Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

annie dillard Pilgrim at muck a labialize creek for Richard It invariably was, and is, and sh e genuinely be, invariably-living Fire, in mea incontestables being winsomeled and in measures passing game divulge. HERACLITUS Contents Epigraph 1 Heaven and Earth in Jest unitary- terzetto 3 2 Seeing 16 3 Winter 37 4 The Fixed 55 5 Untying the K non 73 6 The Present 78 7 Spring 105 8 Intricacy 124 9 Flood 149 10 Fecundity 161 11 stubble 184 12 Nightwatch 209 13 The Horns of the Altar 225 14 Nor occasion 247 15 The wets of judicial separation 265 Afterword 278 More Years Afterward 283 Ab tabu Annie Dillard 285 Ab prohibited the Author some different Books By Annie Dillard C everyplace CopyrightAb reveal the Publisher Pilgrim at diddle brook 1 Heaven and Earth in Jest I used to need a cat, an old fighting tom, who would jump by means of the open window by my bed in the middle of the night and land on my chest. Id half-a c both passn. Hed stick his skull chthonian my sc hnoz and purr, stinking of urine and tear. Some nights he kneaded my b ar chest with his social movement paws, power across-the-boardy, disclosepouringhing his behind, as if sharpening his tikes, or pummeling a mother for milk. And some mornings Id wake in day softlying to vertical find my ashes cover with paw prints in rail declivity I bearinged as though Id been painted with blooms.It was hot, so hot the mirror mat up warm. I washed in the beginning the mirror in a daze, my twisted spend sleep bland hung closely me want sea kelp. What blood was this, and what roses? It could hasten been the rose of union, the blood of murder, or the rose of beauty perfect(a) and the blood of some unspeakable sacrifice or pedigree. The sign on my body could do been an emblem or a stain, the keys to the kingdom or the come up of Cain. I neer knew. I neer 4 / Annie Dillard knew as I washed, and the blood taproomed, faded, and fin entirelyy dissolveed, whether Id purifi ed myself or ruined the blood sign of the passover.We wake, if we ever wake at solely, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence. Seem ana lumberous were incisively set d make hither, a wo troops res publica to me recently, and wear thint nobody popu posthumous why. These argon morning matters, pictures you reverie as the concluding quaver heaves you up on the sense to the bright sprightly and prohibitionisting duck soup. You remember pressure, and a cut sleep you be against, soft, the interchangeables of a sc anyop in its shell. just the air hardens your cutis you s bronzed you leave the lit shore to explore some glaze over headland, and soon youre lost in the leafy interior, intent, remembering nonhing.I subdued think of that old tomcat, mornings, when I wake. Things elementic number 18 tamer now I sleep with the window eject. The cat and our rites atomic number 18 g wholeness and my keep is changed, tho the memory remains of something plyful play ing over me. I wake expectant, hoping to face a new thing. If Im lucky I baron be jogged awake by a strange chick c every last(predicate). I dress in a hurry, imagining the yard flapping with auks, or flamingos. This morning it was a wood duck, b function at the creek. It flew a counsel. I move by a creek, shirk brook, in a valley in Virginias Blue Ridge.An anchorites hermitage is called an anchor-hold some anchor-holds were simple sheds clamped to the lieu of a church similar a barnacle to a rock. I think of this d wellheading clamped to the fount of muck ab bug bring out Creek as an anchor-hold. It holds me at anchor to the rock prat of the creek itself and it bear ons me steadied in the current, as a sea anchor does, facing the stream of escape gushing d accept. Its a unafr back up place to live on that points a lot to think astir(predicate). The creeks mess around and Carvinsargon an eternal restless mystery, fresh every molybdenum. Theirs is the mystery of the continuous creation and all Pilgrim at work Creek / 5 hat providence implies the uncertainty of mountain, the repulsive force of the fixed, the dissolution of the present, the intricacy of beauty, the pressure of fecundity, the elusiveness of the bump, and the flawed genius of perfection. The mountains gradeter and B bucket alongy, McAfees Knob and breathless Manargon a passive mystery, the oldest of all. Theirs is the wholeness simple mystery of creation from nothing, of matter itself, anything at all, the accomplishn. Mountains are giant, restful, absorbent. You thunder mug heave your spirit into a mountain and the mountain will nurse it, clo moderated, and not throw it bum as some creeks will.The creeks are the macrocosm with all its stimulus and beauty I live on that point. precisely the mountains are radix. The wood duck flew a expression. I caught barely a coup doeil of something resembling a bright torpedo that b finaleed the leaves w present it flew. Back at the star sign I ate a scroll of oatmeal much later(prenominal) in the day came the long slant of lightsome that means good walkway of purport. If the day is fine, any walk will do it all fancys good. Water in particular expects its best, reflecting blue cast out in the flavourless, and chopping it into graveled shoals and blanched derail and foam in the riffles. On a drab day, or a hazy one, everythings washed-out and lackluster nevertheless the piss.It carries its own lights. I set out for the railroad tracks, for the hill the flocks fly over, for the woods where the unobjectionable mare lives. further I go to the weewee. Today is one of those fantabulous January partly cloudies in which light chooses an unexpected part of the landscape to illusion out in gilt, and then night epoch sweeps it forward. You know youre alive. You restitution huge stairs, assay to palpate the planets roundness arc amidst your feet. Kazantzakis says that when he was young he had a drive outary and a globe. When he freed the potfulary, it would perch on the globe and sing. on the whole his life, wandering the earth, he felt as though he had a targetary on spend of his mind, telling. West of the house, diddle Creek makes a sharp loop, so 6 / Annie Dillard that the creek is both in back of the house, south of me, and also on the other side of the road, north of me. I want to go north. in that respect the subsequentlynoon solarize hits the creek just right, deepening the reflected blue and discharge the sides of steers on the banks. Steers from the pasture crossoverwise the creek come down to booze I al itinerarys flush a rabbit or devil there I sit on a fallen physical structure in the shade and watch the squirrels in the sun. on that point are both disconnected wooden fences suspended from cables that cross the creek just upstream from my steer-t plyk bench. They keep the steers from escaping up or down the creek when they co me to drink. Squirrels, the neighborhood children, and I use the downstream fence as a smodal valueing bridge cross slipway the creek. But the steers are there today. I sit on the downed tree and watch the black steers slip on the creek bottom. They are all bred beef beef heart, beef report, beef hocks. Theyre a valet product like rayon. Theyre like a field of shoes.They come cast-iron shanks and tongues like foam insoles. You sesst take in by dint of to their brains as you stub with other animals they sincereise beef fat fanny their meatball, beef stew. I cross the fence six feet supra the weewee, walking my hands down the rusty cable and tightroping my feet on the narrow exhibit of the planks. When I hit the other bank and terra firma, some steers are bunched in a knot amidst me and the barbedwire fence I want to cross. So I on the spur of the moment rush at them in an enthusiastic sprint, flailing my build up and hollering, Lightning Copperhead Swedish meatballs They flee, exempt in a knot, stumbling across the suave pasture. I protest with the wind on my face. When I luxate under a barbed-wire fence, cross a field, and run over a scottish maple fig trunk felled across the irrigate, Im on a teeny island shaped like a tear in the middle of Tinker Creek. On one side of the creek is a steep afforest bank the water is swift and deep on that side of the island. On the other side is the level field I walked Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 7 through next to the steers pasture the water between the field and the island is shal kickoff and sluggish.In summers low water, flags and bulrushes grow along a series of shallow pools cooled by the lazy current. Water striders patrol the surface film, cray slant hump along the silt bottom eating filth, batrachians shout and glare, and shiners and sharp bream hide among roots from the sulky super C herons eye. I come to this island every month of the year. I walk around it, stopping and staring, or I st raddle the sycamore pound over the creek, curling my legs out of the water in winter, trying to contract. Today I sit on dry grass at the end of the island by the slower side of the creek. Im worn-out to this snoop.I come to it as to an oracle I re shape to it as a man historic period later will overtakek out the follow of transmission line where he lost a leg or an arm. A parallel of summers agone I was walking along the edge of the island to secure what I could earn in the water, and mainly to scare frogs. Frogs fork over an inelegant way of winning off from invisible positions on the bank just in comportment of your feet, in dire panic, emitting a froggy Yike and splashing into the water. Incredibly, this amused me, and, incredibly, it amuses me still. As I walked along the grassy edge of the island, I got better and better at beholding frogs both in and out of the water.I well-educated to recognize, slowing down, the fight in texture of the light reflected f rom mud bank, water, grass, or frog. Frogs were fast all around me. At the end of the island I find a half-size green frog. He was ex deportly half in and half out of the water, give earing like a schematic diagram of an amphibian, and he didnt jump. He didnt jump I crept closer. At last I knelt on the islands winter eliminateed grass, lost, dumbstruck, staring at the frog in the creek just four feet remote. He was a very depressed frog with wide, dull eyeball. And just as I looked at him, he slowly crumpled and began to sag.The spirit vanished from his eyes as if snuffed. His unclothe 8 / Annie Dillard emptied and drooped his very skull regainmed to collapse and settle like a kicked tent. He was shrinking before my eyes like a de straight offing football. I watched the taut, g bewareing fur on his shoulders ruck, and rumple, and fall. Soon, part of his skin, excogitateless as a pricked balloon, lay in floating folds like bright scum on top of the water it was a monstro us and terrifying thing. I gaped bewildered, appalled. An oval shadow hung in the water behind the drained frog then the shadow ghated international. The frog skin bag started to sink.I had hold or so the giant water bug, entirely never telln one. Giant water bug is really the name of the creature, which is an enormous, heavy-bodied embrown bug. It eats insects, tadpoles, fish, and frogs. Its grasping forelegs are mighty and hooked inward. It seizes a dupe with these legs, hugs it tight, and paralyzes it with enzymes injected during a vicious bite. That one bite is the precisely bite it ever takes. Through the puncture shoot the poisons that dissolve the victims muscles and study and organsall exactly the skinand through it the giant water bug sucks out the victims body, reduced to a juice.This offspring is quite common in warm fresh water. The frog I saw was being sucked by a giant water bug. I had been kneeling on the island grass when the unrecognizable flap of frog ski n settled on the creek bottom, swaying, I stood up and brushed the knees of my pants. I couldnt catch my breath. Of wrinkle, many carnivorous animals devour their antedate alive. The usual method seems to be to subdue the victim by downing or grasping it so it foott flee, then eating it solely or in a series of bloody bites. Frogs eat everything building block, salad dressing prey into their mouths with their thumbs.People seduce seen frogs with their wide jaws so full of live dragonflies they couldnt close them. Ants dont even book to catch their prey in the spring they swarm over freshly hatched, featherless birds in the nest and eat them tiny bite by bite. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 9 That its rough out there and sly is no surprise. Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac. But at the homogeneous time we are also created. In the Koran, completelyah asks, The heaven and the earth and all in between, thinkest thou I make them in jest? Its a good unbelief.What do we think of the created human race, spanning an unimaginable void with an unthinkable profusion of forms? Or what do we think of nothingness, those sickening reaches of time in either direction? If the giant water bug was not do in jest, was it then do in earnest? Pascal uses a nice term to describe the apprehension of the creators, once having called ahead the man, turning his back to it Deus Absconditus. Is this what we think happened? Was the sense of it there, and God absconded with it, ate it, like a wolf who disappears round the edge of the house with the Thanksgiving dud? God is subtle, Einstein said, just now not malicious. Again, Einstein said that nature conceals her mystery by means of her essential molarityeur, not by her cunning. It could be that God has not absconded exactly dispel, as our vision and understanding of the universe use up spread, to a fabric of spirit and sense so dreadful and subtle, so tendinous in a new way, that we lavatory altogether feel blindly of its hem. In making the thick night a swaddling readiness for the sea, God set bars and doors and said, Hitherto shalt thou come, entirely no further. But vex we come even that far? confuse we rowed out to the thick darkness, or are we all playing bezique in the bottom of the boat? Cruelty is a mystery, and the waste of pain. But if we describe a orb to compass these things, a adult male that is a long, brute game, then we bump against other mystery the inrush of power and light, the roll in the hayary that sings on the skull. Unless all ages and races of men stir been deluded by the corresponding mass hypnotist (who? ), there seems to be such a thing as beauty, a tenderness wholly gratuitous. About five years ago I saw a mockingbird make a 10 / Annie Dillard traight vertical descent from the roof gutter of a four-story building. It was an scrap as careless and spontaneous as the curl of a still lead or the kindling of a st ar. The mockingbird took a single gait into the air and dropped. His wings were still folded against his sides as though he were singing from a limb and not falling, accelerating thirty-two feet per second per second, through lift air. Just a breath before he would have been cannonball along to the ground, he unfurled his wings with exact, deliberate care, revealing the broad bars of ovalbumin, spread his elegant, white-banded tail, and so floated onto the grass.I had just rounded a corner when his insouciant step caught my eye there was no one else in sight. The fact of his free fall was like the old philosophical conundrum about the tree that falls in the forest. The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are fareed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there. Another time I saw another wonder sharks off the Atlantic coast of Florida. There is a way a wave rises in a higher place the ocean horizon, a triangular wedge against the tilt . If you stand where the ocean breaks on a shallow beach, you see the tind water in a wave is translucent, scene with lights. maven late afterwardsnoon at low tide a speed of light macro sharks passed the beach near the mouth of a tidal river in a feeding frenzy. As each green wave rose from the churning water, it illuminated within itself the six-or eight-footlong bodies of twisting sharks. The sharks disappeared as each wave rolled toward me then a new wave would swell above the horizon, containing in it, like scorpions in amber, sharks that roiled and heaved. The sight held awesome wonders power and beauty, grace tangled in a rapture with violence. We dont know whats going on here. If these tremendous vents are ergodic combinations of matter run amok, the yield of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 11 millions of monkeys at millions of type make un demandrs, then what is it in us, ham unmixedd out of those same typewriters, that they come alive? We dont know. Our life is a faint t belt along on the surface of mystery, like the idle, curved tunnels of leaf miners on the face of a leaf. We must somehow take a wider view, look at the safe and sound landscape, really see it, and describe whats going on here. then(prenominal) we can at least wail the right question into the swaddling band of darkness, or, if it comes to that, choir the proper praise.At the time of Lewis and Clark, setting the prairies on fire was a well-known signal that meant, Come down to the water. It was an extravagant gesture, but we cant do less. If the landscape reveals one certainty, it is that the extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation. After the one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with ever-fresh vigor. The whole shew has een on fire from the word go. I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire that which isnt flint is tinder, and the whole globe sparks and flames. I have come to the grassy island late in the day. The creek is up icy water sweeps under the sycamore log bridge. The frog skin, of course, is utterly gone. I have stared at that one spot on the creek bottom for so long, focusing past the rush of water, that when I stand, the opposite bank seems to stretch out before my eyes and flux grassily upstream.When the bank settles down I cross the sycamore log and grave again the big plowed field next to the steers pasture. The wind is wondrous out of the west the sun comes and goes. I can see the shadow on the field before me deepen uniformly and spread like a plague. Everything seems so dull I am 12 / Annie Dillard stunned I can even distinguish objects. And suddenly the light runs across the land like a comber, and up the trees, and goes again in a wink I think Ive gone blind or died. When it comes again, the light, you hold your br eath, and if it stays you forget about it until it goes again.Its the most handsome day of the year. At four oclock the eastern sky is a dead stratus black flecked with low white clouds. The sun in the west illuminates the ground, the mountains, and oddly the bare branches of trees, so that everywhere facile trees cut into the black sky like a photographers negative of a landscape. The air and the ground are dry the mountains are going on and off like neon signs. Clouds slide east as if pulled from the horizon, like a tablecloth whipped off a table. The hemlocks by the barbed-wire fence are flinging themselves east as though their backs would break.Purple shadows are racing east the wind makes me face east, and again I feel the cockamamieing, gaunt sensation I felt when the creek bank reeled. At four-thirty the sky in the east is undetermined how could that big blackness be pursy? Fifteen minutes later another darkness is coming viewgraph from the northwest and its here. Ev erything is drained of its light as if sucked. even so at the horizon do inky black mountains give way to distant, lighted mountainslighted not by direct illumination but sort of macabred by glowing sheets of mist hung before them. Now the blackness is in the east verything is half in shadow, half in sun, every clod, tree, mountain, and hedge. I cant see Tinker Mountain through the line of hemlock, till it comes on like a streetlight, ping, ex nihilo. Its smoothstone cliffs pink and swell. short the light goes the cliffs recede as if pushed. The sun hits a clump of sycamores between me and the mountains the sycamore arms light up, and I cant see the cliffs. Theyre gone. The pale network of sycamore arms, which a second ago was transparent as a screen, is suddenly Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 13 opaque, glowing with light.Now the sycamore arms snuff out, the mountains come on, and there are the cliffs again. I walk home. By five-thirty the show has pulled out. Nothing is odd but an unreal blue and a fewer banked clouds low in the north. Some sort of carnival magician has been here, some fast blab outing worker of wonders who has the act backwards. Something in this hand, he says, something in this hand, something up my sleeve, something behind my back and abracadabra, he snaps his fingers, and its all gone. Only the bland, blank-faced magician remains, in his unruffled coat, bare handed, acknowledging a smattering of baffled applause.When you look again the whole show has pulled up stakes and moved on down the road. It never stops. newfangled shows roll in from over the mountains and the magician reappears unannounced from a fold in the curtain you never dreamed was an opening. Scarves of clouds, rabbits in plain view, disappear into the black hat forever. Presto chango. The audience, if there is an audience at all, is dizzy from head-turning, dazed. Like the bear who went over the mountain, I went out to see what I could see. And, I might as well warn y ou, like the bear, all that I could see was the other side of the mountain more of same.On a good day I might catch a glimpse of another wooded ridge bun under the sun like water, another bivouac. I propose to keep here what Thoreau called a meteoric journal of the mind, telling some tales and describing some of the sights of this rather tamed valley, and exploring, in fear and trembling, some of the unmapped dim reaches and unholy fastnesses to which those tales and sights so dizzyingly lead. I am no scientist. I explore the neighborhood. An infant who has just gain vigored to hold his head up has a frank and forthright way of gazing about him in bewilderment.He hasnt the 14 / Annie Dillard faintest clue where he is, and he aims to swindle. In a couple of years, what he will have learned instead is how to fake it hell have the cocksure air of a squatter who has come to feel he owns the place. Some unwonted, taught pride dunkrts us from our original intent, which is to explore the neighborhood, view the landscape, to discover at least where it is that we have been so startlingly set down, if we cant learn why. So I think about the valley. It is my leisure as well as my work, a game.It is a maddened game I have linked because it is being play anyway, a game of both skill and portion, played against an unseen adversarythe conditions of timein which the payoffs, which may suddenly baffle in a blast of light at any moment, might as well come to me as anyone else. I stake the time Im grateful to have, the energies Im glad to direct. I risk getting stuck on the board, so to speak, unable to move in any direction, which happens adequacy, God knows and I risk the searing, exhausting nightmares that plunder rest and force me face down all night long in some grimy ditch seething with hatching insects and crustaceans.But if I can bear the nights, the days are a pleasure. I walk out I see something, some event that would otherwise have been utterly missed and l ost or something sees me, some enormous power brushes me with its bonnie wing, and I resound like a beaten bell. I am an explorer, then, and I am also a obsesser, or the instrument of the hunt itself. Certain Indians used to carve long grooves along the wooden shafts of their arrows. They called the grooves lightning marks, because they resembled the curved fissure lightning slices down the trunks of trees.The function of lightning marks is this if the arrow fails to kill the game, blood from a deep wound will channel along the lightning mark, streak down the arrow shaft, and spatter to the ground, laying a scuff Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 15 dripped on broad-leaves, on stones, that the unshoed and trembling archer can follow into whatever deep or rare wilderness it leads. I am the arrow shaft, carved along my distance by unexpected lights and gashes from the very sky, and this book is the straying reside of blood. Something pummels us, something barely sheathed. Power broods a nd lights.Were played on like a pipe our breath is not our own. James Houston describes two young Eskimo filles seated cross-legged on the ground, mouth on mouth, dazeing by turns each others throat cords, making a low, unearthly music. When I cross again the bridge that is really the steers fence, the wind has thinned to the delicate air of twilight it crumples the waters skin. I watch the running sheets of light raised on the creeks surface. The sight has the appeal of the purely passive, like the racing of light under clouds on a field, the beautiful dream at the moment of being dreamed.The breeze is the merest puff, but you yourself public opinion poll hurried and breathless under the gale force of the spirit. 2 Seeing When I was six or seven years old, growing up in Pittsburgh, I used to take a precious penny of my own and hide it for someone else to find. It was a curious compulsion sadly, Ive never been seized by it since. For some resolve I always hid the penny along the same stretch of sidewalk up the street. I would cradle it at the roots of a sycamore, say, or in a hole left by a chipped-off adult male of sidewalk.Then I would take a piece of chalk, and, starting at either end of the block, draw huge arrows wind up to the penny from both directions. After I learned to write I labeled the arrows SURPRISE AHEAD or MONEY THIS WAY. I was swell(p)ly excited, during all this arrow-drawing, at the thought of the first lucky passer-by who would receive in this way, regardless of merit, a free gift from the universe. But I never lurked about. I would go straight home and not give the matter another thought, until, some months later, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 17 I would be gripped again by the impulse to hide another penny.It is still the first week in January, and Ive got great plans. Ive been mentation about seeing. There are lots of things to see, uncover gifts and free surprises. The world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast broad side from a generous hand. Butand this is the pointwho gets excited by a mere penny? If you follow one arrow, if you crouch motionless on a bank to watch a tremulous ripple thrill on the water and are rewarded by the sight of a muskrat turnout paddling from its den, will you count that sight of a chip of copper only, and go your rueful way?It is dire poverty indeed when a man is so malnourished and fatigued that he wont patronize to pick up a penny. But if you cultivate a well poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a living of days. It is that simple. What you see is what you get. I used to be able to see flying insects in the air. Id look ahead and see, not the row of hemlocks across the road, but the air in forward of it. My eyes would focus along that column of air, picking out flying insects.But I lost interest, I guess, for I dropped the habit. Now I can see birds. Probably some people can look at the grass at their feet and discover all the crawling creatures. I would like to know grasses and sedgesand care. Then my least journey into the world would be a field trip, a series of happy recognitions. Thoreau, in an sublime mood, exulted, What a rich book might be made about buds, including, perhaps, sprouts It would be nice to think so. I cherish mental images I have of collar absolutely happy people. One collects stones.Anotheran Englishman, saywatches clouds. The third lives on a coast and collects drops of seawater which 18 / Annie Dillard he examines microscopically and mounts. But I dont see what the specialist sees, and so I cut myself off, not only from the total picture, but from the heterogeneous forms of happiness. Unfortunately, nature is very much a now-you-see-it, now-youdont affair. A fish flashes, then dissolves in the water before my eyes like so much salt. Deer apparently ascend bodily into heaven the brigh test oriole fades into leaves.These disappearances stun me into stillness and concentration they say of nature that it conceals with a grand nonchalance, and they say of vision that it is a deliberate gift, the revelation of a terpsichorean who for my eyes only flings away her seven veils. For nature does reveal as well as conceal now-you-dont-see-it, now-you-do. For a week last family line migrating red-winged blackbirds were feeding heavily down by the creek at the back of the house. One day I went out to investigate the racket I walked up to a tree, an Osage orange, and a hundred birds flew away.They simply materialized out of the tree. I saw a tree, then a whisk of color, then a tree again. I walked closer and another hundred blackbirds took flight. Not a branch, not a twig budged the birds were apparently weightless as well as invisible. Or, it was as if the leaves of the Osage orange had been freed from a spell in the form of red-winged blackbirds they flew from the tree, ca ught my eye in the sky, and vanished. When I looked again at the tree the leaves had reassembled as if nothing had happened.Finally I walked outright to the trunk of the tree and a final hundred, the real diehards, appeared, spread, and vanished. How could so many hide in the tree without my seeing them? The Osage orange, unruffled, looked just as it had looked from the house, when three hundred red-winged blackbirds cried from its crown. I looked downstream where they flew, and they were gone. Searching, I couldnt spot one. I wandered downstream to force them to play their hand, but theyd go across the creek and scattered. One show to a Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 19 customer.These appearances catch at my throat they are the free gifts, the bright coppers at the roots of trees. Its all a matter of keeping my eyes open. Nature is like one of those line drawings of a tree that are puzzles for children Can you find recondite in the leaves a duck, a house, a male child, a bucket, a z ebra, and a rosiness? Specialists can find the most incredibly wellhidden things. A book I read when I was young recommended an easy way to find caterpillars to effect you simply find some fresh caterpillar droppings, look up, and theres your caterpillar.More recently an author advised me to set my mind at ease about those piles of cut arcs on the ground in grassy fields. Field mice make them they cut the grass down by degrees to reach the seeds at the head. It seems that when the grass is tightly packed, as in a field of ripe grain, the blade wont topple at a single cut through the substructure instead, the cut stem simply drops vertically, held in the crush of grain. The mouse severs the bottom again and again, the stem keeps dropping an inch at a time, and finally the head is low enough for the mouse to reach the seeds.Meanwhile, the mouse is positively littering the field with its superficial piles of cut stems into which, presumably, the author of the book is constantly st umbling. If I cant see these minutiae, I still try to keep my eyes open. Im always on the lookout for antlion traps in sandy soil, monarch pupae near milkweed, skipper larvae in locust leaves. These things are utterly common, and Ive not seen one. I bang on empty trees near water, but so far no flying squirrels have appeared. In flat country I watch every old in hopes of seeing the green ray.The green ray is a seldom-seen streak of light that rises from the sun like a spurting fountain at the moment of sunset it throbs into the sky for two seconds and disappears. One more reason to keep my eyes open. A photography professor at the University of Florida just happened to 20 / Annie Dillard see a bird die in midflight it jerked, died, dropped, and pissed on the ground. I squint at the wind because I read Stewart Edward etiolate I have always respected that if you looked closely enough you could see the windthe dim, hardly-made-out, fine debris fleeing high in the air. White was an excellent observer, and devoted an entire chapter of The Mountains to the subject of seeing deer As soon as you can forget the naturally obvious and reach an unlifelike obvious, then you too will see deer. But the schmalzy obvious is hard to see. My eyes account for less than one portion of the weight of my head Im bony and dense I see what I expect. I once spent a full three minutes looking at a bullfrog that was so unexpectedly large I couldnt see it even though a dozen enthusiastic campers were shouting directions.Finally I asked, What color am I looking for? and a fellow said, Green. When at last I picked out the frog, I saw what painters are up against the thing wasnt green at all, but the color of wet hickory bark. The caramel brown can see, and the knowledgeable. I visited an aunt and uncle at a quarter-horse ranch in Cody, Wyoming. I couldnt do much of anything useful, but I could, I thought, draw. So, as we all sat around the kitchen table after supper, I produced a sheet of paper and drew a horse. Thats one lame horse, my aunt volunteered.The rest of the family joined in Only place to saddle that one is his neck Looks like we better shoot the deplorable thing, on account of those terrible growths. Meekly, I slid the pencil and paper down the table. Everyone in that family, including my three young cousins, could draw a horse. Beautifully. When the paper came back it looked as though five shining, real quarter horses had been corralled by skid with a papier-mache moose the real horses seemed to gaze at the devil with a steady, puzzled air. I stay away from horses now, but I can do a Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 21 creditable goldfish.The point is that I just dont know what the lover knows I just cant see the artificial obvious that those in the know construct. The herpetologist asks the native, Are there snakes in that ravine? Nosir. And the herpetologist comes home with, yessir, three bags full. Are there butterflies on that mountain? Are the bluets in bloom, are there arrowheads here, or fossil shells in the shale? Peeping through my keyhole I see within the range of only about thirty share of the light that comes from the sun the rest is infrared and some little ultraviolet, perfectly apparent to many animals, but invisible to me.A nightmare network of ganglia, aerated and firing without my knowledge, cuts and splices what I do see, editing it for my brain. Donald E. Carr points out that the sense impressions of noncellular animals are not edited for the brain This is philosophically interesting in a rather mournful way, since it means that only the simplest animals perceive the universe as it is. A fog that wont burn away drifts and flows across my field of vision. When you see fog move against a setting of deep pines, you dont see the fog itself, but streaks of pellucidity floating across the air in dark shreds.So I see only tatters of clearness through a pervading obscurity. I cant distinguish the fog from the overcast sky I cant be sure if the light is direct or reflected. Everywhere darkness and the presence of the unseen appalls. We estimate now that only one atom dances alone in every cubic meter of intergalactic space. I blink and squint. What planet or power yanks Halleys Comet out of field of doings? We havent seen that force yet its a question of distance, density, and the pallor of reflected light. We rock, cradled in the swaddling band of darkness.Even the simple darkness of night whispers suggestions to the mind. sound summer, in August, I stayed at the creek too late. 22 / Annie Dillard Where Tinker Creek flows under the sycamore log bridge to the tear-shaped island, it is slow and shallow, fringed thinly in cattail marsh. At this spot an astonishing bloom of life supports vast breeding populations of insects, fish, reptiles, birds, and mammals. On windless summer evenings I stalk along the creek bank or straddle the sycamore log in absolute stillness, watching for mus krats.The night I stayed too late I was hunched on the log staring spellbound at spreading, reflected stains of lilac on the water. A cloud in the sky suddenly lighted as if turned on by a flip out its reflection just as suddenly materialized on the water upstream, flat and floating, so that I couldnt see the creek bottom, or life in the water under the cloud. Downstream, away from the cloud on the water, water turtles smooth as beans were gliding down with the current in a series of easy, weightless push-offs, as men bound on the dream.I didnt know whether to trace the progress of one turtle I was sure of, risking sticking my face in one of the bridges spiderwebs made invisible by the gathering dark, or take a chance on seeing the carp, or scan the mud bank in hope of seeing a muskrat, or follow the last of the swallows who caught at my heart and trailed it after them like streamers as they appeared from directly below, under the log, flying upstream with their tails forked, so f ast. But shadows spread, and deepened, and stayed. After thousands of years were still strangers to darkness, fearful aliens in an enemy camp with our arms crossed over our chests.I stirred. A land turtle on the bank, startled, hissed the air from its lungs and withdrew into its shell. An sick pink here, an unfathomable blue there, gave great suggestion of lurking beings. Things were going on. I couldnt see whether that sere rustle I heard was a distant rattlesnake, slit-eyed, or a nearby sparrow kicking in the dry flood debris slung at the foot of a willow. abominable action Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 23 roiled the water everywhere I looked, big action, inexplicable. A tremor welled up beside a gaping muskrat burrow in the bank and I caught my breath, but no muskrat appeared.The ripples continued to fan upstream with a steady, powerful thrust. Night was knitting over my face an eyeless mask, and I still sat transfixed. A distant airplane, a delta wing out of nightmare, made a glid ing shadow on the creeks bottom that looked like a stingray cruising upstream. At once a black fin slit the pink cloud on the water, shearing it in two. The two halves merged together and seemed to dissolve before my eyes. Darkness pooled in the tear of the creek and rose, as water collects in a well. Untamed, dreaming lights flickered over the sky. I saw hints of hulking underwater shadows, two pale splashes out of the water, and ound ripples rolling close together from a blackened center. At last I stared upstream where only the deepest violet remained of the cloud, a cloud so high its underbelly still glowed feeble color reflected from a hidden sky lighted in turn by a sun halfway to China. And out of that violet, a sudden enormous black body arced over the water. I saw only a rounded sleekness. Head and tail, if there was a head and tail, were both submerged in cloud. I saw only one ebony fling, a headlong dive to darkness then the waters closed, and the lights went out. I wal ked home in a shivering daze, up hill and down.Later I lay open-mouthed in bed, my arms flung wide at my sides to steady the whirling darkness. At this latitude Im spinning 836 miles an hour round the earths axis I often fancy I feel my brush fall as a breakneck arc like the dive of dolphins, and the hollow rushing of wind raises hair on my neck and the side of my face. In orbit around the sun Im mournful 64,800 miles an hour. The solar system as a whole, like a circle unhinged, spins, bobs, and blinks at the speed of 43,200 miles an hour along a course set east of Hercules. Someone has 24 / Annie Dillard iped, and we are dancing a tarantella until the sweat pours. I open my eyes and I see dark, muscled forms curl out of water, with flapping gills and flattened eyes. I close my eyes and I see stars, deep stars giving way to deeper stars, deeper stars bowing to deepest stars at the crown of an infinite cone. Still, wrote van Gogh in a letter, a great deal of light falls on everyt hing. If we are blind by darkness, we are also blinded by light. When too much light falls on everything, a special terror results. hawkshaw Freuchen describes the notorious boat sickness to which Greenland Eskimos are prone. The Greenland fjords are peculiar for the spells of completely quiet weather, when there is not enough wind to blow out a match and the water is like a sheet of glass. The kayak hunter must sit in his boat without stirring a finger so as not to scare the shy seals away. The sun, low in the sky, sends a glare into his eyes, and the landscape around moves into the earth of the unreal. The reflex from the mirrorlike water hypnotizes him, he seems to be unable to move, and all of a sudden it is as if he were floating in a bottomless void, sinking, sinking, and sinking.Horror-stricken, he tries to stir, to cry out, but he cannot, he is completely paralyzed, he just falls and falls. Some hunters are especially cursed with this panic, and bring ruin and sometimes starvation to their families. Sometimes here in Virginia at sunset low clouds on the southern or northern horizon are completely invisible in the lighted sky. I only know one is there because I can see its reflection in still water. The first time I discovered this mystery I looked from cloud to no-cloud in bewilderment, checking my bearings over and over, thinking maybe the ark of the covenant was just passing by south of Dead Man Mountain.Only much later did I read the explanation polarized light from the sky is very much weakened by reflection, but the light Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 25 in clouds isnt polarized. So invisible clouds pass among visible clouds, till all slide over the mountains so a greater light extinguishes a lesser as though it didnt exist. In the great meteor shower of August, the Perseid, I wail all day for the shooting stars I miss. Theyre out there showering down, committing hara-kiri in a flame of fatal attraction, and bird perhaps at last into the ocean.B ut at dawn what looks like a blue dome clamps down over me like a lid on a pot. The stars and planets could smash and Id never know. Only a piece of ashen moon occasionally climbs up or down the inside of the dome, and our local star without surcease explodes on our heads. We have really only that one light, one source for all power, and yet we must turn away from it by universal decree. Nobody here on the planet seems aware of this strange, powerful taboo, that we all walk about cautiously averting our faces, this way and that, lest our eyes be blasted forever.Darkness appalls and light dazzles the scrap of visible light that doesnt hurt my eyes hurts my brain. What I see sets me swaying. Size and distance and the sudden swelling of meanings confuse me, bowl me over. I straddle the sycamore log bridge over Tinker Creek in the summer. I look at the lighted creek bottom snail tracks tunnel the mud in quavering curves. A crayfish jerks, but by the time I absorb what has happened, hes gone in a billowing smokescreen of silt. I look at the water minnows and shiners. If Im thinking minnows, a carp will fill my brain till I scream.I look at the waters surface skaters, bubbles, and leaves sliding down. Suddenly, my own face, reflected, startles me witless. Those snails have been tracking my face Finally, with a shuddering wrench of the will, I see clouds, cirrus clouds. Im dizzy, I fall in. This looking business is risky. Once I stood on a humped rock on nearby Purgatory Mountain, watching through binoculars the great autumn 26 / Annie Dillard hawk migration below, until I discovered that I was in danger of joining the hawks on a vertical migration of my own.I was used to binoculars, but not, apparently, to balancing on humped rocks while looking through them. I staggered. Everything advanced and receded by turns the world was full of unexplained foreshortenings and depths. A distant huge tan object, a hawk the size of an elephant, turned out to be the chocolate-br own bough of a nearby loblolly pine. I followed a sharp-shinned hawk against a plain sky, rotating my head unawares as it flew, and when I lowered the glass a glimpse of my own looming shoulder sent me staggering. What prevents the men on Palomar from falling, surd and blinded, from their tiny, vaulted chairs?I reel in confusion I dont understand what I see. With the naked eye I can see two million light-years to the Andromeda galaxy. Often I mash some creek water in a jar and when I get home I dump it in a white china bowl. After the silt settles I return and see tracings of minute snails on the bottom, a planarian or two winding round the rim of water, roundworms shimmying frantically, and finally, when my eyes have adjusted to these dimensions, amoebae. At first the amoebae look like muscae volitantes, those curled moving spots you seem to see in your eyes when you stare at a distant wall.Then I see the amoebae as drops of water congealed, bluish, translucent, like chips of sk y in the bowl. At length I choose one individual and give myself over to its conception of an evening. I see it dribble a grainy foot before it on its wet, unfathomable way. Do its unedited sense impressions include the fierce focus of my eyes? Shall I take it outside and show it Andromeda, and blow its little endoplasm? I stir the water with a finger, in sequel its running out of oxygen. Maybe I should get a tropical aquarium with motorized bubblers and lights, and keep this one for aPilgrim at Tinker Creek / 27 pet. Yes, it would tell its fissioned descendants, the universe is two feet by five, and if you listen closely you can hear the buzzing music of the spheres. Oh, its undercover lamplit evenings, here in the galaxy, one after the other. Its one of those nights when I wander from window to window, looking for a sign. But I cant see. Terror and a beauty insoluble are a ribband of blue woven into the fringes of garments of things both great and small. No culture explains, no bivouac offers real haven or rest. But it could be that we are not seeing something.Galileo thought comets were an optical illusion. This is rich ground since we are certain that theyre not, we can look at what our scientists have been saying with fresh hope. What if there are really gleaming, embattled cities hung upsidedown over the desert sand? What limpid lakes and cool date palms have our caravans always passed untried? Until, one by one, by the blindest of leaps, we light on the road to these places, we must stumble in darkness and hunger. I turn from the window. Im blind as a bat, sensing only from every direction the echo of my own thin cries.I chanced on a wonderful book by Marius von Senden, called Space and Sight. When Western surgeons discovered how to perform safe cataract operations, they ranged across Europe and America operating on slews of men and women of all ages who had been blinded by cataracts since birth. Von Senden collected accounts of such cases the his tories are fascinating. Many medical students had tested their patient role ofs sense perceptions and ideas of space both before and after the operations. The vast majority of patients, of both sexes and all ages, had, in von Sendens opinion, no idea of space whatsoever.Form, distance, and size were so many meaningless syllables. A patient had no idea of depth, confusing it with roundness. Before 28 / Annie Dillard the operation a doctor would give a blind patient a cube and a sphere the patient would tongue it or feel it with his hands, and name it correctly. After the operation the doctor would show the same objects to the patient without letting him touch them now he had no clue whatsoever what he was seeing. One patient called lemonade square because it pricked on his tongue as a square shape pricked on the touch of his hands.Of another surgical patient, the doctor writes, I have found in her no notion of size, for example, not even within the narrow limits which she might have encompassed with the aid of touch. Thus when I asked her to show me how big her mother was, she did not stretch out her hands, but set her two index-fingers a few inches apart. otherwise doctors reported their patients own statements to similar effect. The room he was inhe knew to be but part of the house, yet he could not call back that the whole house could look bigger Those who are blind from birthhave no real conception of height or distance.A house that is a mile away is thought of as nearby, but requiring the taking of a lot of steps. The elevator that whizzes him up and down gives no more sense of vertical distance than does the train of horizontal. For the pertly sighted, vision is pure sensation unencumbered by meaning The girl went through the experience that we all go through and forget, the moment we are born. She saw, but it did not mean anything but a lot of different kinds of brightness. Again, I asked the patient what he could see he answered that he saw a n grand field of light, in which everything appeared dull, confused, and in motion.He could not distinguish objects. Another patient saw nothing but a confusion of forms and colors. When a newly sighted girl saw photographs and paintings, she asked, why do they put those dark marks all over them? Those arent dark marks, her mother explained, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 29 those are shadows. That is one of the ways the eye knows that things have shape. If it were not for shadows many things would look flat. Well, thats how things do look, Joan answered. Everything looks flat with dark patches. But it is the patients concepts of space that are most revealing.One patient, according to his doctor, practise his vision in a strange fashion thus he takes off one of his boots, throws it some way off in front of him, and then attempts to gauge the distance at which it lies he takes a few steps towards the boot and tries to grasp it on failing to reach it, he moves on a step or two and g ropes for the boot until he finally gets hold of it. But even at this stage, after three weeks experience of seeing, von Senden goes on, space, as he conceives it, ends with visual space, i. e. with color-patches that happen to bound his view.He does not yet have the notion that a larger object (a chair) can mask a smaller one (a dog), or that the latter can still be present even though it is not directly seen. In general the newly sighted see the world as a dazzle of colorpatches. They are pleased by the sensation of color, and learn quickly to name the colors, but the rest of seeing is tormentingly difficult. Soon after his operation a patient generally bumps into one of these color-patches and observes them to be substantial, since they take issue him as tactual objects do.In walking about it also strikes himor can if he pays attentionthat he is continually passing in between the colors he sees, that he can go past a visual object, that a part of it then steadily disappears fr om view and that in spite of this, however he twists and turnswhether entering the room from the door, for example, or reverting back to ithe always has a visual space in front of him. Thus he gradually comes to realize that there is also a space behind him, which he does not see. The mental causal agent involved in these reasonings proves over- 0 / Annie Dillard whelming for many patients. It oppresses them to realize, if they ever do at all, the tremendous size of the world, which they had previously conceived of as something touchingly manageable. It oppresses them to realize that they have been visible to people all along, perhaps unattractively so, without their knowledge or consent. A disheartening number of them refuse to use their new vision, move to go over objects with their tongues, and lapsing into apathy and despair. The child can see, but will not make use of his sight.Only when pressed can he with difficulty be brought to look at objects in his neighborhood but mor e than a foot away it is impossible to bestir him to the necessary effort. Of a twenty-one-year-old girl, the doctor relates, Her unfortunate father, who had hoped for so much from this operation, wrote that his daughter carefully shuts her eyes whenever she wishes to go about the house, especially when she comes to a staircase, and that she is never happier or more at ease than when, by closing her eyelids, she relapses into her former state of total blindness. A fifteen-year-old boy, who was also in love with a girl at the refuge for the blind, finally blurted out, No, really, I cant stand it anymore I want to be sent back to the asylum again. If things arent altered, Ill tear my eyes out. Some do learn to see, especially the young ones. But it changes their lives. One doctor comments on the quick and complete loss of that striking and wonderful serenity which is characteristic only of those who have never yet seen. A blind man who learns to see is ashamed of his old habits. He dresses up, grooms himself, and tries to make a good impression.While he was blind he was indifferent to objects unless they were edible now, a sifting of set sets inhis thoughts and wishes are mightily stirred and some few of the patients are thereby led into dissimulation, envy, theft and fraud. On the other hand, many newly sighted people speak well of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 31 the world, and teach us how dull is our own vision. To one patient, a human hand, unrecognized, is something bright and then holes. Shown a bunch of grapes, a boy calls out, It is dark, blue and shiny. It isnt smooth, it has bumps and hollows. A little girl visits a garden. She is greatly astonished, and can scarcely be persuaded to answer, stands speechless in front of the tree, which she only names on taking hold of it, and then as the tree with the lights in it. Some delight in their sight and give themselves over to the visual world. Of a patient just after her bandages were removed, her doct or writes, The first things to attract her attention were her own hands she looked at them very closely, moved them repeatedly to and fro, bent and stretched the fingers, and seemed greatly astonished at the sight. One girl was eager to tell her blind friend that men do not really look like trees at all, and astounded to discover that her every visitor had an utterly different face. Finally, a twenty-two-old girl was bedazzle by the worlds brightness and kept her eyes shut for two weeks. When at the end of that time she opened her eyes again, she did not recognize any objects, but, the more she now directed her gaze upon everything about her, the more it could be seen how an expression of gratification and astonishment overspread her features she repeatedly exclaimed Oh GodHow beautiful I saw color-patches for weeks after I read this wonderful book. It was summer the peaches were ripe in the valley orchards. When I woke in the morning, color-patches wrapped round my eyes, intricat ely, leaving not one un change spot. All day long I walked among shifting color-patches that parted before me like the Red Sea and closed again in silence, transfigured, wherever I looked back. Some patches swelled and loomed, while others vanished utterly, and dark marks flitted at stochastic 32 / Annie Dillard over the whole dazzling sweep.But I couldnt assert the illusion of flatness. Ive been around for too long. Form is condemned to an eternal danse down(p) with meaning I couldnt unpeach the peaches. Nor can I remember ever having seen without understanding the color-patches of infancy are lost. My brain then must have been smooth as any balloon. Im told I reached for the moon many babies do. But the color-patches of infancy swelled as meaning filled them they arrayed themselves in solemn ranks down distance which unrolled and stretched before me like a plain. The moon rocketed away.I live now in a world of shadows that shape and distance color, a world where space makes a ki nd of terrible sense. What gnosticism is this, and what physics? The fluttering patch I saw in my nursery windowsilver and green and shape-shifting blueis gone a row of Lombardy poplars takes its place, mute, across the distant lawn. That humming oblong creature pale as light that stole along the walls of my room at night, stint exhilaratingly around the corners, is gone, too, gone the night I ate of the bittersweet fruit, put two and two together and puckered forever my brain.Martin Buber tells this tale Rabbi Mendel once boasted to his teacher Rabbi Elimelekh that evenings he saw the apotheosis who rolls away the light before the darkness, and mornings the angel who rolls away the darkness before the light. Yes, said Rabbi Elimelekh, in my youth I saw that too. Later on you dont see these things anymore. Why didnt someone hand those newly sighted people paints and brushes from the start, when they still didnt know what anything was? Then maybe we all could see color-patches too , the world unraveled from reason, Eden before Adam gave names.The scales would drop from my eyes Id see trees like men walking Id run down the road against all orders, hallooing and leaping. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 33 Seeing is of course very much a matter of verbalization. Unless I call my attention to what passes before my eyes, I simply wont see it. It is, as Ruskin says, not merely unnoticed, but in the full, clear sense of the word, unseen. My eyes alone cant solve affinity tests using figures, the ones which show, with increasing elaborations, a big square, then a small square in a big square, then a big triangle, and expect me to find a small triangle in a big triangle.I have to say the words, describe what Im seeing. If Tinker Mountain erupted, Id be likely to notice. But if I want to notice the lesser cataclysms of valley life, I have to maintain in my head a running description of the present. Its not that Im observant its just that I talk too much. Otherwise, especia lly in a strange place, Ill never know whats contingency. Like a blind man at the ball game, I need a radio. When I see this way I analyze and pry. I hurl over logs and roll away stones I study the bank a square foot at a time, probing and tilting my head. Some ays when a mist covers the mountains, when the muskrats wont show and the microscopes mirror shatters, I want to climb up the blank blue dome as a man would force the inside of a circus tent, wildly, dangling, and with a steel knife claw a rent in the top, peep, and, if I must, fall. But there is another kind of seeing that involves a letting go. When I see this way I sway transfixed and emptied. The difference between the two ways of seeing is the difference between walking with and without a camera. When I walk with a camera I walk from shot to shot, reading the light on a calibrated meter.When I walk without a camera, my own shutter opens, and the moments light prints on my own silver gut. When I see this second way I am above all an unscrupulous observer. 34 / Annie Dillard It was sunny one evening last summer at Tinker Creek the sun was low in the sky, upstream. I was sitting on the sycamore log bridge with the sunset at my back, watching the shiners the size of minnows who were feeding over the enigmatical sand in skittery schools. Again and again, one fish, then another, turned for a rend second across the current and flash the sun shot out from its silver side. I couldnt watch for it.It was always just happening somewhere else, and it drew my vision just as it disappeared flash, like a sudden dazzle of the thinnest blade, a sparking over a dun and chromatic ground at chance intervals from every direction. Then I noticed white specks, some sort of pale petals, small, floating from under my feet on the creeks surface, very slow and steady. So I film over my eyes and gazed towards the brim of my hat and saw a new world. I saw the pale white circles roll up, roll up, like the worlds turning, m ute and perfect, and I saw the linear flashes, gleaming silver, like stars being born at random down a rolling scroll of time.Something broke and something opened. I filled up like a new wineskin. I breathed an air like light I saw a light like water. I was the lip of a fountain the creek filled forever I was ether, the leaf in the zephyr I was flesh-flake, feather, bone. When I see this way I see truly. As Thoreau says, I return to my senses. I am the man who watches the baseball game in silence in an empty stadium. I see the game purely Im abstracted and dazed. When its all over and the white-suited players lope off the green field to their shadowed dugouts, I leap to my feet I cheer and cheer. But I cant go out and try to see this way.Ill fail, Ill go mad. All I can do is try to gag the commentator, to hush the racquet of useless interior babble that keeps me from seeing just as certainly as a newspaper dangled before my eyes. The effort is really a Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 35 discipline requiring a lifetime of dedicated struggle it marks the literature of saints and monks of every order eastern hemisphere and West, under every rule and no rule, discalced and shod. The worlds spiritual geniuses seem to discover universally that the minds muddy river, this ceaseless flow of trivia and trash, cannot be dammed, and that trying to dam it is a waste of effort that might lead to madness.Instead you must allow the muddy river to flow unheeded in the dim channels of consciousness you raise your sights you look along it, mildly, acknowledging its presence without interest and gazing beyond it into the realm of the real where subjects and objects act and rest purely, without utterance. Launch into the deep, says Jacques Ellul, and you shall see. The secret of seeing is, then, the pearl of great price. If I thought he could teach me to find it and keep it forever I would stagger barefoot across a hundred comeuppance after any lunatic at all.