Highest & Best Use (Part 2 of 2)
Highest & Best Use (Part 2 of 2)
A Letter to My Cousin, Continued...
This is the second part of a letter and essay. To read the first part, click here.
Consider your own farming in light of the Irish cultural revival. Your local markets have disappeared. The wheat you produce isn’t milled here, nor is that flour leavened or baked here. Nearly all of the wheat you produce is exported to foreign countries. At least there’s a market, some will say. However, you’re producing for a market that exploits your labor and land, offering you a smaller and smaller margin against higher and higher risk. Those markets, separated from the people who grow the crops, have two daughters named Give and Give.
Consider when you go to the grocery store. Nearly every brand of bread is owned by a single corporation headquartered in Mexico City1. Despite being part of a region that grows a majority of the world’s wheat2, we are compelled to import the very bread we eat. What Wendell Berry says of his own Port Royal, Kentucky, can be said of our Umbarger:
“We…are part of an agricultural region surrounded by cities that import much of their food from distant places. We produce practically no vegetables or other foods for consumption in our region. Having no local food economy, we produce less and less diverse food supply for the general market. This condition implies and virtually requires the abuse of our land and our people, and they are abused.”
The policies of that Mexican bakery corporation are celebrated, award-winning even, for their language about health, communities, and nature. But a policy is not a person. A charity donation is more a tax write-off than it is a change in practice; it is not the same as leaving the field corners ungleaned.
I can see the changes in our land. All of the playa lakes were full when our dads were young. Many of the tributary creeks were spring fed, but the water table has dropped and the underground springs have disappeared; along gullies the skeleton copses of elms tell me that water was just below the surface once. The house we live in was built in 1995 and had a 250-ft well. This summer, we had to drill to the next—and last—aquifer at 498-ft.
Even from a distance of thirty minutes, I can hear your exasperation with the weather and the finances and the massive overhead in equipment and land you’re expected to maintain. A policy separates the corporation from its responsibility. They won’t change what they do based on problems you face on your farm. They still have bakeries that run twenty-four hours a day. They have supermarkets to supply. They have stockholders who only see pie charts. They have creditors at the world’s largest banks. When your well runs dry, their policy does not help you drill a deeper one. And their kind of policy compelled us all to drink the primordial aquifer dry.
The Wild West period between 1865-1890—before all the tributary rail lines were built—produced the great American myth of the cowboy and the cattle drive. At least in Texas, operations would gather wild, longhorn cattle and drive them to markets in larger ports like Wichita, Kansas, which then fed the slaughterhouses in Chicago or New York City. So much of the American identity is tied up with those cattle-driving legends. But it’s less well-known that all of the longhorns driven out of all the mesquite thickets in Texas during those years could not even supply New York City’s voracity for a single year. Wendell Berry again: “The Civil War made America safe for the moguls of the railroads…who wanted to be free to exploit the countryside. They have dispossessed, disinherited, and moved into the urban economy almost the entire citizenry; they have defaced and plundered the countryside.”
The corporations are not the only ones to blame. I have to blame myself, too. Like I said, my house is in the urban sprawl, and I make my living appraising the developments. I buy the bread at the grocery store because I spend the majority of my day at a desk in order to pay the bank for my fallow land. My acreage could easily produce enough wheat to supply my entire neighborhood with bread. I gnash my teeth about watering my yard, but I turn on the faucet because I’m mindful of conforming to the neighborhood, so the bank who loaned me the money (then sold the loan thrice to upstream banks) can maintain maximum profitability. I benefit because my assets appreciate. And so does everyone in Amarillo.
Daniel Corkery, a politician and academic, noticed the same thing about his fellow Irishmen. Speaking of Irish literature though, and the Irish consumers of literature, he said,
[Ireland] shows itself scornful of the judgment of this country, shows itself indeed utterly provincial in its overwrought desire to be assessed and spoken well of by the critics of another people…It should abide the judgement of its own people, and by that judgement live or die.
When people write stories in the Texas Panhandle, they do so looking over their shoulder for the approval of outside critics. Readers of books—those rare birds—look to see if our local boy or gal received a thumbs up from New York. They couldn’t be asked to judge for themselves what might be a good story. But New York does not possess the only writers, nor the only education that produces writers. Don’t let New York distract you from my point: a town like Umbarger, or Canyon, or Tulia, or Perryton has in them writers who will challenge the static gods of the empire if we’ll just take our own songs seriously. And if we didn’t just try to write stories they want to hear in New York.
The theologian Walter Brueggemann, contemplating the miracle of Moses extracting the nation of Hebrews out of Egypt after they’d been assimilated and enslaved for four hundred years, made the observation that as Moses led the Hebrews, he composed a series of songs:
It is only a poem, and we might say rightly that singing a song does not change reality. However…the evocation of an alternative reality consists at least in part in the battle for language and the legitimization of a new rhetoric. The language of the empire is surely the language of managed reality, of production and schedule and market. But that language will never permit freedom because there is no newness in it. Doxology is the ultimate challenge to the language of managed reality, and it alone is the universe of discourse in which energy is possible….doxology cuts through the ideology that pretends to be a given. Only where there is doxology can there be justice, for such songs transfigure fear into energy.
Brueggemann is discussing what sort of imagination a prophet must have to first criticize the injustice of the status quo gods, but also to give form to grief, and finally to energize a people into creating something new. His example lies in the Exodus story, but it seems as though the Irish revival could be described with the same words. “A prophet,” he says,
is called to be a child of the tradition, one who has taken it seriously in the shaping of his own perception and system of language, who is so at home in that memory that the points of contact and incongruity can be discerned and articulated with proper urgency.
Umbarger was founded in 1895. Umbarger is an ugly word. It’s German and means “an ill-mannered or boorish person.” The town was named for a man, Umbarger, a former Confederate Lieutenant from Virginia. After the Red River Wars eradicated the Comanche in the 1880s, the federal government granted land through Texas to the railroads; the railroads, in turn, could sell the land cheaply to pioneers and immigrants.
Lt. Umbarger was the first person to establish a permanent trading post along the railroad, so the Panhandle and Santa Fe rail lines gave the town his name with no mind to what the name meant. In 1907, the German Catholic priest, Joseph Reisdorff, planted the Marienkirche, or St. Mary’s Church. He also established the town of Nazareth thirty miles south. I haven’t been able to find this in my research, but it’s my understanding that when he came to Umbarger, he intended to rename our town Bethlehem. That’s the way the story came to me, anyway, in those background conversations that the adults had at dinner tables and over dominoes.
In 1904, twenty-two year old James Joyce began writing a collection of short stories that would eventually become Dubliners. The first three stories were published in The Irish Homestead, Horace Plunkett’s agricultural journal. Yet, he could find no legitimate, literary Irish publisher for the whole collection. Partly because of the sexual content of his books, which would seem tame to us now, but at the time could have landed him and his publisher in hot water. Joyce could also be a boor to his own people. Yet he found favor with two literary giants, Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, in London.
In 1916, after a decade of writing and attempting to publish his first novel in Ireland, James Joyce finally released his autobiographical, coming-of-age story A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. He was able to have it published serially in London in 1914-15, and then in America in 1916. The painful irony being that he could find no Irish publisher for his Irish stories. If an Irishman wished to read Joyce, he would have to import the book as we import our bread. Joyce himself emigrated from Ireland to mainland Europe, spending the rest of his life in London, Paris, and Trieste3 before he fled Italy in World War II for Switzerland and died of a stomach ulcer in Zurich.
When I say Joyce’s fictional novel was autobiographical, I mean that it’s difficult to tell the difference between Joyce and the novel’s main character Stephen Dedalus. Stephen attended the same schools as Joyce, lived on the same streets, drank in the same pubs and so on. The life and language and characters of Portrait—and his later novels Ulysses and Finnegans Wake— were a mirror to the city that formed him. That’s not an accident. It’s just as the title suggests: a self-portrait. Of course, an artist can paint himself in any number of ways and we’d recognize the person and also recognize the artifice. We’ve all seen Van Gogh’s self-portrait4. No one would mistake it for the man himself, but by his art we understand what he may have looked like. Imagine the million paint strokes, pigments suspended in oil, hue after hue, that build into an image. Now consider that achievement rendered in language, spanning twenty years of a life, written across the weathers of a decade.
The subject of any self-portrait is obviously the artist himself. The limit of a painting, besides its frame, is time. An artist must sit for and finish the painting in a few hours. We are given a record of a moment. With Portrait though, we are not just given a record of a moment, but the record of a culture which bore the artist. As he says, “This race and this country and this life produced me. I shall express myself as I am.” The final touches of Joyce’s Portrait—his signature, if you will—is this statement about his future ambitions as an artist: “I go for the millionth time into the reality of experience to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”
That’s an audacious thing to say about oneself: I’m going to forge the uncreated conscience of my race. But if there were ever—in Brueggemann’s terms—a child of the Irish tradition, one who has taken seriously the community’s system of language, then it would have been Joyce. No other artist, before or since, has been so at home in Ireland’s memory, her history of languages, her imagination. In short, her conscience.
Three of America’s largest banks are in New York and San Francisco. The monetary assets managed by those three institutions are so large and abstract, they may as well be numbering stars, or sand, or hairs on your head. No single one of their employees can humanly have a grasp on those numbers, but each has her tasks laid out: buttons she must push, correspondence she must maintain, policies she must develop and enforce. She probably doesn’t like her job or what the banks do to generate profits, but she is dutiful and reasonably efficient and she needs to put bread on the table. These people, because of their proximity to the levers of money flow, are influential.
Our region of America is commonly referred to as “flyover country” by those influential citizens in the major ports of culture. Seated placidly in chairs, designed for people smaller than the average person, nonetheless cruising at speeds inconceivable to most human beings in history, they peer through tiny, double-paned portholes on the wide earth below. From those heights and those speeds, I’m sure they see wastes void of notable architecture smeared like butter across milquetoast topography. Various browns, tans, beiges, venturing into dull ochres and dusty greens are carved into the geometrical shapes of crops.
From the ground, we see the evidence of their passing: the contrails criss-crossing—hither and thither—the occasional glint of sunlight along their aluminum fuselages, while in all seasons, there is much to consider where the soles of my feet meet the soil. In the untended land at the back of my five acres, I’ve counted no less than seventeen varieties of weeds, most of which remain nameless to me. But I can catalog a few: pink and white-flowered bindweeds, kochia (which grows into tumbleweed), purple thistles, pigweed, ragweed (which carpets the dry playa lake with a billion yellow flowers in early spring), and a naturalized black-eyed susan (which I’ve seen teeming with black ants I don’t find anywhere else on the property). When the rains come every four or five years, the playa lake fills up and the frogs that had brumated, estivated, and somehow did not get desiccated crawl out of their deep mud slumbers to call and get mated. It is cacophonous. It is loud enough to keep one up at night. It is all there, living and dying, six inches either side of the surface, by a providence whose eye is on the sparrow feasting on windborne thistleseeds; whose eye is on the swallow flicking her weight in mosquitoes from the air; and the rare heron overwintering on frogs, all independent of my attention, flittering hither and thither. It’s there for those with eyes to see.
I was talking to my friend, the linguist Dr. Ryan Pennington. He and his family spent a decade in Papua New Guinea learning the oral languages of indigenous tribes who have no written alphabets. Effectively, they are in the Stone Age, like the Clovis tribe who left no record of their culture save a few spearheads. Ryan oversaw a team of linguists who were building alphabets for these tribes, partly to preserve their cultures in language, but also in the hopes of being able to translate the Holy Scriptures into their languages. This is a multi-generational project both on the part of the linguists and the tribes.
He told me that many cultures use spatial language to talk about time. We do this. For us, moving forward indicates the future; backwards is the past. “In languages like Ma Mandi,” he said, “where they escaped warfare in the valley and moved forward up into the mountains, the upward directional terms have come to be associated with future and progress. Weirdly though, that language in particular did not have a future tense. It had multiple layers of past tense, but no future.”
If a language has no verb for the future—no way to describe actions we will take—how do we even begin to imagine the future?
Likewise, if I allow a bank in New York City to define what is the highest and best use of my land according to their terms—again the maximum profitability for their organization—then I have subscribed to their imagination for what is actually highest and best.
The Whole Essay
You just finished the first of three letters that comprise this whole essay. The final two letters dive deeper into how language, specifically local language, trains us to imagine ourselves and our community. I get pretty close to James Joyce in the second letter, and then I come back to Umbarger with a manifesto for how to be a writer from a small place. Whether you’re a writer or a farmer or a citizen at large, I think the essay is helpful. I wrote it out of love.
Many writers are migrating to the Substack/Email format because it gives us more control over what we publish, when we publish, and possibly how much we can earn. I subscribe to many writers who offer both free and paid subscription options. I’m not sure how I feel about charging readers for an email. Maybe I’m showing my geriatric millennial gray hairs, but the medium matters. So for the foreseeable future, I’ll continue to write the email essays for free. However, since writing is work and a workman should be paid his wages, I’ve hit upon another way. I’ll be making these essays available for purchase in another medium.
My friend Joshua Aaron Davis designed a booklet (you know, printed on paper) that is available for purchase at SethWieck.com. It’s small enough to fit in your back pocket and maybe carry with you instead of a phone. Or read at the coffee shop and leave for the next customer. Or lend to a friend. Or carry into a public restroom with a Sharpie to scrawl passages on the stall walls.
On the day that I am writing this paragraph—Holy Saturday, April, 16, 2022—the market price for a bushel of wheat is $11.13, which is about as high as it has ever been. One bushel of wheat will make ninety one-pound loaves of bread. The cheapest one-pound loaf of bread I found at my local grocery store was $2.69. My family buys about two loaves per week. For easy math, I figure our family consumes about one bushel of wheat in sandwich bread every year; if those prices held for the whole year, we’ll spend $269 on bread made from wheat for which you earned $11. To spit on your sore, you drive thirty minutes to buy bread at the same grocery store I do and pay the same $269 a year.
The Great Plains. Texas actually ranks 7th in wheat production in the United States.
Our grandad, John Wieck, was injured by a German M1 Garand rifle grenade launcher in Italy. Later, while he was hospitalized, his division, the 88th Infantry Blue Devils liberated Trieste.
Van Gogh painted at least 35 self-portraits over his brief life. If you’re the average person, like me, you’re likely to remember a composite of many similar images.
One of my favorite things about your writing, in general, Seth, is how you draw these parallel lines in the dust or soil of different places across time and space. And I like how those lines, as you draw us nearer to them oscillate sort of as a fractal- that unified pattern across scales. Anyway- I thank you for your generous sharing of your labor.