Annie Dillard; Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

So, I picked up a copy of Annie Dillard’s masterpiece, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Having already been somewhat acquainted with Ms. Dillard’s writing, I was expecting her typical infusion of mysticism and nature philosophy with actual experiences out in the wild. And I wasn’t disappointed.

It’s sort of drawing mixed feelings from me. Some critics say that Dillard is too indulgent. She talks at length about one spiritual revelation or another, but not in a way that allows us to understand the meaning of the experience. Instead, she describes what having the experience is like, and gives us nothing else. It’s sort of like someone telling you about their dream: you’re mildly interested, but you listen more of politeness than genuine curiosity.

But at the same time, you can’t deny that she’s an amazing writer. Passages as beautiful as this one abound:

“In a dry wind like this, snow and ice can pass directly into the air as a gas without having first melted to water. This process is called sublimation; tonight the snow in the yard and the ice in the creek sublime. A breeze buffets my palm held a foot from the wall. A wind like this does my breathing for me; it engenders something quick and kicking in my lungs. Pliny believed the mares of the Portuguese used to raise their tails to the wind, “and turn them full against it, and so conceive that genital air instead of natural seed: in such sort, as they become great withal, and quicken in their time, and bring forth foals as swift as the wind, but they live not above three years.” Does the white mare Itch in the dell in the Adams’ woods up the road turn to this wind with white-lashed, lidded eyes? A single cell quivers at a windy embrace; it swells and splits, it bubbles into a raspberry; a dark clot starts to throb. Soon something perfect is born. Something wholly new rides the wind, something fleet and fleeting I’m likely to miss.

“To sleep, spiders and fish; the wind won’t stop, but the house will hold. To shelter, starlings and coot; bow to the wind.”

Go ahead; reread it. It’s worth it.

What astonishes me so much about Dillard is how she’s able to take scientific fact and turn it around, making something that seems dry and empirical into something magical, full of wonder. The passage above is a perfect example of this; she begins with the description of sublimation, and ends it by speculating whether or not a horse that lives near her desires to be impregnated by the wind. All that happens within a paragraph.

So there might be something to Dillard’s indulgence. I mean, if an author does indulge himself or herself in flights of her own imagination, it is certainly best that the author be someone as insightful, poetic, and maybe even as wise as Dillard is. Let’s face it: she’s a fantastic writer, and she sees things in nature that most people don’t.

As I was reading Pilgrim, I couldn’t help but compare Dillard to Bjork, the musician. Both of them seem to approach their craft in a manner that draws the observer into their ability to unwrap themselves, to expose themselves innocently to the world at large. And while it may be self-indulgent, in that both of them are so wrapped up in the beautiful way they give themselves to the world, there’s also something universal in that self-indulgence. Their self-indulgence is, at a certain level, almost unbelievably human, and it’s something that each individual can relate to, if they let themselves.

I suppose that’s a little bit contradictory, but I think it’s kind of true.

It brings me back to some earlier thoughts you can find here. At what point does science, a study whose soul purpose is uprooting the notion of mystery and replacing it with one of security, leave the realm of empiricism and enter the realm of magic? Is there not something wonderful and awe-inspiring to know the theories of slow geologic process that have formed the Cascades? Doesn’t it make you shiver to see a bee milking a flower for nectar, knowing that these two have danced together for millenia?

And think about all the photos that have been taken by our incomprehensibly large telescopes. Without modern science, would we be able to enjoy the nebulae, galaxies, and stars that color our universe? Of course not.

Maybe that’s the secret to Annie Dillard’s self-indulgence: it’s a way for her to deal with the fact that, as Loren Eiseley said, the despair of modern man is the inability to see miracles. Anne Dillard’s flights of fancy subvert science by turning it from a mechanical dissection of reality into a a special lens to peer at the wonders of our world. But because that subversion is invariably so personal, we see it as the imaginary world of a child.

But is that fair? Don’t we all, to some extent, ignore the dogma of science so that we can live more fully? Who thinks of chemical processes when they fall in love? Not many, I can assure you. Such a consideration would strip life of any sort of meaning, any sort of special quality that gives life its necessary pulse. So maybe it’s not wrong for Annie Dillard to write the things she sees; maybe that’s the level at which we all intuitively relate to her.

I’m not done with the book, yet, so I can’t make any final sort of critique. But maybe reading her work this way will make it slightly more palatable. I guess we’ll just have to see.