There is no such thing as an artist: there is only the world, lit or unlit, as the light allows. When the candle is burning, who looks at the wick? When the candle is out, who needs it? But the world without light is wasteland and chaos, and a life without sacrifice is abomination.
What can any artist set on fire but his world? What can any people bring to the altar but all it has ever owned in the thin towns or over the desolate plains? What can an artist use but materials, such as they are? What can he light but the short string of his gut, and when that's burnt out, any muck ready to hand?
His face is flame like a seraph's, lighting the kingdom of God for the people to see; his life goes up in the works; his feet are waxen and salt. He is holy and he is firm, spanning all the long gap with the length of his love, in flawed imitation of Christ on the cross stretched both ways unbroken and thorned. So must the work be also, in touch with, in touch with, in touch with; spanning the gap, from here to eternity, home. -Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm
Holy the Firm, which may be my favorite literary work, provoked author Geoff Dyer to this remarkable quote, folded seamlessly into his laudatory introduction to Dillard’s retrospective collection, The Abundance:
[I]t helps, also, that Dillard’s pretty much a fruitcake. In an insightful review of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Eudora Welty confessed that at certain points “I honestly do not know what she is talking about.” And Pilgrim is far from being Dillard’s most difficult or nuttiest offering; that honour would have to go to Holy the Firm (really bonkers and all the more enjoyable for that). Incomprehension is usually the result of obfuscation – the words refusing to slip into focus – whereas Dillard remains a writer of exceptional clarity, even when we are struggling to grasp the meaning of what is being said so clearly, so brightly.
Dyer summarizes well what may be mesmerizing, exasperating, or both at once about Dillard’s early work: with all the demands she is making on the English language and with all the liberties she is taking with the reader’s expectations, she is telling us what she is experiencing, and saying what she means. What we make of it, as far as she is concerned, is up to us.
Her 1982 essay, Total Eclipse, begins thus: “It had been like dying, that sliding down the mountain pass. It had been like the death of someone, irrational, that sliding down the mountain pass and into the region of dread. It was like slipping into fever, or falling down that hole in sleep from which you wake yourself whimpering.” Mind you, at that point she was describing the drive to the motel where she and her then-husband, Gary Clevidence, spent the night before the eclipse.
There is a temptation to suspect Dillard of being melodramatic, of subjugating narrative and reader to incommunicable corners of her own subjectivity. This is unfair; she’s creating a vibe, a general feel, within which the narrative particles are building blocks carefully crafted and deployed, but properly intelligible only in context. Thus, she can at once soften the dramatic and remarkable and heighten the mundane, as in this passage:
When we tried to cross the Cascades range, an avalanche had blocked the pass…. We waited as highway crews bulldozed a passage through the avalanche. With two-by-fours and walls of plywood, they erected a one-way, roofed tunnel through the avalanche. We drove through the avalanche tunnel, crossed the pass, and descended several thousand feet into central Washington…. As we lost altitude, the snows disappeared; our ears popped; the trees changed, and in the trees were strange birds. I watched the landscape innocently, like a fool, like a diver in the rapture of the deep who plays on the bottom while his air runs out.
The avalanche tunnel, which should frankly have been terrifying, is rendered flatly, while the descent into the valley is ominous, lulling her into complacency. The effect is uncanniness. Everywhere she is seeding in slips of the spooky: a picture on the motel room wall, an article in a magazine found in the lobby, hotel denizens that seem at once plausible and vaguely mythological – such that by the time the eclipse reaches totality, we are prepared:
From all the hills came screams. A piece of sky beside the crescent sun was detaching. It was a loosened circle of evening sky, suddenly lit from the back. It was an abrupt black body out of nowhere; it was a flat disk; it was almost over the sun. That is when there were screams. At once this disk of sky slid over the sun like a lid. The sky snapped over the sun like a lens cover. The hatch in the brain slammed. Abruptly it was dark night, on the land and in the sky. In the night sky was a tiny ring of light. The hole where the sun belongs is very small. A thin ring of light marked its place. There was no sound. The eyes dried, the arteries drained, the lungs hushed. There was no world.
This tone continues, indeed intensifies, far beyond what I can cite here; in toto, her piece might as well have been named Eclipse Apocalypse. For my part, I am inclined to ask, in her own words from Holy the Firm: “What in the Sam Hill is going on here, anyway?”
As I suggested in a previous post, Dillard seems eager to give the materials a chance to acquit themselves – she took the title of Holy the Firm from a proposed Gnostic “missing link” between matter and spirit. However, she explains her position more clearly in a chapter from Living by Fiction, a book of “unlicensed literary theory,” as she calls it. She writes, “To an Australian aboriginal before Europeanization, as is well known, every bush and rock, by its very existence, continuously uttered its human meaning as if it were speech.” On the one hand, in such a cosmos (or perhaps rather, chaos), the world is unmediated, and fully open to us, in principle; on the other, all our intuitions and feelings are vindicated by this unmediated world, and thus all have equal authority. The voices in our heads are as real as any other voices, and we must listen to them.
She sets this in contrast to the world we know:
Christianity and science, which on big issues go hand in hand intellectually as well as historically, everywhere raised the standard of living and cut down on the fun. Everywhere Christianity and science hushed the bushes and gagged the rocks. They razed the sacred groves, killed the priests, and drained the flow of meaning right off the planet. They built schools; they taught people to measure and add, to write, and to pray to an absent God. The direction of recent history is toward desacralization, the unhinging of materials from meaning. The function of Western knowledge is to “de-spookify.” Christianity and early science began this process; the ideals of the Protestant Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, coupled with Enlightenment ideals of progress and democracy, carried it still further. The individual, with his society changing all around him, with his private prayer and reasoned vote, was the new unit of meaning.
The next waypost on this path, Dillard suggests, is contemporary subjectivism. She is understandably ambivalent on this, and tentatively suggests the remedy of turning the methods of literary analysis on the world at large, as a third way between outright superstition and this objectification which she sees as so distancing being from thinking as to subjectivize both at once.
It is worth noting that in the early 1980s, when Dillard was writing Total Eclipse and Living by Fiction, she was a believing and practicing Christian, on a curve toward a conversion to Catholicism which carried her through the Nineties. Her Christianity throughout seems to have had substantial elements of mythical religiosity; this may have informed her search for a third way between Christian and scientific rationality and animistic wonder in the Eighties, and by the current decade had resolved into the following, from a brief sketch she gave to The Christian Century: “I identify as a Christian…. I can’t and don’t give intellectual assent to many very established and agreed-upon Christian dogmas, if not most of them, if not all of them. That Jesus of Nazareth is ‘the only begotten son of God, begotten not made, God of God, light of light, true God of true God’ is something I always enjoy saying. But I wouldn’t bet the farm on it. I wouldn’t render it to Caesar. These are spiritual matters. Their language merely resembles ours. They need not make sense in worldly terms.”
In a pair of earlier posts, I discussed Christianity as religio vera – “the religion of the truth,” not so much as “the religion that is true,” or worse, “the religion that is the truth,” but as the religion that concerns itself with what is true. In this, Christianity in its nature shares with philosophy, and to some degree with the natural sciences, a method and spirit that sociologist Max Weber called theoretical rationality. This form of rationality prioritizes internal consistency and logical interconnectedness; Weber attributes its origins to theological reflection.
Weber also identified three other types of rationality – practical, substantive and formal. Practical and formal rationality share a means-end modus operandi – the former directly pursuing interests (often self-interest), the latter tracing out inexorably the results of law, method, rule. Between these two, we find the balance of contemporary society: the former being the life’s path of the abstractly postulated Enlightenment man, the free, rational individual acting in his own self-interest; the latter bearing the prestige of the experimental scientist, the technocrat, the guardians of the rules-based order under which we live.
More saliently for contemporary believers, there is that substantive rationality which comes so easy for many; it centers ethics, and seeks to reform the world in the image of its ideals. Yet just as much as those aforementioned rationalities, such moral idealism can conceal a certain disrespect for truth. Theoretical rationality is there to keep us honest, both literally and aphoristically.
Christianity, and especially Catholicism, with its unified magisterium and Scholastic heritage, have carried theoretical rationality through the ages, to where it dwells today: still a handmaid, but now no longer of theology, but of technology. For better or for worse, the faith played a part in the history that got us to where we stand.
Do we live up to our own standards of rationality?—of course not, no more than we live up to the Gospel itself. Even discounting the weakness, selfishness and malice we dare not deny, the lure of our moralisms and our technologies, the power we covet and the good we dream ourselves capable of doing, so easily get in the way of our theoretical integrity.
Last week, on the Solemnity of the Annunciation, Val and I drove north to Vermont to witness the total solar eclipse. For a number of reasons, our experience differed from Dillard’s[i]. But reflecting on her work, her reaction, and our own motives in driving north, I felt the need to offer a few words on the conjunction of eclipses, religio vera, and theoretical rationality.
In the New York Times, an artist who was raised in the Hare Krishna movement wrote of how its adherents hid indoors in horror during eclipses, in response to the mythological Vedic account of the shadow planet/dragon head Rahu devouring the sun. Historical Christianity, of course, has never held such a view, nor have the other Abrahamic religions – indeed, Mohammed made the total eclipse of 521 the occasion of sober and authentically spiritual reflection on his and his followers’ service to Allah. Of course, the kind of mythologizing that involves dragon heads and shadow planets isn’t exactly a common feature of the contemporary outlook, although some seem intent on making it so. I am also emphatically not trying to equate Dillard’s account of numinous terror with the beliefs of the Hare Krishnas. Indeed, this whole issue is not yet the real point.
More significant is the freedom to see and to rejoice in nature as nature. Annie Dillard is often cited as the best nature writer of the late 20th Century, and not without reason. Yet her awkwardness, made explicit in the passage from Living by Fiction, with the dichotomy between animism and materialism, is telling. Religio vera, in contrast, is clear in where it stands here. It acknowledges the supernatural, and does not per se deny the preternatural (however much it admonishes caution and a skeptical eye in that regard). What it does reject is the paranormal – that is to say, claims about aberrant behaviors attributed to the material universe per se. Religio vera is in many ways a better guard against such spookiness than the study of the physical sciences themselves; the most hard-headed materialism has far less stake in opposing pseudospirituality than does actual spirituality. Actual spirituality (as opposed to the diaphanous notions of the late Dillard) is eager to honor and respect the gravity, the objectivity, and the transcendent character of the spiritual order; and thus vehemently insists on letting the natural order be itself. But even this is not yet all.
For me most of all: the lure of power, be it technical, social, or religious, and the desire to effect change, be it material, moral, or evangelistic – these offer the sanction of apparent virtue to our forays away from theoretical rationality, into formal or substantive rationality. I would not disparage these other rationalities; at their best, formal and substantive rationality are responsible for much of our growth, both as persons and as a species. Yet there is something liberating about the disinterested pursuit of reason and truth, the commitment to a disposition of receptivity and intellectual integrity, free of interest and motivated reasoning. Our days are starving for lack of contemplation, even natural contemplation; it’s refreshing and restorative to be called out of ourselves, to wonder or to adore.
[i] Most obviously: an unexpected half-hour delay caused by an accident ahead of us left us five miles, five minutes short of totality. Not the decisive difference, I can say with confidence, but an irony I might yet write about!