This past spring, ever since seeing The Commoners, a 12-minute film about starlings by Penny Lane (yes, that’s really her name; http://www.p-lane.com/commoners.htm), I have been engrossed by this film’s brevity of form and how it engenders a comprehensive meditation on existence, survival, and progress. Then this week, reading Annie Dillard’s two hundred seventy-odd page Pilgrim at Tinker Creek for the first time, I re-encountered starlings as well as Pink Floyd, Van Gogh, Emerson, Blake, Hereclitus, Picasso, the Koran, and dozens of types of winds, planktons, and grasshoppers in her teeming, creek-side metaphysical journey.
In many ways, Dillard’s densely packed narrative mirrors her observations and her activity: “we see in an effort to discover where we so incontrovertibly are. It’s common sense: when you move in, you try to learn the neighborhood” (128). The millions of starlings are just one of the many dozens of categories of nature and its elements that Dillard observes and ruminates on, the volume and detail of which is overwhelming at times. But it is the details that lead to an understanding of the bigger picture, the larger world. “That there are so many details seems to be the most important and visible fact about creation” (129). And Dillard’s details, from nature and from numerous cultural references, are exhaustive. It is in the middle chapter of the book, titled “Intricacy,” that these thoughts about details, creation, and existence coalesce. Suddenly the reader is asked to imagine that she is a man, a starling, a sculptor, a chloroplast, “you are a God” (130), as Dillard connects what it is we know and can observe to the mysteries of interdependence. All the things that Dillard observes are not necessary at all; she writes: “The creation in the first place, being itself, is the only necessity, for which I would die, and I shall” (129). Dillard’s extended meditation on creation out of nothing compels her to focus intensely on the details of her environment, and her cataloging, classifying, and naming is how she views landscape and ultimately orders her world.
As a child, Dillard thought “that all foreign languages were codes for English” (104). Only when she had to learn French did it become apparent to Dillard that she would have to change her thinking and “learn speech all over again” (104). It is through the use of language, the naming and the taxonomy of things, that Dillard absorbs the meaning and identifies with the world around her. When Dillard sees starlings, she also sees everything connected with them: rocks, trees, feathers, chloroplasts. Dillard’s process is more than simply that of looking through a microscope and seeing the universe; the universe is comprehensible only by looking at everything through a microscope. There is nothing big that cannot be small, and conversely, that which is small is, in many ways, large. The depiction of the natural environment that Dillard offers to her reader is extensive, and the implication is that it is authoritative and reliable.
Salt of the Earth, although from a different time and mode, is a documentation of place, society, and culture even though actors are used and fact is mixed with fiction. The community depicted in the film reflects the interdependence between genders, races, as well as socio-economic classes, and questions the dominance and power any one group holds over another. Life in a place like “Zinctown” is foreign to most viewers, but the private and personal experiences of the miners and their wives evoke a kinship with the underdog as reality is transformed and translated via film. For the viewer, reality, and perhaps truth, are expressed and distilled because of the emotive quality of the us/them dichotomy.
-Deb Paczynski
*The copy I have of Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is a 1974 edition from HarperPerennial
Hi Deb - I'm really intrigued by your discussion of language, taxonomy and ecology (that's how I read it, anyway). I've believed for a long time that language not only describes reality but creates it, but you also seem to be saying that language allows us, as part of that creation, to see the connectedness of things. I wonder if different languages come with their own embedded notions of connectedness, like cultures certainly do, and if these differences are only of degree, or by type . . . ?
ReplyDeleteI love this: "Dillard’s process is more than simply that of looking through a microscope and seeing the universe; the universe is comprehensible only by looking at everything through a microscope. There is nothing big that cannot be small, and conversely, that which is small is, in many ways, large."
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