Thursday, September 23, 2010

More on Annie Dillard

Just something to think about:

"Nor presumably does baitfish consider itself baitfish."
I am about to spoil a big part of Annie Dillard's "The Maytrees," so if that book is on your list, read no further!

About a third of the way into the book, which is thick with rhyme, assonance, and alliteration (see, e.g., "He saw the tide line -- shell bits and turnip parings, paper, fish racks, shark cartilage, culch" or "Even the mudflat was matte"), Toby Maytree leaves his wife Lou. They had been very much in love and his departure is a shock that the characters spend the rest of the book absorbing. Lou copes by climbing a monument in town with broad views of "flat sky, flat sea, and flat land" of Cape Cod. High up in the salty air, surveying the scraped world below her, Lou begins to learn to let go.

"For one minute by her watch, she imagined liking Maytree impartially. For only one minute by her watch she saw him for himself. That day, having let go one degree of arc only, for one minute, she sighted relief. Here was something she could do. She could climb the monument every day and work on herself as a task."

Thirty pages later, her son Pete, a fisherman, has a similar desire to ascend out of emotional turmoil into cool recollection.

"Could he surmount his trash-ditch thoughts and work above them? Could he let them come and go without bias, minnows schooling about his feet? Simply slosh through them and let the waves wash over? He could build on the mainmast a crow's nest. With his life, with his mind, he would build him a crow's nest, rope by rope and plank by plank for as long as it took."

Lou's actual monument has become a monument of the mind -- a way of being apart, above, out of the wrack and wreckage of investment and disappointment. Lou, heaving herself up actual steps, realizes the distance she is covering and the immensity of her task. She is quitting Toby like a drug and can only stand to do so for a minute at a time. Pete, too, recognizes the paintstaking nature of the work of self-removal. Rope by rope. Plank by plank. For as long as it takes.

Sunday, September 12, 2010

The Garden & The Window

L started teaching last week, which I am tremendously excited about. The first topic he tackled was close reading and he introduced it with a metaphor: imagine that the text you are reading is a garden you are looking at through a window. You can look through the window at the flowers and notice their colors, their crowns of petals, the sunlight tracing each blade of grass. Maybe there is a bench in the garden. Who is it for? When was it built? Or you can shift the angle of your gaze and focus on the window itself. Is the glass smudged? How wide are its panes? Can you see your own reflection in it?

Most people when they read look at the garden: the flowers are the characters whose lives we admire and watch grow. It is lovely to look at a garden; we may feel many things. Students and scholars of literature when they read must learn to look at the window: how does the depth and texture of the language through which we read shape our view of the world on the other side?

Learning to see the window takes time -- even learning to care about the window takes time. After all, the garden is so beautiful. And sometimes looking at the window seems silly. Isn't transparency in a window's very nature -- its sole defining feature? Do we do a window a disservice by refusing to look past it?

But over time, the glass' grain emerges. It becomes possible to see within it a bank, a thread where a core of liquid cooled, and the scarce scratches scored by beads of sand colliding. The garden may be pretty but the window is epic, ancient, the site of revolutionary encounters between irrepressible forces.

It is only after the window has occupied you for so long and with such intensity that you have ceased entirely even to wonder about the garden that you make a most surprising discovery: there is no garden there at all -- whether it has disappeared or whether it never existed in the first place is a question for experts beyond your level.

What L didn't tell his students is that if you look at the window long enough, one day it will be the only thing you can see.