why annie dillard rocks my
world
The first piece I ever read by Annie Dillard is titled
“The Deer at Providencia” from the collection of essays Teaching a Stone to
Talk. I was looming in the library,
looking for creative nonfiction, when I laid hands on it in the nature section,
and after half an hour of open-mouthed reading, I was emotionally swept,
handled, pummeled. I had to walk for an hour to come back to reality.
Up to that point in my reading and writing career, I had
never realized that language could breathe, that phrases could writhe, that
phonemes could fluctuate like atoms, or like ballroom dancers. Literature took on a new, organic element.
Annie Dillard was my new mentor.
She won the Pulitzer in 1975 for her book Pilgrim at
Tinker Creek. It was categorized as “general nonfiction”, blowing away all
books in the realms of politics, social issues, history, criticism, and
biography. Rightly so. When I read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,
I feel like I am worshipping, holding an invocation. She is nature’s mother, her biggest fan, and it’s in every single
line that you can find appreciation and raw energy. Her letters tingle like electric flow.
She defies scope. “I have to look at the landscape of the
blue-green world again. Just think: In
all the clean beautiful reaches of the solar system, our planet alone is a
blot; our planet alone has death. I
have to acknowledge that the sea is a cup of death, and the land is a stained
alter stone. We the living are
survivors huddled on flotsam, living on jetsam. We are escapees. We wake
in terror, eat in hunger, sleep with a mouthful of blood.”
It was with Annie Dillard that I finally felt comfortable
to be antisocial with grammar, schizophrenic in laying it down, with her that saw
a circle and a plane and a sphere simultaneously. I saw like I had never seen, with a writer’s eye, even if it
wasn’t mine but hers. I read “Evolution loves death more than it loves you or
me,” and I feel like I’ve been slapped across the face. When the world turns
Dillard’s tint, you don’t know where you are.
“The Deer at Providencia” forced me open with the most
aggressive indifference I have ever lived through. In the essay, she and three “metropolitan men” happen upon a disgraceful
sight: a dear killing itself, ripping itself to pieces, trying to get free from
the rope around its neck. Literally,
hanging itself.
“We watched the deer from the circle, and then we drifted
on to lunch . . . . There was even a breeze.”
She’s just seen one of Life’s most gruesome tricks, and she comments on
quaintness, making the grotesque more so by omission. Providence is a leper.
She mentions Alan McDonald, who had his face burnt off
once by gasoline explosion as a young man, and again by gunpowder thirteen
years later. For Dillard, McDonald
represents the victims of the callousness of the universe, an unfeeling, truly
inconsiderate Nature, God, Whatever.
Ultimately, she leaves the question to the reader: if
providence is real, if there’s some incredible universal tapestry to which we
are all bound as part of some kind of plan, “would somebody please tell the Alan
McDonald in his dignity, tell the deer at Providencia in his dignity what is
going on? And mail me the carbon.”
I slipped three rungs closer to earth on that one.
There’s no way out it: either everything happens for a
reason, everything is inextricably linked to some larger scheme of things. That your child dies as a result of a stray
bullet in gangland because of some divine arrangement. That my mother is shaken to the floor
because of freak seizures due to natural assignment. That a perfect family is split into hundreds of pieces because it
serves some higher purpose. That
precious people lose eyes out of some larger moral initiative.
Or, maybe shit just happens.
Neither explanation sits well with me. Neither sits well with Annie Dillard
either. Life, Dillard teaches me, is as
complex, not as a tapestry, but as a planet, as the universe, as time. She teaches me how to see life through a
cynic’s lens. I read her to learn how
to find beauty in the grotesque and the disgusting in the remarkable. I read Annie Dillard to shake my world, to
see what comes down, to see what falls off, to see what remains.