Sherry Chandler

Two Views of Usefulness

192. A friend, a member of the Old Left, challenges my aesthetic. How, he asks, can one write so as not to “communicate”? I, in turn, challenge his definitions. It is a more crucial lesson, I argue, to learn how to experience language directly, to tune one’s senses to it, than to use it as a mere means to an end. Such use, I point out, is, in bourgeois life, common to all things, even the way we “use” our friends. Some artists (Brecht is the obvious example) try to focus such “use” to point up all the alienation, to present a bourgeois discourse “hollowed out.” But language, so that it is experienced directly, moves beyond any such exercise in despair, an unalienated language. He wants an example. I give him Grenier’s
     thumpa
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pointing out how it uses so many physical elements of speech, how it is a speech that only borders on language, how it illumines that space. He says, “I don’t understand.”

— from Ron Silliman’s The Chinese Notebook

Holly M. Brockman: I’ve heard you use the term “useful” in some of your talks, and it certainly permeates all your essays and other writing. What does usefulness mean? Who is somebody who is useful and why?

Wendell Berry: There’s a kind of language that obscures its subject. Such language makes it harder to see and to think. By the word usefulness I mean language or work that enables seeing, makes clarity. Wes Jackson’s work and language have been wonderfully useful to me in that way. Harry Caudill too, by his books and his conversation, helped me to see and think and make the radical criticism.

— from Wendell Berry’s Thoughts on the Good Life, an interview by Holly Brockman in The New Southerner

The only reason I have for putting these two quotations up in proximity is that I happened to run across them at about the same time – another of my meaningless coincidences (?). I was struck by the contrast. I don’t mean to be setting them up in contradiction, one to the other. I find the second statement more comfortable but as a poet, as I want to be a poet, I must also live in the first, even though, like the lefty friend, I don’t understand.

Possibly related posts:

Speaking prose

Joy Bale Boone Symposium

Eye Level and Wendell Berry

Two views of surrealism

More mere coincidence? Irony?

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