The Annie Dillard Reader

by Annie Dillard

  The old cabalistic phrase is “Mystery of the Splintering of the Vessels.” The words refer to the shrinking or imprisonment of essences within the various husk-covered forms of emanation or time. The Vessels splintered and solar systems spun; ciliated rotifers whirled in still water, and newts with gills laid tracks in the silt-bottomed creek. Not only did the Vessels splinter: they splintered exceeding fine. Intricacy, then, is the subject, the intricacy of the created world.

  You are God. You want to make a forest, something to hold the soil, lock up solar energy, and give off oxygen. Wouldn’t it be simpler just to rough in a slab of chemicals, a green acre of goo?

  You are a man, a retired railroad worker who makes replicas as a hobby. You decide to make a replica of one tree, the longleaf pine your great-grandfather planted: just a replica—it doesn’t have to work. How are you going to do it? How long do you think you might live, how good is your glue? For one thing, you are going to have to dig a hole and stick your replica trunk in the ground halfway to China if you want the thing to stand up. Because you will have to work fairly big; if your replica is too small, you’ll be unable to handle the slender, three-sided needles, affix them in clusters of three in fascicles, and attach those laden fascicles to flexible twigs. The twigs themselves must be covered by “many silvery-white, fringed, long-spreading scales.” Are your pine cones’ scales “thin, flat, rounded at the apex, the exposed portions (closed cone) reddish brown, often wrinkled, armed on the back with a small, reflexed prickle, which curves toward the base of the scale”? When you loose the lashed copper wire trussing the replica limbs to the trunk, the whole tree collapses like an umbrella.

  You are a starling. I’ve seen you fly through a longleaf pine without missing a beat.

  You are a sculptor. You climb a great ladder; you pour grease all over a growing longleaf pine. Next, you build a hollow cylinder like a cofferdam around the entire pine, and grease its inside walls. You climb your ladder and spend the next week pouring wet plaster into the cofferdam, over and inside the pine. You wait; the plaster hardens. Now open the walls of the dam, split the plaster, saw down the tree, remove it, discard, and your intricate sculpture is ready: this is the shape of part of the air.

  You are a chloroplast moving in water heaved one hundred feet above ground. Hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, in a ring around magnesium…. You are evolution; you have only begun to make trees. You are God—are you tired? finished?

  Intricacy means that there is a fluted fringe to the something that exists over against nothing, a fringe that rises and spreads, burgeoning in detail. Mentally reverse positive and negative space, as in the plaster cast of the pine, and imagine emptiness as a sort of person, a boundless person consisting of an elastic, unformed clay. (For the moment forget that the air in our atmosphere is “something,” and count it as “nothing,” the sculptor’s negative space.) The clay man completely surrounds the holes in him, which are galaxies and solar systems. The holes in him part, expand, shrink, veer, circle, spin. He gives like water, he spreads and fills unseeing. Here is a ragged hole, our earth, a hole that makes torn and frayed edges in his side, mountains and pines. And here is the shape of one swift, raveling edge, a feather hole on a flying goose’s hollow wing extended over the planet. Five hundred barbs of emptiness prick into clay from either side of a central, flexible shaft. On each barb are two fringes of five hundred barbules apiece, making a million barbules on each feather, fluted and hooked in a matrix of clasped hollowness. Through the fabric of this form the clay man shuttles unerringly, and through the other feather holes, and the goose, the pine forest, the planet, and so on.

  In other words, even on the perfectly ordinary and clearly visible level, creation carries on with an intricacy unfathomable and apparently uncalled for. The lone ping into being of the first hydrogen atom ex nihilo was so unthinkably, violently radical, that surely it ought to have been enough, more than enough. But look what happens. You open the door, and all heaven and hell break loose.

  Evolution, of course, is the vehicle of intricacy. The stability of simple forms is the sturdy base from which more complex stable forms might arise, forming in turn more complex forms, and so on. The stratified nature of this stability, like a house built on rock on rock on rock, performs, in Jacob Bronowski’s terms, as the “ratchet” that prevents the whole shebang from “slipping back.” Bring a feather into the house, and a piano; put a sculpture on the roof, sure, and fly banners from the lintels—the house will hold.

  There are, for instance, two hundred twenty-eight separate and distinct muscles in the head of an ordinary caterpillar. Again, of an ostracod, a common freshwater crustacean of the sort I crunch on by the thousands every time I set foot in Tinker Creek, I read: “There is one eye situated at the foreend of the animal. The food canal lies just below the hinge, and around the mouth are the feathery feeding appendages which collect the food…. Behind them is a foot which is clawed and this is partly used for removing unwanted particles from the feeding appendages.” Or again, there are, as I have said, six million leaves on a big elm. All right…but they are toothed, and the teeth themselves are toothed. How many notches and barbs is that to a world? In and out go the intricate leaf edges, and “don’t nobody know why.” All the theories botanists have devised to explain the functions of various leaf shapes tumble under an avalanche of inconsistencies. They simply don’t know, can’t imagine.

  I have often noticed that these things, which obsess me, neither bother nor impress other people even slightly. I am horribly apt to approach some innocent at a gathering and, like the ancient mariner, fix him with a wild, glitt’ring eye and say, “Do you know that in the head of the caterpillar of the ordinary goat moth there are two hundred twenty-eight separate muscles?” The poor wretch flees. I am not making chatter; I mean to change his life. I seem to possess an organ that others lack, a sort of trivia machine.

  When I was young I thought that all human beings had an organ inside each lower eyelid which caught things that got in the eye. I don’t know where I imagined I’d learned this piece of anatomy. Things got in my eye, and then they went away, so I supposed that they had fallen into my eye pouch. This eye pouch was a slender, thin-walled purse, equipped with frail digestive powers that enabled it eventually to absorb eyelashes, strands of fabric, bits of grit, and anything else that might stray into the eye. Well, the existence of this eye pouch, it turned out, was all in my mind, and, it turns out, it is apparently there still, a brain pouch, catching and absorbing small bits that fall deeply into my open eye.

  All I can remember from a required zoology course years ago, for instance, is a lasting impression that there is an item in the universe called a Henle’s loop. Its terrestrial abode is in the human kidney. I just refreshed my memory on the subject. The Henle’s loop is an attenuated oxbow or U-turn made by an incredibly tiny tube in the nephron of the kidney. The nephron in turn is a filtering structure that produces urine and reabsorbs nutrients. This business is so important that one-fifth of all the heart’s pumped blood goes to the kidneys.

  There is no way to describe a nephron; you might hazard into a fairly good approximation of its structure if you threw about fifteen yards of string on the floor. If half the string fell into a very narrow loop, that would be the Henle’s loop. Two other bits of string that rumpled up and tangled would be the “proximal convoluted tubule” and the “distal convoluted tubule,” shaped just so. But the heart of the matter would be a very snarled clump of string, “an almost spherical tuft of parallel capillaries,” which is the glomerulus, or Malpighian body. This is the filter to end all filters, supplied with afferent and efferent arterioles and protected by a double-walled capsule. Compared to the glomerulus, the Henle’s loop is rather unimportant. By going from here to there in such a roundabout way, the Henle’s loop packs a great deal of filtering tubule into a very narrow space. But the delicate oxbow of tissue, looping down so far, and then up, is really a peripheral extravagance, which is why
I remembered it, and a beautiful one, like a meander in a creek.

  Now, the point of all this is that there are a million nephrons in each human kidney. I’ve got two million glomeruli, two million Henle’s loops, and I made them all myself, without the least effort. They’re undoubtedly my finest work. What an elaboration, what an extravagance! The proximal segment of the tubule, for instance, “is composed of irregular cuboidal cells with characteristic brushlike striations (brush border) at the internal, or luminal, border.” Here are my own fringed necessities, a veritable forest of pines.

  Van Gogh, you remember, called the world a study that didn’t come off. Whether it did “come off” is a difficult question. The chloroplasts do stream in the leaf as if propelled by a mighty, invisible breath; but on the other hand, a certain sorrow arises, welling up in Shadow Creek, and from those lonely banks it appears that all our intricate fringes, however beautiful, are really the striations of a universal and undeserved flaying. But, van Gogh: a study it is not. This is the truth of the pervading intricacy of the world’s detail: The creation is not a study, a roughed-in sketch; it is supremely, meticulously created, created abundantly, extravagantly, and in fine.

  Along with intricacy, there is another aspect of the creation that has impressed me in the course of my wanderings. Look again at the horsehair worm, a yard long and thin as a thread, whipping through the duck pond, or tangled with others of its kind in a slithering Gordian knot. Look at an overwintering ball of buzzing bees, or a turtle under ice breathing through its pumping cloaca. Look at the fruit of the Osage orange tree, big as a grapefruit, green, convoluted as any human brain. Or look at a rotifer’s translucent gut: something orange and powerful is surging up and down like a piston, and something small and round is spinning in place like a flywheel. Look, in short, at practically anything—the coot’s feet, the mantis’s face, a banana, the human ear—and see that not only did the creator create everything, but he is apt to create anything. He’ll stop at nothing.

  There is no one standing over evolution with a blue pencil to say, “Now, that one, there, is absolutely ridiculous, and I won’t have it.” If the creature makes it, it gets a “stet.” Is our taste so much better than the creator’s? Utility to the creature is evolution’s only aesthetic consideration. Form follows function in the created world, so far as I know, and the creature that functions, however bizarre, survives to perpetuate its form. Of the intricacy of form, I know some answers and not others: I know why the barbules on a feather hook together, and why the Henle’s loop loops, but not why the elm tree’s leaves zigzag, or why butterfly scales and pollen are shaped just so. But of the variety of form itself, of the multiplicity of forms, I know nothing. Except that, apparently, anything goes. This holds for forms of behavior as well as design—the mantis munching her mate, the frog wintering in mud, the spider wrapping a hummingbird, the pine processionary straddling a thread. Welcome aboard. A generous spirit signs on this motley crew.

  Take, for instance, the African Hercules beetle, which is so big, according to Edwin Way Teale, “it drones over the countryside at evening with a sound like an approaching airplane.” Or, better, take to heart Teale’s description of South American honey ants. These ants have abdomens that can stretch to enormous proportions. “Certain members of the colony act as storage vessels for the honeydew gathered by the workers. They never leave the nest. With abdomens so swollen they cannot walk, they cling to the roof of their underground chamber, regurgitating food to the workers when it is needed.” I read these things, and those ants are as present to me as if they hung from my kitchen ceiling, or down the vaults of my skull, pulsing live jars, engorged vats, teats, with an eyed animal at the head thinking—what?

  Blake said, “He who does not prefer Form to Colour is a Coward!” I often wish the creator had been more of a coward, giving us many fewer forms and many more colors. Here is an interesting form, one closer to home. This is the larva, or nymph, of an ordinary dragonfly. The wingless nymphs are an inch long and fat as earthworms. They stalk everywhere on the floors of valley ponds and creeks, sucking water into their gilled rectums. But it is their faces I’m interested in. According to Howard Ensign Evans, a dragonfly larva’s “lower lip is enormously lengthened, and has a double hinge joint so that it can be pulled back beneath the body when not in use; the outer part is expanded and provided with stout hooks, and in resting position forms a ‘mask’ that covers much of the face of the larva. The lip is capable of being thrust forward suddenly, and the terminal hooks are capable of grasping prey well in front of the larva and pulling it back to the sharp, jagged mandibles. Dragonfly larvae prey on many kinds of small insects occurring in the water, and the larger ones are well able to handle small fish.”

  The world is full of creatures that for some reason seem stranger to us than others, and libraries are full of books describing them—hagfish, platypuses, lizardlike pangolins four feet long with bright-green, lapped scales like umbrella-tree leaves on a bush hut roof, butterflies emerging from anthills, spiderlings wafting through the air clutching tiny silken balloons, horseshoe crabs…the creator creates. Does he stoop, does he speak, does he save, succor, prevail? Maybe. But he creates; he creates everything and anything.

  Of all known forms of life, only about ten percent are still living today. All other forms—fantastic plants, ordinary plants, living animals with unimaginably various wings, tails, teeth, brains—are utterly and forever gone. That is a great many forms that have been created. Multiplying ten times the number of living forms today yields a profusion that is quite beyond what I consider thinkable. Why so many forms? Why not just that one hydrogen atom? The creator goes off on one wild, specific tangent after another, or millions simultaneously, with an exuberance that would seem to be unwarranted, and with an abandoned energy sprung from an unfathomable font. What is going on here? The point of the dragonfly’s terrible lip, the giant water bug, birdsong, the beautiful dazzle and flash of sunlighted minnows, is not that it all fits together like clockwork—for it doesn’t particularly, not even inside the goldfish bowl—but that it all flows so freely wild, like the creek, that it all surges in such a free, fringed tangle. Freedom is the world’s water and weather, the world’s nourishment freely given, its soil and sap: and the creator loves exuberance.

  What I aim to do is not so much learn the names of the shreds of creation that flourish in this valley, but to keep myself open to their meanings, which is to try to impress myself at all times with the fullest possible force of their very reality. I want to have things as multiply and intricately as possible present and visible in my mind. Then I might be able to sit on the hill by the burned books where the starlings fly over, and see not only the starlings, the grass field, the quarried rock, the viney woods, Hollins Pond, and the mountains beyond, but also, and simultaneously, feathers’ barbs, springtails in the soil, crystal in rock, chloroplasts streaming, rotifers pulsing, and the shape of the air in the pines. And, if I try to keep my eye on quantum physics, if I try to keep up with astronomy and cosmology, and really believe it all, I might ultimately be able to make out the landscape of the universe. Why not?

  Landscape consists in the multiple, overlapping intricacies and forms that exist in a given space at a moment in time. Landscape is the texture of intricacy, and texture is my present subject. Intricacies of detail and varieties of form build up into textures. A bird’s feather is an intricacy; the bird is a form; the bird in space in relation to air, forest, continent, and so on, is a thread in a texture. The moon has its texture, too, its pitted and carved landscapes in even its flattest seas. The planets are more than smooth spheres; the galaxy itself is a fleck of texture, binding and bound. But here on earth texture interests us supremely. Wherever there is life, there is twist and mess: the frizz of an Arctic lichen, the tangle of brush along a bank, the dogleg of a dog’s leg, the way a line has got to curve, split, or knob. The planet is characterized by its very jaggedness, its random heaps of mountains, its frayed
fringes of shore.

  Think of a globe, a revolving globe on a stand. Think of a contour globe, whose mountain ranges cast shadows, whose continents rise in bas-relief above the oceans. But then: think of how it really is. These heights aren’t just suggested; they’re there. Pliny, who knew the world was round, figured that when it was all surveyed, the earth would be seen to resemble in shape, not a sphere, but a pineapple, pricked by irregularities. When I think of walking across a continent I think of all the neighborhood hills, the tiny grades up which children drag their sleds. It is all so sculptured, three-dimensional, casting a shadow. What if you had an enormous globe in relief that was so huge it showed roads and houses—a geological survey globe, a quarter of a mile to an inch—of the whole world, and the ocean floor! Looking at it, you would know what had to be left out: the freestanding sculptural arrangement of furniture in rooms, the jumble of broken rocks in a creekbed, tools in a box, labyrinthine ocean liners, the shape of snapdragons, walrus. Where is the one thing you care about on earth, the molding of one face? The relief globe couldn’t begin to show trees, between whose overlapping boughs birds raise broods, or the furrows in bark, where whole creatures, creatures easily visible, live out their lives and call it world enough.