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.