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This weekend we are returning to Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. The chapter today is on "sight," and once again I am struck at the similarities between Dillard and Mary Oliver, in that both are poets (though Dillard more of a prose poet) who see the natural world as an occasion of grace. Pretty much this whole chapter is about seeing or failing to see the truth and beauty of nature. She has lots of anecdotes about sight; for example, looking at a tree and seeing hundreds of birds depart from it that she hadn't seen before they took flight, or her patient attempts to witness the many manifestations of life at Tinker Creek--muskrats swimming, turtles moving about, insects and amoebae and birds--sometimes successfully, often unsuccessfully.
"'Still,' wrote van Gogh in a letter, 'a great deal of light falls on everything.' If we are blinded by darkness, we are also blinded by light," and then she tells the story of hunters in the Greenland fjords being driven to madness by light on the still waters. "The reflex from the mirror-like water hypnotizes him, he seems to be unable to move, and all of a sudden it is as if he were floating in a bottomless void, sinking and sinking and sinking." This reminds me a great deal of Julie Norwich in Holy the Firm getting her face burned off, like the moths so consumed with light they become engulfed with flames--a metaphor for being drawn to the light of the divine yet completely consumed/overcome by it.
Clearly she sees her role as a witness to the light in the natural world. Another part of the chapter explores stories of adults blind because they were born with cataracts, who are suddenly able to see, and their perceptions of the world as blobs of light with no context--and how it upends their sense of the world and often their ability to navigate it. Seeing is both transformative and disorienting. The end of the chapter is practically Buddhist in its urging us to see as pure experience of the moment, without the filter of language; she talks about the difference between seeing with a camera--where she's moving from picture to picture--and pure seeing. She talks about an experience of watching minnows in the creek: "I blurred my eyes and gazed toward the brim of my hat and saw a new world. I saw the pale white circles toll up, roll up, like the world's turning, mute and perfect, and I saw the linear flashes, gleaming silver, like stars being born at random down a rolling scroll of time. 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, feather and bone. When I see this way, I see truly. As Thoreau says, I return to my senses."
But, she says, trying to produce this clear seeing--striving after it--doesn't work. You have to be present without seeking. "Although the pearl may be found, it may not be sought. The literature of illumination reveals that above all: although it comes to those who wait for it, it is always, even to the most practiced and adept, a gift and a total surprise....I cannot cause light; the most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam."
"'Still,' wrote van Gogh in a letter, 'a great deal of light falls on everything.' If we are blinded by darkness, we are also blinded by light," and then she tells the story of hunters in the Greenland fjords being driven to madness by light on the still waters. "The reflex from the mirror-like water hypnotizes him, he seems to be unable to move, and all of a sudden it is as if he were floating in a bottomless void, sinking and sinking and sinking." This reminds me a great deal of Julie Norwich in Holy the Firm getting her face burned off, like the moths so consumed with light they become engulfed with flames--a metaphor for being drawn to the light of the divine yet completely consumed/overcome by it.
Clearly she sees her role as a witness to the light in the natural world. Another part of the chapter explores stories of adults blind because they were born with cataracts, who are suddenly able to see, and their perceptions of the world as blobs of light with no context--and how it upends their sense of the world and often their ability to navigate it. Seeing is both transformative and disorienting. The end of the chapter is practically Buddhist in its urging us to see as pure experience of the moment, without the filter of language; she talks about the difference between seeing with a camera--where she's moving from picture to picture--and pure seeing. She talks about an experience of watching minnows in the creek: "I blurred my eyes and gazed toward the brim of my hat and saw a new world. I saw the pale white circles toll up, roll up, like the world's turning, mute and perfect, and I saw the linear flashes, gleaming silver, like stars being born at random down a rolling scroll of time. 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, feather and bone. When I see this way, I see truly. As Thoreau says, I return to my senses."
But, she says, trying to produce this clear seeing--striving after it--doesn't work. You have to be present without seeking. "Although the pearl may be found, it may not be sought. The literature of illumination reveals that above all: although it comes to those who wait for it, it is always, even to the most practiced and adept, a gift and a total surprise....I cannot cause light; the most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam."
