beijing and then to America. It has now been three years since he has been to the family temple. I ask him, “What will happen if people stop going there?”
He thinks again, and then laughs as he answers. “I don’t know. I think my father will be very unhappy.”
As I listen, I notice that I am deeply honored by Mao’s willingness to labor to find English words for what he has seen and heard. It strikes me that the “simple things” spoken at the temple may be difficult to translate into English because the act of speaking directly to—not to mention preparing food for—one’s dead relatives is largely unknown here. I wonder if prayer might be the closest English equivalent. Prayer describes the act of speaking directly to—rather than speaking about—another who is not entirely visible in front of you. In the Christian context, you don’t pray about God, you pray to God, following the assumption that God both exists and has the capacity to hear you. Prayer employs specific patterns of speech, such as praise, petition, or plea. Perhaps the word prayer might also allow us to approach Illich’s notion of vernacular speech.
For the people Illich describes as “subsisting on vernacular values,” the surrounding landscape is, calorically speaking, the place where individual human lives emerge from—and recede back into. The local terrain is the wellspring of the collective Life in which they participate. At some point, after many generations of babies delivered and elders buried, you could imagine that it might be difficult to differentiate between the ancestors and the living land. It might be difficult to differentiate between the care and feeding of dead relatives and the care and feeding of the surrounding landscape. Difficult to differentiate between the health of the people and the health of the local ecology. In that way of seeing things, prayerful speech and respectful action simply amount to an ongoing conversation with a landscape that is alive and wholly relied-upon by humans. A landscape that is also human. Ancestors provide names and faces for the goodwill expressed by the surrounding soils, weathers, waters, plants and animals. Ancestors are the specific storied volumes checked out from, and eventually returned to, the living library of the place. This library might have one “capital L” Librarian, or a whole host of lower-case librarians working to keep things swept and organized behind the scenes. But a library is definitely not a book store. Checking out a library book entails an entirely different etiquette than ordering one from Amazon. I am going to guess that librarians receive a lot more thank you notes from readers than do Amazon employees. A world covered with people living in this vernacular way—each tending to the prayerful care and feeding of their home place—is a world on the receiving end of human gratitude. Such a world is most likely a healthy world.
So what will happen if people stop going to the temple to feed and talk to their dead? The question could be asked in various ways. What will happen if people stop imagining their lives to be an ongoing conversation with their home place? If people stop saying thank you directly to the landscapes that they lived from and within? What will happen if the people stop praying altogether? Stop imagining that there is anyone out there worth praying to? Stop imagining that there is anyone worth speaking, or listening, to besides other living humans? Stop maintaining languages for those other types of conversations?
I keep remembering the way Mao laughed when he said, “My father will be very unhappy.” It seemed to me a nervous laugh, emerging from a person just one generation away from direct contact with vernacular values, attempting the impossible feat of translating those values into modern television English and the modern life it describes. Ironically, Mao’s interest in farming—and in his wife Sydney—led him from Beijing to a farm in rural New York where draft horses are used for the field work, including field tillage and hay making. That farm offers its farmers and shareholders a whole diet, year-round. The farm leans toward subsistence, toward a living conversation with a home place, toward the vernacular. The farm amounts to a lunge toward sanity in a time of ecological and social collapse.
The hoe, the ditch, the yoke, were basic means to harness the sun. These cultures that lived mostly from the sun subsisted basically on vernacular values. In such societies, tools were essentially the prolongation of arms, fingers, and legs. (p. 66)
Words—strung together into prayerful speech—were the prolongation of the human tongue in conversation with a living landscape. Human life had a chance of continuing so long as the people kept their listening ears and their speaking tongues finely tuned to their specific home ground.
Many blessings to you and yours on these darkest of days. Please reach out to say hello if you’re willing to jot a few lines. You can reach me at peasantryschool@gmail.com or 1044 Mace Chasm Rd, Keeseville, NY, 12944. A short note to report these words have landed on real ground somewhere out there means a lot here at the Farm. I will be diving deep into writing over the next few months, revisiting some of the older stories from the past years, reworking and retelling them. To see if I can find some pieces that are willing to hold together in a longer format. I will send out bits of what I find along the way.
With great care,
Adam
Gropple - that's what cloud scientists call those little cone shaped hard snow...they start as a little bitty raindrop that freezes as it falls and snowflakes the drop falls on stick to the bottom - hence the little cone shape. Gropple is the weather trying to make up it's mind if it is going to warm up and rain, or cool off and snow more....