Hello readers!
I hope your week is off to a great start. Thank you to everyone who attended yesterday’s event with Mary Berry — I saw several names I recognized from this community. I so appreciate you being there, and I would love to hear your questions and thoughts re: the event. Mary said that she seeks, through her work, to build “an economy that will support good farming, and a culture that will support good land use.” I loved this statement. It emphasizes the idea that healing only comes through connection—the connections between economics and culture, between rural towns and big cities, between soil and farm, and more.
We’ve got more events coming up, and so I’ll keep you posted as those dates draw near!
We’re continuing our summer book club, reading through Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.
This week’s chapter—Chapter 4, “The Fixed”—is an interesting, even shocking, chapter in Tinker Creek. (Schmoop’s alternative name for the chapter: “A Bunch of Messed-Up Stuff About Bugs.”)
If I am completely honest, it’s not an easy chapter to wrap my mind around. In this chapter, Dillard wrestles with forms of cruelty, neglect, or loss in nature that are often passionless or unintentional. Her anecdotal experiences with the mating habits of the praying mantis, plus her childhood memory of a Polyphemus moth’s failed hatching (due to adult error), are jarring and difficult to read about. But they reinforce the chapter’s overarching concept of fixedness. To be “fixed”—if I were to venture a definition—is to blindly live with the destructive, or the brutal, without any sense of meaning or any hope of escape. Caterpillars march endlessly in a circle, dragonflies get stuck in tar, the poor moth walks along the sidewalk because it cannot fly: these are all instances of “the fixed.”
Rather than reducing these horrors to a simple explanation, Dillard returns to the idea of mystery and shadow as the chapter concludes: “These are mysteries performed in broad daylight before our very eyes; we can see every detail, and yet they are still mysteries,” she writes.
We resist the brokenness of this bug-eat-bug world. Maybe we should resist it. But we cannot forget that we are part of it: the parasitic, the predatory, and the giving, the beautiful, the benign, and the “ugly,” all exist together. And we’re included in that existence. We can wrestle with the things we don’t understand, bump up against them, turn them over in our brains, try to puzzle them out. But grappling with fixedness does not mean settling for easy or simplified explanations. Neither does it mean turning a blind eye. All such attempts at making sense of this world are reducing or objectifying. They put us at the center, and insist that the sphere spin and move according to our scruples. As Dillard puts it,
“Where do I get my standards that I fancy the fixed world of insects doesn't meet? … [T]he world may be fixed, but it never was broken. And shadow itself may resolve into beauty.”
One might add, too, that we can do our part to reject cruelty: to resist it, and to embrace tenderness in its stead. Amid the mystery and the shadow, the inexplicable and the shocking, we can serve as anchors of gentleness and care.
This week, read Chapter 4: The Fixed in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (pages 55–72 in my edition). Consider the following questions as you read:
How would you define this chapter’s idea of “fixedness”? Is it something you’ve also observed or struggled with? How have you thought about it in the past? What insights does Dillard offer you (if any)?
A reader and commenter offered an important question that I’d love to contemplate with you this week. There are some very dark and dismal images in this book. The reader asked, back in week one, why we should spend this time looking at or reading about the horrific and the cruel in nature. Why? What purpose does a chapter like this serve? There are so many beautiful things in the world, and we could consider them instead. Are the meditations in this chapter encouraging or meaningful in any way?
This week’s outdoor challenge: spend at least one hour outside this week. Use part of the time to notice shadows, as Dillard does in this chapter. How do they relate to light, and to our understanding of space and time? Is there anything you learn about or from shadows as you observe them?
Over the weekend, my kiddos and I went on a hike into the Boise foothills. As part of last week’s challenge, I spent some time learning more about the Pinacate Beetles we observed as we walked. They were everywhere: strolling, mating, hiding in or perching atop the dirt mounds that served as their homes. My children were fascinated by them. They’re huge, but harmless (apparently you can adopt them as pets)—as long as you don’t scare them. If you do, the Pinacate Beetle will stand on its head and spray you with some stinky spray.
The Pinacate Beetle likes to go on walks, and will travel some distance in search for food. It eats rotting material, and is an essential part of our planet’s decomposition team (which one site delightfully refers to as the “FBI—fungi, bacteria, and insects, the primary agents of decomposition. Without them the planet would soon be covered with dead animals and plants.”)
My children quickly noticed that bikers had crushed some of these beetles as they sped along our trail. Moving bugs off the trail, safe from the unsuspecting cruelty of bikers or runners, became their primary goal as we inched along. They rescued a couple caterpillars, a cricket, and a few beetles. One of the things I love about walking: it slows you down enough to prompt attentiveness—and with that attentiveness come opportunities for care.
Reviewing Book Club + Outdoor Challenge Goals for this week:
First: read the entirety of Chapter 4: The Fixed.
Second: spend at least one hour outside, and within that time, spend some time observing shadows.
Then with regard to why focus on/explore the horrible things in nature - I think this keeps us realistic. Nature is a violent place, everywhere we look from the Serengeti plains to the soil beneath our feet violent relationships of predator and prey are playing out. If we ignore or neglect to think about such events they can take us by surprise when we are (inevitably) exposed to them. This can lead to wrong reactions like trying to intervene (a predator has to feed as much as its prey does), running away in horror, or even at the extreme end of the spectrum, trying to annihilate all predators (as some philosophers advocate for - albeit philosophers on the fringe).
That said, a reaction of sadness and tempered horror to some of the predatory encounters we witness is warranted. Death is meant to be a horror.
In the same vein as the clearing to safety of insects from a footpath; I am trying to encourage my disbelieving sons to weave around dung pats on the farm when driving: The reason being (apart from avoiding a good splattering) that there are a number of insect inhabitants who they would pointlessly be killing or leaving without a home: particularly the many varieties of Dung Beetle, integral at the beginning of food chains. They are consummate at opening up soils for improved water percolation, clearing up the larvae of internal and external parasites and dispersing their old homes before moving on to fresh ones, quickly allowing the organically fertilised farmland plants shaded out below to grow on and flourish - this is to name but a few of their virtues.