Noticer: The Visionary Art of Annie Dillard
Noticer: The Visionary Art of Annie Dillard
This essay originally appeared in Massachusetts Review 21 (1980): 255-70.
And she wrote, when I let this bird fly to her own purpose, when this bird flies in the path of his own will, the light from this bird enters my body, and when I see this beautiful arc of her flight, I love this bird, when I see, the arc of her flight, I fly with her, enter her with my mind, leave myself, die for an instant, live in the body of this bird whom I cannot live without . . . because I know I am made from this earth . . . and all that I know, I know in this earth, the body of the bird, this pen, this paper, these hands, this tongue speaking, all that I know speaks to me through this earth and I long to tell you, you who are earth too, and listen as we speak to each other of what we know: the light is in us. Susan Griffin, Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her The impressionist Claude Monet wanted to paint each of his subjects without knowing what it was: he hoped evidently that his ignorance would de-gloss things, subverting the tendency of the eye-in conjunction with human memory-to stereotype the visible world and rob it of its uniqueness. Although a writer, a creator of verbal imagery alone, Annie Dillard nonetheless shares with Monet the hope of seeing the world raw. It is her project as a writer, in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Tickets for a Prayer Wheel, and Holy the Firm , to attain the secret of vision-the "pearl of great price" (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek 34)-and thereby to be able "to look spring in the eye" (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek 124). It is through vision that she hopes to enact the most difficult of tasks: learning the neighborhood (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek 130). All that she has been and all that she doesfrom her experiences as a big city child to her own wide reading-it is all in order to enable her "to look at the creek" beside which she lives (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek 104). Twice, in both Pilgrim and Ticket, she quotes the unfathomable question, first proposed by Thoreau, "With all your science can you tell how it is and whence it is, that light comes into our soul?" The search for an answer to this question constitutes nothing less than the intrinsic movement of her books. She senses in advance that attainment of such a secret will grant to her special powers: when the scales drop from her eyes, in fact, she hopes to "see trees like men walking" (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek 32). Yet the "uncertainty of vision (Pilgrim at Tinker
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Creek 3) troubles her deeply. The 'pearl of great price" is no simple acquisition. Above all, she knows, it is not to be secured through the Faustian pursuits which usually characterize the intellectual quests of western man." Nor can it be discovered in the ecstasy of a Dionysian frenzy. As May Sarton sagaciously observes in Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing, there can be no such thing as a Dionysian woman, a female Dylan Thomas, for such a woman would be mad. As a woman writer, Dillard likewise senses that her art must be in keeping with natural process and earthly rhythms. The woman writer, Anais Nin once observed in her diaries, must never forget that everything that is born of her is planted in her . . . she was born to represent union, communion, communication, she was born to give birth to life, and not to insanity. . . . The art of woman must be born in the womb-cells of the mind. She must be the link between the synthetic products of man's mind and the elements. (My italics.) Because Annie Dillard knows this, she understands that "although the pearl may be found, it may not be sought" (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek 34). It will be discovered, she intuits, only by not trying to secure it. But how then is she to act? How is the search to be conducted? Dillard senses at first that she need do nothing of her own will. Vision, she thinks, "is a deliberate gift, the revelation of a dancer who for my eyes only flings away her seven veils" (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek 17); its "payoffs suddenly arrive in a blast of light" (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek 12-13), as a satori, not as the result of cogitation. The individual's responsibility, it would seem, is only "to be there" (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek 8) when vision reveals itself; she need only place herself "in the path of its beam" (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek 35) and revelation will come. She has heard, it would seem, the reprimand delivered to mankind's egotism by Emerson's Sphinx and knows that to the mystery of the visible creation in which she moves is by a "yoke-fellow," an eye to the eyebeam, inseparably part of its mystery. And though she understand that such revelatory vision "comes and goes, mostly goes," she lives for its coming, "for the moment when the mountains open and a new light roars in spate through the crack, and the mountains slam" (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek 35); she watches the "magician" of the visible in hopes that he may reveal that "fold in the curtain you never dreamed was an opening" (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek 12). Her art is, as a result, an art of waiting: "The waiting itself is the thing" (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek 265). But she knows that such waiting is a kind of purposive purposelessness, for, she asks, "isn't waiting itself and longing a wonder, being played n by wind, sun, and shade?" (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek 222). Her books are a record of this waiting. Her goal, she explains, is in the meantime to produce what Thoreau called a "meteorological journal of the mind" (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek 12). But she seeks no ordinary acclimation; she hopes through her work of days to find a home in the midst of what Wallace Stevens liked to call "major weather." Like Stevens, with whom she shares
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a passion for vision, she knows the great longing (described in "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction"): To discover an order as of a season, to discover summer and know it, To discover winter and know it well, to find,, Not to impose, not to have reasoned at all, Out of nothing to have come on major weather. Like him, she is guided by a faith that It is possible. It must be possible. It must be that in time The real will from its crude compoundings come, Seeming at first, a beast disgorged, unlike Warmed by a desperate milk (my italics) The real, finally, does disclose itself to her, discloses itself so fully in fact that reality comes to seem to her to encircle the "mind like rings in a tree" (Tickets for a Prayer Wheel 22). But when it first appears it seems, as Stevens understood it would, like a "beast disgorged"; it seems, in fact, grotesque. Because the visible world appears to her a kind of a muse, initially Annie Dillard feels herself very close to attaining the secret of wisdom. But her very manner of assimilating its inspirational gifts bring her close as well; she ingests the visible through a physiological, not a conscious mental process. The light which she seeks, she explains, "prints on my own silver gut" (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek 33); she is a camera. Her sensitivity to light is extraordinary, almost hallucinogenic, or, to be more precise, it is literally "photogenic"-"light born." She lives in a world of brightness, in which she is familiar with the "long slant of light that means good walking" (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek 3); recalls how for her a "cloud in the sky suddenly lighted as if turned on by a switch . . . " (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek 21); and watches a scene in which "running sheets of light raised on the creek's surface . . . like the racing of light under clouds on a field" (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek 14). It is along Tinker Creek that her experience with light is strongest. The creek mediates between her worldly eyes and the light of eternity. The future is the light on the water; it comes, mediated only on the skin of the real and present creek. My eyes can stand no brighter light than this; nor can they see without it. . . . We can't take the lightning. But we can take the light, the reflected light that shines up the valleys on the creeks. (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek 103) The creek even passes on the light which it absorbs to everything it touches: "It waters an undeserving world, saturating cells with lodes of light" (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek 104). But water is not the only element filled with light: "I breathed an air like light" (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek 33), se announces, and it does not appear to be either an exaggeration or a
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Noticer: The Visionary Art of Annie Dillard
mere metaphor. It is within this world that the very day itself becomes for the movements of God's "long eyes" (Holy the Firm 4); it is here that she sees the "tree with the lights in it" (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek 81) which becomes for her a kind of search image behind her quest for the secret of vision. Dillard has yet another physiological way of understanding her body's receptivity to vision: When I was young I thought that all human beings had an organ inside each lower eyelid which caught things that got in the eye. I don't know where I imagined I'd learned this piece of anatomy. Things got in my eye, and then they went away, so I supposed that they had fallen into my eye-pouch. This eye-pouch was a slender, thin-walled purse, equipped with frail digestive powers that enabled it eventually to absorb eyelashes, strands of fabric, bits of grit, anything else that might stray into the eye. Well, the existence of this eye-pouch, it turned out, was all in my mind, and, it turns out, it is apparently there still, a brain-pouch, catching and absorbing small bits that fall deeply into my open eye. Her eye and brain have always worked together, she is telling us, in their unity taking note of the revelations of every day. Her role as an artist, she believes, is to be a notetaker, or, to put it more precisely, her concept of inspiration leads her to believe rather that "There is no such things as an artist; there is only the world lit or unlit as the light allows" (Holy the Firm 76) This understanding of her function allows her to dwell momentarily at peace within her world, almost indistinguishable from it: Since I live in one room, one long wall of which is glass, I am myself, at everything I do, a backdrop to all the landscape's occasions, to all its wanderers, colors, and lights. From the kitchen sink, and from my bed, and from the table, the coach, the hearth, and the desk, I see land and water, islands, sky. (Holy the Firm 17) To assume such a stance is to return to a being-in-the-world, characteristic, to her own mind at least, of the instinctual world. Her ability to "reflect" her world instead of reflecting upon it, is the genius of the animal: No one has ever seen fish. Fish secrete highly reflective compounds That act as a skin of mirror. It is thought the fishes' sides are painted in landscapes, mountainous. (Tickets for a Prayer Wheel 28) Annie Dillard's art is an art of noticing, and to be a good noticer, as Hugh Lofting parrot philosopher Polynesia observes in The Voyages of Doctor Doolittle, is no mean feat. In
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noticing lies the key to learning the secret ways of nature and mastering the languages of animals. "Well that," said Polynesia . . . "is what you call powers of observation-noticing the small things about birds and animals: the way they walk and move their heads and flip their wings; the way they sniff the air and twitch their whiskers and wiggle their tails. You have to notice all those little things if you want to learn animal language. For you see, lots of animals hardly talk at all with their tongues; they use their breath or their tails or their feet instead. That is because many of them, in the olden days when lions and tigers were more plentiful, were afraid to make a noise for fear the savage creatures heard them. Birds, of course, didn't care; for they always had wings to fly with. But that is the first thing to remember; being a good noticer is terribly important in learning animal language. Annie Dillard's art of noticing brings her close to this private realm, and within the contents of her "brain-pouch" at least, she seems to approach fluency in such language. All of nature, in fact, begins to seem to her an "illuminated manuscript, whose leaves the wind takes . . ." (Holy the Firm 19). She even begins to feel herself in touch with all the secrets of nature, knowing, for example, how "At night in the ocean/the sponges are secretly growing" (Tickets for a Prayer Wheel 18). And she comes, too, to know that topos within her exchanges with her world where she can see how the very ground itself "speaks/its one word: tree" (Tickets for a Prayer Wheel 70). But merely to gaze upon the twentieth century reincarnation of "the book of nature" finally does not satisfy her; she wants to read it with understanding, to gain knowledge of it, even though the words are 'halting." A loss of innocence thus ensues, an expulsion from what had been a garden of light, and amidst those days which hard previously "dazzled" her vision, she soon finds herself almost irretrievably "lost" (Holy the Firm 19). Her mood turns to despair; her vision of immanence evaporates in the face of overwhelming odds against its difficult maintenance. "What use has eternity for light?" she begins to ask (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek 81), and the God she had once felt in the very presence of the day becomes "deus absconditus" (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek 7). Nature itself even begins to disappear, receding somewhere beyond the reach of vision, a reclusive "Shane" to whom her cries of "Come back" are in vain (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek 205); nature becomes for her no longer intimate, no longer a female presence, but the mysterious male strange of American western myth. Her vision of her art disappears as well. In Holy the Firm, she describes herself lying about the house reading which had, at the age of sixteen, first inspired her to be a writer, as if she needs to recapitulate her own artistic genesis. The time when light itself was her daemon has passed. At such times she turns to books as a substitute for the revelations provided by the "illuminated manuscript" of the natural world. Her reading is both eclectic and abstruse. She seeks insights into her malaise in the writings of esoteric Christianity, the Koran, Thoreau, and, above all, in the investigations of natural science. The poet Rilke once
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Noticer: The Visionary Art of Annie Dillard
lamented his ignorance about nature work, about how it is "with flowers, with animals, with the simplest laws operative here and there. . . ."He longed to know how "life comes into being, how it functions in lower animals, how it branches and unfolds, how life blossoms, how it bears. . . .In order to fill this void, he toyed with returning to school for scientific training (he never did so). Annie Dillard, however, knows these things. Her reading brings her such knowledge, and her art is made out of it as much as from the promptings of the light. In her reading she is a noticer as well. Every fact she discovers about the natural world-that, for example, there are two hundred twenty-eight separate muscles in the head of a caterpillar-seems numinous to her, and she suffers, as a result of her note-taking, an Ancient Mariner complex: the desire to rush into the street with news of her discoveries in order to change people's lives with her wonder. But she rests uneasily with her knowledge. The discoveries of her reading-about such things as the fiendish behavior parasitic insects and the courtship habits of the female preying mantis (she eats the male during copulation)-unearth another, less mystical underside of her vision of the natural world and bring it into prominence. Under the sway of their coupled negative power, nature becomes for her grotesque. Whether any such thing as the 'natural grotesque" actually exists has, of course, long been debated by the likes of Sir Thomas Browne, Hegel, Ruskin, and, most recently, by Wolfgang Keyser. That it exists, at least for a time, for Annie Dillard, seems beyond question. Both Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Holy the Firm can be viewed as personal encounters with the grotesque which attempt to transmogrify, to redeem, the stultifying pallor it casts upon her visionary eye, in order to return to a vision of immanence. In Pilgrim, early in the book's first chapter, Dillard describes the book's genetic moment, an encounter with the grotesque: A couple of summers ago I was walking along the edge of the island to see what I could see in the water, and mainly to see frogs. . . . At the end of the island I noticed a small green frog. He was exactly half in and half out of the water, looking like a schematic diagram of an amphibian, and he didn't jump. . . I crept closer. At last I knelt on the island's winterkilled grass, lost, dumbstruck, staring at the frog in the creek just four feet away He was a very small frog with wide, dull eyes. And just as I looked at him, he slowly crumpled and begn to sag. The spirit vanished from his eyes as if snuffed. His skin emptied and drooped; his very skull seemed to collapse and settle like a kicked tent. (5-6) The frog, she discovers, had been destroyed by a giant water bug, which, after having injected into the frog enzymes which turned its inner organs to liquid, proceeded to suck them out, as if through a straw. This moment, after which she "couldn't catch her breath," sends shock-waves through the entire book and through her life. To the location of the incident, Dillard explains, she returns again and again, "as a man years later will seek out the battlefield where he lost a leg or an arm" (5). Though she lost no appendage in the incident, she was nevertheless dis-membered: there she had lost the unity of eye and world she had once possessed; there had begun a rift between them and her own estrangement from the natural. Yet from this scene she does, will not, flee. The
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grotesque is to her an "oracle" in which she hopes to find the means of revelation to enact her "re-membrance" as well. Her perception of nature as grotesque initially, however, obscures even her vision of the light. She had, of course, always been aware that even the light which had once highlighted "in gilt" "an unexpected part of the landscape" for her art of noticing, at least momentarily, succumbs to those shadows that sweep it away (3-4). But the shadows cast upon her vision by the grotesque are unnatural. Watching the movement of clouds, for instance, she sees it with eyes shaped by her encounter with the giant water bug: At four-thirty the sky in the east is clear; how could that big blackness be blown? Fifteen minutes later another darkness is coming overhead from the northwest; and it's here. Everything is drained of its light as if sucked. (11; my italics) Deprived of light, she feels the encroachment of another darkness which is, however, no mere play of light and shadow, a more than grotesque darkness: death itself. Yesterday I watched a curious nightfall. The cloud ceiling took on a warm tone, deepened, and departed as if drawn on a leash, I could no longer see the fat snow flying against the sky; I could see it only as it fell before dark objects. Any object at a distance-like the dead, ivy-covered walnut I see from the bay window-looked like a black-and-white frontispiece sheet through the sheet of white time. It was like dying, this watching the world recede into deeper and deeper blues while the snow piled; silence swelled and extended, distance dissolved, and soon only concentration at the largest shadows let me make out the movement of falling snow, and that too failed. . . . It was like dying growing dimmer and deeper and deeper and then going out. (44-45) This is a vision of growing alienation like that Conrad Aiken once portrayed in Paul Ableman's descent into madness in "Silent Snow, Secret Snow." Here her project as a woman writer stands far removed from the ideal set forth by Anais Nin to "represent union . . . to give birth to life, and not to insanity." In Holy the Firm the same intrinsic movement away from immanence is precipitated by her fierce grappling with the grotesque fate of a young girl, Julie Norwich, a mysterious namesake of the medieval Christian mystic Julian of Norwich, whom Dillard on occasion quotes), whose face has been burned away by flaming oil in a plane crash/ Unable to accept such senseless cruelty into a world of light, she finds herself again on the far side of a widening gulf which separates her from her world, a world in which Thought itself is impossible, for subject can have no guaranteed connection with object, nor any object with God. Knowledgeable is impossible. We are precisely nowhere, sinking on an imaginary seas themselves adrift. Then we reel out love's long line toward a God less lovable than a grasshead, who treats us less well than we treat our lawns. (44-55)
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But love does not reestablish contact, and the very universe itself begins to seem to her neither "contingent upon nor participant in the holy, in being itself, the real, the power play of fire." Rather, it is "illusion merely, not one speck of it real, and we are only its victims, falling always into or smashed by a planet slung by its sun . . . (48). At such times, even the sun appears to her "looming low like the mouth/or a tunnel to hell" (Tickets for a Prayer Wheel 56). But even as she feels herself "stumble in darkness . . . blind as a bat," having surrendered almost entirely to Cartesian dualism, she steers her way back toward the light by "the echo of [her] own thin cries" (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek 26). Her words are these cries: it is by means of her verbal powers that she hopes to reestablish her vision. But those words, in Pilgrim, Tickets, and Holy, are themselves notes, retrievals from her brain-pouch of light which had once fallen into her open eyes; they are "uncreated light." The opposition of the word and the light, which has been with western man since John, begins to dissolve. "We are most deeply asleep at the switch," Dillard realizes, when we fancy we control any switches at all. We sleep to time's hurdy-gurdy; we wake, if we ever wake, to the silence of God. And then we wake to the deep shores of light uncreated, then when the dazzling dark breaks over the far slopes of time, when it's time to toss things, like our reason, and our will; then it's time to break our necks for home. (Holy the Firm 64) The jettisoning of reason and will is not, however, a rejection of language; it marks, rather, the search for a logos beyond the limitations of logic, the attempt to discover a 'Rosetta stone" (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek 108) which will enable her to learn the "sensual speech" which Jacob Boehme (and Lofting's Polynesia) claimed once existed before the fall of man. it is this language which will bring her knowledge of the neighborhood in which she lives, a knowledge and a praxis, the absence of which is her grief: "Have I once turned my head in this circus, have I ever called it home" (Holy the Firm 45). In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek's dialectical movement between lament and praise, a movement reminiscent of Rilke's Duino Elegies, the encounter with the giant water bug and discovery of the grotesque with its opposite pole; an encounter with "sensual speech" in which Annie Dillard's turn toward home is begun. At a point in her separation from nature at which she feels "the earth reel down" around her, she sees a sign and take note of it: I was standing lost, sunk, my hands in my pockets, gazing toward Tinker Mountain. . . . All at once I saw what looked like a Martian spaceship whirling towards me in the air. It flashed borrowed light like a propeller. Its forward motion greatly outran its fall. as I watched, transfixed, it rose, just before it would have touched a thistle, and hovered pirouetting in one spot, then twirled on and finally
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came to rest. I found it one spot, then twirled on and finally came to rest. I found it in the grass; it was a maple key, a single winged seed from a pair. Hullo. . . . O maple key, I thought, I must confess I thought, O welcome, cheers. (274) She greets the seed as a "thou," not an "it," for it is "bristling with animate purpose, not like a thing dropped or windblown, pushed by witless winds of convection currents hauling round the world's rondure where they must, but like a creature muscled and vigorous. . . ." The maple key is "creature spread thin to that other wind, the wind of the spirit which bloweth where it listeth, lighting and raising up, and easing down." In its presence she hears a "bell" within her ring a "true note" (my italics) that makes "a long dim sense" which she tries to explain: Flung is too harsh a word for the rush of the world. Blown is more like it, but blown by a generous, unending breath. That breath never ceases to kindle, exuberant, abandoned; frayed splinters in every direction and burgeon into flame. The message, the note, which the maple key leaves with her "brain-pouch" remains with her, bringing back into her world the immanence of earth's regenerative powers: And now when I sway to a fitful wind, alone and listing, I will think, maple key. When I see a photograph of earth from space, he planet so painterly and hung, I will think, maple key. When I shakes your hand or meet your eyes I will think, two maple keys. if am a maple key falling, at least I can twirl. (275-76) Her world has become a vast regeneration, in all its elements and as a whole. The earth itself had earlier in the book, in a dream, presented itself to her, as if through a Borgesian "aleph," in which she saw its whole history unfold before her eyes like a gigantic fabric, a "never-ending cloth" in which her own time was hardly discernible and her own concerns seemed petty (143-44). Its immensity, its intricacy, seemed to her even then beyond human fathoming; the vision seemed to offered her no real alternative but acceptance of the earth and its ways, including the grotesque. But it is not until her call back to the world of death and regeneration by the maple key that she finds the words to express her acceptance; she finds them in her reading, in the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson: "I dreamed that I floated at will in the great Ether, and I saw this world floating also not far off but diminished to the size of an apple. Then an angel took it in his hand and brought it to me and said, 'This must thought eat.' And I ate the world." (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek 278) But it is not just Emerson who has eaten the world, accepting thereby its incarnation: "The giant water bug ate the world" (279). Its action, she has realized, indeed the whole of the "natural grotesque," are not be questioned, for the "grotesques and horrors bloom from [the] the same free growth" as the beauty she sought alone, as if it were the light's one desirable revelations; all springs from "that intricate scramble up and down the
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conditions of time" which generates all that is (149). She realizes that is interfering human consciousness which creates the grotesque and invents evil. The "thorns and thistles" which had been part of Adam's curse are no curse to the animal world ("But does the goldfinch eat thorny sorrow with the thistle, or do I?" [Pilgrim at Tinker Creek 221].) To Annie Dillard, finally, there has been no fall of man, either historically or in her own momentary aberrations from the guidance of the light. Only the male mind's Platonizing disposition could have ever produced such an illusion; there is no perfect realm of forms. There is only the incarnation: "creation itself was the fall, a burst into the thorny beauty of the real" (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek 221). Amidst that thorny beauty, resigned to "the flawed nature of perfection" (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek 3), she finds a home, at least until the time when her doubts begin to sever her from it again. But the means of her healing then, she knows, will still be the same. Tinker Creek, indeed the whole of the natural world she loves, is "a place even my faithfulness hasn't offended . . ." (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek 103). The creek is the incarnation, "Christmas," in which "This old rock planet gets the present for a present on its birthday every day" (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek 104). But the creek is filled with light as well as matter: "it waters an undeserving world, saturating cells with light." Light is in everything that is embodied; it is not ethereal, not a thing of the spirit. It is in the "tree with the lights in it," which has served as a search image throughout her search for the secret of vision, as Dillard suddenly realizes. When she first saw it in all its radiance, she taken the light to be a mere reflection. But no, she finally understands, it was an emanation: "I know what happened to the cedar tree. I saw the cells in the cedar tree pulse charge like wings beating praise" (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek 247). Light is within the creation, and so, then must be "the pearl of great price.' Dillard remembers a Polyphemous moth that he grade school class in Pittburgh once captured, which, upon being released, walked slowly, pitifully away, its wings damaged, back toward the wild, as if following a summons which the young Dillard could not comprehend. In retrospect, however, wondering what it was that drew the moth on, she finds a hypothetical answer: Did the crawling Polyphemous have in its watery heart one cell, and in that cell one special molecule, and in that molecule one hydrogen atom, and round that atom's nucleus one wild, distant electron that, split, showed a forest swaying? (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek 71) All things have eye-pouches, she is suggesting, in which are stored nothing less than the earth and all its contents. The light is in us; is "Holy the Firm." To remember this is to be re-membered back into nature. Mankind's exchanges with nature, including his selftouted capacity for creativity, are not really his own; they are, rather, inextricably a part of the vast möbius strip of creation Since Holy the Firm is in touch with the Absolute at base, then the circle is unbroken. And it is. Thought advances, and the world creates itself, by the gradual
http://mtsu32.mtsu.edu:11072/Writing/Noticer.htm (10 of 11)9/18/2004 2:09:46 AM
Noticer: The Visionary Art of Annie Dillard
positing of, and belief in, a series of bright ideas. . . . Eternity sockets twice into time and space curves, bound and bound by ideas. Matter and spirit are of a piece but distinguishable; God has a stake guaranteed in all the world. And the universe is real and not a dream, not a manufacture of the senses; subject may know object, knowledge may proceed, and Holy the Firm is in short the philosopher's stone (Holy the Firm 75) This intricate pattern is a mirror of the seasons themselves, for the yearly round is a knot, like a snakeskin, which cannot be untied for "there are no edges to grasp" (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek 74-75). Reality is an oroboros, and, standing as she does in the midst of this knot, Annie Dillard begins to see the search for the "pearl of great price"-the secret of vision-as an act of outrageous egotism; vision is not, and never has been our own. We are the eyes of the earth itself; we do not see, we are seen. Dillard feels "some enormous power" play over her "like a pipe" as it "brushes her with its clean wing . . ." (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek 13). She comes to know that moment when vision seems to her "less like seeing than like being for the first time seen" (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek 35). And the philosopher's stone, the matrix from which the whole knot of creation is born is, in turn everything, indistinguishable from the quotidian. Dillard's ends Pilgrim by quoting a sixteenth century alchemist on the nature of the long-sought-for stone: One finds it in the open country, in the village and in the town. It is everything which God created. Maids throw it in the street. Children play with it. (279) Annie Dillard's visionary art has, to date, sought to learn how to "choir the proper praise" (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek 9) of this everything, but the discovery still remains, in a sense, unrealized, cloistered. At the end of Holy the Firm it is Julie Norwich, the victim of disfigurement, who re-enters that commonplace world transformed by the philosopher's stone into a luminous ordinary reality, while Annie Dillard remains a private woman of the spirit. I'll be the nun for you. I am now. (83) She seems to speak, however, not just for Julie Norwich, but, as a writer, for her age as well, an age reluctant to accept her kind of distinctly female voice and visionary naturalism.
http://mtsu32.mtsu.edu:11072/Writing/Noticer.htm (11 of 11)9/18/2004 2:09:46 AM