The Annie Dillard Reader by Annie Dillard
Turning to the French is a form of suicide for the American who loves literature—or, as the joke might go, it is at least a cry for help. Now, when I was sixteen, I had turned to the French. I flung myself into poetry as into Niagara Falls. Beauty took away my breath. I twined away; I flew off with my eyes rolled up; I dove down and succumbed. I bought myself a plot in Valéry’s marine cemetery, and moved in: cool dirt on my eyes, my brain smooth as a cannonball. It grieves me to report that I tried to see myself as a sobbing fountain, apparently serene, tall and thin among the chill marble monuments of the dead. Rimbaud wrote a lyric that gently described a man sleeping out in the grass; the sleeper made a peaceful picture, until, in the poem’s last line, we discover in his right side two red holes. This, and many another literary false note, appealed to me.
I’d been suspended from school for smoking cigarettes. That was a month earlier, in early spring. Both my parents wept. Amy saw them weeping; horrified, she began to cry herself. Molly cried. She was six, missing her front teeth. Like Mother and me, she had pale skin that turned turgid and red when she cried; she looked as if she were dying of wounds. I didn’t cry, because, actually, I was an intercontinental ballistic missile, with an atomic warhead; they don’t cry.
Why didn’t I settle down, straighten out, shape up? I wondered, too. I thought that joy was a childish condition that had forever departed; I had no glimpse then of its return the minute I got to college. I couldn’t foresee the pleasure—or the possibility—of shedding sophistication, walking away from rage, and renouncing French poets.
Late one night, my parents and I sat at the kitchen table; there was a truce. We were all helpless, and tired of fighting. Amy and Molly were asleep.
“What are we going to do with you?”
Mother raised the question. Her voice trembled and rose with emotion. She couldn’t sit still; she kept getting up and roaming around the kitchen. Father stuck out his chin and rubbed it with his big hands. I covered my eyes. Mother squeezed white lotion into her hands, over and over. We all smoked; the ashtray was full. Mother walked over to the sink, poured herself some ginger ale, ran both hands through her short blond hair to keep it back, and shook her head.
She sighed and said again, looking up and out of the night-black window, “Dear God, what are we going to do with you?” My heart went out to them. We all seemed to have exhausted our options. They asked me for fresh ideas, but I had none. I racked my brain, but couldn’t come up with anything. The U.S. Marines didn’t take sixteen-year-old girls.
I GREW UP IN PITTSBURGH 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.
Sometimes after dinner, when my sisters and I were young, Mother could persuade Father to perform Goofus—to “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 away…
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 ‘business.’”
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 crash—the 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!”—but 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 work—dusty 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, because—why? 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.
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, an
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 enough—in 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?
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 imitating 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 Orleans—if you could get to New Orleans—would the music be loud enough?
1987
POEMS
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 light….
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 barnacles—
remember?—
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 stones….
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 grease….
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 splits—
fishes, grass—the 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 wind—
the williwaw, cheechako—
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.
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 tongue….
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.
—BORGES, INTERVIEW IN ENCOUNTER, 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 pears—
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