There were fields steeper than barn roofs ending in sheer cliffs, where a fall would be death. (Andean farmers do occasionally fall out of their fields.) And we continued to see herders with flocks of sheep and llamas. (23)
Wendell Berry, The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays Cultural and Agricultural (1979)
By now I have several checkmarks āļø and phis Éø in the margins of Berry’s The Gift of Good Land, idiosyncratic but patterned marks distinguishing themselves over the years as the homing punctuation that give me a chance of returning and rereading. A checkmark or a phi is like a waving hand, a beckoning forefinger, and a glittering agate fieldstone combined. While reading the other morning, I was struck by these lines nodding to the sharp, impassable edges sometimes demarcating the small potato fields Berry observed and described during his visit to the northern Andes. Unto itself, it produces quite an imageāto tumble, cruel gymnastikoi!, from one’s potato field. Considering my continuing strickenness with the doubling of “field” for parcel of land (field1) and semistable plane cohering shared academic inquiry (field2), the scenario of falling out got me thinking about the comparable tumble from the second type of field, the field more or less synonymous with a status quo academic discipline. Are there comparable fallings out, where someone decided, in effect, I’ve had enough of this small potatoes field!? Recent stories about leaving academia altogether cartwheel to mind, as do older examples of dismounting quietly (e.g., North, Vivion). I suppose that choosing an alt-ac path or choosing to switch fields from rhetoric-composition to English education (or whatever) is not quite the same as nose-diving over the cliff at an earthen field’s edge. And so maybe it is enough to pause with the definitional character of a field as a parcel with edges. And to think about how those edges are not necessarily on level with what is adjacent to them. Sometimes the adjacent field levels up, and sometimes down.
I’m in the third summer of living on these wonderful but rugged and moderately non-level (by Andes standards) six acres at the end of Rosemary Road. In two and a half years, I’ve only fallen twice. The first spill was two years ago, June 2022, when after transplanting a sugar maple and three or four tansies, I thought I would water them extra generously by carrying five gallon buckets of water to where I had set them in the ground. All of these new plants were plugged in along the bank running from the easement westward toward the upper shed. I’d climbed the steep slope easily enough and was five or six feet above grade, but when I started to pour the plant a long drink from the bucket, I slipped and fell on my right side, shoulder and collarbone especially screaming what the fuck is the matter with you. I was fine, but startled to be fine. The fall was teeth-clackingly jarring, all the more forceful for gravity’s hard pull not only on me but on me with a water-filled bucket in hand. The second fall was last winter break, so December 2023. Icy precipitation had glassed over the holler. When I went out in the morning to bring the chickens their food and water, I made the classic mistake of gaining my sure but shortlived footing on the grass, only to step onto the sidewalk slab near the door to the front shed where as though to a 1970s cartoon soundtrack I slipped and planted myself squarely on my back. This time, too, I was astonished not to be injured beyond having the wind knocked out of me. Doubly astonishing was that the chickens’ water didn’t spill. To imagine falling from one’s potato field is to rewind the tape on all the spills that have taken me down before, it turns out.
Longer ago, farther away, I was on what I may be misremembering as my first or second campus visit in January of my final year at Syracuse, walking along Putnam Street near the dumpster between Parking Structure 6 and Wayne State’s Maccabees Building, where the English Department is located, and unsuspecting but with slippy shoes, I caught a frozen-over puddle and whoop-whoop-whoop did an improvised Charleston move that included, miraculously, spilling my coffee into the air and, steadied by hands of winged angels, regained my balance in time to catch the floating river of scalding hot coffee back in the cup again. This goes down not as a slip and fall but as a damned close. I remember the rest of the day well because this slip sparked sharpened focus: the committee interview, the conversation with the grad director at the time, the job talk and especially the questions that followed, and then the lunch immediately after the job talk, which all of the attendees enjoyed eating as they watched Obama’s inaugural inauguration. It would have felt a bit more like opening act to the day’s headliner, except that I’d regained my balance and caught the coffee earlier that day. I don’t mean to imply that my job talk was on level with Obama’s inauguration; I only mean that at a private and personal scale, even though the after-talk questions were barbed and even though I didn’t end up getting a job offer, I was in the slip recovering and coffee catching sense having a great day.
And then there are a couple of falls on basketball courts. Courts are not fields, except when you consider Janice Lauer’s reframing of field as a kind of “epistemic court,” jurisprudentially negotiated through give and take, consensus building, etc. (granting of course that these days certain so-called high courts are not what they once were, that ‘supreme’ judgments of late have been skewing asshatted toward a politics bent on dissolving the republic). On basketball courts, I’ve fallen more times than I can count, yet two in particular are memorable because they are the only two times I have broken bones in my life. In 1990, a Highland Conference home game against the Leroy-Pine River Bucks, I intercepted an upcourt pass and lost balance, falling backward and using my left hand to break the fall and, as a consequence, fracturing my left wrist. Hurt, redness, swelling, but because it happened in the first half, and because I was the tallest player, and because Pine River had dominant bigs that year, I was encouraged to tough it out, play through the pain, be a man, and so on. I played on, suckily finishing the game even though I could hardly catch or rebound or squeeze with both hands the basketball. Many years later, older and presumably wiser, when on October 1, 2014, I similarly disrupted a long upcourt pass but landed with the tiniest of toe rolls followed by an audible pop, I hopped off the court and told my teammates I’d just broken my foot. They didn’t believe me! And sure enough, I heel-walked to the Honda Element, drove myself to the ER, and confirmed it: fractured fifth metatarsal on the right foot. Though they are not falls from fields, they are falls on courts that required eventual exits, interruptions, healing, transitions, and subsequent wayfinding.
Is the line connecting this back to the Peruvian potato fields unfollowably jaggy? Like potato fields, academic fieldsāas ritual, locative, material, social, and epistemic concentrationsāshare edges and bear out adjacencies that can be navigated, sometimes with ease and sometimes with crash or clamor. To grant fields topography opens them to a more careful review of leveling and traversals, or how cross-field movement has worked and might work differently. We can and perhaps should, every so often, run the thought experiment that asks how this field leveling has changed, how individual and collective standpoints have reshuffled. What can grow here? Who remains to carry the water, to pull weeds, to edit journals, to shepherd promotion cases? What elevations do we ascribe to the subfields in English Studies today? What elevations do we ascribe to the constitutive nominative jabberwocky ever reshuffling for rhetoric and composition/writing studies? What elevation differential are folks who tumble in or tumble out negotiating as they play chutes and ladders, this field to the next, or the next back to this? I am, for now, more interested in refreshing the old and possibly adequated (or dead) question an aid for checking up on first principles among the terms, rhetoric, composition, and writing studies, as these, too, have now become split and spliced almost as much as apple varieties and chicken breeds, to include technical writing, professional writing, scientific communication, business communication, and dozens more. Within the small potato field, it is as if each footfall has its own special, unique elevation, as if the field’s name(s) offer a stamp of dissensus so stubbornly fractal erosion, as gravity, has the final word and mountains, too, draw flat.
Reading Time: 5minutesFigure 1. Two-track easement rising to the upper plot south of Wonder Hollow.
The two-track easement I mentioned a couple of posts back angles on a more or less straight line from NNE to SSW, bending ever so slightly where the grade steepens from driveway to an off-road pitch of what I’d guess is at least 25 degrees. I asked the former owner how long the two-track carved a line up the easement, and he said it had been there as long as he could remember, which I’d guess goes back to maybe the 1950s when he was growing up in the then-newly-constructed bungalow (which dates to 1948). The easement links the end of Rosemary Road and the 10 acre plot just above the holler. The legal description includes the exact coordinates for the two-track, noting its 20-foot width, noting it persists only for as long as that upper plot is owned by the same family. And then there is a code in Virginia, 55.1-305. Enjoyment of Easement, which conserves the ways the easement can be used. No converting it to a raceway; not sure it could be paved or significantly upgraded. The code begins, “Unless otherwise provided for in the terms of an easement, the owner of a dominant estate [neighbors] shall not use an easement in a way that is not reasonably consistent with the uses contemplated by the grant of the easement, and the owner of the servient estate [us] shall not engage in an activity or cause to be present any objects either upon the burdened land or immediately adjacent to such land that unreasonably interferes with the enjoyment of the easement by the owner of the dominant estate.”
When it rains, the easement two-track gathers and delivers torrents like a dried up river bed subjected to a heavy downpour. At the bottom of the two-track is our front shed, and until last fall when we had an excavator operator dig below the shed’s foundation wall and then go over it with a sealcoat, laying drain tile, and backfilling with gravel, it didn’t take much rain to send puddling across the shed’s slab, soaking everything that touched the floor. The excavation work successfully redirected the intense runoffs, and now the shed floor stays dry, though the two-track still switches from dry to gushing every time it rains. Erosion spills snaking routes onto the driveway below and exposes a rocky subsurface all along the two-track. Can’t imagine driving a basic passenger vehicle up it all that often. You’d feel tossed-about, and you’d worry about the brakes. I haven’t tried it before, but my guess is it’d feel unsafe. It does fine with small tractor or rugged vehicles like four-wheelers , not that we have anything like that. With each subsequent rain, the ground gives to the water course silty bits of itself, clay particulate, organic material, dust. I couldn’t guess how many times the easement has had to be repaired since the 1950s, nor how many times it has washed out, nor how many small rinses it takes to render it impassable, nor how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Roll Tootsie Pop.
Just as the two-track divides Turkey Slope, erosion and deposition, the weather, and vegetative growth cycles participate in shaping the field, sometimes bringing to the surface reminders and remnants, those underlying conditions that through time form a crust that lasts for a while, enduring but changing, transforming while seeming to stand still. “Underlying conditions” come up briefly in Lorrie Moore’s 2023 novel I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home. There is much, much more to layer on about the book, but for now, let’s just say it is a living-dead travelog, with its protagonists, Finn, who is alive, and Lily, who is dead but talking and otherwise behaving as-though alive, making their way across the midwestern United States and, as they go, negotiating their old relationship, decaying flesh, and the real risks felt to occasionally blinker into the surreal plot. At one of the lodging stops along the way (a bed and breakfast, sort of), the novel hints at chronotopic laminations, “the dispersed, fluid chains of places, times, people, and artifacts that come to be tied together in trajectories of literate action along with the ways multiple activity footings are held and managed” (180). Moore’s novel characterizes the boarding house this way: “Memories from another time and other people in the form of humidity saturated the place. Any given time always had other times beneath it” (161). Could be the slow reveal of the rock bed underlying the two-track, could be the crumbling granite everywhere underfoot in these Blue Ridge mountains, could be that feeling of aging, at home, at work, everywhere you go. But that line has traction; it catches and holds: Any given time always had other times beneath it.
Any given time always had other times ahead, too. Witnessing this capacity, or recognizing these times beneath and times afore, is something close to temporal bandwidth, ĪT (in conceptual light more than a formulaic one). I don’t know what will become of the two-track. Can’t predict whether its run-offs will become more fitful until water and gravity prevail. Maybe it becomes a pristine road, as humans love to create roads and then to travel on them (notwithstanding that this occludes much of what is beyond the sensory margins of the road and its immediate surrounds!). To grant this path ephemerality itself as an underlying condition is, I suppose, similar to acknowledging the impermanence of everything. Gone-noting intersects with temporal bandwidth, and maybe even underwrites it.
I also don’t know what will become of the academic field where I have lingered for half of my life. It is changing, in some respects trending kinder and more humane, in some ways trending farther spun-out and dissolute. But trends, too, have a way of doubling back, so we have to keep checking, asking whether we are still becoming kinder and more humane, asking whether we are even listening to and reading one another any more. Yesterday, summer solstice, I saw online a social media post from a senior, now-retiring scholar in the field who was trying to rehome something like 500 books from a long and prosperous career. His conclusion, “no one wants them.”
For a couple of entries now, I’ve been hinting at Wendell Berry’s poem, “IX,” as a low-key motivator for these few meandering thoughts on fields. The poem is reprinted in full, with permission, at The Writer’s Almanac. I’ll share a small excerpt, but you can click over and read the rest, if you want to.
I go by a field where once I cultivated a few poor crops. It is now covered with young trees, for the forest that belongs here has come back and reclaimed its own.
Reading Time: 4minutesFigure 1. A pair of wild turkeys crossing Turkey Slope toward the easement two-track, May 14, 2022.
A few weeks ago, a friend who guest lodges at the one room Wonder Hollow Moon House from time to time sent midday a text to A. and me mentioning that a lone chicken had found her way to the “the road by the high property.” And this eyes-up, helpful message as if on bended arrow pointed me back to a passage only a few days earlier from Wendell Berry’s The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays Cultural and Agricultural. Berry was visiting Peruvian potato fields and attempting to describe in detail all that he saw there.
In this field, which could not have been larger than two acres, were twenty-two people, including a few children and two babies. In sight, in and around the field, there were also nine dogs, seven pigs, twelve sheep, nineteen horses, and fifteen llamas and alpacas, The name of the field was Tronco, Tree Trunk.
Nothing better reveals the long human history of the Andes and the topographical intimacy of Andean agriculture than this naming of the fields. In his book on the Vilcanota Valley, Daniel W. Gade wrote that “almost every parcel [of land], no matter how small, has a name to identify it. Property is identified by the names of the individual parcels and not by surveyor’s measurements which are in most cases non-existent. Every field…and every enclosure has a name, many of them plant names, reflecting their immediate natural environment” (20).
Once there, lingering in that frame where I leaf and find the page, stare at the words, mull them over, I began to consider again the correspondences between this named field and that named field, the importance of these locative references, ad hoc and informal as they tend to be in my own everyday life. You see, “the road by the high property” didn’t immediately click for me. Where now? I wasn’t sure what it referred to. But once we discussed it, A. and I between us sorted out that it probably meant the middle right of way, halfway up the climbing two track between Turkey Slope and the chanterelle patch. This switch from “the road by the high property” to places we knew in common, owing to our having gained an indexical handle on sharing these field names over time, helped us grasp where, exactly, the hen in question, be it Cinnabon or Tiny Honey, had wandered.
Field naming questions also happen to come up all the time in the academic discipline I consider as much of a home base as one must claim to carve out a career path. Interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity being in great if blurred fashion for the past twenty years, I continue to accept that identifying my own work with Rhetoric and Composition/Writing Studies, generally, holds both true and reasonably specific, tempting as it has been in some contexts to untether and float the smokier alternatives, “interdisciplinary scholar,” or “transdisciplinary nomad,” or “Sophist.” But Rhetoric and Composition/Writing Studies, even if you shorten it to RCWS, is kind of a spillway, as naming goes. The slash used to stake its hold between Rhetoric/Composition, but the double-slash is just too much algebra, especially when we pause on the question of hospitality and remember that this discipline’s name is usually paired with a sign that says, “Welcome.”
Over the years, I have encountered folks who reject the conjunction and who call the field only “Rhetoric” or only “Composition.” Are they territorialists or purists? I couldn’t say. Some would have us crumple and toss “Composition” into the dustbin of time, rending it gone, replaced instead by “Writing,” because people know what writing is. Some would have us ditch “Rhetoric,” because it is too caught up with pedicuring the carved marble feet of ancient Greek statesmen and philosophers. No matter how much thoughtful effort goes into pluralizing the tributaries, ethos, pathos, and logos roll on. Were we to entertain for a few more linesāon the controversial if minuscule (I think?) demarcations sequestering technical and professional writing, or scientific and technical communication, or business communication, and so on and so onāwe can see the free-wheel spin, and each in our private moments yearn for something more like Tronco, Tree Trunk, for RCWS. On second thought, this name wrangling, even if it diminishes wide-stance footing in English Departments, gives us something to puzzle over, an old riddle about the impossibility of calling a river any name at all, since you can’t stand in the same river twice, thanks to Heraclitus.
I’ve curlicued this entry, commonplace book style, into a good enough for now stopping place. I have more to say about field naming, about Young, Becker, and Pike’s jump to particle physics and wave, particle, fieldādistinctions requiring a microscopeāto make sense of repeating patterns. I’ve been in this field for 25 years, depending on how you want to count those early years when I was an idealistic MA student teaching composition, and so by now I might have expected to be able to say I teach and research in an academic discipline you’ve possibly not heard of, called Never Head Of It. To be continued, as such: wave, particle, whatsit; Berry’s poem “IX,” and a short yarn on underlying conditions (for fields more-so than human health).
