Dillard on Babbling and Seeing

"Annie Dillard. Annie Dillard. Annie Dillard..." Most of my walk consisted of this. Just repeating her name over and over again trying to get some idea about where to start this blog and trying to control the chatter going on endlessly in my head. That constant stream of thought that usually looks a lot like, "Ok, so I'll do this for 15 minutes or so and then when I get home I'll spend ten minutes writing the blog then I will do the 10-12 page paper that is due Tuesday since I will have no time tomorrow because I am working all day. Then I need to do a load of laundry and get some supper. Crap, I almost forgot about that, what am I going to eat?" Right about then I realized that thinking about food was A) Not thinking about Dillard and B) Making my belly rumble. And that was when it hit me. Dillard has a wonderful quote on page 34, "All I can do s try to gag the commentator, to hush the noise of useless interior babble that keeps me from seeing just as surely as a newspaper dangled before my eyes." She is so right! It happens to me a lot when I go on the walks for this class. I head out, determined to be filled with wonder and awe at something, to be inspired in some new way about the text and instead all I do is babble along, in my head, about what I usually babble about, school, work, housework, friends, family, life. What is it about our own tiny lives that has us so enthralled? What keeps us from seeing the things around us, those "unwrapped gifts and free surprises" that Dillard talks about? Why are we so self centered? It reminded me a lot of Leopold when he said that the non-hunter sees nothing.

Maybe Leopold was right, maybe we just aren't trained to see things in that way. But Dillard actively tries to. And the best she can come to is this; "Instead you must allow the muddy river to flow unheeded in the dim channels of consciousness; you raise your sights; you look along it, mildly, acknowledging its presence without interest and gazing beyond it into the realm of the real where subjects and objects act and rest purely, without utterance" (35). Perhaps she would agree with Leopold, only hunters really see.

On the other hand, Dillard is very interested in religion. Something Leopold spends very little time on in his book of essays. In fact, opens her book with a wondering about the bloody paw prints her old tomcat would leave on her chest every morning. She writes, "The sign on my body could have been an emblem or a stain, the keys to the kingdom or the mark of Cain" (3). She is more enthralled by the almost mystical quality of nature than Leopold is. There is a sense of awe that I think is missing in Leopold's hunters. They understand animals in a much more primal way, they are able to get inside of an animals head. They have to in order to hunt them. But I think when you do that, while you are able to see, hear, smell, and sense more. The breath taking, inspiring, mind blowing moments of nature don't seem as extraordinary any more.