During my first pregnancy, I spent a lot of time thinking about diapers. Specifically, the environmental impact of diapers. The average newborn will go through about 2,000 diapers in their first year of life. Typical disposable diapers are made from petroleum, do not biodegrade, and are filled with hazardous chemicals. If that’s not bad enough, McGill University’s Office for Science and Society points out, “The fecal contents of those diapers can leach out into groundwater.” More expensive, “eco” options exist, but most of these are little more than greenwashing. For this reason, many parents choose cloth diapers, small squares of cotton fabric that can be reused again and again. Except cloth diapers must be washed, often, and by some accounting, the energy expended in all that washing is greater than the energy used in manufacturing disposable diapers. Diaper services can clean diapers more efficiently at scale, but you have to factor in the emissions expended trucking all those diapers around. Then there are the environmental costs of growing cotton. My husband, an engineer, ran through a series of equations trying to determine which one is better, cloth or disposable? What about compostable paper disposables? Line-drying cloth diapers? In the end we went with cloth, which seemed marginally better, but it was an unsatisfying resolution at best. “Nothing in science is ever simple,” the Office for Science and Society concludes. Nothing is ever simple, or fair or right or pure, and yet still we have to live here, knee-deep in laundry and shit, trying to do the best bad thing.

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Piers Plowman is a long allegorical poem written by William Langland, a contemporary of Geoffrey Chaucer, at the end of the 14th century. It is the story of Will, the protagonist, and his lifelong search for Truth. The poem is composed of a series of episodes that end abruptly and often inconclusively, with reversals and false starts. Unlike the typical romance structure, where individual episodes are either prolonged or locally closed before opening onto a new situation, episodes in Piers are neither neatly concluded nor infinitely dilated. Instead, they explode into conflict and irresolution, characterized by what Anne Middleton refers to as “free-floating combative animus.” A social problem is raised and possible solutions offered, but before any solution is implemented, it is met with rhetorical or literal combat that dissolves whatever tentative improvement it had promised; or, as D. Vance Smith writes, the poem’s structuring principle is “the cancellation of an idea by its own consequence.” Reading the poem feels not unlike trying to decide what diapers to buy, what car to drive, what to eat, what to wear, how to live as an individual in a system over which we have little agency, where every solution only seems to create new problems. A maddening poem, offering little closure or consolation, Piers Plowman suggests not only that another world is possible, but that this one simply isn't.

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The late 14th century was in many ways a time like our own, one marked by economic and social upheaval, widespread institutional failure, and access to a wealth of new information that questioned traditional wisdom and destabilized authority. Almost nothing is known about William Langland—we are not even certain his name was William Langland. We can only guess at his probable level of education, his class affiliation, his political and religious commitments. We do not know whether edits he made in later versions of the poem, toning down some of the more radical passages, indicate changes of heart, or attempts to evade censure. During his life and after, Langland’s work has been claimed by political and religious groups of all types. He has been cast as a proto-Protestant, a romantic, an environmentalist, a communist, a heretic, a zealot, and an anarchist. Alternately radical and conservative, utopian and apocalyptic, Piers Plowman asks, how do you live a good life in a bad world? Or, as Adin Lears put it in a recent meeting of the International Piers Plowman Society, "It's kind of a poem about getting out of bed in the morning.”

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In the poem’s most famous episode, a group of penitents encounter the Christ-like plowman Piers and beg him to tell them the way to Truth. He replies with an extraordinarily long, complicated, and indirect series of instructions, adding that one may follow all his complicated directions only to fail at the very end, where it might take 100 years to get back to where you were again. Overwhelmed, the penitents ask if Piers can act as their guide. He agrees to lead them if they will first help him plow a half-acre of land. The penitents agree and quickly form a utopian community in which men and women of all stations have a role to play. However, no sooner has the work begun than the entire community dissolves into squabbling over the question of how to deal with those who refuse to work. Piers initially endorses letting Hunger take those who won’t contribute, but soon realizes the ravening Hunger causes far more societal harm than good. What do we do with those who resist the common good? How do we weigh the competing claims of justice and mercy? How can we enforce society’s rules in a way that is both compassionate and fair? 

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Before this question is resolved, however, another, even more contentious and confusing episode arises. Truth sends a pardon promising to forgive Piers and all his heirs their sins. Truth tells Piers to focus on his half-acre, create a prosperous farm, and use the proceeds to do good, funding hospitals, repairing broken roads, and providing for unmarried women, prisoners, and students. Moreover, this pardon is available not only to Piers and his family but 

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Alle libbynge laborers that lyven with hir hondes,

That treweliche taken and treweliche wynnen,

And lyven in love and in lawe, for hir lowe herte

Haveth the same absolucion that sent was to Piers. 

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All honest working people will be saved. Hearing this, the penitents rejoice. This is followed by a lengthy passage about dishonest people and beggars, distinguishing the truly needy from liars, thieves, and lay-abouts. But when the long-awaited pardon is finally opened, it reads only, “‘Do wel and have wel, and God shal have this soule,’” and “‘Do yvel and have yvel, and hope thow noon oother/That after thi deeth day the devel shal have thi soule.’” It is no pardon at all, but simply a statement of Christian teaching Piers and the penitents already know well. Enraged, Piers snatches up the pardon and tears it to pieces. He abandons his own utopian project, swears off productive labor entirely, and goes off on another of the texts’s many pilgrimages. 

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What are we to make of this strange episode? Perhaps Langland is saying we have to get our hearts right before we can rebuild society? Perhaps he is impugning the right of the church to sell pardons? Perhaps he is saying something else entirely. Scholars are far from unanimous on this point. (Helen Barr remarks simply, “The poem cannot comfortably manage the logic of the medieval secular economy.”) And what of all those widows, prisoners, and students? What of the penitents still at the plow? What of the sinners waiting for Piers to lead them somewhere they can be good, and fed, and free?

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In an essay about Langland’s better-loved contemporary, Charles Muscatine writes, “For [Langland] the pull between an apostolically pure moral idealism and a sickeningly vivid sense of the facts of life was too great to control. His style produces a hallucinatory effect, in which the distinctions between abstract and concrete, moral and physical, have all but been lost." Muscatine goes on to praise Chaucer’s more capable handling of nascent late-medieval realism, to produce something certainly more readable than Piers.

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Muscatine is certainly not the only scholar to consider the poem flawed. Piers is notoriously difficult and confusing. Generations of scholars have debated, why is the poem like this? And, is it like this on purpose? I like to imagine the poem’s aesthetic failures, if you can call them that, are evidence Langland was willing to sacrifice the poem’s beauty for something more than beauty. “Uncompromising” is a word usually employed to describe auteurs who won’t accede to the exigencies of budgets or deadlines or decency or taste, who refuse to compromise their singular aesthetic vision. I believe Langland would not compromise even for his vision, would not succumb to the lure of style or the seduction of form. Where many artists won’t let the “real world” get in the way of their art, Langland wouldn’t let his art get in the way of the “real world,” his dogged commitment to seeing the world as it is, messy and sad and strange, while resisting easy answers and pat conclusions.

Three hundred years before Piers Plowman, St. Anselm defined sin in Cur Deus Homo as a kind of wavering sight: 

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Anselm: If you should find yourself in the sight of God, and one said to you: "Look thither;" and God, on the other hand, should say: "It is not my will that you should look;" ask your own heart what there is in all existing things which would make it right for you to give that look contrary to the will of God.

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[W]hat if it were necessary either that the whole universe, except God himself, should perish and fall back into nothing, or else that you should do so small a thing against the will of God?

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Boso: I must confess that I ought not to oppose the will of God even to preserve the whole creation.

 

Anselm: What if there were more worlds as full of beings as this?

 

Boso: Were they increased to an infinite extent, and held before me in like manner, my reply would be the same.

 

For Anselm, sin meant turning away from the singular good, even when all the things of this beautiful world call you to turn away. I like to think Langland was tempted by a vision of what his poem could be, but he wouldn’t turn his head from something else, not even a vision, but something he couldn't even see.

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Under the conditions of modern global capitalism, it can feel almost impossible to do the right thing. Every apparent solution only raises new problems: the windmills kill birds; the canvas grocery bags are made in sweatshops. Even the best consumer choices hardly seem to matter when a hundred corporations are responsible for 71% of carbon emissions. But we still have to live here, now, in this dying time. So what are we supposed to do: eat less meat? Blow up a pipeline? Stop using plastic straws? Archimedes famously claimed that he could move the world with only a lever and a place to stand. Our only levers are voting and shopping, and we have no place to stand. There's nowhere to stand outside the world to move it, not even to see it all at once. Langland, too, wasn’t able to get outside it, but he dedicated his heart and mind to trying. I believe he loved the world he depicted so critically; his work reminds us that anger is a part of love. 

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Throughout the poem, Will vacillates between sleeping and waking, falling into dreams and dreams-within-dreams. The distance he walks between dreams grows greater as the poem progresses, from a furlong (about three city blocks), to a mile, to months and years of wakeful wandering, in the shape of a spiral, where the same fixations reoccur but with ever more time and space between them. Characters return where they started, or break off their journeys to disappear from the text. One section ends with a pair of penitents giving up on the quest for Truth and returning to a life of sin; the narrator concludes, “I ne woot where thei bicome,” I don’t know what became of them, they simply fall away.

 

At the end of the long series of directions Piers gives to the penitents, he adds that one may follow all his complicated directions only to fail at the very end, where it might take 100 years to get back to where you started. Then you fail, then you begin again. Langland wrote and rewrote the poem, his only known work, over at least twenty years, trying to write his way out, starting again, and again, and again. After as many as 10,000 lines, the poem ends where it began, as the character Conscience declares he will begin another pilgrimage seeking, still, for the way out. Doubtless we can imagine a more satisfying ending, but maybe not a truer one.