Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Mar. 9th, 2025 09:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mickiIt is the Sunday when we sacrifice sleep for more light, a sacrifice I usually resent but this year I am craving the evening light so it seems like a small sacrifice to make. We'll see how I feel tomorrow.
I've been wanting to think more deeply about the paradoxes of nature I've been pondering as spring approaches: the abundance, generosity, and lavish excess of the flowering trees as a providential sign, yet the competition, death, and decay, and what that means about reading nature to look for hints of the divine. For these paradoxes Dillard is my favorite writer. I've taught For the Time Being many, many times so I've learned to love her language, but Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is the book that most addresses the cruelty of nature.
Starting it, I am struck again at what an amazing prose poet she is. Her language is so beautiful and evocative; it reminds me of the opening of For the Time Being, where her vivid and horrifying descriptions of the pictures in Smith's Recognizable Patterns of Human Malformations are so much more powerful and moving than the pictures themselves--I often bring the book into class to show students. I suspect the Tinker Creek in her writing is much more beautiful and full of divine mystery than it is in real life. Perhaps she is writing the Platonic Form of Tinker Creek, which is odd to think of, since she's just trying to describe it as accurately as possible.
Some favorite passages from chapter one:
"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, the canary that sings on the skull. 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. About five years ago I saw a mockingbird make a straight vertical descent from the roof gutter of a four-story building. It was an act as careless and spontaneous as the curl of a stem or the kindling of a star.
The mockingbird took a single step into the air and dropped. His wings were still folded against his sides as though he were singing from a limb and not falling, accelerating thirty-two feet per second per second, through empty air. Just a breath before he would have been dashed to the ground, he unfurled his wings with exact, deliberate care, revealing the broad bars of white, spread his elegant, white-banded tail, and so floated onto the grass. I had just rounded a corner when his insouciant step caught my eye; there was no one else in sight. The fact of his free fall was like the old philosophical conundrum about the tree in the forest. The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there."
That is a point on which Dillard and Thich Nhat Hanh would agree, I think: the importance of being present for that moment of grace (and perhaps also the moment of horror--like the frog being devoured by the water bug that she describes earlier in the chapter). The horror and the beauty of nature are interconnected for Dillard.
And speaking of Buddhism and horror, there was a line in chapter one--"Our line is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle, curved tunnels of a life miners on the face of a leaf"--that reminded me of the talk on ghosts and corpses in Thai Buddhism I went to last week (perhaps if I am not too lazy I will track down the name of the speaker and edit it into this). He pointed out that one reason that Buddhist scriptures are revered and treated as ritual objects is that they literally contain the bodies of teachers. I knew early scriptures were written on palm leaves; what I didn't know was they were carved/traced onto palm leaves, which leaves invisible impressions, and then rubbed with ashes--often the ashes of the teachers!--to make them visible. That's a certain type of mingling of the material with the spiritual I am still trying to wrap my head around.
I've been wanting to think more deeply about the paradoxes of nature I've been pondering as spring approaches: the abundance, generosity, and lavish excess of the flowering trees as a providential sign, yet the competition, death, and decay, and what that means about reading nature to look for hints of the divine. For these paradoxes Dillard is my favorite writer. I've taught For the Time Being many, many times so I've learned to love her language, but Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is the book that most addresses the cruelty of nature.
Starting it, I am struck again at what an amazing prose poet she is. Her language is so beautiful and evocative; it reminds me of the opening of For the Time Being, where her vivid and horrifying descriptions of the pictures in Smith's Recognizable Patterns of Human Malformations are so much more powerful and moving than the pictures themselves--I often bring the book into class to show students. I suspect the Tinker Creek in her writing is much more beautiful and full of divine mystery than it is in real life. Perhaps she is writing the Platonic Form of Tinker Creek, which is odd to think of, since she's just trying to describe it as accurately as possible.
Some favorite passages from chapter one:
"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, the canary that sings on the skull. 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. About five years ago I saw a mockingbird make a straight vertical descent from the roof gutter of a four-story building. It was an act as careless and spontaneous as the curl of a stem or the kindling of a star.
The mockingbird took a single step into the air and dropped. His wings were still folded against his sides as though he were singing from a limb and not falling, accelerating thirty-two feet per second per second, through empty air. Just a breath before he would have been dashed to the ground, he unfurled his wings with exact, deliberate care, revealing the broad bars of white, spread his elegant, white-banded tail, and so floated onto the grass. I had just rounded a corner when his insouciant step caught my eye; there was no one else in sight. The fact of his free fall was like the old philosophical conundrum about the tree in the forest. The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there."
That is a point on which Dillard and Thich Nhat Hanh would agree, I think: the importance of being present for that moment of grace (and perhaps also the moment of horror--like the frog being devoured by the water bug that she describes earlier in the chapter). The horror and the beauty of nature are interconnected for Dillard.
And speaking of Buddhism and horror, there was a line in chapter one--"Our line is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle, curved tunnels of a life miners on the face of a leaf"--that reminded me of the talk on ghosts and corpses in Thai Buddhism I went to last week (perhaps if I am not too lazy I will track down the name of the speaker and edit it into this). He pointed out that one reason that Buddhist scriptures are revered and treated as ritual objects is that they literally contain the bodies of teachers. I knew early scriptures were written on palm leaves; what I didn't know was they were carved/traced onto palm leaves, which leaves invisible impressions, and then rubbed with ashes--often the ashes of the teachers!--to make them visible. That's a certain type of mingling of the material with the spiritual I am still trying to wrap my head around.
