Farmers depend on the sky. Even if irrigation can mitigate the effects of a short drought, hail will ruin a crop of ripe wheat. An early warm spell can trick trees into budding, and the frost that follows can destroy whole years of apples, cherries, pears. In June and July and August and September, when the harvest should be, there will be leaves that look chewed and brown-edged. Apples are hardy and so there will be some apples, but not many, and they’ll be misshapen, with dry brown spots like anti-tumors, where growth seems to have been sucked in, stunted.
Productivity is a machine word; fruitfulness is a plant word. Several years ago I heard a sermon on the difference between them. It is the difference between factory and farm, a difference we’ve been trying to eradicate with pesticides and fertilizers and ever-larger machines. But we can’t get rid of weather. And so farmers either stop farming, or they work hard and develop that horizon-watching squint. You can sow, plow, plant, you can water till the well runs dry. You can do everything right, weed, find tricks to keep crows away from the kernels. And in the end it takes not even a tornado, nothing so dramatic, to kill what was alive, or to render it unharvestable. In Dakota, in a chapter called “Rain,” Kathleen Norris writes that on a hot day, in the afternoon, light rain can burn wheat. Or a long rain at harvest can make cut wheat sprout, and ruin it for sale. It doesn’t even take hail; just wind and a downpour can leave huge swathes clubbed, plastered so flat to the ground no combine can reach them.
Factories are affected by weather too, literally and figuratively: floods and earthquakes, economic swings, consumer fads. And yet their roofs and bright lights, their large paved parking lots, their linoleum or concrete floors and white walls, all block out the sky and the earth, and make horizon-watching difficult at best.
There is an essential humility missing when we call our activity “productivity,” a narrowing of focus that leaves out the scope of the world beyond us, as though this one productive process can be sealed off from the mess and disaster and glory of seasons, oceans, famines, wars, elections, death, birth. “Bearing fruit,” by contrast, is as much something that happens to us as something we do. Bearing children (the most literally, physically fruitful thing a human body can do) is a good example: women are constantly becoming pregnant when they don’t want to, or failing to conceive though they desperately want to. And the changes of pregnancy happen, like the apple blossom turning into fruit. They often include humiliating changes—throwing up, exhaustion, becoming cumbersome, and weepy, and overwhelmed by everything from smells to birdsong. You can practice breathing exercises and birthing techniques, but the contractions will hit when they hit, and you’ll have to take them for as long as they last. You don’t set the time or the duration. It may be like getting hit by a truck. It may be like running five marathons. Or, God help you, both.
Beforehand, we say “she’s having a baby,” but while it’s happening we name the process: pregnancy, giving birth. “Productivity” is a process named after the thing that exists when the assembly line has attached all the parts and sprayed on the last coat of lacquer. The people I know who have worked on assembly lines tell me they are spirit-killing places, that their repetitive action denies what it is to be human at every level, from the body on out. This is true even if no limbs are lost; there is physical, psychic, spiritual danger in making a body do only one action, again and again.
There is also an awkward, machine-y dancing quality to assembly lines in some documentary films. Maybe the “ivity” in “productivity” applies to this dance. There is a mystery in the dance of factory processes that is usually not what I mean when I call something “productive.” It’s the mystery of things-working-together, of whole-that-is-more-than-its-parts. And maybe it is the same mystery that is at work in a hydroponic tomato, grown in a trough of water in a hothouse—which is the same mystery at work in a Sungold cherry tomato bush lovingly tended in a small plot: the wondrous fact of a tomato’s ripening. A plain red-and-green apple (as Chesterton points out in Orthodoxy) has something in common with the golden apple in the fairy tale. And I’d add, with Apple products at their best, elegant in the way of mathematical formulas boiled down to their simple, graceful bones. Even when we can describe the chemical processes (the little machines) that fertilize the bud and let the fruit bulb ripen, producing sugars and juice and a blush on the skin, a fruit (and the part of technology that is usefulness and dance at once) reminds us that we lack the language, the science, the understanding, to explain what makes life alive. And so does technology when it is, at the same time, usefulness and dance.
