Stalk the Gaps

Annie Dillard, the great American writer of faith and imagination, is gone. Her Pulitzer Prize–winning book of essays, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, written in her midtwenties, announced to many a new Thoreau—a naturalist writing about “fertility and destruction in the natural world,” according to NPR’s appreciation that, strangely, identifies her first as a novelist (fiction was her weakest form). But Dillard was much more than that. She was, before all else, a seer, a poet of seeing, best known for her visionary prose. She wrote extensively about Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (“the whole of life lies in seeing”), and Tinker Creek bursts not only with muskrats and dragonfly larvae but with Martin Buber and the advice of Jacques Ellul: “Launch into the deep and you shall see.” “The effort,” writes Dillard, outlining her life’s work early on, requires “a lifetime of dedicated struggle; it marks the literature of saints and monks of every order East and West, under every rule and no rule, discalced and shod.” It would mark the literature she created, too. No surprise, then, that you’ll find in Dillard’s work scenes of miracles and healings that sound like she’s remixing the Gospels. Her writing is where the newly sighted “teach us how dull is our vision.” For example, Dillard opens Tinker Creek by remixing the story of the two-part healing of the blind man in Mark’s Gospel, which is most famous for the man’s first response: Jesus took the blind man by the hand and led him outside the village. When he had spit on the man’s eyes and put his hands on him, Jesus asked, “Do you see anything?” He looked up and said, “I see people; they look like trees walking around.” Dillard offers glimpses of a book called Space and Sight, about successful cataract operations on those born blind; she is careful to select the following moments in “Seeing,” the second chapter of Tinker Creek: A little girl visits a garden. “She…stands speechless in front of the tree, which she only names….as ‘the tree with the lights in it.’”… One girl was eager to tell her friend that “men do not really look like trees at all.”… Finally, a twenty-two-year-old girl was dazzled by the world’s brightness and kept her eyes shut for two weeks. Strange visions like these might have come straight out of Bethsaida, or the pools of Siloam in the Gospel of John. Dillard presents them so we may remember what it means to see: “I saw color-patches for weeks after I read this wonderful book,” Dillard tells the reader: Maybe we all could see color-patches too, the world unraveled from reason, Eden before Adam gave names. The scales would drop from my eyes; I’d see trees like men walking; I’d run down the road against all orders, hallooing and leaping. If only: but Dillard the realist and writer knows that the imagination can run amok, and there’s no going back through the gates of Eden. The imagination divorced from reason can lead to grotesques, and reason alone, instrumental reason, will lay waste to the world. The answer for Dillard is to connect imagination and reason. This is how one meets the world in a process of un-selfing, self-offering, and self-surrender. Dillard, blunt as usual, writes: The interior life is often stupid. Its egoism blinds it and deafens it; its imagination spins out ignorant tales, fascinated. It fancies that the western wind blows on the Self…and people are watching. A mind risks real ignorance for the sometimes paltry prize of an imagination enriched. The trick of reason is to get the imagination to seize the actual world—if only from time to time. By seizing the actual and escaping the ego, Dillard encounters grace. Like the psalmist greeting the day, or like Job listening to God’s old-timey spiritual—“Were you there?”—the Dillard line at its best is ecstatic precisely because agency is reversed: When one truly sees, it is as if one is seen for the first time. This is the selfless calculus of grace, and it explains, too, Dillard’s much lauded writing advice, the very vocation of the artist: “The impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.” In line after chiseled line, Dillard explains the little she can do–which is enough, which is a lot: “Litanies hum in my ears; my tongue flaps in its mouth Ailinon, alleluia! I cannot cause light; the most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam.” She did just that in book after book. Catholic for a time, Dillard might stand as a figure for the restless Christian artist. She is a reminder that the imagination, properly wed to reason, can be transfigurative and redeeming and must always reach out and engage with this world—not Eden before Adam gave names to all the animals, but this world, here and now. Readers who put themselves in the path of Dillard’s light get transfigured, too. On his experience with For the Time Being, Dillard’s stark, enthralling book of clouds and births (and much, much more), Irish writer Mark O’Connell, a nonbeliever, speaks for all of us who no longer see the world’s brightness: Dillard has access to a deeper and more mysterious level of truth than I, in my dull rationalism, could ever attain. When I read [For the Time Being], it makes me want to fling off the constraints of that rationalism and go straight to the wild reality of things. I may not have faith in a God, but I believe in Annie Dillard. That’s why we go into the woods with Dillard: to lose our minds, deliberately. As she puts it in her classic essay “Living Like Weasels,” we need to “learn something of mindlessness, something of the purity of living in the physical sense and the dignity of living without bias or motive.” If we fail to account for this part of Dillard’s legacy, we’ll miss out on the ecstasy of her visions, the playful surrealism of a piece like “Expedition to the Pole,” where Dillard attends an imagined Mass on an ice floe. Her point is that we’re usually blind to the radical commitments Christianity requires: “On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions…. We should all be wearing crash helmets.” That’s because, in this world, we can only get glimpses of the passing God. Dillard draws on Ezekiel to remind us of that: 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…. Go up into the gaps…. Stalk the gaps. Art, in its highest liturgical calling, in Dillard’s greatest moments, does just that: attempts to see the God who can’t be seen. Or not quite: the great historian of Christianity Jaroslav Pelikan used the memorable formula “already” and “not yet” to describe the Christian experience of the parousia, the coming presence of Christ. Dillard’s ecstatic visions embody the unselfing of the artist: readers, through her words, experience the indwelling of sacramental reality. Indeed, it’s a longing to see not just God but as God sees, not just “fertility and destruction,” as NPR puts it, but to see with a different scale that minds the gaps in our feeble imaginations. In this light, death looks different, everything looks different, everything is changing and becoming new, new, and again, new. A pond is dying. Leave it alone. “In another couple of centuries, if no one interferes, the duck pond will be a hickory forest.” Scales must fall from our eyes, indeed. Our sense of scale. How small we make God. How big we make ourselves. We welcome your comments about this article. Please send your response to [email protected].