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Illustration by Sydney Smith
When I was six or seven years old, growing up in Pittsburgh, I used
to take a precious penny of my own and hide it for someone else
to find. It was a curious compulsion; sadly, I’ve never been seized
by it since. For some reason I always “hid” the penny along the
same stretch of sidewalk up the street. I would cradle it at the
roots of a sycamore, say, or in a hole left by a chipped-off piece
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 labeled the arrows:
SURPRISE AHEAD or MONEY THIS WAY.
I was greatly excited, during
all this arrow-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 straight
home and not give the matter another thought, until, some months
later, I would be gripped again by 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. There are lots of things to see, unwrapped
gifts and free surprises. The world is fairly studded and
strewn with pennies cast broadside from a generous hand.
But—and this is the point—who gets excited by a mere penny?
If you follow one arrow, if you crouch motionless on a bank to
watch a tremulous ripple thrill on the water and are rewarded
by the sight of a muskrat kit paddling from its den, will you count
that sight of a chip of copper only, and go your rueful way? It is
dire poverty indeed when a man is so malnourished and fatigued
that he won’t stoop to pick up a penny. But if you cultivate a
healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally
make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in
pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime 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 hemlocks across the road, but the air in
front of it. My eyes would focus along that column of air, picking
out 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. I would
like to know grasses and sedges—and care. Then my least journey
into the world would be a field trip, a series of happy recognitions.
Thoreau, in an expansive mood, exulted, “What a rich book might
be made about buds, including, perhaps, sprouts!” It would be
nice to think so. I cherish mental images I have of three perfectly
happy people. One collects stones. Another—an Englishman,
say—watches clouds. The third lives on a coast and collects drops
of seawater which he examines microscopically and mounts. But I don’t see what
the specialist sees, and so I cut myself 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, then dissolves in the water before my
eyes like so much salt. Deer apparently ascend bodily into heaven;
the brightest oriole fades into leaves. These disappearances stun
me into stillness and concentration; they say of nature that it
conceals with a grand nonchalance, and they say of vision that it
is a deliberate gift, the revelation of a dancer who for my eyes
only flings away her seven veils. For nature does reveal as well
as conceal: now-you-don’t-see-it, now-you-do. For a week last
September migrating red-winged blackbirds were feeding heavily
down by the creek at the back of the house. One day I went out
to investigate the racket; I walked up to a tree, an Osage orange,
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 took flight. 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 walked directly to the trunk of
the tree and a final hundred, the real diehards, appeared, spread,
and vanished. 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 blackbirds
cried from its crown. I looked downstream where they flew,
and they were gone. Searching, I couldn’t spot one. I wandered
downstream to force them to play their hand, but they’d crossed
the creek and scattered. One show to a customer. These appearances catch at my
throat; they are the free
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 that are puzzles for children: Can
you find hidden in the leaves a duck, a house, a boy, a bucket, a
zebra, and a boot? Specialists can find the most incredibly wellhidden
things. A book I read when I was young recommended
an easy way to find caterpillars to rear: you simply find some
fresh caterpillar droppings, look up, and there’s your caterpillar.
More recently an author advised me to set my mind at ease about
those piles of cut stems on the ground in grassy fields. Field mice
make them; they cut the grass down by degrees to reach the seeds
at the head. It seems that when the grass is tightly packed, as in
a field of ripe grain, the blade won’t topple at a single cut through
the stem; instead, the cut stem simply drops vertically, held in
the crush of grain. The mouse severs the bottom again and again,
the stem keeps dropping an inch at a time, and finally the head
is low enough for the mouse to reach the seeds. Meanwhile, the
mouse is positively littering the field with its little piles of cut
stems into which, presumably, the author of the book is constantly
stumbling.
If I can’t see these minutiae, I still try to keep my eyes open.
I’m always on the lookout for antlion traps in sandy soil, monarch
pupae near milkweed, skipper larvae in locust leaves. These
things are utterly common, and I’ve not seen one. I bang on hollow
trees near water, but so far no flying squirrels have appeared.
In flat country I watch every sunset in hopes of seeing the green
ray. The green ray is a seldom-seen streak of light that rises from
the sun like a spurting fountain at the moment of sunset; it throbs
into the sky for two seconds and disappears. One more reason
to keep my eyes open. A photography professor at the University
of Florida just happened to see a bird die in midflight; it jerked, died, dropped, and smashed
on the ground. I squint at the wind because I read Stewart Edward
White: “I have always maintained that if you looked closely
enough you could see the wind—the dim, hardly-made-out, fine
débris fleeing high in the air.” White was an excellent observer,
and devoted an entire chapter of The Mountains to the subject of
seeing deer: “As soon as you can forget the naturally obvious and
construct an artificial obvious, then you too will see deer."
But the artificial obvious is hard to see. My eyes account for
less than one percent of the weight of my head; I’m bony and
dense; I see what I expect. I once spent a full three minutes looking
at a bullfrog that was so unexpectedly large I couldn’t see it even
though a dozen enthusiastic campers were shouting directions.
Finally I asked, “What color am I looking for?” and a fellow said,
“Green.” When at last I picked out the frog, I saw what painters
are up against: the thing wasn’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 ranch in Cody, Wyoming. I couldn’t
do much of anything useful, but I could, I thought, draw. So, as
we all sat around the kitchen table after supper, I produced a
sheet of paper and drew a horse. “That’s one lame horse,” my
aunt volunteered. The rest of the family joined in: “Only place to
saddle that one is his neck”; “Looks like we better shoot the poor
thing, on account of those terrible growths.” Meekly, I slid the
pencil and paper down the table. Everyone in that family, including
my 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-mâché
moose; the real horses seemed to gaze at the monster with a
steady, puzzled air. I stay away from horses now, but I can do a creditable goldfish. The point is that I just don’t know what the
lover knows; I just can’t see the artificial obvious that those in the
know construct. The herpetologist asks the native, “Are there
snakes in that ravine?” “Nosir.” And the herpetologist comes
home with, yessir, three bags full. Are there butterflies on that
mountain? Are the bluets in bloom, are there 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 that comes from the sun; the rest
is infrared and some little ultraviolet, perfectly apparent to many
animals, but invisible to me. A nightmare network of ganglia,
charged and firing without my knowledge, cuts and splices what
I do see, editing it for my brain. Donald E. Carr points out that
the sense impressions of one-celled animals are not edited for the
brain: “This is philosophically interesting in a rather mournful
way, since it means that only the simplest animals perceive the
universe as it is."
A fog that won’t burn away drifts and flows across my field of
vision. When you see fog move against a backdrop of deep pines,
you don’t see the fog itself, but streaks of clearness floating across
the air in dark shreds. So I see only tatters of clearness through
a pervading obscurity. I can’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 one atom dances alone in every cubic meter of intergalactic
space. I blink and squint. What planet or power yanks
Halley’s Comet out of orbit? We haven’t seen that force yet; it’s
a question of distance, density, and the pallor of reflected light.
We rock, cradled in the swaddling band of darkness. Even the
simple darkness of night whispers suggestions to the mind. Last
summer, in August, I stayed at the creek too late.
Where Tinker Creek flows under the sycamore log bridge to the
tear-shaped island, it is slow and shallow, fringed thinly in cattail
marsh. At this spot an astonishing bloom of life supports vast
breeding populations of insects, fish, reptiles, birds, and mammals.
On windless summer evenings I stalk along the creek bank
or straddle the sycamore log in absolute stillness, watching for
muskrats. The night I stayed too late I was hunched on the log
staring spellbound at spreading, reflected stains of lilac on the
water. A cloud in the sky suddenly lighted as if turned on by a
switch; its reflection just as suddenly materialized on the water
upstream, flat and floating, so that I couldn’t see the creek bottom,
or life in the water under the cloud. Downstream, away from the
cloud on the water, water turtles smooth as beans were gliding
down with the current in a series of easy, weightless push-offs,
as men bound on the moon. I didn’t know whether to trace the
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 the mud bank
in hope of seeing a muskrat, or follow the last of the swallows
who caught at my heart and trailed it after them like streamers
as they appeared from directly below, under the log, flying upstream
with their tails forked, so fast.
But shadows spread, and deepened, and stayed. After thousands
of years we’re still strangers to darkness, fearful aliens in
an enemy camp with our arms crossed over our chests. I stirred.
A land turtle on the bank, startled, hissed the air from its lungs
and withdrew into its shell. An uneasy pink here, an unfathomable
blue there, gave great suggestion of lurking beings. Things
were going on. I couldn’t see whether that sere rustle I heard was
a distant rattlesnake, slit-eyed, or a nearby sparrow kicking in
the dry flood debris slung at the foot of a willow. Tremendous
action roiled the water everywhere I looked, big action, inexplicable. A
tremor welled up beside a gaping 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 an eyeless mask, and I still sat transfixed.
A distant airplane, a delta wing out of nightmare, made a
gliding shadow on the creek’s bottom that looked like a stingray
cruising upstream. At once a black fin slit the pink cloud on the
water, shearing it in two. The two halves merged together and
seemed to dissolve before my eyes. Darkness pooled in the cleft
of the creek and rose, as water collects in a well. Untamed,
dreaming lights flickered over the sky. I saw hints of hulking
underwater shadows, two pale splashes out of the water, and
round ripples rolling close together from a blackened center.
At last I stared upstream where only the deepest violet remained
of the cloud, a cloud so high its underbelly still glowed
feeble color reflected from a hidden sky lighted in turn by a sun
halfway to China. And out of that violet, a sudden enormous
black body arced over the water. I saw only a cylindrical sleekness.
Head and tail, if there was a head and tail, were both submerged
in cloud. I saw only one ebony fling, a headlong dive to
darkness; then the waters closed, and the lights went out.
I walked home in a shivering daze, up hill and down. Later I
lay open-mouthed in bed, my arms flung wide at my sides to
steady the whirling darkness. At this latitude I’m spinning 836
miles an hour round the earth’s axis; I often fancy I feel my
sweeping fall as a breakneck arc like the dive of dolphins, and
the hollow rushing of wind raises hair on my neck and the side
of my face. In orbit 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 course set east of Hercules. Someone has piped, and we are dancing a tarantella until the sweat pours. I
open my eyes and I see dark, muscled forms curl out of water,
with flapping gills and flattened eyes. I close my eyes and I see
stars, deep stars giving way to deeper stars, deeper stars bowing
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 by darkness, we are also blinded
by light. When too much light falls on everything, a special terror
results. Peter Freuchen describes the notorious kayak sickness to
which Greenland Eskimos are prone. “The Greenland fjords are
peculiar for the spells of completely quiet weather, when there
is not enough wind to blow out a match and the water is like a
sheet of glass. The kayak hunter must sit in his boat without
stirring a finger so as not to scare the shy seals away…. The sun,
low in the sky, sends a glare into his eyes, and the landscape
around moves into the realm of the unreal. The reflex from the
mirrorlike water hypnotizes him, he seems to be unable to move,
and all 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 falls
and falls.” Some hunters are especially cursed with this panic,
and bring ruin and sometimes starvation to their families.
Sometimes here in Virginia at sunset low clouds on the southern
or northern horizon are completely invisible in the lighted sky. I
only know one is there because I can see its reflection in still water.
The first time I discovered this mystery I looked from cloud to
no-cloud in bewilderment, checking my bearings over and over,
thinking maybe the ark of the covenant was just 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 reflection,
but the light in clouds isn’t polarized. So invisible clouds pass among visible
clouds, till all slide over the mountains; so a greater 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 like a lid on a pot. The
stars and planets could smash and I’d never know. Only a piece
of ashen moon occasionally climbs up or down the inside of the
dome, and our local star without surcease explodes on our heads.
We have really only that one light, one source for all power, and
yet we must turn away from it by universal decree. Nobody here
on the planet seems aware of this strange, powerful taboo, that
we all walk about carefully averting our faces, this way and that,
lest our eyes be blasted forever.
Darkness appalls and light dazzles; the scrap of visible light
that doesn’t hurt my eyes hurts my brain. What I see sets me
swaying. Size and distance and the sudden swelling of meanings
confuse me, bowl me over. I straddle the sycamore log bridge
over Tinker Creek in the summer. I look at the lighted creek bottom:
snail tracks tunnel the mud in quavering curves. A crayfish
jerks, but by the time I absorb what has happened, he’s gone in
a billowing smokescreen of silt. I look at the water: minnows and
shiners. If I’m thinking minnows, a carp will fill my brain till I
scream. I look at the water’s surface: skaters, bubbles, and leaves
sliding down. Suddenly, my own face, reflected, startles me witless.
Those snails have been tracking my face! Finally, with a
shuddering wrench of the will, I see clouds, cirrus clouds. I’m
dizzy, I fall in. This looking business is risky.
Once I stood on a humped rock on nearby Purgatory Mountain,
watching through binoculars the great autumn hawk migration below, until I
discovered that I was in danger of
joining the hawks on a vertical migration of my own. I was used
to binoculars, but not, apparently, to balancing on humped rocks
while looking through them. I staggered. Everything advanced
and receded by turns; the world was full of unexplained foreshortenings
and depths. A distant huge tan object, a hawk the size of
an elephant, turned out to be the browned bough of a nearby
loblolly pine. I followed 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. What prevents the 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 I
dump it in a white china bowl. After the silt settles I return and
see tracings of minute snails on the bottom, a planarian or two
winding round the rim of water, roundworms shimmying
frantically, and finally, when my eyes have adjusted to these dimensions,
amoebae. At first the amoebae look like muscae volitantes,
those curled moving spots you seem to see in your eyes
when 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 over to
its idea of an evening. I see it dribble a grainy foot before it on its
wet, unfathomable way. Do its unedited sense impressions include
the fierce focus of my eyes? Shall I take it outside and show it
Andromeda, and blow its little endoplasm? I stir the water with
a finger, in case it’s running out of oxygen. Maybe I should get a
tropical aquarium with motorized bubblers and lights, and keep
this one for a pet. Yes, it would tell its fissioned descendants, the universe is
two feet by five, and if you listen closely you can hear the buzzing
music of the spheres.
Oh, it’s mysterious lamplit evenings, here in the galaxy, one
after the other. It’s one of those nights when I wander from window
to window, looking for a sign. But I can’t see. Terror and a
beauty insoluble are a ribband of blue woven into the fringes of
garments of things both great and small. No culture explains, no
bivouac offers real haven or rest. But it could be that we are not
seeing something. Galileo thought comets were an optical illusion.
This is fertile ground: since we are certain that they’re not, we
can look at what our scientists have been saying with fresh hope.
What if there are really gleaming, castellated cities hung upsidedown
over the desert sand? What limpid lakes and cool date
palms have our caravans always passed untried? Until, one by
one, by the blindest of leaps, we light on the road to these places,
we must stumble in darkness and hunger. I turn from the window.
I’m blind as a bat, sensing only from every direction the echo of
my own thin cries.
I chanced on a wonderful book by Marius von Senden, called
Space and Sight. When Western surgeons discovered how to perform
safe cataract operations, they ranged across Europe and
America operating on dozens of men and women of all ages who
had been blinded by cataracts since birth. Von Senden collected
accounts of such cases; the histories are fascinating. Many doctors
had tested their patients’ sense perceptions and ideas of space
both before and after the operations. The vast majority of patients,
of both sexes and all ages, had, in von Senden’s opinion, no idea
of space whatsoever. Form, distance, and size were so many
meaningless syllables. A patient “had no idea of depth, confusing
it with roundness.” Before the operation a doctor would give a blind patient a cube and a
sphere; the patient would tongue it or feel it with his hands, and
name it correctly. After the operation the doctor would show the
same objects to the 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 pricked on the touch of his hands. Of another postoperative
patient, the doctor writes, “I have found in her no notion of size,
for example, not even within the narrow limits which she might
have encompassed 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
doctors reported their patients' own statements to similar effect.
“The room he was in… he knew to be but part of the house, yet
he could not conceive that the whole house could look bigger"
“Those who are blind from birth…have no real conception of
height or distance. A house that is a mile away is thought of as
nearby, but requiring the taking of a lot of steps…. The elevator
that whizzes him up and down gives no more sense of vertical
distance than does the train of horizontal."
For the newly sighted, vision is pure sensation unencumbered
by meaning: “The girl went through the experience that we all
go through and forget, the moment we are born. She saw, but it
did not mean anything but a lot of different kinds of brightness."
Again, “I asked the patient what he could see; he answered that
he saw an extensive field of light, in which everything appeared
dull, confused, and in motion. He could not distinguish objects."
Another patient saw “nothing but a confusion of forms and colors."
When a newly sighted girl saw photographs and paintings,
she asked, “‘Why do they put those dark marks all over them?'
‘Those aren’t dark marks,’ her mother explained, ‘those are shadows. That is one of the ways the eye knows that
things have shape. If it were not for shadows many things would
look flat.’ ‘Well, that’s how things do look,’ Joan answered.
‘Everything looks flat with dark patches.’"
But it is the patients’ concepts of space that are most revealing.
One patient, according to his doctor, “practiced his vision in a
strange fashion; thus he takes off one of his boots, throws it some
way off in front of him, and then attempts to gauge the distance
at which it lies; he takes a few steps towards the boot and tries
to grasp it; on failing to reach it, he moves on a step or two and
gropes for the boot until he finally gets hold of it.” “But even at
this stage, after three weeks’ experience of seeing,” von Senden
goes on, “‘space,’ as he conceives it, ends with visual space, i.e.
with color-patches that happen to bound his view. He does not
yet have the notion that a larger object (a chair) can mask a
smaller one (a dog), or that the latter can still be present even
though it is not directly seen."
In general the newly sighted see the world as a dazzle of colorpatches.
They are pleased by the sensation 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 color-patches and observes them to be substantial,
since they resist him as tactual objects do. In walking about it also
strikes him—or can if he pays attention—that he is continually
passing in between the colors he sees, that he can go past a visual
object, that a part of it then steadily disappears from view; and
that in spite of this, however he twists and turns—whether entering
the room from the door, for example, or returning back to
it—he always has a visual space in front of him. Thus he gradually
comes to realize that there is also a space behind him, which he
does not see."
The mental effort involved in these reasonings proves over-whelming for many patients. It oppresses them to realize, if they
ever do at all, the tremendous size of the world, which they had
previously conceived of as something touchingly manageable. It
oppresses them to realize that they have been visible to people
all along, perhaps unattractively so, without their knowledge or
consent. A disheartening number of them refuse to use their new
vision, continuing to go over objects with their tongues, and
lapsing into apathy and despair. “The child can see, but will not
make use of his sight. Only when pressed can he with difficulty
be brought to look at objects in his neighborhood; but more than
a foot away it is impossible to bestir him to the necessary effort."
Of a twenty-one-year-old girl, the doctor relates, “Her unfortunate
father, who had hoped for so much from this operation, wrote
that his daughter carefully shuts her eyes whenever she wishes
to go about the house, especially when she comes to a staircase,
and that she is never happier or more at ease than when, by
closing her eyelids, she relapses into her former state of total
blindness.” A fifteen-year-old boy, who was also in love with a
girl at the asylum for the blind, finally blurted out, “No, really, I
can’t stand it anymore; I want to be sent back to the asylum 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 comments on “the rapid and complete loss
of that striking and wonderful serenity which is characteristic
only of those who have never yet seen.” A blind man who learns
to see is ashamed of his old habits. He dresses up, grooms himself,
and tries to make a good impression. While he was blind he was
indifferent to objects unless they were edible; now, “a sifting of
values sets in…his thoughts and wishes are mightily stirred and
some few of the patients are thereby led into dissimulation, envy,
theft and fraud."
On the other hand, many newly sighted people speak well of the world, and teach us how dull is our own vision. To one patient,
a human hand, unrecognized, is “something bright and
then holes.” Shown a bunch of grapes, a boy calls out, “It is dark,
blue and shiny…. It isn’t smooth, it has bumps and hollows.” A
little girl visits a garden. “She is greatly astonished, and can
scarcely be persuaded to answer, stands speechless in front of
the tree, which she only names on taking hold of it, and then as
‘the tree with the lights in it.’” Some delight in their sight and
give themselves over to the visual world. Of a patient just after
her bandages were removed, her doctor writes, “The first things
to attract her attention were her own hands; she looked at them
very closely, moved them repeatedly to and fro, bent and
stretched the fingers, and seemed greatly astonished at the sight."
One girl was eager to tell her blind friend that “men do not really
look like 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
for two weeks. When at the end of that time she opened her eyes
again, she did not recognize any objects, but, “the more she now
directed her gaze upon everything about her, the more it could
be seen how an expression of gratification and astonishment
overspread her features; she repeatedly exclaimed: ‘Oh God! How
beautiful!’"
I saw color-patches for weeks after I read this wonderful book.
It was summer; the peaches were ripe 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 that parted before me like
the Red Sea and closed again in silence, transfigured, wherever
I looked back. Some patches swelled and loomed, while others
vanished utterly, and dark marks flitted at random over the whole dazzling sweep. But I couldn’t sustain the illusion
of flatness. I’ve been around for too long. Form is condemned to
an eternal danse macabre with meaning: I couldn’t unpeach the
peaches. Nor 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 I reached for the
moon; many babies do. But the color-patches of infancy swelled
as meaning filled them; they arrayed themselves in solemn ranks
down distance which unrolled and stretched before me like a
plain. The moon rocketed away. I live now in a world of shadows
that shape and 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 bittersweet fruit, 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 who rolls away the light before
the darkness, and mornings the angel who rolls away the darkness
before the light. ‘Yes,’ said Rabbi Elimelekh, ‘in my youth I saw
that too. Later on you don’t see these things anymore.”'
Why didn’t someone hand those newly sighted people paints
and brushes from the start, when they still didn’t know what
anything was? Then maybe we all could see color-patches too,
the world unraveled from reason, Eden before Adam gave names.
The scales would drop from my eyes; I’d see trees like men
walking; I’d run down the road against all orders, hallooing and
leaping.
Seeing is of course very much a matter of verbalization. Unless I
call my attention to what passes before my eyes, I simply 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 ones which show, with increasing
elaborations, a big square, then a small square in a big square,
then a big 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 to
notice the lesser cataclysms of valley life, I have to maintain in
my head a running description of the present. It’s not that I’m
observant; it’s just that I talk too much. Otherwise, especially in
a strange place, I’ll never know what’s happening. Like a blind
man at the ball game, I need a radio.
When I see this way I analyze and pry. I hurl over logs and roll
away stones; I study the bank a square 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 blank blue dome as a man would
storm the inside of a circus tent, wildly, dangling, and with a steel
knife 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 sway transfixed and emptied. The difference
between the two ways of seeing is the difference between walking
with and without a camera. When I walk with a camera I walk
from shot to shot, reading the light on a calibrated meter. When
I walk without a camera, my own shutter opens, and the moment’s
light prints on my own silver gut. When I see this second
way I am above all an unscrupulous observer.
It was sunny one evening last summer at Tinker Creek; the sun
was low in the sky, upstream. I was sitting on the sycamore log
bridge with the sunset at my back, watching the shiners the size
of minnows who were feeding over the muddy sand in skittery
schools. Again and again, one fish, then another, turned for a
split second across the current and flash! the sun shot out from
its silver side. I couldn’t watch for it. It was always just happening
somewhere else, and it drew my vision just as it disappeared: flash, like a sudden dazzle of the thinnest blade, a sparking over
a dun and olive ground at chance intervals from every direction.
Then I noticed white specks, some sort of pale petals, small,
floating from under my feet on the creek’s surface, very slow and
steady. So I blurred my eyes and gazed towards the brim of my
hat and saw a new world. I saw the pale white circles roll up, roll
up, like the world’s turning, mute and perfect, and I saw the linear
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 like light; I saw a
light like water. I was the lip of a fountain the creek filled forever;
I was ether, the leaf 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 who watches the baseball game in silence
in an empty stadium. I see the game purely; I’m abstracted and
dazed. When it’s all over and the white-suited players lope off
the green field to their shadowed 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 the commentator, to hush the noise of useless
interior babble that keeps me from seeing just as surely as a
newspaper dangled before my eyes. The effort is really a discipline requiring a lifetime of dedicated struggle; it marks 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 discover universally that the mind’s muddy
river, this ceaseless flow of trivia and trash, cannot be dammed,
and that trying to dam it is a waste of effort that might lead to
madness. Instead you must allow the muddy river to flow unheeded
in the dim channels of consciousness; you raise your
sights; you look along it, mildly, acknowledging its presence
without interest and gazing beyond it into the realm of the real
where subjects and objects act and rest purely, without utterance.
“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 and keep it forever I would stagger
barefoot across a hundred deserts after any lunatic at all. But although
the pearl may be found, it may not be sought. The literature
of illumination reveals this above all: although it comes to
those who wait for it, it is always, even to the most practiced and
adept, a gift and a total surprise. I return from one walk knowing
where the killdeer nests in the field by the creek and the hour the
laurel blooms. I return from the same walk a day later scarcely
knowing 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,
in deep space, to sail on solar wind. Light, be it particle or wave,
has force: you rig a giant sail and go. The secret of seeing is to
sail on solar wind. Hone and spread your spirit till you yourself
are a sail, 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 longer blind saw “the tree with the lights in it.” It was for this tree I searched through the peach
orchards of summer, in the forests of fall and down winter and
spring for years. Then one day I was walking along Tinker Creek
thinking of nothing at all and I saw the tree with the lights in it.
I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged
and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame. I stood on the
grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly fire, utterly focused
and 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. I was still ringing. I had been
my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I
was lifted and struck. I have since only very rarely seen the tree
with the lights in it. The vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but
I live for it, for the moment when the mountains open and a new
light roars in spate through the crack, and the mountains slam.
ϟ
Annie Dillard (born April 30, 1945) is an American author, best known for her
narrative prose in both fiction and non-fiction. She has published works of
poetry, essays, prose, and literary criticism, as well as two novels and one
memoir. Her 1974 work Pilgrim at Tinker Creek won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for
General Nonfiction.
''Pilgrim at Tinker Creek'' is a form of meditation,
written with a headlong urgency, about seeing. A blind child the author happened
to read about saw for the first time after cataracts had been removed from her
eyes. ''When her doctor took her bandages off and led her into the garden, the
girl who was no longer blind saw 'the tree with lights in it.''' Annie Dillard
had found the central metaphor for her book; it is the vision, the spiritual
conception, that she will spend her days in solitude tramping the Roanoke creek
banks and the Blue Ridge mountainside in search of herself.
Meditation
on 'Seeing' by EUDORA WELTY
ϟ
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
- Seeing | Cap. 2
-
Annie Dillard, 1974
HarperCollins e-books
Δ
7.Mar.2018
publicado
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MJA
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