Masaryk University Faculty of Arts

Department of English and American Studies

English Language and Literature

Markéta Tomášková

Searching for Home on This Earth: Linda Hogan and Annie Dillard Bachelor’s Diploma Thesis

Supervisor: Mgr. Martina Horáková, Ph. D.

2016

I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography.

……………………………………………..

Author’s signature

- 2 -

Acknowledgement

I am very grateful to my supervisor Dr. Martina Horáková for her guidance, kind support, and valuable comments on the manuscript. I would also like to thank my family, including Riki the dog, for providing me with a cosy and warm dwelling, which made the writing and the completion of this paper possible.

- 3 -

Searching for Home on This Earth: Linda Hogan and Annie Dillard

Table of Contents

Introduction ...... - 5 -

1 The Perception of ‘Objects’ ...... - 9 -

1.1 ‘Objects’ in Dwellings ...... - 14 -

1.2 ‘Objects’ in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek ...... - 18 -

2 The Perception of Animals ...... - 24 -

2.1 Animals in Dwellings ...... - 29 -

2.2 Animals in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek ...... - 36 -

3 The Feeling of At-homeness in Dillard’s and Hogan’s Texts ...... - 48 -

Conclusion ...... - 61 -

Works Cited ...... - 64 -

Résumé ...... - 66 -

Resumé ...... - 67 -

- 4 -

Introduction

The present study explores the field of nature writing, a field which could be characterized by “awakening of perception to an ecological way of seeing” (Lyon x); nature is thus seen as a network of relations that create communities, as grounded in “patterns [which] radiate outward to include the human observer” (Lyon x). Nature writing as a genre then seems to be as manifold and its diverse tendencies as intertwined as the natural world it is concerned with, while the authors who cultivate it might be also perceived to form certain

“communities” and their writing to “radiate outward” to reach to the reader and pull him/her into “[the] realm of complexly interwoven relationships” (Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous

85), into the landscape shared with “the other presences that surround and influence our daily life” (Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous 7). Conveniently enough, Thomas J. Lyon provides those who are on the verge of losing themselves in or are already overwhelmed by the colours and smells of this rich field with “A Taxonomy of Nature Writing” that could make a helpful companion on their expedition.

Lyon identifies in the chapter, in his small field guide, three principal traits of nature writing as such, namely “natural history information, personal responses to nature, and philosophical interpretation of nature” (20) while “[t]he relative weight or interplay of these three aspects determines all the permutations and categories within the field” (20). His overview ranges from specimen which show only occasional “personal or philosophical or literary” passages and the content is thus mostly of an informative character, as it is the case with “a professional paper or a field guide or a handbook” (20), through “natural history essays” which represent a marriage of “expository descriptions of nature” and “a literary design so that the facts then give rise to some sort of meaning or interpretation” to “rambles” which Lyon describes as “a classic American nature writing form, [where] natural history and the author’s presence are more or less perfectly balanced” (21). The ‘rambler’ undertakes

- 5 - walks in the vicinity of his or her home, of his or her “home ground”, loved and cherished, and describes the events and encounters as “observer-participant” (Lyon 21, 23). The more to the right of Lyon’s spectrum (22), the more is the author present in the writing and the personal experience in or with the natural world begins to prevail over the expositions of natural history (23); “Rambles” are therefore followed by three species of “the nature experience essay”, “Solitude and Back-Country Living”, “Travel and Adventure”, and “Farm

Life” respectively. As these three categories are not relevant for the focus of the thesis, they just serve as a bridge to the other end of the scale which features the category designated as

“Man’s Role in Nature”. These are in their essence philosophical works whose authors employ their experiences and accounts of natural history to pave way for the findings and thoughts they want to share (Lyon 25).

This thesis focuses on two representatives of American nature writing: Annie Dillard and Linda Hogan, more particularly on their nonfiction works or collections of essays Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Dwellings respectively. Lyon classifies Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek as an example of the category “Rambles” and, though he does not state to which part of the spectrum Linda Hogan belongs, she seems to fit best to the area of “Man’s Role in Nature”, except for her writing is far from being “abstract and scholarly” (Lyon 25). This thesis seeks to study in detail the possible ways of perception, understanding, and interpretation of the natural world and of its many voices, smells, and textures, within the field of nature writing.

The choice of the texts by Annie Dillard and Linda Hogan was not, however, inspired by the categorization and by what the distinct categories may imply; the inspiration has grown from their close neighbourhood in the anthology At Home on This Earth: Two Centuries of U.S.

Women’s Nature Writing, where they are presented as unified by a common interest for nature but in fact manifest a diversity of approaches and attitudes.

In the introduction to the above-mentioned anthology, Lorraine Anderson provides a short account of the history of women’s nature writing and of the changes its position has

- 6 - undergone in the wider context of literature and in relation to the literary canon since the beginnings of the genre in the middle of the nineteenth century (2-5). Since women were confined to the households and their surroundings by the character of the role society had ascribed to them (Anderson 3), their writing tends to be more “home-based” than that of their male counterparts and “the word home comes up often in women’s nature writing” (Anderson

5, original emphasis). This tendency represented almost till the end of the twentieth century a hindrance in the women’s nature writing being included into and regarded as a part of the literary canon (Anderson 3-4) as they did not produce “the kind of nature writing that this culture has recognized as such” (Anderson 3). At the same time, the historical and social circumstances gave rise to an interesting and very important phenomenon: perceiving the natural world as home. Anderson draws attention to the fact that “many women nature writers have found freedom from the domestic sphere and all that it traditionally entails by finding a home in nature” and “have embued the concept of home with new meaning by expanding it to encompass the wider world” (Anderson 5). The broadening of the idea of home as to cover

“the wider world” or the world in its entirety right away could be viewed as an essential ingredient in our desire to protect it. It is the emotional ties of the feeling of at-homeness, the feeling of safety, cosiness, and belonging, that make us treat the (natural) world with care.

The thesis aims to provide a comparative analysis of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by

Annie Dillard and Dwellings by Linda Hogan, searching in particular for the feeling of at- homeness in the worlds these two works create. It strives to investigate the distinct ways the two authors perceive nature and how they translate into the texts of their essays. Although they belong to the same generation (Dillard born 1945, Hogan 1947), they started to publish their works in different decades, Dillard in 1970s (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek in 1974) and

Hogan in 1990s (Dwellings in 1995), which may have shaped the principles on which the worlds are built, as well as their ethnicity (Hogan is of a Chickasaw origin). It is not the objective of the analysis, however, to map possible correlations between these contextual

- 7 - factors and the specificity of their texts, and it would have even been implausible in a case study of two authors and two works. Instead, the focus is on the variability of roles nature could play in the texts by writers often classified as nature writers.

One of the most prominent contemporary experts on the roles nature plays and has played (not only) within the Euro-American civilisation as well as in our daily lives is David

Abram, an American environmental philosopher. Abram’s works, namely The Spell of the

Sensuous and Becoming Animal, offer a comprehensive framework for revealing and interpreting approaches to nature, handy and fitting tools analysts can rely on when delving into the waters of creeks and exploring the nooks of dwellings. Abram’s philosophical concepts and ideas introduced in the publications mentioned above provide a methodological guidance and support for the whole thesis.

The thesis consists of three main chapters. Having explained the relevant concepts of

David Abram’s philosophy, the first chapter proceeds to a discussion of Hogan’s and

Dillard’s rendering of ‘objects’, of the material world, and of the senses they employ in accessing it. The second chapter provides an insight into Abram’s perception of animals, or better, of non-human inhabitants of the world, and characterizes the parts they play in

Hogan’s and Dillard’s texts. The last core chapter summarizes the findings of the two preceding analytical chapters and highlights the elements that are constitutive of the feeling of at-homeness and those aspects which disrupt it or inhibit it. The concept of feeling at home on this earth thus becomes the yardstick leading to the crucial distinction between Hogan’s and

Dillard’s essays.

- 8 -

1 The Perception of ‘Objects’

“There is a rather dull cupboard here that knew the voice of my great aunts, that knew the voice of my grandfather dear, that knew the voice of my father, too; and to these memories it is true. You're wrong to think it can only sit, because I talk with it.”

FRANCIS JAMMES

The cupboard which might seem “rather dull” at the first sight, an object simply placed in a certain part of the room and used for storing some sort of things or another, is endowed, at least in the eyes of Francis Jammes – since many “do not believe in such a spirit”

– with qualities that are traditionally ascribed solely to human beings. It (“elle” in the French original, which might purely indicate the grammatical gender of the word “armoire” as well as represent a way to emphasize the cupboard’s animate nature) was attentive to the voices of people who moved around the house, remembers them, and now it interacts with its present inhabitant. However even if no actual words are uttered on the part of the cupboard and the lyrical subject himself remained silent, Jammes hints at one of the crucial parts of David

Abram’s philosophy: there is more to ‘objects’ that surround us than we think it is (Cf.

Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous, “Philosophy on the Way to Ecology”)

In The Spell of the Sensuous, hereafter designated as The Spell, Abram accents the importance of Edmund Husserl’s contribution to philosophy, namely his recognition of

“the intersubjective world of life” (40) or Lebenswelt, “life-world” in Abram’s translation.

European scientific tradition had been and, as Abram suggests, has still been substantially shaped by the views of Galileo Galilei and the philosophy of René Descartes, which rejected the direct sensuous experience of the material reality as merely subjective and therefore irrelevant with regard to the cognition of the world we inhabit (31-32). Dismissive of the information our senses feed us, we entrust ourselves to science which is regarded as the single

- 9 - source of objective knowledge, bridging the gap between our limited bodies and the world which was reduced to “a determinate structure whose laws of operation could be discerned only via mathematical analysis” (Abram, The Spell 32). This concept of our contact with the world led, in Abram’s point of view, to an utter paradox: “The fluid realm of direct experience has come to be seen as a secondary, derivative dimension, a mere consequence of events unfolding in the “realer” world of quantifiable and measurable scientific ‘facts’”

(Abram, The Spell 34). Tangible contours of reality that envelops our bodies, and textures, colours and smells we encounter on our daily journeys, were given a certain eloquence again by Edmund Husserl who, in an effort to bring the attention back to the direct experiencing of the world, established phenomenology, a philosophical discipline that “would seek not to explain the world, but to describe as closely as possible the way the world makes itself evident to awareness, the way things first arise in our direct, sensorial experience” (Abram,

The Spell 35). Eventually, Husserl reached a conclusion that our body would play the key role in this experience as well as the fact that the perceived phenomena reveal themselves not only to our own senses but also to the eyes, ears, and fingers of other subjects with whom we share the particular place (Abram, The Spell 37). Thus he coined the notion of intersubjectivity and intersubjective phenomena, “phenomena experienced by a multiplicity of sensing subjects”

(Abram, The Spell 38). This new view of reality freed the world from the grip of tweezers that had held it in the vacuum of objectivity and suggested that the science can instead provide us with more intersubjective insights and help us learn how a particular phenomenon is perceived by a variety of subjects (Abram, The Spell 38-39). In this light the world ceases to be a specimen with clear-cut limits continuing silently its existence on a Petri dish and comes to life as a many-faceted and constantly changing realm that assumes, in every pair of eyes watching it, a different shape and colour, in every ear a specific sound and in every nose or muzzle a particular scent. It is “an intertwined matrix of sensations and perceptions,

- 10 - a collective field of experience lived through from many different angles” (Abram, The Spell

39). Moreover, the subjects themselves influence and inscribe in each other’s experience.

After more than two centuries when the transcendental reason and the material world of objects found themselves on the opposing ends of a vertical axe (taking in consideration the disdain associated with matter) a new world emerges: the life-world. It is the world which is always present beneath our feet, the world we are rooted in and informed by even at the time when our mind sets off for intellectual, abstract journeys. No idea or theory can come to existence out of nowhere, in a mind’s laboratory perfectly isolated from the outer reality; it is born in the world and from the world like a chicken from an egg (Abram, The Spell 40-41).

However, the body and the mind were in Husserl’s philosophy still understood as separate entities, the latter remaining transcendental, floating above the sensuous world. It was only

Maurice Merleau-Ponty who bridged the chasm between the mind and matter, explaining that the body with its senses is our only means of contact with the world, since, as Abram elaborates, “[w]ithout this body, without this tongue or these ears, you could neither speak nor hear another's voice. Nor could you have anything to speak about, or even to reflect on, or to think, since without any contact, any encounter, without any glimmer of sensory experience, there could be nothing to question or to know” (Abram, The Spell 45). Abram thus explicitly states that without the direct contact of the body with the tangible world there would be no abstract world either, no life of the mind and thus exposes the absurdity of the dichotomy between mind and matter and the rejection of the corporeal.

Nevertheless, when hierarchies are being disrupted and dichotomies dissolved, other changes are likely to occur, other ways to open up. In this particular case the way once more opened is an imaginary corridor between us and the ‘objects’ we encounter. Abram poses himself a question “Where does perception originate?” (Abram, The Spell 53) and, basing his reflections on several passages from Merleau-Ponty’s work Phénomenologie de la perception,

- 11 - explains that neither we nor the ‘object’ of our attention is the sole agent of the process.

Perception consists in interplay between two subjects: if we caress the bark of a nearby birch, it might seem that the agency and action is all on our part; it was me who saw the birch, made a few steps towards the tree, lifted my hand and run over it with my fingers. However,

Merleau-Ponty and Abram show the action occurred differently: the birch attracted my eyes by the contrasting colours of its trunk, the way it glared against the green background of the woods, beckoned to me with its branches and fluttering leaves, and later, when

I approached it enough to see the structure of the bark, its smooth and coarse places seduced my fingers to stroke them. In their point of view, ‘objects’ are far from being inert and passive, though it is the place that our (Western or Euro-American) philosophical tradition reserved for them (Abram, The Spell, 47-48). As Abram notes, “Merleau-Ponty writes of the perceived things as entities, of sensible qualities as powers, and of the sensible itself as a field of animate presences, in order to acknowledge and underscore their active, dynamic contribution to perceptual experience” (Abram, The Spell 56). Therefore, the space between us and the birch can be perceived as a corridor where certain powers flow in both directions: it is our awareness and curiosity regarding the tree and a seductive call emanating from the birch, inviting our body for a closer examination, offering its skin to be touched and its scent to be savoured.

Similarly, the cupboard that Jammes writes about does more than “only sit[s]”. In the original it is capable of other things “que se taire”, literally translated “than remain silent”. It is not passive and mute since it draws Jammes’ attention, reminds him of its presence and becomes a part of his consciousness to the degree he does not feel alone in the room: “And I smile, when a visitor comes my way / that he thinks me alone…” In French, however, this verse suggests even closer contact and greater affinity between the lyrical subject and the cupboard: “Et je souris que l’on me pense seul vivant”, as the literal translation to English would be: “And I smile that they (visitors) take me for the only living being [in here]”. Thus

- 12 -

Francis Jammes, from his living room, in the company of a cupboard, a wooden cuckoo, and old buffet infused with a smell of food, captures a sense of kindredness among all material subjects and overcomes an assumption of “a qualitative difference between the sentient and the sensed”, “the distinction between human ‘subjects’ and natural ‘objects’” (Abram, The

Spell 66-67). All the subjects in the dining room are in their own peculiar way animate and share a presence in the sensuous world. If the lyrical subject touched one of his wooden companions, he would feel not only the texture of its surface, but he would also experience the material, tangible nature of his own existence and would be in return touched by the buffet or cupboard (Abram, The Spell 68).

Being present in the Jammes’ dining room means finding oneself in an ongoing dialogue with the other entities that inhabit the house, a dialogue taking place on a non-verbal level, in a language which is to all of us the second (or rather the first?) mother tongue:

There’s an affinity between my body and the sensible presences that surround me, an

old solidarity that pays scant heed to our overeducated distinction between animate

and inanimate matter. Its steady influence upon my life lies far below my conscious

awareness . . . It unfolds in an utterly silent dimension, in that mute layer of bare

existence that this material body shares with hunkered mountains and the forests and

the severed stump of an old pine . . . (Abram, Becoming Animal 29, original emphasis)

The primordial affinity of our body with other matter and therefore a total disruption of the neatly organized great chain of being represents a strong current of thought meandering through Abram’s texts and is reflected not only in his depictions of particular ‘objects’ but, most importantly, shapes his understanding of and experiencing the (natural) world in general.

This chapter explores whether, and, if so, in what way Linda Hogan and Annie Dillard engage in the dialogue with ‘objects’ they encounter, through which senses they access the surrounding world and whether they seem to acknowledge a certain agency on the part of the

- 13 - stone, wood and other ‘objects’ or parts of nature. The main aim of the analysis is, once more using the metaphor of Monsieur Jammes in his dining room, to examine whether we read about Hogan/Dillard sitting in the room alone, just occasionally taking a conserve and a slice of bread out of the buffet, or about Hogan/Dillard enjoying themselves in the company of old eloquent friends.

1.1 ‘Objects’ in Dwellings

The essays issued under the common title Dwellings depict Linda Hogan in the great variety of situations and engaged in diverse activities: watching the tender movements of mating animals in the chapter entitled “The Bats” followed by a passage describing the way they orient themselves in the world; plunging into the healing embrace of hot water in “The

Caves”; participating in the sweat lodge ceremony in “All My Relations”; observing the dance of the northern lights above the Boundary Waters where the local people fear those who might “Deify the Wolf”; but, also, simply drinking the rain water which gathered in a hollow rock and raking the cages at the Birds of Prey Rehabilitation Foundation in “Waking up the

Rake”. The heterogeneous character of the events portrayed in the essays is related to a profound and intense bodily contact of the author and nature, or the world in general, and the miscellany of senses employed in living the moments Hogan writes about.

The last of the above-mentioned examples, seemingly the most ordinary one, seems to best illustrate the character of her experiencing the contact with and understanding of what is traditionally regarded as a ‘mere object’, as an inert tool designed and manufactured by man to fulfil a particular purpose, or, probably more pertinently, to be used for a certain task. In the following passage Hogan reveals that holding the handle of the rake can be perceived as more than touching a piece of wood; it is reconnecting with matter, with nature and with the life itself:

- 14 -

There is an art to raking, a very fine art, one with rhythm in it, and life. On the days I do

it well, the rake wakes up. Wood that came from dark dense forests seems to return to

life. Water that rose up through the rings of that wood, the minerals of earth mined

upward by the burrowing tree roots, all come alive. My own fragile hand touches the

wood, a hand full of my own life, including that which rose each morning early to

watch the sun return from the other side of the planet. (153)

“On the days [she] [does] it well”, when she concentrates on the movement she performs and does not let her thoughts wander outside the cage in the abstract realms of her mind, the rake in her hands comes to life, and she becomes capable of sensing its origins in the living world.

She is aware of the kinship between her “fragile hand” and the “[w]ood that came from dark dense forests, saying of the former that it is “full of [her] own life” (my emphasis), thus acknowledging the life other than her own. It is a touch of two animate beings, two equally corporeal subjects, a human hand interwoven with veins that circulate life and wood which used to pulsate no less vividly. Bending her back and pulling the handle, Hogan reconnects with the nature’s dynamics, becomes (or becomes more readily aware of being) a part of the world that teems with life, where trees drink water from the ground while nutrient minerals infuse their limbs, all in the harmony with the sun which follows its daily orbit.

However, the raking appears to draw her into an even more basic and primordial connection with the world: “Work is the country of hands, and they want to live there in the dailiness of it” (154), claims Hogan and her statement seems to share the core idea with Abram’s observation that there is a kinship between all material presences which “unfolds in an utterly silent dimension, in that mute layer of bare existence” (Becoming Animal 29, original emphasis). Physical work means a contact with other tangible presences, an immersion in the thick of the present moment1, in “the country of hands”, the tangible world that is for once free of a rampant conceptualization and verbalization. Moreover, it is the hands here which

1 “In the thick of [something]” is an expression often used by David Abram in Becoming Animal. - 15 - are said to “want to live there in the dailiness of it”, which might be taken as an allusion to instinct or a form of intelligence other than that usually acknowledged in the Western world, the one dwelling in the human body, which – among other things – prompts us to touch in general.

The passage where Hogan lets ‘objects’ literally shout their active being is to be found in “The Bats”, where she describes how the animals “hear their way through the world” (25):

“For them, the world throws back a language, the empty space rising between hills speaks an open secret then lets the bats pass through, here or there, in the dark air. Everything answers, the corner of a house, the shaking leaves on a wind-blown tree, the solid voice of bricks” (26).

Nothing remains mute and passive; the bats find themselves in an ongoing dialogue with

‘objects’ they approach on their journeys through night and even the gap between two slopes is described as a kind of presence which invites the animals to fly through and not omitted as

‘a void’ (Cf. Abram, The Spell). Hogan’s vivid description of echolocation might be perceived as a metaphorical rendering of what Abram more theoretically reflects on in the chapter “Wood and Stone” in Becoming Animal. Contemplating the rock he could see through the window of the room where he writes, he admires its perseverance, “its compacted energy, the wild activity that it displays by its simple presence” (48). The rock represents for Abram an “anchor” that, when he raises his head from the screen and lays his eyes upon it, brings him back in the material reality from the abstract realm of words he plunges into and floats in when writing (Becoming Animal 48). He stresses that we tend to forget about such companions of ours and omit their active influence on us or at least presence in our life: “We say that the rock ‘is’ here, that the mountains ‘are’ over there; we use this little verb ‘to be’ countless times every day, and yet we forget that it is a verb, that it names an act – that simply to exist is a very active thing to be doing” (49, original emphasis). The terrain with its particularities and our inner landscape are interconnected – this idea being explored more deeply in the chapters “Mind” and “Mood” – ‘objects’ such as rocks influence the journeys of

- 16 - our mind in a similar way the bat’s flight is guided by the voices of hills, trees and brick walls

(Cf. Abram, Becoming Animal).

Apart from perceiving ‘objects’ as coming from, or, better, as born from the living world that surrounds us and sustains our being and therefore representing a connection with its creative powers, as was shown in the first part of this chapter, and apart from seeing them as strong presences far from remaining mute as described in the second part, Hogan achieves to create in Dwellings a very intense image of (not only) natural world – so vital and vigorous it grows out of the essays and overwhelms the reader in his/her own study – by means of depicting various kinds of experience: visual, auditory, tactual and olfactory. Two passages are in this respect of a particular strength, taking a bath in “the earth’s cauldron” (30) in “The

Caves” and the time spent in the sweat lodge portrayed in “All My Relations”. In the former essay, she “walk[s] down the passageway to inner earth” where “the dank air [is] warm and musty”, “[t]he ceiling drips water, the slow sound of rain falling, rhythmic, as if from the leaves of forests” and “[i]n places, the constant warm dripping of water has layed mineral down over rock . . . until it is smooth to the touch” (30). In a ten-line paragraph, she mediates to the reader all kinds of perceptions that inundate the visitor’s senses and therefore the cave does not figure on the page as a mere notion, a word printed black on white, but opens before the reader’s eyes in all its force and complexity. The contact with the cave becomes even keener and acutely intimate when the author mentions she is “barefoot [and] naked” and, having entered the hot bath, writes: “Surrounded by stone, this body of mine is seen in the dim light for what it is, fragile and brief. The water closes, seamless, around me” (30). Not only do her bare feet meet with the rock and the water penetrates her porous skin; by mentioning her own body Hogan accentuates she is physically present in the world she speaks about, that her body is simply one of the material beings which encounter one another in the dark moist world of the caves: stone, water and human body.

- 17 -

1.2 ‘Objects’ in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

The texts by Annie Dillard that constitute Pilgrim at Tinker Creek are, in comparison to Hogan’s Dwellings, rather homogeneous, or uniform, in terms of the action they portray.

Nearly all of the events and reflections take place or are conceived at or in the vicinity of

Tinker Creek, the only exception being Dillard’s description of the moments spent at a gas station when driving through Virginia in the chapter “The Present”, and the author divides her time mostly between walking around the stream and observing nature and reading or recalling her readings, while both the former and the latter often serves as a starting point or a springboard for contemplations of a philosophical and theological character. It is not, however, the narrower scope of actions and places rendered in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek that represents the essential distinction between Hogan’s and Dillard’s texts, though it is not entirely irrelevant either. The difference seems to consist in the intensity of the authors’ contact with the material, tactile world which is related partly to the diversity of ways this contact occurs, yet bespeaks primarily their ability to perceive and live their connection with the tangible presences they encounter in general. This subchapter strives to illustrate the contrast with passages that appear to be representative of Annie Dillard’s approach, loosely paralleling the previous subchapter on Linda Hogan’s dialogue with ‘objects’, which underlined the power and the eloquence they are given in her essays.

In contrast to Hogan, Annie Dillard virtually never incorporates in her essay a passage that would focus on a physical activity such as mending a broken shelf or wiping a table and a wooden floor. Dedicating her attention almost exclusively to the observation of natural world, to examining its minuscule aspects at times with the aid of a microscope and to reading about its rules and peculiarities, Dillard lets the other aspects of her life pass without being commented upon. Not only situations that tend to require an intensive physical labour but the time spent indoors, inside her house by the creek, in general. As she never thematises

- 18 - activities such as cleaning, preparing food, working in the garden or simply enjoying the evening seated in a cosy armchair by the fireplace with a captivating book on her lap, a

Thoreau or a Teale, the ‘objects’ that accompany her and assist at or even sustain her life at

Tinker Creek are given no voice. The lowered awareness of and the lack of a direct tactile contact with ‘objects’ around her means severing one of the bonds to the immediate sensuous reality and natural world, since she cannot live through a piece of wood a connection with

“dark dense forests” (153), as Hogan does when raking the raptors’ cages. Furthermore,

Abram claims that “[e]very solid thing, whether a toothpick or a trumpet, a porcelain plate or a helicopter, is fashioned from materials once birthed by the earth. Regardless of how profoundly they have been alchemized in the laboratory, the matter that gleams or sleeps in our creations . . . retains some trace of its old ancestry in the wombish earth” (Abram,

Becoming Animal 28). Hence when the things, such as a toothpick and a porcelain plate, are erased from daily life, when the contact with objects in which dwells a “trace of [their] old ancestry in the wombish earth” is omitted or remains a marginal aspect of the events described, the impression is one of a certain estrangement from the living and dynamic world.

As has been stressed, a large portion of space, though it varies across the individual essays, is dedicated to the description of rambles in the surroundings of Tinker Creek. These must inevitably comprise a good deal of struggling through bushes, climbing over fallen logs and clambering up steep hillsides; the author, however, only very rarely mentions any kind of physical efforts that were put into the motion. The lack of articulation of bodily sensations gives the impression of Dillard floating in the air, a foot or two above the ground and speaking of what she sees. The collection depicts a whole year at Tinker Creek and the walks therefore take place under different weather conditions. Yet even the snow which covers the region and the cold that necessarily accompanies the flakes can be barely felt by the reader:

But I didn’t even make a snowball. I wandered upstream, along smooth banks under

trees. I had gotten, after all, a very good look at the coot. Now here were its tracks in

- 19 -

the snow, three-toed and very close together. The wide, slow place in the creek by

the road was frozen over. From this bank at this spot in summer I can always see

tadpoles, fat-bodied, scraping brown algae from a sort of shallow underwater ledge.

Now I couldn’t see the ledge under the ice. (47)

She does not mention her touching the snow except for “I scraped away the smooth snow”

(50), a phrase that merely informs the reader about the steps she took but not about what it felt like to scrape it, whether she did so for instance with her gloves on or with her naked hands, which would in the latter case add to the moment a certain acuteness and intimacy. Similarly, all her movements are described by means of verbs that are no further modified by adverbs. In the passage cited above Dillard writes that she simply “wandered upstream”, later “crossed the bridge” (49) and finally “left the woods” (50) but does not specify whether for instance arduously, the snow holding gently her feet when she crossed a clearing; cautiously as the rime-covered bridge demanded her full attention and skill; or limbs pleasantly stretched by the walk but all her fingertips calling for the warmth of the fireplace in her living room.

Instead, she shifts from place to place, observing keenly the surroundings, recognizing the coot’s footprints in the snow and the changes that winter brought to the creek, yet as if it was not her body that carries her attentive eyes along the frozen stream and through the forest and adjusts its movements to the shapes and rhythms of the terrain. When writing about her observing muskrats in the chapter “Stalking”, Dillard even expresses – though it seems with a portion of a deliberate exaggeration – her aversion to crawling:

Other times I have learned that the only way to approach a feeding muskrat for a

good look is to commit myself to a procedure so ridiculous that only a total

unselfconsciousness will permit me to live with myself. I have to ditch my hat, line

up behind a low boulder, and lay on my belly to inch snake-fashion across twenty

feet of bare field until I am behind the boulder itself and able to hazard a slow peek

around it. (202)

- 20 -

Thus she sweeps aside an activity that could serve as a valuable means of experiencing intensely moving through the landscape, lead to the narrator’s and therefore also the reader’s becoming more fully aware of boulders as material presences in the terrain that offer a hide to those who are stalking or are being stalked, and conduce to a realization of the distance more deeply felt, more subjective and more imaginable than “twenty feet of bare field”. Also, it would be, had she allowed for it, an opportunity to experience a very close contact with the earth, her body joining in its full length the vaster matter spreading underneath and all around her.

Auditory and olfactory perceptions are not abundant in the essays either; it is the sight that is Dillard’s dominant sense and although she paints images of an astounding and, at times, of a rarefied character, for instance when she recalls her walk at Florida coast: “As each green wave rose from the churning water, it illuminated within itself the six-or eight- footlong bodies of twisting sharks” (10), her depiction of (natural) world often remains somewhat flat and lacks a strong immersive force. In the chapter “The Present”, she states that “[it] is a freely given canvas” and adds: “I like the slants of light; I’m a collector. That’s a good one, I say, that bit of bank there, the snakeskin and the aquarium, that patch of light from the creek on bark. Sometimes I spread my fingers into a viewfinder” (84). At the end of the same paragraph she even compares life to “a stroll . . . through a gallery hung in trompes- l’esprit” (84). Similes and metaphors that highlight that the perception of reality is based predominantly on visual impressions occur at other places in the text, for instance when she speaks about her watching flocks of red-winged blackbirds fly one after another from an orange tree, she focuses entirely on the visual aspect of the action: “I saw a tree, then a whisk of color, then a tree again” and comments on their disappearing by saying “One show to a customer” (18-19, my emphasis). Another example could be found in the passage on stalking muskrats, where she uses again the metaphor of a (visual) show: “If I move again, the show is over for the evening” (197). The following extract seems to be representative of Dillard’s

- 21 - employing as well as not employing particular senses and the effect it has upon the intensity of her descriptions:

In April I walked to the Adam’s woods. The grass had greened one morning when I

blinked; I missed it again. As I left the house I checked the praying mantis egg case .

. . The morning woods were utterly new. A strong yellow lighted pooled between the

trees; my shadow appeared and vanished on the path, since a third of the trees I

walked under were still bare, a third spread a luminous haze wherever they grew, and

another third blocked the sun with new, whole leaves. The snakes were out – I saw a

bright, smashed one on the path – and the butterflies were vaulting and furling about

. . . The newts were back. In the small forest pond they swam bright and quivering,

or hung alertly near the water’s surface. (109-110)

The passage represents the canvas she had written of, portraying fresh spring grass, the play of light in the forest, butterflies and a pond with newts. Neither a scent nor a noise inundates or at least reaches to her nose and ears and thus the walk resembles visiting an art gallery, a situation when a spectator might well be impressed by the painting, yet remains outside of the landscape it depicts, and, most importantly, a situation when the agency of nature is restricted by silencing its songs and cries, by smothering its smells and preventing its limbs, tree branches, from caressing and catching one’s arms and jacket. Descriptions that would enable the natural world to seize the reader and draw him in, deep into the thick of the sensuous reality, into the thick of the spring woods, by getting hold of his/her senses occur in the text rather rarely. The excerpt that follows is one of the moments when Dillard lets the landscape unfold in its full power and integrity:

I was in no tent under leaves, sleepless and glad. There was no moon at all; along the

world’s coasts the sea tides would be springing strong . . . could I feel the starlight? .

. . Now also in the valley night a skunk emerged from his underground burrow to

hunt pale beetle grubs in the dark. A great horned owl folded his wings and dropped

- 22 -

from the sky, and the two met on bloodied surface of earth. Spreading over a

distance, and the air from that spot thinned to a frail sweetness, a tinctured wind that

bespoke real creatures and real encounters at the edge . . . (220-221)

As the author lies in the open air in the night woods and staring into the starry skies, her comment that “a skunk emerged from his underground burrow” appears to be at first a mere conjecture, imagining what might be going on in the dark valley, as she cannot possibly see the animal, which is reinforced by her adding a piece of scientific knowledge: “to hunt pale beetle grubs in the dark”. She could not actually see a “great horned owl folded his wings and dropped from the sky” and the meeting of the two creatures “at the bloodied surface of earth” either. However, when Dillard writes that “the air from that spot thinned to a frail sweetness, a tinctured wind that bespoke real creatures and real encounters at the edge” it becomes clear that she was able to deduce the scene on the basis of the shrieks that the wind carried to her ears. Moreover, the air and the wind do not figure in the story as passive elements or immutable void; “the air thin[s] to a frail sweetness” and the wind is even given eloquence as it “be[speaks] real creatures and real encounters” (my emphasis). Not only does the sensuous present materialize at this point in the text in all its acuteness and assail the reader but also it is an instance of Dillard approaching Hogan in her depiction of the wind as animate, as

“a talker” (52), as a presence with a certain agency.

- 23 -

2 The Perception of Animals

Dedicating a special chapter to the approach to animals is already in a contradiction to the philosophy of David Abram. The appropriate way of writing about the perception of the

(natural) world would be not to draw lines between its particular parts, but to proceed in a walking-in-the-country manner: when a rock beside the path you tread catches your eye, write of its staggering presence, when storm-laden clouds roll over a nearby hill and form a bloated curtain that conceals the sun, write of how your mood too then changed, if you noticed that animals altered their behaviour long before the first drops hit the ground, write of their intelligence (Cf. Abram, Becoming Animal). If you were, at the same time, aware of the path and, more broadly, the ground that meets and supports your every step, the air that fills your lungs communicates to your nose messages in the form of miscellaneous scents, and the other lively presences around and touching your body, and include these in your paper, you would get the closest to the description of what Abram calls “the matrix of earthly life in which we ourselves are embedded” (The Spell 65). Nevertheless, this method cannot be, for the sake of clarity, applied and so the chapter “The Perception of ‘Objects’” is followed with “The

Perception of Animals”, as this arrangement seems natural from the logical point of view: the premises introduced in the former constitute the basis or, better, imply the crucial aspects of the latter.

The introduction to the first chapter briefly described the main pillars of David

Abram’s mode of thinking, the fragments of the philosophies of Edmund Husserl and Maurice

Merleau-Ponty and the opposition to Cartesian dualism they have in common, and showed that ‘objects’, presences that are in our cultural tradition considered mostly as inert, are endowed with powers they exercise daily over our mind and enter into an animated dialogue with our bodies. The heightened awareness of and the sensitivity towards what is often

- 24 - perceived as a mute matter lead naturally to the capacity of perceiving the animals differently too, of catching the sight of the wild intelligence that teems in their brains, through their muscles and pervades the tissue of their bodies.

As indicated in the title, Abram dedicates a significant part of his work Becoming

Animal to the exploration of our approach to animals or – not to assign humans the role of the sole agents in this respect and not to place animals in the position of an object of human research, interest, liking or hatred – to examining the relationship between our species and

“the Others” (7), “the alien form[s] of sentience” (19), as he designates the members of the

“more-than-human world” (a term coined in The Spell), between the humans and the representatives of “the intelligence that lurks in nonhuman nature” (19). What is generally understood under the term “intelligence” and what is perceived as manifestations of a thinking mind lies, in Abram’s opinion, at the core of our failure to perceive animals as equals, to treat them with respect and to assess the consequences of our actions with regard to non-human neighbours, to the scaled, winged and four-legged inhabitants of the Earth.

In the chapter “The Discourse of the Birds” in Becoming Animal, Abram sheds light on how narrow our view of intellect actually is: “Intelligence, we assume, is a strictly centralized phenomenon, mistaking our distinctively human form of intelligence for intelligence itself”

(188). He continues by explaining that “[a]s a mammal who long ago learned to balance on its hind legs, freeing its forepaws to manipulate objects, we specialize in a kind of curiosity that looks at things from different directions, turning them this way and that – a highly visual pondering that seems to unfold somewhere behind our eyes” (188). This mode of exploring the material world is likely to create a sense of disengagement of the subject from what is inspected: the forepaws and, in the case of our kind, hands serve only as an instrument that holds the object in a favourable angle, the sight begins to prevail among the senses and the reasoning appears to take place and the ideas to be conceived in a realm existing separately from the tangible reality, including from our own body. Abram constantly returns to the way

- 25 - technological progress has widened this chasm as we are less and less obliged to enter into a direct contact with the (natural) world in order to examine the given phenomenon.

Simultaneously, situations requiring a physical activity become rarer and while our mind is fully employed, in the course of a university lecture for instance, leaping from one thought to another, our body does not shift from its frozen position at the desk. The fact that we often apply ourselves in “manipulating abstract symbols while our muscled body is mostly inert”

(189) shapes our perception of what “real intelligence” is: “[T]hinking [then] often seems entirely independent of our body and our bodily relation to the biosphere. If our reflections do result in a change of stance or an alteration in our actions, they still seem to issue as directives from a centralized thinker – or self – oddly independent of our materiality, a floating locus of awareness situated somewhere within our heads” (189, original emphasis). It consists in our eyes in “the very verbal (and sometimes numerical) cogitations coursing within our heads”

(191) and since animals apparently do not possess this sort of analytical intelligence, we sometimes tend to deny them intelligence as such and ascribe their behaviour and reactions purely to instinct and patterns encoded in their genes.

However, animals do not lack intelligence; their intelligence merely differs from the one that prevails in our species. Abram uses as a basis for the more theoretical part of the chapter where he explains the ways other animals think an experience of his which draw his attention to the creativity and wit that drive the movements of animals. Encompassed by a tempest which hit when he was wandering in a tidal river mouth on the North Coast of Long

Island, he notices several ducks suspended in the air thick with rain (Becoming Animal 185-

186). Observing their conduct, he realizes that they are striving to pierce an invisible solid drapery formed probably by two opposing gusts of wind which is standing in their way to the open water. Having fully focused his attention on the birds, their movements and quacking, without letting his thoughts stray from the present moment, he ceases to perceive them with his eyes and ears separately; they “merg[e] into a single keen sense” and he is able to “sense

- 26 - their strangely different intelligence” (187). He becomes aware of their lively communication and mutual cooperation as he “sense[s] the clear intent in the staccato voices as they speak”

(187) and grasps the correlation between their utterances and their changing positions now and then, shifting from one place to another while still heading straight towards the air barrier:

“Each voice alters its feel when the speaker is blown off course by the gusts, each duck using its quacks to inform the others about the state of the blast just in front of it while also apprising them of its precise location at that moment . . . each also replying and reassuring the others” (187). When we return to our senses, leaving the common assumptions such as assessing other animals by their brain-body ratios (Becoming Animal 188) behind, and fully

‘come to life’ in our animal body, we no longer see a dramatic picture of birds wrestling in the storm; we see or, more accurately, sense deeper than this.

What takes places right above our heads is an arduous manoeuvre of five birds that are determined to get out of the estuary that has been sealed with colliding winds, attempting the breakthrough together, coordinating their motion by means of an ongoing nuanced dialogue. Abram unites these multiple aspects of wit and awareness that reflect in the ducks’

(and other animals’) behaviour in the terms “distributed sentience” (190, original emphasis),

“intelligence in the limbs” (190), or “carnal intelligence” (239). However, he affirms at the same time that they are “[e]quipped with proclivities and patterned behaviors genetically inherited from [their] ancestors” and that their actions are in compliance with “the instructions tucked into their chromosomes” (189). The aim is not to disclaim the share genetic information has in the life of animals but to emphasize the fact that it is a share, which means it leaves space for other factors, and that is, above all creativity. Staying with the ducks in the boisterous air and with birds in general, Abram compares flying to “an uninterrupted improvisation with an unseen and widely metamorphic partner” (190). Improvisation; a duck is partly guided by instinct and cannot possibly resist the voice of its genes, nonetheless the wind, its “widely metamorphic partner” (190), compels the duck to answer instantly to its

- 27 - sudden whims. Similarly, constantly changing circumstances require of all animals a keen awareness and unyielding creativity. As they find themselves, unlike our species, “in a constant and mostly unmediated relation with their sensory surroundings”, they need to “think with the whole of their bodies” (189, original emphasis). The carnal intelligence means that in other animals “it is not an isolated mind but rather the sensate, muscled body itself that is doing the thinking, its diverse senses and its flexing limbs playing off one another as it feels out fresh solutions to problems posed” (190, original emphasis). The recognition of this more intuitive mode of thinking that is tightly connected with the direct sensuous experience of the world as intelligence endows us with a new sensitivity and perceptiveness in relation to the

‘simplest’ actions of the non-human species. If we bear Abram’s observations in mind and tune ourselves to the intelligence and expressivity the surrounding world abounds in, seagulls carrying shells far above cliffs and opening them by letting them fall on rocks will no longer appear to us as creatures driven by instinct who perform quite a mechanical set of actions. We should be able to catch a glimpse of the ingenuity of their conduct, to realize the birds invented and now are employing their own method to crack the clams and to be aware of the attention they treat the shells with, patiently, one by one (Cf. Abram, The Spell).

The chapter explores the way non-human animals and their behaviour are depicted in

Hogan’s Dwellings and Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek respectively, whether the passages dedicated to the observation of a certain animal teem with the understanding of and respect for its creativity and intellect or, possibly, whether the texts leave behind a chasm still gaping between the humans and the members of the more-than-human world, providing little material to bridge the divide.

- 28 -

2.1 Animals in Dwellings

In the very first essay of the collection, “The Feathers”, Linda Hogan writes of her years-long desire to have an eagle feather, of praying for one that would come to her from or be given to her by “a bird still living” (15), because only an eagle which cruises freely the skies possesses the power which then dwells also in the feathers (15). One morning, still asleep, she feels an urge in her dream to look up, she is drawn to the ceiling of the dome she finds herself in, wakes suddenly and raises her eyes to the open window. She sees “a large golden eagle [flying] towards the window, so close that [she] [can] see its dark eyes looking in at [her] for a moment before it lift[s], [catches] a current of air, and fl[ies] over the roof of the house” (16). She rushes out of the house to find out where the eagle is heading and spots a single feather on the road, “the gift of an eagle, soft white with a darker, rounded tip” (16).

Even when omitting, for now, the mystical dimension of the experience, the encounter is brief, yet intense. Hogan captures the moment in a single sentence but her choice to mention out of the many possible aspects of the sight the very eyes of the bird, “dark” and “looking in at her”, gives the passage a particular strength. The eye contact between Hogan, a human being, and the eagle emphasizes the reciprocity of the contact; it is not a woman watching a bird, but a mutual meeting of two attentive pairs of eyes opening to the depths of the two animals’ minds, the human one and the feathered one. The passage foreshadows in a minimalistic way the author’s sensitivity regarding other species and her reverence for these

“alien form[s] of sentience” (Abram, The Spell 19). The feather that figures in the chapter as a key element nonetheless points to an even broader and deeper understanding of intelligence and knowledge that circulates in the more-than-human world. Hogan speaks of it as of an

“element of bird, so formed, so groomed to catch the wind and lift, that one-time part of a whole flying” (19) and notes that “[t]here is something alive in a feather”, that “[t]he power of it is perhaps in its dream of sky, currents of air, and the silence of its creation. It knows the insides of clouds” (20). She regards it as an attribute of the eagle that is shaped so as to make

- 29 - possible the symphony of the bird’s movements corresponding to changes in the air currents, as a tool the eagle employs, if we return to Abram’s metaphor, in his “improvisation with an unseen and widely metamorphic partner” as a magician performs his art with instruments that fit perfectly in his skilful hands. And, most importantly, Hogan suggests that a sort of power resides in the feather, a power that consists in its travelling the realms which we are not able to access directly, without the aid of our hang-gliders and airplanes and in the quality commensurable with the one of eagle’s/feather’s experience for whom the air is their natural element, their home. The feather is endowed, and the bird itself naturally too, in this point of view, with a knowledge that remains far beyond our reach, the feel of and the intimate acquaintance of the “currents of air” and “the insides of clouds” a human being can never fully experience or acquire. The unknowability of all aspects of the sensuous world is, in the opinion of David Abram, one of the factors that incite our curiosity about and interest in the material reality we live in and are of one substance with, which is the reason we cannot get the unmediated knowledge of everything (or, not so improbably, anything) that surrounds us

(Becoming Animal 44-45). It is a source of enigma that envelops all the presences we encounter and therefore a reason to pay a deep respect to them. Abram names this aspect of the approach to the more-than-human world as one of the nine main traits of the relationship of indigenous cultures with nature he has traced and studied: “The depth of the world, and indeed of any part of the world, is . . . inexhaustible. Every certainty, every instance of clear knowledge, is necessarily surrounded by a horizon of uncertainty shading into mystery”

(Becoming Animal 269-270). Thus the first story Hogan relates opens a door to the world of which humans occupy only a certain part, a world shared with creatures who are not only gifted with a bright intellect but whose knowledge and experience exceed our own.

The second essay in the collection takes the reader to one of this world’s many peoples: the bats. The view of the creatures shifts over the course of the text from a mostly aesthetic admiration through focusing on the way they use calls to navigate through the air to

- 30 - their spiritual significance and abilities. At the beginning, Hogan recalls moments when she was bewitched by a graceful, liquid dance of mating bats, she describes how “they climbed each other softly and closed their wings together” and writes that “[t]heir turning was beautiful, a soundless motion of wind blowing great dark dunes into new configurations”

(21). She begins the chapter with a sentence that informs the reader that the mating took place

“in the darkest corner of a zoo”, which reminds us of bats’ habitat: caves, the underground world, which are in our cultural tradition commonly associated with darkness, with the unknown and the hidden and has therefore a tint of a possible danger, however, her impressions are those of tenderness, beauty and utmost grace (21). The scene is reflected upon without a shade of anything that might disconcert or intimidate an observer, we do not witness breeding of strange creatures stuck between a rodent and a bird, but an act of love as they embrace each other “softly” and “[close] their wings together” (21). Moving from the admiration of their bodies and the way they entangle in “the most beautiful turnings” (23) to their capabilities, Hogan points out that the bats “hear the sounds that exist at the edges of our lives” (25) and therefore the whole world talks to them, as has been discussed in the chapter

“The Perception of ‘Objects’”, everything they approach speaks out its pure being and to their ears “[the] world [is] alive in its whispering songs” (26). In the following paragraph, the bats’ hearing abilities are given a new potency and the animals themselves depicted as powerful beings that are assigned a certain role in this world. Here the author’s point of view seems to be grounded in her native understanding of things2 as she designates them as “people from the land of souls”, “listeners to our woes, hearers of changes in earth, predictors of earthquake and storm” (26). By calling them “people” she erases the difference that the notions of human and animal are likely to wedge between us and other species and therefore clearly states that bats are to be considered equal to our people. The Earth is populated by people that differ from each other to a greater or a lesser extent, but they are all people and thus akin, while

2 Hogan explains her point of view in the Preface. - 31 - each kind finds its home in a different part or sphere of the world and is gifted with special powers. According to Hogan, bats hear us, they even listen to “our woes”, which suggests they are neither unaware of nor indifferent to our existence and sorrows that are inseparable from our days. Moreover, they can be of help to their neighbours since they are able, unlike us, to sense, thanks to their carnal intelligence alone, an earthquake or an upcoming storm.

And they can be of help even in a broader and more spiritual sense:

They are creatures of the dusk, which is the time between times, people of the

threshold, dwelling at the open mouth of inner earth like guardians at the womb of

creation . . . Hearing the chants of life all around them, they are listeners who pass on

the language and songs of many things to human beings who need wisdom, healing,

and guidance through our lives, we who forget where we stand in the world. Bats

know the world is constantly singing, know the world inside the turning and twisting

of caves, places behind and beneath our own. (27)

Hogan explicitly suggests that bats, living on the borderland between times and places, “at the open mouth of inner earth”, figure in the world and our lives as “intermediaries between our world and the next” (24). However, she continues, we may understand this ‘mediation’ also as maintaining of the connection between us and this very world in its full expanse and eloquence: they “hear language and songs of many things” and are familiar with “the world inside the turning and twisting of caves” and thus remind us of the existence of speech flowing outside the range our ears can capture and of the depths of this world that wind, open and taper beneath the places we inhabit. They remind us, people “who forget where we stand in the world”, by their otherness, possessing a different kind of intelligence and having access to knowledge and experience very remote from and in many ways surpassing our own, of who we are and our place.

No matter how alien their sensations, intelligence and knowledge might be, the differences, though in many cases very profound, do not represent an unbridgeable gap.

- 32 -

Abram accents that we share with the other animals for instance the feelings of “fear, pain and pleasure” and that “[t]here is a subtle entanglement and confusion between all beings of the earth, a consequence not only of our common ancestry, and the cellular similarities of our makeup, but also of our subjection of the variant aspects of the same whirling world”

(Becoming Animal 192). Both Abram and Hogan explore the ways of communicating with the other species, including not only animals, but also plants and all aspects of the living world in general, and seem to reach the same conclusion, or, as this is probably the way of describing their learning and knowledge of this world they would probably prefer, to feel it the same.

Hogan writes of “communications that take place on a level that goes deeper than our somewhat limited human spoken languages” and “a deep-moving underground language in us

[whose] currents pass between us and the rest of nature” (57). Abram expresses what seems as the very same thought as he speaks of “a layer of language much older, and deeper, than words”, of “a dimension of expressive meanings that [are] directly felt by the body, a realm wherein the body itself speaks – by the tonality and rhythm of its sounds, by its gestures, even by the expressive potency of its poise” (Becoming Animal 167). This claim follows an account of his personal experience of the communication with sea-lions while in the kayak close to the southeast coast of Alaska (159-166) and, years before, with a moose in the Rocky

Mountains (161-162), both taking place on a similar principle. Cross-country skiing through the woods, Abram reached a small fen where a mother moose was grazing with her offspring:

“The moose looked up as startled as I; she was facing me head-on, her nostrils flaring, her front legs taut, leaning forward. Her eyes were locked on my body, one ear listening toward me while the other was rotated backward, monitoring the movements of her calf” (161).

Abram, however, did not feel any fear although the situation was tense and acted intuitively: he started to sing “a single mellifluous note, a musical call in the middle part of [his] range, holding its pitch and its volume for as long as he could muster” (161). He repeats it, “relaxing his own body and pouring as much ease as [he] was able to the tone” (162). The moose

- 33 - reacted instantly; first the tension leaves the animal’s muscles and soon she returns to the gnawing of small willows. Abram managed, the situation demanding an instantaneous response, to communicate to the moose the essential, since such song carries “information about the internal state of various organs in the singer’s body, and the relative tension in that person, the level of aggression or peaceful intent” (162). He succeeded to avoid a conflict thanks to his intuition, to his body remembering and using a way of speaking that is, in his own words, “much older, and deeper, than words”, recalling a language more universal that the one in which we daily immerse ourselves, verbalizing our abstract ideas in order to communicate them to the other members of the purely human world that we only seldom leave (Cf. Abram, The Spell, “The Ecology of Magic”). This language is often forgotten and even the possibility of any kind of communication with a wild animal such as a moose is likely to appear to the modern Westerners as a delusion, if not a madness, as we have “shut ourselves off from these other voices” (Abram, The Spell 22) and are no longer able to recognize the meaning that flutters in their melodies. Hogan begins her essay “A Different

Yield” by mentioning that “A woman once described a friend of hers as being such a keen listener that even the trees leaned toward her, as if they were speaking their innermost secrets into her listening ears” (47). For her the world and beings that populate it are far from remaining mute too and she dedicates the chapter specifically to showing that intelligence is not restricted to the tissues tangled up in human skulls but flows in through the landscape unbound and can be expressed in many different languages. She relates the story of geneticist

Barbara McClintock who studied corn plants by listening to them and became indeed “such a keen listener” that the corn confided to her some of its “innermost secrets”. McClintock’s method consisted solely in the close observation of the plants growing, becoming familiar with each of them and listening to their speech. But most importantly it was her confidence that a sort of eloquence is proper to all plants that enabled her to discover what had not revealed itself to the others. However, in the eyes of Linda Hogan we do not listen and, even

- 34 - if we do, we do not want to hear. Reflecting on the experiments with American Sign

Language conducted on chimpanzees in 1970s, she points out that what they reveal is primarily that we are not able to accept that other creatures experience the same emotions that take hold of our own bodies and have thoughts and ideas and that they are moreover capable of expressing them (if a stance, gestures and a facial expression are dismissed as somehow inferior to a verbal language, by means of signs) and the responsibilities that come together with becoming aware of these ancient and, to some, obvious facts. Also, it seems we resist the questioning of our ‘exclusive’ position among living creatures out of the fear that it would throw us in the whirl of the world from which we have been able to pretend a certain detachment (53-55). Yet something in us craves for the reconnection with the natural world and our fellow creatures. Hogan argues that what is needed is a “liberation for not only the animals of earth, but for our own selves, a freedom that could very well free us of stifling perceptions that have bound us tight and denied us the parts of ourselves that were not objective or otherwise scientifically respectable” (54). In the following essay, “Deify the

Wolf”, Hogan visits with a very diverse group of people Boundary Waters and appears to draw on this idea when contemplating why people hate and wish to shoot them and at the same time feel attracted to these wild animals and long for touching (at least) the dead ones.

A reason for the former might be that “[wolves] contain for us many of our own traits, ones we repress within ourselves. More than any other animal, they mirror back to us the predators we pretend not to be” (71). The latter she expresses through a powerful metaphor:

There is another slow, rising howl. It is a man. It’s a man speaking. In a language he

only pretends to know, he calls out to the wolves.

We wait. We are waiting for the wolves to answer. We want a healing, I think,

a cure for anguish, a remedy that will heal the wound between us and the world that

contains our broken histories. If we could only hear them, the stars themselves are

howling, but there is just the man’s voice, crying out, lonely. It is a silence we rarely

- 35 -

feel, a vast and inner silence that goes deep, descends to the empty spaces between

our cells. (76)

Deep in ourselves we do not want to be alone; we yearn for the touch with ‘the wild’, for the contact with other animals, for returning home from the enterprise that has cost us too much.

However ignorant towards the existence of the more-than-human world we might be, however hostile to our fellow creatures we might prove, a realization lingers just beneath the conscious thoughts of many of us that without them, without ‘the Other’ we become ill since we are not whole. Abram and Hogan send a common message; he states clearly that “[t]o shut ourselves off from these other voices, to continue by our lifestyles to condemn these other sensibilities to the oblivion of extinction, is to rob our own senses of their integrity, and to rob our minds of their coherence. We are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human” (The Spell 22).

2.2 Animals in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

The beginning of the first chapter of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek bears a certain formal resemblance to “The Feathers”: Annie Dillard too relates her waking up and the following moments and thoughts are characteristic of her mode of thinking and, what is pertinent regarding the main focus of this subchapter, of her approach to other animals. The author opens her work with a description of her tomcat’s habits. He would jump on her bed at night, walk over and cuddle against her and press his front paws on her chest, “stinking of urine and blood” (3). In the morning she would then “find [her] body covered with paw prints in blood” and “looked as though [she]’d been painted with roses” (3). Pondering it retrospectively, she asks herself and contemplates:

What blood was this, and what roses? It could have been the rose of union, the blood

of murder, or the rose of beauty bare and the blood of some unspeakable sacrifice or

birth. The sign on my body could have been an emblem or a stain, the keys to the

- 36 -

kingdom or the mark of Cain. I never knew. I never knew as I washed, and the blood

streaked, faded, and finally disappeared, whether I’d purified myself or ruined the

blood sign of the passover. We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumours of

death, beauty, violence…. “Seem like we’re just set down here,” a woman said to me

recently, “and don’t nobody know why”. (3-4)

The excerpt might be perceived as foreshadowing some of the principal aspects of Pilgrim at

Tinker Creek and to define the role animals seem to play in her text. What is possible to observe over the course of the passage is, primarily, that the cat, although he was the agent of the incident(s) and the author of the scarlet paintings, fades and disappears from Dillard’s reflections like the roses she washes off before the mirror. She does not provide any details concerning the animal or other peculiarities of living close to each other; the focus of her attention lies evidently somewhere behind or above the actual event as his paw prints are regarded as a symbol and her grimy skin to mirror either a beauty and holiness of what took place in the world outside her house, to bear marks that represent “an emblem”, “the keys to the kingdom”, or to be a testament of cruelty and death, “the mark of Cain”. The author closes the passage with a statement that “[w]e wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumours of death, beauty, violence….” The mystery Dillard writes of appears, however, to differ substantially from the one Abram draws our attention to and Hogan weaves into her writing, as has been discussed in the previous subchapter. It does not consist in the realization that

“[t]he depth of the world and indeed of any part of the world, is . . . inexhaustible” (Abram,

Becoming Animal 269) and that human beings cannot grasp it in its entirety, which leads to the respect or reverence for other species as they possess knowledge and experience that remain out of our reach, which might be for instance “the world inside the turning and twisting of caves, places behind and beneath our own” (Hogan 27) the bats are familiar with.

Rather, it is a mystery that envelops our days that we live out hearing various “rumours”, witnessing events that can be beautiful, terrible or both. The word rumours suggests only a

- 37 - partial knowledge of what happens in the world and its meaning and a desire to know more, to learn the truth about the beauty and the cruelty that characterize what she sees and therefore about the world. If the first essay of Hogan’s Dwellings opens a door to the world where non- human intelligence flashes by into trees, flies above our head and guides and sustains our steps, in what place are we going to find ourselves when crossing the threshold of the room where Dillard stands before a mirror, painted with “sign[s]”? The two authors seem to wake up – in Dillard’s case “if we ever wake at all” – into very different worlds and, acquainted at least a bit with powers and forms of intelligence we can encounter in the realm of Dwellings, this subchapter explores what creatures do we meet in the latter one and how they are depicted in terms of their capacities and the position they hold in the world.

The close-reading of passages that depict or contain an observation of a member of non-human world reveals very few instances of Dillard acknowledging a kind of creativity or intelligence on the animal’s part. Recalling the conduct of a mockingbird who undertook a dive from the roof of a high building, she writes: “Just a breath before he would have been dashed to the ground, he unfurled his wings with exact, deliberate care, revealing the broad bars of white, spread his elegant, white-banded tail, and so floated onto the grass” (10). Here the bird’s action is described as a graceful and very precise manoeuvre, clearly a manifestation of his faultless appraisal of circumstances and a perfect harmony with the fluid element that supports him. Moreover, he avoids the ground with “deliberate care” (my emphasis), which emphasizes in particular the concentration that must have been involved in the turn and its timing. Again on birds, this time observing a large flock of starlings prepare for roosting in a nearby forest, she describes that “[e]ach individual bird bobbed and knitted up and down in the flight, at apparent random, for no known reason except that that’s how starlings fly, yet all remained perfectly spaced” and how they finally “sifted [into the woods] without shifting a twig, right through the crowns of trees, intricate and rushing, like wind”

(42). The starlings’ movement is portrayed as well-coordinated, though she admits she does

- 38 - not understand the way they fly, and the flock, compared to the wind blowing through the snarl of branches, emerges before the reader as a sort of power, a swift and spectral materialization of whirling air. There are, however, almost no further examples that would be supportive, in a convincing way, of Dillard’s sensitivity towards intelligence in nature to add.

Instead, the text comprises a number of passages where animals are depicted as creatures of very limited mental capacities whose actions may well appear nonsensical and ridiculous to the human eyes. Her first encounter with an animal in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek takes place in the first chapter; it is January and the author describes her afternoon walk to the creek. From the meadow on the other bank, steers come to the stream to drink:

I sit on the downed tree and watch the black steers slip on the creek bottom. They are

all bred beef: beef heart, beef hide, beef hocks. They’re a human product like rayon.

They’re like a field of shoes. They have cast-iron shanks and tongues like foam

insoles. You can’t see through to their brains as you can with other animals; they

have beef fat behind their eyes, beef stew. (6)

Though steers are domesticated animals no more capable of reproduction, who are bred for human consumption, the author makes a big and depreciating leap forward: they are bred for beef, but they are not beef. She seems to feel absolutely no respect for the animal since she actually does not view the steers as animals, but as foodstuff, and further reduces them to “a human product”, to “shoes”, “shanks” and “foam insoles”. In the last sentence of the excerpt they are denied all possibility of at least a trace of intelligence gleaming in their eyes, as there is nothing but “beef fat” and “beef stew” behind them. Moreover, the remark that “[y]ou can’t see through to their brains as you can with other animals” points to an immodest, if not an arrogant attitude to non-human species, as it is a recognition of “brains” being present in the other animals, but at the same time an expression of the belief that man is able to “see through to [them]”, which is in a sharp dissonance with both Hogan’s and Abram’s attitudes, the latter one having consecrated months of concertation and laborious exercise with his consciousness

- 39 - to explore, literally, raven’s point of view (Cf. Becoming Animal, “Shapeshifting”).

The impression that the steers are perceived as mere objects and a distraction of a sort is reinforced by the author’s conduct when she crosses the creek and some steers stand in her way: “So I suddenly rush at them in an enthusiastic spirit, flailing my arms and hollering:

‘Lightning! Copperhead! Swedish meatballs!’ They flee, still in a knot, stumbling across flat pasture” (6). Her desire to provoke action when observing animals tends to reoccur. Two times she writes, for instance, of the enjoyment she takes in scaring frogs, claiming that

“[f]rogs have an inelegant way of taking off from invisible position on the bank just ahead of your feet, in dire panic, emitting a froggy ‘Yike!’ and splashing into the water” and that

“[i]ncredibly, this amused [her], and, incredibly, it amuses [her] still” (7). Further in the text, she goes for a walk to a pond, startles frogs and ends the account of the evening with: “one big frog, bright green like a poster-paint frog, didn’t jump, so I waved my arm and stamped to scare it, and it jumped suddenly, and I jumped, and then everything in the pond jumped, and I laughed and laughed” (119). Her longer observations and stalking of animals are equally marked with disrespect towards other animals and are reflective of Dillard’s failure to regard and approach them as “alien form[s] of sentience” (Abram, The Spell 19), as thinking and sensitive beings. They seem to take form of a game – a one-sided one – which is supposed to test their sensory and intellectual capacities and which the animals, in Dillard’s eyes at least, it appears, often lose. On the grounds that coots are supposed to be shy, the information she remembers from her readings, Dillard approaches a coot which floats and dives in the creek very cautiously, running from one tree trunk she can hide behind to another while the coot is under water. Having thus stalked the bird for almost an hour, she reaches a conclusion “[t]hat all this subterfuge was unnecessary, that the bird was singularly stupid, or at least not of an analytical turn of mind, and that in fact [she]’d been making a perfect idiot of [her]self all alone in the snow” (46-47). Dillard admits, having labelled the bird as “singularly stupid”, that the coot might not be “of an analytical turn of mind”, however, in the context of the

- 40 - sentence the latter seems to be only a milder alternative or a paraphrase of the former and as she does not develop the idea, the bird remains in her text mute and inert as the rubber duck she compares it to (46). Finally, she leaves her hiding place and expects that the animal gets startled and takes flight, but it still ignores her and so she waves her arm. No reaction.

Irritated by the bird’s serenity, she thinks “I’ll kick it. I’ll hit the thing with a snowball,

I really will; I’ll make a mudhen hash” (47). Although she in the end leaves the place without taking any such action, the irritation that grows almost to aggression reveals a crucial aspect of her contact with animals: it is always her thoughts, needs and longings that constitute the centre of attention, not the animal, and, as discussed further in this subchapter, she thematises only those implications of what she observes that concern humans or herself and her personal interests and goals, not the animals in themselves or the relation between us and other species.

Her observation of muskrats might be perceived as another example of the game, of the experiment. Even though she affirms that “[wild animals] have a nice dignity, and prefer to have nothing to do with [her], not even as the simple objects of [her] vision” (195) and admits that “learning to stalk muskrats took [her] several years” (192), her contact with the animals as depicted in the chapter “Stalking” does not appear to be an example of a carefully and slowly built relationship, of growing gradually used to each other to the point they let her come closer and spend a while in their company, or, at least, a presentation of Dillard’s becoming attuned to the muskrat’s senses and thus capable of approaching the animal without betraying her presence. Instead of respecting their way of perception and the kind of intelligence that animates their bodies, she writes: “The wonderful thing about muskrats in my book is that they cannot see very well, and are rather dim, to boot. They are extremely wary if they know I am there, and will outwait me every time. But with a modicum of skill and a minimum loss of human dignity, such as it is, I can be right “there”, and the breathing fact of my presence will never penetrate their narrow skulls” (196). Muskrats are portrayed as slow- witted creatures of weak eyesight that are therefore easy to circumvent. Dillard then presents

- 41 - as “the ultimate in muskrat dimness” the moments when a muskrat swims in the stream and climbs at times the riverbank to feed while the author sits on the bridge, smoking, and he does not notice her presence: “[H]e was downwind of me and my cigarette: was I really going through all this for a creature without any sense whatsoever?” (198-199), she asks. Certain

‘dimness’, absurdity and, in this case, ridiculousness is ascribed also to a squirrel the author meets in the autumn woods: “I moved, and he went into his tail-furling threat. I can’t imagine what predator this routine would frighten, or even slow . . . he might have fooled me better by holding still and not letting me see what insubstantial stuff his tail was” (250). Both the encounter with the squirrel and the passage depicting the time spent watching the muskrats, reveals that Dillard is not able to appreciate the tolerance on the part of the animals and instead reads their relative friendliness, the acceptance of her presence and the way they try to communicate with her as the lack of alertness, naivety and absurd gestures.

The game, the individual observations that show animals as stupid and their behaviour as incomprehensible or slightly ridiculous may, however, degenerate into a disclosure of an utter dysfunctionality of nature, when the risible turns into the horrifying. This turn seems to take place when Dillard describes an experiment conducted and recorded by the biologist

Jean-Henri Fabre, or, probably more precisely, the passage appears to reveal a cause of the chasm between Dillard and non-human world that reflects in the low intensity of her contact with the tangible reality, as has been discussed in the first chapter, and the distance between her and animals that remains, despite the years in contact with Tinker Creek, unbridged. In his greenhouse, Fabre tests what would follow if pine processionaries, caterpillars “who travel about at night in pine trees along a silken road of their own making” (67), happened to get on a circular route. He lets them climb a wide flowerpot and when the procession, treading its rim each individual following closely the one who marches before it, forms a circle, he

“removes the caterpillars still climbing the vase and brushes away all extraneous silken tracks.

Now he has a closed circuit of caterpillars, leaderless, trudging round his vase on a never-

- 42 - ending track. He wants to see how long it will take them to catch on” (67). The tiny animals, however, are not able to cope with this new situation for days. Although several times, in

Fabre’s point of view, a good opportunity occurs for the caterpillars to free themselves from the never-ending, and so fatal, march, they continue, hungry, tired, and tortured by cold and heat, to shuffle in the same way for a whole week before they manage to leave the vase for their nest. The incident demonstrates, in Dillard’s opinion, that in the realm of insects

“blindered and blinkered enslavement to instinct is the rule” (67) and notes that “Fabre himself, ‘already familiar with the abysmal stupidity of insects as a class whenever the least accident occurs’, is nevertheless clearly oppressed by this new confirmation that the caterpillars lack ‘any gleam of intelligence in their benighted minds’” (68). The result of the experiment highly disturbs her and in the following paragraph she states that “[i]t is the fixed that horrifies us” and by “the fixed” she means “the world without fire – dead flint, dead tinder, and nowhere a spark”, “motion without direction, force without power”, and declares:

“and I hate it because at any moment I myself might step to that charmed and glistening thread” (69). The statement sheds light on the author’s position in relation to the natural world, or, at least, to the (natural world) that appears to her to lack “fire”: she does not consider herself to be a part of it and the idea that she might belong there, that she might step across a certain imaginary line and fall into this “benighted” realm seems to her repulsive.

The “I” denoting Dillard is accentuated by “myself” and figures in the sentence in a clear opposition to, or in a separation from, “that charmed and glistening thread”, stressing that the two are independent of one another and that the lyrical subject observes the action/ the absurd, mindless realm from the outside.

Admitting the possibility of stupidity and senselessness in nature then grows in her writing into images of world in decay, a world that is utterly nonsensical and cruel without restraint, a world teeming with creatures of loathsome forms and hideous habits. The dismal, disquieting, and terrifying scenes sprawl mainly in the chapters entitled “Fecundity” and

- 43 -

“The Horns of the Altar”, though this dark stream of thoughts flows through the text and keeps emerging on the surface from the very beginning, when we hear for the first time of

“the rumours of death, beauty [and] violence” (4, my emphasis), till the end. Already in the chapter “The Fixed” she admits: “I never ask why of a vulture or shark, but I ask why of almost every insect I see. More than one insect – the possibility of fertile reproduction – is an assault on all human value, all hope of a reasonable god. Even that devout Frenchman, J.

Henri Fabre, who devoted his entire life to the study of insects, cannot restrain a feeling of unholy revulsion” (64). Questioning the meaning of one ‘knot’ in the complex net of relationships that characterizes nature, severing one organ as “unholy” from the rest of the body, unstables however inevitably the whole. Moreover, she presents insects as antagonists of man, their “fertile reproduction” being “an assault on all human value”, and thus allows for the sense of danger in this world, the sense of uncertainty and fear, and the possibility that the existence and ways of life of certain animals might somehow cast doubt upon the meaningfulness of our lives and threaten our identity. In the chapter “Fecundity” Dillard demonstrates, primarily, that reproduction comprises “a mindless stutter”, “an imbecilic fixedness” and “a terrible pressure [that] drives the creature relentlessly towards its own death” (163) and so, reading these pages, pictures of masses infinitely reproducing themselves and devouring each other surge before our eyes, the copulation and clasping of jaws directed by a blind instinct, we see mothers eating their own eggs (170) and newborns (171) they gave life to a minute before, and the offspring programmed so as to satisfy their hunger by eating their parents (172). Dillard fences herself off against the world and its repulsive appetites and states that “[she] must draw the line” (178) between herself and nature (represented by the creek) lest she might become “utterly brutalized” (179): “we [humans] are moral creatures in an amoral world” (181). The chapter “The Horns of the Altar” shows that the world might be regarded not only as “amoral” but also as ill, using for the description of certain animals terms such as “degenerate” and “disorganized” (235), stressing a rampant parasitism in nature and

- 44 - arguing that “[t]he world is festering with suppurating sores” (241). These statements and conclusions put us in a difficult position in the world: physically, we are bound to this – inherently, to a certain extent – cruel, absurd, and sick world but our minds refuse to merge with the material reality and its flow and keep seeking solace in sights and events that seem to prove that there exists a counterbalance to the dim scenes of breeding, devouring and death.

Looking again at the passages where Dillard writes of her walks in the surroundings of the creek and her observations of animals, it is possible to identify the pattern or the principle they have in common. Dillard longs to see something, to take a close look at the coot, to witness an apparition of muskrats on the surface of the stream, to see a mockingbird perform the breathtaking manoeuvre. Having watched the latter, she concludes that “beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them” (10) and it is a crucial statement, maybe even the crucial statement in the work: the passage describing the mockingbird and its trick does not end with the mockingbird, but with beauty and grace. The concrete tangible animal is overshadowed by an abstract idea and figures eventually in the text merely as a manifestation of something larger, of the presence of beauty and grace in the world. Over the course of her writing she seems to oscillate between viewing the world as infused with beauty, pure and innocent in its nature, and moments when she is tormented with doubts, fearing that the world she is “set down in” is not the place of beauty and grace, that it is simply not ‘good’. Even in the very last chapter she asks herself: “Could it be that if I climbed the dome of heaven and scrabbled and clutched at the beautiful cloth till I loaded my fists with a wrinkle to pull, that the mask would rip away to reveal a toothless old ugly, eyes glazed with delight?” (271) Although she disclaims such possibility in the following paragraph and affirms that “[b]eauty is real”, it nevertheless remains that beauty or good are not inherent to the world that surrounds her but something that is “performed”, that is borne by a coot or a muskrat, something that appears, dazzles the spectator, and vanishes like the lights in the cedar tree (36). Light is another recurrent motif in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and

- 45 - seems to correspond in its essence to beauty and grace the author hopes to catch sight of at the creek or in nature in general. In “Seeing” she writes that “[t]he vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but [she] live[s] for it, for the moment when the mountains open and a new light roars in spate through the crack, and the mountains slam” (36). Thus, the lack of contact with animals, of respect for their ways and of the acknowledgement of their intelligence, and the fact that her actual encounters with real animals occupy a rather small part of the work, can be interpreted not as an intentional neglect but as a result of the true focus of her attention lying elsewhere and her senses tuned to the aesthetic qualities of what she observes, to the flashes of beauty and grace. And, above all, her mind craving for solace consisting in the reassurance that what flows and falls around her does not senselessly hasten to meet its death but is

“blown by a generous, unending breath” (273). Dillard incorporates in one of the essays (or chapters), “Nightwatch”, a moment similar to the one Linda Hogan experiences in the Boundary Waters region:

Earlier a bobwhite had cried from the orchard side cliff, now here, now there, and his

round notes swelled sorrowfully over the meadow. A bobwhite who is still calling in

summer is lorn; he has never found a mate . . . Somebody showed me once how to

answer a bobwhite in the warbling, descending notes of the female. It works like a

charm. But what can I do with a charmed circle of male bobwhites but weep? Still, I

am brutalized enough that I give the answering call occasionally, just to get a rise out

of the cliffs, and a bitter laugh. (220)

This time it is an opposite situation: an animal is calling and it gets an answer. No “healing”, however, takes place since “remedy that [would] heal the wound between us and the world” is not what Dillard seeks. Instead of rejoicing in her ability to enter into a dialogue with the animal or remaining silent in order to spare it the false hope of meeting finally with a partner, she replies to the cries “just to get a rise out of the cliffs, and a bitter laugh”. The scene appears to be not only an image of the gaping breach in her relationship to animals but also

- 46 - might be seen more as Dillard’s metaphor for her own journey, for her own quest. In that case the bobwhite would represent the author wandering through the dark landscape, calling and writhing in the anticipation of an answer coming from “the spirit [she] seek[s]” (141, my emphasis). And her false answer, followed with “a bitter laugh” could be then compared to the discovery of the “toothless old ugly, eyes glazed with delight” which observes the world from behind the sky.

- 47 -

3 The Feeling of At-homeness in Dillard’s and Hogan’s Texts

Both Linda Hogan and Annie Dillard allow us to witness their encounters with the natural world, which range from being called into waking by a great winged power wheeling round in the sky above the house to waiting for muskrats, still, yet excited, to appear on the surface of the creek, and, initially, it might seem that we see one and the same nature with two pairs of eyes, once the focus being on a “liquid dance of mating bats” (see p.31) another time on “a mockingbird who undertook a dive from the roof of a high building” (see p. 38) and changes direction only an inch above the ground. However, the close-reading of

Dwellings and Pilgrim at Tinker Creek shows that though the subject matter of the two works, or collections of essays, might be similar, or, though nature, landscape and animals, play an important role in both authors’ writing, the impressions or the images of the world that Linda

Hogan and Annie Dillard create are substantially different. It is the sense of cosiness, of a profound calm and belonging, which the word at-homeness seems to contain, that emanates from one depiction of the (natural) world but seems to be absent in the other portray.

The analyses of Dillard’s perception of ‘objects’ and the way she employs her senses and of her approach to non-human inhabitants of this world respectively reveal, step by step, her somewhat detached and sterile rendering of the material, sensuous reality and an attitude towards animals that indicates that the author does not regard them as representatives of “a different kind of intelligence” who are in touch with “knowledge and experience very remote from and in many ways surpassing our own” (see p. 32) as Abram and Hogan portray them.

As has been discussed in the subchapter dedicated to Dillard’s text in “The Perception of

‘Objects’”, the author does not include in her writing passages that would capture “[her] time spent indoors, inside her house by the creek” and neither she depict herself engaged in

“activities such as cleaning, preparing food . . . or simply enjoying the evening seated in a cosy armchair by the fireplace with a captivating book on her lap” (see p. 19). The absence of

- 48 - a regular physical contact with familiar objects and an almost complete dissolution of the house that provides her with shelter and warmth brings in the text the feeling of uncertainty and even a slight, yet continual, agitation. Although Dillard states at the beginning of the first chapter: “I think of this house clamped to the side of Tinker Creek as an anchor-hold. It holds me at anchor to the rock bottom of the creek itself and it keeps me steadied in the current” (4), the house and its possible comforting and stabilizing effect is not thematised any further in the work, the author does not express an affection for its interior or that its walls, ceilings and furniture would radiate a sense of cosiness and safety (Becoming Animal 29-35). The situation outside is, to a large extent, parallel to the situation inside. The subchapter also shows that the descriptions of her walks around the valley and stalking of animals display “[a] lack of articulation of bodily sensations” (see p. 19) related for instance to the need to surmount the difficulties of a particular terrain or changes in weather and the third stresses that auditory, olfactory and tactile perceptions are introduced in the text only rarely – eyesight is her main means of experiencing reality and so it is the visual that dominates her writing – and “her depiction of (natural) world often remains somewhat flat and lacks a strong immersive force”

(see p. 21). These factors create an impression of a certain detachment from the natural world and the time the author spends in the vicinity of the creek might be compared to “visiting an art gallery, a situation when a spectator might well be impressed by the painting, yet remains outside of the landscape it depicts” (see p. 22). Furthermore, the beings that inhabit this landscape, or, on a larger scope, this world, figure in the work mainly as objects of examination and unconsciously participate in “a game . . . which is supposed to test their sensory and intellectual capacities”. Another role in which they appear is one of actors in a visual spectacle, either performers of beauty and grace or protagonists of disconcerting and dreadful scenes, dim beings that populate a “cruel, absurd, and sick world” (see p. 45). The author oscillates between the two and so the exterior is, similarly to the interior, to the house near the creek, deprived of the sense of safety and cosiness. It is not, if a house is taken as a

- 49 - metaphor for the world, it is not the cottage where Abram’s daughter Hannah would “[love] rolling on the floor” and “[delight] in caressing the walls [and] the cabinets” (30) and whose beams and rafters “len[d] a communal warmth to [the] structure, instilling the uncanny kinship [he]’d been feeling with [the] place” (Becoming Animal 35). Rather, it is a house

“we’re just set down [in] . . . and don’t nobody know why” (Dillard 3-4), a house with a vast and bleak cellars that seethe with trivial little lives devouring one another, a house in which one walks impatiently from one window to the other in the hope of seeing something, maybe a mockingbird touch the grass with the tips of its wings and then ascend to heights or, sitting at a table half-unconscious of one’s surroundings, of catching sight of a ray of light that flashes through the room. It is a house we happen to live in but not a place we would call home. The world Annie Dillard painted in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is one of miscellaneous rarefied sights as well as smaller examples of beauty, of a great awe and joy as well as of an overwhelming horror, but can hardly be characterized by the feeling of at-homeness.

As one of the keys to the nature of Annie Dillard’s world might be perceived the word

“pilgrim” in the title. James I. McClintock points out that “the essential characteristics of

Annie Dillard’s nature writing” comprise a “religious preoccupation and vocation” (88) as well as David L. Lavery, who states that Dillard’s art is “an art of waiting” (257) as she is awaiting a “revelatory vision” (257) and claims that “the creek mediates between her wordly eyes and the light of eternity” (258). The extensive debates concerning the three traditionally monotheistic religions, Islam, Judaism, and Christianity and the negative impact of their understanding and interpretation of the world and God on the contemporary approach to nature and treatment of natural resources3 (McClintock 89-90) surpass by far the framework of this thesis and it would be a dangerous simplification to ascribe the missing sense of at-

3 Abram stresses the consequences of perceiving God as an entity outside this world in both The Spell of the Sensuous and Becoming Animal, see the chapter “The Ecology of Magic” and particularly the beginning of the chapter “Animism and the Alphabet” in the former and the pages 274 – 278 in the latter. Also see Snyder, The Practice of the Wild, particularly the chapters “True Nature” and “Decomposed”. - 50 - homeness to the author’s religious interests and aims, yet it seems to be a flow of thinking that strongly shapes her world and, possibly, partly carries away some ingredients of the feeling of being at home in this world. McClintock affirms that “her God is identifiably Judeo-

Christian” (89) and that what she seeks is “the ‘pearl of great price’, religious vision, which will reconcile the self, pulled between faith and doubt, with a nature that is often cruel and ugly, and with a God who seems as irrational as loving” (90). The longed-for reconciliation should spring from a “vision” which appears to be awaited from the part of a God existing

“entirely beyond, or outside of, the bodily world” (Abram, The Spell 94). This would explain both the author’s detachment from, or disunity with, the natural world and her ambiguous relationship to animals: she screens her surroundings for a sign, for a ray of light (Cf. Lavery) or a sudden appearance of a muskrat (Cf. McClintock), and so while the material reality, the places she returns to in the valley, seem to be the subjects of her pondering and of her writing, the true focus of her attention lies beyond the tangible forms; the creek with the animals it hosts do not stand there for themselves, but, in the words of Lavery already mentioned above,

“mediates between [Dillard’s] wordly eyes and the light of eternity”. This mindset seems to figure as a major obstacle in her “tun[ing] [herself] to the intelligence and expressivity the surrounding world abounds in” (see p. 28), in the ability to perceive “the creativity and wit that drive the movements of animals” (see p. 26). The second part of the subchapter on the place of animals in Dillard’s text includes a claim that “she thematises only those implications of what she observes [or reads about] that concern humans or Dillard herself and her personal interests and goals, not the animals in themselves or the relation between us and other species” (see p. 41). As an example of Dillard thus interpreting the phenomena she encounters, either directly or in her reading, can be taken Fabre’s experiment with pine processionaries analysed in the subchapter “Animals in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek” (see p. 42), as it probably captures best animals playing the role of “impulses” for further reflections in the work. The caterpillars and their behaviour represent at first the subject of her

- 51 - contemplation, yet in the following paragraphs she is already absorbed in the implications the case has upon her and upon the character of the place she is “set down in”, again in relation to her. Margaret Loewen Reimer affirms that “Dillard constantly makes the leap from observation of natural phenomena to religious interpretation of the phenomena” (187). The regular shifts to “religious interpretation[s]” do not only, however, leave the actual animals behind, but also, being of a dialectical character (Cf. Reimer), open a door for the sense of uncertainty, disquiet, and danger to enter Dillard’s (natural) world. Over the course of the text

“[the author’s] delight and wonder quickly change into horror and disgust and then back again to delight” (184) and Reimer provides her readers with a detailed analysis of the two positions. Nonetheless, for the purposes of this thesis the confirmation itself of the nervous oscillation between the two poles is crucial, since it is the shifts and leaps that appear to trigger the disruption of the sense at-homeness. Another important aspect of the work that strips nature of its creative autonomy and own ways of intelligence has been suggested in the last paragraph of the subchapter “Animals in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek”: the author keeps seeking “solace consisting in the reassurance that what flows and falls around her does not senselessly hasten to meet its death but is ‘blown by a generous, unending breath’ (Dillard

273)” (see p. 46). The reassurance she longs for consists in believing that what she sees is not

‘it’, that there is a power existing outside and independent of the visible world (The Spell 94) that may gently carry the things as they fall. Reimer concludes that “[Dillard] has experienced a deep encounter with the beautiful and the evil and, like Job, has hurled her questions and misgivings at the creator. Although no answers come, it is enough for her that she has been touched and purified by her encounter. She has seen the sign (275)” (190). “The sign” refers to the moment when Dillard sees the “maple key . . . blown by a generous, unending breath”, to the moment of reconciliation when she is filled with a belief that world is not deprived of meaning, purpose, and order: God did not leave the world he created, as she ponders for the first time in the first chapter (9). Lavery too writes “she finds a home” at one point, yet adds

- 52 -

“until the time when her doubts begin to sever her from it again” (268). Once the integrity of the world is put in question, once “the possibility of stupidity and senselessness in nature”

(see p. 43) is allowed for and the world depicted as an “absurd, mindless realm” (see p. 43) it represents no more a place we entirely belong to and will never leave in the soothing and healing sense that that there is nothing to fear, that the world has its own rhythm and order and will always have a place for us (Abram, The Spell 15-16). Dillard keeps looking for an assurance originating from outside the very things she sees and her searching thus seems to be a variant of a situation she herself recalls at one point in the text: “While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease”: God makes this guarantee very early in Genesis to a people whose fears on this point had perhaps not been completely allayed (75). She fails to entrust herself to the world as it lies before her eyes, floats above her head and lasts underneath her feet and seeks a “sign” (27, 65,

130, 237, 272 etc.) that would affirm that there is the “guarantee”. It is questionable if a place whose security one does not feel but seeks to be assured of can be called home.

Another key may be found in the literary study “Seeking Awareness in American

Nature Writing” and the view from the threshold of the door it opens represents a very different perspective on the text. Scott Slovic argues that “Dillard’s fascination with the mysterious workings of the mind is evident in all of her books” (62) and “[r]ather than thinking of Pilgrim as a spiritual document, as a kind of exemplary confession of faith, [he] would classify it as an informal, experiential work of psychology” (76), as a study of states and responses of her consciousness in relation to impulses coming from the surrounding world (82). Nevertheless, although the interpretation of Dillard’s primary intention differs substantially from the previously mentioned suggestions, Slovic’s observations are not in contradiction to the conclusions concerning the image of the world Dillard created and the feeling of at-homeness that have been made, instead, his comment can be read as yet another argument supporting it. Stating that what she concentrates on is “the self in friction with

- 53 - external phenomena, sometimes human (for instance, in the form of texts by other writers), but more often natural”, he affirms that the focus is not on nature itself but, this time, on “the self”. The importance of the “external phenomena” lies mainly in that they cause “friction”, in their effect upon the observer’s mind and, as the structure of the sentence suggests, their being rooted in the natural world is not crucial. Slovic even stresses that “she remains detached from nature, observant of it and attuned to it, but still essentially separate” (84) since for the purposes of her study not a harmony with nature but “energizing tension of opposition” (84) is desired. Dillard’s time spent in the valley, at the creek and in the woods, observing the landscape and stalking animals, is not supposed to help her to reach a deeper understanding of the “more-than-human matrix of sensations and sensibilities” (Abram, The Spell 22) and

“[cross] over the boundary lines between species” (Dwellings 48); on the contrary, “Dillard requires the ‘otherness’ of nature to stimulate the prized emotions of surprise and uncertainty”

(84). Also, Slovic opposes David Lavery’s claim that witnessing a frog being sucked by a giant water bug (7-8), seeing life abandon the body, represents “an encounter with the grotesque” which triggers “her . . . estrangement from the natural” and that she seeks

“revelation to enact her ‘re-memberance’” (263), the reconciliation that has been discussed in the previous section. In his opinion “the observing writer feasts on the excitement derived from strange, inexplicable, and even abhorrent phenomena in nature” (85) and actually welcomes the disconcerting and at times terrifying images as they “thrust [her] into a new state of awareness” (85). “It is not a continued calm, but rather calamity, that is the appropriate stimulus of consciousness during periods of relative harmony” (85), Slovic concludes the subchapter. Adopting this perspective, the feeling of being at home in this world, the tranquillity it comprises and a close relation to and harmony with the natural world is not what is missing in Dillard’s world; it is unwanted.

- 54 -

In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, as the title augurs, we see the (natural) world through the eyes of a pilgrim, by a dictionary definition “[a] person who journeys to a sacred place for religious reasons” (Oxford Dictionaries), here a narrator whom Tinker Creek enables to glimpse the “mystery in nature but [also] mystery beyond nature” (McClintock 108, my emphasis), or/and, as Scott Slovic suggests, we can observe the self in response to impulses springing from the valley and pages of books Dillard reads like the creek from the mountains.

The title of Linda Hogan’s piece(s) of writing, Dwellings, also captures the core characteristics of the essays: the author takes us to the actual dwellings of various animals and thus shows us the manifold homes this world offers to the beings it gave birth to and the essays themselves represent “places in which to contemplate” (Chandler 18), where the reader obtains “lessons learned from the land” and can “[expand] his/her vision of the world”

(12), as Hogan expresses her wish in the preface. Moreover, dwelling, a present participle of the verb dwell, means “[living] in or at a specified place” (Oxford Dictionaries) and implies that it is not a temporary state, settling, stability, durability, and an attachment to a particular place. The definition provided by Merriam-Webster includes also “to remain for a time” and, which is most important in terms of the focus of this thesis, “to live as a resident” and therefore is linked to the sense of at-homeness, to the sense of belonging somewhere.

Hogan’s text emanates this feeling and the methods she employs to pass it on the readers range from clear statements that reassure them of our tight and warm connection with this world (which has been forgotten and untended but can be restored) that fill them with the sense of safety and calm, such as “Can we love what will swallow us when we are gone? I do.

I love what will consume us all, the place where the tunnelling worms and roots of plants dwell . . .” (30) and “Sitting in the hot sun, watching the small bees fly in and out around the hill, hearing the summer birds, the light breeze, I felt right in the world. I belonged there.”

(118) to the language she uses, above all the recurrent motif of a shelter, an affectionate embrace the world gives us, and of the earth as our mother. The bats she rescues are “nestled

- 55 - safe in dry leaves and straw” (23), caves are designated as “womb of earth” (31) and when

Hogan plunges in their hot springs, she is “within the healing of nature, held in earth’s hand”

(35), the world is “a house we have always lived in” (60), the stones that “crash heavily down the canyon floor” are perceived as being “called home by gravity” (99) and, similarly, death is

“our [return] home to the deeper, wider nest of earth that houses us all” (123). Also, the notion of love is omnipresent in Hogan’s world, “water and earth love each other . . . meeting at night, at shore, being friends together, dissolving in each other in the give and take that is where grace comes from” (46), “bodies of land and water are broken by each other”, “[i]n winter cold and water marry” (63), “forests are the place our air is born from a marriage of water and green-leafed, dripping plants” (107) and swallow’s nests represent a “marriage of elements” (121). The natural world is not a set of largely separate entities or of predators and victims, but a community of powers and beings that live together in harmony while sustaining and nurturing one another “in the give and take that is where grace comes from”. However, the harmony and grace Hogan sees in the world do not result from an idealized view of reality. The harmony and grace is revealed in the meaningfulness of the world: “Death and life feed each other. I know that” (122). Hogan’s Dwellings offer guidance on our way to recognition and appreciation of what may seem antagonistic or cruel but is in fact vital to the life of the wider organism, to the world as a whole. When we accept our being a part of “the big web of interdependence” (Abram, Becoming Animal 63), when we realize that “the porcupine lives on . . . in the buzzing of flies and the ants”, that “[i]n its transformation, life continues” (146), we can fully embrace the world as our home and treat it, tend it, and serve it as it deserves. This understanding is however more of a process and a way of living than a sudden awakening and thus might be stirred in us by the above-mentioned statements and metaphors, but to live it truly demands time, attention and commitment. “Fortunately”,

Katherine R. Chandler writes, “the essays in Dwellings reveal how Hogan perfects her ability to learn about the spirit by listening to the land” (19). The following paragraph revisits some

- 56 - of the moments that have been discussed in the previous chapters and shows them more clearly as ways Linda Hogan tends and strengthens her bond with the (natural) world as well as the reader’s.

The second paragraph of the subchapter “‘Objects’ in Dwellings” analysed the passage where the author describes her raking cages in the rehabilitation centre for birds of prey (see p. 14). The task, which might seem utterly ordinary or even tedious at first sight, bears, for

Hogan, a special significance. Her contact with the rake and repetitive movements represent

“more than touching a piece of wood; it is reconnecting with matter, with nature and with the life itself” (see p. 14), holding the wooden handle “she becomes capable of sensing its origins in the living world” and thus feels again a concord with “the nature’s dynamics” (see p. 15), experiences deeply her being a part of the world’s vigorous cyclic life (Cf. Dreese). Chandler names in her study on “Hogan’s Terrestrial Spirituality” three principal methods through which the author broadens and deepens her ‘understanding’ (see the previous paragraph):

“Drawing closer to nature is the initial way Hogan reaches for the sacred, but she also turns to two other sources of spiritual enlightenment: stories and ceremonies” (19). However, it is essential to always keep in mind that “Hogan’s ultimate destination is a terrestrial, not a celestial spirituality. Her search for a life force is centered on earth. By employing language sensitive to the land and realigning story with ceremony, Hogan further develops an ecology of mind she considers vital to survival” (19). Chandler stresses that stories and ceremonies do not stand separately but mingle and complement each other in Hogan’s writing (19), nonetheless the rich realm of stories that figure in Dwellings, as well as the range of ceremonies, “both those in which she participates and those she creates in her written reflections” (27), deserve a thorough analysis of its own and cannot be therefore unfortunately covered in this thesis. For now, it seems important to point out the raking not as an isolated moment of experiencing a reconnection with the natural world but as an example of one of

Hogan’s main ways of attaining it. The passage “demonstrates how even daily activities,

- 57 - accompanied by appropriate attitudes, can be turned into rituals from which we learn something spiritual” (27) and that, on larger scale, “[b]y refocusing attention, ceremonies offer a means to return health to ourselves, the land, our nation, our world” (29).

The following paragraphs of the subchapter focus on how the author lets the world speak by means of employing various sensory perceptions in her text and highlighting the fact that our way of perceiving the world is one of many, drawing attention to the fact that, for instance, “bats find themselves in an ongoing dialogue with ‘objects’ they approach on their journeys through night” and therefore “[n]othing remains mute and passive” (see p. 16).

Katherine R. Chandler notes the importance of senses in relation to ceremonies Hogan evokes and engages in. The analysis of Hogan’s description of the bath she takes in “The Caves” discussed the close, even intimate, contact between the author and her tangible surroundings, stressing that “by mentioning her own body Hogan accentuates she is physically present in the world she speaks about, that her body is simply one of the material beings which encounter one another in the dark moist world of the caves: stone, water and human body” (see p. 17).

Chandler focuses on what was only subtly suggested by the juxtaposition at the end of the sentence and claims that “[a]s Hogan lowers her body into the healing water of an underground spring, the physical sensations she records in “The Caves” remind her of vulnerability and mortality” (26). The senses remind us of who we are and who we are in the wider context, in the world. Also, Chandler affirms that Hogan, in the largely same way as

David Abram, recognizes the spell that dwells in the sensuous: “For Hogan . . . musty air in a cave transports her to earlier times when she experienced other ways of knowing. Hogan demonstrates throughout Dwellings how our bodies sense that kind of knowing, hearkening to terrestrial spiritual energies that most of us conceptually never knew, now ignore, or have forgotten” (26). Noting that the atmosphere was “warm and musty”, that “[t]he ceiling drips water, the slow sound of rain falling, rhythmic, as if from the leaves of forests” and that “rock

. . . is smooth to touch” (Hogan 30) is far from being merely a vivid and immersive rendering

- 58 - of reality. These are instances when the author makes “[the] deep-moving underground language in us [whose] currents pass between us and the rest of nature” (Hogan 57) surge to the surface for the reader to see and learn.

Already the first paragraph of the subchapter dedicated to Hogan in “The Perception of Animals”, which provides an analysis of the opening essay of Dwellings, “The Feathers”, reveals that the world Hogan brings to life in the following essays, the reading of which “can become a ceremonial act in itself, for Hogan’s essays are at moments poetic enough to suggest a form of ritualistic chanting” (Chandler 27), is one “of which humans occupy only a certain part, a world shared with creatures who are not only gifted with a bright intellect but whose knowledge and experience exceed our own” (see p. 30). A model example of the way

Hogan (re)introduces animals to her readers can be found in the second essay of the collection, “The Bats”, as the passage contains and develops multiple layers of the approach one can assume towards the nocturnal winged mammals; on the level of aesthetic appreciation they are portrayed as beautiful creatures, their hearing abilities depicted as singular, and they are assigned a great spiritual significance consisting also in that they “remind us . . . by their otherness, possessing a different kind of intelligence and having access to knowledge and experience very remote from and in many ways surpassing our own, of who we are and our place” (see p. 32). Moreover, the choice itself to write of these at first sight strange, eerie or even repulsive beings is representative of another of Hogan’s methods of evoking the feeling of at-homeness. Using again the metaphor of the house, the one Hogan builds might have cellars but definitely not “bleak” or “seeth[ing] with trivial little lives devouring one another”

(see p. 50); she works with a deconstruction of the fossilized concepts and views of nature the

Western culture still entertains (Dreese 7). It has been already mentioned that although the places bats inhabit, “caves, the underground world, which are in our cultural tradition commonly associated with darkness, with the unknown and the hidden and has therefore a tint of a possible danger . . . [Hogan’s] impressions are those of tenderness, beauty and utmost

- 59 - grace” (see p. 31). In order to “dismantle existing Western notions” she chooses bats, “often associated with the blood-sucking terrors of Dracula” and frees them of the negative presuppositions by reintroducing them into our awareness “as sacred creatures that occupy two worlds, giving them great insight and wisdom” and thus she enables them to “transcend the Western and popular culture stigmas that have associated them with fear and evil” (Dreese

8). A similar pattern applies to the rendering of bats’ habitat, where we accompany the author in “The Caves”: “For Hogan, caves are places of great spiritual significance: safety and sanctuary, not dark holes where fire-breathing dragons are waiting for curious travellers, as in the Western literary tradition” (Dreese 11). In fact, they represent the right opposite of danger and death, as Dreese points out in the following paragraph, since in Dwellings they are presented as “the womb and birth canal, where the people emerge from the world of darkness into the world of light” (11). In a similar way Hogan relieves for instance snakes, traditionally perceived as an embodiment of evil, of the stereotypes they have been burdened with from the very beginnings of Euro-American civilization (Dreese 8-10). In short, Hogan’s world is not a house whose dark corners and cellars provoke fear and anxiety, the mystery belongs to its inherent qualities and represents an enriching element of the household, not a disruption of the sense of safety and cosiness.

The house has been used here as a metaphor for both Dillard’s and Hogan’s world – in the light of Melani Bleck’s observations, however, the metaphorical connection between the house and the world blurs: in Hogan’s writing houses are “inseparable from nature” and

“nature resists spatial confinement” (31). There is no interior or exterior – the world is the house we all share.

- 60 -

Conclusion

Both Linda Hogan and Annie Dillard being regularly viewed and classified as nature writers and their standing almost side by side – separated only by twenty pages of Ehrlich’s and de la Peña’s texts – in the anthology At Home on This Earth in particular became an inspiration for this thesis. The aim of the thesis was to carry out a detailed analysis of the way the two authors perceive nature and how they understand and interpret what they see/hear/smell/feel or read of and thus learn what worlds the written words of two authors, whose prime preoccupation is nature, might create and whether the feeling of at-homeness is to be experienced in the woods, in the fields, and inside the caves of these worlds. The sense of being “at home on this earth” was identified as a crucial attribute of the relation to the natural world, since it seems to be a decisive factor in the approach of society to the environment. Feeling somewhere “at home” implies a strong bond to the place and a desire to care for it and protect it from a possible – or an actual and ongoing – damage.

The thesis is composed of three chapters; the first and the second one provide analyses respectively of Hogan’s and Dillard’s perception of ‘objects’ and perception of animals that are substantially based on the philosophy of David Abram as formulated in The

Spell of the Sensuous and Becoming Animal. The third chapter represents a comparative part and explains, with the aid of relevant studies and essays – while the principles argued by

Abram continue to be present in the paper as a sort of mycelium – what the findings that have been made in the two analytical parts imply in relation to the feeling of at-homeness and what factors imprinted on and what currents of thought shaped the worlds of Dwellings and Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.

The contrastive analysis of Hogan’s and Dillard’s texts has revealed that Hogan’s world beckons to the reader, its smells and cries and a vivid contact with its various textures luring him/her into the thick of a moment in a healing bath or of the spell the repetitive

- 61 - character of raking casts upon those who engage in the movements body and mind (if these are not one). Focusing on the non-human inhabitants of the world(s), the passages in

Dwellings, which are dedicated for instance to an eagle and to bats, snakes, and wolves, present them as our neighbours who play a singular role in the wider context of ‘life’, enrich it with their own special kinds of intelligence, knowledge and experience and thus can be of help and guidance. Hogan’s world is thus a place we can feel at home at and enjoy being a part of the earth’s living. The essays quoted in the comparative chapter attract attention to a variety of ways and strategies Hogan employs to reinforce her relation with nature and this world as a whole. These include ceremonies and stories, and the power of senses, as

Katherine R. Chandler points out, replacing Western constructs related to nature with new significancies according to Donelle N. Dreese, and the theory developed by Melani Bleck works on the dissolution of boundaries and restrictions of all sorts and lets nature and the world become one again.

By contrast, Dillard’s world is much less eloquent and, due to the lack of touch of the narrator with the material reality, appears, at times, almost sterile, and the animals which appear in Dillard’s text do not enjoy such a firm position. They are observed and examined, yet the approach of the author seems to lack respect for their peculiarity, for the singular character of each animal; their abilities are more tested than recognized and revered. Also, what is particularly significant, they figure in the author’s reflections as signs, attesting either to the presence of beauty and grace in this world or to its mindlessness and cruelty. As a result, the sense of cosiness, safety, and belonging, the feeling of at-homeness are not inherent to Dillard’s world. Adopting the views of David L. Lavery and James I. McClintock, who interpret Pilgrim at Tinker Creek mainly in religious terms, it is possible to explain the low intensity of the author’s contact with her immediate surroundings and animals which inhabit it and the failure to find reconciliation within this very world by Dillard’s eyes searching for an entity behind or beyond the creek, the woods and the mountains, an entity whose presence

- 62 - means good and whose absence seems embodied in the senseless reproduction and repulsive ways of insects or parasitism and various diseases and provokes uncertainty, disgust or horror.

Scott Slovic suggests an alternative point of view: the work(s) of Annie Dillard is/are to a considerable extent a study of an individual’s awareness and its reactions to what s/he encounters. The focus does not lie on the natural world itself; as Slovic stresses, a distance from nature and moments of fright or horror are welcomed since they provoke the observer’s mind to respond in a way that the atmosphere of calm, safety and harmony, the sense of at- homeness in short, does not.

- 63 -

Works Cited

Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-human

World. New York: Pantheon, 1996. Print.

Abram, David. Becoming Animal. New York: Pantheon, 2010. Print.

Anderson, Lorraine. Introduction: The Great Chorus of Woman and Nature. At Home on This

Earth: Two Centuries of U.S. Women’s Nature Writing. Ed. Lorraine Anderson and

Thomas S. Edwards. Hanover: University Press of New England, 2002. 1-12. Print.

Bleck, Melani. “Linda Hogan’s Tribal Imperative: Collapsing Space through “Living” Tribal

Traditions and Nature.” Studies in American Indian Literatures (Winter 1999): 23-45.

JSTOR. Web. 15 September 2016.

Chandler, Katherine R. “Hogan’s Terrestrial Spirituality.” From the Center of Tradition:

Critical perspectives on Linda Hogan. Ed. Barbara J. Cook. Boulder: University Press

of Colorado, 2003. 17-33. Print.

Dillard, Annie. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. E-book ed., HarperCollins, 2007.

Dreese, Donelle N. “The Terrestrial and Aquatic Intelligence of Linda Hogan.” Studies in

American Indian Literatures (Winter 1999): 6-22. JSTOR. Web. 15 September 2016.

“Dwell.” Oxford Dictionaries, Oxford University Press, 2016. Oxforddictionaries.com, https//enoxforddictionaries.com/definition/dwell. 12 November 2016.

“Dwell.” Merriam-Webster, Merriam-Webster, Inc., 2016. Merriam-webster.com.

www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dwell. 12 November 2016.

Hogan, Linda. Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World. New York: Touchstone,

1996. Print.

- 64 -

Jammes, Francis. “La Salle à Manger.” Un Jour Un Poème. Web. 8 October 2016.

Jammes, Francis. “The Dining Room.” Poetry Explorer. Web. 8 October 2016.

Lavery, David L. “Noticer: The Visionary Art of Annie Dillard.” The Massachusetts Review.

(Summer 1980): 255-270. JSTOR. Web. 10 June 2016.

Lyon, Thomas J. Preface. This Incomparable Land: A Guide to American Nature Writing. By

Thomas J. Lyon. Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions, 2001. ix-xii. Print.

Lyon, Thomas J. This Incomparable Land: A Guide to American Nature Writing.

Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions, 2001. Print.

McClintock, James I. Nature’s Kindred Spirits. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press,

1994. Print.

“Pilgrim.” Oxford Dictionaries, Oxford University Press, 2016. Oxforddictionaries.com,

https//enoxforddictionaries.com/definition/pilgrim. 12 November 2016.

Slovic, Scott. Seeking Awareness in American Nature Writing. Salt Lake City: University of

Utah Press, 1992. Print.

Snyder, Gary. The Practice of the Wild. Berkeley: North Point Press, 1990. Print.

Reimer, Margaret Loewen. “The Dialectical Vision of Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker

Creek.” Critique (Spring 1983): 182-191. EBSCO. Web. 2 October 2016.

- 65 -

Résumé

The thesis explores the field of nature writing through the lens of a selection of essays by two of its many representatives in American prose: Annie Dillard and Linda Hogan. The study aims to provide a close comparative analysis of the ways the two authors perceive nature, seeking to reveal how their perceptions translate into the worlds they build out of words in their writing, and whether they endow them with the feeling of at-homeness. The sense of being “at home on this earth” was identified as a crucial attribute of the relation to the natural world, since it seems to be a decisive factor in the approach of a society to the environment, in the desire to care for it and protect it from damage. Grounded in Abram’s philosophical thinking and drawing upon findings by Slovic and other relevant essayists, the analysis offers an insight into Hogan’s and Dillard’s perception of objects and perception of animals, and a detailed comparison of the attitudes and strategies the two woman writers manifested and employed in their collections of essays (Dwellings and Pilgrim at Tinker

Creek respectively). The contrastive analysis of Hogan’s and Dillard’s texts has shown considerable differences: whereas Hogan’s world beckons to the readers as a place they can feel at home at and enjoy being part of the earth’s living, Dillard’s world is much less eloquent and, due to the lack of touch of the narrator with the material reality, appears, at times, almost sterile; the sense of cosiness, safety, and belonging, the feeling of at-homeness are not inherent to Dillard’s world.

- 66 -

Resumé

Bakalářská práce se věnuje americkému psaní o přírodě (nature writing), konkrétně jeho dvěma představitelkám – Annie Dillardové a Lindě Hoganové. Cílem práce je provést zevrubnou srovnávací analýzu specifického vnímání přírody, jímž se tyto autorky vyznačují, a sledovat, jak se jejich způsoby vnímání promítají do světů vytvářených v jejich esejích slovy a nakolik jsou jejich světy naplněny pocitem domova. Prožívání země jako domova hraje ve vztahu k přírodnímu prostředí zásadní roli, neboť rozhoduje o přístupu společnosti k přírodě, především o její potřebě přírodu ošetřovat a chránit. Metodologie analýzy textů obou autorek se opírá o filozofické myšlení Davida Abrama a zohledňuje také přístup Scotta Slovica a dalších relevantních badatelů. Těžištěm práce je rozbor obrazu předmětů a zvířat ve zvolených textech Hoganové a Dillardové a detailní srovnání postojů obou autorek a strategií, kterých užívají v souborech esejů Dwellings („Obydlí“, Hoganová) a Poutník u Tinker Creeku

(Dillardová). Kontrastivní analýza upozorňuje na prvky, jimiž se obraz světa v dílech sledovaných autorek podstatným způsobem liší: zatímco svět Lindy Hoganové se čtenáři otevírá jako útulné prostředí, v němž se může cítit doma, jako přirozená součást všeho živého, svět Dillardové je méně přístupný, a jelikož se jej sama autorka zřídka dotýká, zůstává často sterilní a útulnost, pocit sounáležitosti a bezpečí domova mu nejsou vlastní.

- 67 -