Annie Dillard’s Invitation
Repost from September 23rd, 1997
Reading Annie Dillard’s essays can be dangerous, especially the one titled “Living Like Weasels,” because you don’t know when you will be tempted to bite an eagle’s throat and let it bring you to the sky, “till your eyes burn out and drop” (In Depth, p 189).
Dillard is writing about a weasel, whose dry skull was found on the eagle’s throat. Her desire to live like the weasel, “open to time and death painlessly, noticing everything, remembering nothing, choosing the given with a fierce and pointed will,” can infect an innocent reader with the temptation to sacrifice everything, to experience the eagle’s talons, and to leave his bones scattered over fields, all for just one necessity, whatever it is. However, to bite an eagle is not the most dangerous temptation.
Dillard’s essays invite you to look and see. If you ever see a live eagle, you might never get it to fly close to you enough that you can bite on its neck, but you might be tempted to experience the looking between Dillard and the weasel with every human being you can see, a look that can swap your brains, “I’ve been in that weasel’s brain for sixty seconds, and he was in mine” (p 188). You will want that look because you need the intense and blank feeling of “two lovers, or deadly enemies, [who] met unexpectedly on an overgrown path when each had been thinking of something else”; you need “a clearing blow to the gut” (p 187). You can go to a movie theatre, watch a horror movie, an action movie, or a love movie, to see the actors thrilled in a clearing blow to their gut, but you want a blow to your gut. Sadly you will not feel that blow, after scaring away all the passengers in a bus, because you cannot find a weasel.
If staring at everyone’s eyes is too risky, and you want to keep out of trouble in the bus, like a normal passenger, Ms. Dillard suggest look into something else. In the essay “Sight into Insight,” she explains, “unless I call my attention to what passes before my eyes, I simply won’t see it” (paragraph 29). In order to maintain in her head “a running description of the present” and “know what’s happening,” Dillard proceeds to “hurl over logs and roll away stones. . . study the bank a square foot at a time, probing and tilting [her] head.” She is looking for a penny. At the beginning of the essay, she writes that when she was six, she hid a penny somewhere and drew huge arrows leading up to it, so others can find it. She believes that nature does the same thing, so she looks for the arrows nature draws.
That penny becomes valuable in Dillard’s essay. It is the hundreds of birds, or “leaves,” flying away from an Osage orange tree. It is the piles of cut stems that mice make on the ground in grassy fields. It is the green ray of sunset, the bird died in mid-flight, the great meteor shower of August, the jerking crayfish—Dillard’s list of pennies runs on and on, and the penny grows into dimes, quarters, and dollar bills.
Still, “this looking business is risky,” because you might join the great autumn hawk migration vertically when watching them “on a humped rock on nearby Purgatory Mountain” (paragraph 19), so you should try some safer experiences mentioned in the essay. Try looking at everything as mere color patches, like the men and women who were blinded by cataracts since birth and suddenly could see (paragraph 22). Try putting a dam on your mind’s muddy river and stop the flow (paragraph 34). Try lifting yourself and striking to see if you can ring like a bell (paragraph 36).
Of course, you know those experiences are not safe either, but the detailed descriptions and peculiar imaginations in Annie Dillard’s essay make her invitation tempting and irresistible. Before you accept her invitation, give a second thought. I am still struggling to reject the temptation of looking into someone’s eyes, in search of the look that Dillard describes as “a bright blow to the brain, or a sudden beating of brains, with all the charge and intimate grate of rubbed balloon,” the look that “emptied our lungs. . . felled the forest, moved the fields, and drained the pond; the world dismantled and tumbled into that black hold of eyes” (In Depth, p 187). So far, I still keep my skull, I still keep the key that opens the eye-lock, and my eyes have not burnt or dropped.
