Pilgrim on Tinker Creek
23 July 2008
by: Annie Dillard
When I was young, well, for the whole of my formative years, I thought creek differed from crick in that creeks were generalized and what we had further down the driveway was a crick, our crick, the one and only crick. Eventually, I learned this was a pronunciation thing; the Tamarack is in fact a creek and a crick, both.
The Tamarack Creek is a well-winding creek, its two sides stroke round about our small town, its brown waters are almost rapid in some places, behind our house they move, a current in no hurry, soft reflective water like smooth plates of mirrors being pushed up by their backsides. That’s the summer. One summer a farmhand caught crayfish by the bucketful, then he went home and ate it. I was too scared to plunge into the silt-specks, which hung there in the water like gold catching light and throwing it, they would dance suspended in the perpetual movement, still as silt. One summer I jumped through the crowd and when I emerged I had leeches stuck to my body like sluggish black polka-dots; I never went back in. It was the Tamarack’s banks I liked best to explore.
I’m not trying to fool myself: the Tamarack’s no Tinker; my adolescent plunging into the natural world pales when set besides Annie Dillard’s streamlined scrutiny. Because that’s what Annie Dillard is, she’s relentless.
Oh! how I strain to imagine her tranquil position, her mental fluidity in such an immersion. I’ve always wanted that; one day I’ll do it down by the Tamarack. But for now I have an “itch”; the world sits like a little blue marble in the palm of my hand. I point to a new continent, I move there; moving always away from home.
I don’t fool myself in thinking I’ll pull out a Pilgrim at Tinker Creek from this grey gushy mass of brain, no, most likely it’ll be fiction, but who knows…
Above all and all, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is a book of praise; it’s like sitting in an old-fashioned pew and a man of no certain religious leaning says, “All take out your psalms.” And so you get your singing voice ready, but these little ditties were written by Annie Dillard and she wants you to trip over her words. Not the words really, but the “ideas,” she wants you to go slowly, learning how to sing as she does. What stunning poetics and what oddball facts! One must pass one sentence twice-by for sometimes the reflection off the words cause a over-white gleaming blur, like a flash, like the sun glinting off a the scales of a fleet-finned fish or a crystalized beautiful thought.
At times Annie Dillard struck me as an unquestionable descendant of the late-great illustrious Henry Miller. Like Henry Miller, she frequently mentions writers (and Eskimos) who have stolen her fancy, alas! Mr. Miller wasn’t one of them, though to a jittery surprise John Cowper Powys was. It’s not the name dropping which struck lightning from one solid grounding to another, both Henry Miller and Annie Dillard share the eloquence of bare truth, wonder in minutiae details and a penchant for sucking it “all” up as if “all” were the insides of an unfortunate frog.
The wonder is—given the errant nature of freedom; and the burgeoning texture of time—the wonder is that all the forms are not monsters, that there is beauty at all, grace gratuitous, pennies found, like mockingbird’s free fall. Beauty itself is the fruit of the creator’s exuberance that grew such a tangle, and the grotesques and horrors bloom from that same free growth, that intricate scramble and twine up and down the conditions of time.
Here it is again, the fabled “Life Abundant.” How can anyone miss this? miss it in anything, not just these words, but in the world. I don’t understand.
I am not washed and beautiful, in control of a shining world in which everything fits, but instead am wondering awed about on a splintered wreck I’ve come to care for, whose gnawed trees breathe a 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, under the wind-rent clouds, upstream and down.
What Henry Miller meant by his “Life Abundant” is what Annie Dillard meant by “the tree with the lights in it.” “It was less like seeing,” she wrote, “than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance.” It’s this inversion of vision that seems to sneak up behind one and ring the bell cling-clang! set inside one’s gut with all energy and power afforded, energy and power the creator bestowed upon itself. The “life abundant” gives and gives abundantly, but one must wait, must have patience, practice and silence. There must be a inherent belief that the miraculous is possible; not only that it’s possible but that it’s there, all the time, every single waking second there is a magic flare sparking golds and light just waiting as we’re waiting for an open vessel to come along into which it lets itself go like a firecracker gone berserk, gone glorious. Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!
Something broke and something opened. I filled up like a new wineskin. I breathed an air like light; I saw a light like water. I was the lip of a fountain the creek filled forever; I was ether, the leaf in the zephyr; I was flesh-flake, feather, bone.
Lately, it seems I’m always coming around to this. I guess that’s my pre-requisite for a great writer; first in their life they must flood over.
Besides Annie Dillard’s ballads of praise, she is in the upmost, meticulous. Maybe that’s why she’s chosen to be par for many university courses; her writing is superb, relentless. No word or idea misplaced, no “upholstery,” as Milan Kundera calls it. That this book is said to be a series of essays seems silly to me; Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is a book manifested in the highest sense. My favorite chapters were Intricacy and Fecundity. With all fifteen there are many, many surprises. Her scientific, religious, and Arctic references left me stunned or rendered me appalled, especially that bit about parasites. This isn’t a book for the weak in spirit.
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek deserves all praise for praise. Annie Dillard’s voice is like that giant water bug who sucked out the insides of a frog. She’s seen some pretty gritty stuff and swallowed, for our sake or maybe even more so for her own, regurgitated it all back up; she thought to lovely lace it in poetics and bolster it unparalleled with facts.
Go into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too. Stalk the gaps. Squeak into a gap in the soil, turn and unlock—more than a maple—a universe. This is how you spend the afternoon, and tomorrow morning, and tomorrow afternoon. Spend the afternoon. You can’t take it with you.
Bracciano Italia
July 2008
Visit Annie Dillard’s website!
Porius
8 July 2008
by: John Cowper Powys
The forests of Edeyrnion, Ynys Prydein, were of the ancient mythical sort. Ancient even in Porius’s time, 499; trees already brought dust to dust, trees whose liquid properties extended so far beyond the usual solid wooden type, trees that spoke, trees that moved more than swayed, trees whose leaves whispered by the wind from the south particularly. The earth of the forests had history and in certain places, history made itself known. Porius ab Einion ab Iddawc complacently plodded through such forests; through such forests Porius’s subtle mind-butterflies fluttered.
As it is with most good trips through the forest, in Porius the novel, there is never any rush. “All in good time,” creator and character seem to say. “There is time upon time for all.”
. . .the condition of Time is the inner subjective condition, within which every conceivable ‘I am I’ has to function once it asserts its living existence.
The genius that is John Cowper Powys excels—within Porius as I read it—in that he has managed to secure a place for this book in the very bosom of Time itself. The Time of Porius is so unlike any other time in any other book I have read. What John Cowper Powys did was elongate it, dissect it, dove into it, almost unnaturally, so that the reader is given an obscene sense that this book could very well go on forever!
But it won’t and it can’t! Half the illusion lies in that, that the whole novel but brief histories is the present course of one week. This astounds me! Blows my socks off, as they say! Perhaps by part effect of the medieval setting and its uncanny reality; how John Cowper Powys has displaced himself almost 1450 years with a perfection that only comes when one eats, breathes, lives the words one writes.
Back to Time, whose discourse is related on a rest during the unhurried ascent up Eyri mountain. Porius seems to be taking forever to arrive at the top, in no desperate hope of saving the crooked-counseling Chronos or Myrddin Wyllt. “All in good time,” he mumbles under his caught breathe. Porius pulls up a rock and as quickly discovers the craving to prove “the dynamic importance of Time compared to the cumbrous necessity of Space.”
After some minor interruptions and change of locale, Porius stumbles upon the conclusion—far from ‘Space the devourer of Time’ and ‘Time the begetter of Space‘—that “one of the deities Medrawd’s God-Devil, life-death, chip-chop, see-saw, one-is-three-and-three-is-one vision of things leaves out entirely is Uncle Brochveal’s bitch queen of the dice, the great goddess Chance!” That we are all locked into Time and Space is perhaps enough—‘enjoy to the end’ or ‘endure to the end‘—but what drama is wrought within them!
Isn’t it better to be creatures dependent on Chance than creatures pulled in half all the time between good and evil and God and the Devil, especially when you’re always catching the same expression whether under the crown or under the horns?
. . . that for all the beautiful, hollow-staring, world-despairing eyes of the emperor’s nephew [Medrawd], neither his God nor his Devil, neither his good nor his evil, were mysterious enough to correspond with the multitudinous waves of the ocean of being that washes us up and sucks us down along the shores of the boundless.
Instinctively I turn back to the forests through which Porius plods at his dullard’s pace. By which the forest is mysterious, through which Nature operates on Chance and refuses to follow any kind of duality’s logical laws. Was it Porius’s outstanding use of the invented verb, ‘to cavoseniargize’, that brought him “into the inner existence of all natural entities,” which revealed to him the wordless, thoughtless, inner-workings of such mysteries? Mysteries enough to warrant no explanation but as such.
What John Cowper Powys attests to with this invention, ‘to cavoseniargize’ is what I expect to be his own experiences in Nature, something I think he called elementalism. He ‘flung’ himself out into the things he enjoyed; as boring as a rafter of Brother John’s cell, as sweeping as the minutiae muscular chest of a swallow in a head-long dive, the water that ripples due to unpredictable winds, anything, he claims, has a spirit into which we may climb.
In the very beginning of the book, relatively, Porius caught Nineue, the seductress, with the very same far-off dreamy look on her face. She was also ‘cavoseniargizing’ he supposed. Many pages later, in Brother John’s cell, as they sat quietly side-by-side: “She was enjoying herself just like I [Porius] was. . . she draws into herself the things she enjoys. . . But that’s only because she’s a woman and I’m a man. Otherwise our enjoyment’s the same.”
When I read this sentence I stopped reading and I thought, “Is this true? Is my ‘cavoseniargizing’ not a big exhale but a big inhale instead?” So I imagined myself standing on the sentinella or better yet, an Alpine peak, of which I climbed alone at the brave age of eighteen. I decided what Mr. Powys claims is true; and that whatever end of the breathing process it is, it is breathing all the same. I also decided, that by John Cowper Powys giving name to this most personal of explorations was a way of getting to know it better.
‘To cavoseniargize’ is something all writers must do to write well, all artists must do to create well. I ‘cavoseniargize’ daily from behind my typewriter and my keys. I’ve been doing it since youth, I would say, walking through the forests all the same. I do think there is spirit in the rafters; I do think that by joining it with my own I at once become less, a mere rafter, and more. . . “souls and bodies, of worlds and creators of worlds, of dreams within dreams within dreams within dreams, of multiverses beyond multiverses, it seems to me. . . “
Porius is a novel to span dimensions. Because of this I can’t agree with the tagline, “A romance of the Dark Ages.” I just don’t like it. When I first began to conjure up images of this book from short descriptions found online, it became this unwieldy dark bulk set in old-world forests. But Porius‘s darkness is a very natural darkness as its light is a very natural light. There is something about this book that defies other books, almost spits in their faces by the sheer delight it takes from itself. As I said in the beginning, John Cowper Powys has set Porius into the bosom of the Earth herself.
I don’t know. I guess I’m going to use this book as a bible of sorts from now on. Maybe that makes me as nuts as Mr. Powys himself, but I truly believe that no great writer comes out of the usual. A great writer must be accustomed to living out their own worlds, worlds like Porius walks through, worlds of the mind, worlds back and forward in Time and Space; where Time and Space become something like a leaf, something we can hop into or fling ourselves out into, as much as anything else.
In a very hard-mannered kind of way, Porius has brought me hope, more hope than any tree-hugging manifesto ever has. A hope dark and light all the same, weighted and weightless; for John Cowper Powys has seen through the spirits of the dirt as well as the spirits of our souls. A life always there. That’s probably why I don’t like that tagline: Porius is more than medieval: Porius is Time-less.
Oh, how long it takes us all to learn the trick of ‘laying down the law’, as they say, ‘each for himself,’ and of carrying about with us the responsibility for ourselves like a good slice of bread to feed upon! That’s the thing to do—live upon the stuff of your conscience and see to it that you keep it fresh and wholesome!
Bracciano Italy
July 2008
See Also: Porius, so far and Porius, again for additional commentary.
Porius, again
18 June 2008
by: John Cowper Powys
My big idea for this week’s post was to write what would have been called, “John Cowper Powys and the Life Illusion.” Though, as I easily convinced myself, this is a thesis best left to a time when I have a better bulk of his books under my belt and not to mention a full two days of devotion, at least. To write something of that stature I want to be sure it would be the most truthful representation of all he has written and like it or not, I haven’t even skimmed the surface.
Maybe that’s the worst part about coming upon new ‘obsessions,’ the childlike eagerness and an unwavering devotion without development. John Cowper Powys is not someone I should be taking so lightly. It is not only his novels that I want to tackle but those books dedicated solely to his philosophy, The Art of Happiness, In Defense of Sensuality and A Philosophy of Solitude most notably. Though I do believe the tome of Porius does a very complete job of “summing-up” much of what John Cowper Powy’s own life-illusion was about.
I do want to make some note as to some of my own developments on the theme of JCP’s life-illusion, wherein I compared the ‘mythology’ of Wolf Solent to the ‘cavoseniargizing’ of Porius. I now think this is a mistake; it is the explanation of this mistake I must save for later. Instead, I’ll fall to quoting a most enlightening scene found on the pages 550 to 551 of Porius, where Porius stands staring at a patch of white moss used for “the staunching of blood and the binding up of wounds,” as his father, the Prince, lies dying.
Thus the self-created tendency to be pursued by the very association of ideas from which he shrank away was always forcing him to employ all manner of curious devices; and he had, indeed, become a successful adept in a thousand self-healing tricks to help him escape his self-created devils.
But another [trick] was to pile up a monstrous mountain of appallingness, so that it became possible to deal with it, so to say, on its own terms; in other words to imagine himself to be a compounded identity of monstrosities so shocking that he became a veritable leviathan whose maw was terrific enough to dispose of any conceivable bemoth.
In most cases, however, the tricks he employed in this self-healing magical ritual partook of both wisdoms; firstly the wisdom of running away himself, and secondly the wisdom of transforming himself into a monster of such appalling desperation that any spectre he could possibly encounter would be the one to flee.
Moreover, since accident and chance only provided the occasions out of which his self-tormenting soul invented its own obstinately returning secret horror, so fate and destiny, endowing him with parents, with his wife, with his teacher, with his foster-brother, and even with the ancestral Creiddylad, had fixed the boundaries and set up the barriers that of necessity limited the stage of his interior comic tragedy.
And now as he surveyed that trickle of water and that patch of greenish white moss he gave vent in his heart to a soundless howl of exultation over the fact that in a world where the foundations had been laid so long ago, and where necessity and chance vied with each other to reduce the amount of plastic life clay at the disposal of a person’s individual will, there were yet such unbelievable opportunities for asserting oneself craftily, powerfully, and effectively.
two paragraphs later:
And never to the end of his days did he forget exactly how he saw the mystery of life at that second. He invented many obscure emblems and any grotesque parables after that; but the particular vision of things as he apprehended it at that moment remained with him as the authentic response of the secret self of Porius ab Einion to the mirage known as human existence.
. . . For in this glimpse of reality seen through the white moss he saw existence not as one creation, or as one world, but as many worlds, and he saw all the innumerable consciousnesses of these worlds as possessed of creative power.
He saw all creatures… as composed of a natural human clay and of a natural human spirit activating that clay, activating it and motivating it with desires, purposes, instincts, impulses that on the whole were not only natural but absolutely necessary if the individuals composing the human race were to enjoy as well as endure their short and troubled lives.