Reading ......Annie .........Dillard ........slowly

I have I think read most if not all of Annie Dillard’s books or so I thought.  I recently discovered that she had written a couple of poetry books.  I was re-reading possibly the most famous of her books Pilgrim at Tinker Creek published in 1997, a book that again I think my mother gave me. It has been compared to Henry Thoreau’s book Waldon although for my own taste Pilgrim is the better book. Both though are slow reads for me. I can only take so much at one go. It’s not so much the detail but the depth of the writing. I should at this stage out myself as a highly dyslexic person who reads very well but probably at a third of the speed of most people, so what I mean by slow read’ is picking it up reading and then reading again and then sitting often stunned by what I have just read. Sometimes it’s just sometime later that I think back to it and Kaprow! I am catapulted back into the enormity of it. Dillard writes of such everyday experiences but draws out the extraordinary complexity of them. Thinking of the book now it’s got a lot in it about looking for muskrats. She spends much time seeking out these creatures, watching, stalking them. But it is not so much muskrats, as the extraordinary found within the ordinary that she, is actually, stalking. Pilgrim is a reflection of ,living in the house situated on Tinker Creek in which she lived for a year, but actually its about a lifetime of seeking out the divine in the whole of life. I guess Buddhism may call it something akin to enlightenment, but Dillard is no real Buddhist she is just alive.

I think that Wendell Berry is another author who seems to be able to do this. He is also a poet. Perhaps there is something in the brevity, the stark nature of the stanza that allow for the reel of images weather actual or metaphorical to unfold through the words on the page, but poetry can capture things in a way that prose struggles with. Berry is a farmer and man of the soil, something of which he has a passion. My father in law was a man such like. Nine generations of farmers in the same place, knowing this from just the paperwork held in the family archives. We are sadly losing such prophets of the land because of the changing pattern of the farming community and the cheap food that we all demand and need. I can picture him sitting on his small tractor at the end of the day looking back over the land much of which he farmed and on paper held as his but that he never really owned, it was always a part of the landscape no matter who's name was on the deed. I once found out that he had as a boy learned to plough with a horse. Berry had written that the plough drawn in his case by a mule had never been bettered, just as nothing had been invented better than a pencil for writing. Ploughing with a horse as with a mule both allowed for some places not accessible by tractor were ploughable, but perhaps more important horse ploughing did not compress the soil in the way machinery did so as not to cause so much soil erosion. I think that for both of them it was also something about being in touch with the land, getting your hands dirty.

There is a close up photo of my father in law with his face smiling and looking like a ploughed field.

I guess the point is that whatever the format, work song, picture there is a need to slow down and in so doing we find the detail that is not ‘the devil’ but the figure print of the divine in what we see. It’s just there as Dillard reminds us, there for the looking, if only we looked a little.

I wonder when the last time was when you spent time just sitting and looking?

Walking up the hill path home sometime ago there were two young women crouched down on the path at the foot of the seat they had been sitting on. They were both looking intently with laughter on their faces at the ground. When they saw me the leapt back up onto the seat. Still laughing. As I passed by, I asked what had been so funny.

‘We were just watching the ants’ they said.

There on the path was a sweet with several ants gamely trying to lift, drag, push generally trying to move the to them huge, sweet mass presumably to their nest. It was an impossible task but to leave that much sugar would have been crazy. The girls had been watching this caught up in the absurdity of the struggle, fascinated at the tenacity of these small insects in the face of their task. Suddenly for them the tiny had become their world. Perhaps they had similar such Herculean tasks to face perhaps they had given the ants the sweet, who knows but there was genuine joy in what was going on.

I have been stood in the middle of the river Teigen supposedly fishing and watched a single leaf as it drifted in spirals and slides down river journeying to who knew where but so gracefully, caught in a current that had taken the dead brown leaf and made it a picture of grace and beauty. It was a bittersweet moment because it was Autumn, the fishing was not hard for a compitant fisherman but I had made it hard work that day. I think all fishermen say that it is about being there not about what you catch, I put them all back these days anyway. But it was true that day. There were trout in the river and Gayling as well but the river seemed to just leap up and take away the interest in them. When not in spate the river is often fairly clear and the bars of the rocks form ledges where the fish often lay. With polaroid glasses you can see through the water, the gravel or mud on the bottom and occasionally the fast glint of a fish that can see you as well if not better than you see them. The surface of the current may not be carried down to the depths so counter currents bring unexpected things your way. I have tried to capture some of this with a camera but never well. Perhaps somethings should just be left as they are . . . .

It can seem obvious to say that we need these moments to slow the pace of life, we bundle them up into commercialized packages and give them names like 'mindfulness' and meditation' but for me at least authors like Dillard and Berry just sa 'Look and you shall also see and then look deeper'.

Can I invite you (if not to read some Annie Dillard ) then to spend a bit of time this week jus watching something. Wait and watch and see what it reveals to you, a cloud, a leave a raindrop down the window anything traditionally if there are no muskrats around a blade of grass will do.

Thank you for reading this today

Chris Rowberry 

Annie Dillard

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek  

Teaching a stone to talk

Poetry 

Tickets for a prayer wheel 

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