Peasants are among the closest of humankind to nature, knowing intimately and with great depth what nature is, even though their idea of nature is assuredly not ours. Perhaps we might even learn something from them, something about the ‘nature’ we think we know, and something about what we call progress has done to nature.
Peasants were, after all, right to distrust progress. We may all have to learn before too long how to be survivors, and peasants, the class of survivors, have things to teach us. They face extinction just as we may do. Peasants come from a world that in essence is not capitalist, although they have coexisted with capitalism for cen-turies. They do not conceive of a world of unlimited increase, the world of progress that is, for they know things are finite. Capitalism lives for unlimited increase, which it sees only by looking to the future, upon which it depends (credit always refers to future possibility). In its nature capitalism must erase the past to realize this future. Peasants hope for the future but do not forget the past.
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John Berger wrote in 1987 that ‘very few peasants become artists—occasionally perhaps the son or daughter of peasants has done so.’ He writes about the lack of records of peasant experience — some songs, a few autobiographies, very little: “This lack means that the peasant’s soul is as unfamiliar or unknown to most urban people as are his physical inventories and the material conditions of his labour. This is so. But while Berger is right, it is only in part, for if the peasant’s own speaking voice is absent (there are in truth only a tiny few memoirs, given the peasant millions who have lived and died) there are many more than a few songs. And through ethnographic study we now know a great deal of much else. Yet this is almost always mediated knowledge — vastly illuminating, but often historically about things called the ‘folk’ and their ‘lore,’ these terms meaning nothing to peasants themselves. Knowledge from the outside, in other words. There is also the knowledge as well of tax collectors, policemen, lawyers, recruiting sergeants, land surveyors and many others of the ‘official world.’ So we interpret, hearing only the echoes of the soul.
Salt to the Brain
As a rule we are not the brain surgeons
or the bridge builders. We did not figure
how to make water flow in a pipe
or keep airplanes stable in flight.
Instead, we stood in a circle and chanted,
“All praise to the most beautiful bridge,”
then walked across it.As a rule we do not meet the payroll
or keep the factories open.
Others figured how enzymes work
and built hydraulic brakes.
Instead, we were the ones at the machines
whose idea it was to sing, “Happy Birthday,”
or “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.”In this world the moneychangers change money.
The nurses nurse and the lawyers lawyer.
My mother feeds the stray cats that come
to the screen door of her house in Marion Oaks.
The orange tiger has a nasty scratch.
The poets take note,
add this small pinch of salt to the brain,
our gift to the taste of existence.