When
Dillard begins trying to see the gifts of the universe, she simply looks, being
observant as she walks around Tinker Creek. She knows that if you look for
clues like the cut wheat-stalks of grain, she will find mice, or if she looks
for caterpillar droppings, she should be able to find the caterpillar (Dillard
1). However in the reflective style that is intertwined with her observations,
Dillard also realizes that experts or lovers of certain subjects (like experts
of mice or horses) are able to see things that the mere observer misses. At one
point an airplane flew overhead and its shadow on the creek bottom gave sight
to gifts Dillard could not see outside of the shadow. “At once a black fin slit
the pink cloud on the water…I saw hints of hulking and underwater shadows, two
pale splashes out of the water, and round ripples rolling close…and out of that
violet, a sudden enormous black body arced over the water” (Dillard 4). As she
reflects on this, she recalled a time when she saw clouds reflected in the
water that she could not see in the sky. She later read the explanation that “polarized
light from the sky is very much weakened by perfection, but the light in clouds
isn’t polarized. So invisible clouds pass among visible clouds, till all slide
over the mountains; so a greater light extinguishes a lesser as though it
didn’t exist” (Dillard 4). Dillard admits that although this experience led her
to see the beauty of the water, she saw it because she stayed out later than
was wise. She could have easily walked into a rattlesnake or other creature.
Another time she got so caught up in walking hawks through her binoculars that
she nearly staggered off a cliff (Dillard 5). As Dillard sought finding the
gifts of nature, she tried to relearn how to see before understanding.
Dillard read a book about the
experiences of blind patients who had surgery and could then see. They had no
understanding of what they were looking at and so saw the world in an entirely
different way. Dillard attempted to recreate what they must have seen but
learned that it didn’t work as knowledge of what she is seeing is too ingrained.
There was a child that “when her doctor took her bandages off and led her into
the garden, the girl who was no longer blind saw ‘the tree with the lights in
it’” (Dillard 7). Dillard saw the color-patches the newly sighted did for a
while, but could not sustain it. She lamented, “But the color-patches of
infancy swelled as meaning filled them; they arrayed themselves in solemn ranks
down distance which unrolled and stretched before me like a plain. The moon
rocketed away. I live now in a world of shadows that take shape and distance
color, a world where space makes a kind of terrible sense…the fluttering patch
I saw in my nursery window—silver and green and shapeshifting blue—is gone; a
row of Lombardy poplars takes its place, mute, across the distant lawn”
(Dillard 8). She wishes that the people who had just received their sight would
have been given brushes to paint what they were seeing before understanding
took over and then we could see that as well (Dillard 8). But there is another
type of seeing, she moves on, seeing by letting go and giving into the senses.
Dillard says that letting go is like
going from seeing the world through the lens of a camera, looking one from shot
to the next, or letting the camera go and allowing everything in. In one moment
she was looking into the creek, not seeing much, when she let go and “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 world’s tuning, mute and perfect,
and I saw the linear flashes, gleaming silver, like stars being born at random
down a rolling scroll of time. Something broke and something opened. I filled
up like a new wineskin. I breathed an air like light; I saw a light like water.
I was the lip of a fountain the creek filled forever” (Dillard 9). She warns
that although wonderful, staying in that sense-filled state can lead to a type
of madness as it will “flow unheeded in the dim channels of consciousness”
(Dillard 9). Dillard concludes that with all of her searching that “Seeing is a
gift and surprise” (9).
Dillard’s search in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek turns out to be an interesting guide to go
about seeking the beauty and sometimes horrors of nature by looking at what
isn’t normally seen through the natural eye, by trying to glimpse what might be
seen without labeling it with our own understanding, and by using our senses and
letting go. What Annie Dillard learned is that “although the pearl
may be found, it may not be sought…a gift and a total surprise” (9). Dillard
searched for years among the peach trees to see the same light the girl who had
been blind once saw, but it was when she wasn’t looking and “was walking along
Tinker Creek thinking of nothing at all and I saw the tree with the lights in
it. I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and
transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame. I stood on the grass with the
lights in it, grass that was wholly fire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed.
It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked
breathless by a powerful glance” (Dillard 9). Just like finding a penny in an
unexpected way, the universe gave Annie Dillard the prize she had been seeking
all along.
Dillard, Annie. “Seeing.” Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, HarperPerennial, 1974. WayBack Machine, web.archive.org/web/20160702065318/http:/dcrit.sva.edu/wp-content/uploads/1974/01/Seeing.pdf
