A Week With My Wife – A Mother’s Day Tribute To A Warrior Of Love

The week leading up to Mother’s Day 2014 has highlighted time and time again the incredible power my wife has as a mother and the effect her strengths as a woman have outwardly beyond our children, on myself and other mothers and families and friends.

When we got married about 4 1/2 years ago, all we really knew what that we wanted to make a family and care for other people and we really wanted to do it together. God gave me perspective on how this girl who thought herself weak and incapable would become someone who would boldly encourage others to have confidence and hope against their own fears. We were young and people told us before we got married that it would be really hard. We often struggled to wade through difficult seasons of our early marriage and some friends even said that they felt like we were changing for the worse. While I knew before I married her that my wife was designed to nurture others and that growing through really hard experiences would make us both more available to care for others, it still sucks to live through the actual hardships and try to maintain the belief that it’s worth it.

In the past couple of years we have started to hit our stride a bit more. We’re coming into our own identities as a family and as individuals in a way that makes us secure enough to pour out into the lives of those around us. Here’s a quick overview of the past week to give a taste of why I’m so blown away by who my wife is becoming.

On Sunday, when she was about 42 weeks pregnant, I sobbed on my wife’s shoulder because of how strong she is and how much stronger she is becoming. This is the first time this has ever happened. If she keeps growing like she has been it probably won’t be the last. On Monday, labor started around 4pm. It lasted through the night. In the midst of the insanity of hard labor, she suggested that I go take a nap so I could be rested(!?) Tuesday morning around 5:30am, after roughly 14 hours of sleepless, emotional, physically torturous labor, my wife gave birth to our third child, our first son! On Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, we had countless helps from my visiting parents and friends who have dedicated themselves to making our home less stressful. Throughout this, my wife was more engaging and involved than I would have thought she should or could be. Her mind consistently went to making sure our two preschooler daughters felt like she was still interested in them. On Thursday, she started venturing out to sit in the living room. On Friday night, she started cleaning around the house again. On Saturday, she asked to go out for a drive to get some fresh air. This morning, on Mother’s Day, she was up with all three kids before I had a chance to know what was going on. She expresses worry that she won’t be able to handle three kids, but the truth is that there is no stopping this woman.

I expected her to be in bed for at least a week or two; I thought that was more than fair. She has been blessed with a pretty quick recovery, but her eagerness to get back into the game has alarmed and humbled me. She is doing things that she never thought she could do and recovering from them ready to do more. She’s pushing through all sorts of pain and she’s aware enough to be looking after the lesser needs of others. She is a seriously powerful mom.

The Tragedy Of Childbirth: If It Hurts, Embrace It

This morning, around 5:30, my wife gave birth to a beautiful, healthy baby boy. This baby ended up coming 15 days after his original due date and was born at home, my wife’s first VBAC. Mother and child are both in absolutely wonderful, if exhausted, shape.

The 14 hours or so of labor were utterly depleting, surreal, and some of the most emotionally moving experiences I’ve partaken in. There are a few human experiences which draw out our character and beliefs through situational responses and participating in the birth of a child is one of the most moving and least discussed of these experiences.

I think we often shrug away from this sort of experience because of the amount of hope investment and lack of control available through such a trying time. People can argue statistics day and night about the safety and ethics of homebirth v. hospital birth or vaginal v. C-section, but in the end I think our prefered stance really comes out of our capability to accept life-threatening and potentially tragic situations without attempting to control them. No one wants to stand by and watch tragedy befall their loved ones, but it is a constant and real possibilty. While we understand a lot about the human body and how to “successfully” modify its efforts at the birthing process, the truth is that it knows what it’s up to and often our attempts to improve upon its effects can just as easily thwart an ideal outcome.

So why do we insist upon an ever more informed and proactive approach? I would agrue that it is generally out of a fear of experiencing the emotional gravity of a situation out of our own control. We would rather trust a professional and work to create the outcome than trust fate or nature, though the professional always knows less than what the natural body is capable of.

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As we slowly labored through the evening and the night, we experienced all available emotions. My wife was eager then scared, prayerful and penitent, cursing her existence and submissive to God’s will. She prayed for strength at time and at other times she prayed to die. She accused us of lying to her and of not trying to help her. She was a wreck and then she was utterly calm. She kept believing that she was incapable of birthing and it would never happen. Overall and through this, she was like a warrior whose battle was within her own mind and body.

I was there to help her as best I could through every contraction. Even though I didn’t experience any on the birthing pain, I got a front row seat to see the physical aspects of the pain. I shared in all her emotional fears and more. The sheer exhaustion of physically fighting a body as it tries to work a baby out creates insanity. Mostly I assumed that all the midwives thought I was a terrible husband. At times I thought of telling my wife to suck it up. I wanted to run away because I knew I wasn’t good enough. I sat in awe of her resolve. I decided that she should have tried to deal with the pain more efficiently. I knew at some point that my muscles would literally give out. Overall, we both went back and forth between having hope and losing faith. We had times of trusting each other, the birthing process in her body, the midwives, and God. We also separately experienced times of condemning one another, the entire experience, the people we had chosen to rely on, and the will of God.

Human beings need these definitive experiences. We need to run marathons that we have invested our very lives in, completely draining and testing our commitments and our trust. We tend toward shallowness and half-hearted relations. We don’t want to experience hardships that test our true merits and expose out faults. Hardships might provide solid feedback and consequences.

Pushing ourselves to emotional, physical, and spiritual brinks provides us with increased strength and knowledge of the reality of our current beliefs and what we are fit to accomplish. My wife did more than either of us originally wanted her to or expected her capable of, and she showed herself to be a hero of mine. Our son’s life is the memorial of his mother’s strength.

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I’ll leave you with this transcript of a comment from comedian Louis C.K. on the value of experiencing emotions to their fullness instead of living in distraction.

“You need to build an ability to just be yourself and not be doing something. That’s what the phones are taking away, is the ability to just sit there. That’s being a person. Because underneath everything in your life there is that thing, that empty—forever empty. That knowledge that it’s all for nothing and that you’re alone. It’s down there.

And sometimes when things clear away, you’re not watching anything, you’re in your car, and you start going, ‘oh no, here it comes. That I’m alone.’ It’s starts to visit on you. Just this sadness. Life is tremendously sad, just by being in it…

That’s why we text and drive. I look around, pretty much 100 percent of the people driving are texting. And they’re killing, everybody’s murdering each other with their cars. But people are willing to risk taking a life and ruining their own because they don’t want to be alone for a second because it’s so hard. . .

(After hearing a song that brought back sad memories.)

And I go, ‘oh, I’m getting sad, gotta get the phone and write “hi” to like 50 people’…then I said, ‘you know what, don’t. Just be sad. Just let the sadness, stand in the way of it, and let it hit you like a truck.’

And I let it come, and I just started to feel ‘oh my God,’and I pulled over and I just cried like a bitch. I cried so much. And it was beautiful. Sadness is poetic. You’re lucky to live sad moments.

And then I had happy feelings. Because when you let yourself feel sad, your body has antibodies, it has happiness that comes rushing in to meet the sadness. So I was grateful to feel sad, and then I met it with true, profound happiness. It was such a trip.

The thing is, because we don’t want that first bit of sad, we push it away with a little phone or a jack-off or the food. You never feel completely sad or completely happy, you just feel kinda satisfied with your product, and then you die.”

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Related reading

How To Get Rid Of Faith

Our Decisions Make Lives

What Daughters Should Expect From Their Fathers

How To Get Rid Of Faith

“What those ancient Greeks (who also had some understanding of philosophy) regarded as a task for a whole lifetime, seeing that dexterity in doubting is not acquired in a few days or weeks, what the veteran combatant attained when he had preserved the equilibrium of doubt through all the pitfalls he encountered, who intrepidly denied the certainty of sense-perception and the certainty of the processes of thought, incorrigibly defied the apprehensions of self-love and the insinuations of sympathy–that is where everybody begins in our time.

In our time nobody is content to stop with faith but wants to go further. It would perhaps be rash to ask where these people are going, but it is surely a sign of breeding and culture for me to assume that everybody has faith, for otherwise it would be queer for them to be. . .going further. In those old days it was different, then faith was a task for a whole lifetime, because it was assumed that dexterity in faith is not acquired in a few days of weeks. When the tried oldster drew near to his last hour, having fought the good fight and kept the faith, his heart was still young enough not to have forgotten that fear and trembling which chastened the youth, which the man indeed held in check, but which no man quite outgrows. . .except as he might succeed at the earliest opportunity in going further. Where these revered figures arrived, that is the point where everybody in our day begins to go further.

The present writer is nothing of a philosopher, he has not understood the System, does not know whether it actually exists, whether it is completed; already he has enough for his weak head in the thought of what a prodigious head everybody in our day must have, since everybody has such a prodigious thought. Even though one were capable of converting the whole content of faith into the form of a concept, it does not follow that one has adequately conceived faith and understands how one got into it, or how it got into one.”

– Soren Kierkegaard (under the pseudonym Johannes De Silentio), excerpt from the Preface of Fear And Trembling.
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This sarcastic little preface starts one of the key works of existentialism, a book that champions faith. It turns out that Kierkegaard is, contrary to his claims, capable of presenting very dense philosophical concepts. His goal in this preface seems to be to validate self-doubt in a culture of self-presumption and faith in a culture that assumes it can discover all that there is to know. Doubt and faith exist as check and balance that should last a lifetime, keeping us honest about the nature of the things we believe and helping us to more deeply trust what we have recognized as reliable truth.

The interesting point here is that “our day” for Kierkegaard was the early 1840’s. It is sometimes hard to remember that the troubled ideas of a modern age brimming with scientific discovery are not new. Just because we are only recently making rampant “discoveries for discovery’s sake” does not mean we are the first or second or fifth generation to assume we can get somewhere based on discoveries alone. Humanity has eternally presumed and desired a mysterious completion of (or in) discovery rather than faith in anything. But isn’t that a form of faith in scientific discovery?

Kierkegaard is humble enough to assume that he will never be able to Systematize existence. Just as he calls our implicit faith in sensory-perception and process-of-thought into question, he questions whether faith itself, even if we claim to understand what it entails, can be pulled out and set aside from ration.

When I read this piece I immediately think about how ready we are to hurl a slew of random statistics and scientific studies at problematic points to prove our emotionally-based opinions. There are studies and statistics available to validate nearly every opposing viewpoint available to choose from today; so much so that, though we haven’t created self-presumption and human omnipotence, our generation has nearly perfected the use of them.

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Related reads

The Tragedy Of Having A Baby

What Christians Can Learn From Athiests

Wanna Change The World? Shake Someone’s Hand!

Author Quotes: Science, Religion, and Vonnegut’s Disrespect

PROTEIN
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“He was supposed to be our commencement speaker,” said Sandra.

“Who was?” I asked.

“Dr. Hoenikker – the old man.”

“What did he say?”

“He didn’t show up.”

“So you didn’t get a commencement address?”

“Oh, we got one. Dr. Breed, the one you’re gonna see tomorrow, he showed up, all out of breath, and he gave some kind of talk.”

“What did he say?”

“He said he hoped a lot of us would have careers in science,” she said. She didn’t see anything funny in that. She was remembering a lesson that had impressed her. She was repeating it gropingly, dutifully.

“He said, the trouble with the world was …”
She had to stop and think.

“The trouble with the world was,” she continued hesitatingly,

“that people were still superstitious instead of scientific. He said if everybody would study science more, there wouldn’t be all the trouble there was.”
“He said science was going to discover the basic secret of life someday,” the bartender put in. He scratched his head and frowned.

“Didn’t I read in the paper the other day where they’d finally found out what it was?”

“I missed that,” I murmured.

“I saw that,” said Sandra.

“About two days ago.”

“That’s right,” said the bartender.

“What is the secret of life?” I asked.

“I forget,” said Sandra.

“Protein,” the bartender declared.

“They found out something about protein.”

“Yeah,” said Sandra,

“that’s it.”

 

– Kurt Vonnegut, chapter 11 of Cat’s Cradle, titled “Protein.”

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I recently reviewed Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five on the blog, and everyone shouted loudly that I must read Cat’s Cradle, which I am happily diverting from my 55 List to indulge. As I mentioned before, Vonnegut gets us comfortable, speaks to us disarmingly and then makes a silly character of all of our presumptions and standards. He says, “look, I can show you the epitome of our social normalcy, and I can damn everything about these religions and this science and this culture. It’s all rotten.”

That’s what I like about this tiny chapter. It makes a perfectly poignant, stand-alone social commentary on how easily we can assume that science can replace religion, which can replace engagement. Apparently if we understand the “how”, we need not understand the “why”.

Religion is, by definition, systematization and lifestyle adherence to a standardized philosophy. It often gives us answers which have been pre-reasoned for us. We are asked to simply concede their apparent truth. Science often attempts to walk a similar line, replacing the “here’s why” with a “here’s how.” Just because something is presented to us systematically does not invalidate it, but there is always paradox and apparent holes.

Vonnegut’s constant hostility toward these forms seems to come almost solely from his perspective on their complete lack of moral sustenance. Surviving WWII, his confidence in the integrity of most social institutions was utterly destroyed. He is able to look at Christianity and democracy and science through the lenses of Hiroshima and genocide, and his arguments are pretty convincing. Humanity is implicit in evil, Vonnegut is a grinning rebel against responsible parties, and his claim is that your religion and your scientific discoveries are worthless without moral bearings to reel them in.

Do you object?

 

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Further reading

What Christians Can Learn From An Atheist

Masanobu Fukuoka And The Philosophy Behind The Science

Wendell Berry On Paths V. Roads

Wanna Change The World? Shake Someone’s Hand!

“II” by Wendell Berry

The poignancy of this poem is palpable. Alliteration.

Go check out jrbenjamin.com, ASAP.

The Tragedy Of Having A Baby

UPDATE!!!

My wife is 41+ weeks pregnant with our third child. Even though we’ve done this (twice) before, we are attempting a VBAC home-birth and we’ve both been running the full gamut of stressful and nervous emotions. All signs point toward a healthy and comfortable baby who just doesn’t want to come out yet(who can blame them?), but expecting to go into labor every hour for 3 weeks is exhausting.

The other day, after a solid cry session, my wife expressed again her current emotions in the constant waiting and said “I just feel like something bad has happened and I have to convince myself to be okay and bear it.” The truth is that anything we put significant hope in is a tragedy until it is fulfilled. It’s not tragic because we don’t want this baby, its tragic because we really, REALLY want this baby and we can’t do anything to get at it.

From a storytelling perspective, this makes a lot of sense. The goals that any characters hope toward and how their actions and fate play together are the plot of a strong story. The only difference between a traditional comedy and a tragedy is whether the hopes of the protagonist were eventually fulfilled. In a comedy he gets the girl and the happily-ever-after. In a tragedy he dies alone. Either way, the plot along the way is tinged with some level of fear that his hope is misplaced.

I think life should be full of these experiences. They suck pretty badly, but if we want to cultivate things like faith and hopefulness then we have to pour a lot of them out before we start seeing them rewarded. We live in a world that mostly let’s us down. Whether its the people we care for or the general negativity of circumstances, cultures, or political structures, we have more reasons to stop hoping and cut off faith in beauty and love and truth-acted-upon. But there is reason to hope, though we only do so in weakness now.

We’re pushing in to this idea. We’re recognizing the confusion and frustration and are choosing actively to have hope that we will look back in joy and laugh at what becomes a comedy in hindsight. We want ever stronger and stronger muscles of faith, persevering to trust in the truth regardless of attacks or whispers against it. As a farmer plants his seeds in the spring and watches the seasons change in eagerness, we have hoped and prayed toward this child’s birth and will continue to seek and find rest in the future healthy delivery of a son or daughter (we don’t know which!)

UPDATE!!!

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Further reading

What Daughters Should Expect From Their Fathers

Wanna Change The World? Shake Someone’s Hand!

What Christians Can Learn From Atheists

Author Quotes: Dave Eggers On Why Publishing Is Scary

“Publishing other people’s work is a hell of a lot more enjoyable than publishing your own. Publishing your own work is fraught with complicated, even tortured, feelings. Invariably you believe that you’ve failed. That you could have done better. That if you were given another month or another year, you would have achieved what you set out to do.
Actually, it’s not always that bad.
But usually it is.
Publishing someone else’s work, though, is uncomplicated. You can be an unabashed champion of that work. You can finish reading it, or finish editing it, and know that it’s done, that people will love it, and that you can’t wait to print it. That feeling is strong, and it’s simple, and it’s pure.”

– Dave Eggers, Introduction to the new collected volume The Best Of McSweeney’s

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I’m sure anyone that writes fiction and takes this action seriously experiences at least fleeting questions of whether everyone else with think they are crazy for what came from their mind. It is somehow easy to feel, simultaneously, a very deep human connection with a story and a fear that no one else will connect with the same elements. It’s much easier to read a new manuscript, know that it’s wonderful, and instantly validate it because we are not responsible for it and because we have already made a human connection with the author. Two people that grasp the value of a work is all that is needed to be sure of its merit.

I recently self-published an odd little children’s book that I have come to love. Self-publishing has been a really fun and positive experience and using Kickstarter to fund it provided a lot of community support that made all the difference, but having very little outside editing and really only printing on my own approval made me all the more apprehensive about the reception of the story.

People have finally started receiving and reading the book with a lot of positive responses, but the most impactful came last night, when my aunt contacted me and expressed a deep understanding of the simple story. Having at least one person grasp the human elements makes all the difference.

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Excerpts from my aunt’s response to Wandlung.

“Got your book today. Read it five times to six different people. . .It took me until the third read to really warm up to it partly because I like happy endings. Yet, in life, especially when our lives interact with others, we can’t always expect a happy ending. Sometimes friendships are only for a season and we go our separate ways. It’s not always a pain we acknowledge or even stop to properly grieve.”

Mary Berry and What She Expects From Her Father

“It is hard to imagine now that until coming back to live permanently in Henry County in 1964 we had lived in Europe, California and New York City, with stays in Kentucky between those moves. We moved to Lanes Landing, where my parents live now, when I was 7 and my brother, Den, was 3. . .

Daddy was encouraged to seek his fame and fortune elsewhere; in fact, he was told that coming home would ruin his career. I don’t have to imagine, however, the great happiness that was his when he knew that he could come home because I experienced that. When I was away at school, for instance, I don’t think anyone was thinking that I was blowing a shot at a brilliant career by returning home. Coming home was not encouraged by any influential person in my life except my family. And this is where my unending debt begins in my heart and in my memory. . .

I was asked once what it was like to be a Berry child. I answered that it was fine except for the constant humiliation. I believe that I went along with my father’s plans for us very agreeably until I was 12 or 13, the age when I think many children realize that their parents need guidance.

Daddy had come home to live and farm. He bought a rocky hillside farm overlooking the Kentucky River. He and my mother have added some acreage over the years and the place has been their home and their fascination ever since. . .

I went right along with all of this until I was old enough to have a reputation to protect. That coincided with the addition of a composting privy to the rest of an ever-more-embarrassing way of life.

Unfortunately for me, my father didn’t understand at all that he should. . .never mention the composting privy to a journalist. I was in a difficult predicament. I never really thought that my father was wrong about anything. In fact, the reasons for the things we did at home were talked about all of the time, and I understood and even honored those reasons. But, to have details about your composting privy reported in the Louisville Courier-Journal was just too much to be borne. . .

The very public privy opened the floodgates and suddenly I knew how abused I was: no television, no junk food, no trips to amusement parks, and I had to WORK outside in the dirt. And, my father was always protesting something: wars, dams, strip-mining, airports, etc.

Well, to make a long story short, I expect that by the time I left for college there must have been a general sigh of relief. Some of the freshman English classes at the college I attended were reading The Memory of Old Jack, a novel written by my father. I had not read it before I left home. In fact, I had read almost nothing of Daddy’s by then. He read things to us that he was working on and I guess I thought that was plenty. I suppose I experienced positive peer pressure at school because girls in my dorm were reading The Memory of Old Jack. So I read The Memory of Old Jack, myself. That book gave me back my home and it gave me the chance to make amends with my father and then to find out that no amends were necessary. . .

A heartbreaking part of Old Jack’s story is his estrangement from his daughter Clara, who, like me, had wanted something else, something better. I called my father when I finished the book and asked, “Am I Clara?” I remember being reassured by the phone call. I still have the letter he wrote me a few days after we talked. He said that he was moved by my question and told me that of course I was not Clara. The letter is long and beautiful and I treasure it because of its kindness, its good sense, its understanding of a flawed young girl. . .

Trouble has come to me in my life as it does to all and I have made mistakes. The gift that my father gave me so many years ago was the knowledge that I live in his love, and if forgiveness is needed it has already been given. What greater gift could a parent give a child? Daddy has kept alive in my head — even in the worst of times and in the face of awful news — that if we actively choose it over and over everyday, we can indeed live in the world of affection and membership that he honors in his life and his stories.”

 

– Mary Berry-Smith, from Wendell And Me, published in the May/June 2013 issue of Edible Louisville Magazine (emphasis mine).

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I find so many details about this story life-giving, but the real solidifying agent for my respect of Wendell Berry is that his child knows and can articulate why she respects him so greatly as to devote her adult life and the family she started to following in his footsteps. Many great leaders of men have inspired the masses while leaving wreckage at home, but those devoted eternally to their families carry a certain weight that should not be overlooked.

As a parent myself, the greatest impact of this story is the fact that above all else in their relationship, Berry’s daughter has been moved by a realization that she has always existed in her father’s love, affection, and forgiveness. She came to realize that, whether she knew it or not, he cherished her, delighted in her personality, and was always ready to pardoned her missteps.

Things like obedience are valuable. Social skills and a drive to learn are developmentally key. But after about 18 years, obedience becomes completely obsolete in the parenting relationship. Social skills and learning generally fall out of our influence range. So when my daughter it 25 or 30, what is my deepest desire for our relationship? The answer is intimacy.

More than I want my daughters to make great decisions and live to the fullest, I want them to know that any failures or tragedies that befall them can be safely confided in me, without any negative repercussions. The deepest, underpinning goal is that the relationship may always be authentic, open, and capable of enduring all things.

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From the text of The Memory Of Old Jack.

“In all their minds his voice lies beneath a silence. And in the hush of it they are aware of something that passed from them and now returns: his stubborn biding with them to the end, his keeping of faith with them who would live after him, and what perhaps none of them has yet thought to call his gentleness, his long gentleness toward them and toward this place where they are at work, they know that his memory holds them in common knowledge and common loss, the like of him will not soon live again in this world, and they will not forget him.”

Keats And A Creative Fear Of Death

“When I have fears that I may cease to be

~~Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,

Before high-piled books, in charact’ey,

~~Hold like rich garners the full-ripen’d grain;

When I behold, upon the night’s starr’d face,

~~Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,

And think that I may never live to trace

~~Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;

And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!

~~That I shall never look upon thee more,

Never have relish in the faery power

~~Of unreflecting love!–then on the shore

Of the wide world I stand alone, and think

Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

– John Keats, When I Have Fears
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I find this poem so deeply relatable. I have many books and stories I am in process of completing and I always tend to keep more content in my head than on paper. I would assume that most other artists have contemplated the fear of dying without completing the work they can visualize. J.D. Salinger had a 6 chapters draft of The Catcher And The Rye stuffed in his jacket when he landed on the Normandy beaches on D-Day. I wonder what other manuscripts didn’t survive that day? That’s not to mention the countless authors like Dickens who have died in the midst of some of their most intriguing work.

This poem is not simply about leaving unfinished work. It’s also about the fear of leaving behind the very inspirations of this world. Keats writes like a man nurtured by romanticized nature and the triumphs of artists before him. For him the standing alone, thinking, and sinking into nothingness must have been greater than most. To be inspired is to run great risk.

Author Quotes: Guy Davenport On Tolkien’s Bluegrass Shire

“The closest I have ever gotten to the secret and inner Tolkien was in a casual conversation on a snowy day in Shelbyville, Kentucky. I forget how in the world we came to talk of Tolkien at all, but I began plying questions as soon as I knew that I was talking to a man who had been at Oxford as a classmate of Ronald Tolkien’s. He was a history teacher, Allen Barnett. He had never read The Hobbit or The Lord Of The Rings. Indeed, he was astonished and pleased to know that his friend of so many years ago had made a name for himself as a writer.

‘Imagine that! You know, he used to have the most extraordinary interest in the people here in Kentucky. He could never get enough of my tales of Kentucky folk. He used to make me repeat family names like Barefoot and Boffin and Baggins and good names like that.’

And out of the window I could see tobacco barns. The charming anachronism of the hobbit’s pipes suddenly made sense in a new way. The Shire and its settled manners and shy hobbits have many antecedents in folklore and in reality. . .Kentucky, seems, contributed its share.”

– Guy Davenport, essay excerpt from The Geography Of The Imagination

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While enlightening, this revealing little excerpt may not be as interesting to non-Kentuckians. I am myself of Bluegrass stock and, having lived away for a few years now, I am continuing to see my appreciation of the simple green nooks of the Ohio River Valley snowball with every continuing season. This little tidbit makes me almost as excited about Kentucky as having Wendell Berry among our numbers.

It has been argued that Davenport stretches this Kentucky idea and perhaps Tolkien did not often reconsider his stories from Barnett in the writing of The Hobbit. It does seem unlikely that Barnett would know nothing of Tolkien’s success and yet trump up these recollections, so I would assume that either he knew more of Tolkien’s works than he let on or Davenport stretched the truth in his retelling their conversation. If neither of these is true, it does seem hard to see no connection whatsoever between Barnett’s recollections and Tolkien’s writing.

The truth of the matter is that I am a quarter Irish and a quarter I-Don’t-Know, both from Cincinnati, Ohio. The other half in me is Appalachian. With family names like Ball, Hensley, and Phillips; its safe to guess that most of those ancestors started out on rolling English hills before the uprooted to rolling Kentucky hills. The reason Tolkien would have been fascinated by Kentucky would be that it reminded him of the rural English countryside of his youth. It was the land rooted-ness, the folk-ishness underlying these similar peoples, that obviously and undeniably fascinated him.

The hill people with their limited outside knowledge and unique local customs were at the heart of Tolkien’s most popular myths. For years, he created a fantastic world of higher orders of beings warring for pure good and evil. Then, almost accidentally, he stuck in an entire race Hobbits; the Kentucky-rural, English bumpkins who didn’t know there were other lands with which to be concerned.

Realizing this, I can’t help but feel proud, then insulted, then honored. Proud to be associated with a culture that Tolkien found fascinating. Insulted to see how backwards and ignorant he (accurately?) paints such cultures. Ultimately, its an honor to realize that The Lord Of The Rings really points out that simple people can continually surprise you with their bravery and willingness to fight for good.

If you understand Tolkien, you begin to realize that he cherished the idea of localized, slow-growth cultures. He was fearful of the impending washout of all cultures to one, because he valued the traditions and heritage of all peoples, and the truth, beauty, and courage that can be built upon and passed down by every Father.

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I will leave you with this interesting bit from Davenport’s essay. He met Hugo Dyson, the loudest of the Inklings and class clown of the group who stuck his foot in his mouth with everyone he met. He would often refuse to participate in meetings if his dear friend Tolkien’s fantasy manuscripts were to be read aloud.

“‘Dear Ronald,’ Dyson said, ‘Writing all those silly books with three introductions and ten appendixes. His was not a true imagination, you know: He made it all up.’ I have tried for fifteen years to figure out what Dyson meant by that remark.”