Pseudogamy 107

     I've been reading a delightful book by a Breton (last name Helias; can't remember his Christian name) about what it was like to grow up on that foggy, rainy peninsula, before the World War.  He's writing in the 1970's, long after it has come to him with the weight of nostalgia that that way of life, or, more accurately, that distinctive Breton culture, had nearly disappeared.  He mourns this impoverishment, not because he thought that the old ways were all wise and good, all sweetness and light.  His chapter-long description of what happens when someone dies is a fascinating study in charity and pride, generosity and selfishness.  Who comes to pay respects to the body?  Where do the people sit, and who gets to sit where?  If you are kin, but you live far away, and you can't afford to leave your farm, what do you do?  Who cleans the corpse if it's a man, and who does it if it's a woman?  Who's that odd fellow showing up before the priest, singing out prayers of his own half-wild devising?  He mourns it, just as we'd mourn a particular friend -- this man here, this Ed with the big ears, or this Joe who never could turn down a bottle of gin; because it was a good thing to live at the same time and the same place where there was this Ed or this Joe, and now the poor slob is gone, and we're the poorer for it.

     There's a lot of humor too in the book, some of it lost on the B-minus sociology student who evidently owned it before I did.  When the author was a little boy, his grandfather, one of those big-shouldered shambling grandfatherly sorts who knows all things and says some of them, explained to him the difference between the sexes.  "Girls are like broom, and boys are like gorse," he said.  The broom, he explained, flowers all spring and summer, and has long slender delicate branches that sway in the wind.  Girls are like that, he said, and that's why they sweep the broom in the house.  Boys, he went on, are hard and spiny like the gorse bush.  You can't easily grab them without getting a thorn in your hand.  They don't bloom for long, but they're tough, and they stay outdoors, and they brave the elements.  So, of course, when the lad and his sister were on the outs with one another, she would call him prickly-gorse, and he would call her finicky-broom, and each thought it was good to be gorse or broom and silly to be the other.  Which was, when you think of it, healthy enough, and exactly right.  My B-minus sociology student, misunderstanding the anecdote and evidently never having had to do any work to raise calluses all over the hands, wrote at the top of the page, "Gender dichotomy very strict."

     Well, I doubt a Breton woman would have looked twice at a young man who said to her, "I'd like to spend most of the day in the house cooking and knitting.  You can tend the animals, plow the fields, and chop down trees."  The point is that a way of life comes to be what it is because it works, and more than that, because people fall in love with it.  It becomes theirs, just as the land is theirs.  It's important to assert that this way of life I'm talking about is not describable statistically; it isn't what a certain large number of people do, as if they could reasonably choose to do something completely different.  It's a culture, embracing every single person living within it, and all of them together in their families and clans and parishes.  Now it may be that the culture that Helias describes could not possibly survive the World War -- and cultures, like Ed and Joe, go the way of all flesh; they are born and they flower, they age and they die.  But we ought to shed a tear for them when they die, as we'd shed a tear for Ed or Joe.  And we'd hope that one culture would be replaced by another, just as, though Ed may no longer be with us, his grandson Matty is, and right now is standing on the fencepost teasing the dog with a bicycle horn.

     What has happened, though, and what Helias could not really penetrate to the heart of, since it is a new thing in man's history, is that a thriving culture dies and is not replaced by anything at all.  What comes to the fore instead is not some other thing that we love as if it were permanent, though it isn't, but another thing that we don't care a rat's tail about because it is essentially transient, and so are we.  It isn't just that we move about a lot, though we do.  It is that we have come to consider permanence of any sort to be an affront to our beings, to our sovereign "choice".  Which means that "culture," such as it is, is demoted to a smorgasbord to meet Mike's taste in Bach and Marty's taste in jazz, with nothing really to unite everyone in acts of general love or worship or celebration.  Divorce, as I've written in an old article for Crisis magazine, is the sacrament for this new anti-state of affairs.

     I'm not the only one, not by far.  Wendell Berry writes about it all the time -- writes about how you can't understand rootedness to a place you love and to the "membership" of people who live there without understanding what marriage is all about.  In a sense, easy divorce is a function of the more general and heart-dampening transience.  We don't tend the land with care; we treat animals as if they were no more than meat-making machines; we ship our children off to day-asylums and then to school, and when they are not at school we leave them in the care of Hollywood; we don't know our neighbors; and we, surprise, surprise, uphold no-fault divorce.  That last is the stake in the community's heart.  It is transience in the most intimate relation we know on earth.  And we raise our children up for it: witness their "relationships," one after the other, ruin after ruin, or worse, lassitude of soul after lassitude of soul, and then they marry, and we expect them to live as if the vows they make really meant something.  Somehow we still know that you can't have a coherent community if people are moving in and out of the apartments around you every nine months.  Indeed, in that situation people often don't bother getting to know anyone, since transience breeds carelessness and even a kind of noonday sloth of heart.  But divorce, and the expectations that common divorce must breed, infects the community at large with that same transience. 

     Berry calls for an ecology of man to match ecology for -- not the "environment," a mechanistic and neutral word he dislikes -- animals and trees and rivers and hills, and all the beautiful things we live among and usually ignore.  As we now ignore one another, along with the tough rootedness of gorse and the elegant sprays of broom, and the orioles singing their unmistakeable measures as I write this.  I wish I knew my neighbors as well as I know the orioles. 

Comments

[Kamilla]

"Gender dichotomy very strict." -- there you have it.

Tony,

Heartbreakingly beautiful. Thank you.

Kamilla

[Truth Unites... and Divides]

"... we, surprise, surprise, uphold no-fault divorce. That last is the stake in the community's heart. It is transience in the most intimate relation we know on earth. And we raise our children up for it: witness their "relationships," one after the other, ruin after ruin, or worse, lassitude of soul after lassitude of soul, and then they marry, and we expect them to live as if the vows they make really meant something. Somehow we still know that you can't have a coherent community if people are moving in and out of the apartments around you every nine months. Indeed, in that situation people often don't bother getting to know anyone, since transience breeds carelessness and even a kind of noonday sloth of heart. But divorce, and the expectations that common divorce must breed, infects the community at large with that same transience."

Speaking of the general category of infection coupled with transcience, I'd say these twin diseases are symptomatic of theological liberalism. And theological liberalism has hollowed out the mainline LibProt denominations, doing the same thing to a lesser and slower degree in evangelicalism, mucking things up in the Catholic church, and not knowing much about Eastern Orthodox churches, it doesn't seem to affect the EO church at all.

Pseudogamy roughly equates to theological liberalism.

[Ben]

To be fair to the B- student: he was probably trained by a long string of professors who deadened him to truth, beauty, humor, and pathos, and taught him to pay attention only to things like "gender dichotomies." If they can do it to Beowulf, Chaucer, and Shakespeare, they can do it to anything.

[Joel]

The problem is that once you get to know the neighbors you figure out how bad they are and you don't like them.

[Benighted Savage]

Where I come from in North Central Texas, we've got plenty of skeeters and chiggers and beggar's lice and stickers. An occasional water moccasin if you live next to a creek, and perhaps a rattler or two if you have a woodpile on your property. Can't exactly ignore them, since they don't ignore us!

[Wolf Paul]

That would probably be Pierre J. Helias, and the book you read was probably, "The Horse of Pride: Life in a Breton Village".

Another thing to add to my wishlist :-)

Wolf

[Michael R]

A common element of Thomas Hardy's novels is mourning the changes in society that took place in large part due to the Industrial Revolution and the dis-connectedness to place that it produced. Here's one of my favorite passages:

"But whether he meditated the Muses or the philosophers, the loneliness of Hintock life was beginning to tell upon his impressionable nature. Winter in a solitary house in the country, without society, is tolerable, nay, even enjoyable and delightful, given certain conditions, but these are not the conditions which attach to the life of a professional man who drops down into such a place by mere accident. They were present to the lives of Winterborne, Melbury, and Grace; but not to the doctor's. They are old association--an almost exhaustive biographical or historical acquaintance with every object, animate and inanimate, within the observer's horizon. He must know all about those invisible ones of the days gone by, whose feet have traversed the fields which look so gray from his windows; recall whose creaking plough has turned those sods from time to time; whose hands planted the trees that form a crest to the opposite hill; whose horses and hounds have torn through that underwood; what birds affect that particular brake; what domestic dramas of love, jealousy, revenge, or disappointment have been enacted in the cottages, the mansion, the street, or on the green. The spot may have beauty, grandeur, salubrity, convenience; but if it lack memories it will ultimately pall upon him who settles there without opportunity of intercourse with his kind."

- Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders, CHAPTER XVII

[Michael R]

Here's another Hardy quote:

The change at the root of [the disappearance of old traditions and pastimes] has been the recent supplanting of the class of stationary cottagers, who carried on the local traditions and humours, by a population of more or less migratory labourers, which has led to a break of continuity in local history, more fatal than any other thing to the preservation of legend, folk-lore, close inter-social relations, and eccentric individualities. For these the indispensable conditions of existence are attachment to the soil of one particular spot by generation after generation.

- Thomas Hardy, preface to Far from the Madding Crowd

[Rob G]

Careful now, Michael! You'll find yourself accused of being a sentimental nostalgist, pining for a golden age that never really existed.

Thus is condemned anyone retrograde enough to prefer Mayberry or Mayfield to Springfield.

[Michael R]

Rob,

I'll admit that more than once as I've sat with my wife on the swing of our front porch on a fine summer evening, I've wished Andy was there with guitar in hand to play some tunes as we while away the evening!

[Rob G]

Michael, ain't that the truth!

You mentioned Hardy, of whom I'm a big fan, and Tony mentioned the great Wendell Berry in his post. I recently read Booth Tarkington's novel "Turmoil," written in 1915, I believe, which takes a somewhat similar approach to the coming of commercialism/industrialism to the American Midwest -- highly recommended.

I had only known Tarkington from his hilarious 'Penrod' books, but it turns out he's a darn good writer when it comes to more serious subjects as well. This piece got me interested in his non-Penrod works:

http://www.kirkcenter.org/index.php/bookman/article/what-about-booth/

[James Englert]

Until Dr Esolen's pseudogamy book comes out, here is a link to the Crisis article --

http://insidecatholic.com/Joomla/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2263&Itemid=48

[Benighted Savage]

I had friends in high school who were of Cherokee descent. Sometimes they expressed a longing for a Golden Age where the forests and river valleys of North America were "theirs," and -- aside from Christian missionaries, I guesss; all of them went to the local Church of Christ -- the land-hungry Europeans had stayed on the other side of the Atlantic. However, I never could figure out how serious they were when they talked like this. Perhaps they were just teasing me.

[Ranee @ Arabian Knits]

It is interesting that you mention farm chores in your discussion. My husband and I read a lot about farming as we are trying (slowly) to build a family farm. We are rather inexperienced, and don't claim any expertise except what we have learned hands on, however it is funny to us to read some of the negative reviews of books that have been full of such helpful information to us. They are often negative precisely because the books describe rather strict sex roles on the farm. The reviewers do not like it that the woman does a particular set of work and the man does another. Rather than address this, however, they talk about how the woman is lazy and should do X herself, rather than making her poor husband do it. I am convinced these people have never had to do the work of a farm (even a small, hobby farm in the semi-rural suburbs as we are) or they never would say such idiotic things. Sure, if her husband wasn't around, the animals or crops were at risk or her life or the live of her children were at stake, she would take up shot gun, face down beasts, do the ploughing, whatever it took, but the farm runs far better if she takes care of the family garden, the cooking and cleaning, the small animal husbandry, preserving of foods, all with the children, and the husband does the large animal care, the chopping of the wood, the clearing of the fields, the ploughing and harrowing, heavy butchering, while the family plants and harvests together. There is a reason, a rather practical reason, that the division of labor happens this way. The egalitarians resent that, though, so they blame the people who actually live the life, doing the real work, rather than accept that perhaps all is not interchangeable. You don't even have to believe in any ordering of the sexes by God to understand this, you just have to do the work.

[Tony]

Dear Ranee,

You betcha! Funniest thing about it: the strongest women I know are all farm girls, and could clean the city feminist's clock.

[Nick]

Tony,

The strongest women, as you've pointed out in the past, are the ones that are well aware that their brothers are stronger. Sans the industrial revolution and service jobs feminism would be impossible.

[Dn Nathan Thompson]

Tony,

Thank you for another great post. As a former firefighter, I always felt that there are a few women who could do the job, and more men, but not everybody. I weighed around 175 when I did it, then I would put on 6o+pounds of gear, let's be serious, almost everyone weighing less than 150 could not get me out of a burning building if I went down. I struggled with drills in which I had to get the really big guys out and in the end, payed with my back. I don't believe that you need to limit the fire service to men, but don't risk their lives by lessening the physical requirements. Departments that have not lessened the requirements have stayed "boys clubs," but it is just a matter of time before one of these non "boys clubs" departments loses a firefighter because a 125 lb firefighter can't get him out when he needs it.

Thanks for the visit to St Tikhon's, it was great meeting you.

[Michael]

Deacon Nathan:

A friend of mine is currently pursuing firefighter training (although admittedly to be an EMT with an independent ambulance firm, but still working with a fire department). She's 5'1" and weighs 115. Don't you trust her? ;-)

[Judy K. Warner]

Whenever I read the musings of the various posters who love sense of place and regret the mobility that modern life has brought us, and the changes that the industrial revolution has wrought in our lives, I wonder where we all would be if our ancestors had felt the same way. Every one of us, except for those whose ancestors were slaves, is descended from people who uprooted themselves from their traditional (or not so traditional) lives in some place other than America, and hauled themselves and usually their families across vast distances to a new land, leaving behind family, friends, and sometimes property and language. Many did this because they were not happy with the settled societies where they lived and were looking for an outlet for their energies and talents and an improvement in their fortunes. This is our heritage, like it or not, and we will always be more restless and dissatisfied than other people.

[Rob G]

Remember, though, that our ancestors moved with the intent of settling somewhere else. The difference between them and we moderns is that we simply move around with no intent or desire to settle, and call that good. What our ancestors did, and a sort of constitutional deracination are not the same thing.

[Judy K. Warner]

I've moved to a number of places intending to settle, but because circumstances changed I couldn't. I don't think everybody just roams around. Usually when people have children they become much more settled. I know many people who were rootless when single who now live in suburan neighborhoods or rural areas they are very much attached to and involved in. Of course, their children usually will live somewhere else.