SeeingAnnie Dillard(from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, HarperPerennial, 1974)
When I was six or seven years old, growing up in Pittsburgh, I used to take a precious penny ofmy own and hide it for someone else to find. It was a curious compulsion; sadly, I’ve never beenseized by it since. For some reason I always “hid” the penny along the same stretch of sidewalkup the street. I would cradle it at the roots of a sycamore, say, or in a hole left by a chipped-offpiece of sidewalk. Then I would take a piece of chalk, and, starting at either end of the block,draw huge arrows leading up to the penny from both directions. After I learned to write I labeledthe arrows: SURPRISE AHEAD or MONEY THIS WAY. I was greatly excited, during all thisarrow-drawing, at the thought of the first lucky passer-by who would receive in this way,regardless of merit, a free gift from the universe. But I never lurked about. I would go straighthome and not give the matter another thought, until, some months later, I would be gripped againby the impulse to hide another penny.
It is still the first week in January, and I’ve got great plans. I’ve been thinking about seeing. Thereare lots of things to see, unwrapped gifts and free surprises. The world is fairly studded andstrewn with pennies cast broadside from a generous hand. But—and this is the point—who getsexcited by a mere penny? If you follow one arrow, if you crouch motionless on a bank to watch atremulous ripple thrill on the water and are rewarded by the sight of a muskrat kid paddling fromits den, will you count that sight a chip of copper only, and go your rueful way? It is dire povertyindeed when a man is so malnourished and fatigued that he won’t stoop to pick up a penny. But ifyou cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make yourday, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought alifetime of days. It is that simple. What you see is what you get.
I used to be able to see flying insects in the air. I’d look ahead and see, not the row of hemlocksacross the road, but the air in front of it. My eyes would focus along that column of air, pickingout flying insects. But I lost interest, I guess, for I dropped the habit. Now I can see birds.Probably some people can look at the grass at their feet and discover all the crawling creatures. Iwould like to know grasses and sedges—and care. Then my least journey into the world would bea field trip, a series of happy recognitions. Thoreau, in an expansive mood, exulted, “What a richbook might be made about buds, including, perhaps, sprouts!” It would be nice to think so. Icherish mental images I have of three perfectly happy people. One collects stones. Another—anEnglishman, say—watches clouds. The third lives on a coast and collects drops of seawater whichhe examines microscopically and mounts. But I don’t see what the specialist sees, and so I cutmyself off, not only from the total picture, but from the various forms of happiness.Unfortunately, nature is very much a now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t affair. A fish flashes, thendissolves in the water before my eyes like so much salt. Deer apparently ascend bodily intoheaven; the brightest oriole fades into leaves. These disappearances stun me into stillness andconcentration; they say of nature that it conceals with a grand nonchalance, and they say of visionthat it is a deliberate gift, the revelation of a dancer who for my eyes only flings away her sevenveils. For nature does reveal as well as conceal: now-you-don’t-see-it, now-you-do. For a weeklast September migrating red-winged blackbirds were feeding heavily down by the creek at theback of the house. One day I went out to investigate the racket; I walked up to a tree, an Osageorange, and a hundred birds flew away. They simply materialized out of the tree. I saw a tree,then a whisk of color, then a tree again. I walked closer and another hundred blackbirds tookflight. Not a branch, not a twig budged: the birds were apparently weightless as well as invisible.Or, it was as if the leaves of the Osage orange had been freed from a spell in the form of red-winged blackbirds; they flew from the tree, caught my eye in the sky, and vanished. When I
looked again at the tree the leaves had reassembled as if nothing had happened. Finally I walkeddirectly to the trunk of the tree and a finally hundred, the real diehards, appeared, spread, andvanished. How could so many hide in the tree without my seeing them? The Osage orange,unruffled, looked just as it had looked from the house, when three hundred red-winged blackbirdscried from its crown. I looked downstream where they flew, and they were gone. Searching, Icouldn’t spot one. I wandered downstream to force them to play their hand, but they’d crossed thecreek and scattered. One show to a customer. These appearances catch at my throat; they are thefree gifts, the bright coppers at the roots of trees.
It’s all a matter of keeping my eyes open. Nature is like one of those line drawings of a tree thatare puzzles for children: Can you find hidden in the leaves a duck, a house, a boy, a bucket, azebra, and a boot? Specialists can find the most incredibly well-hidden things. A book I readwhen I was young recommended an easy way to find caterpillars to rear: you simply find somefresh caterpillar droppings, look up, and there’s your caterpillar. More recently an author advisedme to set my mind at ease about those piles of cut stems on the ground in grassy fields. Fieldmice make them; they cut the grass down by degrees to reach the seeds at the head. It seems thatwhen the grass is tightly packed, as in a field of ripe grain, the blade won’t topple at a single cutthrough the stem; instead, the cut stem simply drops vertically, held in the crush of grain. Themouse severs the bottom again and again, the stem keeps dropping an inch at a time, and finallythe head is low enough for the mouse to reach the seeds. Meanwhile, the mouse is positivelylittering the field with its little piles of cut stems into which, presumably, the author of the book isconstantly stumbling.
If I can’t see these minutiae, I still try to keep my eyes open. I’m always on the lookout forantlion traps in sandy soil, monarch pupae near milkweed, skipper larvae in locust leaves. Thesethings are utterly common, and I’ve not seen one. I bang on hollow trees near water, but so far noflying squirrels have appeared. In flat country I watch every sunset in hopes of seeing the greenray. The green ray is a seldom-seen streak of light that rises from the sun like a spurting fountainat the moment of sunset; it throbs into the sky for two seconds and disappears. One more reasonto keep my eyes open. A photography professor at the University of Florida just happened to seea bird die in midnight; it jerked, died, dropped, and smashed on the ground. I squint at the windbecause I read Stewart Edward White: “I have always maintained that if you looked closelyenough you could see the wind—the dim, hardly-made-out, fine debris fleeing high in the air.”White was an excellent observer, and devoted an entire chapter of The Mountains to the subjectof seeing deer: “As soon as you can forget the naturally obvious and construct an artificialobvious, then you too will see deer.”
But the artificial obvious is hard to see. My eyes account for less than one percent of the weightof my head; I’m bony and dense; I see what I expect. I once spent a full three minutes looking at abullfrog that was so unexpectedly large I couldn’t see it even though a dozen enthusiasticcampers were shouting directions. Finally I asked, “What color am I looking for?” and a fellowsaid, “Green.” When at last I picked out the frog, I saw what painters are up against: the thingwasn’t green at all, but the color of wet hickory bark.
The lover can see, and the knowledgeable. I visited an aunt and uncle at a quarter-horse race inCody, Wyoming. I couldn’t do much of anything useful, but I could, I thought, draw. So, as weall sat around the kitchen table after supper, I produced a sheet of paper and drew a horse. “That’sone lame horse,” my aunt volunteered. The rest of my family joined in: “Only place to saddle thatone is his neck”; “Looks like we better shoot the poor thing, on account of those terriblegrowths.” Meekly, I slid the pencil and paper down the table. Everyone in that family, includingmy three young cousins, could draw a horse. Beautifully. When the paper came back it looked as
though five shining, real quarter horses had been corralled by mistake with a papier-mâchémoose; the real horses seemed to gaze at the monster with a steady, puzzled air. I stay away fromhorses now, but I can do a creditable goldfish. The point is that I just don’t know what the loverknows; I just can’t see the artificial obvious that those in the know construct. The herpetologistasks the native, “Are there snakes in that ravine?” “Nosir.” And the herpetologist comes homewith, yessir, three bags full. Are there butterflies on that mountain? Are the bluets in bloom, arethere arrowheads here, or fossil shells in the shale?
Peeping through my keyhole I see within the range of only about thirty percent of the light thatcomes from the sun; the rest is infrared and some little ultraviolet, perfectly apparent to manyanimals, but invisible to me. A nightmare network of ganglia, charged and firing without myknowledge, cuts and splices what I do see, editing it for my brain. Donald E. Carr points out thatthe sense impressions of one-celled animals are not edited for the brain: “This is philosophicallyinteresting in a rather mournful way, since it means that only the simplest animals perceive theuniverse as it is.”
A fog that won’t burn away drifts and flows across my field of vision. When you see fog moveagainst a backdrop of deep pines, you don’t see the fog itself, but streaks of clearness floatingacross the air in dark shreds. So I see only tatters of clearness through a pervading obscurity. Ican’t distinguish the fog from the overcast sky; I can’t be sure if the light is direct or reflected.Everywhere darkness and the presence of the unseen appalls. We estimate now that only oneatom dances alone in every cubic meter of intergalactic space. I blink and squint. What planet orpower yanks Halley’s Comet out of orbit? We haven’t seen that force yet; it’s a question ofdistance, density, and the pallor of reflected light. We rock, cradled in the swaddling band ofdarkness. Even the simple darkness of night whispers suggestions to the mind. Last summer, inAugust, I stayed at the creek too late.
Where Tinker Creek flows under the sycamore log bridge to the tear-shaped island, it is slow andshallow, fringed thinly in cattail marsh. At this spot an astonishing bloom of life supports vastbreeding populations of insects, fish, reptiles, birds, and mammals. On windless summer eveningsI stalk along the creek bank or straddle the sycamore log in absolute stillness, watching formuskrats. The night I stayed too late I was hunched on the fog staring spellbound at spreading,reflecting stains of lilac on the water. A cloud in the sky suddenly lighted as if turned on by aswitch; its reflection just as suddenly materialized on the water upstream, flat and floating, so thatI couldn’t see the creek bottom, or life in the water under the cloud. Downstream, away from thecloud on the water, water turtles as smooth as beans were gliding down with the current in aseries of easy, weightless push-offs, as men bound on the moon. I didn’t know whether to tracethe progress of one turtle I was sure of, risking sticking my face in one of the bridge’s spiderwebs made invisible by the gathering dark, or take a chance on seeing the carp, or scan themudbank in hope of seeing a muskrat, or follow the last of the swallows who caught at my heartand trailed after them like streamers as they appeared from directly below, under the log, flyingupstream with their tails forked, so fast.
But shadows spread, and deepened, and stayed. After thousands of years we’re still strangers todarkness, fearful aliens in an enemy camp with our arms crossed over our chests. I stirred. A landturtle on the bank, startled, hissed the air from its lungs and withdrew into its shell. An uneasypink here, and unfathomable blue there, gave great suggestion of lurking beings. Things weregoing on. I couldn’t see whether that sere rustle I heard was a distant rattlesnake, slit-eyed, or anearby sparrow kicking in the dry flood debris slung at the foot of a willow. Tremendous actionroiled the water everywhere I looked, big action, inexplicable. A tremor welled up beside agaping muskrat burrow in the bank and I caught my breath, but no muskrat appeared. The ripples
continued to fan upstream with a steady, powerful thrust. Night was knitting over my face aneyeless mask, and I still sat transfixed. A distant airplane, a delta wing out of a nightmare, made agliding shadow on the creek’s bottom that looked like a stingray cruising upstream. At once ablack fin slit the pink cloud on the water, shearing it in two. The two halves merged together andseemed to dissolve before my eyes. Darkness pooled in the cleft of the creek and rose, as watercollects in a well. Untamed, dreaming lights flickered over the sky. I saw hints of hulking andunderwater shadows, two pale splashes out of the water, and round ripples rolling close togetherfrom a blackened center.
At last I stared upstream where only the deepest violet remained of the cloud, a cloud so high itsunderbelly still glowed feeble color reflected from a hidden sky lighted in turn by a sun halfwayto China. And out of that violet, a sudden enormous black body arced over the water. I saw only acylindrical sleekness. Head and tail, if there was a head and tail, were both submerged in cloud Isaw only one ebony fling, a headlong dive to darkness; then the waters closed, and the lights wentout.
I walked home in a shivering daze, up hill and down. Later I lay open-mouthed in bed, my armsflung wide at my sides to steady the whirling darkness. At this latitude I’m spinning 836 miles anhour round the earth’s axis; I often fancy I feel my sweeping fall as a breakneck arc like the diveof dolphins, and the hollow rushing of wind raises hair on my neck and the side of my face. Inorbit around the sun I’m moving 64,800 miles an hour. The solar system as a whole, like a merry-go-round unhinged, spins, bobs, and blinks at the speed of 43,200 miles an hour along a courseset east of Hercules. Someone has piped, and we are dancing a tarantella until the sweat pours. Iopen my eyes and I see dark, muscled forms curl out of the water, with flapping gills andflattened eyes. I close my eyes and I see stars, deep stars giving way to deeper stars, deeper starsbowing to deepest stars at the crown of an infinite cone.
“Still,” wrote van Gogh in a letter, “a great deal of light falls on everything.” If we are blinded bydarkness, we are also blinded by light. When too much light falls on everything, a special terrorresults. Peter Freuchen describes the notorious kayak sickness to which Greenland Eskimos areprone. “The Greenland fjords are peculiar for the spells of completely quiet weather, when thereis not enough wind to blow out a match and the water is like a sheet of glass. The kayak huntermust sit in his boat without stirring a finger so as not to scare the shy seals away… The sun, lowin the sky, sends a glare into his eyes, and the landscape around moves into the realm of theunreal. The reflex from the mirror-like water hypnotizes him, he seems to be unable to move, andall of a sudden it is as if he were floating in a bottomless void, sinking, sinking, and sinking…Horror-stricken, he tries to stir, to cry out, but he cannot, he is completely paralyzed, he just fallsand falls.” Some hunters are especially cursed with this panic, and bring ruin and sometimesstarvation to their families.
Sometimes here in Virginia at sunset low clouds on the southern or northern horizon arecompletely invisible in the lighted sky. I only know one is there because I can see its reflection instill water. The first time I discovered this mystery I looked from cloud to no-cloud inbewilderment, checking my bearings over and over, thinking maybe the ark of the covenant wasjust passing by south of Dead Man Mountain. Only much later did I read the explanation:polarized light from the sky is very much weakened by perfection, but the light in clouds isn’tpolarized. So invisible clouds pass among visible clouds, till all slide over the mountains; so agreater light extinguishes a lesser as though it didn’t exist.
In the great meteor shower of August, the Perseid, I wail all day for the shooting stars I miss.They’re out there showering down, committing hara-kiri in a flame of fatal attraction, and hissing
perhaps at last into the ocean. But at dawn what looks like a blue dome clamps down over me likea lid on a pot. The stars and planets could smash down and I’d never know. Only a piece of ashenmoon occasionally climbs up or down the inside of the dome, and our local star without surceaseexplodes on our heads. We have really only that one light, one source for all power, and yet wemust turn away from it by universal decree. Nobody here on the planet seems aware of thisstrange, powerful taboo, that we all walk about carefully averting our faces, this way and that, lestour eyes be blasted forever.
Darkness appalls and light dazzles; the scrap of visible light that doesn’t hurt my eyes hurts mybrain. What I see sets me swaying. Size and distance and the sudden swelling of meaningsconfuse me, bowl me over. I straddle the sycamore log bridge over Tinker Creek in the summer. Ilook at the lighted creek bottom: snail tracks tunnel the mud in quavering curves. A crayfishjerks, but by the time I absorb what has happened, he’s gone in a billowing smokescreen of silt. Ilook at the water: minnows and shiners. If I’m thinking minnows, a carp will fill my brain till Iscream. I look at the water’s surface: skaters, bubbles, and leaves sliding down. Suddenly, myown face, reflected, startles me witless. Those snails have been tracking my face! Finally, with ashuddering wrench of the will, I see clouds, cirrus clouds. I’m dizzy, I fall in. This lookingbusiness is risky.
Once I stood on a humped rock on nearby Purgatory Mountain, watching through binoculars thegreat autumn hawk migration below, until I discovered that I was in danger of joining the hawkson a vertical migration of my own. I was used to binoculars, but not, apparently, to balancing onhumped rocks while looking through them. I staggered. Everything advanced and receded byturns; the world was full of unexplained foreshortenings and depths. A distant huge tan object, ahawk the size of an elephant, turned out to be the browned bough of a nearby loblolly pine. Ifollowed a sharp-shinned hawk against a featureless sky, rotating my head unawares as it flew,and when I lowered the glass a glimpse of my own looming shoulder sent me staggering. Whatprevents men on Palomar from falling, voiceless and blinded, from their tiny, vaulted chairs?
I reel in confusion; I don’t understand what I see. With the naked eye I can see two million light-years to the Andromeda galaxy. Often I slop some creek water in a jar and when I get home Idump it in a white china bowl. After the silt settles I return and see tracings of minute snails onthe bottom, a planarian or two winding round the rum of water, roundworms shimmyingfrantically, and finally, when my eyes have adjusted to these dimensions, amoebae. At first theamoebae look like muscae volitantes, those curved moving spots you seem to see in your eyeswhen you stare at a distant wall. Then I see the amoebae as drops of water congealed, bluish,translucent, like chips of sky in the bowl. At length I choose one individual and give myself overto its idea of an evening. I see it dribble a grainy foot before it on its wet, unfathomable way. Doits unedited sense impressions include the fierce focus of my eyes? Shall I take it outside andshow it Andromeda, and blow its little endoplasm? I stir the water with a finger, in case it’srunning out of oxygen. Maybe I should get a tropical aquarium with motorized bubblers andlights, and keep this one for a pet. Yes, it would tell its fissioned descendants, the universe is twofeet by five, and if you listen closely you can head the buzzing music of the spheres.
Oh, it’s mysterious lamplit evenings, here in the galaxy, one after the other. It’s one of thosenights when I wander from window to window, looking for a sign. But I can’t see. Terror and abeauty insoluble are a ribband of blue woven into the fringes of garments of things both great andsmall. No culture explains, no bivouac offers real haven or rest. But it could be that we are notseeing something. Galileo thought comments were an optical illusion. This is fertile ground: sincewe are certain that they’re not, we can look at what our scientists have been saying with freshhope. What if there are really gleaming, castellated cities hung upside-down over the desert sand?
What limpid lakes and cool date palms have our caravans always passed untried? Until, one byone, by the blindest of leaps, we light on the road to these places, we must stumble in darknessand hunger. I turn from the window. I’m blind as a bat, sensing only from every direction theecho of my own thin cries.
I chanced on a wonderful book by Marius von Senden, called Space and Sight. When Westernsurgeons discovered how to perform safe cataract operations, they ranged across Europe andAmerica operating on dozens of men and women of all ages who had been blinded by cataractssince birth. Von Senden collected accounts of such cases; the histories are fascinating. Manydoctors had tested their patients’ sense perceptions and ideas of space both before and after theoperations. The vast majority of patients, of both sexes and all ages, had, in von Senden’sopinion, no idea of space whatsoever. Form, distance, and size were so many meaninglesssyllables. A patient “had no idea of depth, confusing it with roundness.” Before the operation adoctor would give a blind patient a cube and a sphere; the patient would tongue it or feel it withhis hands, and name it correctly. After the operation the doctor would show the same objects tothe patient without letting him touch them; now he had no clue whatsoever what he was seeing.One patient called lemonade “square” because it pricked on his tongue as a square shape prickedon the touch of his hands. Of another postoperative patient, the doctor writes, “I have found in herno notion of size, for example, not even within the narrow limits which she might haveencompassed with the aid of touch. Thus when I asked her to show me how big her mother was,she did not stretch out her hands, but set her two index-fingers a few inches apart.” Other doctorsreported their patients’ own statements to similar effect. “The room he was in… he knew to bebut part of the house, yet he could not conceive that the whole house could look bigger”; “Thosewho are blind from birth… have no real conception of height or distance. A house that is a mileaway is thought of as nearby, but requiring the taking of a lot of steps… The elevator thatwhizzes him up and down gives no more sense of vertical distance than does the train ofhorizontal.”
For the newly sighted, vision is pure sensation unencumbered by meaning: “The girl wentthrough the experience that we all go through and forget, the moment we are born. She saw, bit itdid not meaning anything but a lot of different kinds of brightness.” Again, “I asked the patientwhat he could see; he answered that he saw an extensive field of light, in which everythingappeared dull, confused, and in motion. He could not distinguish objects.” Another patient saw“nothing but a confusion of forms and colours.” When a newly sighted girl saw photographs andpaintings, she asked, “’Why do they put those dark marks all over them?’ ‘Those aren’t darkmarks,’ her mother explained, ‘those have shape. If it were not for shadows many things wouldlook flat.’ ‘Well, that’s how things do look,’ Joan answered. ‘Everything looks flat with darkpatches.’”
But it is the patients’ concepts of space that are most revealing. One patient, according to hisdoctor, “practiced his vision in a strange fashion; thus he takes off one of his boots, throws itsome way off in front of him, and then attempts to gauge the distance at which it lies; he takes afew steps towards the boot and tries to grasp it; on failing to reach it, he moves on a step or twoand gropes for the boot until he finally gets a hold of it.” “But even at this stage, after threeweeks’ experience of seeing,” von Senden goes on, “’space,’ as he conceives it, ends with visualspace, i.e. with colour-patches that happen to bound his view. He does not yet have the notionthat a larger object (a chair) can mask a smaller one (a dog), or that the latter can still be presenteven though it is not directly seen.”
In general the newly sighted see the world as a dazzle of color-patches. They are pleased by thesensation of color, and learn quickly to name the colors, but the rest of seeing is tormentingly
difficult. Soon after his operation a patient “generally bumps into one of these colour-patches andobserves them to be substantial, since they resist him as tactual objects do. In walking about italso strikes him—or can if he pays attention—that he is continually passing in between thecolours he sees, that he can go past a visual object, that a part of it then steadily disappeares fromview; and that in spite of this, however he twists and turns—whether entering the room from thedoor, for example, or returning back to it—he always has a visual space in front of him. Thus hegradually comes to realize there is also a space behind him, which he does not see.”
The mental effort involved in these reasoning’s proves overwhelming for many patients. Itoppresses them to realize, if they ever do at all, the tremendous size of the world, which they hadpreviously conceived of as something touchingly manageable. It oppresses them to realize thatthey have been visible to people all along, perhaps unattractively so, without their knowledge orconsent. A disheartening number of them refuse to use their new vision, continuing to go overobjects with their tongues, and lapsing into apathy and despair. “The child can see, but will notmake use of his sight. Only when pressed can he with difficulty be brought to look at objects inhis neighbourhood; but more than a foot away it is impossible to bestir him to the necessaryeffort.” Of a twenty-one-year-old girl, the doctor relates, “Her unfortunate father, who had hopedfor so much from this operation, wrote that his daughter carefully shuts her eyes whenever shewishes to go about the house, especially when she comes to a staircase, and that she is neverhappier or more at ease than when, by closing her eyelids, she relapses into her former state oftotal blindness.” A fifteen-year-old boy, who was also in love with a girl at the asylum for theblind, finally blurted out, “No, really, I can’t stand it any more; I want to be sent back to theasylum again. If things aren’t altered I’ll tear my eyes out.”
Some do learn to see, especially the young ones. But it changes their lives. One doctor commentson “the rapid and complete loss of that striking and wonderful serenity which is characteristiconly of those who have never yet seen.” A blind man who learns to see is ashamed of his oldhabits. He dresses up, grooms himself, and tries to make a good impression. While he was blindhe was indifferent to objects unless they were edible; now, “a sifting of values sets in… histhoughts and wishes are mightily stirred and some few of the patients are thereby led intodissimulation, envy, theft and fraud.”
On the other hand, many newly sighted people speak well of the world, and teach us how dull isour own vision. To one patient, a human hand, unrecognized, is “something bright and thenholes.” Shown a bunch of grapes, a boy calls out, “it is dark, blue and shiny… It isn’t smooth, ithas bumps and hollows.” A little girl visits a garden. “She is greatly astonished, and can scarcelybe persuaded to answer, stands speechless in front of the tree, which she only names on takinghold of it, and then as ‘the tree with the lights in it.’” Some delight in their sight and givethemselves over to the visual world. Of a patient just after her bandages were removed, her doctorwrites, “The first things to attract her attention were her own hands; she looked at them veryclosely, moved them repeatedly to and fro, bent and stretched the fingers, and seemed greatlyastonished at the sight.” One girl was eager to tell her blind friend that “Men do not really looklike trees at all,” and astounded to discover that her every visitor had an utterly different face.Finally, a twenty-two-old girl was dazzled by the world’s brightness and kept her eyes shut fortwo weeks. When at the end of that time she opened her eyes again, she did not recognize theobjects, but, “the more she now directed her gaze upon everything about her, the more it could beseen how an expression of gratification and astonishment overspread her features; she repeatedlyexclaimed: ‘Oh God! How beautiful!’”
I saw color-patches for weeks after I read this wonderful book. It was summer; the peaches wereripe in the valley orchards. When I woke in the morning, color-patches wrapped round my eyes,
intricately, leaving not one unfilled spot. All day long I walked among shifting color-patches thatparted before me like the Red Sea and closed again in silence, transfigured, wherever I lookedback. Some patches swelled and loomed, while others vanished utterly, and dark marks flitted atrandom over the whole dazzling sweep. But I couldn’t sustain the illusion of flatness. I’ve beenaround for too long. Form is condemned to an eternal danse macabre with meaning: I couldn’tunpeach the peaches. Now can I remember ever having seen without understanding; the color-patches of infancy are lost. My brain then must have been smooth as any balloon. I’m told Ireached for the moon; many babies do. But the color-patches of infancy swelled as meaning filledthem; they arrayed themselves in solemn ranks down distance which unrolled and stretchedbefore me like a plain. The moon rocketed away. I live now in a world of shadows that take shapeand distance color, a world where space makes a kind of terrible sense. What gnosticism is this,and what physics? The fluttering patch I saw in my nursery window—silver and green and shape-shifting blue—is gone; a row of Lombardy poplars takes its place, mute, across the distant lawn.That humming oblong creature pale as light that stole along the walls of my room at night,stretching exhilaratingly around the corners, is gone, too, gone the night I ate of the bittersweetfruit, put two and two together and puckered forever my brain. Martin Buber tells this tale:“Rabbi Mendel once boasted to his teacher Rabbi Elimelekh that evenings he saw the angel whorolls away the light before the darkness, and mornings the angel who rolls away the darknessbefore the light. ‘Yes,’ said Rabbie Elimelekh, ‘in my youth I saw that too. Later on you don’t seethese things any more.’”
Why didn’t someone hand those newly sighted people paints and brushes from the start, whenthey still didn’t know what anything was? Then maybe we all could see color-patches too, theworld unraveled from reason, Eden before Adam gave names. The scales would drop from myeyes; I’d see trees like men walking; I’d run down the road against all orders, hallooing andleaping.
Seeing is of course very much a matter of verbalization. Unless I call my attention to what passesbefore my eyes, I simple won’t see it. It is, as Ruskin says, “not merely unnoticed, but in the full,clear sense of the word, unseen.” My eyes alone can’t solve analogy tests using figures, the oneswhich show, with increasing elaborations, a big square, then a small square in a big square, then abig triangle, and expect me to find a small triangle in a big triangle. I have to say the words,describe what I’m seeing. If Tinker Mountain erupted, I’d be likely to notice. But if I want tonotice the lesser cataclysms of valley life, I have to maintain in my head a running description ofthe present. It’s not that I’m observant; it’s just that I talk too much. Otherwise, especially in astrange place, I’ll never know what’s happening. Like a blind man at the ball game, I need aradio.
When I see this way I analyze and pry. I hurl over logs and roll away stones; I study the bank asquare foot at a time, probing and tilting my head. Some days when a mist covers the mountains,when the muskrats won’t show and the microscope’s mirror shatters, I want to climb up the blankblue dome as a man would storm the inside of a circus tent, wildly, dangling, and with a steelknife claw a rent in the top, peep, and, if I must, fall.
But there is another kind of seeing that involves a letting go. When I see this way I swaytransfixed and emptied. The difference between the two ways of seeing is the difference betweenwalking with and without a camera. When I walk with a camera I walk from shot to shot, readingthe light on a calibrated meter. When I walk without a camera, my own shutter opens, and themoment’s light prints on my own silver gut. When I see this second way I am above all anunscrupulous observer.
It was sunny one evening last summer at Tinker Creek; the sun was low in the sky, upstream. Iwas sitting on the sycamore log bridge with the sunset at my back, watching the shiners the sizeof minnows who were feeding over the muddy sand in skittery schools. Again and again, onefish, then another, turned for a split second across the current and flash! The sun shot out from itssilver side. I couldn’t watch for it. It was always just happening somewhere else, and it drew myvision just as it disappeared: flash, like a sudden dazzle of the thinnest blade, a sparking over adun and olive ground at chance intervals from every direction. Then I noticed white specks, somesort of pale petals, small, floating from under my feet on the creek’s surface, very slow andsteady. So I blurred my eyes and gazed towards the brim of my hat and saw a new world. I sawthe pale white circles roll up, roll up, like the world’s tuning, mute and perfect, and I saw thelinear flashes, gleaming silver, like stars being born at random down a rolling scroll of time.Something broke and something opened. I filled up like a new wineskin. I breathed an air likelight; I saw a light like water. I was the lip of a fountain the creek filled forever; I was ether, theleaf in the zephyr; I was flesh-flake, feather, bone.
When I see this way I see truly. As Thoreau says, I return to my senses. I am the man whowatches the baseball game in silence in an empty stadium. I see the game purely; I’m abstractedand dazed. When it’s all over and the white-suited players lope off the green field to theirshadowed dugouts, I leap to my feet; I cheer and cheer.
But I can’t go out and try to see this way. I’ll fail, I’ll go mad. All I can do is try to gag thecommentator, to hush the noise of useless interior babble that keeps me from seeing just as surelyas a newspaper dangled before my eyes. The effort is really a discipline requiring a lifetime ofdedicated struggle; it makes the literature of saints and monks of every order East and West,under every rule and no rule, discalced and shod. The world’s spiritual geniuses seem to discoveruniversally that the mind’s muddy river, this ceaseless flow of trivia and trash, cannot bedammed, and that trying to dam it is a waste of effort that might lead to madness. Instead youmust allow the muddy river to flow unheeded in the dim channels of consciousness; you raiseyour sights; you look along it, mildly, acknowledging its presence without interest and gazingbeyond it into the realm of the real where subjects and objects act and rest purely, withoututterance. “Launch into the deep,” says Jacques Ellul, “and you shall see.”
The secret of seeing is, then, the pearl of great price. If I thought he could teach me to find it andkeep it forever I would stagger barefoot across and hundred deserts after any lunatic at all. Butalthough the pearl may be found, it may not be sought. The literature of illumination reveals thisabove all: although it comes to those who wait for it, it is always, even to the most practiced andadept, a gift and a total surprise. I return from one walk knowing where the killdeer nests in thefield by the creek and the hour the laurel blooms. I return from the same walk a day later scarcelyknowing my own name. Litanies hum in my ears; my tongue flaps in my mouth Ailinon, alleluia!I cannot cause light; the most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam. It is possible, indeep space, to sail on solar wind. Light, be it particle or wave, has force: you rig a giant sail andgo. The secret of seeing is to sail on solar wind. Hone and spread your spirit till you yourself are asail, whetted, translucent, broadside to the merest puff.
When her doctor took her bandages off and led her into the garden, the girl who was no longerblind saw “the tree with the lights in it.” It was for this tree I searched through the peach orchardsof summer, in the forests of fall and down winter and spring for years. Then one day I waswalking along Tinker Creek thinking of nothing at all and I saw the tree with the lights in it. I sawthe backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzingwith flame. I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly fire, utterly focusedand utterly dreamed. It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked
breathless by a powerful glance. The flood of fire abated, but I’m still spending the power.Gradually the lights went out in the cedar, the colors died, the cells unflamed and disappeared. Iwas still ringing. I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I waslifted and struck. I have since only very rarely seen the tree with the lights in it. The vision comesand goes, mostly goes, but I live for it, for the moment when the mountains open and a new lightroars in spate through the crack, and the mountains slam.
