The Course of a Creek
Annie Dillard has always been a part of my life.
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is one of my mother’s favorite books of all time, up there with A Wrinkle in Time and The Little Prince (you can tell what kind of family we are, honestly). Because of her love for it, I eventually broke down and read the whole thing. I was entranced from the beginning to end. Her writing spoke to the deeply weird kid I was–and the deeply weird man I am. It rambled, tripped, flowed, bounced from concept to concept the same way my brain did. She let my mind soar in a way nothing ever had, a sort of literary Pale Blue Dot that sent me rocketing into the heavens, on purpose.
“The whole show has been on fire since the word go.”
This was the basis for my… I won’t call it a spiritual practice, because it isn’t, though some people would say it is. It’s a practice, sure, and it might look like spirituality if you squint, but what it really is is an indulgence of my chronically understimulated brain’s need to understand, to peer closely and find the structure in things. The profligacies, the intricacies, the colossi hurtling down eons (read the whole book, as I did; this is in the first chapter and by page 16, where it appears in my copy, you’ll be hooked), these complexities all exist meaninglessly. We make them into meaning. The making of meaning out of them is similar to the making of a pun, or a meal. The pieces are all here–we assemble them, and we try to set them spinning, and we see if the gears fly out and remove an eye. If this practice happens to improve my mental health and give structure to my life, then amen.
I believe I’ve seen the road sign for Tinker Creek, just once, while on a drive through the glorious Shenandoah River Valley. I don’t think I saw the creek itself; if I did, it was a pedestrian sort of trickle of water with a little bridge over it–the kind that you don’t notice is a bridge until you see the concrete barrier, if then. But Tinker Creek raised me, in a very tangible way. Dillard watched the water in those years at the creek, and I watched Dillard. She spun that groping, twisting thread of words she described in The Writing Life, a long, unwieldy line of words, a pair of tweezers to make the mast of the ship stand up inside the bottle. It’s something like an old cathode ray tube TV, in that I can see that creek, the platonic form of it, any time I conjure it up.
It was from Dillard and my mother that I learned to notice light. The gilding, frosting edge of it, the way it rests against cracked bark and casts a shadow behind a grain of dust, all of it. All the unconventional ways I talk about thunderstorms and the crunch of limestone laid down on the road by the logging company, all the ways I listen to the cold and the wind and the rustling of spring waking up, all of it’s down to her. She taught me it’s alright, it’s correct, even, to harbor a lust for the land you live on, a sort of thirst for the way it behaves when you sit still and watch it long enough.
Recently, I was made aware that Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania is, technically, an Appalachian city. That makes Dillard, who was born and raised there, an Appalachian writer. It’s another kinship I hope I share with her. She describes her childhood and the person she became as a result of it in An American Childhood, which is a memoir in the way Julius Caesar is a historical re-enactment. She writes about her past like she writes about amoeba, which is, to me, the best way to write about your past. She’s where I learned that you can treat people as part of the natural world without dehumanizing them. She never sits still when she writes. I view it as a sort of hyperactivity. She demonstrates a need to always be bouncing between the world, the people on it, the specks of life that make up the whole thing, and the cymatic patterns in the background microwave radiation of the universe.
Much like the world itself or a particularly industrious housecat, Dillard slaughters a thing in her observations, tosses it at your feet, and offers it to eat–or offers to duel you. She’s still doing it. Her website, self-maintained, slices through with the same all-nonsense frankness that her other work does. My sister once said that Dillard is too poetic to be truly enjoyable. She’s mistaken. Dillard isn’t poetic at all, I would argue. She’s just good at wandering artistically, and the line flickers across the screen faster than the eye can catch. The magnets in the stereo pull it a little off course, plant a few furrows in the subject matter, but that’s to be expected. Of course she’s influenced by the things she’s read. We keep shapes in our skin when we take off socks, after all.
If you’d like to read Dillard’s work, I can strongly recommend the three I’ve mentioned here. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is a book of essays, sort of, about nature and the ways that it shapes our reality. An American Childhood is a personal history of what it means to gain perspective as we grow up. The Writing Life is a very long essay about how to stop feeling sorry for yourself as a creative writer and simply do the work. All three are excellent, and serve as a perfect stepping-off point for her body of work.
