Annie Dillard went camping once. She pitched a tent. She boiled some water. She lit a candle.
Then she wrote about it.
One night a moth flew into the candle, was caught, burned dry, and held. I must have been staring at the candle, or maybe I looked up when a shadow crossed my page: at any rate, I saw it all. A golden female moth, a biggish one with a two-inch wingspan, flapped into the fire, dropped her abdomen into the wet wax, stuck, flamed, frazzled, and fried in a second. Her moving wings ignited like tissue paper, enlarging the circle of light in the clearing and creating out of the darkness the sudden blue sleeves of my sweater, the green leaves of jewelweed by my side, the ragged red trunk of a pine. At once the light contracted again and the moth's wings vanished in a fine, foul smoke. At the same time, her six legs clawed, curled, blackened, and ceased, disappearing utterly. And her head jerked in spasms, making a spattering noise; her antennae crisped and burned away, and her heaving mouth parts crackled like pistol fire. When it was all over, her head was, as far as I could determine, gone, gone the long way of her wings and legs. Had she been new or old? Had she mated and laid her eggs, had she done her work? All that was left was the glowing horn shell of her abdomen and thorax––a fraying, partially collapsed gold tube jammed upright in the candle's round pool.
And then this moth essence, this spectacular skeleton, began to act as a wick. She kept burning. The wax rose in the moth's body from her soaking abdomen to her thorax to the jagged hole where her head should be, and widened into flame, a saffron-yellow flame that robed her to the ground like any immolating monk. That candle had two wicks, two flames of identical height, side by side. The moth's head was fire. She burned for two hours, until I blew her out.
Annie Dillard, "Death of a Moth"
The Written Word is Weak
The written word is weak. Many people prefer life to it. Life gets your blood going, and it smells good. Writing is mere writing, literature is mere. It appeals only to the subtlest senses—the imagination’s vision, and the imagination’s hearing—and the moral sense, and the intellect. This writing that you do, that so thrills you, that so rocks and exhilarates you, as if you were dancing next to the band, is barely audible to anyone else.
Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
There was a jagged hole where the moth's head should be. The moth's head was fire. She burned for two hours. Until the camper blew her out. It's like any immolating monk.
And, the written word is weak.
A Writing Life
Annie Dillard is best known for
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. And beyond that for being both a proponent and a writer of literary nonfiction. Nonfiction that borrows literary styles and techniques from creative writing.
It's more like poetic nonfiction. She's going for an extreme concentration of language and an extreme referentiality more like poetry than prose.
When I gave up writing poetry I was very sad, for I had devoted 15 years to the study of how the structures of poems carry meaning. But I was delighted to find that nonfiction prose can also carry meaning in its structures, can tolerate all sorts of figurative language, as well as alliteration and even rhyme. The range of rhythms in prose is larger and grander than it is in poetry, and it can handle discursive ideas and plain information as well as character and story. It can do everything. I felt as though I had switched from a single reed instrument to a full orchestra.
Annie Dillard, "To Fashion a Text"
Technique
Wallace Stevens is my favorite poet. He only ever wrote one poem. The poem is about the relation of imagination and reality. It took a lifetime to write.
Sleater-Kinney is my favorite band. They only ever wrote two songs. The song about the desire to be open and big hearted. And the song about being cold and hard. The two songs took twelve years to play.
Annie Dillard is my favorite writer. She only ever wrote one paragraph. Since it's the paragraph near the top of this diary, you can see that it's technically two.
Selected Works
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. The best known work. Eudora Welty thought it was about like a spaceship landing.
a voice that is trying to speak to me out of a cloud instead of from a sociable, even answerable, distance on our same earth
Eudora Welty
In my room, the world is beyond my understanding;
But when I walk I see that it consists of three or four
Hills and a cloud.
Wallace Stevens, "Of the Surface of Things"
Holy the Firm. Holy the fuck, but this book is concentrated and intense.
If I wanted to make a theological statement I would have hired a skywriter.
Annie Dillard
I think she did. An airplane crashed, and she skywrote about it. That, and our moth.
Living by Fiction
This book is her "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird". It's the book that explains the book. It's a meta nonfiction about meta fiction.
She wrote the book on meta. Meta is her first name. Literally.
Since this book can be read as an accounting for the technique, it can be helpful to read it before moving on to the essential work.
Teaching a Stone to Talk. My favorite book. The essential work.
At any rate, this is not a collection of occasional pieces, such as a writer brings out to supplement his real work; instead this is my real work, such as it is.
Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk
I've talked to people who were at the event in the first chapter, "Total Eclipse". They claim it did not really happen that way. At least for them. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is keyed. There is stuff you can look up, to help figure out what she is talking about. Living by Fiction is a guide to the technique. This book is a guide to the overall ideas. And is the overall ideas. It's all one poem, all two songs, all one paragraph.
For the Time Being. It's about death.
Writing as if on the edge of a precipice, staring over into the abyss.
Publishers Weekly
Don't read this book when you are depressed. Well, do, but have a romance novel handy as antidote.
The Maytrees. This book is in the form of a romance novel. A friend once took it to it to the beach, and was disappointed on that account. I think it's an extended essay on the possibility of human intimacy. It's definitely of the one same paragraph as the nonfiction work.
Readers used to Dillard's nonfiction nature writing might initially be surprised at this novel about the subtle undercurrents that make up love. The surprise won't last; Dillard does in The Maytrees what she always does — asks big brave questions of her subject material. Negative criticism of this novel centers on her writerly prose (especially her ornate and sometimes obsolete vocabulary), which can knock you out of the narrative by making you glimpse the writer's hand.
Powell's
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
The essay builds up its force by assembling various narratives and philosophical forays in distinctly nonlinear ways.
Annie Dillard's "A Field of Silence": The Contemplative Tradition in the Modern Age, Dana Wilde
The written word is weak. Between external and internal realities, between something or an other, words sit as tenuous and insufficient connection. Words cannot convey it.
My God what a world. There is no accounting for one second of it.
Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Because the word is weak and insufficient, we have an existential question: what to do?
Make It Way Too Loud
The mind itself is an art object. It is a Mondrian canvas onto whose homemade grids it fits its own preselected products. Our knowledge is contextual and only contextual. Ordering and invention coincide: we call their collaboration "knowledge." The mind is a blue guitar on which we improvise the song of the world.
Annie Dillard, Living by Fiction
They said, "You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are."
The man replied, "Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar."
And they said to him, "But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,
A tune upon the blue guitar,
Of things exactly as they are.
Wallace Stevens, "The Man With the Blue Guitar"
Words and guitar
I want it
Way way too loud
Sleater-Kinney, Words and Guitar