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Summer
Books
Annie
Dillard demands that we look life in the eye
By MICHAEL J. FARRELL
Annie Dillard was walking one day on
the shore of a little island. She was, she says, scaring frogs for fun. They
would jump into the water just ahead of her feet. One small frog didnt
jump, so she moved closer. And just as I looked at him, he slowly
crumpled and began to sag. The spirit vanished from his eyes as if snuffed. ...
He was shrinking before my eyes like a deflating football. Eventually the
frog skin started to sink in the water. The villain of this little drama was a
brown beetle called simply the giant water bug. He bit the frog from below,
injected enzymes into the frog that paralyzed it and turned it to juice, then
sucked the frog out of its skin.
Things like that seem to happen to Dillard all the time. The
island was in Tinker Creek, Va., focus of her 1974 Pilgrim at Tinker
Creek (Harpers Magazine Press) in which she set out, like Thoreau, to
write a meteorological journal of the mind.
Her latest book, For the Time Being (Knopf, 1999, 205
pages, $22) begins on a similarly sour note: an exposition of a manual of human
birth defects, Smiths Recognizable Patterns of Human
Abnormalities. She dwells at length on bird-headed dwarfs, who are what
their name suggests. This is soon followed by the story of Rabbi Akiva who in
135 A.D. was flayed by the Romans, his flesh stripped from his bones by
currycombs. He was 85.
Few writers depict whats wrong with the world as vividly as
Dillard. At the end of the most brutal century in human history, we, weary,
search desperately for the happy ending, the escape, while Dillard urges us not
to turn away, coaxes us instead to look life in the eye. Here, let me show you,
she says. Relentlessly. Her books are one tour de force after another.
About good and evil
Its old news now that the world is harsh and in need of
improvement. Nearly all humans try, according to their capacity, to adjust life
for the better. This is true of the refugee holding out a tin cup, of the
politician manipulating the bigger picture, of the butcher, baker and even the
writer, who, self-important as the next one, strives for a single if a home run
is out of reach.
In a hurry and in need of simplicity, we tend to reduce all our
striving to good and bad, the ubiquitous polarity, encompassing everything from
breakfast for the kids to God on the cross. Because we rely so much on writers
to interpret the world for us, to be critics or cheerleaders, we finally judge
their writing on how it has fared in the trenches with good and evil.
And scribblers respond to the challenge. From tabloids to New
Testament, the main event is good and evil. Their writing is judged by whether
it nuances the gray or merely serves up black and white in the raw. Since it
takes a lifetime to learn that success will be limited in any case, writers
keep trying to scribble in new ways, from epic to haiku, from fiction to
nonfiction. They contort and distort, giving reality a black eye here, a leg up
there. In a way its arrogant of them. Yet here and there they make a
lasting impression, leave echoes.
In Graham Greenes novel, The End of the Affair, an
adulteress dies unrepentant. But strange things, such as cures, happen and seem
to point back to her. The narrator begins to be aware of, then to believe in
God -- as someone to be hated. But, as the priest of the story says, he is a
good hater. Something is stirring. Similarly, in William
Goldings equally celebrated Lord of the Flies, a bunch of
supposedly civilized schoolboys, planewrecked and thus free of the usual
restraints, grow savage rather than orderly and nice, the good intentions of
the few overwhelmed by the innate evil of the many.
Novels, accounts of fabricated worlds plucked out of thin air,
have had immense popularity. So they must be saying something to our psyche.
And they say it more painlessly than writers who run at reality foursquare.
Novelists touch us at a tangent. In their desperation to grab our attention and
goodwill they up the tragedy or the comedy. In all this they sidestep intellect
to get at emotions. Wrote W.B. Yeats: Art bids us touch and taste and
hear and see the world, and shrinks from what Blake calls mathematical form,
from every abstract thing, from all that is of the brain only, from all that is
not a fountain jetting from the entire hopes, memories and sensations of the
body.
We know better than to think this is easy. I have asked a
lot of my emotions, wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald. The price was high
... because there was one little drop of something, not blood, not a tear, not
my seed, but me more intimately than these, in every story. It was the extra I
had. Art, in short, is a tall order.
At the other end of the spectrum from the fabricated world of
novels is the more solid ground of nonfiction. Dillard does both, as well as
essays, poetry and perhaps more. She breaks down the barriers between these,
climbing over literary distinctions to get at insights that will knock our
socks off, that is the feeling a reader gets: Nothing less than knocking our
socks off will do.
She sets out on the winding road of ambiguity: Cruelty is a
mystery and the waste of pain, she writes in Tinker Creek.
But if we describe a world to compass these things, a world that is a
long, brute game, then we bump against another mystery: the inrush of power and
light, the canary that sings on the skull. Unless all ages and races of men
have been deluded by the same mass hypnotist (who?), there seems to be such a
thing as beauty, a grace wholly gratuitous.
In For the Time Being Dillard says the Torah says that the
fetus in the womb, as yet innocent and holy, moments before birth sees
all the mingled vastness of the universe, and its volumes of time, and
its multitudes of peoples trampling the generations under. At the last
moment an angel comes along and taps the infant lips so that the infant forgets
and joins the human race bewildered as the rest of us.
Impressions of life
For the Time Being is, among other things, an impressionist
picture of that tempest-tossed world. It is divided into enigmatic categories
that circle and rotate: Birth, China, Clouds, Israel, Numbers, Thinker, Evil
and so on. There is no predicting how Dillard will deal with any of these. An
early section called Sand, for example, is mostly about Jesuit
paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin, though later we meet him in the
China section. Dillard introduces Teilhard gradually. The book is a
gradual unveiling of the world as Dillard is obsessed by it, which also, of
course, is a gradual unveiling of the author.
She leaps from one obiter dictum to another, from insight to
aside. Searching for a tangent to connect with us, she returns to the womb:
An infant is a pucker of the earths thin skin; so are we. We arise
like budding yeasts and break off; we forget our beginnings ... but we can
still leave footprints in a trail whose end we do not know.
Yet Dillard is not such a romantic softy as this might imply.
The world is as glorious as ever, and exalting, she writes,
but for credibilitys sake lets start with the bad
news.
Shes an expert on bad news, can pick it out of the air like
a magician. She visited the Chinese city of Xian and saw the ongoing
excavation of perhaps 10,000 clay soldiers, some still protruding every which
way from the earth. The soldiers were buried to honor the dead Emperor Qin.
Extravagant gesture, posterity may say, but no option for the poor. No, it was
an enlightened stunt, history says. The emperor ordered the clay mannequins as
stand-ins for real soldiers who by custom were buried alive to escort Qin to
the afterlife. Ah, posterity sighs in relief. Until we realize -- something
Dillard does not mention -- that a comparable number of concubines were in fact
buried alive with his deceased nibs. This either reflects the emperors
priorities or hints that soldiers had a stronger union than concubines.
Dillards strength is specificity in lieu of abstractions. We
are born alone and die alone, one at a time. Ten thousand buried concubines is
a statistic. But each, once upon a time, for minutes or hours, struggled with
the unfairness of life, with separation from children, parents or husband, with
claustrophobia and then the frantic effort to breathe, each struggle
unique.
We rightly mourn the victims of the Littleton, Colo., high school
massacre. We feel their pain a bit more than that of the Kosovars whose numbers
are more daunting, about whom we have less specific knowledge. Until perhaps a
TV face of one of them arrests us, maybe haunts us. Can our prizing of
each human life weaken with the square of the distance, as gravity does?
Dillard asks. Do we believe the individual is precious or do we
not?
From history to now, from babies with grotesque deformities to
Emperor Qin gathering up his mothers enemies and ordering them buried
alive, the cruel pendulum swings. Dillard is by no means the first since Job to
be baffled by evil. Nor does she even pretend to have answers to it. But she
writes as one born with an extraordinary gift for wondering about things. In
this and other books -- best known are An American Childhood, Pilgrim
at Tinker Creek, Holy the Firm, Tickets for a Prayer Wheel -- she reaches
into the most unexpected corners of reality for perspective and clarity.
After visiting the emperors clay soldiers she is struck by
the real-life actuality of Chinese farmers, nearly 5 billion people on the
planet that 1982 morning. We who were awake were a multitude trampling
the continents of our day in the light -- feeling our lives and stirring about,
building a better world a jot, or not -- and soon the continents would roll us
under, and new sets of people would trample us.
Goodness trapped in evil
Whatever the all-merciful does, he does for the good,
old Rabbi Akiva used to teach. Presumably including getting people currycombed
to death. Dillard doesnt hide her skepticism. And in the 5th century an
aristocratic woman called Hypatia got similar treatment, only with oyster
shells. Her problem was Neoplatonism.
Evil can exist because entrapped deep inside the force of
evil there is a spark of goodness, she quotes another rabbi -- she has
read a lot of rabbis. Gradually she ventures to say that a good and
all-powerful God allowing, not to mention causing, evil is a distortion of
everyday language. That is not what we mean by good, God or omnipotent.
So she takes another tack. God is -- for the most part --
out of the physical loop of the fallen world he created, let us say. Or God is
the loop, or pervades the loop, or the loop runs in God like a hole in his side
he never fingers. Certainly God is not a member of the loop like the rest of
us.
Theologian Martin Buber had a caveat for trawlers in the waters of
good and evil, especially for packagers of neat dogmas: This is the world
of contradiction, so just as soon as it appears fathomable to us we
should know were in trouble.
Thus we become repositories of creative scripture stories from
every culture that tried to explain itself. We often think others efforts
goofy, having grown accustomed to the tics in our own. Dillard gives us Rabbi
Lurias version: In the beginning the divine essence withdrew into itself
to make room for a finite world. This left room for evil, from physical to
moral. The creator thought his light and grace would trickle down through this
muddled arrangement and eventually save it. But so many calamities have
happened, the sparks of holiness are scattered so wide and thin that most of
the time we search in vain for the dregs of divinity that have trickled down.
Hence it is literally sensible to deny that God exists.
Matter to spirit
There is a rough progression in the book from material and
temporal to spiritual and eternal. She has sections on sand because a few
years ago, I grew interested in sand. And why not sand? She explains its
place in the scheme of things. Part of earth, where she lives, as we do, of
course sand matters. The more spherical a grain of sand, the older it likely
is, she writes. She quotes an expert to the effect that an average river
requires a million years to move a grain of sand a hundred miles. Dillard
doesnt ask if anyone cares. She writes out of the conviction that it
matters, that its an integral part of our roller-coaster ride. Sooner or
later each grain of sand spends time in a desert, just as every American sooner
or later visits Disneyland. Most of the round sand grains in the world,
wherever you find them, have spent some part of their histories blowing around
a desert.
Dust, sands close kin, is equally integral. Repeatedly
Dillard reminds us of civilizations buried by dust, some faster than we might
think. The Mexico City in which Cortés walked is now 30 feet
underground. It would be farther underground except that Mexico City itself has
started sinking. Its amazing how involved this author can get in
ordinary dust, which isnt ordinary at all: A surprising portion of
it is spider legs, and bits thereof. ... Another unexpected source of aerial
detritus is tires.
She is equally -- at least -- fascinated by clouds, knows what
nearly everyone said and wrote about them. Gerard Manley Hopkins, for example,
on Oct. 25, 1870: One great stack in particular over Pendle was knoppled
all over in fine snowy tufts and penciled with bloom-shadow. Why bother?
Why bother about anything? Or as Hopkins wrote June 13 of the same year:
What you look at hard seems to look at you. And isnt that
enough?
And on June 12, 1824, gray clouds swirled over the water in the
failing light at Brighton Beach, England. We know this because John Constable
painted them and dated the canvas. Unless, of course, he got creative and
improvised. He had taken along his beloved wife, who was dying of tuberculosis,
and he could not be faulted for trying to foil nature by improvising at a time
like that.
Factoids and anecdotes are scattered seemingly at random, just as
randomly as they come down roads and round corners to meet us in life. They are
what we live with, the human condition:
- A Dutch person named R. Honwink figured out that the whole
population of earth, if snugly arranged, would fit into Englands Lake
Windermere, which is no big deal of a lake.
- A man from Perus Amazon region asked: Isnt it
true that the whole population of the United States can be fitted into their
cars?
- The dead outnumber the living, probably about 85 billion to 5.9
billion, though its hard to keep track of either living or dead.
- There are approximately nine galaxies out there for everyone
alive, though here, too, Dillard is obviously winging it.
- About 164,300 people a day die. She mentions this in the
context of hospitals, to which she frequently returns. A hole in the
universe, she calls the hospital, through which some depart, others
arrive. The young come, she notes elsewhere, with their little hands clenched,
ready to fight for it; the old leave hands open, aware at last that they can
take little with them.
- Humans speak 10,000 languages. Give or take. Twenty-three
million of us are refugees. More than 3 percent of us are mentally retarded.
Two thousand of us a day commit suicide.
Its a great time to be looking at ourselves, as we round the
millennium bend. Teilhard, she says, called us the whole vast anonymous
army of living humanity ... this restless multitude, confused or orderly, the
immensity of which terrifies us, this ocean of humanity whose slow monotonous
wave-flows trouble the hearts even of those whose flame is most firm.
She tells more and more of Teilhard in the course of the book.
Probably because he had a big vision about beginnings and endings that could,
if we finessed the details, encompass us all. She tells how Rome put its fat
hand over Teilhards mouth to silence him. She admires the Jesuit for
staying and staying human, loved by a woman, even. Otherwise Dillard
doesnt say a lot about the churches, as if they were no longer part of
the discussion.
Buber once said some angels are born with twisted limbs. Like
nearly everyone else, he was imagining heaven with only earth to go on.
Everyone from Karl Rahner to Simone Weil is invoked. Aquinas and Leibniz and
Paul Tillich, too, all saying -- what we all knew all along -- that God is not
omnipotent. Cant put the square peg in the round hole.
But this is saying nothing about God, just something about us, how
little we know. We dance around in a ring and suppose, some poet
said, but God sits in the middle and knows. And another poet:
The angels keep their ancient places; turn but a stone and start a
wing. And most of the time we miss the many-splendored thing.
I can and I must throw myself into the thick of human
endeavor, and with no stopping for breath, Dillard quotes Teilhard.
Look at yourselves, this risk-taking writer is saying to us. And
its not just a rhetorical flourish. Dont settle for every old
formula, shes saying. Let wonder have its way.
Michael Farrell is editor of NCR.
National Catholic Reporter, May 7,
1999
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