Read An Annie Dillard Reader Online
Authors: Annie Dillard
An Annie Dillard Reader (27 page)
I
GREW UP IN
P
ITTSBURGH
in the 1950s, in a house full of comedians, reading books. Possibly because Father had loaded his boat one day and gone down the Ohio River, I confused leaving with living, and vowed that when I got my freedom, I would be the one to do both.
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Sometimes after dinner, when my sisters and I were young, Mother could persuade Father to perform Goofusâto “do” Goofus. Goofus, he explained, was an old road-show routine, older than vaudeville, that traveling actors brought to the cities of the young republic, and out into the frontier towns. It was a pantomime, a character, and a song.
Doing Goofus, Father shambled, holding his tall frame unstrung like one of those toy figures whose string collapses when you press the bottoms of their stands. He walked onstage a hayseed, a farm boy, a rube, sticking his neck forward. He sang the syncopated song, dipping his knees mock-idiotically on the beats:
I was born on a farm down in loway,
Flaming youth who was bound that he'd fly awayâ¦
Between verses of the song the rube stepped forward and concentrated on some absurdity, like balancing on his finger an imaginary hair plucked from his head. He stiffened the hair with his fingers and, wincing horribly, inserted it into one of his ears. He pushed it through to the other ear till he could grasp it; then he drew it sawing back and forth through his skull with both hands, in one ear and out the other, grinning stupidly in the character of the rube. That was the flaming youth.
“Do you know what you call that?” he asked as he sat back down. The intelligence had come back to his eyes. What? “That,” he said. “What you do up there. That is called a âbusiness.'”
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Our father taught us the culture into which we were born. American culture was Dixieland above all, Dixieland pure and simple, and next to Dixieland, jazz. It was the pioneers who went West singing “Bang away my Lulu.” When someone died on the Oregon Trail, as someone was always doing, the family scratched a shallow grave right by the trail, because the wagon train couldn't wait. Everyone paced on behind the oxen across the empty desert, and some families sang “Bang away my Lulu” that night, and some didn't.
Our culture was the stock-market crashâthe biggest and best crash a country ever had. Father explained the mechanics of the crash to young Amy and me, around the dining-room table. He tried to explain why men on Wall Street had jumped from skyscrapers when the stock market crashed: “They lost everything!”âbut of course I thought they lost everything only when they jumped. It was the breadlines of the Depression, and the Okies fleeing the Dust Bowl, and the proud men begging on city streets, and families on the move seeking workâdusty women, men in black hats pulled over their eyes, haunted, hungry children: what a mystifying spectacle, this almost universal misery, city families living in cars, farm families eating insects, becauseâwhy? Because all the businessmen realized at once, on the same morning, that paper money was only paper. What terrible fools. What did they think it was?
American culture was the World's Fair in Chicago, baseball, the Erie Canal, fancy nightclubs in Harlem, silent movies, summer-stock theater, the California forty-niners, the Alaska gold rush, Henry Ford and his bright idea of paying workers enough to buy cars, P.T. Barnum and his traveling circus, Buffalo Bill Cody and his Wild West Show. It was the Chrysler Building in New York and the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco; the
Concord
and the
Merrimack
, the Alamo, the Little Bighorn, Gettysburg, Shiloh, Bull Run, and “Strike the tent.”
It was Pittsburgh's legendary Joe Magarac, the mighty Hungarian steelworker, who took off his shirt to reveal his body made of high-grade steel, and who squeezed out steel rail between his knuckles by the ton. It was the brawling rivermen on the Ohio River, the sandhogs who dug Hudson River tunnels, silver miners in Idaho, cowboys in Texas, and the innocent American Indian Jim Thorpe, who had to give all his Olympic gold medals back. It was the men of every race who built the railroads, and the boys of every race who went to war.
Above all, it was the man who wandered unencumbered by family ties: Johnny Appleseed in our own home woods, Daniel Boone in Kentucky, Jim Bridger crossing the Rockies. Father described for us the Yankee peddler, the free trapper, the roaming cowhand, the whalerman, roustabout, gandy dancer, tramp. His heroes, and my heroes, were Raymond Chandler's city detective Marlowe going, as a man must, down these mean streets; Huck Finn lighting out for the territories; and Jack Kerouac on the road.
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Every time we danced, Father brought up Jack Kerouac,
On the Road
.
We did a lot of dancing at our house, fast dancing; everyone in the family was a dancing fool. I always came down from my room to dance. When the music was going, who could resist? I bounced down the stairs to the rhythm and began to whistle a bit, helpless as a marionette whose strings jerk her head and feet.
We danced by the record player in the dining room. For fast dancing, Mother only rarely joined in; perhaps Amy, Molly, and I had made her self-conscious. We waved our arms a lot. I bumped into people, because I liked to close my eyes.
“Turn that record player down!” Mother suggested from the living room. She was embroidering a pillow. Father opened the cabinet and turned the volume down a bit. I opened my eyes.
“Remember that line in
On the Road?
” He addressed me, because between us we had read
On the Road
approximately a million times. Like
Life on the Mississippi
, it was the sort of thing we read. I thought of his blue bookplate: “Books make the
man.” The bookplate's ship struggled in steep seas, and crowded on too much sail.
I nodded; I knew what he was going to say, because he said it every time we played music; it was always a pleasure. We both reined in our dancing a bit, so we could converse. Sure I remembered that line in
On the Road
.
“Kerouac's in a little bar in Mexico. He says that was the only time he ever got to hear music played loud enoughâin that little bar in Mexico. It was in
On the Road
. The only time he ever got to hear the music loud enough. I always remember that.”
He laughed, shaking his head; he turned the record player down another notch. If it had ever been at all, it had been a long time since Father had heard the music played loud enough. Maybe he was still imagining it, fondly, some little bar back away somewhere, so small he and the other regulars sat in the middle of the blaring band, or stood snapping their fingers, drinking bourbon, telling jokes between sets. He knew a lot of jokes. Did he think of himself as I thought of him, as the man who had cut out of town and headed, wearing tennis shoes and a blue cap, down the river toward New Orleans?
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I was gaining momentum. It was only a matter of months. Downstairs in the basement, I played “Shake, Rattle, and Roll” on the piano. Why not take up the trumpet, why not marry this wonderful boy, write an epic, become a medical missionary to the Amazon as I always intended? What happened to painting, what happened to science? My boyfriend never seemed to sleep. “I can sleep when I'm dead,” he said. Was this not grand?
I was approaching escape velocity. What would you do if you had fifteen minutes to live before the bomb went off? Quick: What would you read? I drove up and down the boulevards, up and down the highways, around Frick Park fast, over the flung bridges and up into the springtime hills. My boyfriend and I played lightning chess, ten games an hour. We drove up the Allegheny River into New York and back, and up the Monongahela River into West Virginia and back. In my room I shuffled cards. I wrote poems about the sea. I wrote poems imi
tating the psalms. I held my pen on the red paper label of the modern jazz record on the turntable, played that side past midnight over and over, and let the pen draw a circle hours thick. In New Orleansâif you could get to New Orleansâwould the music be loud enough?
1987
BIVOUAC
I
The she-wolf whelps in thunder.
The newborn prophet licks his palms
to clean his face like a cat.
You wake on the shore, weeping,
biting your own salt knee.
You remember, don't you?
You remember the sea,
the deep sea, the pressure,
and the pebbled shallows
where the nurse sharks wait
to heave you toward the lightâ¦.
You wake on the shore,
sand and gravel under your back,
wrack and sand in your hair.
Blink, and the light gives way
to the fixed and waterless stars.
You wake. The ocean
is furling its green tons down.
Volcano weather.
The sharp-shinned hawk
cleaves with intricate strain
to the skin of air rivers rising,
spreading, peeling half over
and off to the side like a leaf.
This is the mainland,
this heaping of stones and the pines.
And the barnaclesâ
remember?â
when the water came over,
you waved your feathery arms.
The sky never ceases to widen,
hollow, over your head.
You can fashion
a fish-life here on the coast,
willow-strip, driftwood
and dugout, or go in
to a land already planted.
You remember, don't you?
You remember the forest,
the deep jungle, the tree ferns,
the club mosses, the green air;
turning a golden eye to watch
the lizards still on the stonesâ¦.
There's forest inside, straight wood,
a mud clearing, and a man
on his knees shaking feathers,
owl feathers, owl tongues, twisted
in sinew and thong.
And there's desert inside,
caves, and a woman
splitting her lips with a thorn.
This is your son, and your daughter.
You remember, don't you?
You remember the plains,
the wind, the hot grass,
hefting a gritty rock
to split thick bones and suck
the bloody greaseâ¦.
Follow the rivers, look for a pass,
or follow the ridges, rise.
There are no eyes on you.
You were kindled from a clot
and washed on the beach like a conch
from one more witless wave.
II
You have never been so tired.
The wooded ridges roll under the sun
like water, and none of the mountains home,
and all of the mountains bivouac,
campaigner; lean-to, hoe-down, shack-up: run.
III
A baby is a pucker
of the earth's thin skin;
he swells, circles, and lays him down.
The lakes fill, the ice rolls back
(the ice rolls up!), the ice rolls back,
the skin wrinkles and splitsâ
fishes, grassâthe skin
bunches and smooths.
You die, you die.
First you go wet
and then you go dry.
This is the end,
the dry channel,
the splintered sluice,
where you slake your thirst on chert.
There's a spread to the light
and a rising, a way
that even the air is a cobra;
and at night
the rock moon and the desert rock
bat the dead light back
and forth till it snaps.
You sleep
under a ledge away from the riverbed;
you wake
to the sun looming low like the mouth
of a tunnel to hell.
A scale-legged bird is eating a snake.
Dig for mice. Smell
your shoulder. There's been
flash-flood, dust-storm,
rivers run in and move out
like haunts, and still those two round lights,
the fire-light and the ash;
and still you wake, you wake a million days,
and walk.
Oh yes,
it's a hard slide,
it's a rough winter,
what with the sharp gravel
and acid salts in the sand.
You're softshell and peeled,
with nothing to keep out the windâ
the williwaw, cheechakoâ
that splits the cell and drains it dry as ash.
IV
You have walked beyond
the highest tide and seen
how, where birds have landed,
walked, and flown,
their tracks begin in sand,
and go, and suddenly end.
Our tracks do that, but we go down.
Where have we been,
and why do we go down?
At night your best-loved dead appear
back, and start their stare.
You wake; you greet them;
you wake again; the dead still steer
their sleeping course,
their sleeping heels in the air.
Hold fast.
Duck.
There's a flat-out, flinging way
the clouds begin their dive,
there's a scurf of earth and air
so thin
you'd step clear through
or blow clean off.
You remember it all:
how you lungless lay in slime,
how you shied across the plain
on your sharp split hoof,
the mist, the sip of ozone on the tongueâ¦.
You wake. This is the mainland.
Here you must look
at each thing with the elephant eye:
greeting it now for the first time,
and bidding, forever, good-bye.
Ease her when she pitches.
Keep your tinder dry.
1972
THE MAN WHO WISHES TO FEED ON MAHOGANY
Chesterton tells us that if someone wished to feed exclusively on mahogany, poetry would not be able to express this. Instead, if a man happens to love and not be loved in return, or if he mourns the absence or loss of someone, then poetry is able to express these feelings precisely because they are commonplace
.
âB
ORGES, INTERVIEW IN
E
NCOUNTER
, APRIL 1969
Not the man who wishes to feed on mahogany
and who happens to love and not be loved in return;
not mourning in autumn the absence or loss of someone,
remembering how, in a yellow dress, she leaned
light-shouldered, lanky, over a platter of pearsâ
no; no tricks. Just the man and his wish, alone.
That there should be mahogany, real, in the world,
instead of no mahogany, rings in his mind
like a gongâthat in humid Haitian forests are trees,
hard trees, not holes in air, not nothing, no Haiti,
no zone for trees nor time for wood to grow:
reality rounds his mind like rings in a tree.
Love is the factor, love is the type, and the poem.
Is love a trick, to make him commonplace?
He wishes, cool in his windy rooms. He thinks:
of all earth's shapes, her coils, rays, and nets,
mahogany I love, this sunburnt red,
this close-grained, scented slab, my fellow creature.
He knows he can't feed on the wood he loves, and he won't.
But desire walks on lean legs down halls of his sleep,
desire to drink and sup at mahogany's mass.
His wishes weight his belly. Love holds him here,
love nails him to the world, this windy wood,
as to a cross. Oh, this lanky, sunburnt cross!
Is he sympathetic? Do you care?
And you, sir: perhaps you wish to feed
on your bright-eyed daughter, on your baseball glove,
on your outboard motor's pattern in the water.
Some love weights your walking in the world;
Some love molds you heavier than air.
Look at the world, where vegetation spreads
and peoples air with weights of green desire.
Crosses grow as trees and grasses everywhere,
writing in wood and leaf and flower and spore,
marking the map, “Some man loved here;
and one loved something here; and here; and here.”
1971
FOUR FOUND POEMS
Poems seldom require explanation, but these do. I did not write a word of them. Other hands composed the poems' linesâthe poems' sentences. These are found poems. They differ, however, from what we usually think of as found poems. Instead of presenting whole texts as “found,” these poems derive from sentences of broken text. The poems are original as poems; their themes and their orderings are invented. Their sentences are not. Their sentences come from the books named; I lifted them. Sometimes I dropped extra words; I never added a word. (There is a forthcoming book of such,
Mornings Like This
.)
Dash It
âM
IKHAIL
, P
RISHVIN
,
N
ATURE'S
D
IARY
, 1925,
TRANS
. L. N
AVROZOV
How wonderfully it was all arranged that each
Of us had not too long to live. This is one
Of the main snagsâthe shortness of the day.
The whole wood was whispering, “Dash it, dash it⦔
What joyâto walk along that path! The snow
Was so fragrant in the sun! What a fish!
Whenever I think of death, the same stupid
Question arises: “What's to be done?”
As for myself, I can only speak of what
Made me marvel when I saw it for the first time.
I remember my own youth when I was in love.
I remember a puddle rippling, the insects aroused.
I remember our own springtime when my lady told me:
You have taken my best. And then I remember
How many evenings I have waited, how much
I have been through for this one evening on earth.
1993
I Am Trying to Get at Something Utterly Heart-Broken
.
âV.
VAN
G
OGH, LETTERS
, 1873-1890,
ED.
I. S
TONE, TRANS
. J
OHANNA VAN
G
OGH
I
At the end of the road is a small cottage,
And over it all the blue sky.
I am trying to get at something utterly heart-broken
.
The flying birds, the smoking chimneys,
And that figure loitering below in the yardâ
If we do not learn from this, then from what shall we
learn?
The miners go home in the white snow at twilight.
These people are quite black. Their houses are small.
The time for making dark studies is short.
A patch of brown heath through which a white
Path leads, and sky just delicately tinged,
Yet somewhat passionately brushed.
We who try our best to live, why do we not live more?
II
The branches of poplars and willows rigid like wire.
It may be true that there is no God here,
But there must be one not far off.
A studio with a cradle, a baby's high chair.
Those colors which have no name
Are the real foundation of everything.
What I want is more beautiful huts far away on the heath.
If we are tired, isn't it then because
We have already walked a long way?
The cart with the white horse brings
a wounded man home from the mines.
Bistre and bitumen, well applied,
Make the colouring ripe and mellow and generous.
III
A ploughed field with clods of violet earth;
Over all a yellow sky with a yellow sun.
So there is every moment something that moves one
intensely.
A bluish-grey line of trees with a few roofs.
I simply could not restrain myself or keep
My hands off it or allow myself to rest.
A mother with her child, in the shadow
Of a large tree against the dune.
To say how many green-greys there are is impossible.
I love so much, so very much, the effect
Of yellow leaves against green trunks.
This is not a thing that I have sought,
But it has come across my path and I have seized it.
1993
An Acquaintance in the Heavens
âM
ARTHA
E
VANS
M
ARTIN, WHO SEEMED LONELY IN
T
HE
F
RIENDLY
S
TARS
, 1907,
REV
. D
ONALD
H
OWARD
M
ENZEL
, 1964
A window in my bedroom opens towards
The northeast. Many times I have suddenly
Opened my eyes in the night. Betelgeuse
Pushes its red face up over the horizon.
One begins in February to watch the handle
Of the Dipper, so clearly pointing to something
Important just below the horizon.
It has pulled into the view the steady
Shining face of Arcturus. The hawks
And crows are among the high trees.
There comes a soft June evening. The blue
Jays have become stealthy. One walks
To the end of the porch and looks for Altair.
