Tend Your Own Garden
Twelve thoughts in defense of the apolitical
Besides the following, I have a new piece of writing out with the journal Mere Orthodoxy on the theme of “empty words.” It takes up language as a garden, Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World, and artificial writing. I hope you’ll give it a read on the Mere O website.
In the wake of last week’s election, the novelist Kat Rosenfield has published an essay in the Boston Globe with the plaintive title: “Can we please have less political art now?” She leads the piece with a litany of recent works of art that espoused scrupulously correct political values—novels in which characters share their pronouns and songs edited to remove any hint of offense—observing that eight years of this “art as resistance” has proved spectacularly ineffective. More importantly, however, “The fierce conformism urged by the resistance completely misses the point of art, which even when it reflects political themes is never only political. It’s bigger than that, more beautiful; art speaks not to how we vote but to how we live.” Rosenfield is right, of course, but I don’t have much optimism that her appeal will be heard. Our imaginations are held captive by the political and narrowly partisan. Freeing our artists from that captivity will take more than one election result, and more than one appeal.
My politics can be stated rather simply: I am committed to a rather prim and proper old-fashioned morality and an emphasis on community (in an expansive sense of the term) over individualism. Since the politics of my state and our nation seem rather to be animated primarily by greed and resentment, I expected that most of the representatives and propositions I voted for would be losers, as indeed they were. My values, of course, have been losers at the ballot box for my entire adult life, and so such a result was nothing new. I mourn the fact that my fellow citizens can’t see how much better off they would be if they would only conform to my infinite wisdom, but as an essayist I can’t entirely regret my distance from the political mainstream. As essayist’s job, after all, is to prompt new thoughts, and such thoughts are hard to come by if your values line up neatly with the principalities and powers of your culture. So much better, in my view, to be a little orthogonal to it all.
The essay is a wandering, wayfaring form; a set of thought experiments, following the thread of an idea to see where it leads. The excitement and interest of a well-constructed essay is to trace the writer’s mind in action, which may involve writer and reader in false starts, wrong turns, and long ways around. An essayist’s job is not to draw conclusions so much as to make a start. So endorsement of a political program is not suited to the work that I do as an essayist. Rather than to form consensus, I have something of a duty to ward it off. Such a position about the purposes of art is, of course, unwelcome in the age of resistance art. But I take some comfort in recognizing my wandering approach would be familiar to the masters of my form: to Montaigne, Thoreau, Orwell, Berry.
On election night, my wife Rachel and I watched a comedy show and went to bed. I had half-jokingly stated that I would try to see how many days I could go without finding out the results of the election, but I woke the next morning and found that myself troubled and preoccupied, so I looked at a headline, then returned to my book. (I am reading a collection of the original Tracts for the Times, works of Anglo-Catholic theology from the nineteenth century.) I was teaching that day, part of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and an excerpt from C.S. Lewis’ Out of the Silent Planet, and I addressed myself to those classes as if there was nothing more important in the world than that material and those students, because, for me, there wasn’t.
I feel an irresistable compulsion, always, to profane the idols—to scorn those things which I am told I ought to care about because they are so important. There’s no doubt something childish and a little perverse in this part of my personality, but in my best moments I think it lets me refuse my attention to things that really don’t deserve it.
Rachel is a fiber artist, working in a medium that’s domestic and practical but in which (she tells me) many practitioners insist that their work must be vigorously politicized. Sewing as an act of resistance. I can’t help but feel that this trivializes the craft. Sewing, weaving, and fabric are fundamental to human civilization. These crafts existing long before American democracy and will continue, God willing, long after our current political arguments have long since died. Is it really fitting to the dignity of these ancient and essential disciplines to concern them so insistently with our fleeting political moment?
The theological ethicist Oliver O’Donovan has written: “The notion that political deliberation is basically about the rival claims of competing parties is one which the church must do everything it can to challenge. Political deliberation is about understanding our situation truthfully.” Art is not necessarily nonpartisan, but its partisan allegiances are to parties that may not be represented by the politicians of the moment. An essayist must be a partisan in the cause of truth; a craftsperson must insist on the good of the craft, which might mean that she refuses to yoke it to one fleeting political debate.
O’Donovan again: “The worship that the principalities and powers seek to exact from mankind is a kind of feverish excitement. The first business of the church is to refuse them that worship. There are many times – and surely a major Election is one of them – when the most pointed political criticism imaginable is to talk about something else.” If, in O’Donovan’s scheme, it is the role of the church to remind us of deeper things than the passing frenzies of politics, the same must also be true of the arts. Artists help us most when they point us to something more fundamental. If an artist is just a sort of opinion columnist in a scarf, you’ll have to excuse me for losing interest. Opinion columns, after all, used to be printed on something one would later use to start a fire or to line a litterbox. I would hope for art to offer something slightly more enduring. The great ones manage somehow to care about the issues of their day and yet still make work that endures. I think of Dante’s Divine Comedy—a work both timely and timeless. Or consider Charles Dickens, who in novels like Bleak House or Hard Times expressed a bitter moral outrage over the injustices of his time, yet did so in a form that rendered his moral and political vision ever more relevant. His portraits of Josiah Bounderby or Mrs. Jellyby illuminate more about our current political situation than many works of art that have been written more narrowly out of a desire for “resistance.”
It’s a funny thing, in the wake of a national election, to have a book coming out that is literally about tending your own garden. Clearly, for many writers and artists today, “to talk about something else” in so flagrant and sustained a manner must mean I’m okay with whatever atrocities are taking place, just benefitting from my white and male privilege. There is no meaningful defense against these charges I can make, or would want to. All I can really do is to point at the world, and the work, and to invite my readers to see what I see. In fact, my writing does have a political and even a partisan dimension to it, insofar as I want my work to serve the good of my community and I have certain definite ideas about what sorts of steps might serve that end. What I will insist upon is that it’s my right as an essayist to hold something in view that’s longer-term and more enduring than the next election.
Meghan O’Gieblyn has an essay in which she observes that people of her class and generation (artsty and writerly people approaching middle age) “speak easily of our internal lives” and “regard most social contexts as occasions to divulge the experiences we deem most crucial to our personal development.” That is, we are exquisitely aware of our mental health, our personal hangups, and we scrutinize these difficulties endlessly. However, O’Gieblyn notes, “awareness is not the same as perspective; sometimes the former is an obstacle to the latter.” Something similar is true, I think, of politics. Those who do the most to remain “aware of what’s going on” may in fact be those least likely to understand them.
Tending your own garden, whether literally or metaphorically, must inevitably take away from your awareness of the present political drama. What it might give you in exchange is a little perspective, a sense that the world is bigger than the news, or the inside of your phone.
In other matters, I have been much occupied, over the past week, with gathering and processing firewood. We don’t heat our home with wood or anything close to that point, so all I need is to scavenge a few logs from trees downed in storms or for other problems, then split them with axe, maul, and wedge. I bought a Fiskars splitting axe, which I am finding one of the most pleasing tools I have ever used, and each day after work I go out to the yard and split a few rounds while my children look on from a safe distance. They find this task curiously pleasing, as do I. I am gathering wood that would otherwise go to waste, with little expenditure other than some time and sweat. Through the exertions of my body and some simple tools, I transform that waste product into something useful, steadily building up a neat little stack on the edge of my yard. With each blow of the axe, I change the world, reveal something never before seen by human eyes, turn something fallen into a source of warmth, making things over little by little into the way they ought to be.