The Mysticism of Annie Dillard's
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

~ Sandra Stahlman



Introduction
Annie Dillard- Background Information
Imagery in "Tinker Creek"
Mystical Themes of "Tinker Creek"
Conclusion
Appendix: Stalking
Appendix: Running Imagery in "Tinker Creek"
Bibliography
Your Comments? Email Me.

Introduction


Annie Dillard is a modern-day mystic. In her Pulitzer Prize winning Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie uses stories of her experiences living near Tinker Creek to speak about the human condition, and our relationship with the Divine. She is a highly skilled writer: her prose wraps you up in the event - making you feel like you are there with her. She brings into her discussions knowledge from the whole spectrum of thought - referencing physics, literature, numerous religious traditions, anthropology, medicine and folklore -- just to name a few of her sources. Through her stories, she transports us to the mystical dimension -- her stories invoke an understanding of the mystical that goes beyond words. Somehow, you're reading what seems like just another bird story, and it suddenly turns into much more -- you can just feel the profound implications as she simply relates what she is seeing around her.

Biographical Information


Annie Dillard was born in 1945, and is now forty-nine and living and teaching in Connecticut (for perspective, Tinker Creek was written in 1974, when she was twenty-nine). She has an unquenchable thirst for knowledge, it seems. Often she reads over 100 books a year, on just about any topic imaginable. She's been this way from her childhood on.

Annie is the oldest of three daughters, born to affluent parents. Her parents encouraged her to be creative and explore her surroundings. They taught her to have a good sense of humor. Her mother was defiant, a non-conformist, and incredibly energetic. Her father taught her everything from plumbing to economics to the intricacies of the novel On The Road. Annie enjoyed a childhood filled with many good memories - days of piano and dance classes, and rock and bug collecting. But, as is typical with most any childhood, there were also many troubles.

During her high school years, Annie rebelled against her affluent, country club upbringing. She hated everyone, got into trouble in school a lot. Around this time, her academic interests turned to poetry. She read all sorts of poetry, and was particularly interested in Ralph Waldo Emerson. She also wrote a lot of poetry on her own, sometimes using her own style, sometimes trying to imitate her favorite authors. Her interests in wildlife continued as well - with Annie still rereading her longtime favorite book once a year - The Field Book of Ponds & Streams.

Next, Annie went to college at Hollins College, near Roanoke, Virginia and studied English, theology, and creative writing. She married her writing teacher, Richard Dillard (her maiden name is Doak) -- the person she says "taught her everything she knows" {Smith, 7} about writing. In 1968 she graduated with a Masters in English, after creating a 40-page thesis on Thoreau's Walden, which focused on the use of Walden Pond as "the central image and focal point for Thoreau's narrative movement between heaven and earth." {Smith, 7} When you read Tinker Creek it's obvious that Thoreau had an enormous influence on her own style of writing. The next couple of years after graduation, Annie spent painting, and writing, having several poems published.

One thing I should mention now is Annie's religious background. Her family attended Presbyterian church when she was a child. She spent a few summers at a fundamentalist summer camp. During her rebellious teenage years, she quit her church because of the "hypocrisy". But, her priest was able to lure her back the next month with a well-thought-out argument based on the works of CS Lewis. After her college years, Annie became, as she says, "spiritually promiscuous," incorporating the ideas of many religious systems into her own personal religious world-view. Not only are there references to Christ, and the Bible in Tinker Creek, but also to Sufism, Buddhism, the Eskimo's religious system, and Hasidic Jews, just to name a few. She tries to look at every situation from every angle. (Just recently, Annie has converted to the Catholic Church.)

Annie's writing Tinker Creek was indirectly influenced by a near fatal attack of pneumonia which she was stricken with in 1971. After she recovered, Annie decided that she needed to experience life more fully. She spent four seasons living near Tinker Creek, an area surrounded by forests, creeks, mountains, and a myriad of animal life. She spent her time outdoors mostly, walking and camping, just being there with the nature. When she was inside, she mostly read. After living there for about a year, Annie began to write about her experiences there by the creek (challenged to write a book herself because the one she was reading at the moment was particularly bad). She started by writing a journal of her experiences, then transposed it all to notecards when the journal reached 20-plus volumes. It took her about 8 months to turn the notecards into the well-crafted Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Towards the end of the 8 months she was so absorbed that she was spending 15, 16 hours a day writing, cut off from society, not even keeping up with the latest world news, living on coffee and coke. She lost 30 pounds and all of her plants died - she was so absorbed she forgot about everything else.

Annie was timid about presenting her book to the public. She even thought of publishing it under a man's name, because she was worried that a theology book by a woman would not be well-received. But, she was worrying for no reason. The book was incredibly well-received. In 1975 she was awarded the Pulitzer for general non-fiction. The fame that came along with a Pulitzer winning book did not sit well with Annie. She didn't trust it. For example, she was bothered by all of the people who were coming to her wanting poems -- that had rejected her works in the past before she was famous. She moved to an isolated cabin on an island in the Puget Sound, and lived there for a while before moving to Connecticut to teach. In 1982 she was honored with an invitation to take part in a cultural delegation of scholars, traveling with them to China.

Since Tinker Creek, Annie has continued to write. Some of her other works include Ticket for a Prayer Wheel, a book of poetry, and An American Childhood, an autobiography of her early years. Her writing continues to meet with critical acclaim. She has been divorced and has remarried several times, and has a daughter now, born in 1984. The latest information I could find says that her current husband is a man named Robert who wrote "the best biography she had ever read" {Smith, 14} on Thoreau. Annie now works at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, as an adjunct professor of English and a writer-in-residence.


Imagery in Tinker Creek


Now, I'd like to describe some of the symbolism running through Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, with the help of some ideas I found in a book by Linda Smith, which examines Annie's writings. Tinker Creek is a incredibly complex mix of imagery and analogy; although it's also very easy reading, you get the sense that Dillard is speaking about the Divine throughout the whole text, with every story and every detail.

There are many running metaphors which help clue you in on what she means, mystically speaking. I found it helpful to have these symbols as a reference point when I read Tinker Creek. Keep in mind that she hopes to convey to us a sense of the human condition - and our relationship with God - by talking about the natural world. She uses these metaphors so naturally it's hard to tell if she is really constructing it that way on purpose - of if it just turned out that way, as if she was handed a gift of grace.

Imagery related to light and fire - these are used to express God's presence in the material world and the experience of unity or illumination. Annie spends a great deal of time discussing vision, and perception. She tells stories from a book she read about people who surgically gain vision for the first time. Some of these patients described their first impression of the visual world as "a lot of different kinds of brightness." {PTC, 26} or "an extensive field of light, in which everything appeared...in motion." {PTC, 26} Annie describes another young patient's first visit to a garden after her sight was restored: "She is greatly astonished, and can scarcely be persuaded to answer, stands speechless in front of the tree, which she only names on taking hold of it, and then as `the tree with the lights in it." {PTC, 28} Annie searches for this raw, unmediated experience of the Divine. She tells us of her quest to see `the tree with the lights in it.' and how she spends time trying to see things just as patches of color, as the raw, unfiltered data. She writes, "Then one day I was walking along Tinker Creek thinking of nothing at all and I saw the tree with the lights in it. I saw a backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame. I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly fire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed. It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance. The flood of fire abated, but I'm still spending the power. Gradually the lights went out in the cedar, the colors died, the cells unflamed and disappeared. I was still ringing. I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck." {PTC, 33} From this passage, we can get a sense of Dillard's use of images of light and fire as both a representation of the natural manifestation of the Divine, and also as more traditional "religious" symbols.

More casually, Annie might toss in a story of bird with a berry in its beak. She writes: "the berry flashed in the sun and glowed like a coal from some forge or cauldron of the Gods." {PTC, 114} Annie spends a great deal of time simply describing the instances of creation around her -- recognizing each as an embodiment of God. Another time she describes how she "watched a chickadee swooping and dangling high in a tulip tree. It seemed astonishingly heated and congealed, as though a giant pair of hands had scooped a skyful of molecules and squeezed it like a snowball to produce this fireball." {PTC, 47}

And, here is a final example where light or fire is used to invoke a sense of God's unity with the material world. In describing a moment of mystical union, Annie says, "I return from the same walk a day later scarcely knowing my name. Litanies hum in my ears...alleluia! I cannot cause the light; the most I can do is try to put myself in the path of it beam. It is possible, in deep space, to sail on a solar wind. Light, be it particle or wave, has force: you rig a giant sail and go..."{PTC, 33}

Annie continues the description of this experience: "The secret of seeing is to sail on solar wind. Hone and spread your spirit till you yourself are a sail, whetted, translucent, broadside to the merest puff." {PTC, 33} In this quote you can see her use of the imagery of the wind. Air, wind, the clouds, and the sky - all are used to symbolize the breath of God - God manifest, God's creative power. She speaks of the wind: "A wind like this does my breathing for me; it engenders something quick and kicking in my lungs." {PTC, 52} She tells of a legend where the mares of the Portuguese used "to raise their tails to the wind, and turn them full against it, and so conceive that genital air instead of natural seed: in such sort, they became great withal, and quicken in their time, and bring forth foals as swift as the wind." {PTC, 52} Dillard uses the wind as both a vehicle for the Divine's creative power and as an expression of God incarnate. "Something wholly new rides the wind," Annie tells us, "something fleet and fleeting that I'm likely to miss." {PTC, 53}

The wind is also vehicle to another aspect of God's manifestations that Annie spends a great deal of time discussing - the horrible suffering, the ugly and grotesque side of God's creation. She tells stories of her experiences of the winter winds: "I know that one night I will go to the kitchen for milk and find on the back of the stove a sudden stew I never fixed, bubbling, with a deer leg sticking out." {PTC, 52} These winds, she says, stir up memories like the following: "I used to kill insects with carbon tetrachloride - cleaning fluid vapor - and pin them in cigar boxes, labeled, in neat rows. That was many years ago: I quit one day I opened a cigar box lid and saw a carrion beetle, staked down high between its wing covers, trying to crawl, swimming on its pin. It was dancing with its own shadow, untouching, and had been for days." {PTC, 52} She sees the suffering and pain of the world as a substantial, and utterly puzzling, element of God's creation.

Later, in a chapter titled "The Present", Annie refers to the wind as she tries to relay the experience of sensing God's presence in the here-and-now. She writes: "On the planet the winds are blowing: the polar easterlies, the westerlies, the northeast and southeast trades...Lick a finger, feel the now." {PTC, 97} I found this imagery to be quite vivid; it expressed to me the idea that God is right here, all around me. By wetting your finger, you can feel the real presence of the air (or God) - a presence that is invisible, yet tangible nonetheless if you just look in a different way.

The next major symbol I'd like you to keep in mind is that of the Earth. The rocks and soil and cliffs and craters - these can be seen representing the unchangeable nature of God - God's enormous presence in the material world and role as a stable foundation, and the source from which we spring and will ultimately return.

Mountains, specifically, are referred to as the source of mystical insight - where revelation comes from. After finally experiencing the tree with the lights in it, Annie explains, "I have since only rarely seen the tree with the lights in it. The vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but I live for it, for the moment when the mountains open and a new light roars in spate through the crack, and the mountains slam." {PTC, 34} She talks of the stability and protection given by the Divine: "I don't come to the creek for sky unmediated, but for shelter. My back rests on a steep bank under the sycamore; before me shines the creek ..." {PTC, 89} Annie finds grounding & stability in her experience of the earth. We can also see the continuing images of sky and light in that quote. These images are everywhere! It's important to realize that Annie's not just consciously using these images as literary metaphors - this is actually how she experiences the Divine - through the embodiment of God in nature.

Annie describes trees as seeming more like the earth and soil than like the animals and insects. She describes trees as a mediator between the material and the transcendent -- as a tunnel to the Divine. In a story which stands out in my mind, she describes a tree, poised just so, with radiant, glowing yellow leaves, so striking and moving - yet the tree just was there, utterly unselfconscious, wholly aligned with the Divine.

The last symbol I would like to point out is water. Water, particularly Tinker Creek itself, represents the gift of life - and the abundance of grace. Here is an example: "The sharks I saw roving up and down the coast. If the sharks cease roving, if they still their twist and rest for a moment, they die. They need water pushed into their gills; they need dance." {PTC, 98} The water is the lifeblood of the planet, she writes:"...as a tree blasts into leaf sprouting water hurled up from its roots..."{PTC, 99} Tinker Creek is often used to convey a sense of God's grace, which is present to us even in the hardest of times; Annie writes, "it has always been a happy thought to me that the creek runs on all night, new every minute, whether I wish it or know it or care...So many things have been shown me on these banks, so much light has illuminated me by reflection here where the water comes down, that I can hardly believe that this grace never flags..." Her use of the imagery of water is poetic and conveys not only an image of a natural setting, but also a profound message about the mystical nature of life.

These images run throughout the whole book and have implications far beyond what I was able to touch on here! Again, I would like to stress that not only are these images used as symbols to represent the transcendent characteristics of the Divine, they are, in effect used to convey the actual manifestation of the God in our material world. (That is to say, for example, the wind not only represents God's creative power - it is the Divine expressing itself in the wind.) This aspect of Dillard's mysticism can be described as apophatic, or the Via Positiva; Dillard finds evidence of God in all things. Although we may never truly know the nature of the Divine, Annie recognizes and relates to the outward materializations of God that she finds in her self, other people, animals, and the earth.


Mystical Themes of Tinker Creek


Pain & Suffering
The other side of Dillard's mysticism explores with the unanswerable questions, such as -- why must there be pain and suffering? She wonders why God would create creatures in such great numbers that some must die of famine, or why God would create 10% of the earth's creatures as parasites -- creatures that live only by destroying other life - and she provides lots of examples of the gruesome ways that parasites devour their prey. Dillard feels that we give children the wrong idea in regards to the nature of reality -- and muses that perhaps stuffed teddy bears should come with little stuffed lice, to paint a true picture of the way things are. {PTC, 233} However, at the same time she is cursing God for the creation of parasites, she also understands that "these parasites are companions for life...more life to the universal dance." {PTC, 234} The existence of two such diametrically opposed facets of nature is confusing to her, and she finds herself dwelling on this paradox.

Annie really grapples with the horrors of reality. She realizes that death, pain and struggling must spring from the same source as do all of the wonders she experiences. She faces the issues despite her fears because she feels it is her holy duty to understand every aspect of the Divine that she comes into contact with - even if the process is a painful one. {PTC, 121}

One of the basic themes of the book is what Annie calls the Universal Chomp -- or, the horrors of the food chain. Here is a story she tells about the horrors of the food chain: "When I was in elementary school, one of the teachers brought in a mantis egg case in a Mason jar. I watched the newly hatched mantises emerge and shed their skins; they were spidery and translucent, all over joints. They trailed from the egg case to the base of the Mason jar in a living bridge that looked like Arabic calligraphy, some baffling text form the Koran inscribed down the air by a fine hand. Over a period of several hours, during which time the teacher never summoned the nerve or the sense to release them, they ate each other until only two were left. Tiny legs were still kicking from the mouths of both. The two survivors grappled...in the Mason jar; finally both died of injuries. I felt as though I myself should swallow the corpses...so all that life wouldn't be lost." {PTC, 56} Annie finds it very hard to come to terms with these types of occurrences in the world - the conditions of suffering which cannot be escaped.

She writes, "It is the fixed that horrifies us, the fixed that assails us with the tremendous force of its mindlessness. The fixed is a mason jar, and we can't beat it open." {PTC, 67} Dillard sees that humans, animals, and plants alike are destined to exist as part horrific food chain, where it is "chomp or fast." {PTC, 237} She laments, "It is ridiculous...what happened to manna? Why doesn't everything eat manna? Into what rare air did the manna dissolve that we harry the free live things - each other?" {PTC, 239} She is confused and frightened of a God that would thrust such conditions on its creations. "Evolution loves death more than it loves you or me..." she broods, "are my values so diametrically opposed to those that nature preserves? This is the key point!" Her deliberations continue, "We value the individual supremely and nature not a whit. It looks for the moment as though I might have to reject this creek life unless I want to be utterly brutalized. Is human culture with its values my only real home after all?" {PTC, 176} Her wavering faith in light of the horrors of the world - horrors that spring from that same Divine she adores - is not unusual. On the contrary, she precisely conveys universal questions and doubts about the existence and nature of God.

There is another story in the very beginning of the book that is about the universal chomp . This story is about a frog which she watched being devoured in the creek by a giant water beetle, which bites into its prey under water and literally sucks its insides out. It was so disturbing that it troubled me for days. I'd like to refer back to the metaphors which I previously reviewed for a moment - for the frog's death to happen in the creek seems especially fitting -- Annie wants us to understand that death and the grotesque are an integral part of the gift of life created by God (symbolized by the Creek).

She struggles further with the dilemma, noting that although the suffering of the frog is long over, she still must suffer from the experience over and over as she remembers and thinks about it. She writes: "Our excessive emotions are so patently painful and harmful to us as a species that I can hardly believe that they evolved...(But, some higher animals have emotions that we think are similar to ours: dogs, elephants and sea mammals mourn their dead. Why do that to an otter? What creator could be so cruel?...It would seem that emotions are the curse, not death - emotions that appear to have developed upon a few freaks as a special curse from Malevolence." {PTC, 178} She calls God a "maniac" {PTC, 270} for the seemingly haphazard methods of creation, and for allowing suffering to be part of creation. She distresses, "what if God has the same affectionate disregard for us that we have for barnacles? Or if people are interchangeable?" { PTC, 167} Dillard spends a great deal of time questioning the existence of pain and suffering and the nature of God's benevolence (or lack of...).

She eventually comes to the understanding that both horror and ecstasy are interdependent aspects of God's creation, that you can't have one with out the other, and that, "The new is always present with the old, however hidden." She writes: "I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too. I am not washed and beautiful, in control of a shining world in which everything fits, but instead am wandering awed about on a splintered wreck I've come to care for, whose gnawed trees breath delicate air, whose bloodied and scarred creatures are my dearest companions, and whose beauty beats and shines not in its imperfections, but overwhelmingly in spite of them..." {PTC, 242} Dillard concludes that our world may not be the "cleanest place," but sparkles in comparison to the alternative ("No Place"). {PTC, 240} Annie feels that (and I agree) it is precisely this vulnerability to the horrors of the world that leaves her open to experience the beauty and wonders of the Divine.
Pursuit of the Divine

In Tinker Creek, Annie explains that there are two ways to stalk the Divine. She writes: "The first is not what you think of as true stalking, but it is the Via negativa, and as fruitful as actual pursuit. When I stalk this way...I put myself in the way of the creature's passage...and wait, emptied...I am Buddha under the bo. Stalking the other way, I forge my own passage seeking the creature. I wander the banks; what I find, I follow...I am Jacob wrestling with the angel." {PTC, 184}

Annie is able to actively seek out a relationship with the Divine by exploring and understanding each and every aspect of nature that she comes across. On the other hand, she also understands that another way to come upon God is to still the mind - "gag the commentator" {Ronda, 484} that holds discussions in her mind, and simply wait, emptied and passive. She writes: "Learning to stalk muskrats took me several years...I had read in several respectable sources that muskrats are so wary they are almost impossible to observe...One hot evening three years ago, I was standing more or less in a bush. I was stock-still, looking deep into Tinker Creek from a spot on the bank opposite the house, watching a group of blue-gills stare and hang motionless near the bottom of a deep, sunlit pool. I was focused for depth. I had long since lost myself, lost the creek, lost everything but still amber depth. All at once, I couldn't see. And then I could: a young muskrat had appeared on top of the water, floating on its back. Its forelegs were folded langorously across the chest; then sun shone on its upturned belly. Its youthfulness and rodent grin...made it an enchanting picture of decadence, dissipation, and summer sloth...But in my surprise at having the light come on so suddenly, and at having my consciousness returned to me all at once and bearing an inverted muskrat, I must have...moved and betrayed myself. The kit...righted itself so that only its head was visible above the water, and swam downstream, away from me." {PTC, 190-1} She relates fleeting moments of mystical illumination - like the one described in the above excerpt - to the pleasures of finding a lucky penny, or more elaborately, to discovering a great pearl. She writes, "...although the pearl may be found, it may not be sought. The literature of illumination reveals this above all: although it comes to those who wait for it, it is always, even to the most practiced and adept, a gift and a total surprise." {PTC, 33} She delights in this game of hide-and-go-seek with the Divine, and waits adoringly for her next encounter.


Conclusion


Annie Dillard grapples with age-old questions with the knowledge and energy of a 20th century thinker. She is not limited to one religious point-of-view, and has at her disposal information from numerous fields of study. Sometimes it's as if she is burdened with the facts; knowing so much, she cannot take anything at face value, but looks from every angle, fitting the pieces to together to form a coherent picture. The nature of God, and of the human condition, does not escape her scrutiny. Annie takes the information she has acquired from her schooling and through reading many books, and mixes that together with the images she finds in nature. The result is Pilgrim at Tinker Creek - a poignant look at the mystical relationship between God and nature, and an attempt to synthesize the duality between suffering and beauty.






Appendices



STALKING


Two ways to stalk the divine: "The first is not what you think of as true stalking, but it is the Via negativa, and as fruitful as actual pursuit. When I stalk this way...I put myself in the way of the creature's passage...and wait, emptied...I am Buddha under the bo. Stalking the other way, I forge my own passage seeking the creature. I wander the banks; what I find, I follow...I am Jacob wrestling with the angel. (p. 184)"

"I was standing more or less in a bush. I was stock-still, looking deep into Tinker Creek from a spot on the bank opposite the house, watching a group of blue-gills stare and hang motionless near the bottom of a deep, sunlit pool. I was focused for depth. I had long since lost myself, lost the creek, lost everything but still amber depth. All at once, I couldn't see. And then I could: a young muskrat had appeared on top of the water, floating on its back. Its forelegs were folded langorously across the chest; then sun shone on its upturned belly. Its youthfulness and rodent grin...made it an enchanting picture of decadence, dissipation, and summer sloth...But in my surprise at having the light come on so suddenly, and at having my consciousness returned to me all at once and bearing an inverted muskrat, I must have...moved and betrayed myself. The kit...righted itself so that only its head was visible above the water, and swam downstream, away from me. (p.190-1)"


RUNNING IMAGERY in PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK


Light and Fire - these are used to express God's presence in the material world and the experience of unity or illumination.

"a lot of different kinds of brightness." or "an extensive field of light, in which everything appeared...in motion."

"She is greatly astonished, and can scarcely be persuaded to answer, stands speechless in front of the tree, which she only names on taking hold of it, and then as `the tree with the lights in it."

"Then one day I was walking along Tinker Creek thinking of nothing at all and I saw the tree with the lights in it. I saw a backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame. I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly fire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed. It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance. The flood of fire abated, but I'm still spending the power..."

"the berry flashed in the sun and glowed like a coal from some forge or cauldron of the gods."

"I return from the same walk a day later scarcely knowing my name. Litanies hum in my ears...alleluia! I cannot cause the light; the most I can do is try to put myself in the path of it beam. It is possible, in deep space, to sail on a solar wind. Light, be it particle or wave, has force: you rig a giant sail and go."

Air, Wind, the Clouds, and the Sky - these images are used to express God's presence in the material world and the experience of unity or illumination.

"A wind like this does my breathing for me; it engenders something quick and kicking in my lungs."

"Something wholly new rides the wind, something fleet and fleeting that I'm likely to miss."

"On the planet the winds are blowing: the polar easterlies, the westerlies, the northeast and southeast trades...Lick a finger, feel the now"

The Earth - the rocks and soil and cliffs and craters, etc. - are the unchangeable nature of god - god's enormous presence in the material world and role as a stable foundation, and the source from which we spring and will return. Mountains - specifically, are referred to as the source of mystical insight - where revelation comes from.

"I have since only rarely seen the tree with the lights in it. The vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but I live for it, for the moment when the mountains open and a new light roars in spate through the crack, and the mountains slam."

"I don't come to the creek for sky unmediated, but for shelter. My back rests on a steep bank under the sycamore; before me shines the creek..."

Water, particularly Tinker Creek itself - represents the gift of life - and the abundance of grace.

"The sharks I saw roving up and down the coast. If the sharks cease roving, if they still their twist and rest for a moment, they die. They need water pushed into their gills; they need dance." "...as a tree blasts into leaf sprouting water hurled up from its roots."



Note: not only are these images used as symbols to represent the transcendent characteristics of the divine, they are, in effect used to convey the actual real manifestation of the divine in our material world. (That is to say, the wind not only represents the god's creative power - it is the divine expressing itself in the wind.)

Other reoccurring images to consider when reading Pilgrim at Tinker Creek: shadows, snakes, gifts, the muskrat, fish





Bibliography


Dillard, Annie. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Harper's Magazine Press: New York, 1974.

Dillard, Annie. "Writing Back" Harper's, June, 1989, p.28-29.

Hitchcock, Helen H. "Annie Dillard: Mystique of Nature" Communio, Winter 1978, p.388-392.

J.S.T. "Of Many Things" America, Vol. 171 No. 16 (Review of The Annie Dillard Reader)

McIlroy, Gary. "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and the Burden of Science" American Literature, Vol 59, p.71-84.

Ronda, Bruce. "Annie Dillard and the Fire of God" The Christian Century, May 18, 1983, p.483-486.

Smith, Linda. Annie Dillard. Twayne Publishers: New York, 1991.


Essay by Sandra Stahlman, May 1994
Written under the direction of Paul Bernadicou SJ, of the University of San Francisco
as part of his graduate seminar Mysticism: East and the West

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