VISION AND PRAISE: SCIENCE AND MYSTICISM

IN PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK

A Thesis

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts

by

Dannie Floyd Damerville, B.A.

The Ohio State University 1'1982

Approved by ~~.\liJ}~ Department of English TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iii

INTRODUCTION • 1

Chapter

I. SCIENCE. 6

II. MYSTICISM. 41

III. CRITICISM AND CONCLUSION • 89

NOTES. 102

BIBLIOGRAPHY • 107

ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank the following people for their help: Pat Mullen, my adviser, for his enthusiastic interest in my ideas about Pilgrim at Tinker Creek; my friends

Brad Thomas and Valeska Green, for our numerous discussions about science and mysticism; Val Mannino, for providing me with a warm and friendly home in which to live and work; my mother, for sharing her love for reading and writing;

Mary Bartels, for typing and helping to edit the thesis; and my spiritual teacher Baba Muktananda, for showing me how to combine love and work.

iii INTRODUCTION

Published in 1974 when Annie Dillard was not yet thirty years old, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek won the 1975

Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction as well as the

National Book Award. The simplest way to describe the book is as a modern Walden, for like Thoreau's classic it is one person's account of what they found out by living alone in close communion with nature and their own thoughts. In the first chapter Dillard pays homage to her predecessor while announcing her intentions for her book: "I propose to keep here what Thoreau called 'a meteorological journal of the mind. ,"l Indeed, there are important similarities between the two authors, and one of the most admirable is the acuteness with which they observe and describe natural phenomena. Thoreau's naturalist writings were recognized as significant contributions by the scientists of his day; the plethora of detailed observations in Pilgrim at Tinker

Creek lead many of the book's early reviewers to assume that Dillard was trained as a scientist. Eva Hoffman, one reviewer who did not make this mistake, saw a further similarity in the way the two writers move beyond the bare facts of observation to speculate on the actual dynamics

1 2 of consciousness and the nature of our perceptions: "From

Thoreau, she inherits the talent for transforming natural facts into metaphors of the mind. One of the most pleas­ ing traits of the book is the graceful harmony between scrutiny of real phenomena and the reflections to which they give rise.,,2 And it is in such reflections that despite their shared science-like qualities, both Thoreau and Dillard express deep reservations about the actual value of science.

When Thoreau was invited to join the Academy of

Science, he wrote in his journal that if the following self- description were known, the offer to join the scientists would surely be rescinded: "The fact is I am a mystic, a transcendentalist and a natural philospher to boot.,,3

Although he grossly simplifies Dillard's metaphysical back­ ground, critic Hayden Carruth suggests that a similar sentiment underlies Pilgrim at Tinker Creek: "In essence her view is plain old-fashioned optimistic American tran­ scendentalism, ornamented though it may be with examples from quantum physics and biochemistry. ,,4 The present study will demonstrate that Carruth's choice of the word

"ornamented" is perfectly apt, for despite Dillard's abundant and skillful use of scientific knowledge in her book, her sympathies, like those of Thoreau, are with mysticism as it is opposed to science. In this sense,

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek can be understood as an elaborate, 3

ambitious rhetorical ploy. Dillard uses the popular

fascination with science to ensnare an audience that

generally shi.es away from anything smacking of religion.

When queried in an interview published in a Christian

magazine about her book's lack of explicit references to

mainstream Christian teachings, Dillard explained that her work was aimed at non-religious people: "You must remem­

ber, however, my prime audience is the skeptic, the agnos­

tic, not the Christian. Just getting the agnostic to

acknowledge the supernatural is a major task."S Her

strategy of using science as a misleading come-on is

successful to the extent that Dillard presents mysticism,

the highest and most esoteric expression of religion, as

being superior to the currently prevailing world view of

science. In the last volume of his journals, Thoreau posed a question that summarizes Dillard's message in

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek: "Which are the truest, the sub­

lime conceptions of Hebrew poets and seers, or the guarded

statements of modern geologists which we must modify or

unlearn so fast?,,6 A great part of the credibility of

Dillard's answer springs from her genuine appreciation of

science when it is properly understood and applied as a powerful intellectual tool, and not as a philosophy of

life. More important, however, is the beauty and power with which she presents her own experiences as a seer. 4

Dillard's book begins with her recollecting how her old tom cat used to awaken her in the morning by jumping on her chest. The book ends with the author making her way, "exultant in a daze, dancing to the twin silver trumpets of praise" (279). The theme is established by the key words "awaken" and "praise." Pilgrim at Tinker

Creek is an astonished and astonishing exhortation to awaken, take a good look at the world, and praise. The good look is provided by a blend of personal observation, natural history, biology, physics, chemistry, astronomy, folklore, mysticism, meditative speculation, old time religion and uncommon sense, and it reveals a truly awe­ some world, one that is both terrible and beautiful. As

Dillard writes, "We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty and violence" (2).

Time and again the author asks what we are to make of this planet, our home, where wonder and horro~ love and cruelty exist simultaneously: "'Seems like we're just set down here,' a woman said to me recently, 'and don't nobody know why'" (2).

This study attempts to trace the path by which Annie

Dillard arrives at her own passionate answer to these ultimate questions. The first chapter is a detailed examination of Dillard's use of and attitudes towards science. The second chapter explores the way Dillard incorporates the teachings of mysticism and her own 5 mystical visions. The final chapter responds to the negative criticism that Pilgrim at Tinker Creek has received, and concludes by discussing the overall signi­ ficance of the book. CHAPTER I

SCIENCE

"The Extravagance of Minutiae"

Halfway through Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, the author

comments "that these things which obsess me neither bother nor impress other people even slightly" (l3S). While

pondering her passion for passing on the most arcane tid­

bits of natural science trivia, she likens herself to the

ancient mariner. Imagining that she has cornered "some

innocent at a gathering," she provides an example of her

obsession by pulling a particularly obscure crumb from her bag of knowledge:

Do you know that in the head of the caterpillar

of the ordinary goat moth there are two hundred

twenty-eight separate muscles? The poor wretch

flees. I am not making chatter; I mean to

change his life. I seem to possess an organ

that others lack, a sort of trivia machine.

(l3S).

Inasmuch as Pilgrim at Tinker Creek won the Pulitzer Prize

and the National Book Award, and that it was printed in its

6 7 entirety in Harper's and Atlantic magazines, and is cur­ rently in its twelfth printing, we can reasonably conclude that Dillard's claim for the uniqueness of her obsession is a modest conceit. Indeed, one of the great pleasures of reading her work is to remember that we also possess a dormant "sort of trivia machine" that is brought to life by the book's encyclopedic, almanac-like character.

Tickled, baffled, wounded as we are by the constant barrage of amusing, bizarre, and sometimes bitter information, we are certainly more apt to identify with the eccentrically curious narrator than with the fleeing wretch in the above anecdote. The deluge of knOWledge about the natural world may not change our lives, but neither does it register as idle chatter.

For the reader who neither cares for Dillard's mys­ tical flights nor is moved by the beauty of her prose, the single most striking aspect of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is this flood of information, facts, observations, and theor­ ies, many of which fit under the rubric of "scientific."

Her book is so loaded with such scraps of scientific lore that we expect to learn that the author, herself, is a scientist. When she tells us otherwise, "I am no scien­ tist, I explore the neighborhood," we are forced to wonder from where does she get her tremendous stockpile of information (12). In an otherwise bitter attack on her lack of political conscience, Hayden Carruth 8 begrudgingly concedes that besides being extraordinarily observant of natural phenomena, Dillard is amazingly well read:

She has organized her life, there in her

primarily natural habitat, so that she has

plenty of time to spend not only in the field

but in the library and laboratory as well. She

is the person who has read the books you have

always promised yourself to read, from Pliny to

Henry Fabre; she knows, though she is not a

specialist, more about recent work in biolog­

ical and physical science than you can hope to I learn. And she uses her knowledge well.

Dillard's similar reply to the same question (How does she know all this stuff?) adds a motive and a defense for her prodigious reading. In her typically gentle way she also implies that such broad reading about natural life should be more than a matter for casual interest for everyone:

I am as passionately interested in where I am as

is a lone sailor sans sextant in a ketch on the

open ocean. What else is he supposed to be

thinking about? Fortunately, like the sailor,

I have at the moment a situation which allows

me to devote considerable hunks of time to

seeing what I can see, and trying to piece it 9

together. I've learned the names of some

color-patches, but not the meanings. live read

books. live gathered statistics feverishly.

(130).

Because Dillard is primarily a naturalist, it is not

surprising that most of her information is culled from

biology. In less than a page we often become privy to a

lecture's worth of facts: While frogs breathe through

their skin when they hide in the mud to escape winter's

cold, "a turtle in the creek under the ice is getting oxygen by an almost incredible arrangement. It sucks water posteriorally into its loarge cloacal opening, where sensitive tissues filter the oxygen directly into

the blood as a gill does;" bluegills and carp swim beneath

Tinker Creek's ice, but further north the ice stays long

enough that the fish metabolize the oxygen, die, "and

float up to the ice, which thickens around their bodies

and holds them fast, open-eyed, until the thaw;" worms, dragonfly larvae, and some algae all manage to survive; water snakes hibernate in "dense balls," while water

striders affect the same trick "as adults along the bank;" finally, some of the mystery of bird migration is

unraveled when Dillard allows how "birds migrate for

food, not for warmth as such. That is why when so many people allover the country started feeding stations, 10 southern birds like the mocking bird easily extended their range nor t.h" (48). Did the reader have any idea all this was going on in the dead of winter? Why was high school biology class so rarely this interesting?

Somehow Dillard's continual reference to scientific facts is neither tiresome nor confusing. Like Lewis

Thomas and Loren Eisley, to name two of the more eloquent science apologists, she gracefully bridges the gap between what the specialist knows and what we know. The key to her success is that like an experienced teacher, Dillard seems to have an accurate sense of how much scientific information we already know, which is a great deal. The incorporation of science into her writing is based on the correct assumption that we live in a time that is shot through with science. In effect she says, IIYes, this stuff is pretty neat, but it is not beyond our grasp.1I

This attitude, which strives to place science within the broader spectrum of human knowledge, contrasts with the benign condescension of the popular priests of scientific elitism, such as Carl Sagan. Through all his gee-whiz smiles and distortingly shallow explanations, Sagan's real message is to smugly imply that real science, glit­ tery and grand, is the pinnacle of human experience, and is ultimately accessible only to trained scientists.

The first paragraph of Chapter 8, IIIntricacy,1I is a good example of how common scientific knowledge provides 11 the fuel for Dillard's flights of imagination. The point is that this knowledge is widespread through our society; we co-operate with the writer by already possessing the necessary background information that makes the passage work:

A rosy, complex light fills my kitchen at the

end of these lengthening June days. From an

explosion on a nearby star eight minutes ago,

the light zips through space, particle-wave,

strikes the planet, angles on the continent,

and filters through a mesh of land dust: clay

bits, sod bits, tiny wind bourne insects, bac­

teria, shreds of wing and leg, gravel dust,

grits of carbon, and dried cells of grass,

bark, and leaves. Reddened, the light inclines

into this valley over the green western moun­

tains; it sifts between pine needles on the

northern slopes, and through all the mountain

blackjack oak and haw, whose leaves are

unclenching, one by one, and making an intri­

cate, toothed and lobed haze. The light

crosses the valley, threads through the screen

on my open kitchen window, and gvilds the

painted wall. A plank of brightness bends

from the wall and extends over the goldfish 12

bowl on the table where I sit. The goldfish's

side catches the light and bats it my way.

I've an eyeful of fish-scale and star. (126).

Dillard's purpose in this paragraph is to demonstrate how

something as seemingly simple as seeing a goldfish is

actually a complex and intricate process. And to fully

appreciate her description, the reader must already know:

visible light is a "complex," not a homogenous phenomenon;

the sun is a star; it produces light by a process similar

to an explosion; light takes about eight minutes, to

travel the 93,000,000 miles from the sun to the earth;

light has a particle and a wave nature; light changes

color as it moves through the atmosphere; the air itself

is not empty space but is filled with countless small bits

or organic and inorganic materials; light refracts or

bends when it moves from one medium to another; the color

of an object is a function of which frequencies of light

are reflected and absorbed by the object's surface. These

"facts" read like the answers to a high school physics

test. Although none of them are contained in the passage,

they explain or flesh out the text. And, most importantly

these "facts" are not the exclusive property of special­

ists, but are likely to be known by most educated people.

No small part of Dillard's craft and her book's appeal is

that along with bizarre and incredible facts she also 13

selects just those scraps of scientific learning that most of us are likely to know, or with her prodding, to

remember, or at least think we know.

Although Pilgrim at Tinker Creek ultimately deals

with universal questions about human existence, it is

interesting to question, disregarding the language differ­

ence, whether an Elizabethan Englishman or an ancient

Chinese or, for that matter, anyone who lived before the

Twentieth Century could understand what Annie Dillard is

writing about. Would the plethora of facts make the book

incomprehensible? Could Leonardo understand Pilgrim at

Tinker Creek? Would Aristotle be confused?

Because the actual message of Pilgrim at Tinker

Creek, that despite the world's apparent faults, the atti­

tude of a truly awake person is love and praise, will seem

strange, even preposterous to many readers, Dillard is

anxious to prove that she is a reliable observer. She wants to convince us that she is a writer whom we can trust

not only because she is sincerely trying to tell the truth,

but because she looks at things from many different angles.

If she tak~holiday flights of metaphysical speculation and

mystical ecstasy, she wants us to know she has also done

her homework in observational ground school. Her major

strategy in this direction is to defer to the recognized

champions of observation, scientists, hence her frequent use of scientific sources. To prop up her admiration of 14

scientific observation, she occasionally avows that such

detailed vision is beyond her capacities. More often she

adopts the narrowed focus of the specialists as a model

for her own observations. The coherent, multi-dimensional view of the world that results from adding a vast amount

of scientific information to a rich mixture of recollec­

tion, hearsay, and personal observation makes the reader wonder if Dillard had the book planned from early child­ hood. The imaginative interweaving of scientific fact with personal experience and memory in her extended treat­

ment of the praying mantis is perhaps the best example of her ability to blend material from different kinds of

sources.

As insects are Dillard's personal demons, the praying mantis receives more attention than even the giant water bug, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek's paramount symbol of natural violence. For six pages at the beginning of Chapter 4,

"The Fixed," we are told much more than we ever wanted to know about this voracious, complex insect. "I have just

learned to see praying mantis egg cases" (55). This mild start to a horrible tale emphasizes one of the book's major themes, that given our usual state of drowsy dull­ ness, we must learn to see. This gentle exhortation leads to a detailed description of the egg cases that could have come out of an entomologist's field guide. Next we get a hint that Dillard's involvement with these insects, 15 in particular, and natural phenomena, in general, goes beyond simply looking and academic knowledge when she takes some of the cases home with her. She adds a brief message of commercial interest for the practical minded that ends on a grisly note: "I think the mail order houses sell them to gardeners at a dollar apiece." And if the eggs survive, "you get the fun of seeing the new mantises hatch, and the smug feeling of knowing, all summer long, that they're out there in your garden devour­ ing gruesome numbers of fellow insects all nice and organically" (56).

After slipping in this seemingly innocent introduc­ tion to the coming carnage, we learn that mantises are rather ravenous: "People have actually seen them seize and devour garter snakes, mice, and even hummingbirds"

(56). Insects eating live reptiles, mammals and birds!

However, even this monstrous reversal of the usual order of eating and being eaten is only a prelude to Dillard's childhood memory of watching in fascinated horror as mantises hatched and devoured each other in a sealed

Mason jar at elementary school. As the two uneaten sur­ vivors battle and eventually succumb to injuries, Dillard draws a curtain on this ghastly episode, and in so doing expresses her deep need to create meaning out of apparent chaos that is the driving force of her whole book: "I felt as though I myself should swallow the corpses, 16 shutting my eyes and washing them down like jagged pills, so all that life wouldn't be lost" (57).

A short lesson about learning to spot previously invisible egg cases offers a brief respite from the awful lives of praying mantises, but soon we are plunged back into their bizarre world when Dillard describes seeing a mantis laying eggs as "a horrible nature movie, a

'secrets-of-nature' short, beautifully photographed in full color" (58). Dillard has looked closely at nature, and not just at pretty flowers and chirping birds. She seems driven to convince us that she is not simply enjoy­ ing the fresh air and sunshine, but is desperate to find out what is really going on. If she can't find the right scientific fact that will make the unappealing side of natural life seem real, then she will get down on her hands and knees and show us. Though the sight is so pul­ satingly gooey and disgusting that she can1t believe it is real, that does not prevent her from thrusting our innocent noses in the revolting scene:

I leaned to examine the white thing and saw a

mass of bubbles like spittle. Then I saw some­

thing dark like an engorged leech rummaging

over the spittle, and then I saw the praying

mantis. She was upside-down, clinging to a

horizontal stem of wild rose by her feet which 17

pointed to heaven. Her head was deep in dried

grass. Her abdomen was swollen like a smashed

finger; it tapered to a fleshy tip out of which

bubbled a wet, whipped froth. I couldn't believe my eyes. I lay on the hill this way

and that, my knees in thorns and my cheeks in

clay, trying to see as well as I could. I

poked near the female's head with a grass; she

was clearly undisturbed, so I settled my nose

an inch from that pulsating abdomen. It pUffed

like a concertina, it throbbed like a bellows;

it roved, pumping, over the glistening, clab­

bered surface of the egg case testing and

patting, thrusting and smoothing. (59).

Lest the moist, fecund repulsiveness of this everyday

natural event fail to register any possible connection and

corresponding discomfort with human life, Dillard concludes

by drawing a comic parallel:

It seemed to act so independently that I forgot

the panting brown stick at the other end. The

bubble creature seemed to have two eyes, a

frantic little brain, and two bUsy, soft hands.

It looked like a hideous, harried mother slicking

up a-fat daughter for a beauty pageant, touching 18

her up, slobbering over her, patting and hem­

ming and brushing and stroking. (59).

Maybe it looks like your mother, Annie Dillard. Not like mine.

If, in Dillard's discouraging though admittedly drama­ tized view of praying mantis life, the basic biological functions of eating and birth are simply euphemisms for death and ugliness, the wonder of sex fares far worse. The black widow spider, as most of us know, is apt to make a snack of her paramour, but she at least has the good manners to wait until after the tryst. Not so with the insect world's version of the femme fatale. The two para­ graphs that describe the female mantis devouring the male while they are copulating must diminish the glee of the most felicitous of libertines:

The male, absorbed in the performance of his

vital functions, holds the female in a tight

embrace. But the wretch has no head; he has no

neck; he has hardly a body. The other, with

her muzzle turned over her shoulder continues

very placidly to gnaw what remains of the

gentle swain. And, all the time, that mascu­

line stump, holding on firmly, goes on with

the business! ••• I have seen it done with 19

own eyes and have not yet recovered from my

astonishment. (59).

The facile grace with which Dillard blends scientific

sources into her own writing is well illustrated by the

above passage, as not she, but the French entomologist

and writer on insect life, Jean Henri Fabre, is the

author. Smoothly incorporating another writer's work is

never as easy as it seems, as many a discovered plagia­

rizer is sadd~ed to learn. And the initial giveaway in

such literary crime is almost always the jarring incon­

gruity of personal writing styles, not the clear cut dis­

covery that text has been copied verbatim. Dillard, of

course, is not stealing from Fabre, but is rather stylis­

tically dancing across the century that separates their

writing. Her casual black humor, 'I'No, don't go near her,

you fool, she'll eat you alive.' And at the same time a

chemical in his abdomen says, 'Yes, by all means, now and

forever yes, 'II is the perfect accompaniment to Farbe's

droll parody of anthropomorphism (59).

As the preponderance of scientific lore in Dillard's

writing demonstrates, her involvement with science goes far

beyond casual interest or the desire to sprinkle some color­

ful oddities. Her passion for telescopes, microscopes,

laboratory findings and field studies is in good part an expression of her aim to have us value her final judgments. 20

She can not let herself be thought naive or ignorant, par­

ticularly about science. In fact, in the much ballyhooed

struggle between the sciences and the humanities, Dillard

is clearly on the side of the former: "Imperceptibily at

first, and now consciously, I shy away from the arts,

from the human emotional stew. I read what the men with <­ telescopes and microscopes have to say about the land­

scape" (182). Dillard seems bent on establishing herself

as someone who knows about and is sympathetic to science.

And it is from this strategic inside position that she

launches her curious guerilla war against the prevailing

overestimation of science.

Ambivalent Feelings About Science

There is a keen double edge to Dillard's estimation

of scientists and specialists (the words are used inter­

changeably in her book) and the kind of knowledge they

uncover. The obvious edge is her admiration for the

specialist's mind and her appreciation of scientific

facts and details: "Specialists can find the most incred­

ibly well-hidden things" (18). The intensely focused

concentration that the specialist brings to his field of

study yields a harvest of acute observations that the

ordinary person is dumb to. For someone who is as pas­

sionately dedicated to seeing clearly as is Dillard,

there is something to be envied in the scientific view. 21

"The herpetologist asks the native, 'Are there snakes in

that ravine?' 'Nosir.' And the herpetologist comes home

with, yessir, three bags full" (20). Scientists, it

seems, have a superior vision because they take a good,

close look. They narrow their focus and the result is

particular knowledge. Dillard is lavish in expressing her

astonishment over just how well science can see certain

things.

Less obvious are her actual ambivalent feelings

about what is gained by taking a scientific perspective.

Her major reservation, as it will turn out, is whether

scientific thinking leads to knowledge in the sense of wisdom, knowing what is true and good coupled with good

jUdgment, or to knowledge in the sense of information, which while organized may be unrelated or even detrimental

to deeper human concerns. Dillard's skepticism is

expressed both directly and indirectly. Some of the

latter cases may require reading between lines to see that

apparent praise of science and ~ scientists actually

implies criticism.

After musing over what enjoyment might be gained from

being a specialist, she seems despondent with her own lot:

"But I don't see what the specialist sees, and so I cut

myself off, not only from the total picture, but from the

various forms of happiness" (17). On the surface and iso­

lated from the rest of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, this quote 22 seems to express regret that she sees less and less well than an intensely focused scientist. More accurately, how­ ever, she is voicing less a personal lament than a descrip­ tion of what she calls "ordinary human consciousness."

Her book is an eXhuberantly urgent attempt to "somehow take a wider view," as well as gentle prod to at least become familiar with "the extravagance of minutiae" (12). Since

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is nothing if not a testimonial to Dillard's professly being very much in touch with "the total picture," as well as with an impressive number of

"the various forms of happiness," her self-deprecation must be considered rhetorical. As such, we can wonder whether specialists are more awake than the average per­ son. Certainly, specialists are not known for any special tap into happiness. On the contrary, it is often the narrowly focused specialist who manages to isolate him­ self from any broad view of life and at the same time to deprive himself of any particular joy through his obses­ sion with a constantly shrinking view of reality.

To believe that Dillard's frequent use of scientific facts and observations constitutes an endorsement of science as a world view is to totally miss the point of her book. For all her obvious appreciation of scientific knowledge and her admiration of the specialist's ability to narrow his focus and concentrate his attention on isolated phenomenon, Dillard is anxious to make her 23 readers aware of the limits of science as a way of think­ ing. While having intrinsic interest and worth by them­ selves, all the facts, details, statistics, and observa­ tions, "the extravagance of minutiae," don't add up to produce satisfactory answers to any of the basic questions of human existence.

To a great extent Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is an argu­ ment with the currently existing tendency in modern thought to position science at the pinnacle of human pos­ sibility. Once awarded this lofty perch, science is then asked to pass judgment on all other endeavors. The crea­ tive arts, economics, politics, the environment, and personal life, as expressed through religion and psychol­ ogy, are to be explained and accorded relative merit by

"application of the scientific method. II Of course, the foolishness of using science as a world view or as a life philosophy, instead of what it actually is, a methodical way of gathering limited information about certain cate­ gories of phenomena, is built in to the basic definition of scientific thinking. For science to work, measur­ ability, objectivity, and repeatability (validity) must all apply. By using these criteria, science has chalked up some impressive feats, along with some equally impres­ sive nightmares, but what can it tell Annie Dillard about

"the tree with lights," the central epiphany of her life? §

Dillard's criticisms of science appear throughout

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. That they are not immediately apparent is sometimes due to Dillard's rhetorical subtlety.

She knows she is taking on the number one sacred cow of her era, and her attacks are often veiled and brief. For example, Dillard suggests the inability of science to deal with ultimate issues by incorporating an extremely mater­ ialistic explanation of evolution into her own passionate quest for meaning:

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 type­

writers, that they ignite? We don't know. (9).

If this passage has a familiar ring, it is because it alludes to the popular scientific fable in which "millions of monkeys at millions of typewriters" are employed for millions of years to write the Encyclopedia Britannica,

Don Quixote, or some other huge work. This is supposed to explain how anything, no matter how purposeful it seems, can be the result of random chance working over sufficient time. Allowing the hypothetical possibility that pecking primates could render such a feat, Dillard takes the implied speculative leap to consider the real @ meaning of the story, that IIrandom chance" has IItypedll the whole universe, and in doing so has assumed the role of creator traditionally reserved for God. But where, she asks, does belief in such a reductive explanation leave our response to the world, our sense of "awesome wonders: power and beauty, grace tangled in a rapture with vio­ lence?" "If these tremendous events," the horrors and splendors of nature that evoke such powerful responses have no meaning, but are merely the products of blind fortune,

II what is it in us ••• that they ignite?1I (9).

While not all of Annie Dillard's knowledge of nature's apparent waste and cruelty is derived from science, the central episode of the giant water bug sucking the frog is a personal experience, for example, most of the detailed observations in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek are culled from scientific sources. And however grim their revelations,

Dillard appreciates the painfully close-up views that science provides her: "I do it as a moral exercise • a constant reminder of the facts of creation that I would just as soon forget ll (123).

Chapter 13, "The Horns of the Altar, II is an extended meditation on Dillard's realization that no one who has familiarized themselves with just one field of natural science, parasitology, could remain a nature loving

Pollyanna, looking through blinders that reveal only 26 growth and vitality while obscuring the equally present and necessary death and destruction:

Let me repeat that these parasitic insects

comprise ten percent of all known animal species.

How can this be understood? Certainly we give

our infants the wrong idea about their fellow

creatures in the world. Teddy bears should come

with tiny stuffed bear-lice; ten percent of

baby bibs and rattles sold should be adorned

with colorful blow-flies, maggots, and screw­

worms. What kind of devil's tithe do we pay?

What percentage of the world's species that

are not insects are parasitic? Could it be,

counting bacteria and viruses, that we live in

a world in which half the creatures are run­

ning from--or limping from--the other half?

(239).

Aldous Huxley, a writer who shared Dillard's ambiva­ lent feelings about science, made this same point with less graphic detail in his essay "Wordsworth in the

Tropics. ,,2 While drastically simplyfying the poet's ideas about nature, Huxley makes a clever point about people in general by asking whether a man as intelligent as Words­ worth could have so faciley deified nature had he not been brought up,in a long civilized country in the 27 temperate zone, but in a tropical jungle complete with parasites, diseases, and large predators.

The spectacularly bizarre (even for Annie Dillard) facts of "The Horns of the Altar" are fascinating, but by themselves they weigh heavily on any optimistic or even tenable view of life. Dillard demonstrates as much by examining her own life by the principle of parasitism:

I wonder how many bites I have taken, parasite

and predator, from family and friends; I wonder

how long I will be permitted the luxury of this

relative solitude. Out here on the rocks the

people don't mean to grapple to crush and starve

and betray, but with all the good will in the

world, we do, there's no other way. We want

it; we take it out of each other's hides; we

chew the bitter skins the rest of our lives. (245).

Such fatalistic pessimism is not the stuff of college graduation speeches nor Sunday school lessons. Nor is it less than the opposite of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek's ultimately joyful exhortation to love the world. But although the power of Dillard's book is her ability to create an affirmation after meeting such discouraging knowledge head on, half the point of this chapter, and of the entire work, is that the accumulation of facts and 28

observations about parasites, or any accumulation of

facts about any subject, does not mean anything by itself.

The facts that science produces in such profusion may be

interesting, amusing, or, in this case, horrifying, but devoid of any more powerful framework of meaning, they can only accumulate, eventually gathering sufficient mass to lead to confusion, alienation, and despair.

Chapter la, "Fecundity," resembles "The Horns of the

Altar" in its surfeit of basically discouraging, mostly scientific information. The facts crystallize in two

separate quotes where Dillard couples evolution with death: "The faster death goes, the faster evolution goes"

(178); "Evolution loves death more than it loves you or me" (179). The point here is not that Dillard is in any way "against evolution." Interestingly, throughout

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek she accepts completely the orthodox scientific position that evolution is not a theory, as is commonly believed, but is itself a fact proven by the fossil record. Moreover, as the above quotes indicate, she also adheres to the currently controversial notion

that natural selection, the actual theory part of evolu­

tion, with adaptive mutation and survival of the fittest, is the mechanism by which the natural world produces new forms. Possibly to our surprise, we find that on such a debatable topic as biological evolution, Dillard, for all her religious sentiment and metaphysical leanings, sides 29

with neither the creationists nor the latest crop of

scientific vitalists. Instead, as she launches into her

most extended inquiry into good and evil, she hunkers

down with mainstream scientists. (180-84).

This allegiance is only temporary, and in retrospect

rhetorical, for while Dillard will entertain the facts,

she is horrified by the philosophical implications of an

atheistic evolutionary view:

This view requires that a monstrous world

running on chance and death, careening blindly

from nowhere to nowhere, somehow produced wonder­

ful us. I came from the world, I crawled out

a sea of amino acid, and now I must whirl

around and shake my fist at that sea and cry

Shame! (180).

The crawling, whirling theatrics of this scenario are

only a slight exaggeration of the archetypal existential

scene of the lonely, despairing human being protesting his

fate to an uncaring universe. Dillard's pairing of modern

science with an atheistic, pessimistic existentialism is

not original, but rather a common theme of Western think­

ing in this century. Yeats, Hardy, and Eliot number among

the major literary figures who have alternately railed

against and succumed to such an essentially dreary out­

look. And William Blake, whom Dillard quotes and alludes , "I":

" 30 to in several key sections of her book, warned against elevating scientific thinking to the status of art, philo­ sophy and religion almost two hundred years ago.

However, if for no other reason than her writing is, in a sense, "scientific," her protest is a clever inside blow against the absurd, computer-enhanced optimism of a world that is dying from the weight of scientific progress.

Dillard suggests that if we follow science as a philosophy or as a world view, we will end up in despair. If we replace God with "evolution" or "random chance," the nature of death changes radically. No longer is death a punish­ ment for atoneable sin or a release to a higher existence.

Neither is death simply the natural end to our existence, but the flame and fuel of a machine-like universe. Read

"evolution" to mean the supreme purpose and director of life that religions call God in the following: "Evolution loves death more than it loves you or me" (179). Not belief in evolution nor the study of science, remember

Dillard is a sciencophile herself, but the error of equat­ ing facts with meaning leads to fatalistic nihilism. If we follow such a path, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek suggests we will soon reach a point where "We must as a culture disassemble our telescopes and settle down to back-slapping.

We little blobs of soft tissue crawling around on this one planet's skin are right, and the whole universe is wrong" (181). 31

The vigor of Dillard's sallies against scientific

dominance results in part from her hearty enthusiasm

(some consider it over-reaction) for whatever she is

confronting. As she admits "I exercise easily" (120).

Equally accountable for the intensity of her attacks is

her knowledge that we live in the land and time of science.

If she is going to be heard over the hurrahs for this

morning's latest scientific breakthrough, which more often

than not is a remedy for the terrible problems caused by a previous breakthrough, she knows she will have to scream.

This is particularly true since her own complex rhetorical

plan is to fill Pilgrim at Tinker Creek with plenty of

pro-science cheers.

With these conditions in mind, we can recognize that

extracted from the whole book, the passionate intensity of

certain quotes can easily create the false notion that

Dillard is a neo-Luddite who would smash all telescopes

and microscopes and turn the scientists out into the vernal

wood where they might get a real education. Of course,

this is not the case, and it is not suggested that Pilgrim

at Tinker Creek be read as an anti-science tract, but as a

daring attempt to redress the imbalance of holding science

too highly. 32

Spiritualizing Science

Always anxious that she might fall asleep, literally become unaware and miss the beauty around her, Dillard sees a profound value in scientific knowledge when it can aid her to realize invisible connections. This deep, all embrac­ ing perception of interconnectedness that she seeks is the mystical vision, the highest and least easily attained level of religious experience. To place Pilgrim at Tinker

Creek in the current wave of non-rational, wholistic think­ ing, we need only realize that Dillard's preferred term,

"mysticism," has given way to "spirituality" as the unify­ ing principle and goal of what has, for roughly the last decade, been called "the consciousness movement." While the next chapter demonstrates the necessity of Dillard's using the older term, another writer's definition of spirituality will make it clear that at least for this book the words are synonymous: "Spirituality is that quality of being that expresses the bonding of all living and non-living things as an evolutionary unit.,,3 With­ holding for later the full expression of mysticism in

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, there are many examples of how

Dillard's imaginative interaction with scientific know­ ledge synthesizes a higher, or spiritual level of aware­ ness. Dillard wants to take the inert, meaningless find­ ings of science and blend them into a joyous, fulfilling vision--she wants to spiritualize facts. 33

As has been discussed, Dillard uses scientific facts and findings in several ways. The cumulative juxtaposition of "nice facts" and "bad facts" serve as the basis for posing many of the hard questions she asks about the nature of good and evil. The amassing of such details also helps to establish her as a reliable observer, already mentioned as a necessary part of the book's purpose. But Pilgrim at

Tinker Creek is much more than a skillfully wrought almanac or compendium of natural science. Dillard wants to change her own life even more than she wants to change ours, and she does allow that an expanding awareness of facts can sometimes lead to a higher mental state where the whole is perceived as being far greater than the sum of its parts.

Such a vision is necessarily unscientific in its being sUbjective, unmeasurable, and unpredictable. Rather than being the product of observation, analysis and explanation, this view of the world will be best understood as a mode of being that must be experienced from the inside out.

As she considers all the things there are to know about all the world's creatures, she writes: "My ignor­ ing them won't strip them of their reality, and admitting them, one by one, into my consciousness might heighten mine, might add their dim awareness to my human conscious­ ness, such as it is, and set up a buzz, a vibration" (96).

The. "buzz " is the thing. In some of the book's mos t resonantly meanigful passages Dillard uses scientific flints ~ 34 so to speak, to ignite her imagination to transcend ordinary consciousness.

The third paragraph of Chapter 7, "Spring," provides an example of the author self-consciously telling how she uses scientific knowledge to lift her spirits. "When I lose interest in a given bird, I try to renew it by look­ ing at the bird in either of two ways" (107). Since one of the clearly stated themes of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is that it is only through an "energetic readiness" that we-might perceive the true beauty and meaning of the world, for Annie Dillard to "lose interest in a given bird" is a catastrophe on the order of an investor losing interest on a guaranteed stock.

Her first remedy for loss of attention is to "imagine neutrinos passing through its feathers and into its heart and lungs" (107). Neutrinos, as we are expected to know, are elementary particles that zip around and through just about everything as a result of natural radioactive decay.

We can be aware of neutrinos or not, the scientific fact is that they exist, all the time, everywhere. Recalling this bit of knowledge reminds the author, and us, that forces great and invisible are always present and working, whether we realize it or not. As neutrinos pass through the bird, they pass through all things, including Annie

Dillard and the reader. This scientific fact symbolizes the spiritual truth that where it matters most, in our 35 innards, in our "heart and lungs," we are tied together by forces beyond our easy comprehension. This interconnec­ tedness that Dillard expresses in her uplifting sub-atomic insight was given a pessimistic interpretation by an ear­ lier writer who used botanical terms: "The force that through the green fuse drives the flower/Drives my green 4 age. "

The second way Dillard tries to renew her interest in the bird is to:

••• reverse its evolution and imagine it as a

lizard. I see its scaled legs and that naked

ring around a shiny eye; I shrink and deplume

its feathers to lizard scales, unhorn its lip­

less mouth, and set it stalking dragonflies,

cool~~d, under a palmetto. Then I reverse

the process once again, quickly; its forelegs

unfurl, its scales hatch, feathers and soften.

It takes to the air seeking cool forests; it

sings songs. (108) •

Obviously, this fantasy trip backwards through time could only occur to a writer and appeal to an audience familiar with theories of evolution. The passage expands our consciousness in at least two ways: our narrow view of the present is stretched and we are chronologically connected to the distant past by calling to mind the vast 36 periods of time necessary for evolution to change one species into another; and by detailing these changes, our attention is called to the interrelatedness of birds to reptiles, and by evolutionary extension, to all of life.

Birds were once reptiles, reptiles were once amphibians, were once fish, were once still more primitive forms.

Where does this leave us? Of course, we have evolved from and are intrinsically related to all these creatures, even if we are not usually aware of it. Again Dillard uses scientific principles to bring our attention to the very heart of spirituality, the interconnectedness of all things.

The goldfish that elicited the crash course in optics at the beginning of Chapter 8 joins with a simple aquatic plant to provide a further scientifically based lesson about the unity of life. After carefully describing what this particular variety of goldfish, an Ellery, looks like, and telling how she got it, "I went to a store in Roanoke

l called IWet Pets ; I handed the man a quarter, III she recalls how years earlier she had seen "red blood cells whip, one by one, through the capillaries in a goldfish's transparent tail" (126). She had, of course, been looking at an etherized specimen through a microscope, which, she describes admiringly as'~ne of those wonderful light-gather­ ing microscopes" (127). After musing how the ceaseless flow of red blood cells were 'Ilike the creek itself," she goes 37

farther and links the past to the present and the flow in

the fish to the creek in her own body: "Those red blood cells are coursing in Ellery's tail now ••• and through his mouth and eyes ••• and through mine" (127). The passage continues and Dillard transforms the raw facts of circulation from a recognition of biological similarity into a more profound awareness of unity:

live never forgotten the sight of those cells;

I think of it when I see the fish in the bowl;

I think of it lying in bed at night, imagining

that if I concentrate enough I might be able to

feel in my fingers I capillaries the small knock­

ings and flow of those circular dots, like a

string of beads drawn through my hand. (127).

The key words are "never forgotten," "think, "imagining,"

"concentrate," and "feel." These processes are the essen­ tial human work that not only the writer, but all people must perform if they are to move beyond the disconnected emptiness of both scientific findings and ordinary conscious­ ness.

Dillard is not through with this lesson drawn from her finny microcosm: "Something else is happening in the goldfish bowl" (127). That something else includes an elodea, the simple aquatic plant that shares living quar­ ters with Ellery. "Using a very expensive microscope," 38

Dillard once saw "the streaming of the chloroplasts in

the cells of an elodea leaf" (128). Like the red blood

cells in the goldfish's tail, these green dots "pulsed, pressed, and thronged," "they wandered, they charged, they

milled, raced, and ran," "they flowed and trooped" (129).

So striking is the similarity of such apparently different

organic mechanisms that Dillard need not mention the obvious. Instead she brings up the now resonantly mean­

ingful fact that chlorophyll, the key constituent of the

chloroplast, and hemoglobin, the main ingredient of a red blood cell, have exactly the same number of hydrogen,

carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen a to.ms arranged in an iden­

tical manner around a central ring. If you were to remove

the magnesium atom at the center of a molecule of chloro­ phyll, and replace it with an atom of iron, it would com­ bine "with all the other atoms to make red blood, the streaming red dots in the goldfish's tail" (129).

Red dots and green dots? An Ellery and elodea?

Any biochemist could tell us that the molecular structure of chlorophyll and hemoglobin is so similar. Perhaps the biochemist might ask us to speculate as to what that might mean. Then our minds would begin to whir. Dillard's point

is that it is this whirring, the thinking, remembering, concentrating, imagining, and feeling that we can add to the base fact that brings a sense of wonder and meaning. 39

Did Dylan Thomas know that only one atom kept his spiri­ tual truth from being literal as well?

It should not surprise anyone who has kept up with popular thought that Dillard eventually finds a way out of reductive materialism, and one that depends on neither artistic nor religious imagination, in quantum mechanics, the most scientific of all the sciences~ Variously called atomic physics, elementary particle physics, and high energy physics, this complex, technical and highly theo­ retical field is, due to the popularity of several books, on its way to becoming a topic of every day conversation, comparable to how the once recondite Freudian psycho­ analytic theories have become assimilated into common thought. The unlikely possibility that physics could ever have the same broad appeal as psychology is realized in such books as The Tao of Physics, Fritz Capra, him­ self a physicist; The Dancing WuLi Masters, Gary Zukav;

The Fabric of the Universe, Dennis Postle; The Bond of

Power, Joseph Chilton Pearce; and Truth and Actuality,

David Bohm, a revered disciple of the man who first brought this whole mind-boggling mess down on us, Albert S Einstein. All these books are concerned with what may prove to be the intellectual discovery of our era, that modern science, when taken far enough, seems to validate the blend of rationalism and spirituality that lies in the esoteric heart of the world's high religions: Taoism, 40

BUddhism, Hinduism, North and South American Indian reli­ gions, and even the mystical brancheS of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity.

Dillard's examination of quantum mechanics acts as a bridge between science and mysticism, and as such is dis­ cussed in the next chapter. Two quotes serve to conclude her struggle to transcend the dry, sterile, nihilistic view of the world that she believes is the inevitable end of our foolish insistence that science is something more than just another intellectual tool. Although they both appear in Chapter 11, "Stalking," it is fitting that only one is by Dillard, herself. The first, in the manner to which we have grown accustomed, is borrowed from a great scientist, Werner Heisenber, who formulated the Principle of Indeterminancy:

The scientific world-view has ceased to be ~ scientific --view -in --the ---true sense ----of the word. ( 2a7 ) •

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.

For they have perfected their instruments just

enough to whisk 'away the crucial vein, and what

stands revealed is the Cheshire cat's grin. (206). CHAPTER II

MYSTICISM

"Physicists are Once Again Mystics"

Despite what skeptics like to believe, genuine mysti­ cism does not begin with airy, other-worldly fantasies, but with close observation of the concrete facts of life.

Whatever seems ethereal about mysticism comes as a conclu­ sion after the experiences of both inner and outer worlds have been weighed. The primary importance of the real world is certainly true to Annie Dillard. And one of the things that most fascinates her about the natural world is the way it seems to be in perpetual flux: "The nature that I know is the old-touch-and-go" (205). Even those aspects of nature that we sometimes use as symbols of permanence, the sky, the ocean, the mountains, are con­ stantly changing their appearances, alternately revealing and concealing, making observation a tricky affair.

Dillard has noticed that as we look at increasingly small aspects of nature this mecurical aspect becomes more apparent:

'Nature,' said Heraclitus, 'is wont to hide

herself.' A fleeing mocking bird unfurls for

41 42

a second dazzling array of white fans •••

and disappears in the leaves. Shane! •••

Shane! Nature flashes the old mighty glance-­

the corne-hither look--drops the handkerchief,

turns tail, and is gone. (205).

Her observations of the world tell her that "it scatters, it comes and it goes" (205). And she wonders if this fleeting, unpredictable side of nature has an intelligible significance and whether it fits into frameworks of under­ standing other than her personal one.

"I find in quantum mechanics a world symbolically similar to my world at the creek" (205). Dillard's discus­ sion of quantum physics and its epistomological problems involving the interference of the observer with the obser­ vation is found in Part III of Chapter 11, "Stalking."

The section has three main themes, "the truly pathetic fallacy of the old science," "the Principle of Indeter­ minancy," and "mind stuff," and together they suggest that science has, in effect, discovered and embraced mysticism.

Considering the brevity of her presentation, she does a credible job of presenting the revolution in thought that was brought on by quantum physics, but the most signifi­ cant passages are those where she reveals her pre-existing biases towards science and mysticism. 43

There is a tone of bemused indigatnion in the way

Dillard expresses her chagrin that society as a whole ever fell for science1s claim to being the answer to all our problems. After she reveals her genuine fondness for

Emerson by calling him a "wildman," she allows how even he spent some time in the enemy camp when he "accepted the truly pathetic fallacy of the old science when he wrote grudgingly towards the end of his life, IWhen the microscope is improved, we shall have the cells analyzed,

l and all will be electricity, or somewhat else " (206).

What is worse, she says, "Many of us are still" living under the delusion that the march of scientific progress will "gradually roll back the cloud unknowing • • • until we reveal the nub of things, the sparkling equation from whom all blessings flow" (206). Notice the use of reli­ gious language to ridicule what is still widely believed to be the final and fully satisfying substitute for religion.

As Dillard understands scientific history, the event that signaled the end of Newtonian physics was not one of

Einstein1s theories nor Bohr1s early experiments, but the formulation of the Principle of Indeterminancy: "In 1927

Werner Heisenberg pulled out the rug, and our whole under­ standing of the universe toppled and collapsed" (206).

Dillard1s grasp of this point is particularly keen, for 44 whereas the previous work of Einstein and his colleagues had told us that we had probably been wrong about most of our previous assumptions concerning the basic nature of the universe, Heisenberg gave us the startling news that, in a sense, we could never again be "right." Heisen­ berg's finding is also called the "uncertainty principle" and, as Dillard explains, it

• • • says in effect that you cannot know both

a particle's position and its velocity. You

can guess statistically what any batch of electrons

might do, but you cannot predict the career of

anyone particle. They seem to be as free as

dragonflies. You can perfect your instruments

and your methods til the cows come home, and

you will never ever be able to measure this

one basic thing. It cannot be done. The elec­

tron is a muskrat; it cannot be perfectly

stalked. (206-207).

Since most of us fail to see the earth shaking signifi­ cance in this statement, Dillard, who is always the good science teacher, explains the consequences of the prin­ ciple: "The use of instruments and the very fact of an observer seem to bollix the observations: as a consequence, physicists are saying that they cannot study nature per se, but only their own investigation of nature" (207). This 45 means that every observation we make, even with our unaided eyes or other senses, is actually an interaction which changes the nature of the object and the subject.

Although Dillard does not fully explain this point, the reason we can not be accurate in an objective sense is that the energy required to make the measurements for one condition affects all other conditions, including the observer. There can be no objectivity because the obser­ ver is not a detached, objective entity, but an integral part of a larger system, which is the entire universe.

Both the notions of cause and effect and objective reality are tossed out the window. Depending on whether one is a physicist, a mystic, or somewhere in between, that which gives the apparent multiplicity of the universe its actual wholeness is called energy, God, or consciousness.

Next Dillard quotes three world-famous physicians to demonstrate the dramatic effect the Principle of Indeter­ minancy had on those people who were intelligent enough to follow its logic. Eddington said the world was composed of IIlmind stuff ' ll and that we now have II 'no clear distinc­ tion between the Natural and the Supernatural'lI; Sir James

Jeans lIinvokes 'fate, I saying that the future 'may rest on the knees of whatever gods there be'lI; and Heisenberg says lI'there is a higher power not influenced by our wishes, which finally decides and jUdges'lI (207-208). 46

Annie Dillard is very happy about all of this. But she has no doubt that the mystics were right all along, and she is pleased that science, at least quantum physics, has finally come to its senses:

The physicists are once again mystics, as

Kepler was, standing on a rarefied mountain pass,

gazing transfixed into an abyss of freedom.

And they got there by experimental method and

a few wild leaps such as Einstein made. What

a pretty pass! (208).

The last two pages of "Stalking" are a joyous home­ coming celebration for the wayward physicists, an envigorat­ ing whirl of terms from quantum mechanics and religious and natural imagery: "The whole universe is a swarm of those wild, wary energies, the sun that glistens from the wet hairs on a muskrat's back and the stars which the moun­ tains obscure on the horizon but which catch from on high in Tinker Cree~ It is all touch and go" (208). Her ecstasy culminates in allusions to several of her own mystical ephiphanies: "And then the mountains part. The tree with the lights in it appears, the mockingbird falls, and time unfurls across space like an oriflamme. Now we rejoice" (208). She approaches the end of the chapter with an uncited mystical exclamation: "'Surely the Lord place, is in this ~ and I knew it not '" (210). 47

These joyous exaltations are somewhat misleading, because despite what Dillard has said, the truth is that most physicists, including the ones she quotes, are not mystics. The demolition of class Lcat physics may have sent scientists out searching for another answer, but to simply hypothesize some powerful force beyond our ken is not mystical perception. Except for Eddington's notion that the world is made of "mind stuff," the sentiments expressed in the physicists' quotes are not more mystical than are

Billy Graham's, which is to say not at all. Other than a vein of humility, what the sentiments have in common is a sense of trepidation, as if we have been in serious error against the inferred powerful forces. The Principle of lhdetenninancy "pulled out the rug" from under scientific determinism, but it does not necessarily lead to the utter, unshakable conviction of joyous union with the cosmos that is the hallmark of true mystical experiences.

There is no scientific proof of any spiritual truth, and to the degree Dillard suggests there is, she is mislead­ ing. Many physicists who know every bit as much as Capra,

Bohm, and Eddington see absolutely no correlation between the laws of reality as revealed in their science and the way in which mysticism has suggested men might better lead their lives. Bohm may help explain this crucial differ­ ence. "The true state of affairs of the material world is l wholeness ... This much can be revealed by quantum 48 mechanics. But he continues, "If we are fragmented, we must blame it on ourselves." These parts of ourselves which are to blame, according to mysticism, are the

Jgressive, ego-oriented mental processes in which human beings take so much pride. Until we are shown how to deal with these processes, either through practice or in a vision of illumination, we will not understand spiritual truths, we will continue to feel fragmented. In a similar but more dramatic way, history is filled with intelligent, reasonable individuals who had continuous contact with great mystical teachings and teachers and yet continued to be the most flagrant unregenerates, plotting, stealing, lying, killing, in the name of their religion. From the mystical perspective this is not puzzling, for attachment to the intellect and to reason is known to be a major impediment to the true vision.

Coming as it did, several years before the most successful attempts to show the similarities between physics and mysticism (The Tao of Physics was published in

1977, The Dancing WuLi Masters in 1970), Dillard's appre­ hension of the two fields makes a significant addition to

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. And it is foolish to chastise her for what is one of her most endearing qualities, her sometimes excruciating enthusiasm for ideas in general and mystical ideas in particular. This caution is particu­ larly true since the major criticism of Capra, Zukov, and 49 other science-mysticism writers is that they occasionally make the same error of trying to win by argument that which, by definition, can not be argued. A person can no more become a mystic or have a genuinely mystical view of the world by learning about physics than by learning about mysticism. The attainment and belief in mystical revela­ tion is a matter of personal experience and faith, not of learning and reason. If the theories and discoveries of quantum physics do not lead directly to a joyous mystical view of the world, they can free us from a narrow material­ istic determinism to consider a vast range of alternate explanations, one of the most comprehensive of which is the mystical perception.

IIMysticism My Message ll

In a letter written after the publication of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard said, ItArt is my interest, mysticism my message, Christian mysticism. 1t 2 Having read this admission from the author's own pen, we are under no obligation to believe it. Afterall, what a writer writes is almost always more important than what she says about what she writes. This may be particularly true when the sUbject is mysticism, a word with many different meanings, one of which is Itself-delusion or dreamy confusion of thought. 1t 3 Even so, an analysis of her book demonstrates that Dillard has a firm grasp of the fundamentals of 50 what might be called "respectable mysticism," in addition to her own mystical experiences.

A brief examination of what mysticism is will provide a background for appreciating these mystical strands in

Dillard's writing. The first definition of "mysticism" in the OED is the positive one:

1. The opinions, mental tendencies, or habits

of thought and feeling, characteristic of

mystics; mystical doctrines or spirit; belief

in the possibility of union with the Divine

nature by means of ecstatic contemplation;

reliance on spiritual intuition or exalted

feeling as the means of acquiring knowledge of

mysteries inaccessible to intellectual appre­ . 4 h ensJ.on.

People who take mystical states seriously consider them to be the highest experience of human consciousness. Such people believe that the mystic reports of cosmic union, expansion and joy are the ultimately accurate description of reality. There are other people, however, who consider mysticism to be a euphemism for an imaginative but still pathological condition. These people believe mystics are

"dreamers" or "crackpots" whose lack of contact with the real world has resulted in meglomanical hallucinations.

Somewhere in between the believers and the skeptics are a 51 small minority of people who attempt to investigate the claims of mysticism in a dispassionate manner. William

James was such an investigator.

Published in 1902, James's The Varieties of Reli­ gious Experience remains a definitive work. Inasmuch as James disavowed any trace of mysticism in himself, yet devoted a long chapter in his book to the subject, his thoughts have an admirable rt~trality and help clarify what can be a confusing subject. Because his exhaustive study of religion had convinced him that "personal reli­ gious experience has its root and centre in the mystical states of consciousness," he says that the subject "will form the vital chapter from which the other chapters get their light."S

He prefaces his attempt to arrive at a definition of what mysticism is by acknowledging the confusing and unfavorable meanings that are often attached to the term:

The words 'mysticism' and 'mystical' are often

used as terms of mere reproach, to throw at

any opinion which we regard as vague and vast

and sentimental, and without a base in either

facts or logic. For some writers a "mystic'

is any person who believes in thought-transfer­

ence or spirit return. Employed in this way 6 the word has little value. 52

James then proposes "four marks which, when an experience has them may justify us in calling it mystical. lI ? These characteristics are ineffability, noetic quality, tran­ siency, and passivity. Each of these characteristics will be enlarged on as they appear in the context of Dillard's work.

James further simplifies the subject by suggesting an easily understood criteria: liThe simplest rudiment of mystical experience would seem to be that deepened sense of-the significance of a maxim or formula which occasion­ ally sweeps over one. 'I've heard it said all my life,' we exclaim, 'but I never realized its full meaning until now. ' ,,8 Allowing that Dillard is an artist with a particu­ lar love of natural beauty and not a philosopher with a penchant for aphorisms, we can substitute lIobject or scene" for IImaxim or formula" and see her parallel under­ standing of mysticism in the central epiphany of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, lithe tree with the lights in it. 1I That tree, afterall, was not special nor extraordinary, but one she had seen every day, "the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost. 1I And her sudden realization of its meaning is, as James suggests, totally unexpected: II I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck ll (35). This under­ standing, that mysticism begins in the appreciation of simple, ordinary things, is central to most mystical thinking. 53

Indeed, perhaps the greatest value of both James's academic analysis and Dillard's artistry is that they are broad-minded when considering what might be a mystical experience. Both writers recognize that while the inten­ sity and subsequent effects of a mature mystical state are qualitatively different from ordinary life, such states also fit into a broad spectrum of positive experiences.

By working from the bottom up, from simple experiences to the more elaborate and more powerful, Dillard and James encourage an understanding, sympathy and interest in mysticism in people who have probably not had full blown mystical experiences themselves. Dillard's exquisite alertness and unabashed desire for transcendent vision makes her sensitive to the faintest echoes of mystical significance in common place things. Pilgrim at Tinker

Creek is charged with a generally heightened awareness that sees a thread of mystical similarity in experiences as different as taking a walk on a clear day and the ecstasy of a life-changing vision of cosmic joy. Simi­ larly, James is willing to consider almost any uplifting experience as a poor cousin of high mystical states, including intoxication by alcohol and other drugs: "The drunken consciousness is one bit of the mystic conscious­ ness.,,9 What these seemingly different states have in common is that they are "the great exciters of the Yes 54 function in man • • • they make him for the moment one with truth. ,,10

In order to define mysticism, James quotes heavily from many people whose experiences were characterized by his "four marks." His sources include the great Spanish mystical saints, Teresa, John of the Cross, and Ignatius

Loyala; other Christian mystics and religious figures, such as Jacob Boehme, Martin Luther, Dionysius the

Areopagite, and George Fox, who founded the Quakers; more exotic individuals such as the Sufi Al-ghazzali, the Hindu missionary Swami Vivek~nanda and the leading exponent of what James calls "Whitmanism," Walt Whitman; and finally a host of less imposing persons, among them, Charles Kings- ley, J. A. Symonds and an anonymous French "old man."

Based on their testimony James arrives at a rather bland definition of "the mystic range of consciousness. "It is on the whole pantheistic and optimistic, 2£ at least the opposite of pessimistic. It is anti-naturalistic, and harmonizes best with twice-borness and so-called other­ =;;:;;..;;.;;;.;;..;;.:.::.== ------­ worldly states of mind."ll Coming after the deluge of mystical quotations, this abstract seems somewhat like

Lewis and Clark returning from their transcontinental trek to report that "we saw some interesting scenery."

However, James's terseness serves the admirable function of restraining the imagination on a subject with which 55

it would like to run wild. One additional quote from

James suffices to launch into Dillard's use of mysticism:

In spite of their repudiation of articulate

self-description, mystical states in general

assert a pretty distinct theoretic drift. It is

possible to give the outcome of the majority of

them in terms that point in definite philoso­

phical directions. One of these directions is

optimism, and the other is monism. We pass

into mystical states from out of ordinary

consciousness as from a less into a more, as

from a smallness into a vastness, and at the

same time as from an unrest to a rest. We feel

them as reconciling, unifying states. They

appeal to the yes-function more than to the

no-function in us. In them the unlimited

absorbs the limits and peacefully closes the 12 account.

The key words are "optimisn," "monism," "less into a more,"

"smallness into a vastness," "unrest to rest," "yes,"

"peacefully closes the account."

"The Tree With the Lights in It"

Although Pilgrim at Tinker Creek contains many ecstatic episodes, the one that is most important is 56

Dillard's vision of "the tree with the lights in it."

This passage can be understood, to use Eliot's phrase, as

"the still point of the turning world," for it is the central image around which the rest of the book is written, and according to Dillard it is the central moment of her life. Although she never uses the word "mystical ll to describe her own experiences, a close look at her rendering of the event and its subsequent effect on her life will make it clear that she was in a mystical state.

Both literature and nonfiction abound with accounts of singularly significant experiences, visions, and moments that have shaped people's lives. In the sense that they fit James's definition, it is likely that many more of these life-shaping episodes were mystical than either we or the subjects themselves realize. There are two rea­ sons why many people could have such an experience and not know to call it by its formal name. First, IImystical vision" is only a name, and the experience itself is not the exclusive property of the formally religious. Rather it is a natural function that is often experienced when a person leads a life of surpassing charity and awareness and finds the delicate balance between dedication and detach­ ment. Secondly, in the West, unlike politics, warfare, economics, art, and science, mysticism has not been a mainstream topic since the Middle Ages. This has been particularly true in the orthodox churches, Catholic, 57

Protestant, and Jewish, where the appearance of a genuine mystic is cause for great consternation. Because with few exceptions churches have long been establishment institu­ tions oriented towards supporting the status quo, they are understandably threatened by the freedom, spontaneity, and disregard for external authority that characterize most mystics. An old saying goes: liThe worst possible news for a bishop is that there is a mystic in the diocese."

Because of Dillard's delight in natural beauty, it is-not surprising that her supreme vision should have come in the form of a tree. Like Dillard, the mystic Thomas

Traherne spent much of his life in close contact with nature. In one of his visions he also shared her spec­ tacularly elevated appreciation of trees: liThe green trees, when I saw them ••• transported and ravished me; their sweetness and unusual beauty made my heart to leap, and almost mad with ecstasy, they were such strange and wonderful things. 111) In a similar manner, mystic fisher­ men and sailors have visions of cosmic oceans and grace bestowing fish, and mystics of tribal hunting societies have visions of sacred animals. Successful movies that deal with mystical and pseudo-mystical ideas like 2001:

A Space Odessey, and more recently Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T., make clear that humanity's desire for transcendence will be envisioned in currently popular symbols. In the near future, mystical visions 58 may take the form of illuminated computers or numinous video games.

In Dillard's more traditional vision of "the tree," it is interesting to note that the immediate analogue was not the Biblical Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil or the Kabalistic Tree of Life, but a tree she had read about in "a wonderful book by Marius von Senden called

Space and Sight" (36). Von Senden collected numerous accounts of previously blind people who were given their sight by a new cataract operation. Many of the people had been blind from birth, and their reactions ranged from delight and ecstasy to confusion and horror: "A disheartening number of them refuse to use their new vision, continuing to go over objects with their tongues, and lapsing into apathy and despair" (29). Dillard's frequently stated low estimation of normal human conscious­ ness imbues such passages with double meaning, as if she is reminding us that a disheartening number of sighted people refuse to see things in any but our ordinary modes of perception, continuing to go over our lives, as it were, with our tongues. Of course, not all the patients reacted so poorly to their gift: "Many newly sighted people speak well of the world, and teach us how dull is our vision" (31). It is from one such person, a little girl who visited a garden, that Dillard gets the name, if not the actual inspiration for her own vision: "She is S9 greatly astonished, and can scarcely be persuaded to answer, stands speechlessly in front of the tree, which she only names on taking hold of it, and then as 'the tree with the lights in it'" (31). The stunning appropriateness of these quotations to the mystical message of Pilgrim at

Tinker Creek m~st make us wonder for at least a moment if von Senden is a real person who actually wrote a book called Space and Sight, -0% if Dillard just made it all up.

Because of the poem-like density of Dillard's writ­ ing, particularly when she is describing an ecstatic vision, and because this is the central vision of her book, a line-by-line analysis will best reveal the mystical nature of lithe tree with the lights in it" passage.

According to the teachings of mysticism, higher vision comes not because any thing or quality has been added to the world or the seer, both of which in essence and actuality are already perfect, but because the scales of ego-centered self-interest have been dropped from the seer's eyes. In The Perennial Philosophy, his reknowned anthology of mystical teachings, Aldous Huxley para­ phrases the mystic Thomas Traherne on this point: "0ne cannot know created Nature in all its essentially sacred beauty, unless one first unlearns the dirty devices of adult humanity. Seen through the dung-coloured spectacles of self-interest, the universe looks singularly like a 14 dung_heap.1I With this in mind, note the exact 60 appropriateness of how Dillard begins the account of her own vision by recalling the newly sighed little girl:

"When her doctor took her bandages off and led her into the garden, the girl who was no longer blind, saw 'the tree with the lights in it'" (35). In order to see her tree, Dillard has had to remove her own perceptual bandages.

Two aspects of the dung-colored spectacles she has removed are our lack of receptive concentration and lack of-perseverance. Most of the time we are either com­ pletely unfocused or enthralled by our own internal chatter. As Dillard puts it, "I wonder if we do not waste most of our energy just by spending every waking minute saying hello to ourselves II (202). An alternative state to both this and dopey mindlessness is what Dillard calls

"innocence": "What I call innocence is the spirit's unself-conscious state at any moment of pure devotion to any object. It is at once a receptiveness and total concentration II (83). Dillard's understanding of the need to calm the mind's seemingly ceaseless commentary so she can experience receptive concentration will be discussed at length later in this chapter.

Dillard seems to have much less to say about the need for perseverance, perhaps because her own dedication is evidenced by the fact she wrote the book. She makes frequent mention of the need for passivity if one wishes 61 to attain higher vision, a topic closely related to stopping the internal squawk box, but seems to take per­ sistence for granted, as in the following passage in which she speaks of "the secret of seeing" as "the pearl of great price": "But although the pearl may be found, it may not be sought. The literature of illumination reveals this 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" (34-35). Dillard may or-may not consider herself among "the most practiced and adept," but her ability to walk the razor's edge of perse­ vering without aggressively seeking, is expressed in the second line of her vision: "It was for this tree I searched through the peach orchards of summer, in the forests of fall and down winter and spring for years"

(35). Likewise, her mind is still and empty when she has her vision: "Then one day I was walking along Tinker Creek thinking of nothing at all and I saw the tree with the lights on it" (35).

The remaining eight sentences in which Dillard describes and comments on her vision of "the tree" show

"the four marks" that James said characterize a mystical experience. Two of the marks, transiency and passivity, are more apparent than are noetic quality and ineffability. 62

Dillard does not directly say how long her vision lasted. James writes, "Except in rare instances, half an hour, or at most an hour or two, seems to be the limit beyond which they fade into the light of common day." 15 What evidence Dillard offers suggests her experience was much briefer than even a half hour, perhaps a few minutes or even seconds. The last sentence of the passage describes the vision as "the moment when mountains open and a new light roars in spate through the crack, and mountains slam~" And earlier it is "at that moment I was lifted and struck~' About transiency James also writes,

"when they recur it is recognized; and from one recur­ rence to another it is susceptible of continuous develop­ ment in what is felt as inner richness and importance"

(300). Of the recurrence of her vision Dillard says, "I have since only very rarely seen the tree with the lights in it. The vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but I live for it." Although this is not an explicit statement of "continuous development," Dillard makes clear here and in her book's numerous references to "the tree" that it certainly is not old hat.

Passivity relates to mysticism in two ways. In one sense, which has been touched on briefly and about which

Dillard has much to say, it refers to a particularly calm mental state and to a general attitude of peaceful resig­ nation towards life. James writes of passivity in second 63 sense, how it relates to the subjective experience of an actual mystical state: "When the characteristic sort of consciousness (a mystical state) has once set in, the mystic feels as if his own will were in abeyance, and indeed sometimes as if he were grasped and held by a superior power. II 16 Were James writing The Varieties of

Religious Experience today, he could use Dillard's vision as a perfect example of this point. Her sense of a super­ ior power is expressed in two images, one in which she, in

James's exact words, is "grasped and held": lilt was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance. I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck" (35).

By definition, there will be a communication problem with any experience that is both noetic and ineffable,

"pertaining to knowledge" and "inexpressible." It is the apparent contradiction between these two qualities of mystical states that brings the howls of derision from hard-core rationalists. II How, II they are justified in asking, "can there be knowledge that can not be imparted or transferred to others? And if there is such a thing, what good is it?" Any attempt to answer these questions will ultimately rest on personal experience and faith.

This is where mysticism separates from both science and the less developed forms of common sense. Already many 64 researchers have monitored Hindu yogis and Buddhist monks while they were in ecstatic meditative states. As

James would have predicted, the trances were generally brief, and all the available instruments (galvanic skin response, EKG, EEG, respiration meters) agreed that the meditators were in deeply passive states. And as James would also have foreseen, this is about all science has been able to learn from such experiments: transiency, passivity, and that the yogi and monks were calm and happy and a delight to be around. l ?

James attempts to explain the noetic and ineffable qualities of mystical states by appealing to our exper­ ience in communicating feelings. He says that mystical experiences are more like feelings than like intellectual events: "No one can make clear to another who has never had a certain feeling, in what the quality and worth of it exists. 1I 18 He suggests a parallel between mystical states and two more common experiences which are some­ times thought to pertain to certain kinds of inexpress­ ible knowledge--music and love: "0ne must have musical ears to know the value of a symphony; one must have been 1 in love one's self to understand a lover's state of mind. 11 9

If we add three other experiences to music and love-­ poetry, art, and dreams--, we begin to see that noetic and ineffable are not as contradictory as rational skeptics would have us believe, particularly if by ineffable we 65 mean the inability to communicate verbally. Even though her medium is words, the poet, like the musician and the lover, depends upon a sympathetic faculty in the receiver to complete her communication. The absurd flatness of trying to explain a poem to someone who can not "get it" by themselves is the result of our trying to compensate for the listener's lack of an "ear for poetry."

This same hazard is encountered with attempting to explain the ineffable knowledge of a mystical state to someone who lacks an ear for mysticism. Dillard's task is difficult; she attempts to express the inexpressible. As many mystics have done before her, she turns to a highly poetic lanaguage:

I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning

doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell

buzzing with flame. I stood on the grass with

the lights in it, grass that was wholly fire,

utterly focused and utterly dreamed. It was

less like seeing than like being for the first

time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful

glance ••• I had been my whole life a bell,

and never knew it until at that moment I was

lifted and struck. {35}. 66

That not only people, but plants, animals, rocks,

the wind, every real and imagined thing is vibrantly alive

and sparkling with divine energy is one of the common­ places of mystical knowledge. The convention most often used to communicate this revelation is that everything is

seen as being aflame. The frontispiece to Dillard's own book, a quote from Heraclitus, is an example of this:

"It ever was, and is, and shall be, ever-living Fire, in measure being kindled and in measure going out." And in her own vision it is not only "the tree" that has "each

cell buzzing with flame," but the ground on which she

stands has "grass with lights in it, grass that was

:wholly fire." Earlier Dillard had written "The whole show has been on fire from the word go • • • everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn't flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks with flames" (10). Inasmuch as our ordinary consciousness does not perceive the unity of the world aflame with divine energy, but rather as consisting of discrete lumps of more or less animate matter, we can conclude that Dillard, Heraclitus, and countless other mystics have either been lying, hallucinating, or that they have reached, in James's words, "states of insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect.,20

When Dillard says the experience was like being seen by a greater power and like being rung like a bell, she is again intimating the elusive mystical knowledge that forces 67

greater than our own conscious selves are observing and

directing our lives. In summing up the noetic quality of

mystical states James writes: "They are illuminations,

revelations, full of significance and importance ••• and

as a rule they carry with them a curious sense of authority for aftertime.,~l This brings us again to Dillard's

comment on her vision of "the tree,": "I live for it" (35).

Simplicity and the Two Ways of Seeing

Besides her vision of "the tree with the lights in

it," Dillard has other experiences that have mystical quali­

ties. In "Stalking," she spends an extraordinary forty

minutes on the creek bank with a muskrat who did not know she was there: "I never knew I was there either. • • • My own self-awareness has disappeared. . . . And I have often noticed that even a few minutes of this self-forgetfulness

is tremendously invigorating" (201-202). In "The Waters of

Separation," the fall of a simple maple key is envisioned

as "a creature spread thin to that other Wind, the wind of

the spirit which bloweth where it listeth, lighting, and

raising up, and easing down" (275). Each of these and

similar experiences contain some or all of James's four marks of mystical vision.

However, Dillard's incorporation of mystical thinking goes beyond describing episodes of heightened awareness.

Even the most unassuming passages sometime contain a

"hidden curriculum" of mystical ideas. An example of 68

Dillard's ability to impregnate a short passage with mystical teaching is found at the beginning of Chapter 2,

"Seeing." Dillard tells how as a small girl in Pittsburgh she would "hide" pennies for passersby to find. To guide the strangers towards the waiting treasures she would draw arrows and write helpful messages on the sidewalk:

I was greatly excited, during all this arrow­

drawing, at the thought of the first lucky

passer-by who would receive in this way,

regardless of merit, a free gift from the uni­

verse. But I never lurked about. I would go

straight home and not give the matter another

thought, until, some months later I would be

gripped again by the impulse to hide another

penny. (15-16).

Of course, most children quickly learn that generosity is another tool to gain status in the eyes of other people and, as such, is best employed in public. However, in truth or rhetorically, the narrator of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek as a child and as an adult is extraordinarily sensitive to a wide range of stimuli. The generosity of nature is one of the most repeated themes in the book: "There are lots of things to see, unwrapped gifts and free surprises.

The world is fairly strewn with pennies cast broadside from a generous hand" (16). The description of the young 69

Dillard being "gripped again by the impulse to hide another penny ff is a memorable expression of the central hermetic dictum, that the microcosm reflects the macrocosm: "As above, so below. II

Somewhere between the innocent, impulsive giving of the young child and the fully manifested abundance of nature lies the realm of those notorious tightwads, unre­ generate adults, the people who, like ourselves, are usually too involved with our narrow views and pursuits to notice, pick up and appreciate a penny, much less to give one away. It is to the stingy in heart and mind that Dillard addresses the paragraph following her hidden penny story. She extolls the necessity of creating a healthy poverty in our lives so that simple things can bring us joy:

It is a dire poverty indeed when a man is so

malnourished and fatigued that he won't stoop

to pick up a penny. But if you cultivate a

healthy poverty and simplicity, so that find­

ing a penny will literally make your day, then,

since the world is in fact planted in pennies,

you have with your poverty bought a lifetime

of days. It is that simple. (16). 70

That we would profit by simplifying our lives is the message of many teachers, from Lao Tzu to St. Francis to

Thoreau. When the process of simplification is taken beyond outward, material circumstances to include mental, emotional and spiritual life, it is called "becoming poor in spirit, II and it lies at the heart of all mystical teachings. To be poor in spirit does not mean to be gloomy, depressed nor ignorant about spiritual matters, but rather to curb our pride about possessing wordly know­ ledge, to refrain from what the Buddhists call lithe greed of views, II our proclivity for holding opinions about nearly everything. In its various injunctions against judging other people the Bible expresses the same ideal with typically social, hence, moral overtones.

Dillard, however, is not concerned with society, but with individual psychology and mystical vision. She wants to know how lithe greed of views" affects our acquisition of knowledge, both relative knowledge, what we learn about the world from our mind and our senses, and absolute know­ ledge, what is gained in a mystical state. She is explor­ ing the relationship between ordinary modes of knowing and the mystical mode. In what ways is worldly knowledge an aid to higher awareness, and in which ways is it a hind­ rance? She is guided in her analysis of these questions by her belief that simplicity, pride and language are important considerations. 71

Dillard feels that a smattering of learning often has the harmful effect of leading us to believe we know every­ thing. After describing the natural curiosity of an infant, she implies the near universality of the dismal process by which we become smugly dull:

An infant who has just learned to hold his head

up has a frank and forthright way of gazing

about him in bewilderment. He hasn't the faintest

clue where he is, and he aims to learn. In

a couple of years, what he will have learned

instead is how to fake it: he'll have the cock­

sure air of a squatter who has come to feel he

owns the place. Some unwonted, taught pride

diverts us from our original intent. (12).

Throughout the book Dillard offers similar disparagements of normal human consciousness. Most of the time, she suggests,we suffer from the old saying, "A little know­ ledge is a dangerous thing." The danger is that proud of what little we know, we are always falling asleep and missing any new opportunities. It is not difficult to see that this description fits the sonambulant who is so jaded

"that he won't stoop to pick up a penny," be it real or figurative.

Of course, the accumulation of relative knowledge does not always lead to a stuporous complacency. It can move in 72 the opposite direction, towards a vigorous, dynamic uncer­ tainty. Dillard quotes Albert Einstein, a man who obviously possessed his share of relative knowledge, yet who maintained his keen awareness and appreciation of the unknown: "'Never lose a holy curiosity'" (208). And

Dillard's book is proof that her extensive fact gathering has not dulled her curiosity. It is interesting to note, however, that aside from her mystical affirmations, which are expressions of absolute she believes that all her read­ ing and observations add up to very little. As if to atone for any possible hUbris, she frequently discounts her knowledge: "We don't know what's going on here" (9); "We rock, cradled in a swaddling band of darkness" (21). Such disclamations are faint echoes of the mystical warning that the knowledge we gain from our senses and from our reason, if taken too seriously, can lock us into a home­ made world, one that we may find comfortable, but one that is hopelessly distant from the broader view of spiritual unity:

All that the imagination can imagine and the

reason conceive and understand in this life is

not, and cannot be, a proximate means of union

with God.

~-St. John of the Cross 73

Lejune and barren speculations may unfold the

plicatures of Truth's farment, but they cannot

discover her lovely face.

--John Smith, the Platonist 22

Dillard's aim is not to dismiss relative knowledge as having no importance, that would be foolish, but rather to place it in a broader hierarchy of the possible ways of knowing. Certainly a state of curiosity is preferrable to torporous drowsiness. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek's many exhor­ tations to open our eyes, to think, to imagine, to look, to read, to study, and to keep searching, are Dillard's hedge against the most basic failure of consciousness, drifting into mental lethargy. This common sense notion, that we improve our lot by paying attention, gathering information through our senses and processing it in our minds, is the sound basis of conventional psychology. But Dillard also thinks that we tend to grow too fond of our mind's ability to gather relative knowledge in this manner and that we mistake it for the highest and only kind of knowing. Her examination of different modes of knowing leads her towards the center of mystical wisdom. On the way she learns that language, the chief invention of homo loquax, the talking animal, is also the major impediment to mystical vision. 74

Dillard is intrigued by the role that language plays

in the difference between seeing in the normal sense of observing phenomena and in the mystical sense of seeing beyond phenomenal appearances to the underlying reality.

She realizes that it is the interplay of language, atten­ tion and intention that gives us the awareness that

William James called "the stream of consciousness," the sensation of interior commentary that normally alerts us that our minds are working. "Seeing is very much a matter of- verbalization. Unless I call my attention to what passes before my eyes, I simply won't see it" (32). We do not, as common sense tells us, passively see, report or describe what is out there, as much as we select and, in a sense, create what we see by injecting language into the raw physiology of perception. "I have to say the words, describe what is going on • • • I have to maintain a running description of the present" (32). While this profound understanding of cognitive process bares a resem­ blance to both mystical thinking and the metaphysics that grow out of quantum mechanics, the insistence of the centrality of language places it more properly in Husser­ lian phenoenology. As such, it can be considered a poten­ tial step along the way to mystical understanding, which is essentially non-verbal. But it can not tell Annie about lithe tree with the lights in it." 75

Dillard is aware of the flaws in depending too

heavily on language as our only perceptual tool. True,

" a running description of the present" facilitates an

acute discrimination: "When I see this way I analyze and pry. I hurl over logs and roll away stones; I study the

bank a foot at a time, probing and tilting my head" (32).

Powered by language, this determined, aggressive focusing

of attention culminates in naming and classification,

attempts to bring order into the world that both clarify

and severely limit our perceptions. In science, this

tendency, which can be considered an expression of our need

to exert control, reaches greater precision in our desire

to measure and compare, activities where instead of the

sometimes vague but symbolic richness of words, the exact

language of mathematics is used to represent real things.

Because there are many phenomena that resist meaningful

observation by this process, God, beauty, love, to name a

few, a tremendous anxiety builds when we find ourselves

snuggled into a mental straight jacket of names and numbers. We must either exclude the uncountable and

unnamable from our universe or fudge by saying we have

accomplished what we know we have not.

Dillard expresses the failings of this aggressive,

language centered mode of perception with an image of

frustration and destruction: 76

Some days when a mist covers the mountains,

when the muskrats won't show and the microscope's

mirror shatters, I want to climb up the blank

blue dome as a man would storm the inside of a

circus tent, wildly, dangling, and with a steel

knife claw a rent in the top, peep, and, if I

must fall. (32-33).

When the world refuses to submit to the mind's analytical scrutiny, when it can not be counted, and won't be named, we are left with the same desperate existential figure who climbs out of the sea to shake his fist at the unfair universe. Only this time the figure is armed and willing to shred the sky and destroy itself to satiate its "greed for views."

Fortunately for Annie Dillard, and for the rest of humanity, there are other modes of seeing and knowing that do not depend on and are not limited by language. Of these,

Dillard is interested in the mode that ·might lead her to mystical vision: "But there is another kind of seeing that involves a letting go. When I see this way I sway transfixed and emptied" (33). In describing this mode of consciousness Dillard makes explicit her understanding that a cultivated passivity is the basic tool of mystical practice. Interestingly, she does not use the common term "meditation," perhaps because in Christian mystical 77 tradition this word has been used to mean many different things. In any case, she understands that she must some­ how diminish her interior verbalizations: "All I can do is try to gag the commentator, to hush the noise of use­ less interior babble that keeps me from seeing just as surely as newspaper dangled before my eyes" (34). Dillard also makes clear that she understands both the difficulty involved in quieting the mind and the universally recog­ nized need for doing so: "The effort is really a discipline requiring a lifetime of dedicated struggle; it marks the literature of saints and monks of every order East and

West" (34).

The most important aspect of Dillard's comprehension of this other way of seeing is her understanding of the need to maintain a passive attitude towards one's own mental processes. Will power may help someone begin the practice of meditation, or in a broader sense to embark on the quest for mystical vision, but mental effort must be jettisoned if one is to actually experience higher awareness: "The world's spiritual geniuses seem to dis­ cover universally that the mind's muddy river, this ceaseless flow of trivia and trash cannot be dammed, and that trying to dam it is a waste of effort that might lead to madness" (34). It is a basic tenet of mystical discipline that we cannot see truly until our mind is still, but also that it is counter-productive to try to 78

strive for this state. One of the conditions of Dillard's

vision of "the tree" was that she was "walking along

Tinker Creek thinking of nothing at all" (35). Of more

subtle importance was that she was not trying to think of nothing.

"How Could Anything Be Amiss?"

After her long examination of the relationship

between evolution, death and human emotion in "Fecundity,"

Dillard concludes: "Either this world, my mother, is a

monster, or I myself am a freak" (180). The first possi­

bility, which was based on ordinary observation and

enhanced by a scientific view of the world, led her to

the existential nihilism discussed in the previous chapter.

In considering the alternative, that perhaps she is view­

ing the world incorrectly, she call upon a mystic:

Julian of Norwich, the great English anchorite

and theologian, cited, in the manner of the

prophets, these words of God: 'See, I am God,

see I am in all things: see, I never lift my

hands off my works, nor ever shall, without

end ••• How could anything be amiss?' (181).

This short passage is the clearest statement we find in

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek of the archetypal insight into the cosmic process that comes to the mature mystic. As Huxley 79 writes, "These insights permit them to say, with Julian of Norwich, that all shall be well, that, in spite of time, all is well, and that the problem of evil has its solution in the eternity, which men can, if they so desire, experience, but can never describe.,,23

Because Dillard has had a taste of eternity in her vision of "the tree with the lights in it," she is inclined to believe Julian's conviction of rightness in the world. And although she admits that "not even the simplest and best of us sees things the way Julian did," the combination of her experience and faith leads her to consider "that it is only human feelings that is freak­ ishly amiss" (181). She goes on to discuss how our emo­ tions skew our perceptions. Her conclusions, that Julian is probably correct, that "It is our emotions that are amiss," and that she "could use some calming down," lead her "away from the arts, from the human emotional stew"

(181).

Beginning with JUlian's vision of cosmic wholeness,

Dillard has arrived at a secondary mystical principle, one that many people find as difficult to accept in theory as to practice--aversion to the emotions. Because we identify strongly with our emotions and think that we need only weed out the bad ones and nurture the good ones,

Dillard's avoidance of "the arts" may strike us as sterile, overly strict, and counter-productive to living a good 80 life. However, in the light of mystical teaching, she is correct. Huxley writes, "But emotional excitement, what­ ever its cause and whatever its nature is always excite­ ment of that individualized self, which must be died to by anyone who aspires to divine Reality ("Reality" and

"eternity" are among Huxley's terms for mystical v i s Lonv ) , 24

And it is not only the negative emotions that impede our viewing life clearly, as John of the Cross explains:

"The imperfect destroy true devotion, because they seek sensible sweetness in prayer." 25 Fenelon, the mystical

Archbishop of Cambrai, wrote that emotion was a "dangerous illusion" and that imagination was "the gulf of vanity and corruption." 26

John of the Cross and Fenelon are among the high mystics of the Western world, and the superhuman detachment from emotion that is implied in their statements reminds us that Annie Dillard, who is full of joy and fear, enthu­ siasm and dread, is far from being a great mystic herself.

Many people have had mystical visions, either spontaneously or as the result of long practice in one or more of the mystical disciplines. The great mystics, however, are those who have followed their vision and have become more or less permanently grounded in the state of spiritual enlightenment. In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Dillard pre­ sents mysticism as an inspiring, comprehensive view of the world, but this is not the same as claiming that she is in constant touch with that perspective. 81

In fact, as an artist, Dillard is engaged in an activity that is in the same basic way antithetical to mystical vision. While the artist creates particular moments of beauty out of a chaotic world, the mystic sees through the apparent chaos to realize that everything is beautiful. When we consider the flattened, however ele­ vated sense of aesthetics that would come from seeing all of creation as divine, it is not surprising that the artistic works of many high mystics appear to us worldly folk as simple if not bad art. Almost all the widely acclaimed works of what we call "mystical art" are, like

Dillard's book, not created from a mystical perspective, but are rather attempts to in some dim way capture or evoke a fleeting vision of perfection that may have graced the artists maybe once in their lives.

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek would be unreadable, as are some mystical writings, if it had been one "tree with the lights in it" after another. That tree stands out both in Dillard's life and in the book because it is not part of a vast forest of mystical experiences. As have been discussed, she has had other experiences which bare the marks of mystical vision, but all together these episodes of heightened awareness account for only a small part of the book. Dillard has been to the moun­ tain, and she has been shown the promised land, but the value of her writing rests in her recognition that she 82

has not taken up permanent residency in the transcendent

realm. It is her continual waffling, doubting, and for­

getting that she has staked her life on the veracity of

mystical teachings and experiences that makes her book an

intriguing and complex argument about the nature of the

world.

Occasionally she find herself amazed and confused by

the behavior of mystics: "I have never understood why so

many mystics of all creeds experience the presence of God

on-mountaintops. Aren't they afraid of being blown away?"

(92). Dillard senses a frightening aspect of mysticism.

She is afraid, and with good reason. The rigorous disci­

plines of mind, body, and spirit that are required of some

people to become fully-realized mystics are endured at great

risk to the individuals who would attain such a high state.

Dillard expresses her fear, which is also our fear, in a

metaphor of physical danger:

It often feels best to lie low, inconspicuous,

instead of waving your spirit around from high

places like a lightening rod. For God is •

in another sense the destroyer, lightning,

blind power, impartial as the atmosphere" (91).

For believers, who like Dillard, take the claims of

mysticism seriously, God is not an abstract possibility whom with we may have to d e a Lvaft e r death, but a present actuality 83 whose powers are destructive as well as creative. Break­ down, delusion, and madness await those who pursue the spirit foolishly. The tales of the sorcerer's apprentice who conjures up spirits he can not control and the venge­ ful genie who escapes from the magic lamp to wreak havoc on his former master are reminders of the darker conse­ quences of abusing the power released in mystical states.

By the end of her book Dillard has decided that timidity in the face of such dangers is not the answer to the challenges of the spiritual life. She quotes the

American mystic Thomas Merton: "There is always a tempta­ tion to diddle around in the contemplative life, making itsy-bitsy statues" (276). And she joins the Old Testament

Hebrew mystic Ezekiel in denouncing as spiritual pre­ tenders those who have "not gone up into the gaps" (276).

Dillard is inspired by the courage behind these words and she in turn exhorts the reader to give up fear and itsy­ bitsy gentility and go up into the gaps: "The gaps are the spirit's home, the altitudes and latitudes so dazzlingly spare and clean that the spirit can discover itself for the first time like a once-blind man unbound"

( 276) •

An earlier passage concerned the death of the self, the necessary condition for mystical enlightenment:

"The death of the self of which the great writers speak is no violent act. It is merely the joining of the great 84 rock heart of the earth in its roll. It is merely the slow cessation of the will's sprints and intellect's chatter" (65). The gaps she implores us to discover are the moments of silence between acts of will, intellect, imagination and emotion, that time out of mind when "you see the needs of your own spirit met whenever you have asked," and "one day it occurs to you that you must not need your life. Obviously. And then you're gone. You have finally understood you're dealing with a maniac" (277).

Who is the "maniac" she refers to? Is it God? Or is it yourself? From the mystical perspective these answer are one and the same.

Dillard's writing suggests that she has overcome her fears and replaced them with resignation to the awesome demands of the spiritual quest. Although she believes that joy and beauty are the final payoff, that "the dying pray at last not 'please,' but 'thank you, '" she has arrived at a reverential answer to the question posed in the title of the first chapter of her book: "In the

Koran, Allah asks, 'The heaven and the earth and all in between, thinkest thou I made them in jest?" (278, 7).

Dillard's humble reply is that, "Divinity is not playful.

The universe was not made in jest, but in solemn incompre­ hensible earnest" (278).

The corresponding solemnity of her resignation to the trials of her chosen path takes the form of a lone, fearless figure: 85

• the monk in the road who knows precisely

how vulnerable he is, who takes no comfort

among death-forgetting men, and who carries

his vision of vastness and might around in his

tunic like a live coal which neither burns nor

warms him, but with which he will not part.

(278).

Although this passage is brimming with intensity, there is something wrong. My point is not to undercut Dillard as her book roars to an end, but the mood and figure are far too romantic, too heroic, and too dramatic to be the description of a novice mystic, particularly one who has already seen "the tree with the lights in it." The above figure might be an adventurer, a soldier, an artist, or even a bold entrepreneur or a religious fanatic; but it is not representative of a person whose open heart is guided by a vision of mystical joy and unity with the cosmos.

Had Pilgrim at Tinker Creek ended with this image of a solemn monk, it may have been palatable to a wider range of readers. Afterall, dedication, a certain degree of detachment, self-awareness and sustaining secret knowledge are characteristics of a viable, dynamic personality that fits readily into the conventional, secular view of life.

But the book does not end on such a note, and if Dillard is to be faithful to her mystical convictions, it could 86 not. While the mystic has all the above qualities, she has in addition one quality that sets her apart from and above the person of the world, the worker, the fig~r, the scholar, the artist, and the priest. As if on a pendulum,

Dillard has swung back and forth between detailed obser­ vation and visionary seeing, peaceful resignation and gut-level outrage, despair and joy. She has looked closely and thought and felt deeply. As she says in the penultimate paragraph, "I've been bloodied and mauled, wrung, dazzled and drawn" (278). Who could blame her if she opted for a position somewhere between the extremes, a more comfortable position, a reasonable position?

The question does not apply because once having seen

"the tree," Dillard is beyond blame and beyond reason. An earlier American writer had such visions, and his writings were also called "mystical," with all the word's good and bad connotations. Ralph Waldo Emerson saw not a cedar tree, but an apple-sized world. Tree, apple, burning bush, the particular image does not matter in a mystical vision. What is important is the confirmation of whole­ ness beyond the apparent multiplicity of the world.

Emerson saw it.

"I dreamed that I floated at will in the great

Ether, and I saw this world floating also not

far off, but diminished to the size of an 87

apple. Then an angel took it in his hand and

brought it to me and said, 'This must thou

eat.' And I ate the world:' All of it. (278)

Because Dillard has been so bothered by the biological necessity of all the world's creatures dining on each other, the non-stop munching, crunching, nibbling, and sucking, this vision of the total acceptance of life throughout the metaphor of eating is perfectly apt. Dil­ lard's central nightmare is resolved, for as Emerson's path to wholeness is symbolized by eating the apple of the world, so is the book's paramount image of incomprehen­ sible violence, the giant water bug that sucked the frog, absolved of any evil in the holy act of eating. Dillard puts it more simply, liThe giant water bug ate the world"

( 2 79) •

In the last line of the book the figures of the skeptical scientist, the despondent philosopher and the solemn monk give way to the joyful poet-pilgrim whose faith has been generated and sustained by mystical vision:

"And like Billy Bray I go my way, and my left foot says

"Glory," and my right foot says "Amen"; in and out of

Shadow Creek, upstream and down, exultant, in a daze, dancing, to the twin silver trumpets of praise" (279).

Annie Dillard's pilgrimage has taken her deeply into the 88 mystery of the human condition. Her act of devotion is to sing a hymn of loving praise. CHAPTER III

CRITICISM AND CONCLUSION

Because Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is a serious attempt

to make sense out of a confusing world, and particularly

because it claims to have found a positive answer, it is

not surprising that the book received the attention of

doubters as well as supporters. However, both the intensity

of-the negative criticism and the sources from which some

of it arises are surprising. For example, although Dillard's

message is based on the love of God and the love of nature,

both mainstream Christians and ecologists express severe disagreement with Dillard's ideas. In responding to her detractors, I will explain her controversial positions

from the standpoint of the teachings of mysticism. How­

ever irritating they may be to certain critics, Dillard's

ideas are consistent with her professed faith and exper­ ience as a mystic.

The Christian criticism of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is centered around what Dillard fails to include in her

consideration of humankind, nature, and God. This view holds that she has short-changed, even misled the reader by writing a book about God that is not based on the

89 90 authority of the Bible. Indeed, among the many mystical quotations in her book, very few are from the Bible, and as is noticed by one critic, "Dillard leaves out the New 1 Testament almost entirely.1I This same critic finds fault because "Dillard's views on God and his work are implicit in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. There is little 2 straightforward philosophy or theology.1I What is meant, of course, is that there is little conventional Christian theology and philosophy.

These observations are correct, as far as they go, but they fall short of being valid criticisms on two counts. The first is that they are blind to Dillard's rhetorical triumph, the fact that she wrote a highly successful book about God that appealed to many people who consider themselves agnostics, non-Christians, and even atheists. As Dillard has said, "I admit I am consciously addressing the unbeliever in my book. 1I 3 And she knows that such an audience is likely to run at the first hint of Bible thumping. In fact, it is precisely because

Dillard did not appeal to scriptural authority and did not present her religious philosophy in conventional evangelical terms that her book was so well received by her intended audience. Rather than preach a sermon, she woos the reader with wonder, doubt, and rhapsody.

The second reason why Dillard's omission of orthodox theology and the scripture upon which it is based misses 91

the mark as valid criticism from a broad Christian per­

spective is simply that mystical tradition does not invest

supreme authority in scripture based doctrine. Rather,

the most important sources of religious knowledge are,

first, one's own mystical experiences, and second, the

lives of other mystics, preferrably, the life of your own

spiritual teacher, if you are fortunate enough to have

one. As the American Quaker William Penn wrote, "There

is something nearer to us than Scriptures, to wit, the

Word in the heart from which all Scriptures come. 1I 4 Our

present day Christian fundamentalists are the sadly

fanatical inheritors of the Protestant Reformation's

attempt to liberate the individual from a stifling

dependency on the church. Unfortunately, the Reformation's

success has frequently taken the form of an equally stif­

ling dependency on the Bible. More often than not, the

Bible continues to be interpreted not as a body of highly

symbolic mystical teachings interspersed with a greatly

distorted historical account of the early Hebrews, but as

a literal and conservatively biased manual on what to do

and what not to do to stay on the good side of a stern

and wrathful God.

Because the Bible's emphasis on prescribing and

coercing acceptable behavior has historically been used

to advance the position of the social status quo, many people have come to view the "Good Book" as inimical to 92 their own desires for a freer, more abundant life. Whether or not these skeptics have made the mistake of tossing out a great deal of good along with the bad, Dillard was wise to address them with so little of the Bible and so much of other mystical sources.

Of course, not all Christians found reasons to disapprove of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. This study will conclude with the comments of several Christian critics who found the book worthy of high praise. The surprising and refreshing thing about Dillard's work is that it is religious, even Christian, without relying on dogma or on the Bible. There is a long and holy, if relatively unknown, tradition of such writings in the Christian church. Huxley makes this point in The Perrenial Philo­ sophy:

In the West, the mystics went some way towards

liberating Christianity from its unfortunate

servitude to historic fact (or, to be more

accurate, to those various mixtures of contem­

porary record with subsequent inference and

phantasy, which have, at different epochs,

been accepted as historic fact). From the

writings of Eckhart, Tauler and Ruysbroeck,

of Boehme, William Law and the Quakers, it

would be possible to extract a spiritualized 93

and universalized Christianity, whose narra­

tives should refer, not to history as it was,

or as someone afterwards thought it ought to

be, but to 'processes forever unfolded in the 5 heart of man.'"

I am not nominating Annie Dillard for membership into the august group of mystical writers listed above. However, there is considerable accomplishment in transforming mysticism into a readable topic in an age that worships scientific progress and fundamental literalism.

As is the case with Dillard's Christian detractors, her ecological critics are less upset by what she does write than by what she fails to write. Playwright and fiction writer Charles Deemer expresses her alleged fail­ ings this way, "Amazingly enough, ••• there is not one genuine ecological concern voiced in the entire book.,,6

He says that only a vision based on these concerns can

"get us off the macadam to possible extinction."? Hayden

Carruth writes that Dillard's lack of ~oncern for the environment shows that her work has "little reference to life on this planet at this moment, its hazards and mis­ directions, and to this extent it is a dangerous book, literally a subversive book, in spite of its attractions.I,B

He goes on to say that the view of nature held by the poet-writer-farmer Wendell Berry "is historically more 94 relevant and humanly more responsible than the atavistic and essentially passive, not to say evasive, view held by

Annie Dillard. 1I 9 While agreeing with Deemer and Carru­ thers that lIits weakness resides in what it fails to con­ sider,1I Eva Hoffman shifts the locus of Dillard's griev­ ous oversights from the country to the city: liThe book dismisses with hardly a flick of the wrist, as Thoreau never would have done, the whole issue of man-madeciviliza­ tion. but not everyone can abandon urban evils for idyllic rural retreats. How are cities, with their technological ugliness, their excesses and deprivations, to be reconciled with the book's recipe for living, with 1 0 its conviction of overriding plentitude and grace?1I

Dillard admits that her book does not address the concerns expressed by these critics: liThe kind of art

I write is shockingly uncommitted--appallingly isolated from political, social, and economic affairs. 1I 11 This mild defense may help make clear the fact that the ecological criticism directed toward her is political criticism. Although the ecological-environmental move­ ment, for which Deemer, Carruthers, and Hoffman are spokes­ persons, may wish to be considered non-political, and however noble its cause may be, its major goals are political goals--to gather sufficient power to gain and maintain control of the processes by which public and private environmental policy is determined. Since the 95 only powers that mystics are interested in are those by which they can gain and maintain union with God, mystical tradition has little if any interest in politics. How­ ever irresponsible Dillard may appear to these critics, she is being faithful to her professed beliefs when she says, "There are lots of us here. Everybody is writing about politics and social concerns; I don't. 1 1m not . 12 doing any harm."

As William James makes clear, the claims that mystical experience can have on a person are very strong:

"Some memory of their content always remains, and a pro­ found sense of their importance. They modify the inner life ••• and as a rule they carry with them a curious sense of authority for after time.,,13 When Dillard writes,

"I am not making chatter; I mean to change his life," she also means she wants to change her own life (135). Her vision of "the tree with the lights in it" and the realiza­ tion of what the vision means signals that she has embarked on a path leading to a total affirmation of life. The typical reaction of a person who has undertaken such a quest, particularly in its early stages, is to view political movements and other "worldly struggles" as so much bothersome noise. This is not to say that there have not been mystics who did engage in political acti­ vity; Ghandi is an outstanding example of one who did.

But such involvements come when a person has reached a 96 more constant awareness of the mystical state. Remember what Dillard said about her mystical experience: liThe vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but I live for it"

(3S). The truly developed mystics do not live for it, but in it; and it is the permanency of their mystical perspective that gives them the fine balance between dedication and detachment that can make them more effec­ tive political figures than non-mystics.

It is interesting to note that the antagonism of

Di~lard's ecological detractors seems to be exacerbated by their recognition that she is primarily a religious mystic. In this sense, they understand her better than most of her less astute admirers. Deemer says that she is "wrapped in an easy mysticism. lI l 4 Carruthers recog­ nizes but does not share Dillard's high estimation of ecstatic visions: "These are epuphanic moments, pinnacles of life, for which we endure the rest. illS Muriel Haynes writes, 'We can dispense with the comfort of the paternal image of Lord of Creation." (How Haynes can possibly derive a "paternal image" from a book as blatantly pantheistic as Pilgrim at Tinker Creek can be explained by the fact that her otherwise intelligent review was written for Ms. Maqazine.)16 These activist critics are correct in assuming that Dillard's mysticism is what keeps her from joining the ecology movement or any other political cause. 97

It is no coincidence that both fundamentalist Chris­ tians and environmental activists are upset by the mysti­ cism in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Both groups believe that there is something dreadfully wrong with the world and also that they know how to go about making the needed changes. As Dillard's quotation of Julian of Norwich makes clear, the mystic believes that everything is fine, that we need not change anything, but only become aware of the world's beauty and perfection and "choir the proper praise" (9). Dillard is no more fond of litter and hatred than are Ralph Nader and Billy Graham. Her book makes clear that she has seen the darkness as well as the light. But her mystical experience has convinced her '" that our d~ty is to praise all of creation, and not to criticize, not to impose our wills, and not to pick each other and the world apart. These negative activities are all functions of the intellect, and mysticism sees the intellect as an occasionally useful but basically limited and inferior way of dealing with the world.

When Carruthers says Dillard's view is "essentially passive," he is correct. As has already been discussed, mysticism sees that what we normally consider evil is simply the product of the mind's ego-centered attempt to change the world to fit its own narrow interests. But the kind of passivity mysticism calls for is not easy to under­ stand and is very difficult to live by. It requires that 98 we use our will to transcend our will, and by so doing become properly attuned to what Annie Dillard calls "the spirit," what Huxley calls "divine Reality," and what

Taoists call "the Way," or in this poem by Lao Tzu, "the

Mysterious Female":

The Valley Spirit never dies.

It is called the Mysterious Female.

And the doorway of the Mysterious Female

Is the base from which Heaven and Earth spring.

It is there within us all the time.

Draw upon it as you will, it never runs dry.l?

One comes to know lithe Mysterious Female" only through alert passivity. From this perspective, even our most noble attempts to intellectualize are seen as temporary deviations from our true natures.

Dillard's critic Deemer attempts to deprecate the importance of her mystical experiences by implying that he has had them, and he is not wrapped in an easy mysticism:

"I, too, have seen and thought things which have changed my life."IS This fails to appreciate that Dillard did not think "the tree with the lights in it"; neither did Emer­ son think his vision of eating the world-apple. Mystical teaching recognizes that it is very difficult, particu­ larly for an intellectual, to understand that spiritual vision is not a matter of actively thinking, but of 99 passively receiving. And even if we do understand this point, if we lack the courage to apply it to our own per­ ceptions, it will remain just one more bit of intellectual knowledge, never blossoming into actual mystical experience.

Indeed, in a hyper-active world that has almost completely given over to what the European radical Karen Blixen calls

"the masculine initiative"--our non-stop thinking, working, doing, making, acting--, it is little wonder that mystical teachings like "Be still and know I am God" sound very strange. Dillard writes simply, "The waiting itself is the thing" (265).

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is an important book because it brings to our attention the possibility and value of mystical vision. In this sense, Hayden Carruthers is correct when he calls the book "subversive." It may be that what we need to overthrow our current worship of wealth and power is the heightened awareness of spiritual unity that is the heart of mysticism. In this light,

Dillard's skillful incorporation of scientific knowledge to entice the skeptical reader to consider the mystical view is not only subtle, but ironic. We need not work up an irrational hatred of science to realize that a great deal of the world's most pressing problems stem from the unholy marriage of timeless greed and exploitive tech­ nology, science's flashy but essentially hyper-active and demented offspring. 100

However "subversive," Dillard's message is not a call for social action. As Eleanor Wymard makes clear, Dillard is not a utopian reformer: "She does not intend her hermit­ age at Tinker Creek to stand as a political statement, nor to inspire ethical behavior or social reform.,,19 Neither, as has been made clear, does Dillard suggest that we simply need to learn more from biology, physics, and the other sciences. Critic John Breslin sums up Dillard's position on this point: "[oJnlY the contemplative gaze will serve to-reach the heart of the mystery, a microscope helps at times, but its usefulness is limited to enlarging the possibilities of the human eye. That alone can see.,,20

The message that Dillard presents to us from her own experience with "the heart of mystery" is essentially the same as that of all mystics, East and West: wake up, see with new eyes, and live in joyful praise. Her exhortations to this end imply that everyone has the capability to see the world with new meaning. As a mystic, she believes that whatever obstacles prevent us from celebrating our few whirls about the sun are not problems with the world, but are functions or our own faulty perception. Pilgrim at

Tinker Creek stands as an eloquent restatement of one of humankind's most important, yet elusive insights. An earlier artist and mystic, William Blake, put is this way: "If the doors of perception were cleansed, every­ thing would be seen as it is, infinite.,,20 Dillard has 101 not seen everything, but she has looked very closely at this improbable world we all share: And the most improb­ able, yet important thing, she has seen and shared with us is the wayan ordinary tree can appear to someone whose heart is open and whose mind is still:

I still now and will tomorrow steer by what

happened that day, when some undeniably new

spirit roared down the air, bowled me over,

and turned on the lights. I stood on grass

like air, air like lightning coursed in my

blood, floated my bones, swam in my teeth.

I've been there, seen it, been done by it. I

know what happened to the cedar tree, I saw

the cells in the cedar tree pulse charged

like wings beating praise. (247). ZOT

S:3:.LON 103

Notes: Introduction

1 Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (New York: Bantam, 1975), p. 12. All further references to this work appear in the text.

2 Eva Hoffman, "Solitude," rev. of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, by Annie Dillard, Commentary, Oct. 1974, p. 87.

3 Henry D. Thoreau, The Journals of Henry David Thoreau (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949), V., p. 4.

4 Hayden Carruth, "Attractions and Dangers of Nostalgia," rev. of PTC, by A. Dillard, Virginia Quarterly Review, 50, No.4 (Aut. 1974), p. 638.

5 Philip Yancey, "A Face Aflame: An Interview with Annie Dillard," Christianity Today, 5 May 1978, p , 15.

6 Thoreau, XIV, p. 117.

Notes: Chapter I

1 Hayden Carruth, p. 638.

2 Aldous Huxley, Do What You Will: Essays (London: Chatto and Windsor, 1929), p. 119.

3 Bob Samples, Mind of Our Mother (USA: Addison­ Wesley, 1981), p. 184.

4 Dylan Thomas, as quoted by Dillard on p. 184 of PTC.

5 These texts are included in the Bibliography.

Notes: Chapter II

1 Renee Webber, liThe Enfolding-Unfolding Universe," Revision Quarterly, Summer/Fall, 1978, p. 31, an interview with David Bohm.

2 Elanor Wymard, "A New Existential Voice," Common­ weal, 24 Oct., 1975 p. 496. 104

3 OED (Oxford: Clarendon, 1908).

4 OED.

5 William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Collier-McMillan, 1961), p. 299. 6 James, p. 299.

7 James, p. 300.

8 James, p. 301.

9 James, p. 301.

10 James, p. 305.

11 James, p. 331.

12 James, p. 326.

13 Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy (New York: Harper's, 1970), p. 76.

14 Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy, p. 107.

15 James, p. 300.

16 James, p. 300.

17 Claudio Naranjo and Robert E. Ornstein, On the Psychology of Meditation (New York: Penguin, 1976), pp. 161­ 197.

18 James, p. 301.

19 James, p. 300.

20 James, p. 300.

21 James, p. 300. 105

22 Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy, p. 129. 23 Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy, p. 240. 24 Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy, p. 255. 25 Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy, p. 255. 26 Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy, p. 254.

Notes: Chapter III

1 Cheryl Forbes, "With a Shake of the Fist," Christi­ anity Today, 5 May 1978, p. 28.

2 Forbes, p. 28.

3 Yancey, p. 16.

4 Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy, p. 14.

5 Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy, p. 52.

6 Charles Deemer, "Up the Creek," rev. of PTC by Annie Dillard, New Leader, 24 June 1974, p. 18.

7 Deemer, p. 19.

8 Carruth, p. 639.

9 Carruth, p. 640.

10 Hoffman, p. 88.

11 Yancey, p. 18.

12 Yancey, p. 17.

13 James, p. 300.

14 Deemer, p. 23. 106

15 Carruth, p. 640.

16 Muriel Haynes, "We Are All Nibblers," rev. of PTC, by A. Dillard, Ms. Magazine, Aug. 1974, p. 39. 17 Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy, p. 165.

18 Deemer, p. 23. 19 Wymard, p. 497.

20 John Breslin, rev. of PTC, by A. Dillard, America, 130 (1974), 312. --­ LOT

XHdVM£>OI'IHIH 108

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