Today is Julius Caesar’s birthday and the reason we call this month July.
Then August? His heir…
I prefer the Moon of the Flowers and the Nutting Moon and the Cold Moon. And of course the Wolf Moon. I think names matter. I think words matter. These are the ways we see the world and, more significantly, the ways we don’t see the world. If we say the month has 31 days to please a despot, then in how many ways are we blind to the actual moon cycle? If we name the days after dead men, how do we know when it’s time to plant, time to sing, time to mow the hay, time to rest? How do we know that these are things that should happen with each round of the year when we hardly remember these words in our daily living?
Words like making hay are dismissed as quaint nostalgia, irrelevant to our modern world. But isn’t it the opposite? What relevance has Julius Caesar to life? If Caesar is forgotten will anyone’s belly go hungry? Will anything break down or come undone? Will any one thing that matters to the world be different? I suppose July would no longer be July. But even that… who remembers, who now knows, that we invoke an emperor into the heat of the Northern summer? Seems a waste of a name.
But hay is not irrelevant. The Hay Moon begins in a few days. This is when we cut the fodder that will keep our domestic animals fed in the cold months, that will keep us fed in the cold months. This is not an ancestral notion, one that recedes into the adorable mists of time, as untouchable and insignificant as a rainbow. This is not an abstraction cooked up by front porch halcyon obsessions and agri-tourism boards. This happens today in the physical world. To you. To me. To random people standing on street corners. If it does not happen, ruminants starve in the winter and humans have to pay higher costs to keep themselves fed. In some places, where costs are already beyond means, this means that humans starve as well.
Making hay is essential in all the ways that Julius Caesar and empires and everything to do with the narratives of men are not. Moreover, making hay is real. I’m not saying that Caesar was not real, but he filled a mighty artificial role, one that could well be named imaginary but for the blood on his hands.
Finding what is real and essential and necessary in life is possibly the one true goal in living. Yet we chase after ideas and images. We don’t even know what is necessary to our lives. How many steak-eaters and milk-drinkers know that hay is the foundation of their diet? That without a successful cutting — or, better, two — each and every July there is no steak or milk? Of course, we’ve muddled the whole endeavor with even more artifice, locking cows in muddy cages — mired in their own feces — and feeding them foods that they can’t digest — grains and beans — while blaming them for their indigestion. It is only the elite cows who get to live natural lives eating grass and hay and only the richest humans who get to eat the elite and natural cows in the end. So perhaps humans don’t starve when the hay season is poor, but there is scarcity, scarcity in real food, leading to more suffering of real cows, who are then forced into CAFOs and turned into hamburger for the masses.
Silly story, I suppose… but it is no laughing matter to force another living being into an existence of sheer misery, especially for the sake of inferior and often unhealthy un-food. When there is hay to be mown…
However, this year, the hay is not good in my part of the world. For those living real lives and seeing the actual world as it is, there is a fair degree of anxiety. The Greening Moon was frigid. The Flower Moon was arid. The Strawberry Moon is unrelentingly wet, with a parting gift of catastrophe for those meadows that managed to survive the drought. One lowland mead near my home has been ready for mowing for weeks now, with no weather dry enough to allow for the work or the baling. (Compacted wet hay spontaneously combusts, you know…) It is now razed flat and buried under mud, gravel, and the miscellaneous flotsam of shattered homes and lives. No longer food. No longer living. (But exactly what one might expect from the paths our culture has chosen.) This hay is removed from the local food web and with its death is the unraveling of the weave. No hay, no winter feed. No winter feed, no milk. No milk, no… well, just about everything in Vermont, from ice cream to economic stability.
Julius Caesar has no discernible effects on Vermont, by the way…
In our language and daily thoughts, we privilege certain costs. In all these images of disaster, after what will likely prove an average flood season in a few short years, are there pictures of lost hay? Yes, of course, the muddy doll stranded in a broken tree amidst swirling brown water does play on more emotions. And yes, that is just as real a loss to a child, to a family. Nine feet of water in the local hardware store’s basement is also a visceral reality. But where are the pictures of the farms laid waste, the farmers who will have no income this year, the lands that will not feed us? Why are there no hands wrung over the hay meadows that will not be? I’m not saying that we should ignore the hurts to family and business, but that maybe we might recognize that the hurts are deeper and broader than what is portrayed in our words and images. In the same way that naming a month after one inconsequential and long-dead man is a hurt that cuts far deeper into our ways of being than we seem to realize.
We privilege what we think is important when we don’t even know what important is. It is not status and wealth. It is not even a doll caught in a flood (though that is much closer than Caesar). It is the cycle of living beings supporting living beings. Hay is important. It is at the center of that cycle. When it is removed, the cycle breaks down. Plants are like that… yet we hardly credit them for keeping us all alive each year.
There are many words being wasted on ideas. One recent bit of nonsense is ecomodernism. I’m not sure what that represents to the people who use it, but I can confidently and unequivocally state that it is not a thing. It is founded on the ideas of men, less tangible than a cloud (much less tangible than a storm cloud). There is nothing real about it because it is not based in the entangled reality of life. It assumes a separation that is not only prohibitively costly, it is impossible. Because it does not include hay. It would see humans confined in CAFOs and fed even worse things than grains and beans while the elites complain about ill-health amongst the masses. It does not recognize plants as the warp of the food web. It assumes that humans make their own lives. Which is preposterous. Humans don’t even know how to make a seed…
There are no seasons in a CAFO. There are no moons. There aren’t even any years. It is one long day of misery until the sun sets on each imprisoned existence. That ecomodernists do not understand this can be blamed on our words and names to some extent. We see inflated images of ourselves in these words. We don’t see the world. And ecomodernists have very few checks on their imaginations. No actual contact with actual importance or actual necessity or actual actuality. No reminders that it is hay-making season. Ecomodernism is an ugly world to those of us who can see, one of terror and isolation. A world of existence in place of life. But fortunately it is only a fantasy world, one that never will be no matter the words wasted on it. Ecomodernists can’t see that because they can’t see the real world. They can’t see the ugliness in their isolationist fantasies because they can’t the beauty and elegance in the real world, the world of interdependence and cycles and important hay and very, very, very small humans. None of whom can claim the name of time.
So happy birthday to a dead guy… but can we maybe start paying attention to what is real? It’s going to have its way with us whether we name it or not…
©Elizabeth Anker 2023
Teaser photo credit: Photo by Debra Manny Mosley on Unsplash
