I love walking at night. I feel like almost every walk that I blog about is at night, but there's just something that I suppose I'm drawn to, something that is much deeper to understand, something that I myself don't even understand. Tonight's walk was brief, however, it got me thinking about so many things, I don't even know where to start. Lately, the ground feels different under my feet, it's becoming harder and doesn't cradle my step the way it used to. The night sky looks fuzzy, clouded by droplets of percipitation that sparkle and dance in the artifical street lights shining down on the empty street. The night air feels dense and heavy, the coldness burning my lungs like fire. I exhale and my breath is white, something that always has fascinated me since I was a little kid. The night is quiet and everyone is hiding somewhere, and I am left standing in the middle of an empty road, my teeth chattering, my bones shaking inside a sack of pale and delicate flesh. I must have stood in the middle of the road for what seemed like forever, staring at the sky, wondering who I am in the vast emptiness of the world. I was alerted by the headlights of an oncoming car and shook my head to bring myself back to reality. I walked away and checked the time, surprised that no more than three minutes had past. I had completely lost myself in those few moments that felt like an eternity, thinking about who we are, where we're going, what's going to become of us when we reach this end that we all seem so diligently working to acheive.
The question of eternity and what is to become of us has been a question that has had me hooked like a fish since I was old enough to understand that one day, inevitable, we will die. I have read many interpretations of life after death, watched lots of movies, listened to many people, but no matter what, I am never satisfied with the answer. I think it is safe to say that the idea of death is an idea that scares me like no other, resulting in the fact that no answer can ever be given as to why this occurs, it's just something that we must accept. I think our inability to understand the passage of time is what presents a big flaw in my understanding of life and death. I feel like our "invention" of time is our way of making sense of change, of the things that we don't understand. We know that we come into this world, we live and grow, some of us have children and get married, and hope to live long, successful lives and in the end, we return to the ground where we came from. We all have a past, a present and all hope to have a future. In reality, all we really have is the moment that we are living in. We have no proof of the past or the future; they are merely just ideas. We can't see them, touch them, grasp them. Dillard's interpretation has struck me like no other. She not only refrains from making sense of time, but claims that we are infact terrified of the passage of time saying, "It is the fixed that horrifies us, the fixed that assails us with the tremendous force of it's mindlessness. The fixed is a Mason jar, and we can't beat it open" (pg. 69). Our only one and "fixed" moment in time is the one that we have right now, and that scares us, therefore, we have created time as a distraction and a way to make sense of what we call life. We are appraching the ultimate fixed moment, which is death. Dillard explains life by saying, "It is motion without direction, force without power, the aimless procession of caterpillars round a rim of a vase, and I hate it because at any moment I myself might step to that charmed and glistening thread" (pg. 69). For some, death, or the "charmed and glistening thread" seems intriguing, and for others, it's the scariest and most unexplainable thing that perhaps we are ever faced with. What if we really are just science projects stuck in Mason Jars, experiments being watched and awed at, just test subjects suspended in one long, drawn out moment that seems like a dream? Isn't that horrifying? I think Dillard would say so.
You bring up some great questions and I especially love the image of people, as well as other living organisms, being test subjects in Mason jars. The whole concept of time is interesting to analyze, as our days are inevitably leading up to an end, in which our matter is returned to the earth and remolded. The fact that energy cannot be created nor destroyed makes it possible to think about how the "science" within us remains intrinsically tied to all other things...and I think some of the big questions it leaves us with revolve around the ideas of spirituality. Why humans? What makes us so special? Why are we capable of so much intellectual and emotional depth? These open-ended questions are elusive and Dillard seems to just want to snatch whatever glimpses of truth she can out of the air. She admits, "I've learned the names of some color-patches, but not the meanings" (129).
ReplyDeleteIndeed, indeed some great questions! In general it actually seemed like Dillard was utilizing a lot of images that reminds us of the frailties of life and death. On page 100 she describes the power of trees in general;
ReplyDelete"You stand in their dimness, where the very light is blue, staring unfocused at the thickest part of the trunk as though it were a long, dim tunnel... The egg-shaped patch of light at the end of the blackened tunnel swells and looms; the sing of the tire tread over brick reaches an ear-splitting crescendo;...) (100-101).
Though in this passage that she talks about the trees power in relation to the past (in the great context from which the quote was derived), the images of darkened tunnels and swelling lights serves as a reminder of how people talk about death; the dark tunnel symbolizing the passage of death and the light at the end of the tunnel being the emergence of a new life.
But from this, she is referencing memory being a notion of something that is created but dies away quickly, which is just as interesting a topic to ponder about.
It’s interesting that you associate the fixed with the present because I never really thought of it that way but I think part of me is inclined to agree with you. I keep coming back to the passage I talked about in class today: “The present is a freely given canvas. That it is constantly being ripped apart and washed downstream goes without saying; it is a canvas, nevertheless” (84). The canvas could be “fixed” but it doesn’t seem as “fixed” to me as the Mason jar. I believe that this is because the Mason jar is never described as being broken or escaped from, while the canvas is talked about as something constantly getting ripped to pieces. I believe that on some level the Mason jar represents death, because Dillard represents it as something that is sort of inescapable and I believe that the “fixedness” of death scares us, and therefore we treat it like something that doesn’t exist. We believe that our world is the one and only world when in fact it could be a world small enough to fit into a Mason jar. My understanding of the present or at least of the way she portrays it is that we want it to be fixed, but something that doesn’t contain us the way a Mason jar would. I believe that the body of water that rips apart the canvas would be, ironically, the “fixed” element in that scene and therefore only part of the present would be “fixed”. The other part, the canvas, I picture never being able to be completed because it is always getting ripped apart. So the present is some sort of combination or relationship between the “fixed” and the not “fixed”. I don’t think it traps us like the Mason jar seems to do, but it does keep us from moving forward with something.
ReplyDeleteYou've brought some interesting thoughts to the table, and I like how you approach Dillard's view of death. She certainly has made herself out to be a pilgrim in this book, but she is clearly a pilgrim on more than one quest.
ReplyDeleteThe issue of death (or at least of the impermanence of life) is what seems to drive every observation she makes in the world. Whether she is trying to catch a glimpse of life as the fleeting appearance of a minnow or whether she is recounting the experiment involving the train of caterpillars, the spiritual questions that she raises all point back to that one unanswerable question: what happens after death?
It's easy to feel insignificant walking alone at night, letting your thoughts wander like you describe. The scenes and subjects that Dillard visits in the book read very much like one long string of thoughts that anyone might have on a quiet, clear night, and like we have mentioned in class, I think this is probably why we are so quick to call her crazy. There's a reason we stop staring at the stars after a while, and a reason why we feel more comfortable and maybe a bit unburdened when we get back inside to our warm, comfortable homes--we just can't take the weight of the unknown and hold onto it for too long before it starts to scare us. So when we read Dillard and become perturbed in a way that is hard to put our finger on, I think it's because page after page she dwells on this one question and just can't let it go.