III 9th October 1994
The main enemy a farmer has to face in his soil is the weed of dog-tooth grass called here ʻpezʼ (pej), which spreads its white convoluting roots, meter after meter, taking goodness of soil away from other crops. Traditionally it was raked and burnt on the field in bundles, every year - a tedious work, with no guarantee of success, since a single inch stem left behind will germinate a new plant. Yves who knew well the ʻchien-dentʼ on his farm in Algeria looks despondent, whilst a cousin, once a manager of a PGR farm, took one look at these fields, which have not been cultivated for many years, and says: “nothing to do but Roundup the lot”. Roundup, which is a recent product, is a spray which destroys all plants, including pez, in a matter of two weeks; it is ecological in its action because it does not sterilise the soil, but becomes absorbed through foliage of a plant, working its way into the roots and destroying them. Our spraying of pej left the fields reddish after a few days, showing the rotting plants, it was expensive but made the fields ready for ploughing.
The first plough we bought is a ʻUnionʼ of Polish manufacture, a three-blade machine cutting 95cm width, which at the speed of 5 km an hour ploughs at best a hectare in two hours. With fifty hectares to prepare, the winter ploughing is going to take 10 to 12 days (the remaining fields are being left for the spring). We took on a farmerʼs son from a neighbouring village, to work with our crops for the coming farming year and bought a new, four wheel drive Belarus 85 hp tractor, which is refered to as MTZ after the name of the supplier. A powerful machine which only stops for changing a pin on the plough, when a stone cuts it by hitting an outer blade. The work is finished with cross-ploughing of the sides, each field being ploughed in the longest direction, to save the length of returns. The exception is our largest 25 hectare field - with a muddy pond and bog in the middle - which we ploughed diagonally to improve the structure of the soil and to even-out old furrows. Looking at a perspective of 850 meters in one direction is not less impressive than seeing a Barcelona diagonal; put a city dweller behind the plough (maybe Cultural Revolution had a point) and he takes lessons from nature, and dreams about Attica citizen-farmers who did their pez in the morning, and walked to the agora for an evening with Demosthenes or Aeschylus - which can be inspiring for his resolution in the great effort necessary for the job.
The new discoveries in the world destroy in their lusty path the genius loci of our beliefs, which then need to find another focus; the oneness in the vision of the world had to be asserted again, after Copernicus, Columbus or Darwin or Marx. Our penetration of the sciences seems to exceed greatly our grasp of natural science of man and the knowledge of human affairs which form ethical basis and appear to have remained almost stationary for two thousand years. If one no longer discusses seriously Aristotleʼs science, we seem still to look to his ethics - perhaps not because he was a poorer scientist than moralist - but because we ourselves have fallen behind on that aspect. Why it is so many people ask themselves - what are the reasons making it so difficult to adjust our ethics, to these major changes of our awareness - what are the inert blocks holding back our society?
Taking one example: America, which by-and-large is with- out a clouding baggage of history, has found the expression of our times easier to convey than we did in Europe, where we are fogged by so many memories, traditions, histories, relics, myths or superstitions. They led often with their own new rhythms of: democracy, land of the free, productivity, Ford, New Deal, Hollywood, Jazz, Charleston or even Depression, all of which coincided, mirrored or expressed so well our own views of the times, that we chose to call this an American Century. They were blessed by being able to lean on nature, with an opening into the Wild West, with the horse, the tree, field and the gun; dealing with survival or accommodating to primitive circumstances of life, while holding an awareness of a modern man It was a fervid start, with a tabula-rasa, which spoke to people of the world, who either left the natural ways long behind in an industrialised or bourgeois milieu, or lacked the tenacity to look for them in a fresh way. Has it all a danger of mislaying earlier lessons, and losing as it were the baby of the Western culture - from which it stems - with the bath-water of a new dream? Americans succeeded in their iconoclastic way because of the freedom they inherited in new circumstance while we were held back by our mores.
Leaving the obstreperous nationalisms of the twentieth century behind the other dream which stepped to formulate the oneness vision of the world was Socialism or Communism as evinced by the Russian Revolution. It is also an old dream fighting for justice for man, with antecedents of French Revolution, 1848, Kantian and Marxist thinking. It is a beautiful dream and the tragedy is that the dignity and idealism which it brings to many people in various parts of the world has not succeeded in finding an economic foundation. If it does it will provide an awareness of the modern world as strong as American has been.
There seems perhaps another way, a practical way, to face the challenge of the world hinted on by Flaubert when he writes: “Just when the gods had ceased to be, and the Christ had not yet come, there was a unique moment in history, between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius, when man stood alone” that perhaps there is a way of facing the world without dogma. With men retaining their beliefs for personal orientation in life and not for doctoring infrastructure. Such attitude free of dogma seems to show itself in Scandinavian countries like Sweden, Denmark or Finland which are neither fully socialist nor completely capitalist. There was a century in British history between 1650 and 1750 during Queen Anne when men like Wren and his friends looked at the world free of any dogma.
It is good to be exposed again to nature on the farm and its challenges of simple work. In the hullabaloo of opinions it is easy to lose our path of Western inheritance which often acts as a brake on progress if the adjustment to new conditions is not bravely made. So a farmer who faces the soil and the seasons with new methods with a Ferguson tractor, like an artist with his palette of new meanings with primitive, impressionistic, cubist or abstract art - are both faced with setting aside old tradition, but challenged to retain the true meaning of their craft, because without it lie the desert sands. This is a challenge to understand and lead the expression of our times - to offer a dominant philosophy - it is always open to any society which can make the grade, anywhere in the world; one is tempted to hope that it may return to Europe, its ancient home.
And looking at a ploughed field, stretching far behind a modern tractor, we know we have available today all the ingenuity and material resources to make a better world. Obviously what is happening today is happening in the face of momentous ecological, genetic or communications discoveries. We need in this time, as always, a new intelligence, to look optimistically, at the possibility of shaping, in a practical way, a better sculpture of: “the crooked timber of humanity”.
