Expeditions and Encounters

Caution! Long post but should be entertaining once you get through the literary criticisms. Really, lit crit?
Who wants to read that?


Annie Dillard's Teaching a Stone to Talk ranks about average on my reading list and somewhat below average overall on my bookshelf. Guess what! It turns out I already had a copy. I guess the book and the author aren't memorable enough for me when I'm in the bookstore looking over semester textbooks. Even though we're only supposed to blog about "Total Eclipse", there are other writings in the book I'd like to comment upon first.

Dillard gains some ground with me for drawing highly accurate parallels between the danger, degradation and frequent lunacy found in christianity in America today and the ridiculous, folly riddled history of arctic exploration in "An Expedition to the Pole". The way she compares these two things makes several key points. First, if there already exists a better way to do something, don't show up with a different idea thinking your way is going to be superior. Hubris kills people once it exposes them, in this case to the elements. The first British explorers in the arctic focused on bringing fine silver and an expanded library rather than provisions to survive the weather. We see this same sort of logic frequently applied within upstart "christian" churches in America. The lesson here, although Dillard doesn't say it clearly, is if you strip away the institution, something worthwhile should be left behind. Interestingly, she becomes roman catholic 6 years after this essay is published! The second point which I see Dillard making somewhat more clearly is religion is the act of searching for a goal but we are human, mortal, weak and often stupid. In this dangerous land of uncovered and sensitive humanity, ideally, religion becomes a technology to strengthen us and our search. That's what I get out of her titles "The Land", The People" and "The Technology" within the writing. Other great points are well made and I think this essay is her strongest one in the book, even more so than "Total Eclipse". The subject isn't about an epiphanic experience though so I can understand why we would skip over it.

Another essay worth mentioning is Teaching a Stone to Talk. It isn't a terrific essay for what it says directly but for what it infers, the "space between the dots", or how she indirectly covers her points in a very direct manner. Now that last one there, THAT is interesting. "The silence is all there is. It is the alpha and the omega." She so directly covers what she's talking about but indirectly references exactly what points she makes. She argues we exist to witness however our ability to witness is entirely irrelevant for the act of creation. We are not a necessary ingredient in the wonderful thing which is life. And, when we reach this realization, only then do we gain the awareness that all the noise in our brain amounts to nothing as it represents only our own mental/social/species clutter. All that is, all that exists, is the silence, the beginning and the end. The snowflake is silent and we are not. Think about it.

All of this is erased in my mind when she writes fucked up material about prolonging the death of an animal in an effort to have more tender meat (google it yourself or read here about it's a MYTH <- great link, covers a whole lot of other stuff too). Literary criticisms do not even excuse this (at least none that I've read and I've read about this) as it's akin to snuff literature. It serves no great literary purpose other than to piss me off and highlight who else misses the point. So she won the pulitzer prize. I hope future "elite" authors can better represent the sensitive side of humanity which recognizes the moral limits between what is right and what is wrong. This line exists cross culturally and I can see it as clearly as a first down marker for football. How is it that this simple thing is missed by so many people? Isn't it obvious? In one very important paragraph, she almost excuses herself. She writes

We lay in the tent and talked. "If it had been my wife," one man said with special vigor, amazed, "she wouldn't have cared what was going on: she would have dropped everything right at that moment and gone in the village from here to there to there, she would not have stopped until that animal was out of its suffering one way or another. She couldn't bear to see a creature in agony like that."
I nodded.

She agrees even though SHE DID NOTHING!!! She sees the face of suffering and knowingly continues to participate in it. She says she's thought about "carniverousness" and that suffering for her diet is not an "issue". She tries to express condolences, sympathy.. something, and then discounts it completely. "I knew at the time it was a ridiculous thing to say." That is the most disturbing part of this writing to me. This shadow of morality is not a bad thing. When you embrace it, it becomes the most wonderful thing you've ever experience, stronger than a literary epiphany, traditional thoughts on love, or even the power of religion to sway the masses. She watches the animal suffering and does and says nothing. She doesn't even condemn herself for doing nothing. Instead, she excuses herself. If at any point she's commenting on her own weakness, she refuses to acknowledge it and totally missed it. That makes this essay exist basically without a point. She's told us one of her experiences but there is no "moral" to the story (at least not one she's willing to face). In essence, she's told us not to feel bad about the deer and I take issue with that.

I'll spell it out for everyone in case anyone else also can't see the yellow line as clearly as I can.

• Eating animals and animal foods is an acceptable human practice
• Causing unnecessary suffering to animals, under every circumstance, including for the purposes of eating them and the things which come from them, is an unacceptable practice
• Apathy concerning this directly supports unnecessary suffering and is an unacceptable human practice.

Now that we have no confusion, I'd like to say that it is not necessary to eat her way. I traveled to Costa Rica and should probably write about it as a contrast to her travel writings. At the end of the pavement, the road continued. It went on unpaved for several hours, gradually getting more and more rocky. Eventually, we passed the point of other vehicles. The locals only had horses and bicycles. Further on down this road, it finally ends at a dock. At the end of the dock was a boat. A 45 minute boat ride took us a good 20 miles into a national park inaccessible by land. Beyond the park was a tiny little town on a tiny little island amidst the swampy marshy waterways. This town had a dirt packed main street and the few buildings alongside it were built with scrap materials hauled enormous distances at great cost to the people who used them. At the end of the dirt packed main street was a building. I went into the building and, as the few member of my group still with me dispersed to do other things, I entered the kitchen/dining room of one of the oldest people I've ever met. I don't speak Spanish but I made myself understood through what I believe was her grandson (or maybe great grandson) that I was vegan. She seemed confused upon hearing about my being vegan until it clicked. Her eyes lit up, she stared at me as if looking into my soul, reached forward and kissed me on my forehead. Then she busied her self in the kitchen for 30 minutes and served me one of the most amazing meals I have ever eaten.

Food is one of the most regularly occurring epiphanies which we can experience. I think it is exceeded only by taming a feral cat and turning the feral cat into a lap cat (which is an end product to embracing that shadow of morality I mentioned above). Experiencing the daily love and affection of a formerly feral cat even beats food. But back to food. Food is how enemies sit down at a table and become friends. Food is how we seal a wedding, with the feast afterwords. Food is something we use to create the rituals in our lives which affect us on the deepest levels (think of Dr. Sexson popping out of a mask at the end of a sacred ritual and revealing an ear of corn shouting "all is now revealed!") Gravity holds our universe the way it is. Food holds our lives in the same all powerful grasp. Without it, we will not survive. In the last 50-60 years or so, humans have lost more knowledge when it comes to food than in any other time in recorded history. For Annie Dillard to bring up food when she clearly knows nothing about its deep and awesome power either personally or literarily, reminds me of a whiny teen who has not yet learned what it is they speak of.

Commentary on Total Eclipse.

The woman is addicted to eggs (which are probably from a factory farm in which the chickens live perpetually in an eclipse which so frightens Dillard. Ironic?)

One particular line did stand out to me as something important which would probably not be covered in class or in the blogs (and if brought up, would be buried under an avalanche of other stuff like in this blog post). "It was as useless as a memory; it was as off kilter and hollow and wretched as a memory." I think this is in reference to the useless memory of the hotel lobby with the aging hooker/waitress (unclear) and television absorbed older men. The clowns are useless too. One nice thing about Dillard is that the extraneous stuff she writes, the filler, the text garbage, she will point to it and call it what it is: a tangent from the point.

This is an important point. I see Dillard's writing as more about taking us too something than simply the snapshot memory. Movement becomes a necessary element to the points she raises with her writing. The snap shot memories have no movement and pale in comparison to the memories with movement. They drive to the location. They move up the hill. The experience of the eclipse moves upon them and then moves past them at 1,800 miles an hour. To process the event, she and her husband change locations, by car, and then discuss it at the diner. The very process of the eclipse itself requires movement. So I think we should take a closer look at how Dillard uses movement and how relates movement moving her.

If you read this far I commend you. As a side note, check out this story of a former student of Annie Dillard. Something I've learned about one difference between a good teacher and a great teacher, a good teacher shows no faults and no cracks. A great teacher has visible chinks in their armor. This is necessary for us students to over come the challenge of their aura, or presence, and then be strong enough to square off against ourselves and the walls we naturally present ourselves.