Tending

The Hunger Games, the Internet, and Wendell Berry

Goldfinch eating the sunflower seeds in our garden. Photo by Jorge.

On Sunday night, Elena, Jorge, and I watched The Hunger Games. Jorge and I had seen it years ago, but all I remembered were the psychedelic outfits of the people in the Capitol, and Katniss Everdeen sawing a massive beehive off a tree. Turns out that it was an incredibly prescient work of art. It came out in 2012, when Facebook and Twitter were around, but before we were glued to them 24/7 for our news, and before we performed our daily lives on Instagram.

The movie is a vertiginous glimpse at our current reality: the increasingly outlandish lifestyles of the people in the capitol divorced from the realities of the people in the countryside; the abject poverty and gross wealth; and the way in which the desperate, the creative, and the disadvantaged make their way via the quality of their performance, as judged by tech overlords always and forever tweaking the algorithm for maximum profit.

Whew. It was a lot. We ate no fewer than three packages of microwave popcorn AND a bag of chips. I vowed to swear off social media entirely right that instant and then of course as soon as Elena went to bed I was scrolling the ol’ feed, reviewing letters to send to the President and the same James Baldwin quote circulated 100 times and reels and babies and dogs and the familiar notes of outrage and fury and exhaustion played over and over –slamming one’s finger down always on the same three keys –since 2020. Not that I am above it. I am awash in it like everyone else.

But who benefits? Always the question. Who benefits? Yes, we are more informed. Yes, many of us may be calling our senators – and when has that ever made any difference at all, when I wanted to vote for not a single one of my senators (but did, because of course there were only two options and one was flat-out horrifying) and have found them unable or unwilling to achieve 99% of what I believe in? Yes, we are all joined together in angst and fury, but – where? On a platform that makes tech billionaires even richer, that confuses a James Baldwin quote going viral with some sort of action or change, and that leaves 98% of people feeling far shittier and more hopeless and full of rage when they leave it than when they entered?

No, it can’t be there. And of course, I am writing on another tech platform here, on Substack, creating content for someone once again promising to save the world (or at least one aspect of it) via their algorithms. It is creeping into every aspect of our lives. Promising to make us rich, to make us just, to “connect” us, to educate and inspire us, and really is there any time of day that you feel crappier than after putting your phone down and looking up to recognize your child’s curious face?

When I went in to teach yesterday afternoon, I was in a grumpy mood. Angry about the state of the world, tired from 40 midterm conferences, overwhelmed with work. My students’ faces reflected a parallel weariness back at me. Their cheeks were blotchy, red; their eyes raw. They had just come off of their first round of midterms. We were about to discuss a pretty dense and heavy essay – an excerpt from Jenny Odell’s Saving Time, about the Anthropocene – and the energy was low.

But I split them into groups and had them write the excerpts of the reading they found most difficult on Post-its, and then one person in each group compiled all the Post-Its and chose them one by one to discuss. They did really well. They laughed and asked interesting questions and came up with theories and when they started to wander WAY off into dubious-notions-not-supported-by-the-text I reined them in, and then we came together as a big group.

I asked them what they still had questions about, and one student said his group wondered why the book was titled Saving Time. Another student raised her hand and answered that maybe it had to do with saving time from capitalism; with recovering older, forgotten relationships to time. “YES,” I said, trying not to sound too gushy and awestruck as I tend to do when students bust out something phenomenal. More students chimed in with lovely ideas: saving time by not assuming that our demise is inevitable, by re-imagining the future; saving time by remaking our relationship to it.

When the class was over, I biked home in a much better mood. I realized I had been living in an abstract universe in which people thousands of miles apart communicated via images, opinion statements, and isolated facts, echoing or arguing with each other not in conversation but in an endless void of nonstop images, opinions, facts; images, opinions, facts; often directly copied (“shared”) so as to be indistinguishable, creating not so much a textured conversation or community or response as a vibe; a universe in which “community” doesn’t mean the complex work of thinking, exploring, debating, solving, resolving, considering one person’s blotchy eyes and another’s soft hesitant voice and another’s accent and another’s boots and mascara but a bombardment of stimuli in which only two choices exist: righteous engagement (“sharing”) or “ignorant” refusal.

In my classroom, though, were people. Tired people. People who had interesting and important and real ideas, and who had bodies and umbrellas and backpacks and pens. People who live down the street from me, who see the same trees. Why do those people seem less real than the people I “engage with” in a little rectangle in my palm, representing myself via my most simplistic, shareable, repeatable, strident opinions?

We live in the same world. We know, from our news sources, when violence and war have taken hold. We all feel it, even those of us who pretend to tune it out completely or who take the most extreme positions as ways of suppressing the immensity of human suffering. But the question is: does doing what most of us do right now – which is go online – really help. Us, or anyone. I am open to ideas here. But what I’ve found for myself is that like Katniss, I am simply performing for a white-walled room of cynical techsperts who make more and more money the more outraged – “engaged” – I become.

Unlike Katniss, I can choose to leave.

Chopping potatoes in my kitchen, I thought about tending. Tending as a concept, an ethos. This is similar to care, but a bit more specific. Here are the definitions I found for tend:

care for or look after; give one's attention to

move, direct, or develop one's course in a particular direction

pay attention : apply oneself

be disposed or inclined in action, operation, or effect to do something

The potatoes were old. They were about to sprout and go to waste. I had to take 15 minutes out of my day to tend to them. Then, once I tended to the potatoes, I moved on to the brown bananas, and then to a butternut squash. I froze the first; grated the second. To cook is to tend to a kitchen, to honor the food there so it is not wasted and becomes useful and nourishing. To garden is to tend to the plants so they are fed, satisfied, productive, joyful. It is to figure out what each plant might need by stroking its leaves, by running its soil through your fingertips. To tend is to recognize from one glance at your child’s face a whole river of emotion coursing beneath, and to navigate that river together without getting swept away. To tend is to recognize how tired my students are and move the assignment back a week because what kind of world do we want to live in? What am I teaching?

To tend is to take a hike with my class and ask them to follow the wisdom of Barry Lopez: “Perhaps the first rule of everything we endeavor to do is to pay attention. Perhaps the second is to be patient. And perhaps a third is to be attentive to what the body knows.”

To tend is to know in my heart that what is worth tending is, by and large, for the most part (for I honor the complexity of exceptions) not on the Internet. It is all around us. It is in our trees. In the Orthodox Jewish lady stopping to admire the neighbor’s dahlias beside me. In finding a poem for my students to introduce them to the genius of 79-year-old Wendell Berry, and in sharing that poem with you, here, now:

Berry speaks of the knowledge of tending:

This knowledge cannot be taken from you by power
Or by wealth. It will stop your ears to the powerful
when they ask for your faith, and to the wealthy
when they ask for your land and your work.
Answer with knowledge of the others who are here
And how to be here with them. By this knowledge
Make the sense you need to make. By it stand
In the dignity of good sense, whatever may follow.

Amen. Tend. Pay attention. Be disposed to action. Care for, look after. Your plants, your people, your place. In real life, with your body. I think of attending Catholic mass with my Aunt Jane, of the one part I loved: turning in the pew to greet the person beside me, seeing their face for the first time, clasping their hands, saying with a voice throaty from silence, “Peace be with you,” and waiting, skin warmed now, eyes synched with theirs, for them to respond,

“And also with you.”

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