Or Die of Namelessness

I have been feeling an enormous, nameless sorrow for the natural destruction on the East Coast and in the Caribbean, caused effectively by humankind’s abuse of the natural world.  And then I came home, already sick at heart, to find one of the noble old pines that gave shade and solace (a kind of arboreal cathedral or abbey) cut down, being sawed into pieces.  Such devastation on all sides.  Such an absence of love and respect for the world that sustains us.

It is a kind of solace to put this devastation, grief, into words.  To call things by name, as Wendell Berry counsels in this most appropriate poem; to call them out of the silence to be with us; “or die of namelessness.”  Hard to find the words, unless you’re one of the word-blessed poets, but essential.

Words

1.

What is one to make of a life given

to putting things into words,

saying them, writing them down?

Is there a world beyond words?

There is. But don't start, don't

go on about the tree unqualified,

standing in light that shines

to time's end beyond its summoning

name. Don't praise the speechless

starlight, the unspeakable dawn.

Just stop.

2.

Well, we can stop

for a while, if we try hard enough,

if we are lucky. We can sit still,

keep silent, let the phoebe, the sycamore,

the river, the stone call themselves

by whatever they call themselves, their own

sounds, their own silence, and thus

may know for a moment the nearness

of the world, its vastness,

its vast variousness, far and near,

which only silence knows. And then

we must call all things by name

out of the silence again to be with us,

or die of namelessness.

—Wendell Berry

And as an elegy to my lovely, ruined tree (a loss keenly felt, within the even greater losses of the week, by someone who feels akin to trees—my grandfather working much of his life in the Forest Service), this second poem by Wendell Berry.  A kind of bittersweet hope. 

In a country once forested

The young woodland remembers

the old, a dreamer dreaming

of an old holy book,

an old set of instructions,

and the soil under the grass

is dreaming of a young forest,

and under the pavement the soil

is dreaming of grass.

—Wendell Berry

(Sorry, fonts and spacing giving me grief; Blogger not cooperating.)

image: A pinetree branch in the rain, Westend61, Getty Images