When I am in the presence of a barfing child, and the child is one I’m responsible for, my field of vision narrows and ordinary objects crackle with intensity. I do things that I would never normally do. When it’s over and I look back, I have a hard time knowing why I did what I did.

Once, on a road trip down I-40 to see family in Memphis, my family stopped at a Chik-Fil-A for a quick stretch and some food. (Hey, we rarely eat out, but when you’re on a long trip and your kids are crying in the middle of Tennessee, you have to choose the lesser of evils.) My wife and I ordered, and our kids zig-zagged through tables towards the playpen in the back. The two of us sat down and while we waited, I happened to glance behind me to see our six-year-old emerge from the glass shell that separates the supposedly adult zone of this restaurant from the kid one. He was holding his stomach with a look of panic on his face. A few of the restaurant’s geriatric clientele turned their heads. Thinking he got kicked, I shuffled sideways out of my booth and rose to greet him when suddenly his eyelids drooped and he tipped his head back a little, sort of like a baby bird right before it lifts its head and opens its beak. The two of us were so far from the trash can (so far) that I formed my hands into a little bowl below his mouth and then he puked in them. I stood there for a couple of seconds, watching the vomit drip onto my shoes and my pants, taking it all in. Then, cradling the hot mess in my fingers, I stepped over to the trash cans and what didn’t leak out I let fall from between my two hands. I glanced back and saw his body convulsing with sobs. My wife had her arms around him. He and I made our way to the car, changed our clothes, and waited outside for the rest of the family to join us back at the car.

The six-year-old is now ten. Whenever he tells his Chik-Fil-A vomit story, he recalls my cupped hands stretching out to meet his mouth with something like gratitude.

Our family’s most recent tussle with the stomach bug happened two weeks ago. Mercifully, it wasn’t particularly violent. Instead, the virus passed through each member of our household with a kind of remorseless punctuality. Our youngest got it first. The best that I could tell was that she was playing a card game alone in the hallway of our home, vomited, and went on her way without telling anyone. An older sibling found the mess. Soon everyone was hollering about throw-up on the floor. I rushed from the kitchen to find four kids huddled around a small puddle of watery mush. The youngest fessed up: she told us she was playing and then she just threw up, no big deal, she didn’t doubt that I could clean it up easy. She seemed fine and then threw again an hour later, shortly before the next-youngest, her brother, started complaining that his stomach hurt. He didn’t vomit, mercifully, but everyone else did.

After cleaning up in the hallway, I realized that I, too, felt quite ill. I managed to pull our TV out of the closet and set up a movie for the kids before crawling to my room. I spent the rest of the afternoon hugging a bucket in bed. When I felt a bit better, I went over to my desk and grabbed my laptop. I scanned through our subscriptions to see what I could watch for free. Anything would do, really. For whatever reason I settled on Vertigo [1958], a movie I hadn’t seen since I watched it in high school with friends.

I payed attention as best I could, drifting in and out of the plot. Scottie Ferguson, a police detective played by a seriously old Jimmy Stewart, struggles with bouts of extreme vertigo. He’s forced to retire and take on part-time private work. Soon, he’s hired by a shipping magnate named Gavin Elster. Elster asks him to trail his young wife, Madeleine, a woman who (believe it or not) has been acting strangely--so strangely that she seems to believe she is the reincarnation of her own great-grandmother, Carlotta Valdes, a woman of dubious racial and social background who died thirty years before.

Trailing Madeleine, Scottie soon falls in love with this woman who is at least half his age. But there’s a bigger problem for Scottie: Madeleine isn’t really Elster’s wife. She’s just a shopgirl named Judy that Elster hired off the street to impersonate his wife. With Judy’s help, Elster murders the real Madeleine by shoving her off of the top of a bell tower while Scottie struggles to follow the fake wife up to the top (remember, he’s supposed to have vertigo). While Scottie cowers on the climb, magnate and fake wife get away--somehow, it seems, without passing him on the stairway. Elster has engineered the perfect alibi: his crazy wife simply jumped to her death. After a surreal trial scene in which no one is found guilty, Scottie is committed to the psychiatric ward, and the two co-conspirators, Elster and Judy, return to their normal, separate lives, the former no longer bound to a woman he doesn’t love, the latter returning to her life as a San Francisco shopgirl, just a teensy bit richer.

If you’ve seen this movie before, you know that the murder scheme isn’t revealed until the film is two-thirds over. And if you haven’t, then dear reader, I’m sorry I’ve spoiled things, but you’ve made it a thousand words into an essay about a movie you haven’t seen before, maybe you deserve your disappointment. In any case, for the bulk of the film, we aren’t supposed to know that what we’re seeing is a trick, a ruse, nothing real. When a depressed Scottie is released from the hospital and happens across a shopgirl who looks just like Madeleine, you’re inclined to wonder if this is just a trick of cinematic art. Has Hitchcock ordered the same actress to play this other woman in order to make us think that Scottie isn’t totally insane? Or does he alone--and us along with him--see Madeleine’s face in Judy’s? Only when you see Judy the shopgirl sit down and write out a confession, which is read out loud as voiceover, do you realize that it is the same woman writing the letter, Judy is the fake Madeleine, the fake wife that Scottie already fell in love with.

The rest of the movie feels like a long, inevitable sigh. Scottie is right about Judy resembling Madeleine--they are the same person, after all--but also, he’s really gone nuts. He spends every minute, every dollar, making Judy over into the image of an image of a woman he once thought he was in love with.

I’m usually a sucker for noir, but this time, it wasn’t the plot that grabbed me. If you strain too hard, you start seeing holes. Here’s one of the most gaping: in the opening scene, Scottie is chasing a criminal across a rooftop. How did he get up there if he already had a fear of heights? Setting aside pothole-sized plot holes, what grabbed my curiosity were the gorgeous images that occupy just about every frame of the film. The version I watched was the 2018 remaster of the original VistaVision negatives. Maybe I was hallucinating under the covers, but I can’t remember a movie I’ve seen that felt quite so visually rich.

The film takes place in San Francisco, and while a number of scenes and panning shots show the skyline and the surrounding Bay area, the camera seems most interested in exploring the textures and colors of urban spaces, often indoors: apartments, a flower shop, a psychiatric ward, offices, a museum, a bookshop, the interiors of cars and clothes. In a number of scenes, it feels like the camera is bored with what the characters are saying and starts caressing the walls, the drapes, the chairs and couches, or the lapping waves of San Francisco Bay.

One of my favorite scenes (and, as I later found out, one of the film’s most famous) arrives early in the movie. It takes place at a restaurant called Ernie’s. Ernie’s, I have since read, was a real San Francisco restaurant. Apparently Hitchcock was so enamored with the place he had an exact replica of it painstakingly reconstructed on set at his studio at Paramount. According to the film historian, Charles Barr, it took Hitchcock exactly one year to get the Ernie’s sequence, which occupies a whole ten minutes of screen time, filmed exactly the way he wanted.

Except for the wainscot and the floor, every square inch of the interior is covered in a thick-looking red-velvet damask. The carpet is all plush and red, too. When I first saw it I thought, oh, this is where the red room in Twin Peaks comes from. But the original red room is full of geriatric people wearing ball gowns and tuxedos while they eat and talk with funereal decorum. Fake Madeleine, you quickly sense, is the only young person in the room. and it’s full of old people eating. There’s plate clatter in the background, which is not surprising, given the age of the diners. But no child, let alone a puking one, in sight.

Scottie, the detective, is seated at the bar, and he is there to get a first look at Madeleine. A minute or so into the scene, the couple gets up and makes their way to the exit. Scottie looks away, pretending not to be watching them, but the camera remains focussed on Madeleine. When she walks, she seems to glide across the floor. The effect has something to do with the volume of her dress--you can’t see her shoes--and the silence of the carpet. As the couple makes their way for the exit, the camera’s viewpoint reunites with Scottie’s, and in a mirror that faces the camera you see the profiles of husband and wife walking arm-in-arm. When they stride across the face of the mirror, two people suddenly double into four, and for a brief moment you watch at four distinct figures converging on an exit that isn’t wide enough to accommodate them.

Things are not what they seem, for us or for Scottie. But the scene abruptly ends and the film takes you elsewhere. It is an extraordinary moment of fantasy and furtiveness made possible by the play of opulent, dreamlike surfaces of the restaurant’s interior.

However, the movie is chock-full of scenes like this. One beautiful shot after another tests your bearings as a viewer. The ones that really got to me take place in Scottie’s apartment. After Madeleine fake-attempts suicide by chucking herself into the bay, Scottie ferries her apparently unconscious body back to his apartment, undresses her, and lays her down in his own bed. He waits outside in his living room until she wakes up. When she awakens, she dresses in someone else’s nightgown, and the two of them sit in front of the fire in this bachelor’s living room and have an awkward chat. Scottie’s pretense is a kind of anonymous do-gooder care over her mental state. Really, though, Madeleine’s husband has hired him to tail her. But also, there is the attraction, which he doesn’t exactly disguise. Instead, it finds a disturbing place within the whole innocent-passerby ruse. But the film has already made it clear that this attraction, impressed upon us in the Ernie’s scene, is very much real. Somehow, Scottie’s desire is both feigned and felt.

All this visual interplay between image and referent, pretense and real life, takes place inside an apartment that is so distractingly beautiful that it you really want to look away from Scottie’s predator-like fixation on this woman and see how he’s decorated the kitchen. The guy’s living room looks like it belongs in a museum: the couch, the glassware, the horizontal lines of window blinds mirror the painted brick of the fireplace. It is a temple of modernist interior design.

The outside of Ferguson’s apartment may even be more appealing. I mean: go watch the movie and look at the place. It is a soft-cornered stucco box painted in robin’s-egg blue. The window trim is painted a deeper shade of the same blue; it is nearly the same sparkling color as the Bay. The bright, red entry door is shielded by a square notch cut out of the corner of the building, which forms the alcove. A steel railing fences the alcove, and it looks like it’s painted with the same red as the door, only the saturation has been taken out. It’s more of a pale, rusty echo of the door. The whole place looks exquisite. Who wouldn’t want to live there? (After snooping around on Google Streetview, I have good and bad news: the same building is still left standing, but the current owners have remade the building over into a gray blob.)

I watched the scene at Ferguson’s apartment and the comings and goings that followed, and I have to confess that, despite the repulsive conduct of its occupant, the house was irresistible to me. For a brief moment (long enough to remember it, anyway) I suddenly felt the attraction of a domestic space like this: a beautiful place away from children, the inevitable piles of clutter, the excretions, the vomit, the juvenile body’s perennially impatient needs. For about a second, I wanted to be somewhere else, somewhere like this building, maybe, inside or outside of it, I didn’t really care, just away from my kids and away from the stomach pain.

The house spoke to me, I suppose, because it disclosed a model of solitary masculine domesticity that is currently unavailable to me, a dad and a spouse, a man who spends many of his waking hours cleaning up messes and caring for children. It reminded me that there are two kinds of space, the one I have, the one for rearing children and seeing to their needs, and the other kind, whose purpose is little more than being nice to live in and look at. One is not inherently better than they other, but they can’t go together or co-exist at the same time. Anyone who has ever had kids or spent time caring for them knows they are incompatible. And the incompatibility ensures that at least one of them sometimes looks appealing from the perspective of the other.

Let me be the first to say that this is a weird thing to get hung up on in a movie. If a random group of Americans watched Vertigo for the first time, I doubt any of them would be captivated in the same way that I was or still am. Then there is the illness: I’m not sure that I would have felt the way I did had I not spent the morning cleaning up barf in my house and then barfing. Another person will watch the same scene and not feel anything but anger. Vertigo belongs to an America that seems neither possible nor desirable, an America that many would happily believe we are long past, especially the film’s representations of gender and of race. However, the fact that the film works so hard to make its fantasies present to the viewer seems more important than the glittering specifics of any scene or site location. The further I get from this first viewing, the clearer the film’s devotion to foregrounding highly stylized, deeply saturated spaces seems to be. As the narrative moves forward in time, the play of surfaces takes on an incantatory quality. The visual play is intended to hypnotize. It’s designed to do the thing that it did to me.

2.

When Vertigo premiered in 1958, critics assailed the film for its profligate visuality. Writing for the New York Post, Arthur Winsten declared that Vertigo was pure “visual confectionary” and “too full of holes” to ever rank among the director’s best. The New Yorker’s resident film buff, John McCarten, fumed that Hitchcock, “who produced and directed the thing, has never before indulged in such far-fetched nonsense.” For most audiences, it was as if Hitchcock had abandoned the thing that mattered most in his movies: the plot. By the 1950’s, Hitchcock’s name had long been synonymous with narrative twists and turns, murderous intrigue, crimes committed and crimes solved. By comparison to what came before, Vertigo seemed negligent to the point of violation. No one in America believed that it deserved to be taken seriously.

Vertigo received a warmer welcome in Europe. The filmmaker Eric Rohmer, writing for the legendary film magazine, Cahiers du Cinema, immediately ranked Vertigo among the finest films he’d ever seen. However, a decade after its release, Hitchcock grew so upset with Vertigo’s Ango-American reception that he pulled the film from distribution and kept it under lock and key until he died.

The film’s fortunes shifted when Universal bought the rights from Hitchcock’s estate and struck new prints from the restored originals. In the mid 90’s, Vertigo started showing up on popular rankings and “best-of” lists, like AFI’s “100 Years...100 Movies.” The film’s reputation underwent such a dramatic reversal that this last, lost relic of the golden age of cinema seemed poised to reveal something about the medium of film itself. What forms of looking and seeing does cinema depend on to work? What kinds of visual pleasure is possible in a film? Scholars and theorists swarmed to the film’s exploration of voyeuristic pleasure. A list of prominent thinkers who wrote about Vertigo in the decade following its restoration reads like a “who’s who” of late-twentieth-century aesthetic theory: Stanley Cavell, Frederic Jameson, William Rothman, Gilles Deleuze, Slavoj Zizek, Jacques Ranciere. It’s hard to name a single film that did more to entrench film studies in the modern university than Hitchcock’s Vertigo.

Curiously, one of the most influential interpretations of Vertigo arrived much earlier than the analyses of the overwhelmingly masculine group of commentators I just mentioned. In what would become a founding document of feminist film theory, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” [1975], Laura Mulvey singled out Vertigo as a prime instances of the way Hollywood subverted female agency by turning women into “sublime objects of desire.” Mulvey coined the cumbersome term “fetishistic scopophilia” to describe the specific techniques Vertigo relied on to articulate the film’s habitually masculine gaze. By having the points of view of Scottie, director, and audience converge on her face or curvy figure at key points in the movie, Vertigo transforms the actress into a glamorous, unattainable feminine signifier. But if “Madeleine” cannot truly be attained by any one man (Scottie, director, audience), then she is ultimately a threat, and Scottie and, by extension, the film, must expose her performance of femaleness as fake.

One of the reasons Mulvey’s essay feels so persuasive is because it helps explain the aura of remorselessness that lingers over the final third of the film. When Scottie finally discovers Judy’s deception, he realizes that he’ll only be able to overcome his vertigo by taking her back to the scene of the crime. When they get there, Scottie rages at her until Judy’s spooked by the fluttering gown of a nun, and she jumps. Technically, the killing is accidental, but as soon as Judy’s true identity is revealed, which happens two-thirds of the way through, it’s hard to imagine an ending in which Judy comes out well. The extremity of Scottie’s derangement--and the film’s indulgence of it--seems to demand this outcome.

Since Mulvey’s essay, other scholars have argued that Mulvey’s dependence on psychoanalysis keeps her from going far enough. Although Kim Novak is plenty seductive, it’s not just the female body that becomes iconic. It’s the entirety of San Francisco itself, the lush domestic interiors as well as the most recognizable public spaces. It’s all spun from the same glamorous cloth. Hitchcock’s camera refuses to disclose anything but richest, most saturated, most well known images of the place.

The film scholar, Charles Barr, puts the matter this way. Part of Vertigo’s visual charm has to do with the way that it “draws in, and indulges, the pleasurable gaze with extraordinary fulness.” At the same time, the movie “foregrounds the mechanisms behind [this fulness]” by repeatedly calling attention to the conditions of pleasurable looking. In other words, for Vertigo’s visual charms to work, the film works hard to hide certain images of city by foregrounding others.

Consider the city itself. Vertigo is unique among the films of Hitchcock for being so visually rooted in a single, iconic place. But what version of the city does the viewer get? Repeatedly in the film, we are shown glimpses of a kind of urban triumph of postwar capitalism. Gavin Elster, titan of San Francisco’s shipping world, whose name somehow echoes the name of California’s hopelessly unctuous governor and presidential hopeful. We see the Redwoods and the burgeoning “eco-tourism” industry. The tacky cross-section of tree trunk with text bubbles that show which ring corresponds to which major historical event (here is when the Battle of Hastings took place; and here is when Columbus discovered America; and here is when the Declaration of Independence is signed). The iconic Golden Gate Bridge and the frothy spume of the Bay beneath. The luxury retail shops. The monuments. The architecture. The snaking, maze-like streets.

What don’t we see? The working class, the dockworker riots, civil rights protest, the city’s systematic suppression of labor organizing before, during, and after the years during which the film was made, people of color, any hint of a reference to the damming of Hetch Hetchy canyon and the infamous water project that made one of the film’s major motifs, the San Francisco skyline, possible in the first place.

Then there is the issue of America’s origins. The film carefully, repeatedly links the violence of capitalism with the violence of the San Francisco’s past, an America not-yet-made. In the scene where Elster and Scottie first meet on screen, Elster talks nostalgically of “Old San Francisco,” as if it were a buddy he knew back when. “This city,” Elster says, “it no longer spells San Francisco.” Then, he gestures to a painting of the city in 1845, and he claims that in those days, a man was free to take what he wanted, to be whatever he wanted to be. Not anymore, according to Elster. Amazingly, in the background, outside the window of an office the size of Scottie’s apartment, hulking cranes slide back and forth above scaffolding on a container ship.

A few scenes later, when Scottie tries to learn the story of Carlotta Valdes, he visits an antiquarian bookseller who talks with an amazing Dutch accent. The bookseller tells him that Carlotta was spurned by her wealthy, white lover (“a rich man, a powerful man”) who absconded with their mixed-race child. Carlotta is reduced to begging on the streets. Eventually, she killed herself. “There are many such stories,” the bookseller concludes. “The men, they could do that in those days. They had the power and the freedom.”

What is this strange nation? Where did it come from? Scenes like these tempt you into thinking that Vertigo is in the business of political legerdemain, of projecting and then indulging fantasies of American dominance and plenitude. What’s weird, though, is the way the film constantly draws attention to the idea of projection itself, to the mechanics behind pleasurable looking and feeling. Like Scottie, the viewer is constantly tempted to get caught up in the play of surfaces and not what’s actually happening. It’s hard to find a foothold in this film. It’s hard to know where you might go to look for one. The scene where Judy confesses to the crime may be the one one.

Still, the film’s truth is plainly there in front of you. Everything has changed; nothing has changed. Men did terrible things. They still do, and they still get away with them. Without this premise, Vertigo isn’t thinkable. It frames the opening sequence, when an unnamed fugitive escapes the police while Scottie dangles from a high-rise gutter, and it is there at the end, when Scottie, now cured, stares down at Judy’s crumpled body. The difference between the old America and the new is in the pretense, the fantasy, the image, the moving image, the medium of film itself.

A comment from The Dialectic of Enlightenment [1947], published about a decade before Vertigo’s premiere. In a chapter on cinema, Adorno and Horkheimer say that Hollywood tries to integrate its consumers “from above” (96, 107), that is, by projecting the image of capital’s power on the screen before a passive audience of ordinary consumers. Their metaphor is both vertical and horizontal: above the audience is a screen, and the audience gaze at the film from across a room. A film is music, image, word, integrated into a single aesthetic object. The sensory saturation enacts “the triumph of invested capital.” The intended effect? To immobilize the viewer. What could anyone do to stop the movie or stop what’s happening out in the street? The more concretely a film reproduces reality as visual image, they suggest, the more easily it creates the illusion that the world outside the theater (or behind the laptop screen) is a “seamless extension” of what is happening in the film.

In Hitchcock’s film, vertigo is the name for the experience of being unable to move as you perceive the city’s depth, its physical accretions across time and space. Vertigo is what it feels like to look at the world from capital’s perspective when you have no capital. If this is mere coincidence, then it’s the sort of coincidence that joins Scottie’s name and the city that he lives in. They bear the same initials, and if you say them quickly, the prosody almost sounds the same. Improbable? Yes. Telling? Yes, too.

Is vertigo what it felt like to witness the triumph of post-war capital? Maybe the name still feels right. But if that’s the case, then what is the name for the feeling when you realize that the triumph has just papered over the rot beneath the surface? Is it nausea?

3.

Friday night is movie night in our household. The selection committee, comprised of four kids and no parents, typically picks something that everyone has seen a dozen times and no one is particularly excited about. By the end of the movie, half the room may be empty. On this particular Friday, my wife, who isn’t the biggest Hitchcock fan, was working late. I realized I needed to bypass the committee. I didn’t let them choose. The movie we’d watch would be Vertigo.

It wasn’t a hard sell. Vertigo isn’t their first Hitchcock. A couple months back, we showed them North by Northwest, which they loved, mostly, except for the interminably long scenes where Cary Grant and Tippi Hedron are making out in a cramped sleeper car. It was so bad some of them had to leave the room.

Vertigo had plenty of cringe for the family, too. Whenever Jimmy Stewart or Kim Novak leaned in for a smooch, the boys, age ten and eight, would scramble off the couch and distract themselves in the hallway. “Why are they in his apartment,” my older daughter asks after Kim Novak falls in the drink. She is totally creeped out by an old Jimmy Stewart. Is this really be the same guy from It’s a Wonderful Life? The girls, aged twelve and three, also got squirmy during the kissing scenes, but they had more tolerance than the boys.

Everyone grew more restless as the movie went on. By the time that Judy struts out of the bathroom with her hair done up like Madeleine, just the way that Scottie likes, my kids had basically stopped paying attention. The problem was the plot. (Isn’t it always?) Twenty minutes into the thing they had pieced together the outline Elster’s scheme without my help. If you happen to know what’s coming, after Scottie’s back in the hospital, the movie just doesn’t feel very exciting. (“The city...it just doesn’t spell San Francisco anymore.”) Does it feel still feel like vertigo when you feel the sensation coming from a mile away? “He’s gone crazy, just like the wife,” my son says. “The guy who did it just got away,” my daughter chimes in, sounding deflated.

At the very end, when Scottie drives Judy back to the scene of the crime, I call them back into the room. The oldest isn’t fooled; she’s never missed a beat.“He must be trying to cure himself,” she says. “Kill himself?” someone asks. Then, as Scottie physically forces Judy up the stairs, I feel the cringe, too. Or maybe it’s nausea. I have made a mistake in showing them this movie. “What’s he doing?” the three-year-old asks. “Why is she so scared?” I hadn’t noticed--had I not remembered?--just how often he puts his hands on her. Am I traumatizing my children? “Yeah, y’all are right, dude’s crazy,” I say, offering clumsy moral censure for behavior that is patently, obviously wrong to my children. I wonder, have my kids heard their parents argue this loudly? Everyone is tuned back into the movie now, except for the three year old, who’s returned to her crayons and paper on the coffee table. “One or both of them is about to die,” the younger son says. The three-year-old looks up. “What are they doing?” she asks.

Then it happens: a fluttering in the dark behind the tower bell, Judy leaps off, the nun steps forward, crosses herself, and after Jimmy Stewart peers out over the ledge, the credits roll. Simultaneously and in unison, my two older kids cackle and howl with laughter. The seven-year-old has a blanket pulled up to his chin; he’s not so sure. The three year old has no clue what’s going on.

I’m astonished. “What’s so funny about the ending?” I ask. “It wasn’t the bad guy up there with them at the end of it all,” my son explains, “just some old lady.” “We both thought Elster would come back kill them both,” my daughter adds. She sighs, throwing the blanket off. She stands up, stretches.

Later, after I’ve put the younger two down, we hear the door click open, and my wife walks in. We hug each other. She turns to the kids. “How was the movie?” she asks.

“Really good. Really, really good,” my daughter answers. “Not my favorite, but the ending was sad and tragic. Which I like.”

Eric Rohmer, French filmmaker, in his 1958 review of Vertigo, wrote the following: “shadows follow shadows, illusions follow illusions, not like the walls that slide away or mirrors that reflect to infinity, but by a kind of movement more worrisome still because it is without a gap or break and possesses both the softness of a circle and the knife edge of a straight line.” The problem of the film, which is the problem of every film because it is the problem of every life, is that fantasy and form travel along the same road of desire. The trick is in learning to tell the difference.

After the game I invite some friends to dinner. Our kids play together on the same team. They run a restaurant in town; there’s no way they’ll be free, I think. But by some miracle they have no plans either. All we need to do was to figure out dinner, so I went home and I made it, carefully, but also without forcing anything, achieving a kind of equilibrium of unhurried fussiness. Pulled veg from the garden. Boiled potatoes; steamed beans. Later, the crisp, saline bite of salade niçoise. Coppery wine.

While we eat, kids tumble and roam the yard, now hiding then surprising each other with jets of water from little toy guns. Shrieks, then laughter. After an hour of this, they send an emissary to the house. He asks if they can go for a walk down the dirt road. It’s getting dark, our friends need to go home, they live twenty minutes away. We agree to walk as far as the next farm over. We set off, parents tailing children, the former not really bothering to keep up with the latter.

The sun goes down fast, it had already gone down, really, and the light that is left behind bathes the trees and the hilltops in radioactive orange. Everything else, even our faces and our bodies, takes on the blueness of early night. We crest a hill, and the little whips of wind remind you of how cool it really is. I wonder how cold it might get before morning. As we walk, it feels like you are beating and slicing the air with your arms.

Up ahead where our children are playing I see two parallel lines of vehicles parked on either side of the road. Their curved angles sparkle in the light. I can’t tell where the light is coming from. By the time we come midway between the parallel lines, we are not far from the covered porch of Teresa’s double wide. I glance over and see that we have wandered into the middle of what must be the quietest party in human history. A hundred people, maybe more, gathered in tight clusters under strings of light that festoon the branches of old magnolias. Tables are scattered in the yard, all the way from the trailer up to the verge of the road. A slow pulse of cumbia hovers gently over the scene. Benediction. Big women with steaming piles of food step out of the front door of the trailer and then, carefully, slowly, glide down the front steps. Everyone is silent somehow, even the children, who bound and leap in the dark corners like cats.

We see them all first without being seen. I can’t help but feel absorbed by it all, drunk on the whispers of familial exchange, the soft joy of being-with, of belonging. Still, I keep our path straight down the road. When our neighbors finally notice us, they smile and wave. We smile and wave back. Teresa cries out: buenas noches, amigos mios. It’s my daughter’s birthday. Happy birthday, we say, shouting it back. She offers us food, but we decline, impatient of evening. But also: who would dare intrude on this?

We keep walking. The little light that’s left gives way to darkness. We pass a few guys smoking weed behind the trees: the party’s first splinter cell. We call to our kids. We haven’t seen them in what must be ten, fifteen, minutes. Out of nowhere they come running back, breathless. Then we hear our neighbor, Lee, who must have heard us because he has called out. He’s standing by the split-rail fence behind his family’s mansion, the Bowling plantation, what’s left of it. A dying hulk in the dark: tattered, weathered, exhausted. It shows every bit of its two hundred years. At night it looks like a big mushroom, I think, a monument of subterranean life no one asked for, no one deserved. Does it still feed on the bones of slaves? In the daylight it looks haunted and vaguely threatening. In the dark, the house looks dead.

Lee is with his fiance, Dale. We shake hands. Dale gives hugs. I introduce my friends. They run the bakery downtown, I say. I like y’all’s food, Dale says, it’s so good. And then Lee: I like it, too, but I can’t ever figure out when the hell y’all are open.

Later that night my son insists on sleeping outside. For his birthday he got a camping hammock. He’s hung it between two trees fifteen yards from the back door. His older sister insists on joining him. She’s made a little pallet of pillows and blankets on the ground underneath the hammock. She stretches out, insisting that’s she’s comfortable. Together they form another pair of parallel lines, one stretched out above the other. Unconvinced, I tuck them both in and say goodnight.

It’s a little unnerving as a parent, letting your kids sleep outside for the first time. We’ve been camping many times, but they’ve never slept alone, so to speak, without a parent right there. I realize I’m not being reasonable. When the weather’s nice, what difference does thirty feet and a wall make? I realize I’m afraid because my fear has no object, no foothold. There’s no real threat.

I wake early, 4:30am, like I always do. It’s still dark outside, but while I drink my coffee I can make out the shape of the hammock suspended mid-air and the pile of blankets underneath it. But I can’t tell if there’s anyone still there. The hammock is pulled so taut it barely sags. Beneath it, the pallet has become a pile. Had they retreated to the house in the middle of the night?

I step out the back door as quietly as I can and walk over to the hammock. Above my head the birds are already screaming. A thin film of dew beads up on my daughter’s bedclothes and on the hammock. Cold seeps into my sock feet. I stick a foot in the pile of blankets and feel around until I find the solidity of bone and body, my daughter’s slumbering heft. Something like a clean sheet, or relief, embraces me, and I lumber back inside and lie down on the couch, where I spend the next hour sliding back and forth between dreams of the living and the dead.

Geoff Dyer on Mingus, But Beautiful, 103.

Romare Bearden, Empress of the Blues, 1974, acrylic and pencil on paper and printed paper on paperboard, Smithsonian American Art Museum

Geoff Dyer’s But Beautiful is a strange book. It’s a book about jazz, which means you can probably find it on the bookshelf of every white dude who ever wore a pork-pie hat. Unlike so many of its shelf-mates, though, the book isn’t awful. Against the odds, it manages to be quite good. First published in 1991, 35 years ago exactly (I was five years old!), But Beautiful examines the lives of seven musicians and composers whose work spans much of the first half, and at most two thirds, of the 20th century: Lester Young, Thelonius Monk, Bud Powell, Ben Webster, Charles Mingus, Chet Baker, Art Pepper. But even just listing these names makes the book sound more straightforward than it really is. In Dyer’s telling, the identity of each of these players is submerged in conversation and in daily routine, not unlike the distinctive features of the art that the musicians make. In some chapters, you pass through tens of pages before realizing who it is you’re reading about. The same is true for many jazz records. Unless it’s a famous recording, or a beloved one, you’ll have to look at the liner notes to know who’s playing.

Still, the book works. Dyer’s prose renders the lives of these figures so lifelike and interesting that the music seems to flow effortlessly from the lifeworlds he conjures up. Here is Dyer’s account of what it felt like to listen to Thelonius Monk play the piano:

He played each note as though astonished by the previous one, as though every touch of his fingers on the keyboard was correcting an error and this touch in turn became an error to be corrected and so the tune never quite ended up the way it was meant to. Sometimes the song seemed to have turned inside out or to have been constructed entirely from mistakes. His hands were like two racquetball players trying to wrong-foot each other; he was always wrong-fingering himself. But a logic was operating, a logic unique to Monk: if you always played the least expected note a form would emerge, a negative imprint of what was initially anticipated. You always felt that at the heart of the tune was a beautiful melody that had come out back to front, the wrong way around. Listening to him was like watching someone fidget, you felt uncomfortable until you started doing it too. (40)

Can you imagine a lovelier description of Monk’s melodicism, of what it feels like to listen to him improvising by himself? If you’ve ever spent time listening to the solo recordings, you’ll recognize what Dyer’s describing immediately. It’s not for nothing that Keith Jarrett says that But Beautiful is the best book on jazz ever.

Passages like this are rare, though. What Dyer spends most of his time doing is accumulating sketches of the artists as ordinary people. What did they look like, and what must it have been like to be around them, to be them? The typical procedure is to draw a portrait of the artist as a grown man, typically a broken one, and then find in the life some buried link to the art. Sometimes a chapter will begin by positing a break between the person and the art (addiction, paralysis, madness) and then works backwards from the bombed-out remains to the art that once was. What is left, the book wants to ask, if you distill the art and remove it from the person who gave their lives to it? By the end of the book, the characters end up looking a lot like the worn-out instruments they’ve been forced to give up: tattered, bruised and banged up, not longer shiny, sleek, seductive.

Dyer draws on a wide body of research, interviews, and archival materials to do this. A lot of his material is made up, as he readily admits in the preface. Is the book fiction, then? Yes, but also, not quite. Historical fiction? Technically, yes, but the disjointed form makes it feel less like a cohesive novel and more like an impressionistic collage. From chapter to chapter, Dyer’s impulse is always the same. Find some way to sync the shape of a person or personality to the shape the art took. The “logic” of Monk’s was always just the logic of Monk the man. “[Monk] made no concessions in his music,” Dyer writes, “[he] just waited for the world to understand what he was doing, and It was the same with his speech [...] He just waited for people to learn to decipher his modulated grunts and whines.”

Life always leads back to the music, no matter how far away you get from the stage. The invitation is to see the life as a kind of coda or commentary on the music itself, as if the music were could be explicated best by getting to know the person who made it. There’s nothing really wrong with this kind of invitation, but how far does it actually take you in understanding the music? Quite a lot of bad music journalism and criticism operates off of the same impulse. It’s motivated by a kind of dollar-store psychology, an insistence on some necessary, intrinsic link between a type of person, sometimes called “a genius,” and the quality of the art. The problem is that great art frequently has absolutely nothing to do with what a person is or was like.

But Beautiful tries to avoid this trap by insisting on the importance of individuality to the genre’s understanding of itself. In an afterword, Dyer explains that the point of jazz music, indeed, the goal of becoming a jazz musician, is a mastery of form that spills over into a unique, authoritative personal style. Think Coltrane’s sheets of sound or Davis’s Harmon-mute. It doesn’t start that way, of course. Jazz begins with shameless imitation. You learn the compositions, then how to improvise in someone else’s style, and then and only then do you develop your own. It’s a sign of individual freedom and facility, of having mastered the language, that you have your own recognizable signature within the musical tradition.

Part of what Dyer is trying to do is rescue the reputation of jazz from Adorno’s famously austere rejection of it and, indeed, of all black popular music. “Jazz and pogroms go together,” Adorno once wrote in an essay published in 1936, waving away the whole genre as kitsch in blackface. At the level of form, Adorno claimed that no matter the improvisatory dash the jazz artist performed, his or her musical freedom was always reeled in, totalitarian style, by the swing of the rhythm section. Freedom, for jazz musicians and for black folks, was a cruel joke. Dyer tries to counter this by insisting that rhythm actually enables the music to become a kind of living, embodied critique of itself, always tugging and toying at the possibilities in the notes that came just before. That’s what jazz is, relentless self-critique; it is also what it means.“From time to time in his solos a saxophonist may quote from other musicians, but every time he picks up his horn he cannot avoid commenting, automatically and implicitly, even if only through his own inadequacy, on the tradition that has laid this music at his feet” (185). At its worst, the critique verges on self-satire. At its best, it pushes the form into new musical terrain. Somewhere in the middle lies the vast majority of jazz compositions, melodies, formulas, each one a former innovation-turned-standard. The modernism of jazz, he implies, may be more thoroughgoing than Schoenberg’s or Stravinsky’s.

There’s something to Dyer’s argument. Ornette Coleman, one of the most important jazz artists of the twentieth century, once said that “the best statements Negroes have made, of what their soul is, have been on tenor saxophone.” A kind of historical or technological correlative comes into play at the moment of jazz’s ascendancy in popular culture. In the same way that the invention of the violin coincides with the emergence of philosophical subjectivity in the seventeenth century, so the rediscovery of the saxophone’s hybridity coincides with the rise of freedom movements and the Civil Rights Era. It looks like a brass instrument but its mechanism makes it a woodwind. It is an instrument, Adorno thought, that “mutilates” gender difference in its being and in its sound. It sounds like the cry of the slave or the sharecropper, male or female or both. For this reason it was particularly suited to the lamentations of the oppressed. Through the saxophone, “jazz becomes a medium representative not only of a people but, implicitly, of a century,” Dyer writes, “a medium that expresses not simply the condition of the black American but a condition of history” (194).

Dyer is way too polite. Adorno couldn’t be more wrong about jazz if he tried. The thing that I’m not sure about is what Dyer’s rescue-efforts leads him to say about the ensemble in the development and articulation of the individual. It’s plain that Dyer sees jazz as a metaphor for individual freedom, for the striving of the individual with and against the collective, each member constantly seeking to outdo the other. I can certainly think of some jazz records that sound like this, but does it really make sense to think of the genre itself in terms of freedom negatively construed—freedom from something, or the absence of constraint? Part of the problem I’m trying to articulate has to do with the form of the book itself: seven jazz artists, all more or less operating independently of each other, none, so far as I am aware, ever having shared the stage with one another. A book might work this way, but the music doesn’t.

Take for example Dyer’s chapter on Mingus. Repeatedly in this chapter of the book, Dyer connects Mingus’s combustible personality to the howls and yelps and screams in his music:

He bullied his way into making himself heard on every instrument. Miles and Coltrane sought musicians whose sound would complement their own: Mingus sought musicians who offered a version of himself on different instruments. Always dissatisfied with his drummers, he had just given his percussionist a public keelhauling when he met a kid of twenty named Dannie Richmond, who had been playing drums for only a year. Mingus force-taught him to play exactly as he wanted, molding him in his image.

--Don’t play that fancy shit, this is my solo, man.

Dannie stayed with him for twenty years, finding his musical identity only by subsuming it to Mingus’. The fatter Mingus got, the thinner Dannie became--as if even his metabolism adjusted itself in equilibrium with Mingus’.

--Playing with him, there were times when you were terrified, then there were other times when you blew with more exhilaration than you ever felt with anyone else, feeling less like a band than a charging herd as Mingus’ shouts of abuse turned into hollers of encouragement:

--Talk about it, talk about it, talk about it. His voice cracking like a whip over the backs of horses:

Yah, yah, yah.

When the music reached a pitch of intensity, achieved a level of pressure even higher than that inside him, a momentum so urgent that nothing could get in its way and everyone looked like they were hanging on for grim death--that was when he hollered and whooped above the music, urging it on so that he could feel the calm of the hurricane’s eye, yelling and howling like Frankenstein ecstatic and aghast at the monster he has unleashed, delighted by the thought that it is all but beyond his control. Mingus happy--nothing could beat the thrill, the rush of that. At full tilt the band felt like sprinting cheetahs, cheetahs chased by an elephant that always looked as though it might trample them underfoot.

“Music was just part of the ever-expanding project of being Mingus,” Dyer concludes. Perhaps that’s true of specific recordings. Is there anyone else in the world who would have, let alone could have, made Cumbia and Jazz Fusion? And in Dyer’s defense, there are plenty of interviews with fellow musicians who paint him as a kind of tyrant of the stage. He was kicked out of Ellington’s band for chasing a trombonist off stage with a fire-axe. But when I listen to a performance of a piece like Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting from the 1960 Antibes Jazz Festival, with Booker Ervin on tenor sax and Eric Dolphy on alto, I feel compelled to say that something very different is happening than the musical elaboration of a unique personality. The recording is something else entirely: one giant, collective, improvisatory yawp released in the atmosphere. The whole thing sounds like a communal prayer in 6/4 time--not a prayer in the confessional, like Coltrane’s Love Supreme, but the prayer of a whole congregation, a whole people, their voices raised in unison but also, through the unity they achieve, enabling the individual to cry out:

In a typical reminiscence, [Mingus] tied “Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting” “to a form of music I heard as a kid. My mother used to go to church on Wednesday night. There was always clapping of hands and shouting. Methodist or Holiness Church. Holiness was a little louder in order to stir up the spirits. the dead spirits. People went into trances. Women shouted and rolled on the floor.” (Freedom Is, Freedom Ain’t, 165).

The sum of Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting is greater than its parts, even greater than Dolphy’s ululating solo that begins around the five minute mark. It has to be heard to be believed. The whole time, Mingus’s bass playing is in the background, carving out a subterranean, ogre-like pulse behind the horn section. He never solos. The only time you hear the bass by itself is when it performs a little invocation, a call to worship, at the very beginning.

In his book on jazz and the civil rights movement, Scott Saul points out that black activists and musicians of the 50’s and 60’s were equivocal about the concept of negative freedom enshrined in documents like the Bill of Rights. Freedom from was different from freedom to, the freedom to become and to belong. In musical terms, negative freedom, to be totally free of anyone else’s playing, to play whatever you felt like, made little sense to jazz musicians. “The dynamism of hard bop depended on the tension and interplay between the members of the group,” Saul writes. “When once musician ‘infringed’ on the rhythm or harmonic space of another musician, it was usefully re-conceived as a provocation, a license for bold counter-response.” Even a free-jazz impresario like Coleman insisted that the work of his ensemble was “at all times a group effort” (15-6, 10). Across his writings, Martin Luther King, Jr. derided the so-called “freedom of the will” or the freedom of choice, as if such a thing could be isolated from the whole person and the community that made them and to which they belong. The freedom to self-determine only made sense if you had something to become, a people to belong to, a people to become.

***

I have been thinking about the tension between these different kinds of freedom this week as I reflect on the news out of the Supreme Court, the decision that was handed down on the case called Louisiana vs. Callais. And I have tried to lean in and listen more closely to the jazz of the civil rights era, hard bop, to the delicate interplay of collective freedom and personal freedoms that make the music possible.

As countless outlets have reported, the Court’s conservative majority ruled that Louisiana’s two black districts constituted an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. The centerpiece of the Voting Rights Act, Section 2, the part that makes it illegal for states to provide minorities with less opportunity than the majority in the election of representatives, has been rendered null and void. Louisiana’s legislature, majority conservative, now has the legal freedom to carve up its electoral maps in whatever way it sees fit, regardless of demographic make-up. The population of Louisiana is a third black. All of its districts will now be majority-white. Literally days later, the Tennessee legislature capitalized on the ruling and dismantled the state’s lone black district.

Other states, the southern states, will follow this barbaric tide. My home state, Mississippi, will do everything it can to follow the course of white power. For now, it seems, North Carolina is stuck with the maps it has until 2030.

Listening to this extraordinary music I am reminded of several things at once: the inherent shittiness of so much of white America, past, present, and future, the atavism and the revanchism swirling on the surface like a slick of oil. The grift and the corruption and the political despair that go all the way down. Suddenly, no one seems to know how to live well anymore, no one knows what good work or good land is and how to protect and preserve it--with our hands, not anyone else’s. No one seems to know what hope is, what joy might look like. There are few left among us can recognize beauty, it seems. Above all, no one knows how to belong. Meanwhile, I wonder, how is this the country that my children will inherit?

In 2013, the journalist George Packer claimed that America was living through what he called the great “unwinding”: a long, slow unravelling of local sociality and communal solidarity that began in the late 70’s. How did the unwinding happen? The war against unions, the war against local business, the war against public education; deregulation, globalization, and the legislative removal of guardrails around campaign finance; the subprime mortgage crisis; our politics of money. What has taken the place of community? Organized capital.

How far will the unwinding go? Who knows. Here’s what I do know: grab your people, love them, do not let them go.

Postscript: someone on Youtube has uploaded a live video recording of the same performance of Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting that I linked above. The audio isn’t as good, and there are some interesting cinematographic choices, but it’s still worth watching to see the band play together.

Cheers, Brian!

Jack

Last week a farmer called and asked if I had any cotton trash. I told him he had the wrong number. Despite being from Mississippi, I’ve never grown cotton in my life. No one near me grows cotton either. The soil and the weather aren’t right. You have to travel at least fifty miles east, well below the fall line, to find the first cotton field. The man was old, well over ninety. Of course he knew what I know. He’d gotten me mixed up with someone else. He asked me who I was, and when I finished telling him, I asked him why he wanted cotton trash. He said that he has run out of feed for his cows. He used up all his hay, his neighbors are hoarding what’s left, and no rain means no forage in the field.

Cotton trash is a farmer’s term of art. When the big, white, fluffy bolls get tossed inside the hopper of a gin, it descends to a series of interlocking ribs and saws that move back and forth across the fibers, stretching and pulling them inward. The slick, oily cottonseed is too big to pass through, so it usually drop onto a conveyor belt, which shuttles them outside to a pile somewhere. The cottonseeds are then trucked to plant and pressed, like olives or soybeans, into cottonseed oil. Cotton trash is what’s left of the seed once the oils are pressed out. I don’t know anything about its nutritional profile--I’ve never had to use it--but I associate the stuff with hard times. When you need to find cotton trash, you know you’re hard up.

A few days ago I witnessed a silly social media fight between journalists and economists. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has caused the prices of fuel and fertilizer to hit the stratosphere. Since February, the prices for urea and anhydrous ammonia, two key ingredients for nitrogen fertilizer, have ballooned 40 per cent. How will these prices affect American farmers, they asked. Some insisted that, if the spike has any effect, it will be delayed until next year, at which point the USDA and Congress will have figured out how to deal the fallout. Most farmers are in the habit of securing their own fertilizer, seed, and equipment ahead of time, typically after harvest season, when they are most likely to have the cash to do it. It helps them lock in rates ahead of planting season. The practice is called pre-booking, another term of art, and it is in ordinary circumstances what commodity growers do.

A survey the Farm Bureau released last week paints a very different picture. 70 per cent of the nearly six-thousand respondents say they cannot afford the fertilizer they need to buy to plant this spring, as in right now. In the Southeast, only 19 per cent of farmers said they had fertilizer pre-booked. In the Midwest, the number sits at 67 per cent. The figures for farmers out west and in the northeast sit at around 30 per cent.

What do commodity growers do when they don’t have the fertilizer they need? They don’t plant. But what do they do when the price spike happens in the middle of the driest three-month stretch in the contiguous States since 1895? I’m not sure. The ones who didn’t pre-book might feel relief for a moment. Fertilizer costs are typically associated with 33 to 45 per cent of the cost of raising wheat and corn. Equipment and seed also cost money, but it is a significant investment. Farmers who didn’t prebook didn’t buy anything, so now they don’t have to find a way to get their money back. But no fertilizer and no rain means they have to find a different source of income this year. It’s a tight spot. Many will give up: they will declare bankruptcy or sell their farms. I am worried about what it will mean for the remaining mid-sized farms owned by black farmers. They are in a particularly vulnerable position.

2.

Last Wednesday I attended a summit on impact investing and regenerative agriculture. During the closing remarks, one of the conveners got up and gave an impassioned speech about the state of agriculture in the US. We are living through the worst crisis in farming since the 1980’s, he said. It’s not hard to see why. For decades commodity crop prices have declined and the cost of inputs keeps going up. As of 2022, the average age of the American farmer was 58.1 years. According to the American Farmland Trust, one third of all privately-owned farmland in the US will change hands in the next twenty years. Given the acuity of the situation right now--war, drought, price spikes--it’s not unreasonable to think that the number is accelerating. In 2025, farm foreclosures increased by nearly 50 per cent. Whatever the figures for 2026 will be, you can bet they will be higher.

Last week, the USDA announced a $300-million-dollar deal with Palantir Technologies, the intelligence and defense company. Ostensibly the deal is to consolidate the woefully disparate and confusing services that the USDA (US Department of Agriculture, FSA (Farm Service Agency), and the NRCS (Natural Resources and Conservation Services) offers to US farmers. But the circumstances of the deal are concerning. Formally, the contract is a part of the “National Farm Security Action Plan,” the new farm bill, one major goal of which is to end the purchase of American farmland by foreign entities. Setting limits on foreign ownership of American farmland is all well and good. Saudi control of farm leases in Arizona has decimated the agriculture and ecology of that state’s most water-hungry regions. The problem with the Farm Security Action Plan is that it explicitly rebrands agriculture and the USDA as entities that belong to the bailiwick of national security, and therefore subject to direct federal and perhaps military intervention.

Farmers have a long history of being bailed out by direct aid. Maybe it’s nothing new. But there’s something deeply unsettling about the involvement of Palantir, an intelligence and defense company, in the affairs of farmers. This is the same company that actively facilitated war crimes in Gaza and continues to lend its unwavering support, both moral and technical, to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. Its CEO, Alex Karp, happens to be a techno-fascist maniac. (If you haven’t done so already, have a peek at the manifesto the company released a few days ago). Vice-President Vance has deep and abiding ties to Karp, to Palantir and to Palantir’s founder, Peter Thiel. It’s worth saying again that Vance initially funded AcreTrader, a venture capital fund that makes it easier for investors to add ownership of US land to their portfolios. The company purchases “shares” of cropland from farmers who are experiencing crippling levels of debt and in return gives them cash. It’s unknown what his ties to the company still are.

3.

A headline hit my email inbox this morning. Since the war with Iran, US financial markets have outperformed the markets of every other nation on the earth. Lower and middle class people are feeling the pinch of rising food, housing, and energy costs, drought is wreaking havoc across the continental US, industrial agricultural systems are stumbling, and the portfolia of the rich swell with dividends. I suppose it is one measure of the complexity of contemporary economy, a measure of how different things are now than they were a hundred years ago, that the bruised and tattered state of agriculture has no direct impact on the broader economic condition of the country. It’s more diffuse now, or perhaps is felt in different or delayed ways. We’re less afraid of direct monetary bail-outs. Or maybe it’s that war is just that good for business.

“The land, like our skin, is bound to conserve the traces of past wounds,” wrote Fernand Braudel, the great historian of the Mediterranean. What will be the scars of this year’s wounds? Where on the land will we see them? In the after-affects of drought, in failing or the non-existent crops, in the data centers. In the consolidation of farmland into the hands of the rich and powerful. In the uncannily fierce and sudden storms. In the overwhelmingly harmful environmental cost of wars, plural, which the whole planet will feel, if in the typically disproportionate and unjust patterns.

4.

It looks like the new farm bill, the National Farm Security Action Plan, will hit the floor of the US House this week or possibly next. A friend of mine at the Rural Advancement Fund (RAFI), Rachel, has written an excellent summary about why your representative should vote “no” to the bill. To read it, I think you have to subscribe to RAFI. If you can’t or haven’t done that right now, then have a look at this post from the Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, which talks about what’s in the bill. Read it, if you like, and if you feel compelled, call your rep and tell them why the bill’s bad and how it could be better.

There are worse things in life than not having the right life experience to interpret a line of poetry. Here’s something worse: never having the experience of seeing grass be what it is. It’s as kind of spiritual deprivation, being surrounded by grasses and weeds in one’s life and never knowing what sort of being they express or want to express, all because of the totalitarian uniformity of the suburban lawncare regime.

I was reminded of the habituality of these classroom exchanges last week when I had my daughter memorize “Spring” for her school work. I was surprised that she, too, puzzled over this line. Weeds don’t look like wheels, she insisted. After I explained what Hopkins meant, I pointed out that this time of year, the orchardgrass gets so tall that it touches my forehead when I walk through it. It very well swallows her up when she tries. Well, our farm doesn’t look like that right now, she said with truculence now typical. And I realized that she was right: the grass in our fields doesn’t look like that right now, and perhaps won’t for the rest of the year. We’ve missed our window for the “wheels” of weeds phenomenon. We happen to be in the middle of the worst drought in several decades

.

Grass as tall as the author, who does not consider himself short. Photo from 2025 by author.

I’ve been trying to keep it out of my mind for the last few weeks, what drought means, what might happen if it continues much longer. I’ve got hay stores through May, and there’s enough forage on the ground that the cows will be fine until the end of June, at least. But what happens after that? I’d rather not say at this point. My neighbor told me the last time it got this bad, well over twenty years ago, people were selling animals or else shooting them in the field if they couldn’t be sold. All the grass died; soil turned to dust.

Just how bad is it? Looking around at the foliage, perhaps even at your lawns, and you might not realize it. I was talking to two friends who moved here from Texas a year ago, and they said: sure doesn’t look like a drought to Texans. Drive across Falls Lake, though, the source of Durham’s drinking water, and you’ll get some idea of how bad it is. I have to say that part of me doesn’t really want to know how bad it is. When I last looked a month ago, the NOAA said we needed eighteen continuous inches of rain to bring us back up to average annual rainfall for the last six months. Average annual rainfall for our region is 39 inches, give our take. That’s a lot of missing rain, and we haven’t had a drop since I last looked. March and April are typically our wettest months. It’s not uncommon for May and June to be the dry ones.

Hopefully, by the time I write my next post, drought will have been a bad dream.

The photographs and captions Lange produced for the FSA offer a fascinating glimpse inside the sociology of the Jim-Crow South. According to the historian Linda Gordon, the FSA’s photography program was the leading “left edge” of the New-Deal-era Department of Agriculture. Alongside the work of her FSA peers, Lange’s photographs appear unsentimental and candid; modernist in sensibility and scale. In ways both subtle and strange, they raise questions about agricultural economy and race relations in the South--but also, intriguingly, the ways that the country and the city implicate each other in the places people call home.

Lange is much better known for her photographs of the Japanese interment camps and documentation of Dust-Bowl poverty, including the one that circulates under the unfortunate (and unauthorized) title of Migrant Mother. But the photos she took all over the Southeast are no less interesting. I’m thinking about writing a longer essay about them, but for now, enjoy a few shots of hers from the visit to Shoofly. I’ve included the captions Lange included for each image, including her long, patient description of the process. An outsider, Lange reproduces a level of detail that is remarkable.

Source: Library of Congress

Finally, here are Lange’s words about what she observed:

Subject: Putting in Tobacco:

This process is also known as ‘saving’ tobacco; the word ‘priming’ is also sometimes applied to the entire process, although strictly this term describes the actual removal of the leaves from the plant. The process is also known as ‘curing tobacco,’ although here again this term applies strictly only to one particular part of the process.

1. “PRIMING.” Beginning at the bottom of the plant, the leaves are stripped; usually two or three bottom leaves are removed at one priming. Only the ripe leaves are primed, and ripeness is determined by the color of the leaf. When ripe, the leaves are pale yellow in color, although they are often difficult to distinguish from the green leaves. Hence the job of priming is something of an art, which is left to the men of the family or to those ‘women folks’ who are skilled at it. In the field picture, the men are priming for the second time, the ‘first primings,’ or sand leaves, having been removed. Noe the method of removing the leaves, the manner which they are held, and the care which is exercised to prevent bruising or breaking. [a list of 11 negatives follows]

2. “SLIDING TOBACCO TO THE BARN.” The primings are transported to the barns, here they will be tied or strung, in the ‘slide’ (also called sled). Note construction of the slide-frame of wooden strips, on a pair of wooden runners. The body of the slide is made of Guano sacks, and the entire structure is narrow enough to run between the rows of tobacco without breaking the leaves. In this instance to slides are in use; while one load of tobacco is being strung, the other slide is sent to the field for another load. [5 negatives]

3. “STRINGING THE TOBACCO.” At the barn, the tobacco is strung on sticks by the women and children, and those men who are not required i the field. The sticks are of pine, four feet long. The string is fastened at one end, and the leaves of tobacco in bunches of three or four, are strung on the stick alternately on each side. Note the notched ‘horses’ for holding the sticks while stringing. When a stick is filled with tobacco, it is removed from the horse and piled in front of the barn, where it remains until put up in the barn. Sometimes shelters are provided to keep the sun from the tobacco, after it is strung, since very hot sun will burn the tobacco. In this case two people are stringing, one of them an expert negro boy, and two or three people are ‘handing the primings’ to the stringer. [12 negatives]

4. “PUTTING IN THE TOBACCO.” At noon, after the last slide of the morning has come from the field, the tobacco which has been strung is hung from the barn. The barns are of four or five “rooms” (a room is the space between the tier poles; the barn in the picture is a four room barn, and will hold about 600 sticks of tobacco). Two men go up on the tier poles, and the tobacco is handed up to them. One room is filled at a time. In the barn picture, several people’s tobacco is being put in together; there are, in addition to the second primings mentioned, some first primings from another field. These are much inferior in quality of the second primings., and are covered with sand--hence the term ‘sand leaves.’ [7 negatives.]

5. “FIRING THE BARNS.” When the barn is filled, the tobacco is allowed to hang for several hours, sometimes over night, until the leaves are thoroughly wilted. Fires are then built in the furnaces, and the process of curing begins. The heat is kept at ninety degrees until the tobacco is ‘yellowed’ then is gradually raised until all of the leaf except the stem is cured, when the final stage, ‘killing out,’ is reached. The heat is usually raised rapidly until it reaches 190 or 200 degrees. Curing takes about three days and three nights. although under certain circumstances it may take longer. After the tobacco is cured, it is allowed to hang in the curing barn until it ‘comes in order’--absorbed enough moisture so that it can be handled without breaking--when it is taken down and packed in the pack house. Here it remains until it is stripped out. It is usually taken up and repacked once, so that it will not become excessively moist and mould. [5 negatives]

In the novel, Cusk calls the spy “G,” but it doesn’t take much sleuthing to realize that Cusk is describing the life and art of the French filmmaker Eric Rohmer. “Eric Rohmer” was the pseudonym of a filmmaker who worked with such obsessive secrecy that not even his parents or sibling, when they died, knew that he ever made films. (About ten years ago, Rohmer’s Six contes moraux received the Criterion treatment. He’s a wonderful filmmaker; I recommend starting with Ma nuit chez Maud [1969].) “Invisibility was his conduit to self-expression,” Cusk writes of G/Rohmer. In G’s films, in Rohmer’s films, the camera doesn’t penetrate the social or physical space of the people it records, and it rarely scans them for visual pleasure. Most of the time, it is content to sit and watch and record characters played by actors who were not glamorous movie stars. In many cases, the actors were people that G/Rohmer hired off of the street. The camera watches, and it waits--for what? “he watched them lovingly, for the good and the bad in them. He brought them no drama. He forced nothing on them, extended as they were by the task of living” (168). “His style, so uninterfering,” the narrator continues,

drew attention to itself without meaning to. He rarely, for instance, showed his characters in close-up, believing that this was not how human beings saw one another. His films had no particular aesthetic. They often took place in public spaces, and his characters seemed barely to notice that they were being watched. They wore ordinary clothes and rarely looked at the camera. They were absorbed in their own lives. 156

A different auteur might reach out with a camera and try to re-make the world in his or her own image. Here is an aesthetics of conquest and domination: the camera acts as an vehicle for the imposition of a personal vision of the world or how it should be, marrying this vision “with extraordinary public impact and power.” Not so with the spy, and not so with G/Rohmer. “[G] wasn’t interested in change. He was interested in the fragments that change leaves behind behind in its storming passage towards the future” (174).

Cusk divides Parade into four sections, and each section includes a meditation on a different artist. The artists are based on real people, but in each story Cusk refers to them rather cryptically by the initial G. However, by the time she comes around to discussing the last of the four G.’s, the one based on Rohmer, the tone shifts. The fourth G. stands out as an icon or an ideal. G. intuits that the connection between art and the self is a problem in need of demolition. As Cusk or whoever the narrator is puts the matter, it is only by severing the bond between art and the public identity of the artist that G. is able to see anything true or real in the world. If one’s work is successful, then the work will inevitably be connected to the performance of a particular kind of personality or “vision.” But it is precisely this form of relation that G. finds incompatible with his understanding of reality. G is drawn to film in particular because “its unbodied mode of perception--even if it was to some extent an illusion--furnished him with a hiding place. When he was behind the camera, he believed he could not be seen” (173-4).

***

One of the dogmas of modernity is that the making of art is fundamentally disconnected from morality. Art may reveal truths about the human condition. It may show us authentic ways of living that we were previously blind to or were otherwise inaccessible to us. But the making of the art often has little to do with the character of the artist. There are lots of ways this idea gets expressed. Most often, I hear people repeat something along the lines of the following: the truly great artists all had troubled lives. It is as if their being difficult to live with were a sign of a special calling. Perhaps this has more to do with the cult of genius in our country, but I’d be surprised if it were a peculiarly American phenomenon. Of course, the same idea can be expressed from a internal perspective, too (that is, not pseudo-sociologically). The idea goes like this: the daimon of an artist requires them to hold connections to other humans more loosely than other people are required to. You never know how far your art may ask you to go, or what it may require you to do to others (abandonment, betrayal, etc.). To think otherwise is to place artificial constraints on an autonomous practice or a discipline that, in principle, should have no other rules than the ones it chooses to accept for itself.

There is a genealogy to these patterns of thinking that is much more complicated than I have space to discuss here. It involves the attempt to replace religion with art at the dawn of the twentieth century; with art and artistic practice becoming a religion unto themselves, complete with their own idiosyncratic rituals and rules and attendant pietisms and forms of devotion. Under such a regime, it is often the personal idiosyncrasy, a process, or “style” that is taken for the unique contribution of the artist, as if a particular vision or essence of self could be encoded and reproduced through the unique combination of signifiers, whether they be literary, painterly, cinematic, and so on.

I see Parade and Cusk’s earlier work in the Outline trilogy as an attempt to unsettle this dogma, and to do so from within what has to be the most self-obsessed aesthetic form in human history, the modern novel. It’s an odd selection for anyone setting about sifting through the ethics of literary authorship. It’s an especially awkward task for Cusk, the famous novelist and memoirist, who has made a small fortune and a large reputation by writing so publicly about her own life. In 2001, Faber published Cusk’s very famous memoir about becoming a mother. Nine years later, she wrote another one about marriage and divorce. Her fiction, too, is larded with autobiographical detail. The narrator of the Outline trilogy, Faye, is a writer who travels across Europe speaking at book festivals and fiction workshops. Critics often point to her novels and short stories of the last decade and a half when discussing the turn to “autofiction,” a portmanteau that designates the current taste for blending first-personal fact and fiction in novels and short stories.

One of Parade’s unnamed narrators seems to acknowledge the awkwardness as they discuss G.’s decision to leave behind fiction writing and take up film. The novel, Cusk writes, “of all the arts[,] was the most resistant to dissociation from the self. A novel was a voice, and a voice had to belong to someone. In the shared economy of language, everything had to be explained; every statement, even the most simple, was a function of personality” (167). For G./Rohmer, though, it is precisely the connection between language and voice that stands in the way of bearing witness to reality. Film, he concludes, is the natural medium for severing this connection. As a form, it is made possible by a team of actors pretending like there isn’t a camera recording them, while all the time the camera captures every ripple of emotion that passes across their faces. The camera’s invisibility is an illusion, an artifice; it’s there, it’s just that the art of film makes it such that the actors have to pretend that it’s not. What makes G.’s art unique is the decision to continue the severing of language and voice through to life itself. No one knows the true identity of G., and it is the key to the power of his art. “He has no doubt that his anonymity is what allows him to see what he sees. Because of it he has no investment in the game of life. He is a spy; his ego, is exiled, at bay. Like the spy, the difficulty is that he can’t make things happen--he just has to be sure he’s there when they do” (188).

***

Are there certain modes of seeing that require the abandonment of the self of the seeing agent? In the Sovereignty of Good, the philosopher (and novelist) Iris Murdoch argued that there are. For Murdoch, the act of attention to something outside of yourself (a soaring hawk and an annoying daughter-in-law were two famous examples) requires a discipline of “unselfing,” of willfully forgetting the subject who sees but who may otherwise desire, fear, crave, resent or regard with indifference who (or what) they happen to be looking at. Drawing on the work of Simone Weil, Murdoch argues that attention is the fundamental condition of being a moral agent. To act virtuously requires us to see the world and our place in it clearly, unselfishly. Often, the just and right act, when it proceeds from a mode of pure seeing, arrives without any kind of private discourse or interior reflection on the part of the agent. The action itself speaks.

More recently than Murdoch, the philosopher Jonardon Ganeri has drawn on the “unselfing” of attention to explain our situatedness in the world as agents. “Attention precedes self in the explanation of what it is to be human,” Ganeri writes, and it is doubtful (he argues) whether there is anything defensible in the concept of the self at all. He is working within the tradition of Indian philosophy to mount a critique of post-Enlightenment ethics. In particular, he has in mind the idea of the self as “the concept of a detached author, the simple origin of willed directives, a concept that forces us to understand the mind in terms of a dichotomy between free voluntary actions and purely passive happenings.”

I’m not aware of Cusk ever explicitly alluding to Murdoch, much less Ganeri, but the concept of the self as a detached author is one that Cusk seems especially keen to demolish in her fiction. She does so through a motif that pops up throughout Parade and her other experimental novels. The motif is of a person standing outside a house or an apartment and looking in through the window and watching people who do not know they they are being watched. It’s a creepy idea, but Cusk returns to it again and again in Parade and in other works. Curiously, in Parade, it is a habit or an act that is never explicitly associated with G., but it seems to mimic the kind of looking he achieves in his films. In the fourth section of Parade, another unnamed narrator, speaking inexplicably in the first person plural, describes looking out from their apartment and watching the lives of neighbors unfold around them:

At night, when the lights are on, the scenes playing high up in the windows are framed by the emptiness, like paintings. They are paintings of people in rooms, together or alone, seen through windows or across spaces by an eye that seems larger and more omniscient than a human eye. It could be the eye of a god, or equally that of an animal or a child. The human figures have a theatrical quality: in the recurrence of their own lives they seem to exist outside time. That quality in the view from our window arises not because the people are consciously enacting themselves, but because perception itself--the pure perception that involves no interaction, no subjectivity--reveals the pathos of identity. (160)

The windows of a building are like paintings which frame the occupants in a stylized tableau of domestic routine. When the windows light up, we are able to see people absorbed in their lives, unaware of being watched. The eye who sees them is like the eye of a god or an animal, an eye who sees everything and nothing. Crucially, for Cusk, this sort of vision doesn’t come automatically from a person passing by. You don’t get “pure perception” by peering in voyeuristically, seeing your own assumptions or designs i the faces and actions of others. Nor do you get it when the people realize they are being watched and “consciously enacting themselves.” What matters is “no interaction, no subjectivity.”

In a passage in Outline, the first novel in a trilogy Cusk began in 2014, Cusk explores a similar scene, but here the characters who peer in the window cannot help but see reflected back to them their own wants and fears:

I thought often of a chapter in Wuthering Heights where Heathcliff and Cathy stare from the dark garden through the windows of the Lintons’ drawing room and watch the brightly lit family scene inside. What is fatal in that vision is its subjectivity: looking through the window the two of them see different things, Heathcliff what he fears and hates and Cathy what she desires and feels deprived of. But neither of them can see things as they really are. And likewise I was beginning to see my own fears and desires manifested outside myself, was beginning to see in other people’s lives a commentary on my own. (75)

In the Wuthering Heights passage the narrator is recalling, Young Heathcliff and Cathy Earnshaw spy on their wealthy neighbors, the Linton children, by looking in from the outside, but each sees something different from the other. Heathcliff is repulsed by the sight of rich children fighting over a little dog; Cathy is apparently drawn in by the opulence of the rural gentry. Heathcliff and Cathy begin mocking the children from the outside, and the Linton’s, hearing the noise, let their guard dog loose. The dog latches onto Cathy’s leg, and while the family brings her in to have her leg treated, Heathcliff, the adopted foundling, is refused entry to the house. When Cathy returns, her behavior towards Heathcliff is mannered and distant.

For the narrator of Outline, personal disintegration is figured as an uncanny return of the self in the guise of others. It is the paranoid projection of one’s own disappointments in other people, of seeing other people as an implicit commentary on your own life. Subjectivity, as Cusk puts it in Parade, gets in the way of seeing people in the way that they really are. Contrast this with the “pure perception” of the first passage, where attention doesn’t project uncanny versions of self onto the lives of others, but finds itself absorbed by the theatricality of a performance that is no performance at all. Only by not disclosing your presence, by not engaging, and most of all, by not being seen, does the “pathos of identity” disclose itself.

There are two other window scenes in Parade that I want to discuss briefly. Both come at the very end of the novel, and both are inside paintings that the plural narrator sees on a visit to a museum. The paintings, the narrator says, were once thought to be the product of a very famous painter. Later, it was discovered that they were made by a different painter of the same school, but this time, the painter’s identity was “virtually anonymous.”

In the first painting, there is “a middle-aged woman” in a chair reading a book in a room “full of a bare light.” The windows behind her are dark, but in one of them there is a child’s face looking in at her. The child “wanted something, was waiting out there in the dark for something,” but the woman doesn’t, perhaps can’t, see him. She is too “immersed in being herself, [...] indifferent to how she was seen.” In the second, there is a different woman in the same room, but this time, the woman is leaning towards the dark window and the viewer can’t see her face. On the other side of the window is the face of the same child. “The woman was waving at the child through the glass, her hand and face almost pressed to it, the chair nearly toppling with her enthusiasm” (197).

What are we to make of these two paintings? Maybe Cusk’s descriptions are based on real artworks. Probably not. I’m inclined to think that they’re made up, but I don’t think it really matters. Cusk is giving the reader a diptych of attention: of one person so absorbed in themselves that they are no longer in a position of being able to see the needs of others, and in the other, of being so captivated in the giving and receiving of attention that they do not, that they could never see, that they are being observed. The narrator tells us that the paintings are a parable of “the rarity of love”--of a child’s gaze that is answered in a woman’s reaching out, in touch, if only through a pane of glass. But it also seems to be a parable about the limits of art. The first woman holds a book, and as long she holds it, she’ll never see the child. So it is with the giving and receiving of attention.

The wedding and related festivities took up most of our time in Medellin. Except for early morning walks around the neighborhood of Poblado, where we stayed, I didn’t get to see much of the city. I only saw a tiny, hip fragment of a sprawling metropolis of contradiction. Here’s something I learned: Colombia is the world capital of plastic surgery. Walk around the fancy neighborhoods of Medellin, and it really shows. I can’t recall ever seeing crushing poverty so close and cozy to extreme wealth. The place demanded more time and attention than I could give it.

I hate to say that none of us were particularly crazy about the food, which seemed to be a matrix of potato, corn, and meat in different configurations, then deep fried. By day four, I yearned for a different vegetable.

Here is a photo I took from the rooftop of our hotel. The sprawling comunas, the city’s slums, creep up the sides of mountains and sparkle in the darkness.

Poblado by night. Photo by the author.

Cartagena is a city of similar extremes. But the old fort town, surrounded by towering walls and rusty cannons that protruded out to sea, felt worlds away from Medellin. Plumes of tropical life erupted in every direction; so many accretions of history visible from the street. Also, the city seemed to ooze. About a month before we got there the old town flooded. The waters had subsided weeks before, but whenever we left the hotel, water would pool along the city blocks for miles. It never rained while we were there, so it was unclear where the water was coming from. But it always seems to have a gentle flow to it.

Cartagena is the city where Gabriel Garcia Marquez lived for long periods of his life. (Love in the Time of Cholera takes place in Cartagena; so does Love and Other Demons.) Once, when I poked my head inside a men’s clothing shop, I saw a framed picture of a haberdasher measuring the outstretched arms of a very old Marquez. Marquez looks confused, like he had just woke up to someone poking him in the shoulder. It was really funny, and part of me wishes I had taken a picture, but it felt weird to snap a photo and then duck away.

A quieter street in the Getsemani (Gethsemani) neighboorhood of Cartagena (Carthage). Photo by the author.

While we were in Cartagena, a massive international land reform conference took over the big centennial park in the middle of the city. The organization, La Via Campesina, was the focus of the event. If you don’t know about their work, I’d encourage you to read about them. La Via Campesina is an international peasant movement focused on building food sovereignty through agroecology and solidarity. It is, in my view, one of the most inspiring global movements in existence. The conference didn’t really get going until our last 36 hours—we had to leave before the really interesting programs began—but it was enlivening to be surrounded by people from all over the world who believe very deeply in the political possibilities of agriculture and land reform. I am someone who lives in a wealthy country where the concept of land reform is, quite frankly, dead in the water. I felt more hopeful, if only in a vague, unspecified way, about the state of the world than I have in some time.

The world around us lurches towards spring. I have too many writing projects bubbling on the stove. In two weeks, I’ll be buried in farm work. But I press on. In the next few days, I’ll have an essay posted here about a part of a novel that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately: Parade [2024], by Rachel Cusk. More soon.

I’ll join the Denis Johnson party by posting a link to an essay he wrote for Salon in 1997. It’s a sharp little piece about the decision to home school his two younger children. Johnson lived, let us say, a wild life. The essay comes from the late, domesticated period of his career. I encourage you to read the whole thing, but this is my favorite passage:

What about friends their own age? The kids have to work at their friendships now, using the phone and mail and arranging visits. They don’t see their comrades every day. Some days they don’t like that, most days they don’t seem bothered. But the question of friendships touches on a larger and vaguer question. Just as people used to ask me how much my Great Dane weighed and how much he ate, people invariably ask about home schooling — “How will the kids be socialized?” When in turn I ask what it means to be socialized the answers vary wildly, but everybody seems to agree that there’s no better way to get it done to you than to be tossed into a kind of semi-prison environment with a whole lot of other persons born the same year you were.

I question that now. After three years learning at home, Daniel and Lana seem sociable in a way I wouldn’t have hoped for. They don’t convey the impression I usually get from kids, and must have given to my own elders, that they’re pretending, wishing — as I certainly did — that grown-ups didn’t exist. They live in the same world we, their parents, live in. They look us in the eye. We’re counted among their friends.

When I asked the kids this morning what they like about home schooling, they said “incredible freedom” and “lots of leisure.” Lana mentioned being able to spend time with me and Cindy. What about the drawbacks? — “Can’t see our friends every day.” “People act like we’re odd.” “They make me feel alienated.” “People always say, ‘So! When are you going back to school?’” This last is something I often notice too — the expectation that every experiment must end.

I don’t want it to. It’s changed all of us, and speaking just for myself, I’d be hard put even to find the language to talk across the gap to the person I was before.

Maybe Johnson’s caricature of modern schooling is too harsh. Growing up, school certainly felt like prison to me. Nowadays, when I look sideways at these institutions, I can’t help but think that they begin to resemble the caricature. Set that aside, though. What really speaks to me is the wish for children to have the space and freedom and pleasure to be children. Some of you probably know that I homeschool our four kids. I do this not because we don’t believe in public education (we do) or feel passionately about school choice (we don’t) but because modern educational institutions, public and private, have drifted so very far from a purpose that might take our kids’ flourishing seriously. It’s not the teachers’ fault, for God’s sake, nor does the blame lie with administrators’. It is decades of underfunding coming home to roost; the greed and rapacity and callousness of our government leaders; the spineless fools who run the tech companies.

Of course, not every family can make the choice that we did, and not every school is like this. I know parents and students who desperately need the services they get at school. Many need more than they currently get. Still, there are others, perhaps like me, who feel ill at the thought of sending my kids somewhere they will grow to hate. Maybe, for us, homeschool is the right choice.

We came to the decision to pull our kids out of school slowly, haltingly, wracked by fear and uncertainty at every step. How could we, faulty parents, be enough? Who would their friends be? Johnson says the secret to homeschooling is willing to fail at what the schools have already failed at. (Another secret: church, a built-in community, helps. It is an imperfect, sloppy, often infuriating community, but church is a place like the farm, a place where my kids belong.) Like Johnson, we’re three years in, and I can’t help but conclude that it was the right decision. My kids are our friends because of it, and I’d like to think I’m a better person. Homeschool has forced me to grow in patience and kindness.

Okay, enough on school. One more question: any of my readers seen the Netflix adaptation of Train Dreams yet? Was it good? Let me know in the comments.

Breck had separated himself from the herd and found a quiet corner down by the pond. He wasn’t down on the ground, at least not for abnormally long stretches of time, but he was standing with his legs kicked back in a stilted, “come-at-me” pose. It wasn’t until I got much closer that I saw the problem. If you look at a cow from behind it, the profile should be roughly the same shape as an egg would be if you stood it upright with the tip facing up. If the profile of your cow looks like an apple, then you have a problem. Breck’s entire left side, from the ribcage down, was horribly distended. It looked like he’d swallowed a barrel that got stuck 2/3 of the way down his digestive tract.

A sick cow is not to be trifled with, especially if the illness is bloat. One minute they seem like they might pull through. The next, they’re dead in the field. Cows are fine until they aren’t. I’ve learned the hard way that you have to be extremely aggressive at diagnosing symptoms and acting quickly.

After getting on the phone with a couple of vets and veteran farmers, I decided to give him a round of shots to boost his metabolism. I also gave him a bloat drench, orally, in the field, without a restraining device like a head gate. Maybe it wasn’t the wisest decision, but it was Breck, our beloved bull, probably the most docile animal we’ve ever had on the farm. Also, we don’t have a head gate or a chute to speak of. A good head gate is expensive. A solid head gate with a squeeze chute costs costs at least five or six thousand of dollars, so I have always found ways of making do without them.

This time, though, Breck resisted for a bit, pulling away and drifting from me until, after four or five tries, he walked over to a corner of the field and put his nose right up against the corner post so I couldn’t get around to his mouth. Eventually, I got him to take it by mixing it in a bucket with water and emptying his water trough.

Breck, at three years old, in 2021.

At first, everything worked. Ten hours later, the bloat had subsided and he was eating and drinking again. From behind, he looked like an egg again, not an apple. A day later, he had wandered back to the rest of the herd and was eating and drinking contentedly, behaving as he always does. But then something strange happened. The day after that, the bloat was back, and Breck was basically immobile on the ground. I tried to get him up and on the trailer to take him to the large animal veterinary hospital, but he wouldn’t budge. At this point, after a night on the ground, saddled with bloat, he was too weak to get up. He was down, as they say, and there was nothing I could to about it. The local vet was off for the week, and with the first round of bloat, the state vet wouldn’t come because I didn’t have a safe way to physically restrain him even though we pleaded with them. Though he is as meek as cows come, they wouldn’t risk it. I can’t blame them. By the time he got sick the second time, they had agreed to come out in four days after the Christmas holiday. I knew there was no way he’d last that long. I tried my best to keep him alive, but he didn’t make it. Breck died on December 30th, two days before the New Year. He was one of the greatest animals we’ve ever had on the farm. I will miss him so much.

It’s difficult to explain the loss of an animal like this. For years he was the cornerstone of our farm’s breeding program, our pride and joy, a very-old-line Black Angus Scottish bull that descended from the Wye Plantation at the University of Maryland, which has kept a closed herd of Black Angus cattle that came straight from Scotland back in the 50’s. He was small, stocky, the ideal type of animal for a grass-based cattle farm; none of the large-framed nonsense that has dominated the cattle market for the last fifty years.

There is the financial loss, then, and the loss of future genetics to the farm. But Breck was also a friend. I bought him through sheer dumb luck from a farmer friend who knows a lot more about cattle than I do. He’d had enough of the business and was selling out. I had the good sense to buy the bull he wanted to sell me. From day one, Breck was my lead animal. Anytime I needed to work the cattle or move them to a difficult place, he’d come running for a treat, and the rest would follow. Now that he’s gone, my relationship to the animals around me suddenly feels tenuous.

Normally, when a cow is resting on the ground, it will cock its head up and to the side so that the neck curls away from the ground. Its head is lifted up into the air above the body. When it sleeps, it will often wrap its head around rest it on its flank. Sometimes it will lay its head on the ground, but it will always do it with its neck curled. It does this to cut off the rumen. If a cow’s neck were laid out straight like you do when we sleep, the rumen would overwhelm the esophagus with hot liquid ferment. If a cow stays like this for too long, it won’t get up again. You’ve probably seen cows in the normal pose before without knowing what you were looking at. All cows do it, every single one, when they lay down to take a rest.

A strange thing happens when a cow is dying. It relaxes its neck, lies on one side, and lays its head flat on the ground. The body lies in profile with the earth, as if longing to be absorbed by it. A female cow will sometimes do this when giving birth. It’s a terrible thing to witness. If you live around cows and you see one do it, you know instantly that it is in pain. If it happens and you’re not they’re to catch it, the cow will almost certainly die. But then, if they are doing it, then they are pretty far gone to begin with. I’m told that they can lay like this for days, unwilling or at last unable to get up or lift their heads, until they finally die from drowning or dehydration.

There is nothing quite so devastating as walking out into the field and finding a cow prone like this. In my experience, when you get to this point, there’s not much to be done. Mercifully, it is not a frequent occurrence; twice it has happened to us over the last five years. But whenever it happens, it’s enough to make you want to hang it all and quit. When it’s an animal that I love, some small part of me is sundered and drifts off.

Is it possible to regrow parts of ourselves, like some creatures do? Or does a new chunk break off every time something or someone we love dies? Sometimes I worry that if I wait long enough, there won’t be anything left of my love for this place and the creatures who call it home.

There is an older farmer a few roads down from us that I have gotten to know well. He has helped us a lot over the years. I have tried to help him as best I can, though he doesn’t really need my help. Once, when a beloved calf of ours went lame and couldn’t stand up after days of helping her, he came over and shot it because I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I have seen him weep over the deaths of his own animals, large and small: horses, dogs, cats. When I hear his sobs through the telephone, I sometimes can’t believe that, after a lifetime of being surrounded by farm death, he still mourns.

I woke up early and knocked out the chores in the dark. Now, it’s cold and raining. The kids are at school. A car passes down the road with a sibilant whine, and I hear a whomp in front of the house. I dart out in the pricking rain, socks on my feet, no time for boots. Was it a dog, or a cat? Neither: just a squirrel, its body now a small, crumpled heap of fur and broken bone.

In the days leading up to Breck’s death, I slept terribly. Around 2:30 or 3am, I would wake up with an image of Breck’s body transfigured by pain, and I run to help pick his head up, but I couldn’t do anything. I’d sit on the ground and grimace and stare, then I’d wake up feeling like my heart had been torn out. Two nights ago I dreamt I had to shoot him. His body quivered and strained when I did it, each limb stretching, then slowly relaxed as blood and then shit welled around his backside. Earlier that day I had been out to see him and he had been nearly motionless this time--a little labored breathing, a quiver of foreleg. His mouth frothed slightly. I knew he would die soon. In another dream, I am walking back to the house and I pass through the gate to get home, and I realize I am surrounded by the corpses of my cattle herd.

After the day he died, I slept better than I had for weeks. Eleven uninterrupted hours. Does grief always work like this? A welling of pain that grows tumescent, then a long, slow release.

My son John this morning, before he left for school, gazed over at the old garden and said he saw a hawk “swimming” in the wind. He is nine now, and he is constantly searching for the edges of words, trying to figure out how they fit together. I came over and the two of us watched the hawk level over a wave of wind. We see an army of dead leaves come tumbling head over heels, as if in pursuit of us, and the same gust bursts across our faces. The leaves pass all around us and rush beyond, then settle back to the ground again.

We named Breck after Alan Stewart Breck, the hero of Kidnapped, the 1886 novel by Robert Louis Stevenson. It’s not my kids’ favorite Stephenson book, but Breck is our favorite Stephenson character, who is followed closely by Ol’ Barbecue himself, Long John Silver, of Treasure Island. Kidnapped, which is set in Scotland during the Highland Clearances, tells the story of a foundling boy named David Balfour, who after seeking refuge from a rich, crusty uncle is betrayed and sold into indentured servitude. David is bound and shuffled aboard a boat bound for “old Caroliny,” but before the ship manage to pull away from the Isles it strikes a small vessel in the fog, killing all but one of the people on board. It turns out that the man that didn’t die is a political fugitive: Alan Breck, a Jacobite assassin and sworn enemy of the British crown. Alan and David form a team; in no time, they overtake the boat through Breck’s swashbuckling prowess. Soon they are being pursued throughout Scottish Highlands, evading redcoats and assassinating officials of the Empire along the way.

An illustration from the 1906 edition of Kidnapped, which our family uses.

The book ends with David recovering his stolen fortune from his uncle in Edinburgh, and Alan, through the solicitation of a spy, hears that he may find refuge in France. I’ll end this post by quoting the end of Kidnapped, when the two unlikely friends say goodbye to each other, followed by the “editor’s” (that is, Stevenson’s) postscript.

In the meanwhile Alan and I went slowly forward upon our way, having little heart either to walk or speak. The same thought was uppermost in both, that we were near the time of our parting; and rememberance of all the bygone days sat upon us sorely. We talked indeed of what should be done; and it was resolved that Alan should keep to the county, biding now here, now there, but coming once in a day to a particular place where I might be able to communicate with him, either in my own person or by messenger. In the meanwhile, I was to seek out a lawyer, who was an Appin Stewart, and a man therefore wholly to be trusted; and it should be his part to find a ship and arrange for Alan’s safe embarcation. No sooner was this business done, than the words seemed to leave us [...] We came the by-way over the hill of Corstorphine; and when we got near to the place called Rest-and-beThankful, and looked down on Corstorphine bogs and over to the city and the castle on the hill, we both stopped, for we both knew, without a word said, that we had come to where our ways parted. Here he repeated to me again what had been agreed upon between us: the address of the lawyer, the daily hour at which Alan might be found, and the signals that were to be made by any that came seeking him. Then I gave what money I had [...], so that he should not starve in the meanwhile; and then we stood a space, and looked over at Edinburgh in silence.

“Well, good-bye,” said Alan, and held out his left hand.

“Good-bye,” said I, and gave the hand a little grasp, and went off down hill.

Neither one of us looked the other in the face, nor so long as he was in my view did I take one back glance at the friend I was leaving. But as I went on my way to the city, I felt so lost and lonesome, that I could have found it in my heart to sit down by the dyke, and cry and weep like a baby.

It was coming near noon, when I passed in by the West Kirk and the Grassmarket into the streets of the capital. The huge height of the buildings, running up to ten and fifteen storeys, the narrow arched entries that continually vomited passengers, the wares of the merchants in their windows, the hubbub and endless stir, the foul smells and the fine clothes, and a hundred other particulars too small to mention, struck me into a kind of stupor of surprise, so that I let the crowd carry me to and fro; and yet all the time what I was thinking of was Alan at Rest-and-be-Thankful; and all the time (although you would think I would not choose but be delighted with these braws and novelties) there was a cold gnawing in my inside like a remorse for something wrong.

The hand of Providence brought me in my drifting to the very doors of the British Linen Company’s bank.

[Just there, with his hand upon his fortune, the present editor inclines for the time to say farewell to David. How Alan escaped, and what was done about the murder, with a variety of other delectable particulars, may be some day set forth. That is a thing, however, that hinges on the public fancy. The editor has a great kindness for both Alan and David, and would gladly spend much of his life in their society; but in this he may find himself to stand alone. In the fear of which, and lest any one should complain of scurvy usage, he hastens to protest that all went well with both, in the limited and human sense of the word “well;” that whatever befell them, it was not dishonour, and whatever failed them, they were not found wanting to themselves.]

Alan Breck, waiting for David Balfour to leap.

Even the land goes taut in the cold. Animals are searching a little bit harder for food. Songbirds flock to the places in the yard where I haven’t managed to mow down seed heads of perennials; barn cats harass them. Colors bleed, soften, desaturate. You look up and you see the shapes of trees for what they really are: rangy, antic, probing creatures, limbs forever searching for pockets of sunlight.

Farm work has shrunk to a minimum. There are of course the daily herd checks, the flinging out of hay, water, and shelter in poor weather. I still need to do some clean up in the garden and the field. For the last three years, though, I’ve let the day’s abbreviation invite me to do less on the farm, not more. Spring will come soon enough.

Life and writing have been busy. I’m juggling four different writing deadlines at the moment. Please bear with me: a longer Substack post is coming shortly.

As always, thanks for your support of my work here. It means more than you probably know. More soon.

Jack

What of dissidents, of gay and trans people, or immigrants? American integralists with any significant public profile sometimes go silent when you ask such questions, but it’s not hard to see that these are precisely the types of people they want to get rid of. Modern liberalism and the cascade of protections that have been extended to individuals: these are the enemy that a strong executive must bring to heel or eliminate. Muller argues quite plausibly that this virulent form of post-liberal thought can be traced to the writings of Carl Schmitt, the Nazi jurist who once claimed that the Catholic Church was the only institutional force capable of fighting the socially corrosive effects of modern individualism.

It’s worth bearing in mind that common good constitutionalism, and the movement of integralism on which it is based, is a grotesque distortion of Catholic social teaching. Gaudium et spes, a papal encyclical from 1965, sums up the Roman Catholic Church’s longstanding position on these matters. The Church, Paul VI wrote, “by reason of her role and competence, is not identified in any way with the political community nor bound to any political system. She is at once a sign and a safeguard of the transcendent character of the human person.” Moreover, it “does not place her trust in the privileges offered by civil authority. She will even give up the exercise of certain rights which have been legitimately acquired, if it becomes clear that their use will cast doubt on the sincerity of her witness or that new ways of life demand new methods.”

Other things I’m following: COP30 climate talks ended very poorly. Predictably, the US was a complete no-show. Meanwhile, China’s CO2 emissions have peaked or at least plateaued for the last eighteen months. They wildly outpace the rest of the world in new green energy investment. Some researchers think it could provide the conditions for a global about-face. The US is lagging behind–hiariously behind. US LNG (liquid natural gas) currently accounts for 25% of all natural gas exports globally. Meanwhile, the world burns more natural gas than ever has before.

A happy note: Brian Goldstone, author of There Is No Place For Us, continues to reel in the accolades. His book received the “New York Times Notable” designation a few weeks ago, and this week, it was names by the same rag as one of the ten best books of the year. Two weeks ago, a segment featuring the individuals he wrote about aired on CBS. Check out this clip of Brian driving Ted Koppel (of all people) around in a minivan. I am glad I got to review his book, and I’m grateful to call him a friend!

I read two new novels last week: Death and the Gardener, by former Booker Prize-winner Bulgarian novelist, Georgi Gospodinov, and The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, by Kiran Desai. I was reminded of what a brooding, expansive writer Desai can be. I first encountered The Inheritance of Loss as an undergrad and loved it. The new one, her first in nearly twenty years, is also excellent. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize but lost to David Szalay’s Flesh, which I haven’t read yet.

You’d be forgiven if, like me, you supposed that the Humboldt Current’s isolated path represents a kind of attenuation of oceanic power. On the map, it looks as if the mighty, counter-clockwise circuit of saltwater near the South Pole would slow down when it makes contact with the South American continent. The current’s northward drift seems forced, as if the ocean itself were pushing up against the grain of the continent. Compared to other currents, the Humboldt Current is indeed very slow. It moves a tremendous amount of water, up to 700 million cubic feet per second, but it does so at a fairly leisurely pace: eight or nine miles-per-hour, tops. However, the secret of the Humboldt Current isn’t its size or speed so much as what is happening to it on top: the wind.

In her 2023 book, The Blue Machine: How the Ocean Works, the physicist Helen Czerski asks us to imagine a stack of clean, white copy paper on top of a desk. If you place your hand on top of the stack and push the paper to one side, the top sheet moves about as far as you decide to move your hand. Some of the papers below will move, too. The friction between the lower pages allows the top sheet to pull them along with it. But the force isn’t strong enough for all of them to travel the same distance as the top sheet. Instead, the pieces fan out below, each one travelling a little bit less than the other, until the paper that is furthest from your hand barely moves at all.

Czerski explains that this is more or less what happens whenever wind blows on the surface of the ocean. The warmer surface layers of water get pushed about in different directions, generating most of the planet’s major ocean currents. When this surface water moves, it takes some of the lower, colder layers with it. But like the stack of paper, the further down the water column you go, the less these lower layers tend to move. At the bottom of the ocean, the water barely moves at all.

The same phenomenon happens in the Humboldt Current, but on a different order of magnitude. Trade winds blowing off of the Andes perform a constant stripping away of the warmer layers of water that extend horizontally several hundred miles offshore. A staggering amount of ocean, two hundred meters all the way down, is displaced by the wind. The earth’s rotation causes the water to swerve to the north instead of west with the wind (the so-called Coriolis Effect). And the wind doesn’t just stop: it keeps pushing this column of warm water hundreds of miles up and then out to the Pacific. In its place, frigid, nutrient-dense water from the depth surges to the surface in a mechanism ocean scientists call “upwelling.” “Cold, nutrient-rich water has escaped from underneath the warm lid,” Czerski writes, “and as it comes up to meet the sunshine, all the ingredients for life are there in huge quantities.” Bathed in sunlight and a rich broth of nutrients, the phytoplankton “gorge themselves silly on sunlight, stashing away solar energy on a monumental scale.”

“Monumental” undersells it. The explosion of phytoplankton in the Humboldt Current supports the most productive fishery in the world. In a body of water that makes up roughly .05 per cent of the ocean’s surface, the Humboldt Current consistently generates 15 to 20 percent of the global fish catch every year. The majority of this catch is made up of the Peruvian anchoveta, a small, foul-smelling anchovy that is edible, but not palatable, to humans. Once caught, the anchoveta are processed, dried, pulverized, and shipped all over the world in the form of fishmeal. It’s not uncommon for harvests to reach 5 or 6 million metric tons annually. The two fishing seasons in 2024 combined to haul in nearly 8 million tons.

What is done with this abundant harvest of marine life? A tiny percentage of Peruvian anchoveta is pressed into fish oil, which is pumped into pills and sold as a dietary supplement for humans. The rest–ninety-eight per cent of every anchoveta harvest–is destined for animal feed, primarily farmed fish and hogs. So dependent has modern agriculture become on the Peruvian anchoveta that, in 1972, when the anchoveta fishery collapsed, the price of bacon in the UK doubled instantly. In the US, the price jumped by one third.

After reading Czerski’s book, I checked my feed labels. It’s true: the twelve hogs I tend two hundred miles from the coast have a little bit of the ocean, perhaps even the Humboldt Current, inside of them. It’s likely that my chickens do, too. (According to trade groups, Peru accounts for 20 per cent of global fishmeal and fish oil supplies). I’m embarrassed to say that I hadn’t noticed the ingredient before. When piglets are weaned, they are fed a special ration that contains fishmeal. Once they get to fifty pounds, their protein needs shift, and they switch to a feed without fishmeal. I’m told by my ‘feed guy’ that hogs fed on fishmeal their whole lives have an unpleasant fishy smell. Call it the revenge of the anchoveta.

Animal feed is big business. It’s been big business for as long as agriculture has been conducted on an industrial scale. Very large numbers of domestic animals require very large amounts of food. One source of cheap protein is fishmeal; another is soy. Like fishmeal, the majority of soybeans (77%, roughly, according to the UN) produced around the world go to animals like pigs and chickens, not humans. In the US, over a third of corn goes to feed non-human animals. There are, right now, three quarters of a billion hogs alive on earth. Half of them live in China. That’s quite the evolutionary coup for a species that, not very long ago, humans once tended in very small numbers, in their backyards and or woodlots, to graze tree mast and utilize kitchen waste.

From one perspective, then, the Humboldt Current’s role in the global agricultural economy makes a certain kind of sense, which is to say that it makes as much sense as the human appetite for swine flesh does. Agricultural systems reflect human appetites. By looking in the mirror, we can see very quickly that what we want is cheap meat and sugar–and that most of us don’t want to do the work of raising our own food. Certain crops or animals or marine ecosystems lend themselves to industrial-scale exploitation because they can, with careful study or technological tweak, withstand it. They are cheap precisely because they can be grown and harvested or managed at scale.

Czerski’s book isn’t much interested in these systems and the role the ocean plays (or has played) within them. That’s fair, I suppose; her job in the book is to explain the physics of oceans in ways that people like me, people who are bad at math, can understand. What’s odd, though, is how the history of these systems seeps into the language she uses to describe the oceanic mechanisms that make biotic life possible on the planet. Her metaphors for the ocean revolve almost obsessively around the steam engine, the distinctive invention–and engine–of industrial capitalism. It’s not that the metaphor of ocean-as-engine doesn’t work, but that it works too well. The ocean is a machine of life; the ocean is a machine of industrial capitalism. Chapter one opens in a technology park on Kona, in Hawaii, where technology start-ups are trying to figure out how to use temperature differential in the ocean to generate cheap energy. By the end of the book, it’s sometimes hard to know where one machine begins and the other ends:

Earth’s blue is closely connected to the other global components: atmosphere, the ice, life and the land, and all five work together as a single system. But the ocean is the big beast in Earth’s planetary machinery. The engine that is Earth’s ocean takes sunlight and converts it into giant underwater currents and waterfalls, hauling around the ingredients for life: nutrients, oxygen and trace metals like potassium and iron, shaping our coasts and transporting heat. This isn’t just another engine, it’s the grandest one of all: an engine the size of a planet. It’s got all the elegance of the most ingenious human-built engines but the mechanics here are more subtle and intricate. Instead of a nice tidy piston, we’re faced with a flow of water that merges into the water on either side of it; it’s definitely up to something, but it’s hard to say where this pushes on that. But it is absolutely still an engine, converting light and heat into movement in myriad different ways.

Subtle and intricate, but where the tidy pistons and or shiny brass widgets would be, we get water, wind, underwater current, and hidden waterfalls. Each subtlety of current or variance in temperature adds up to “an engine the size of a planet.” (Is this phrase about the ocean or scifi dystopia?) However, in the conclusion, we find out that this metaphor, which seemed so elegant and straightforward, isn’t. The ocean is not a self-contained hydraulic machine for biological life. In fact, precisely because we’ve been acting as if the ocean were a machine that supplies us with endlessly renewable resources that the ocean may soon turn around and start dominating us.

Czerski explains that for the last hundred years, the ocean has been softening the blow of climate change by absorbing excess heat from the atmosphere. But its ability to do so is coming under strain: “the addition of extra heat at the surface is reinforcing the layered structure and therefore acting as a brake on the vertical turning over of the blue machine.” Putting a break on the oceanic machine means drastic changes in weather patterns and the intensification of storms.1 It also means that life in the ocean regenerates more slowly than before. Because of overfishing, the sea, is now devoid of ninety per cent of the largest class of creatures that once called the ocean home (whales). Sixty per cent of creatures with a biomass over ten grams has also disappeared.2 It’s difficult to imagine how these numbers could rebound within any of our lifetimes without drastic, immediate intervention.

Appropriately, the language in this section of the book abandons machines and engines and embraces interdependence and ecology. The implication is that, if we simply make more tweaks to the machines we do in fact control, the machines of global capitalism, then the oceanic engine can recalibrate itself and go on sustaining life in all its human and non-human plenitude. “We have to be very careful about what we do in the ocean, because it’s easy to be blind, either deliberately or accidentally, to the full picture.”3 But who exactly is included in the “we” who operate the levers of capitalism? Is it reasonable to assume that we can attain the full picture of the ocean from within an economic system that is designed to abscond matter from one place and consume it on the other side of the world?

Europeans first came to the Humboldt Current because of the massive deposits of guano, or bird shit, on a chain of islands called the Chinchas that sit in the middle of the Current. Czerski mentions this, but what she doesn’t say is that this discovery utterly transformed the way Europeans did agriculture.

For thousands of years, ocean-going birds have feasted on the seemingly miraculous numbers of fish swimming in the Humboldt. Pelicans, boobies, and cormorants all make their nests on the Chinchas. There’s no rain to wash the excrement away, so it dries and accumulates. The current’s extremely cold waters, coupled with the rain shadow effect of the Andes, keeps this region among the driest on earth. The Atacama Desert in Chile, just inland of the Current, is the most arid non-polar desert in the world.

When Von Humboldt first travelled to the Chincha Islands, he recorded layers of the acrid-smelling stuff three meters deep. Because of the courses he took in chemistry, he knew it had to contain lots of ammonia. But he rejected the explanation that indigenous people gave him (that the guano mounds came from the birds) and surmised that the pungent substance was left behind after some prehistoric cataclysm. In any case, Humboldt shipped back samples to his colleagues all over Europe. The English chemist, Humphrey Davy, a close friend and companion to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, published one of the first chemical analysis of guano in 1813. He instantly realized the value of the substance. Guano, he wrote, was chock full of uric acid, phosphoric acid, lime, and potassium salt. It could be a boon to capitalist farmers, who were experiencing declining crop yields and infertility. To Davy, Peruvian guano demonstrated beyond the shadow of a doubt that God Himself had set down “the modification of the soil, and the application of manures [...] within the power of man, as if for the purpose of awakening his industry, and of calling forth his powers.”4 The guano of the Humboldt Current and the exhausted soils of Europe were two pieces of a puzzle God intended humans to solve. And solve it they did.

Davy’s Elements was translated into a number of languages, including Spanish and Hungarian. His and other popular reports about the potency of Peruvian guano kicked off a bonanza of military expansion to the South Pacific. Numbers help clarify the scale of what unfolded in the decades that followed. During the 18th century, when the Dutch East India Company controlled the South Asian nitrate trade, around 100 tons of guano were imported annually into Europe. By 1800, the British East India Company had supplanted their rivals, hauling in approximately 1,000 tons per year. However, as the historian Gregory T. Cushman notes, “Peruvian nitrate imports immediately dwarfed these numbers, rising from an average of 2,500 tons per year in the 1830s, to 17,000 tons in the 1840s, to 42,000 tons in the 1850s.”5 By the 1890’s, Peru was exploring around a million tons of nitrates from the Chinchas Islands and the Atacama all around the world. Peruvian guano was quite literally feeding the industrialization of the Northern hemisphere.

Cushman proposes calling the period of global history from 1802 to 1884 “the age of shit.”6 He means the phrase literally and figuratively. Haunted by Thomas Malthus’s grim pronouncement that population growth regularly exceeds agricultural production, many of the leading minds of Europe were interested in agricultural productivity and the possibility of turning political economy into a formal object of study. They became obsessed with the properties of animal dung–particularly guano. “Rather than improving the world’s food supply,” Cushman writes, “Peruvian guano mainly served northern consumers of meat and sugar.” And instead of “inaugurating an epoch of peace and prosperity,” rapacity for guano and nitrates inspired some particularly vicious conflicts: the Chincha Islands War (1865-1866), which granted Peru’s independence from Spanish rule, and the War of the Pacific (1879-1884).

To the chagrin of abolitionists in the United States, the search for guano encouraged the seizure of new lands and the expansion of slavery. In 1856, the US passed the Guano Act, which allowed US citizens to lay claim to any uninhabited island that had guano on it. The authors of this legislation reasoned that these islands were effectively a public commons, and therefore could be taken at will by anyone who “demonstrated” need. (Of the sixty-six islands US citizens seized, nine remain in US possession.) However important slaves were to the American capitalists who harvested the nitrates they found in the South Pacific, the new global industry of nitrate production found different ways of adapting to life without the peculiar institution. When Peru achieved independence in 1826 and Great Britain abolished slavery (1833), British capitalists pivoted and perfected the infamous “coolie” system of labor by importing hundreds of thousands of bonded Chinese workers into Peru and Chile. These people labored under some of the most extreme conditions imaginable. One contemporary English eyewitness described that these workers,

[...] besides being worked almost to death, [...] have neither sufficient food nor passably wholesome water. Their rations consist of two pounds of rice and about half a pound of meat. This is generally served out to them between ten and eleven in the morning, by which time they have got through six hours’ work. Each man is compelled to clear from four to five tons of guano a day. During the last quarter of 1875, it is reported that there were 355 Chinamen employed at Pabellon de Pica alone, of whom no less than 98 were in the hospital. The general sickness is swelled legs, caused, it is supposed, by drinking condensed water not sufficiently cooled, and by a lack of vegetable diet. The features of this disease are not unlike those of scurvy or purpura.7

Around the same time, the US consul to Peru noted in a letter that the suicide rate of the Chinese workers who dug guano was so high that the British had to put armed guards “around the shores of the Guano Islands, where they are employed, to prevent them from committing suicide by drowning, to which end the Coolie rushes in his moments of despair.” Guano workers in the early twentieth century reported that they still found bones and the tattered garments of Chinese workers scattered around the islands.

Perhaps the greatest irony of the age of shit is that the importation of guano ended up ruining the soils that it was intended to improve. (It also ruined nations: DNA sequencing suggests that the Peruvian guano trade may have been responsible for the arrival of the P. infestans strain that led to the Great Famine.) Initial returns in Europe and America were good, really good. On both sides of the Atlantic, large landowners touted stupendous crop yields in journals and newspapers addressed to the gentleman farmer. By the 1840s, slaves and sharecroppers in the US were pooling resources to import guano together. Over time, however, farmers found that guano tended to cause soil productivity to decline. This is because plants aren’t able to absorb nitrates unless there is a minimum of other necessary compounds available to them in the soil. (It has also been shown that excess soil nitrogen inhibits the bloom of biological life in the soil. The same is true of modern synthetic fertilizers.) The so-called “law of the minimum,” first articulated by the German chemist Justus von Liebig [1803-1873], brought the guano craze to a sudden halt. In Letters on Modern Agriculture, Liebig spared no British or American farmer for misusing guano. While the Americans were guilty of the worst land abuse–an “open system of [soil] robbery,” he called it–the British practiced a “more refined system of spoliation”: “Good fortune kindly sent guano to rescue them in their utmost need,...but in their fatal hands, this blessing actually turned into an instrument for impoverishing the land in the course of time more completely.”8 Many others joined Liebig’s complaint. But none of the polemic did anything to curtail modern agriculture’s addiction to off-farm inputs.

The anchoveta industry accounts for a much larger proportion of the Peruvian economy than guano does. Guano is still harvested off the coast of Peru and Chile, but the industry is regulated very tightly. Conservationists crisscross the Chinchas every year, ensuring that the harvest of manure doesn’t disturb the populations of sea birds. Since the collapse of the guano industry, global agriculture has pivoted. Nowadays, the majority of fertilizers used in conventional agriculture are produced by artificial means. A byproduct of the munitions industry in World War I, nitrogen fertilizer is made by subjecting atmospheric nitrogen and hydrogen from natural gas to extremely high temperatures and pressures. Rock phosphate is mined below the surface of the earth and then mixed with sulfuric acid to make phosphate fertilizer. One of the largest phosphate mines–in fact, the largest integrated mine and chemical plant in the world, the Aurora Phosphate Mine–lies a hundred miles east of my farm. The mine is located on top of an ancient sea bed that houses the remains of countless prehistoric sea creatures. The phosphorus is in those remains.

Accounting for these changes, it’s still worth asking whether the age of shit has really ended. We’re no longer scanning the globe for large caches of animal manure, but our dependence on the extraction and global distribution of very specific substances from very particular places is every bit as acute as it was during the guano age. If extraction and distribution are what the guano age was all about, then it is hard to believe that we’ve left it. The Humboldt Current is hardly an exception in this history, and it’s not just all about the extraction of fossil fuels (as important as this story is). To take a few of the most salient contemporary examples: the town of Spruce Pine, North Carolina, one of the few places in the world where the pure quartz necessary for computer chips and solar panels can be found. The cobalt mines of the Democratic Republic of Congo, where thousands of modern-day slaves scrape the ground for chunks of blue mineral that go into electric car batteries and rechargeable household devices. Where I live, the soils have been strip mined for so long that the ground is mostly prized for what can go on top of it: data centers, natural gas storage and distribution, conurbation.

Meanwhile, global agriculture is more reliant on off-farm inputs than ever. This is insane: studies suggest that crops absorb about 50 per cent of the nitrogen and phosphate fertilizers that are applied to them. Some residue from the other half leaches into groundwater. The rest finds its way into the ocean, where it creates vast “dead zones” for marine life. One dead zone, in the gulf of Oman, is the size of the US state of Florida. And these zones are growing. A recent study found that the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico has reached 4,298 square miles, two times larger than the 2035 reduction target.

There are still reasons to believe that small, sustainable farms are the future of agriculture. According to different metrics, small farms still account for a large percentage of global food production.9 Also, small farms are still almost certainly more productive per acre than industrial farms. People like David Schlossberg and Chris Smaje have argued that there is an insurgent politics lying dormant within key sustainability movements (energy, fashion, food). However, despite localized enthusiasm in the US, there’s little evidence of governments taking small farms very seriously, or considering what the future of agriculture might look like beyond the age of shit.

An image from Thoreau’s Kalendar project.

The title Thoreau used for his project is borrowed from the title of a treatise called Kalendarium Hortense, a botanical manual and almanac by the seventeenth century experimentalist, author, and founding member of the Royal Society, John Evelyn [1620-1706]. In his journals, Thoreau was so insistent upon making the connection with Evelyn explicit that, when he accidentally writes the modern spelling of calendar, he emends the text by crossing out the “C” and replacing it with the deliberately antiquated spelling. Thoreau says that he read and enjoyed the Kalendarium in early months of 1852, but he must have been a reader of Evelyn’s work from a relatively early date.3 Evelyn’s name pops up in several key passages of Walden that date to the earliest draft of the text, 1846-7—“the Bean Field” chapter, which I discuss here and will do so again soon, as well as several other places. Evelyn shows up in the journals of the 1850’s, too, going so far as to supply Thoreau with a recherché model of project he wanted to compile the last years of his life. And yet, as far as I can tell, only a handful of scholars have treated Thoreau’s engagement with Evelyn seriously (three short articles from 1960, 1967, and 1971, respectively).

Part of the difficulty stems from Thoreau’s own development as a thinker. Scholars of Thoreau often note the slow drift in the journals away from Emerson’s Romantic Neoplatonism to a materialist approach to the observation of natural phenomena. In 1850, his relationship with Emerson buckled, in part due to the intimate friendship Thoreau maintained with Lidia, Emerson’s wife. Thoreau’s departure from the Emerson household preceded a long, slow divestment from the transcendentalist project of discerning higher, spiritual laws through a humble, if not naive, engagement with the natural world. In Seeing New Worlds: Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century Science [1995], Laura Dassow Walls argued that Thoreau’s disentanglement from the Emersonian project was caused in part by Thoreau’s engagement with the writings of that “Napoleon of science,” Alexander von Humboldt [1769-1859]. The fruit of reading Humboldt was a “proto-ecological” vision of human and natural entanglement.4 Journals from this period show a rejection of Emersonian abstraction in favor of a more relational way of knowing and encountering the natural world. Dassow Walls calls Thoreau’s post-Walden achievement an “epistemology of contact,” a sustained scientific delighting in the “raw materials” of the nature as opposed to the practice of transcending them for the higher, eternal laws that she associates with Coleridge and Emerson. The role of the scientific observer is simply to record details and make connections between them. Perhaps some deeper purpose will shine through, but only after a lifetime of meticulous, patient study. In a similar vein, Lance Newman sees an “unrelenting facticity” to the journals from about 1846 on.5 Newman suggests that this facticity is mirrored in an increasingly materialist cast of Thoreau’s social criticism. “As Thoreau moved increasingly toward a materialist understanding of nature,” Newman writes, “he applied this same mode of analysis to the capitalist social order, and was therefore was driven more and more toward radical political conclusions.6

Whatever the precise implications of Thoreau’s materialist turn, the casual reader of Walden will be struck by the late journals’ absence of the man from the recorded minutiae of Concord’s flora and fauna. But Thoreau, even at his most scientific, comes nowhere near a Darwin or a Karl Marx. Perhaps the last, nearly complete text that he wrote—a six-hundred-page tome, intended for the Kalendar project, that bore the handwritten title “Wild Fruits”—is all about how to harvest wild berries and nuts with your friends (and the spiritual benefits of doing so). In this surprisingly comprehensive text, the most revolutionary provocation you will find is Thoreau’s suggestion that towns and cities ought to maintain a orchard-like “commons” of wild fruit trees for its citizens, free of charge—not a bad idea, by any means, but hardly the sort of thing one would expect from a devotee of Humboldt or Darwin, whose Voyage of the Beagle [1839] and Origin of the Species [1859] Thoreau devoured nearly as soon as they washed up on American shores.

This only makes Thoreau’s obsession with John Evelyn’s writings even more curious. From a certain perspective, John Evelyn is about as far away as you could get from Alexander von Humboldt, the “Napoleon of science,” or Charles Darwin’s impersonal micro-studies of species development. An early experimentalist and disciple of Francis Bacon, Evelyn was fascinated by the metaphysics of soils, plants, and climate. But he addresses natural phenomena with an eye towards actively recovering Eden in the gardens and forests of seventeenth-century England. As he explains in his Sylva [1662], probably the first treatise written on the practice of agroforestry, in forests one finds “the very Infancy of the World in which Adam was entertained in Paradise.” He points out that in the second creation narrative of Genesis, God intended trees to be Adam’s first companions, not woman (cf. Gen. 2:4-18). “The Sum of all is,” Evelyn continues, “Paradise itself was but a kind of Nemorous Temple, or Sacred Grove, planted by God himself, and given to Man, tanquam primo sacerdoti [as the first priest], a Place consecrated for sober Discipline, and to contemplate those Mysterious and [143] Sacramentall Trees which they were not to touch with their Hands.” For Evelyn, the implication of the Genesis narrative is that, through careful study and experimentation, humankind might return to such an Edenic state as Adam himself experienced. Here is Thoreau’s response to this text, having re-read Sylva, dated June 9th, 1852: “[Evelyn’s] “Silva” is a new kind of prayerbook, a glorifying of the trees and enjoying them forever, which was the chief end of his [that is, Evelyn’s] life.”7

A new kind of prayerbook, indeed. Thoreau’s remarks on Sylva parody the first question and answer of the Westminster Shorter Catechism [1646-7]: “What is the chief end of Man? To glorify God, and enjoy him forever.” This was a text written in the brief (and failed) attempt to bring the Church of England into alignment with Scottish Presbyterianism—a few years before the execution of Charles I, when Evelyn was busy experimenting with trees and sharing discoveries with the members of Samuel Hartlib’s circle. I take Thoreau to be making the suggestion of alternative pathways for the development of Christian theology in the seventeenth century, pathways Presbyterians—and the Puritans of the New World, and the “mass of men” of nineteenth-century America—might have taken and might still take up. This is a path that Evelyn took up, Thoreau implies, and it is what Thoreau sees himself as having done in Walden and indeed his own life’s work.

In Senses of Walden, the philosopher Stanley Cavell argued that Walden is designed to function as a new sacred scripture for a nation hovering like a ghost at the crossroads of democracy and industrial capitalism. The letter of the Thoreau’s text frames the man’s experiences of living on the shores of Walden Pond and among its trees. But as anyone who has read the text knows, Walden constantly gestures to what it calls “higher laws,” Nature’s sensus spiritualis. Cavell writes: “Walden’s puns and paradoxes, its fracturing of idiom and twisting of quotation, its drones of fact and flights of impersonation—all are to keep faith at once with the mother and the father, to unite them, and to have the word born in us” (16). It strikes me that, for all its “drones of fact,” the Kalendar project only makes sense in the context of the ecological conversion that Walden figures forth and asks—demands—its readers to undergo.

In part 2 of this essay, I’ll look briefly at some of Evelyn’s life and writings, and then loop back one more to the famous passage in Walden where Thoreau appears to use Evelyn’s advice about working the soil. Stay tuned.

None of these hidden creatures are more welcome to the farm’s human inhabitants than the arrival of the fruit of the native passionflower (Passiflora incarnata). Like many plants that have a wide geographic distribution, passionflower goes by many names. Maypop, purple passionflower, passion vine, apricot vine—whatever you want to call it, the vine produces clusters of delicious, egg-shaped fruit in mid-September. As the fruit ripens, it produces juicy, white seed pods behind a shiny green shell. The taste is similar to the plant’s more well-known cousins, Passiflora edulis (purple passionfruit) and Passiflora granadilla: tart and refreshing. I have tried these, and this one tastes wilder somehow: bracing, tropical, earthy, quickening.

The flower of Passiflora incarnata.

There are two reasons native passionfruit is a secret. Not many people know about it, and (because?) it is so damn hard to find. The fruit pods and leaves are a shade of green that is nearly indistinguishable from the greens of grasses and legumes that it tends to grow on top of. A few weeks ago, I stood in our pastures among many passionfruit vines, scanning the ground for fruit. I wasn’t able to see them until I got down on my hands and knees and turned my head sideways so I could look underneath the vine’s shady leaves. Sometimes you have to put your hands on the vine itself and follow it and hope you come across something that a deer or a rabbit hasn’t mangled. Children are more skilled and patient with this method, and they are usually willing to help if you promise they can keep some of what they find. Here’s another way you might discover them: if you step on one and hear the classic “pop” of the shell cracking, you know you are among the maypops, or at least one ruined maypop.

The fruit’s elusiveness is not because the vine has failed to make itself known. In July, passionflower produces the most delusionally beautiful blossoms: spiky, three-dimensional towers of lavender (or sometimes white) petals, squiggly purple filaments, and five yellow anthers on top that actually look like antlers. When passionflower is in bloom, you can spot the flowers from many yards away. But unless you flag the spot of ground where you saw the flowers, you’ll be hard-pressed to find them three months later, when the blossoms are long gone and the fruit is ripening.

A shirt full of maypops.

The Latin for maypop is Passiflora incarnata. It means something like “incarnated flower of suffering.” Carl Linnaeus, the founder of the binomial system still used to categorize all living things, named the plant himself. He chose a name that tried to pay homage to the first Europeans, Jesuit missionaries, who found this remarkable vine in their journeys to the Americas. Sometimes the Jesuits called the vine granadilla, “little pomegranate.” More often, they called it the flos passionis, the flower of the Passion, or the flower of suffering.

An image of a passiflora species first shows up in the famous Codex Badianus, an herbal formulary complied by some of the earliest Spanish missionaries to Mexico. The codex contains beautiful, hand-painted images of the medicinal plants the Aztec people cherished and how they used them. The authors of the codex note that passionflower (coanenepilli in Aztec) is good for reviving prisoners who have been handled too harshly. By 1580, it is supposedly being cultivated in the gardens of the the Spanish king Philip II. From here on out, Passiflora sp. show up frequently in Jesuit herbal and botanical manuals, and with increasingly fantastic proportions.

A drawing of what is probably a Passiflora sp. from the Codex Badianus, 16th cent.

Here is an image of flos passionis that circulated widely in Europe in the early 1600’s: a tall, faintly Greek pedestal is set upon a circular platform with polka dots lining the rim. The pedestal props up three sharp swords that jut up and outward towards the viewer. The swords are encircled by what looks like a crown of thorns. Nicolas Monardes, a Spanish doctor who compiled “Ioyfull newes out of the newfound world” [trans. English, 1577], was the first to connect in print the appearance of the passionflower to the Passion of Jesus. This strange vine “casteth a flower like to a white rose, and in the leaves it hath figures which are signes of the passion of our Lorde, that it seemeth as though they were paynted with muche care, where the flower is more particular than any other that hath beene seene.”

Later commentators were less restrained. Antonio de Leon Pinelo [1589–1660], a historian who trained with the Jesuits in Lima, insisted throughout his career that the original garden of Eden was located somewhere in his native Peru. What fruit might have tempted Eve, if not the fruit of the flos passionis? Never mind that passionflower is a vine, and not a tree. Here is a sign of the felix culpa: the remedy and the curse contained within the morphology of the plant itself. How fitting that the fruit of the flower of the Passion should serve as the object of Eve’s first sin. Giacomo Bosio, an Italian member of the Knights Hospitaller (a Catholic military order based in Malta), goes even further in his apology on behalf of “The Triumphant and Glorious Cross” [Triomphante e gloriose croce, Rome, 1609]. After discussing the Christological significance of the unicorn, Bosio turns to the passionflower. He claims that the Spanish call the vine “la flor de las cinco llagas [wounds]”, because its flower displays in detail all the traditional symbols of Christ’s passion. The five anthers on top are the five wounds of Christ (two in the hands, two in the feet and one in the side); the tendrils are the whips the Roman soldiers used to beat him; the three stigmas are the three nails; the “crown” of filaments are the crown of thorns; and the five petals and five sepals point to the ten disciples who remained faithful to him (Judas and Peter, of course, go missing). How marvelous and strange, Bosio says, that God would hide the mystery of his Passion in plain sight of so many ignorant and impious heathens who had no clue what they were looking at.

from Bosio’s Triomphante e gloriose croce [Rome, 1609], Libro secundo, p. 164.

Protestant botanists had none of this. Using a plant to teach doctrine was one thing. Suggesting that God had placed an icon of the most powerful devotional object of the Counter Reformation in the middle of a pagan paradise was something else. For John Parkinson, an English apothecary and the royal botanist of Charles I, the worst was that it encouraged botanical misdescription—“lyes” “from the Divell,” as he put it in Paradisi in sole paradisus terrestris [London, 1629] (The Latin title is confusing because it puns on Parkinson’s name: “park-in-sun’s terrestrial park”). In his discussion of the “virtues” of the passionflower, Parkinson incorrectly identifies the vine as a species of clematis before letting his readers know that the English have taken to calling it the “Virgin or Virginian Climer,” because it is a vine first discovered and sent back to England by an agent of the Virginia Company (probably John Smith). The Virginians call it “maracoc,” after the custom of the Powhatan people. Spaniards of the West Indies call it granadillo. Still others, after the manner of “some superstitious Jesuite” (he won’t even mention the name!),

would faine make men beleeve, that in the flower of this plant are to be seene all the markes of our Saviours Passion; and therefore call it Flos Passionis: and to that end have caused figures to be drawne, and printed, with all the parts proportioned out, as thornes, nailes, speare, whippe, pillar, &c. in it, and all as true as the Sea burnes which you may well perceive by the true figure, taken to the life of the plant, compared with the figures set forth by the Jesuites, which I have placed here likewise for every one to see: but these by their advantagious lies (which with them are tolerable, or rather pious and meritorious) wherewith they use to instruct their people; but I dare say, God never willed his Priests to instruct his people with lyes: for they come from the Divell, the author of them.

“As true as the Sea burnes”: this Jesuitical fiction, reproduced faithfully from Bosio’s text, lies on the page opposite Parkinson’s own meticulous rendering. He’s certainly got a point. Parkinson’s drawing is impressively accurate. The “lye” is plain for all to see. Let the reader understand, etc.

Parkinson’s drawing of Passionflower incarnata, Paradisi in sole Paradisus terrestris (London, 1629), p. 395. Below, his reproduction of the image from Bosio’s text.

It’s strange to look out in your pasture and find a plant that holds such a modest yet vexing place in Western history—a plant that, through no fault of its own, absorbs and reflects back to us our own histories of colonization, the extermination of indigenous peoples, doctrinal disputes between Protestants and Catholics. Once you see it, it’s hard to unsee. Passionflower, indeed. In a book on the philosophy of plant life, Michael Marder suggests that the sheer exposure of plants—their rootedness to a single place; their horizontal, chlorophyllic embrace of sun and sky—is the key to understanding their relationship to other living things. Plants always go before animals, so to speak, creating the atmospheric and metabolic conditions that make other lives possible. Plants therefore signify a “primordial generosity” that precedes and encompasses the animal. But exposure is also what sometimes tempts us into thinking that they are pure passive—as if plants were simply waiting around for someone (or something) to take them away.

Over the course of September, the kids and I collected about a hundred passion fruit from the farm. We devoured them almost as quickly as we could pick them. Before long, the deer found them, and then the sheep, and then the cows. It is the middle of October now, and all the maypops and maracocks have gone. They are a short-lived fruit; you have a very narrow window to catch them before they go bad or go missing. The vines have gone, too. Evidently the animals found them tasty. Passionflower will be back next year, though, in new and surprising places. Ever since we stopped clipping pasture, we find it somewhere every year. In gobbling up the fruit we do our part—the animal part—spitting out the pips as we make our way back to the house or to the next job.

From one perspective, I’ve been practicing silvopasture since I started farming over ten years ago. Our farm has quite a few trees, and since the beginning, I have tried to find ways to use different animal species to help manage forested lands on our properties and those that we rent. Only in the last five or so years have I gotten serious about intensively planting and managing new trees. In this workshop I’ll talk about my approach to what I call practical silvopasture: the incorporation of trees and shrubs into grazing systems by focusing on getting lots of native trees planted as quickly and as cheaply as possible. We’ll also talk about contour planting, tree selection, and how best to manage animals in these systems.

If you’re around, and you’re interested, sign up via the QR code below. I hope to see at least a few of you there!

If you are new here, welcome. I’m glad to have you. Here are a few brief words about myself and what you’ll find on this Substack.

Jack, Goodie, and the rest of the Bell Farm gang.

WHO ARE YOU? I graduated with a Ph.D. in English literature from Duke University in 2016. After teaching in the English Department at Wake Forest University for five years, I quit academia and started a farm in Granville County, North Carolina, which is about a half hour north of Durham. In my tenure as a farmer, I have focused mainly on animal agriculture and holistic grazing. We’ve always kept a vegetable garden and plant lots of trees and shrubs, but the size of the farms we manage makes keeping ruminants like cows and sheep a necessity. At one point we were managing nearly four hundred acres of pasture land, much of which was under conservation with the state of North Carolina. Two years ago, I began a very different sort of project and renovated our hundred-year-old farmhouse. Since then, the farm business has shrunk to the original footprint of the farm we bought way back in 2017: fifty acres, give or take, and I devote more and more time to writing, thinking, and lecturing about farming, literature, theology, philosophy, and climate justice. I also home school our four children.

What else is there to say? I am married to the incomparable Goodie Bell, senior pastor of Blacknall Memorial Presbyterian Church in Durham, North Carolina. The country and the city are two poles around which our lives are threaded. Amongst agrarians, this makes our lives somewhat unusual. But we wouldn’t really have it any other way. Our love for the city of Durham and the land we farm both feel like vital, nourishing spirits in our life together.

WHAT WILL I FIND HERE? I tend to fill this Substack with short essays on topics I am researching or writing about for bigger projects, like the book I am currently writing about farming and climate justice. I’ll also post links to articles and essays I write elsewhere.

The truth is that I have always been a magpie. For example, on this Substack, I’ve written about the realist novel, climate change, sustainable energy, patristics, medieval iconography, 18th-century poetry, contemporary music, the industrial revolution–among many other topics. I tend to use Substack as a way to force myself to make explicit the connections I find across vastly different texts and disciplines. Sometimes I’ll post essay fragments that I don’t have time to expand and turn into something longer form.

Among my motivations as a writer is a growing sense that the ways modern people relate to and encounter the natural world are impoverished and in need of deep rehabilitation. This impoverishment is connected in obvious ways to the global ecological crisis the world is enduring, but I think it also has something to do with the myriad social fractures that have increasingly come to characterize life in twenty-first-century America. I also think that the intellectual and liturgical traditions of Christianity, in all their complexity and confounding contradiction, offer surprising resources for thinking about how to relate to, and rehabilitate, our relationships with the created world.

Everything that I write on the BFM is free to the public. I’d like to keep it that way, but if you read something I’ve written and find it helpful, I ask that you think about contributing $5, $10, $15 dollars a month to keep the thing going. It may not seem like much, but it does help keep the lights on (so to speak.)

Enough about me! Whether you’re new here or not, take a moment to look through the archives and tell me what catches your eye.

Cheers,

Jack

A real image I pulled from a real tweet posted by our very real Department of Energy.

Last week Bill McKibben ran a piece unpacking the implications of Trump’s absurd energy policy. For context: before the election, Trump famously promised executives from the fossil fuel industry that he would ease restrictions on oil, gas, and coal if they helped raise a billion dollars for his campaign. When Trump won, the administration trundled out a cartload of executive orders that, among other things, rolled back regulations on fossil fuels, cancelled clean energy projects on federal land, and abolished the IRA benefits for new clean energy infrastructure–all while increasing subsidies for coal. The reasoning (that was made public, anyway) was that America needs bigger and more reliable energy sources to bring back manufacturing and win the AI arms race with China. As one of the orders from April put it,

Our Nation’s beautiful clean coal resources will be critical to meeting the rise in electricity demand due to the resurgence of domestic manufacturing and the construction of artificial intelligence data processing centers. We must encourage and support our Nation’s coal industry to increase our energy supply, lower electricity costs, stabilize our grid, create high-paying jobs, support burgeoning industries, and assist our allies.

McKibben says this is “nonsense on a cracker.” For one, it now seems plain that Silicon Valley hoodwinked the Trump administration (and we can add to this list most of Congress, as well as a great number of institutions of higher education) with AI hype. A new study out of MIT suggests that 95% of new AI ventures have fallen flat and will have no positive impact on companies’ and non profits’ P and L. In light of such news it seems unlikely that our “beautiful” nation will receive all the data centers we’ve been promised (thank God). But the truly baffling claim here has to do with coal. McKibben points to a new report that argues that keeping coal power plants alive beyond their lifespan will cost American consumers somewhere in the neighborhood of 3 to 6 billion dollars. Electricity prices are already going up for many Americans; they will only go higher under Trump’s plan. According to an NPR report from two weeks ago, electricity prices are increasing twice as fast as the cost of living. 

I have learned a lot from McKibben over the years. It’s fair to say that, in the last thirty or so years, no journalist or activist has fought quite so hard and well as he has against the fossil fuel industry. He’s also a Christian, a fact that I have trouble separating from the deep moral clarity with which he writes and speaks. But the man is not without his flaws. On occasion he will suggest that a global green energy transition is destiny, and that Trump and his retrograde cronies are merely delaying the inevitable. It’s true that, on a global scale, the cost of renewables is going down, and steeply. But important research casts doubt on the idea that a green energy future will take hold once the technology becomes cheap and widely available. Consider for example the transition from coal to natural gas and nuclear. In the US in the 1950’s, at the very moment coal ceased being used in households and in industry, its use in production of electricity skyrocketed and remained at very high rates up to the 2000s. As a matter of general rule for the twentieth century, the old forms of energy aren’t discarded so much as they are repackaged, exported, or repurposed in different applications and different settings. The picture muddies even more when you look at energy production on a global scale. The world continues to burn more biomass for fuel than it ever has before. Global consumption of coal in 2020 was 60% higher than in 2000. While coal use in countries like the UK and Europe seems destined to decline, its future is bound up with the very small number of countries that burn 70% of the world’s annual coal supply: China, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, the Philippines and Vietnam. Adam Tooze frames the matter helpfully (if with syntactical awkwardness): “energy transitions are not so much a general historical phenomenon, or societal regularity, so much as a sectoral and regional particularity dependent on technologies and complex and long-lasting investments in infrastructure.” A global green energy transition isn’t out of the question, but it will require high levels of coordination between large, cumbersome economies and governments whose goals are far from clear. And the dream of that happening of its own accord is (if you’ll again forgive the expression) nonsense on a cracker. 

Here are a few points I didn’t have the space to address in the review.

(1) Urban housing markets have feasted on the poor for a very long time—perhaps for as long as the industrial cities have been in existence. In 1842, when Friedrich Engels (of Communist Manifesto fame) moved to Manchester, England to help manage his father’s cotton mill, he spent his off-hours documenting the ways that urban landlords systematically hid from view the poorest of the working class, all while reaping huge profits from unsafe dwellings. In some districts, the city’s poorest residents, usually Irish immigrants, were crammed into shelters beside hogs destined for the slaughterhouse. He wrote: “the industrial epoch alone enables the owners of these cattlesheds to rent them for high prices to human beings, to plunder the poverty of the workers, to undermine the health of thousands, in order that they alone, the owners, may grow rich” (Conditions of the Working Class, 66). Since the 1840s, cities have gotten smarter about sanitation and preventing cholera outbreaks. But the structural problems around housing the urban poor remain as entrenched as they were for capitalist societies of the mid-nineteenth century. The sociologist Matthew Desmond sums up the matter rather dryly in his bestselling study of Milwaukee’s unhoused: “there [is] a business model at the bottom of every market” (Evicted, 61).

(2) Goldstone suggests that there are currently four million chronically homeless families in the US. Another 12 million are severely cost burdened and at imminent risk of being unhoused. What often gets lost in these figures is just how many of the unhoused are children. No one knows for sure, but every number I’ve seen is staggering. For example, just before Hobbs’s book was published (February 2025), officials in LA suggested that there are approximately 64,000 homeless children in the city of Los Angeles alone. 64,000. Let that sink in.

(3) Reductive explanations of what causes homelessness—drug addiction, alcohol addiction, mental illness—these are almost always distortions of the truth and characterize a small fraction of those who are chronically unhoused. The psychological costs of not having a stable home are well documented. Look up the studies if you’re not not convinced. It’s easy to lose sight of the brutally obvious fact that, as Goldstone and other people who study homelessness have pointed out repeatedly, the cause of homelessness is not having a home.

(4) The homeless crisis in the US is, above all, a uniquely American problem. It is undoubtedly a bipartisan failure; both parties are to blame. However, the current administration’s attempts to criminalize homelessness have a special cruelty to them. Reports of federal officials demolishing homeless encampments around DC are widespread. But there are also more sinister things going on across the country. In These Times reports that the scurrilously named Cicero Institute, brainchild of tech investor Joe Lonsdale, has written “cut and paste” legislation for state legislatures across the country. The bill makes it easier for states to prosecute homelessness as a crime. (If you go to the Cicero Institute website, which I won’t hyperlink here, you can read a draft of the bill.) The Institute pushed a version of this policy through in the city of Austin, Texas, where the group is based, but now they are taking their show on the road. The bill they’ve sponsored Kentucky may grant its citizens the right to pursue vigilante-style “justice” against anyone sleeping on the streets. From what I’ve been able to tell, the version of the bill in the North Carolina house has stalled.

(5) Last but not least: a simple reminder to those of my readers who are Christians that Jesus himself was homeless. “Foxes have dens and the birds of the sky have nests,” he says in the Gospel of Luke, “but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.”