I am not sure why I blog, to tell the truth, but now I am doing it, I find I am beginning to surprise myself with the things I blog about. A couple of things I’ve written about recently strike me as coming from what is usually some hushed and dimly-lit private world. Why are those things in retreat, like that? Who knows. Up until only a few years ago, I always thought anything I wrote became irrevocably stained and sullied once it was released by me to be read by anyone else. A control thing, maybe. I never revised stuff because I unfailingly hated it as soon as it was let out. Now – thanks in large part to PFFA, heh, which makes rhinos of us all – I see that things can go from you without you losing ownership and that allowing that out and back in cycle actually strengthens whatever it is. Why would not that process apply to many of those so-sensitive things in our lives? It also seems there’s always a lot of creaking old stuff cluttering up the hushed and dimly-lit places. Shouldn’t other, newer stuff move in - and out - occasionally, since presumably that hushed place is some kind of emotional processing station? Let’s keep production moving – kick the old sensitivities out, let new ones in. No bottlenecks, comrades.Annie Dillard has been in that place for me, I don’t really know why. I think I was probably eighteen, or not much older, when I read Living Like Weasels from Teaching a Stone to Talk and was completely blown away, both by the weasel and the metaphor she made from him. Then onto Pilgrim at Tinker’s Creek (set in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains where, as we know, the world began and will end) and Holy the Firm, which continued the blowing-away process. All three editions in my ownership are tattered and hugely worn from being read and read and re-read. More recently, I read For the Time Being, with the same fascination. What is it with her? All the works I have mentioned are supposedly prose works, but they’re not, they’re really lovely long prose poems. Then she has this thing about imparting the most fascinating facts about the physical world, combining science and poetry from line to line in the most mind-boggling (sick-envy-inducing) way.
I have only just turned to her as a poet, just got Tickets for a Prayer Wheel in the mail. This is an old early collection (from 1974, before she won her 1975 Pulitzer for Tinker Creek). Am still at the begining of it, this to end for now:
My Camel
by Annie Dillard
(A dialogue of self and soul)
I snared him with a jackknife
and a four-foot length of gut
before his eyes were open,
or they were shut
against me. I cut
His tongue out; I seared
his bloody tongue-root shut.
Sun in your eye,
desert-heart:
do you even know I’m here?
I chew honey-locust pods;
I spit them down his throat.
For years I forget my camel.
He wanders, edged in light,
caked in grit, like a cloud.
Does he wander.
He scents up empty stream beds
with his nostril slits;
he kneels to sleep –
I watch him through the glass.
He’s upside down
in the sky; behind
a pyramid, he splits
and crosses the lightest lakes
like Moses. Oh artful,
shaggy, folded:
I write the words
of your name on the lintel,
the gates of my house,
like a cloud
on my hands’ binding,
between my eyes,
so like a cloud.
