Fears

I have had Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek on my bookshelf for the last four years, and so I was very excited to have it on the syllabus so that I could finally dig into it.

In high school, I had a teacher who was very much influenced by Dillard, and so I have encountered her before; An American Dream is just as great as this one, along with her story “The Death of the Moth.” But my high school teacher made us read the second chapter of this book on Seeing, and the quote, “It is dire poverty indeed when a man is so malnourished and fatigued that he won't stoop to pick up a penny” (17) is one that I am fondly familiar with.

So, finally getting into this book, I was as satisfied as I could be with the language, although at times I wonder about the economy of it, and I was less impressed with following her argument on the creator and more excited about vision in general. I can't remember when it was, but a few classes ago I was thinking about Marius von Senden's Space and Sight, which Dillard mentions, and it was only until reading it that I remembered where I had originally heard that idea, and it was here (27). But anyway, I'm sort of fascinated with the idea that we truly do “learn to see,” and that in learning to see we exclude ourselves from seeing anything really differently. We learn to see in containers, if you will, we develop outlines and spacial reasoning for ideas – we literally see in language. “Seeing of course is very much a matter of verbalization” (33).

When I was younger, at some point my eye became infected and I had to learn to take eye drops. This was a horrible process for myself and my mother. I fought as hard as I could, not wanting to keep my eyes open, not wanting to be calm and collected, I screamed and fought against her until she finally just said, “You could go blind if we don't do this.” Now, whether or not that was seriously a concern at the time or if it was just a clever tactic, I don't really remember, but the thought sank in and I eventually got over it, quieted down and let her put eye drops into my eye.

The fear of having something in my eye was replaced with a new one, the fear of not being able to see anything at all. It's something that has stayed with me to this day, and I'm sure it has for others', too. Of course, the fear has become extended to my hearing, my memory, recently to my ability to speak, and overall the process of aging itself. It seems like a conundrum that the more we learn and the more we are able to process, the less our bodies are physically able to do anything with it. The experience that is supposed to allow us to expand our minds renders us incapable of doing anything with it, at the very end.

“'Yes,' said Rabbi Elimelekh, 'in my youth I saw that too. Later on you don't see these things anymore.'" (32)

We become so hardened in our ways of experiencing the world that we close ourselves off to the rest of the world. Maybe that's really what death is. When we run out of new information to process.

One of my favorite stories, written by Sylvia Plath, describes a woman who is unable to imagine things like her husband can, she is unable to dream. One part goes like this: 

If, Agnes mourned, in some sweet hallucination an octopus came slithering towards her across the floor, paisley-patterned in purple and orange, she would bless it. Anything to prove that her shaping imaginative powers were not irretrievably lost; that her eye was not merely an open camera lens which recorded surrounding phenomena and left it at that (“The Wishing Box”). 

This story wrestles with that same fear that I've had ingrained in me; the fear of not physically seeing, of not mentally seeing – of being entirely useless, a thing that just records instead of analyses.

I think Dillard is trying to inspire us to keep looking; to keep imagining a different world, as well as being aware that the world around us exists in ways that we won't ever be able to see, but we are blessed enough to see what we can while we're here.