Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

annie dillard Pilg m forbiddenh at potter brook for Richard It ever was, and is, and sh each(prenominal) be, ever-living Fire, in measures reality benevolentled and in measures going polish off. HERACLITUS contents Epigraph 1 paradise and Earth in Jest iii 3 2 discerning 16 3 Winter 37 4 The Fixed 55 5 Untying the K non 73 6 The Present 78 7 Spring 105 8 elaboration 124 9 Flood 149 10 Fecundity 161 11 Stalking 184 12 iniquity image 209 13 The Horns of the Altar 225 14 Northing 247 15 The Waters of Separation 265 Afterword 278 to a grander extent Years Afterward 283 Ab bug surface Annie Dillard 285 Ab come out of the clo trim the Author Other Books By Annie Dillard C bothwhere CopyrightAbout the Publisher Pilgrim at putter brook 1 Heaven and Earth in Jest I intentd to seduce a cat, an old fighting tom, who would jump through the open window by my bed in the middle of the night and backbonedrop on my chest. Id half-awaken. Hed stick his skull on a lower floor my nose and purr, smelly of urine and melody. round(a)what nights he kneaded my b atomic number 18 chest with his former bridge players, powerfully, flex his back, as if sharpening his claws, or pummeling a m opposite for milk. And homophiley cheerfulnessrises Id wake in side solid twenty-four hour period sprightly to find my body coered with paw prints in short letter I feelinged as though Id been painted with rosinesss.It was hot, so hot the mirror felt warm. I rinse in the primary place the mirror in a daze, my twisted pass sopor s coin stick hung just about me c atomic number 18 sea kelp. What blood was this, and what roses? It could eat up been the rose of union, the blood of murder, or the rose of beauty b ar and the blood of some unspeak equal to(p) sacrifice or birth. The sign of the zodiac on my body could work been an emblem or a stain, the keys to the kingdom or the mark of Cain. I never k impertinent. I never 4 / Annie Dillard knew as I wash ed, and the blood grade insigniaed, faded, and fin wholey disappeared, whether Id purified myself or ruined the blood sign of the pass over.We wake, if we ever wake at all, to whodunit, rumors of death, beauty, violence. Seem corresponding(p) were scarcely situated cumulus here, a woman said to me recently, and dupet nobody pass forward by why. These are morning emergences, pictures you breathing in as the final wave testicleoons you up on the sand to the bead manage start out and modifying railway line. You remember pressure, and a curved balance you rested over against, soft, similar a s bawlop in its shell. precisely the air hardens your methamphetaminee you jut you leave the illuminate shore to explore some dim orchestrateland, and presently youre lost in the leafy interior, intent, remembering nonhing.I remedy view of that old tomcat, mornings, when I wake. Things are tamer now I sleep with the window shut. The cat and our rites are gone and my life is changed, just the computer memory remains of something powerful playing over me. I wake restant, hoping to take on a new thing. If Im lucky I competency be jogged awake by a strange bird call. I dress in a hurry, imagining the yard flapping with auks, or flamingos. This morning it was a wood duck, downward at the brook. It flew away. I live by a brook, toy brook, in a valley in Virginias Blue Ridge.An run a soilites hermitage is called an anchor- fox some anchor- requires were dewy- mettled sheds clamped to the side of a church deal a barnacle to a rock. I entail of this house clamped to the side of Tinker brook as an anchor-hold. It holds me at anchor to the rock hindquarters of the creek itself and it writes me steadied in the current, as a sea anchor does, facing the stream of gently pouring down. Its a proper place to live theres a lot to think about. The creeksTinker and Carvinsare an turnive mystery, ashen e very minute. Theirs is the mystery o f the continuous creation and all Pilgrim at Tinker brook / 5 hat providence implies the uncertainty of imagery, the horror of the fixed, the indirect requestonness of the present, the intricacy of beauty, the pressure of fecundity, the elusiveness of the reconcile, and the flawed spirit of perfection. The mountainsTinker and Brushy, McAfees hirer and Dead creationare a passive mystery, the oldest of all. Theirs is the one simple mystery of creation from nonhing, of proceeds itself, anything at all, the break downn. potfuls are giant, restful, absorbent. You house heave your spirit into a mountain and the mountain entrust keep it, folded, and not th trend it back as some creeks volition.The creeks are the populace with all its stimulus and beauty I live there. just now the mountains are home. The wood duck flew away. I caught but a coup doeil of something like a bright torpedo that blasted the leaves where it flew. Back at the house I ate a bowl of oatmeal often easyr in the day came the long slant of demoralize that means good moveing. If the day is fine, any walk will do it all founts good. Water in particular beliefs its best, reflecting sad undersurfacet in the flat, and chopping it into graveled shal clinical depressions and whiteness chute and fizz in the riffles. On a morose day, or a poundy one, all(prenominal)things washed-out and lackluster but the piddle.It carries its own lights. I set out for the rail alley tracks, for the hill the flocks fly over, for the woods where the white female horse lives. But I go to the peeing. nowadays is one of those sharp January part cloudies in which light chooses an unexpected part of the landscape to trick out in gilt, and thusly shadow sweeps it away. You hunch over youre alive. You take abundant stairs, trying to savor the planets roundness arc among your feet. Kazantzakis takes that when he was young he had a pilferer and a globe. When he sinlessd the dealary, it would perch on the globe and sing.All his life, wandering the earth, he felt as though he had a s similarlygeary on top of his mind, singing. air jacket of the house, Tinker creek moulds a sharp loop, so 6 / Annie Dillard that the creek is both in back of the house, south of me, and also on the former(a) side of the road, north of me. I like to go north. There the afterwardsnoon sun hits the creek just right, mystifyingening the reflected unforgiving and lighting the sides of steers on the depository financial institutions. Steers from the pasture across the creek make it down to drink I ever flush a rabbit or dickens there I sit on a clearen eubstance in the shade and watch the squirrels in the sun.There are twain separated wooden fencing materials susp set asideed from cables that cross the creek just upstream from my maneuver-trunk bench. They keep the steers from escaping up or down the creek when they list to drink. Squirrels, the neighborhood children, and I use the downstream fence as a swaying bridge across the creek. But the steers are there today. I sit on the downed tree and watch the sorry steers slip on the creek bottom. They are all bred grouse charge disembodied spirit, beef insure, beef hocks. Theyre a human mathematical product like rayon. Theyre like a line of business of shoes.They turn in cast iron shanks and tongues like foam insoles. You beart confabulate through to their brains as you support with other animals they reserve beef fat behind their meat, beef stew. I cross the fence 6 feet above the water, walking my hold down the rusty cable and tightroping my feet on the narrow edge of the planks. When I hit the other aver and terra firma, some steers are bunched in a knot between me and the barbedwire fence I want to cross. So I jerkyly rush at them in an enthusiastic sprint, flailing my arms and hollering, Lightning copperhead Swedish meatballs They flee, be quiet in a knot, stumbling across the flat pasture. I stand with the wind on my face. When I slide under a barbed-wire fence, cross a cranial orbit, and run over a platan trunk felled across the water, Im on a teeny-weeny island make like a tear in the middle of Tinker Creek. On one side of the creek is a steep forested bank the water is swift and deep on that side of the island. On the other side is the level orbital cavity I walked Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 7 through next to the steers pasture the water between the field and the island is shallow and sluggish.In summers low water, flags and bulrushes grow along a serial of shallow pools cooled by the lazy current. Water striders patrol the rear film, crayfish hump along the silt bottom eating filth, anurans bitch and glare, and shiners and small bream hide among grow from the sulky verdancy hero sandwichs eye. I come to this island every month of the year. I walk somewhat it, stopping and staring, or I straddle the sycato a greater extent log over the c reek, attracting my legs out of the water in winter, trying to say. Today I sit on dry grass at the end of the island by the slower side of the creek. Im drawn to this spot.I come to it as to an oracle I return to it as a man years later will breakk out the battlefield where he lost a leg or an arm. A couple of summers ago I was walking along the edge of the island to mold what I could captivate in the water, and mainly to scare anurans. Frogs save an inelegant way of selectings off from occult positions on the bank just onward 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 sedgelike edge of the island, I got better and better at comprehend frogs both in and out of the water.I learned to have intercourse, slowing down, the difference in texture of the light reflected from mud bank, water, grass, or frog. Frogs were nimble all around me. At the en d of the island I noticed a small reverse lightning frog. He was exactly half in and half out of the water, feeling like a schematic diagram of an amphibian, and he didnt jump. He didnt jump I crept self-coloredsome-nighr. At last I knelt on the islands winter killed grass, lost, dumbstruck, staring at the frog in the creek just four feet away. He was a very small frog with wide, dull eye. And just as I looked at him, he easy crumpled and began to sag.The spirit vanished from his look as if snuffed. His skin 8 / Annie Dillard emptied and drooped his very skull acquiremed to collapse and settle like a kicked tent. He was shrinking before my eyeball like a deflating football. I watched the taut, glistening skin on his shoulders ruck, and rumple, and gloaming. Soon, part of his skin, formless as a pricked balloon, lay in planless folds like bright scum on top of the water it was a monstrous and terrifying thing. I gaped bewildered, appalled. An oval shadow hung in the water behind the drained frog and then the shadow glided away. The frog skin bag started to sink.I had read about the giant water crucify, but never keep an eye onn one. Giant water bug is truly the bid of the creature, which is an enormous, heavy-bodied brown bug. It take in insects, tadpoles, fish, and frogs. Its prehension forelegs are mighty and hooked inward. It seizes a victim with these legs, hugs it tight, and paralyzes it with enzymes injected during a vicious bite. That one bite is the hardly bite it ever takes. through with(predicate) the puncture shoot the poisons that dissolve the victims muscles and bones and organsall but the skinand through it the giant water bug sucks out the victims body, reduced to a juice.This event is quite common in warm fresh water. The frog I byword was organism sucked by a giant water bug. I had been kneeling on the island grass when the unrecognizable flap of frog skin colonised on the creek bottom, swaying, I stood up and brushed the knees of my pants. I couldnt catch my breath. Of course, galore(postnominal) carnivorous animals devour their run alive. The usual method acting turn backms to be to subdue the victim by downing or grasping it so it spatet flee, then eating it whole or in a series of bloody bites. Frogs eat everything whole, overeating prey into their mouths with their thumbs.People bring forth actualisen frogs with their wide jaws so full of live dragonflies they couldnt close them. Ants take ont even have to catch their prey in the spring they swarm over newly hatched, featherless birds in the come tightfitting and eat them tiny bite by bite. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 9 That its rough out there and chancy is no surprise. Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac. But at the same m we are also created. In the Koran, Allah asks, The heaven and the earth and all in between, thinkest thou I made them in jest? Its a good question.What do we think of the created universe, spanning an unthinkable void with an unthinkable intemperance of forms? Or what do we think of nothingness, those sickening put acrosses of time in any direction? If the giant water bug was not made in jest, was it then made in earnest? Pascal uses a fine term to get the notion of the creators, once having called forth the universe, spell his back to it Deus Absconditus. Is this what we think happened? Was the thought of it there, and idol absconded with it, ate it, like a wolf who disappears round the edge of the house with the Thanksgiving turkey? perfection is subtle, Einstein said, but not malicious. Again, Einstein said that nature conceals her mystery by means of her essential grandeur, not by her cunning. It could be that divinity has not absconded but spread, as our vision and brain of the universe have spread, to a fabric of spirit and sense so grand and subtle, so powerful in a new way, that we behind only feel sievely of its hem. In making the thi ck darkness a swaddling dress circle for the sea, God set bars and doors and said, Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further. But have we come even that far?Have we rowed out to the thick darkness, or are we all playing pinochle in the bottom of the boat? Cruelty is a mystery, and the take of pain. But if we describe a world to compass these things, a world that is a long, inhumane patch, then we bump against some other mystery the inrush of power and light, the canary that sings on the skull. Unless all ages and races of custody have been deluded by the same quite a little hypnotist (who? ), there look intoms to be such a thing as beauty, a good will wholly gratuitous. About five years ago I apothegm a mockingbird make a 10 / Annie Dillard traight vertical descent from the roof gutter of a four-story building. It was an act as careless and spontaneous as the curl of a stem or the kindling of a star. The mockingbird took a single step into the air and dropped. His wings we re still folded against his sides as though he were singing from a limb and not falling, accelerating thirty-two feet per reciprocal ohm per second, through empty air. scantily 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.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 locomote in the forest. The answer essential be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The l vitamin Eernmostward we can do is try to be there. Another time I motto other(prenominal) wonder sharks off the Atlantic coast of Florida. There is a way a wave rises above the ocean sensible horizon, a trinity-sided wedge against the gear. If you stand where the ocean b reaks on a shallow beach, you see the brocaded water in a wave is translucent, shot with lights. sensition late afternoon at low tide a hundred spacious sharks passed the beach near the mouth of a tidal river in a victuals frenzy. As each green wave rose from the riotous water, it illuminated within itself the six-or eight-footlong bodies of twisting sharks. The sharks disappeared as each wave furled 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 make out whats going on here. If these dangerous vents are random combinations of matter run amok, the yield of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 11 millions of monkeys at millions of typewriters, then what is it in us, hammered out of those same typewriters, that they ignite? We dont know. Our life is a faint tracing on the break through of mystery, like the id le, curved tunnels of leaf miners on the face of a leaf. We must somehow take a wider view, look at the whole landscape, in truth see it, and describe whats going on here. Then we can at least whimper the right question into the swaddling band of darkness, or, if it comes to that, consort 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 expresstime 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 show has een on fire from the word go. I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everyplace I look I see fire that which isnt flint is ti nder, and the whole world sparks and f saplesss. I have come to the grassy island late in the day. The creek is up icy water sweeps under the syca more(prenominal) than than log bridge. The frog skin, of course, is perfectly gone. I have stared at that one spot on the creek bottom for so long, tensioning past the rush of water, that when I stand, the opposite bank seems to stretch before my eyes and flow grassily upstream.When the bank settles down I cross the sycamore log and enter again the enlarged plowed field next to the steers pasture. The wind is terrific 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 amazed I can even key objects. And suddenly the light runs across the land like a comber, and up the trees, and goes again in a nictate I think Ive gone blind or died. When it comes again, the light, you hold your breath, and if it stays you fo rget about it until it goes again.Its the most beautiful 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 peculiarly the bare branches of trees, so that everywhere plate 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 dizzying, drawn whizz I felt when the creek bank reeled. At four-thirty the sky in the east is clear how could that big blackness be blown? xv minutes later another darkness is coming overhead from the northwestward and its here. Everything is drained of its light as if sucked . Only at the horizon do inky black mountains give way to far-flung, lighted mountainslighted not by direct illumination but rather paled 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 sandstone cliffs solicit and swell. Suddenly 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 right-down 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 left but an unreal blue and a few banked clouds low in the north. both(prenominal) sort of carnival magician has been here, some fasttalking 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 finds, 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 go on down the road. It never stops. New shows run 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. ilk the place upright who went over the mountain, I went out to see what I could see. And, I might as well warn you, like the bear, all that I could see was th e other side of the mountain more of same.On a good day I might catch a glimpse of another wooded ridge wheeling under the sun like water, another bivouac. I propose to keep here what Thoreau called a meteorological ledger of the mind, telling some tales and describing some of the sights of this rather tamed valley, and exploring, in idolise and apprehension, 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 learned 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 learn. 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 steeprts us from our first 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 halt.It is a fierce game I have joined because it is being played anyway, a game of both skill and chance, played against an unobserved adversarythe conditions of timein which the payoffs, which may suddenly arrive in a blast of light at any jiffy, might as well come to me as anyone else. I stake the time Im grateful to have, the energies Im glad to direct. I take chances getting stuck on the board, so to speak, unable to move in any direction, which happens replete, God knows and I risk the searing, exhausting nightmares that plunder rest and line me face down all night long in some muddy 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 lost or something sees me, s ome enormous power brushes me with its clean wing, and I resound like a beaten bell. I am an explorer, then, and I am also a stalker, or the instrument of the hunt itself. certain(prenominal) Indians used to carve long grooves along the wooden shafts of their arrows. They called the grooves lightning label, because they resembled the curved wisecrack 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 trail Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 15 dripped on broad-leaves, on stones, that the barefoot and trembling archer can follow into whatever deep or lofty wilderness it leads. I am the arrow shaft, carved along my space by unexpected lights and gashes from the very sky, and this book is the straying trail of blood. Something pummels us, something barely sheathed. Power broods and lights.Were pla yed on like a metro our breath is not our own. James Houston describes two young Eskimo young ladys sitting cross-legged on the ground, mouth on mouth, blowing 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 decline it crumples the waters skin. I watch the running sheets of light raised on the creeks surface. The sight has the appeal of the sharply 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 sail precipitous 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 centime 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 reason I always hid the penny along the same stretch of si dewalk up the street. I would cradle it at the roots of a sycamore, say, or in a hole left by a chipped-off piece of sidewalk.Then I would take a piece of chalk, and, starting at either end of the block, draw huge arrows leading up to the penny from both directions. After I learned to write I labeled the arrows SURPRISE AHEAD or MONEY THIS WAY. I was greatly excited, during all this arrow-drawing, at the thought of the first lucky passer-by who would assemble 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 thinking about comprehend. There are lots of things to see, un enwrapped gifts and free surprises. The world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast broadside from a munificen t 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 kit paddling from its den, will you count that sight of a chip of copper only, and go your remorseful way?It is dire impoverishment indeed when a man is so malnourished and fatigued that he wont stoop to pick up a penny. But if you cultivate a healthy want 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 lifetime 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 wait 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. P robably 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 expansive mood, exulted, What a rich book might be made about buds, including, by chance, sprouts It would be nice to think so. I cherish mental images I have of trinity perfectly 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 organic picture, but from the various 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 patently ascend bodily into heaven the brightest oriole fades i nto leaves.These disappearances nonplus 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 dancer 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 September 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 byword 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 freightless as well as unperceivable. 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, caught 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 directly 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 cap. 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 crossed 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 hidden in the leaves a duck, a house, a boy, a bucket, a zebra, and a boot? Specialists ca n find the most incredibly wellhidden things. A book I read when I was young recommended an easy way to find caterpillars to rear you simply find some fresh caterpillar fallings, look up, and theres your caterpillar.More recently an author advised me to set my mind at residue about those gobs of cut stems 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 stem 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 little piles of cut stems into which, presumably, the author of the book is constantly stumbling. If I cant see these minutiae, I still try to keep my eyes open. Im always on the lookout for antlion traps in arenaceous soil, monarch pupae near milkweed, skipper larvae in locust leaves. These things are utterly common, and Ive not seen one. I bang on grok trees near water, but so far no flying squirrels have appeared. In flat country I watch every sunset in fancys of seeing the green ray.The green ray is a seldom-seen streak of light that rises from the sun like a spurting spurt 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 smashed on the ground. I squint at the wind because I read Stewart Edward clean I have always maintained that if you looked fast 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 chapte r of The Mountains to the subject of seeing deer As soon as you can forget the naturally frank and construct an fake perspicuous, then you too will see deer. But the artificial obvious is hard to see. My eyes account for less than one percent 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 incidentally 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 aphorism what painters are up against the thing wasnt green at all, but the color of wet hickory bark. The lover 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 lam e horse, my aunt volunteered.The rest of the family joined in Only place to turn on that one is his neck Looks like we better shoot the poor thing, on account of those wonderful 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 mistake with a papier-mache moose the real horses seemed to gaze at the monster 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 percent of the light that comes from the sun the rest is infrared and some little ultraviolet, perfectly apparent to many animals, but in evident to me.A nightmare network of ganglia, charged and liberation 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 one-celled 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 backdrop of deep pines, you dont see the fog itself, but streaks of clearness directionless 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 straw man of the unseen appalls. We estimate now that only one atom dances altogether in every cubic meter of intergalactic space. I scintillate and squint. What planet or power yanks Halleys Comet out of orbit? We oasist seen that force moreover its a question of distance, density, and the sensationalism of reflected light. We rock, cradled in the swaddling band of darkness.Even the simple darkness of night whispers suggestions to the mind. Last 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- manufactured island, it is slow and shallow, fringed softly in cattail marsh. At this spot an astonishing bloom of life supports commodious 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 muskrats.Th e 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 switch its materialisation 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 liquified as beans were gliding down with the current in a series of easy, weightless push-offs, as men bound on the moon.I didnt know whether to trace the progress of one turtle I was sure of, risking glutinous my face in one of the bridges spiderwebs made invisible by the gathering dark, or take a chance on seeing the chicane, 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, s o fast. 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 uneasy 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, cabbage-eyed, or a near sparrow kicking in the dry flood debris slung at the foot of a willow. Tremendous follow out Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 23 roiled the water everywhere I looked, big action, inexplicable. A tremor welled up beside a gawk 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 suppress, and I still sat transfixed. A distant airplane, a delta wing out of nightma re, made a gliding 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 integrated together and seemed to dissolve before my eyes. Darkness pooled in the cleft of the creek and rose, as water collects in a well. Untamed, dreaming lights flickered over the sky. I axiom 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 central to China. And out of that violet, a sudden enormous black body flex over the water. I saw only a cylindrical sleekness. organise 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 close d, and the lights went out. I walked 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 sweeping 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 moving 64,800 miles an hour. The solar system as a whole, like a merry-go-round 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 tarantelle 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 lette r, a great deal of light falls on everything. If we are blinded by darkness, we are also blinded by light. When too much light falls on everything, a special terror results. Peter Freuchen describes the infamous kayak sickness to which Greenland Eskimos are prone. The Greenland fjords are peculiar for the spells of all told allay weather, when there is not enough wind to blow out a match and the water is like a sheet of glass. The kayak hunting watch 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 realm of the unreal. The inborn 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 fill outly paralyzed, he just falls and falls. Some hunters are especially give tongue to with this panic, and bring ruin and sometimes starvation to their families. Sometimes here in Virginia at sunset low clouds on the southern or Federal 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 spy 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 fat al attraction, and hissing perhaps at last into the ocean.But 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 wrong 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 conservatively 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 importees 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 introduce 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. at once I stood on a crookback rock on nearby Purgatory Mountain, watching through binoculars the great autumn 26 / Annie Dillard vend 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 ta n object, a hawk the size of an elephant, turned out to be the browned bough of a nearby loblolly pine. I followed a sharp-shinned hawk against a featureless 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, voiceless and blinded, from their tiny, domed 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 slop some creek water in a jar and when I get home I dump it in a white chinaware 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 sky in the bowl. At length I choose one individual and give myself over to its predilection 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 case its running out of oxygen. Maybe I should get a tropic 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 mysterious light 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 f ringes of garments of things both great and small. No finale explains, no bivouac offers real haven or rest. But it could be that we are not seeing something.Galileo thought comets were an optical prank. This is fertile 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, castellated 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 jump-starts, 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 grand book by Marius von Senden, called Space and Sight. When Western surgeons discovered how to perform impregnable cataract exploits, they ranged across Europe and America operating on dozens of men and women of all ages who had bee n blinded by cataracts since birth. Von Senden collected accounts of such cases the histories are fascinating. numerous pay backs had tested their uncomplainings sense perceptions and ideas of space both before and after the operations. The vast majority of affected roles, 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, conf apply it with roundness. Before 28 / Annie Dillard the operation a doctor would give a blind patient a city block 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 permit him touch them now he had no clue whatsoever what he was seeing. One patient called lemonade true because it pricked on his tongue as a square shape pricked on the touch of his hands.Of another postoperative 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. consequently 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. Other doctors report their patients own statements to similar effect. The room he was inhe knew to be but part of the house, yet he could not conceive 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 newly spy, vision is pure sensation unencumbered by meaning The girl went through the get word 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 an extensive 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 comprehend 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, practiced 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 gropes for the boot until he finally gets hold of it. But even at this stage, after three weeks encounter of seeing, von Senden goes on, space, as he conceives it, ends with opthalmic 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 cursorily 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 resist him as tactual objects do.In walking about it also strikes himor can if he pays attentionthat he is continually passing in between t he colors he sees, that he can go past a visual object, that a part of it then steadily disappears from view and that in pain of this, however he twists and turnswhether entering the room from the door, for example, or returning 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 effort regard 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, continuing 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 hassle be brought to look at objects in his neighborhood but more 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 asylum for the blind, finally blurted out, No, really, I cant stand it any longer 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 rapid 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 dishonored 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 values 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 muted, 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 doctor 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 dazzled 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 ri pe in the valley orchards. When I woke in the morning, color-patches wrapped round my eyes, intricately, leaving not one unfilled spot. All day long I walked among shifting color-patches that parted before me like the going 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 random 32 / Annie Dillard over the whole dazzling sweep.But I couldnt sustain the illusion of flatness. Ive been around for too long. Form is condemned to an eternal danse macabre 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 panoplied 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 kind of terrible sense. What gnosticism is this, and what physics? The fluttering patch I saw in my glasshouse window plate 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, stretching 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 angel 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, enlightenment 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 analogy 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 ru nning description of the present. Its not that Im observant its just that I talk too much. Otherwise, especially in a strange place, Ill never know whats happening. 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 storm 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 close 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 muddy sand in skittery schools. Again and again, one fish, then another, turned for a split second across the current and flash the sun shot out from its silver side. I couldnt watch for it.It was always just happening someplace 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 olive 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 blurred 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, mute and perfect, and I saw the linear flashes, gleaming silver, like stars being born at random down a rolling gyre 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 walkover 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 noise of profitless interior babble that keeps me from seeing just as surely as a newspaper dangled before my eyes. The effort is really a Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 35 discipline requiring a lifetime of utilize struggle it marks the literature of saints and monks of every order East and West, under every rule and no rule, discalced and shod. The worlds ghostly geniuses seem to discover universally that the minds muddy river, this unvarying 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 acro ss a hundred deserts after any lunatic at all.