Listening to voices of a designer-artist and farmer-poet.
Sara Hendren and Wendell Berry talk with me as I write about the work of humans
A couple of posts ago, I reported on tsukumogami, Japan’s old discarded tools that managed to acquire souls and, in one story at least, attained enlightenment. The post was an amusing diversion that I bumped into as I read while writing about tools and work. The little devious creatures of Japanese myth wouldn’t fit well into my writing project, so I let them wander into my Technocomplex posts to raise havoc.
I’m still writing on that chapter, and I’m still reading along the way. Two books have come into focus now, both published in the last twenty-five years (unlike the little tsukumogami, who were medieval or before). One is by an engineering professor and artist and the other by a farmer who is also a poet and philosopher. You might guess the farmer-poet, but I don’t know if you’d be familiar with the professor.
Wendell Berry, from whose pen you probably have read a line or two, wrote Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition (Counterpoint, 2000).
It’s easy to think that the two writers are vastly different — one a farmer in Kentucky, the other a professor in Boston. But they have complementary pathways and, in their own areas of work and life, resonant stances and perspectives. Hendren is an artist as well as a researcher, and Berry, despite his grousing and pungent criticism and suspicion of technology, mixes poetry, philosophy, faith — sometimes even with modern technology, as the photograph above shows.
I want to share a sketch of the landscape of thought and work that Berry and Hendren lay out and that I have found instructive as I’ve been writing. Both chafe at the restrictions that scientists or designers (or scientist-designers) place on their subjects. Berry, especially, rears up when scientists — E. O. Wilson in particular — seek to impose the restrictions of “empiricism” or “theory” on the ways that the arts, religion, and humanities seek and understand knowledge. (Or, as he would probably correct me, the ways they should seek knowledge if they are true to their own roots and inured to the financial, commercial, and material seductions of modern science.) Hendren mistrusts the entrapment of design in industrial sameness, a sameness that ignores the diversity and changes of human shapes, needs, and processes.
Hendren and Berry demarcate landscapes of knowledge and work, and they go beyond what academic disciplines, corporations, or mass manufacturing usually admit. Both regard entrenched scientific and design habits of proof or product as too limited and, finally, false. They want to expand boundaries of “disciplines” (a term Berry is not keen about), but they also want to refocus and, in a way, constrain what real knowledge and real design can be.
For Hendren, design should be particular and respond to particular needs of people. She focuses on the specific needs of individuals. Rather than remaking the human to fit the built world, the built world should meet the human in all humankind’s particularity and dependency and power. One chair doesn’t fit all, and industry hasn’t fully absorbed the fact that all people are different. All need at some point in their lives assistance with things and their worlds. There is where design should be.
For Berry, powerful knowledge, miraculous knowledge, is local. Knowledge loses power and relevance once the seeker of knowledge wanders into abstraction and reduces knowledge and things to scattered products of analysis. Rather than a list of general principles or abstractions or classification or explanation, knowledge of the world is knowledge of place: long and local experience, ever sensitive to complexity, nuance, and, importantly, to mystery and wonder.
Life is a miracle. It springs beyond explanation and unfolds at the pace of human experience. Its communication … limited but not mute, metaphorical but mindful of particulars, artistic but not precious or new, historical but not nostalgic, and reverent which might be the core.
I’ll close with two brief excerpts, one from each writer. Both books are good. Berry may infuriate you at times, but there’s much to learn from his writing, which is as clear as Kentucky air in a field. Hendren’s book flows, too, and is sharp with insight and clarity — as well designed as executed.
Wendell Berry
Berry considers the view outside the window of his twelve-by-sixteen foot cabin where he has written and worked for decades.
Sometimes from this outlook I have seen wonders: deer swimming across, wild turkeys feeding, a pair of newly fledged owls, otters at play, a coyote taking a stroll, a hummingbird feeding her young, a peregrine falcon eating a snake. When the trees are not in leaf, I can see the wooded slopes on both sides of the valley. I have known this place all my life. I long to protect it and the creatures who belong to it….
The one thing that I know above all is that even to hope to protect it, I have got to break out of all the categories and confront it as it is; I must be present in its presence. I know at least some of the categories and value them and have found them useful. But here I am in my life, and I know I am not here as a representative white male American human, nor are the birds and animals and plants here as representatives of their sex or species. We all have our ways, forms, and habits. We all are what we are partly because we are here and not in another place. Some of us are mobile; some of us (such as the trees) have to be content merely to be flexible. All of us who are mobile are required by happenstance and circumstance and accident to make choices that are not instinctive, and that force us out of categories into our lives here and now….
In all of the thirty-seven years I have worked here, I have been trying to learn a language particular enough to speak of this place as it is and of my being here as I am. My success, as I well know, has been poor enough, and yet I am glad of the effort, for it has helped me to make, and to remember always, the distinction between reduction and the thing reduced. I know the usefulness of reductive language. To know that I am “a white male American human,” that a red bird with black wings is “a scarlet tanager,” that a tree with white bark is “a sycamore,” that this is “a riparian plant community” — all that is helpful to a necessary kind of thought. But when I try to make language more particular, I see that the life of this place is always emerging beyond expectation or prediction or typicality, that it is unique, given to the world minute by minute, only once, never to be repeated. And then is when I see that this life is a miracle, absolutely worth having, absolutely worth saving.
We are alive within mystery, by miracle (Life is a Miracle 43-45).
Sara Hendren
Sara Hendren’s focus is on design, but she, too, particularly values the “local” and an “ecology” of human habitat, the “built world.” These paragraphs come from her book’s second chapter, which focuses on chairs and designed items, especially those created by and used by disabled people.
It’s not the specific materials or techniques that are used that matter [in creating a designed work, design researcher Ezio] Manzini emphasizes, so much as the collaborative associations that are formed when universal challenges are considered in a local and unusual way: the agency that comes from reformulating a problem. At [the specialized furniture non-profit] ADA the quest is not for the perfect universal chair but a disposition toward a sustainable and collective form of working on adaptive tools, one at a time — for many. When it comes to truly urgent questions, Manzini writes, “radical innovations generate answers that change the questions themselves.”
That’s the challenge to universalism. Is the all-for-one, one-for-all model the only approach to universal design on offer?
… Adaptive or diffuse design, at ADA and elsewhere, isn’t meant to substitute for standardized devices or the engineering that produces them. Disabled and nondisabled people will always have needs for these devices…. Rather, its focus is on augmentation and alteration — on the entire ecology that is required to make the world more meaningfully accessible, especially when a quarter of an inch makes all the difference.
[…]
I recalled the first time I went to ADA, where I sat on one of their cardboard perches, pitched precisely at the angle recommended by researchers and ignored by most schools and workplaces everywhere. I had felt my spine lightly snap naturally to its most supported position — straight up and relaxed, but without effort. To truly be with ADA is to see the alteration of chairs and other furniture with fresh eyes for history — to see alternatives to chairs and other furniture so pervasive they have become invisible (What Can a Body Do? 89-90, 93-94).
Got a comment?
Tags: local, particular, scientism, design, wendell berry, sara hendren
Links, cited and not, some just interesting
“Last October, Berry showed me the camp, asking only that I not say where it is. Although he has laid bare his entire life in print, he tightly guards his privacy. The single room, containing an antique woodstove against the back wall and a neatly made cot in one corner, was dominated by his worktable, set before a forty-paned window — ‘the eye of the house’ — that looks out onto the porch, the woods, and the river below.” Wickenden, Dorothy. “Wendell Berry’s Advice for a Cataclysmic Age.” The New Yorker, February 21, 2022. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/02/28/wendell-berrys-advice-for-a-cataclysmic-age.
Oddly, I couldn’t find this book on bookshop.org, and it seems contrary to Berry’s spirit to offer a link to Amazon. Buy it at your independent bookstore, new or used (like I did). Berry, Wendell. Life Is a Miracle: An Essay against Modern Superstition. 1st Counterpoint paperback ed. Berkeley, Calif: Counterpoint, 2001.
Nice biographical/bibliographical summary, and of course links to poetry. “Wendell Berry.” Poetry Foundation, February 16, 2024. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/wendell-berry.
“This is a fact so ordinary — and yet not something we routinely pause to know and to ponder and work with. That our built world is designed around something called ‘normal’ and yet every single one of our bodies is mysterious, and constantly adapting, for better or worse, and always, always changing.” Tippett, Krista. “Sara Hendren — Our Bodies, Aliveness, and the Built World.” On Being. Accessed February 16, 2024. https://onbeing.org/programs/sara-hendren-our-bodies-aliveness-and-the-built-world/.
“Hendren’s aim here isn’t to throw cold water on innovation; it’s to re-center the people, behind the tools, who must work with their surroundings, their adaptations at least as miraculous as the technology that helps them. If we’re overly besotted with objects that promise assistance, maybe that’s because our default objects — the givens of the built world — can seem so incompatible with our needs. Look down. Your chair, Hendren declares, is murdering you.” Waldman, Katy. “When the World Isn’t Designed for Our Bodies.” The New Yorker, September 3, 2020. https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/when-the-world-isnt-designed-for-our-bodies.
Hendren’s website is a treat. “Home | Sara Hendren.” Accessed February 14, 2024. https://sarahendren.com/
Hendren, Sara. What Can a Body Do? How We Meet the Built World. New York: Riverhead Books, 2020. (Bookshop.org; Amazon)
She has a Substack newsletter, too. Hendren, Sara. “Undefended / Undefeated.” Substack newsletter.
Although there are questions that require generalizable or “approaching universal” answers, I find that, as I get older, the more interesting (and dare I say, richer and more valid) questions are those that seek to understand the individual hearts of experience. I can probably get away with that more being of psychology. All that to say, great read, Mark, and I need to add the authors to my reading list.
This line resonated with me: “Rather than remaking the human to fit the built world, the built world should meet the human”