Blog#1: Dillard: Self-consciousness and innocence in "The Present"

In “The Present” – chapter 6 of Tinker Creek – Dillard tries to grab hold of the present moment, to divine what’s different between human and non-human experiences of time (a puppy, a tree, a man contemplating a tree, Dillard herself), to think about how consciousness and time create each other. By the second page she’s already playing with different levels of time: she travels an enormous distance in the blink of any eye (from the service station to the mountain top), then claims to see in the span of a few seconds a mountain forest advancing and retreating. Meanwhile she’s scratching the puppy and he’s experiencing the passage of time in his own way.

The difference between the puppy’s experience and Dillard’s is a crucial point for her. Consciousness, she says, allows both humans and non-humans to experience the passage of time in all its profound beauty, allows us to ride a moment in an uninterupted flow of awareness. Self- consciousness interrupts this. It makes the passage of time a series of disconnected sensory impressions. At the same time though, self-reflection, say, after a significant moment has passed, is what allows us to bring meaning to experience. At first Dillard is jealous of the puppy’s ability to surrender completely to any moment, to only be concerned with getting the most possible pleasure from her fingers on his belly. Later, though (upon reflection?), she recognizes that her experience of time is infinitely richer than the puppy’s because she has language to give it meaning. Though she’s ambivalent about this too, as she shows in her passage on Xerxes attempting to “write” the sycamore in gold so he can remember it, even though, try as he might, he’ll never get that present moment back.

But you need both. You need your self-consciousness balanced with what Dillard refers to as “innocence” – as she defines it: “the spirit’s unself-conscious state at any momet of pure devotion to any object” (pg 84 in my copy of the book). Or maybe I don’t have it quite right here. Maybe Dillard is trying to get rid of self-consciousness (as she defines it) altogether. If so, I think that move might be a little problematic, because her entire book is a balancing act of innocence and self-consciousness. A lot of what she’s doing is chronicling not just “nature” itself, but the effects of her surroundings on her consciousness, keeping track of what it means to be a thinking human in the woods. Without a large degree of self-consciousness there’d be no book.

Still, in the essay self-consciousness represents a kind of evil. Or perhaps it’s one manifestation of “evil,” or at the very least, “very bad vibes,” in this chapter. She equates self-consciousness with the worst features of city living: “Self-consciousness is the curse of the city and all that sophistication implies. It is the glimpse of oneself in a storefront window, the unbidden awareness of reactions on the faces of other people” (83). Like many artists, and many people in general, Dillard longs for a pure experience. When she quotes Stephen Graham on (my) page 81, about the golden door opening to reveal the most profound of mysteries, she claims that the door opens onto the present, onto the kind of pure experience she’s looking for, though there’s really no evidence in the text she presents that that’s what he was talking about. In fact the image and the conclusion she draws from it seem forced; I wonder if she chose it for its religious overtones.

There are other images and shifts in topic that feel forced, and all but the Golden Door seem to bring very bad vibes into the essay and to represent the opposite of that door. The first such image/shift happens on (my) page 81, when, out of nowhere, she’s talking about religion: “It is ironic that the one thing that all religions recognize as separating us from our creator – our very self-consciousness – is also the one thing that divides us from our fellow cratures. It was a bitter birthday present from evolution, cutting us off at both ends.” Indeed this passage seems cut off at both ends as there is no lead-up, and the next line is, “I get in the car and drive home,” followed by a section break. Another jarring non-sequitur pops up on pg 85, when she recalls white-coated scientists in a university lab, one dissecting a fish and the other eating a grapefruit.

I’ve gone on long enough here, and don’t know if I’ve accomplished much, but I’m interested in the way Dillard and other authors characterize time and relate it to religion and science.