Thomas Merton wrote, “there is always a temptation to diddle around in the contemplative life, making itsy-bitsy statues.” There is always an enormous temptation in all of life to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for itsy-bitsy years on end. It is so self-conscious, so apparently moral, simply to step aside from the gaps where the creeks and winds pour down, saying, I never merited this grace, quite rightly, and then to sulk along the rest of your days on the edge of rage.
I won’t have it. The world is wilder than that in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. We are making hay when we should be making whoopee; we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain, or Lazarus.
The gaps are the thing. The gaps are the spirit's one home, the altitudes and latitudes so dazzlingly spare and clean that the spirit can discover itself like a once-blind man unbound. The gaps are the clefts in the rock where you cower to see the back parts of God; they are fissures between mountains and cells the wind lances through, the icy narrowing fiords splitting the cliffs of mystery. Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too. Stalk the gaps. Squeak into a gap in the soil, turn, and unlock—more than a maple— a universe.
But can you stalk the gaps when you don't even know they're there? I remember when I was in maybe grade six, I came home from school one day and my mother said that she had spent some portion of the afternoon in the backyard, lying on her back on the picnic table, watching a hawk flying in lazy circles high above her in the air. She described how it glided, rarely flapping its wings, and she felt blessed to have spent what felt like hours watching it.
I asked, "Well, what was it doing?"
"Probably looking for prey," my mother replied. This sounded exciting.
"So did you see it dive and catch something?"
"No, I just laid on the picnic table, watching it fly in circles."
I didn't get it, and on a basic level, I still don't. If it's possible, I seem to have zero connection with nature. I have firm ideas about how humans should protect animals and environments, but I am not fascinated by a cobweb, would never spend an hour engrossed in watching a spider make one. Unlike Annie Dillard, I also have an uneasiness about nature: not only would I never sit down beside a copperhead snake, I would never sleep out in the open, by myself, with just a sleeping bag to protect me. Forget about bears and cougars, what about skunks? Even curious raccoons would send me screaming. I noted when I read Dillard's An American Childhood that the author reminded me of my mother, and had she not been busy at 27 years old taking care of me, my brothers and my father, I suspect there's nothing my Mom would have liked more than to spend a year on Tinker Mountain observing the weather and the plants and living creatures, finding a way to organise them into her personal belief systems.
I was intrigued by how many quotes Dillard sprinkles throughout the book, from W.C. Fields to Einstein and Thoreau, and was not surprised to learn in an afterword that she started with these quotes on index cards, along with fascinating animal facts (The reproductive cycle of blood flukes! The migration of eels!), intending to put everything she knew into its writing. She also describes her very intentional organization of the book, not just through the four seasons of the year, but with a crescendo in the first half exploring the via positiva route to God (accumulating the world's, and God's, goodness), wiping it out with a chapter describing a flood in midsummer, and then declining from the glory through via negativa chapters (stressing God's unknowability). I think that this very deliberate structure, along with incredibly well-worded philosophising, is what won Dillard the Pulitzer Prize for this book-- the few Pulitzer winners that I've read seem to be mainly concerned with technique.
The language of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is rich but dense; it was a slow read, not because I was bored, but because I was attempting to understand, to not skip over the difficult bits.
There are examples of unknown words:
The wind shrieks and hisses down the valley, sonant and surd, drying the puddles and dismantling the nests from the trees.(Sonant: A voiced speech sound. Surd: A voiceless sound in speech. What a perfect pairing, along with the alliteration and sibilance-- how is this not a familiar expression?)
And unknown experiences:
Cruelty is a mystery, and the waste of pain. But if we describe a world to compass these things, a world that is a long, brute game, then we bump against another mystery: the inrush of power and light…unless all ages and races of men have been deluded by the same mass hypnotist (who?), there seems to be such a thing as beauty, a grace wholly gratuitous…we don’t know what’s going on here. If these tremendous events are random combinations of matter run amok, the yield of millions of monkeys at millions of typewriters, then what is it in us, hammered out of those same typewriters, that they ignite? We must somehow take a wider view, look at the whole landscape, really see it, and describe what’s going on here. Then we can at least wail the right question into the swaddling band of darkness, or, if it comes to that, choir the proper praise.
I am a sacrifice bound with cords to the horns of the world's rock altar, waiting for worms. I take a deep breath, I open my eyes. Looking, I see there are worms in the horns of the altar like live maggots in amber, there are shells of worms in the rock and moths flapping at my eyes. A wind from no place rises. A sense of the real exults me; the cords loosen: I walk on my way.When my parents retired they built a log home on a lake in the deep woods of Nova Scotia. This is the lake closest to the small village my father grew up in, where he used to swim as a boy, but though I can nearly understand why they were drawn to return to their roots, I don't really understand how it was so easy to leave all their kids and grandkids and move a 20 hour drive away. Now my mother tells me stories: about going down to the lake and watching the loons and the ducks and the turtles; boating out to the island where the eagle nests, just to watch her roost; sitting still while the hummingbirds and finches and squirrels come to her various feeders, and I still ask, "Why?" If living there does open my parents to the experience of grace as Annie Dillard describes it, it's hard to resent; since they did spend their early adult lives taking care of us, just maybe it's okay for them to spend their later years taking care of themselves:
Something broke and something opened. I filled up like a new wineskin. I breathed an air like light; I saw a light like water. I was the lip of a fountain the creek filled forever; I was ether, the leaf in the zephyr; I was flesh-flake, feather, bone.The fact that I am not open to this experience of grace, that I spend my time diddling about with the itsy-bitsy, speaks of my own poverty of spirit, I suppose. That Dillard could still engage me, however, speaks to her writing powers.
I thought with rising exultation, this is it, this is it; praise the lord; praise the land. Experiencing the present purely is being emptied and hollow; you catch grace as a man fills his cup under a waterfall.
A pop philosophy I can relate to: Make connections; let rip; and dance where you can.
This is where my Goodreads review ends, but it's not the whole truth of the matter-- of course I resent that it was so easy for my parents to leave us. They were so young when they had us that we always felt resented, unwanted. This is likely compounded by the fact that they're Baby Boomers, and has there ever been a more self-centered generation? There's a scene in the movie Nothing in Common where Tom Hanks is complaining to his girlfriend about how needy his aging father has become and he says something like, "All you want is to grow up and move out and have your parents come by and say 'yes, this is a beautiful home and a beautiful family and you did good', and then they should just quietly go off somewhere and die". This has always struck me as a typical Baby Boomer viewpoint, and in reverse, how my parents feel about me-- they've raised us and now they're free to just go away. It is confounding to me that they both seem to revel in nature, now, when they never did before. Do I have a lack of connection because I was never exposed to it? How can my Dad name every species of tree in his woods when he never once took us to the woods when we were little? How can my mother leave the house in the middle of a conversation because she "never misses a sunset over the water" when we were never brought to the water? It is confounding to me.
Another story: When I was in College, after being away from University for a while but never thinking of myself as uneducated, I was required to take an English course. It was taught by a professor from the U of A and the few people I met before class were intimidated, not quite sure if they were up to a University-level course. One woman I spent quite a while talking with was a middle aged Native who was studying Social Work, hoping to make a difference on her Reserve. I found her fascinating and certainly my intellectual equal. At the beginning of the first class, the professor said he liked to know something about the students he taught, and he handed out index cards for everyone to fill out with their names, age, place of birth and answer the question: What is the one subject that you would consider yourself to be the class expert on? I considered that question briefly, and more tongue in cheek than anything else, I wrote: The links between Eastern Mysticism and Quantum Mechanics. I was sitting beside the Native woman and she was stumped by what to write and wanted to see my card -- once she read it and raised an eyebrow at me, I felt a bit pompous, but it still served my purpose: to give the professor notice that I was, just maybe, a bit different from my classmates. It was also not entirely a blast of smoke: the connections I made between Eastern Mysticism and Quantum Mechanics in the reading I had done since leaving University had blown my mind. It lingers still.
While reading Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, I was often reminded of these early forays into finding my own philosophy, and just like when I was young and pompous, I was thinking, "I'd have a different take on writing a book like this because I'd throw in some Heisenberg". And then:
In 1927 Werner Heisenberg pulled out the rug, and our whole understanding of the universe toppled and collapsed. For some reason it has not yet trickled down to the man on the street that some physicists now are a bunch of wild-eyed, raving mystics…Suddenly determinism goes, causality goes, and we are left with a universe composed of what Eddington called, "mindstuff". Listen to these physicists: Sir James Jeans, Eddington's successor, invokes "fate", saying that the future "may rest on the knees of whatever gods there be". Eddington says that, "the physical world is abstract and without 'actuality' apart from its linkage to consciousness…(We are left with) no clear distinction between the Natural and the Supernatural".And so with this passage, Annie Dillard pulls the props out from under my vainest intellectual construct; the one topic on which I would, still, consider myself to be the expert in any given group. I was reminded of a book I read during this period called Zen, Drugs, and Mysticism. In it, as I remember, the author explains the practise of Zen and the search for nirvana through meditation. He explains that some people will find God through meditation, some like Thoreau and Emerson will find Him through a profound connection with nature, and some will need the help of psychotropic drugs. I was so fascinated by this book that I remember even telling my mother about it, which was a safe topic because I knew that I would never have the nerve to experiment with acid or peyote or whatever-- I was too deeply affected by the Go Ask Alice -type afterschool specials; I had a horror of future flashbacks in which I might try to claw a baby out of my pregnant belly. Now I find myself uninterested in psychotropics, unconnected to nature, and ambivalent about meditation: I once scared myself, thinking that I was on the cusp of the understanding that would cause me to disappear like in The Celestine Prophecy. Embarrassing to think about now, but I wonder if Annie Dillard knew all this; she wrote Pilgrim at about the same age I was when I was nosedeep in subatomic physics: The Tao of Physics and The Dancing Wu Li Masters. At the time I felt like a pilgrim myself, walking the road to revelation, until I read some other book (unremembered now) that showed how common my epiphanies were, a book where a character said something like, "We sat around all night discussing physics and mysticism, like all first year University students, thinking we were revealing the world". If I had been capable of writing a book, it may well have been an attempt at writing this book; I can see myself with a pile of index cards, my favourite quotes and amazing facts (all learned, incidentally when I WAS in University, so I don't know now why I found it to be such bullshit at the time); trying to synthesise a worldview out of the crazy soup that has been ladled out to me.
In another afterword, Dillard looks back with squeamishness at how overwritten Pilgrim reads to her now, and I can empathize. I wish I had tried to write a book in my 20's that cobbled together everything that excited me; I wish I had even held onto the essays I wrote for that College English class; even the one that was a profile on my mother that the professor called "interestingly conflicted".
Further edit, added May 2014: My mother was up visiting from Nova Scotia and she came across the street from Ken's house one night and said, "When did you start writing these book reviews?"
I said, "Huh?"
"Laura showed me your goodreads account and it's just incredible. How do I make an account and add you as a friend? I'd love to follow your book reviews."
"Oh, yeah, okay," I hesitated. "I can't do it from my phone here but I'll send you a friend request in the morning."
I thought I was safe from my mother ever discovering me on the internet, and as I would never want to hurt her feelings, I didn't really want her to read even the first, public part of this review. So, first thing the next morning, I went through my 160 book reviews on goodreads and cut out pretty much every reference to my family. I don't know if my reaction to Pilgrim at Tinker Creek makes much sense without my Mom laying out on the picnic table, but it is what it is. I'm more depressed by the self-editing I will need to do going forward, but at least I have this space here for the more personal reflections.
And, of course, after all that effort, my mother didn't accept my friend request on goodreads or make her own account as I told her she would need to. But...that doesn't mean that I'm completely unobserved...
