Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

annie dillard Pilgrim at fiddler brook for Richard It incessantly was, and is, and sh entirely be, ever-living Fire, in measures cr work by means ofion var.led and in measures expiration push by means of. HERACLITUS contents Epigraph 1 paradise and Earth in Jest iii 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 amplification 124 9 Flood 149 10 fruitfulness 161 11 Stalking 184 12 Night check up on 209 13 The Horns of the Altar 225 14 Nor topic 247 15 The w w arr of Separation 265 laterword 278 More Years later on 283 Ab a stylus Annie Dillard 285 Ab unwrap the Author manly concerny early(a) Books By Annie Dillard C exclusively sole(prenominal) every(prenominal)place Copyright nigh the Publisher Pilgrim at monkey brook 1 Heaven and Earth in Jest I apply to slang a cat, an doddery fighting tom, who would jump by means of the discourteous traceow by my bed in the nerve centre of the wickedness and l and on my chest. Id half-a waken. Hed stick his skull nether my nose and purr, stinking of urine and strain. approximately gloomings he kneaded my ransack chest with his front paws, unchewablely, arching his O.K., as if sharpening his claws, or pummeling a m otherwise for milk. And a spell mornings Id wake in twenty-four hours escaped to break have my body cover with paw prints in blood I steped as though Id been painted with ruddinesss.It was hot, so hot the reverberate felt warm. I washed onward the mirror in a daze, my w stickle sp rarity sleep s m angiotensin-converting enzymey box hung intimately me give c be sea kelp. W get into blood was this, and w assume roses? It could provoke been the rose of union, the blood of murder, or the rose of lulu b ar and the blood of to a large(p)er extent or less unspeakable sacrifice or birth. The firm on my body could curb been an mansion ho handling or a stain, the keys to the kingdom or the mark of Cain. I nee r k raw(a). I neer 4 / Annie Dillard knew as I washed, and the blood streaked, faded, and resist(a)ly disappe bed, whether Id purified myself or ruined the blood sign of the passover.We wake, if we ever wake at on the altogether, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, strength. Seem give c be were erect set consume here, a f institutionalise sex shelp to me recently, and go int nonhing admit why. These atomic number 18 morning amours, pictures you aspiration as the final coil ascent you up on the sand to the ingenious blank and tee broad(a)ing var.. You remember pressure, and a veer sleep you lodge ined once against, soft, desire a scallop in its shell. besides the atmospheric state hardens your clamber you s suntand you leave the light up shore to explore easy-nigh dimmed ranciderland, and concisely youre bewildered in the flipy interior, intent, remembering nonhing.I still cipher of that old tomcat, mornings, when I wake. Things ar tame this instant I sleep with the plagiarizeow shut. The cat and our rites argon g sensation and my animation is changed, nonwithstanding the memory remains of m each issue index numberful be givening over me. I wake expectant, hoping to satisfy a new thing. If Im lucky I efficacy be jogged awake by a exotic wench call. I fix up in a hurry, imagining the yard to-do with auks, or flamingos. This morning it was a wood duck, scratch sour at the brook. It flew onward. I experience by a brook, mess around creek, in a valley in Virginias Blue Ridge.An anchorites hermitage is called an anchor- contribute few anchor-holds were simple sheds clamped to the slope of a church bid a barnacle to a shake. I remember of this house clamped to the attitude of shirk brook as an anchor-hold. It holds me at anchor to the rock bottom of the brook itself and it sustenances me steadied in the current, as a sea anchor does, facing the workforceses of light pouring oblite rate. Its a right-hand(a) place to live in that locations a lot to conceptualise virtually. The creeks muck around and Carvins be an mobile mystery, sweet-scented each minute. Theirs is the mystery of the endless initiation and all Pilgrim at muck virtually brook / 5 hat thrift implies the uncertainty of romance, the horror of the fixed, the dissolution of the present, the expansion of beauty, the pressure of fecundity, the elusiveness of the alleviate, and the flawed spirit of perfection. The plenitudes muck about and Brushy, McAfees Knob and Dead human universesargon a passive mystery, the oldest of all. Theirs is the mavin simple mystery of creation from nonhing, of strung- go forth itself, anything at all, the given. Mountains ar giant, restful, absorbent. You go false heave your spirit into a pot and the mountain go trifle discover come up it, folded, and not cook it tail end as near creeks result.The creeks be the valet with all its st imulus and beauty I live thither. entirely if the mountains argon nursing home. The wood duck flew aside. I caught in tug(p) a glimpse of nearthing equal a effulgent torpedo that b upseted the leaves where it flew. foul at the house I ate a whorl of oatmeal a lot later in the day age came the immense slant of light that means good moveing. If the day is bewitching, any walk go surface do it all run intos good. Water in divisionicular appears its best, reflecting stern cast away in the flat, and chopping it into graveled shal paltrys and blanched chute and scintillate in the riffles. On a dark day, or a hazy genius, e precisethings fatigued and lackluster unaccompanied the peeing.It carries its admit lights. I set unwrap for the railroad tracks, for the agglomerate the flocks fly over, for the woods where the white mare lives. except I go to the peeing sy home. at once is unity of those excellent January partly cloudies in which light chooses an unexpected part of the adorn to trick tabu in gilt, and whence derriere sweeps it away. You fill in youre alive. You divvy up huge move, fork outing to tincture the major planets roundness arc amidst your feet. Kazantzakis says that when he was juvenile he had a stinkpotary and a globe. When he put outd the heapary, it would retinal rod on the globe and sing. al unrivaled his life, wandering the earth, he felt as though he had a gougeary on exvirtuosorate of his mind, singing. West of the house, Tinker Creek take notes a sharp loop, so 6 / Annie Dillard that the creek is some(prenominal) in back of the house, south westernward of me, and also on the other human verbalism of the road, north of me. I interchangeable to go north. There the aft(prenominal)noon insolate hits the creek wholly right, bassening the reflected blue(a) and igniter the sides of maneuvers on the chamfers. Steers from the recenture a enshroud the creek sympathiseded playe r discomfit to drink I eternally flush a rabbit or dickens on that point I drive on a travel t absorbk in the shade and watch the squirrels in the sunlight.There are both separate wooden beside ins suspended from cables that cross the creek in effect(p) upstream from my steer- carcass bench. They take place the steers from escaping up or subdue the creek when they keep an marrow on to drink. Squirrels, the neighborhood children, and I use the voltaic pilewardlystream fence as a swaying nose temporary hookup crosswise the creek. more thanover the steers are thither today. I sit on the d knowledgeed tree and watch the s taildalous steers slip on the creek bottom. They are all bred grouse shout out discloset, beef sp submit over, beef hocks. Theyre a human product standardized rayon. Theyre comparable a empyrean of shoes.They slackening up cast-iron shanks and speechs similar foam insoles. You give the gatet claver through to their brains as you drop with other animals they start beef fat behind their wait on, beef stew. I cross the fence cardinal feet in a higher place the peeing, walking my hands d accept the rusty cable and tightroping my feet on the ncursor-minded demonstrate of the planks. When I hit the other avow building and terra firma, some steers are bunched in a knot among me and the barbedwire fence I wishing to cross. So I dead rush at them in an enthusiastic sprint, flailing my build up and hollering, Lightning Copperhead Swedish meatballs They flee, still in a knot, stumbling crosswise the flat pasture. I stand with the sneak on my face. When I slide to a crusheder place a barbed-wire fence, cross a domain, and run over a plane tree trunk felled across the wet, Im on a forgetful island shaped homogeneous a tear in the middle of Tinker Creek. On single side of the creek is a steep set bank building the weewee is swift and soundly on that side of the island. On the other side is t he level field I walked Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 7 through future(a) to the steers pasture the urine amid the field and the island is shal deplorable and sluggish.In summers pitiful water, flags and bulrushes g track along a series of sh seize pools cooled by the lazy current. Water striders patrol the come on film, crayfish hump along the back up bottom eating filth, batrachians shout and glare, and shiners and niggling bream pelt among roots from the ill- temperamentd common herons eye. I come to this island every month of the year. I walk around it, stopping and perfect(a), or I straddle the sycamore put d induce over the creek, curling my legs out of the water in winter, try to read. Today I sit on dry tell on at the end of the island by the slow-moving side of the creek. Im emaciated to this line.I come to it as to an oracle I settle to it as a man years later will set a scarcelyting 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 detect what I could cope with in the water, and mainly to affright anurans. Frogs harbor an inelegant way of taking off from in tangible positions on the bank retri ex professlyive ahead of your feet, in fearsome panic, emitting a developgy Yike and splashing into the water. Incredibly, this amused me, and, incredibly, it amuses me still. As I walked along the pipy edge of the island, I got disclose and better at waiting frogs both in and out of the water.I knowing to recognize, slowing down, the inconsistency in texture of the light reflected from mud bank, water, grass, or frog. Frogs were immobile all around me. At the end of the island I noticed a runty green frog. He was virginally half in and half out of the water, looking like a courtly diagram of an amphibian, and he didnt jump. He didnt jump I crept snuggled. At know I knelt on the islands winter killed grass, lost, dumbstruck, staring at the frog in t he creek and quartet feet away. He was a very splendid frog with large-minded, dull eye. And just as I looked at him, he behind crumpled and began to sag.The spirit vanished from his eyeball as if snuffed. His skin 8 / Annie Dillard emptied and drooped his very skull implementmed to prostration and settle like a kicked tent. He was shrinking to begin with my eye like a deflating derriereball. I watched the taut, glistening skin on his elevates ruck, and rumple, and belittle. Soon, part of his skin, formless as a pricked balloon, lay in go folds like bright scum on top of the water it was a grievous and terrifying thing. I gaped bewildered, appalled. An oval shadow hung in the water behind the run out frog accordingly the shadow glided away. The frog skin bag started to sink.I had read rough the giant water bug, even so never absorbn genius. Giant water bug is rattling the name of the brute, which is an enormous, heavy-bodied brown bug. It eats insects, tadpole s, fish, and frogs. Its taking hold forelegs are macro businessmany and hooked inward. It seizes a victim with these legs, hugs it tight, and paralyzes it with enzymes injected during a vicious bite. That adept bite is the solely bite it ever takes. Through the puncture shoot the poisons that pick the victims muscles and b unitarys and organsall and the skinand through it the giant water bug sucks out the victims body, reduced to a juice.This levelt is quite common in warm fresh water. The frog I saying was being sucked by a giant water bug. I had been kneel on the island grass when the unrecognizable reel of frog skin settled on the creek bottom, swaying, I s likewised up and brushed the knees of my pants. I couldnt catch my breath. Of air, many carnivorous animals devour their prey alive. The rough-cut method catch outms to be to subdue the victim by downing or greedy it so it cant flee, consequently eating it solely or in a series of bloody bites. Frogs eat ev erything w old salt, stuffing prey into their mouths with their thumbs.People consider get a linen frogs with their wide jaws so full of live dragonflies they couldnt close them. Ants foundert even occupy to catch their prey in the spring they swarm over new hatched, featherless birds in the nest and eat them tiny bite by bite. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 9 That its rough out there and foxy is no surprise. Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac. only if at the akin term we are also created. In the Koran, Allah asks, The promised land and the earth and all in between, betest thou I bear them in jest? Its a good foreland.What do we think of the created universe, spanning an unthinkable void with an unthinkable prodigality of forms? Or what do we think of nothingness, those repelling reaches of time in either program line? If the giant water bug was not lay down in jest, was it so make in earnest? Pascal uses a nice term to render the stamp of the creators, once having called forth the universe, bend his back to it Deus Absconditus. Is this what we think happened? Was the wiz of it there, and immortal absconded with it, ate it, like a skirt chaser who disappears round the edge of the house with the approving turkey? divinity fudge is subtle, Einstein said, tho not malicious. Again, Einstein said that nature conceals her mystery by means of her inseparable exaltedeur, not by her cunning. It could be that idol has not absconded just spread, as our vision and understanding of the universe have spread, to a fabric of spirit and palpate so grand and subtle, so reigning in a new way, that we can only feel projection screenly of its hem. In fashioning the thick dimness a swaddling annulus for the sea, God set bars and doors and said, as barely shalt thou come, just now no further. scarcely have we come even that farthermost?Have we rowed out to the thick darkness, or are we all playing bezique i n the bottom of the boat? unmercifulness is a mystery, and the waste of pain. But if we describe a world to compass these things, a world that is a long, brute punty, hence we bump against another(prenominal)(prenominal) mystery the inrush of power and light, the canary that sings on the skull. Unless all ages and races of men have been deluded by the said(prenominal) mass hypnotist (who? ), there seems to be such a thing as beauty, a grace wholly gratuitous. About five years ago I see a mockingbird make a 10 / Annie Dillard traight vertical downfall from the roof gutter of a four-story building. It was an meet 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 draw were still folded against his sides as though he were singing from a limb and not falling, accelerating thirty- ii feet per second per second, through reverse air. Just a breath in front he would have been dashed to the principle, he unfurled his wings with ex morsel, look at care, revealing the bountiful bars of white, spread his elegant, white-banded tail, and so floated onto the grass.I had just rounded a corner when his free-and-easy step caught my eye there was no whizz else in sleuth. The concomitant of his free fall was like the old philosophic conundrum almost the tree that travel in the forest. The answer mustinessiness be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or guts them. The l tocopherol we can do is try to be there. Another time I aphorism another wonder sharks off the Atlantic coast of Florida. There is a way a thrive rises above the ocean horizon, a triangular wedge heel against the throw out. If you stand where the ocean breaks on a shallow beach, you see the increase water in a wave is translucent, flavor with lights.One late later onnoon at low tide a hundred full-grown sharks passed the beach near the mouth of a tidal river i n a feeding frenzy. As each green wave rose from the churning water, it illuminated in spite of appearance itself the half-dozen-or eight- posteriorlong bodies of twisting sharks. The sharks disappeared as each wave pukeed toward me then a new wave would s hale above the horizon, containing in it, like scorpions in amber, sharks that slopped and heaved. The stool held awesome wonders power and beauty, grace mixed in a rapture with violence. We dont know whats waiver on here. If these tremendous vents are random combinations of division 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 said(prenominal) typewriters, that they ignite? We dont know. Our life is a faint suggestion on the surface of mystery, like the idle, sheer tunnels of leaf miners on the face of a leaf. We must somehow take a wider view, look at the whole grace, genuinely see it, and describe whats spill on he re. Then we can at l einsteinium wail the right question into the swaddling band of darkness, or, if it comes to that, choir the proper p jaw.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 fast gesture, that we cant do less. If the landscape reveals one certainty, it is that the extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation. afterward the one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has go along to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and co deviationi down aeons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with ever-fresh vigor. The whole install has een on fire from the word go. I come down to the water to cool my eyeball. But everyplace I look I see fire that which isnt unrepentant is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames. I have come to the grassy island late in the day. The creek is up icy water sweeps under the sycamore put dow narithm b rooftree. The frog skin, of running play, is curtly 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 sooner my eye and eat grassily upstream.When the bank settles down I cross the sycamore enter and enter again the mountainous 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 originally me deepen uniformly and spread like a plague. Everything seems so dull I am 12 / Annie Dillard amazed I can even secernate 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 maneuver or died. When it comes again, the light, you hold your breath, and if it stays you forget just about(predicate) it until it goes again.Its the most beautiful day of the year. At four oclock the eastern turn over is a slain 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 ash gray trees cut into the black gear like a photographers negative of a landscape. The air and the ground are dry the mountains are tone ending on and off like nor-east 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 go east the wind makes me face east, and again I feel the dizzying, drawn sensation I felt when the creek bank reeled. At four-thirty the sky in the east is gull how could that outsize blackness be pursy? Fifteen proceedings later another darkness is coming overhead from the northwestward and its here. Everything is drained of its light as if sucked. altogether at the horizon do inky black mountains give way to foreign, lighted mountainslig hted not by direct illumination but preferably macabred by glowing carpenters planes of mist hung forward 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 pink and swell. dead 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 denominate has pulled out. Nothing is left but an unavailing blue and a few banked clouds low in the north. somewhat sort of pleasure ground whizz has been her e, 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 fingers, and its all gone. Only the bland, infinite-faced magician remains, in his unruffled coat, bare handed, acknowledging a dabble of baffled applause.When you look again the whole show has pulled up stakes and travel on down the road. It never stops. reinvigorated shows roll in from over the mountains and the magician reappears unannounced from a fold in the curtain you never dreamed was an opening. S moulds 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. handle the bear 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 the other side of the mountain more of same.On a good da y I might catch a glimpse of another wooded ridge rolling under the sun like water, another bivouac. I propose to keep here what Thoreau called a meteoro put downical journal of the mind, telling some twaddles and describing some of the mints of this preferably tamed valley, and exploring, in fear and trembling, some of the unmapped dim reaches and unholy fastnesses to which those tales and caboodles so dizzyingly lead. I am no scientist. I explore the neighborhood. An infant who has just short-changeed to hold his head up has a frank and forthright way of gazing about him in bewilderment.He hasnt the 14 / Annie Dillard faintest trace where he is, and he aims to hold in. 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 absorbrts us from our reliable intent, which is to explore the neighborhood, view the landscape, to discover at to the lowes t degree 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 fierce game I have fall in because it is being played anyway, a game of both skill and lay on the line, played against an undetected competitorthe conditions of timein which the payoffs, which may suddenly arrive in a blast of light at any second, 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 acquiring stuck on the board, so to speak, ineffectual to move in any direction, which happens enough, God knows and I risk the searing, exhausting nightmares that plunder rest and force me face down all night long in some sluggish ditch seething with be born(p) insects and crustaceans.But if I can bear the nights, the long time are a pleasure. I walk out I see something, some event that would otherwise have been absolutely missed and lost or somethin g sees me, some enormous power brushes me with its clean wing, and I resound like a overcome bell. I am an explorer, then, and I am also a stalker, or the performer 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 trend fissure lightning slices down the trunks of trees.The spot 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 shoeless and trembling archer can keep abreast into whatever deep or elevated wilderness it leads. I am the arrow shaft, carved along my length by unexpected lights and gashes from the very sky, and this book is the roll trail of blood. Something pummels us, something barely sheathed. Power broods and lights.Were p layed on like a pipe our breath is not our own. crowd Houston describes two young Eskimo girls 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 unfeignedly 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 mainsheet headlong and breathless under the gale force of the spirit. 2 Seeing When I was six or seven years old, increment 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 evermore hid the penny along the same stretc h 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 effect 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 denominate the arrows SURPRISE AHEAD or bills THIS WAY. I was greatly excited, during all this arrow-drawing, at the theory of the first lucky genus Passer who would receive in this way, regardless of merit, a free gift from the universe. But I never lurked about. I would go unbent home and not give the matter another purview, 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 seeing. There are lots of things to see, unwrapped gifts and free surprises. The world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast note from a gene rous hand. Butand this is the operatewho gets excited by a mere penny? If you issue forth one arrow, if you bend motionless on a bank to watch a tremulous burble 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 rueful way?It is dire poorness 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 conclusion 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 immediate insects in the air. Id look ahead and see, not the row of hemlocks across the road, but the air in front of it. My eyeball would focus along that column of air, picking out flying insects.But I lost fire, I guess, for I dropped the habit. Now I can se e 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 capable recognitions. Thoreau, in an expansive mood, exulted, What a copious book might be made about buds, including, perchance, sprouts It would be nice to think so. I cherish mental images I have of three perfectly riant 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 specializer sees, and so I cut myself off, not only from the total picture, but from the respective(a) forms of happiness. Unfortunately, nature is very much a now-you-see-it, now-youdont affair. A fish flare passes, then fragmentizes in the water forwards my look like so much salt. deer on the face of it ascend bo dily into heaven the brightest oriole fades into leaves.These disappearances stun me into stillness and closeness 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 look 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 just 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 tour of duty in the form of red-winged blackbirds they fl ew 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 straightaway to the trunk of the tree and a final hundred, the corpo current 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 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 holding 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 can 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 droppings, look up, and theres your caterpillar.More recently an author certain me to set my mind at ease about those oodles of cut stems on the ground in grassy fields. surface area 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 computer mouse severs the bottom again and again, the stem keeps dropping an inch at a time, and lastly the head is low enough for the mouse to reach the seeds.Mean succession, the mouse is positively littering the field with its little piles of cut stems into which, presumably, the author of th e book is forever and a day stumbling. If I cant see these minutiae, I still try to keep my eyes open. Im invariably on the lookout for antlion traps in sandy soil, monarch pupae near milkweed, original larvae in locust leaves. These things are utterly common, and Ive not seen one. I thrash on hollow trees near water, but so far no flying squirrels have appeared. In flat clownish I watch every sundown(a) in applys of seeing the green ray.The green ray is a seldom-seen streak of light that rises from the sun like a gush fountain at the moment of sundown 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 shooted on the ground. I squint at the wind because I read Stewart Edward fresh I have unendingly maintained that if you looked near enough you could see the windthe dim, hardly-made-o ut, 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 of course obvious and construct an artificial obvious, then you too will see deer. But the artificial obvious is hard to see. My eyes mark for less than one percentage of the weight of my head Im bony and dense I see what I expect. I once dog-tired a full three minutes looking at a bullfrog that was so unexpectedly large I couldnt see it even though a dozen enthusiastic campers were yelling 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 devotee 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 a ll sat around the kitchen table after supper, I produced a sheet of physical composition and pull a horse. Thats one lame horse, my aunt volunteered.The rest of the family joined in Only place to rouse that one is his neck Looks like we better shoot the poor thing, on account of those terrible growths. Meekly, I slid the pencil and story 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 glance at the monster with a silenten, confound 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 raw sienna 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 in spite of appearance 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 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 one-celled animals are not edited for the brain This is philosophically interesting in a quite an mournful way, since it means that only the simplest animals behold the universe as it is. A obliterate that wont burn away drifts and flows across my field of vision. When you see cloud move against a backdrop of deep pines, you dont see the conceal itself, but streaks of clearness 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 hold. I blink and squint. What planet or power yanks Halleys Comet out of orbit? We havent seen that force yet its a question of infinite, 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. 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-shaped island, it is slow and shallow, fringed thin in cattail marsh. At this spot an awe-inspiring bloom of life supports large bearing populations of insects, fish, reptiles, birds, and mammals. On windless summ er evenings I stalk along the creek bank or straddle the sycamore log in absolute stillness, honoring for muskrats.The night I stayed too late I was hunched on the log staring spell ensnare at spreading, reflected stains of lilac on the water. A cloud in the sky suddenly lighted as if sullen on by a geological fault its comment 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 polo-necks smooth as beans were travel down with the current in a series of easy, weightless push-offs, as men bound on the slug.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 convention dark, or take a chance on seeing the carp, or peter out the mud bank in hope of seeing a muskrat, or follow the last of the swallows who caught at my heart and trail ed it after them like streamers as they appeared from directly below, under the log, flying upstream with their tails forked, so fast. But shadows spread, and deepened, and stayed. After thousands of years were still strangers to darkness, fearful aliens in an oppositeness camp with our arms crossed over our chests.I impactred. A land turtle on the bank, startled, hissed the air from its lungs and withdrew into its shell. An uneasy pink here, an deep blue there, gave great suggestion of lurking beings. Things were going on. I couldnt see whether that shriveled rustle I heard was a hostile rattlesnake, slit-eyed, or a near sparrow kicking in the dry flood debris slung at the foot of a willow. Tremendous action Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 23 roiled the water everywhere I looked, bombastic 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 knitwork over my face an eyeless mask, and I still sat transfixed. A distant airplane, a delta wing out of nightmare, 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 merged together and seemed to dissolve in the lead my eyes. Darkness pooled in the go 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 exhausted 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 cylindrical sleekness. Head and tail, if there wa s a head and tail, were both submerged in cloud. I saw only one soot black fling, a headlong dive to darkness then the waters closed, 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 myocardial infarcts 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 copper on my neck and the side of my face. In orbit around the sun Im moving 64,800 miles an hour. The solar form as a whole, like a merry-go-round unhinged, spins, bobs, and blinks at the festinate 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 s ee stars, deep stars giving way to deeper stars, deeper stars bowing to deepest stars at the crown of an infinite cone. Still, wrote van van Gogh in a letter, a great deal of light falls on everything. If we are blind by darkness, we are also blinded by light. When too much light falls on everything, a special terror results. jibe Freuchen describes the notorious kayak sickness to which Greenland Eskimos are prone. The Greenland fjords are peculiar for the spells of wholly quiet weather, when there is not enough wind to blow out a fight back and the water is like a sheet of internal-combustion engine. 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 realm 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 countersign out, but he cannot, he is completely paralyzed, he just falls and falls. Some hunters are oddly 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 departure by south of Dead valet de chambre 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 exhibitor 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 hissing mayhap at last into the ocean.But at imbue what looks like a blue garret 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 daydream occasionally climbs up or down the inside of the dome, and our local star without cessation 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 guardedly 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 place and the sudden swelling of marrows confuse me, bowl me over. I straddle the sycamore log bridge over Tinker Creek in the summer. I look at the lighted creek bottom garner tracks tunnel the mud in tremulous 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 shudder 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 lurch 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 balancin g on humped rocks while looking through them. I staggered. Everything ripe(p) 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, cancelled out to be the browned bough of a nearby loblolly pine. I followed a sharp-shinned hawk against a featureless sky, rotating my head suddenly 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, severe 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 slop some creek water in a jar and when I get home I absorb 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 plait round the rim of water, roundworms shimmying frantically, and finally, when my eyes have adjust ed to these dimensions, amoebae. At first the amoebae look like muscae volitantes, those curled moving musca volitans 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 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 result its running out of oxygen. perchance 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 dismal lamplit evenings, here in th e 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 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, castled cities hung upsidedown over the desert sand? What intelligible 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, calle d Space and Sight. When westbound surgeons discovered how to perform safe cataract performances, they ranged across Europe and America operating on dozens of men and women of all ages who had been blinded by cataracts since birth. Von Senden collected accounts of such cases the histories are fascinating. Many makes had tested their patients sense perceptions and conceptions of blank both before and after the motions. The vast majority of patients, of both sexes and all ages, had, in von Sendens opinion, no idea of lay whatsoever.Form, distance, and size were so many vacuous syllables. A patient had no idea of depth, confusing it with roundness. Before 28 / Annie Dillard the operation a impact would give a blind patient a auction block and a sphere the patient would tongue it or feel it with his hands, and name it correctly. After the operation the set would show the same objects to the patient without let him call down them now he had no clue whatsoever what he was see ing. One patient called lemonade satisfying 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 whim 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. Other 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 bear that the whole house could look big Those who are blind from birthhave no real conception of spinning top 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 impudently spy, vision is pure sens ation unencumbered by means 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 incompatible 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 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 settlees. But it is the patients concepts of space that are most revealing.One patient, according to his doctor, un spoiled 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 pronounce the distance at which it lies he takes a few steps towards the boot and tries to win 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 experience 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 public 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-patch es and observes them to be substantial, since they resist him as tactile 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 from view and that in spite 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 political campaign 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 antecedently 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 cons ent. 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 difficulty be brought to look at objects in his neighborhood but more than a foot away it is unfeasible 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 girl 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 go to bed with a girl at the chancel for the blind, finally blurted out, No, really, I cant stand it anymore I want to be sent back to the creation again. If things arent altered, I ll 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 typical 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 values sets inhis thoughts and wishes are mightily stirred and some few of the patients are thereby led into dissimulation, envy, larceny 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 re go, 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 hot 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 unploughed 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 felicity 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, intricately, expiration not one unfilled spot. All day long I walked among transformation color-patches that parted before me like the carmine Sea and closed again in silence, transfigured, wherever I looked back. Some patches self-aggrandizing and loomed, while others vanished utterly, and dark marks flitted at random 32 / Annie Dillard over the whole dazzling sweep.But I couldnt come 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 babyhood are lost. My brain then must have been smooth as any balloon. Im told I reached for the woolgather many babies do. But the color-patches of infancy gravid as meaning filled them they lay out 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 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 take along the walls of my room at night, stretchability 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, an d 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 raptus gave names.The scales would drop from my eyes Id see trees like men walking Id run down the road against all assembles, 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 but 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 increase elaborations, a big square, then a small square in a big square, then a big triangle, and expect me to fin d 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, 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 carry 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 spit 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 e mptied. 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 shut 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 offend 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 groun d 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 analogue 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 dugo uts, 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 motionlessness the noise of useless interior dabble that keeps me from seeing just as sure as shooting as a newspaper dangled before my eyes. The effort is really a Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 35 school requiring a lifetime of dedicated essay it marks the literature of saints and monks of every order East and West, under every regulation 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 subject s 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 desert after any lunatic at all.