Dillard: A Field of Silence 1

After Annie Dillard's first book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1974, there was general critical agreement that Dillard - then just 29 years old - was "a mystic," and the attention paid since then to this aspect of her writing has referred mainly to Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. The criticism accurately identifies Dillard's Christian background and the fact that her themes and subjects follow in the American literary tradition of Thoreau and Emerson, particularly their view of nature. Pilgrim is in its structure a conventional "nature" book, in some ways comparable to Walden. Conceived and at least partially researched on a camping trip in eastern Maine, Pilgrim traces the seasons through close attention to the natural world and its beauties, peculiarities and horrors, and its main mission might be described as an effort to catch glimpses of God anywhere possible. As in Thoreau, various revelations unfold constantly through the book, and it's possible to argue that Dillard's mysticism in its basic form is transcendentalist.*
Dillard's place in the contemplative tradition is quite a bit more complex, however. In 1977, her long essay Holy the Firm appeared. The book has been called a "meditation" (a term Dillard herself rejects, claiming she writes only narratives ("Interview")), in large part because of its unconventional structure. Telling the story of 7-year-old Julie Norwich (pretty clearly an allusion to Julian of Norwich (Gaskins)) who is badly burned in an accident, the essay builds up its force by assembling various narratives and philosophical forays in distinctly nonlinear ways. It offers bewilderment about what God might be up to, and one of its various focal points is the depiction of a mystical experience of the essay's speaker.** The modern rhetoric of the book, and the sense of horror offered as a theme, clearly set Dillard apart from Thoreau and Emerson, despite other similarities.
Dillard's mysticism is more directly revealed in Holy the Firm than in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, and her disposition to modern forms*** and distinctly modern themes, and the difficulties those things expose, takes its first clear shape there. In this sense Holy the Firm might be the subject of this essay, but in the last 25 years she has written a number of books, all of which to one extent or another probe, in a half-bewildered, half-bemused, fully fascinated narrative voice, as in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, for signs and signals of God's presence. These books include Tickets for a Prayer Wheel (1974), a collection of poems; Living by Fiction (1982), a freewheeling critical statement on what fiction is and does, or should do; An American Childhood (1987), an acclaimed autobiography; The Writing Life (1989); The Living (1992), a novel; and For the Time Being (1999). But Annie Dillard's truly modern experience of the mystic so far is disclosed most fully in her book of essays Teaching a Stone to Talk, first published in 1982.
One essay from that book provides a particularly clear window into Dillard's view of mystical experience, and can serve to help place her in the contemplative literary tradition. At the same time, its distinctly modern depiction, or re-creation, of the classic mystical experience makes it a really troubling work in the context of contemplative literature.
The dramatic moment of "A Field of Silence" occurs at a time when the speaker of the essay lived by herself in a rented house on a farm. We learn that it was "a time that was very lonely" (132), and that the speaker loved the farm in the multiplicity of its "clutter ... the way everything blossomed or seeded or rusted ... the hundred half-finished projects, the smells, the way the animals always broke loose" (133). The central figures in this first section are the earthiness of the farm - "The farm seemed eternal in the crude way the earth does-extending, that is, a very long time" (133) - and the speaker's intense loneliness, which she claims she was, at the time, only half aware of.
The second section cuts straight to a summary of the critical mystical moment, or epiphany, that the essay focuses on:

I have seen from behind the barn, the long roadside pastures heaped with silence ... the fields bent just so under the even pressure of silence, bearing it, palming it aloft: cleared fields, part of a land, a planet, that did not buckle beneath the heel of silence, nor split up scattered to bits, but instead lay secret, disguised as time and matter as though that were nothing, ordinary - disguised as fields like those which bear the silence only because they are spread, and the silence spreads over them, great in size.
I do not want, I think, ever to see such a sight again. That there is loneliness here I had granted, in the abstract - but not, I thought, inside the light of God's presence, inside his sanction, and signed by his name. (133-34)

Here, before the narrative proper begins, we are invited through the evocative details to inhabit the epiphanic moment. But this summary also introduces the narrative proper by providing the specific sense of the essay's subject and preparing us for the great weight of the experience in the speaker's mind. It also echoes the setting and moment of the mystical experience recounted in Holy the Firm, in which the speaker walks alone a long a road beside pastures carrying a bottle of communion wine and sees "blasted, the bay transfigured below me ... the bay and the islands on fire and boundless beyond it, catching alight the unraveling sky. Pieces of the sky are falling down. Everything, everything, is whole, and a parcel of everything else" (Holy the Firm 66). The incidents in "A Field of Silence" and Holy the Firm are parallel, perhaps versions of the same event, but different in atmosphere and in the reaction of

the two speakers. Things unfold differently on the road at the farm.
In the third section of "A Field of Silence," after the introductory summary, the narrative rewinds and takes us to the scene itself. The speaker has been inside during the morning taking pleasure in reading and eating, activities of the world. She hears the rooster screeching and goes outside to look around, carrying us into the feel of her loneliness by remarking that she left "hoping at heart to see either of the owners, but immediately to watch our rooster as he crowed" (134). Outside, the rooster is setting up such a racket that the noise begins to swell almost surreally: "The din came from everywhere, and only the most rigorous application of reason could persuade me that it proceeded in its entirety from this lone and maniac bird." Then the roosters across the street join in, and a total cacophony results, a complete disorder of individual screechings, all present but unrelated to each other: the roosters were "stubbornly deaf to each other, and loudly alone" (135). The speaker stares silently at the rooster and "from time to time ... looked beyond the pastures to learn if anyone might be seen on the road." The section ends with this sentence, leaving a considerable emphasis on the image of the road, which is essentially empty. Then:

When I was turned away in this manner, the silence gathered and struck me. It bashed me broadside from the heavens above me like yard goods; ten acres of fallen, invisible sky choked the fields. The pastures on either side of the road turned green in a surrealistic fashion, monstrous, impeccable, as if they were holding their breaths. The roosters stopped. All the things of the world - the fields and the fencing, the road, a parked orange truck - were stricken and self-conscious. A world pressed down on their surfaces, a world battered just within their surfaces, and that real world, so near to emerging, had got stuck.
There was only silence. It was the silence of matter caught in the act and embarrassed. There were no cells moving, and yet there were cells. (135)

The land's "poise" and "stillness" are "unendurable," and the essence of the experience pours onto her from the details:

There were flies buzzing over the dirt by the henhouse, moving in circles and buzzing, black dreams in chips off the one long dream, the dream of the regular world. But the silent fields were the real world, eternity's outpost in time, whose look I remembered but never like this, this God-blasted, paralyzed day. I felt myself tall and vertical, in a blue shirt, self-conscious, and wishing to die. (136)

We are clearly meant to understand (or in modern terms, actually experience) that God or the Absolute has emerged in the silence and transformed the landscape; as in a similar experience narrated in another essay, "Total Eclipse," this presence terrifies the speaker. A striking feature of the experiences in both essays is that they differ radically from the sense of bliss or pleasure conventionally described in accounts of visitations by, or proximity to, God: the "real world" the speaker sees is not a glorious vision of light or
peace, but silence itself, essentially nothing.
To get a grip on what this difference implies, and how it might arise, comparison to several parallel texts in the mystical tradition seems appropriate. One such text is the conversion of St. Paul on the road to Damascus. The powerful image of the farm road which closes Dillard's third section sets the scene for the parallel. The speaker of the essay, like Paul on the road, is struck suddenly - "suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him" (Acts 9:3) - but by the gathering silence rather than by light. A few paragraphs later we learn that the speaker regards this silence as having come, like
Paul's light from heaven, from God: the day is "God-blasted" and "Holiness is a force," she says.
The field of silence experience is parallel to, but different from the road to Damascus experience. The silence parallels the light: like Paul who arises and sees nothing, Dillard's speaker stops and hears nothing. The sudden strike on Paul's perceptions actually opens the possibility of his conversion, and in Acts, God sends Ananias to heal Paul, telling him that he himself will show Paul "'how much he must suffer for the sake of my name'" (Acts 9:16), a burden which Paul takes on with enormous consequences for Christianity and humanity. In "A Field of Silence," the speaker interprets the experience in roughly the same way, equating the silence with
holiness: "Holiness is a force, and like the others can be resisted." But her response differs from Paul's:

[The holiness] was given, but I didn't want to see it, God or no God. It was as if God had said: "I am here, but not as you have known me. This is the look of silence, and of loneliness unendurable; it too has always been mine, and now will be yours." I was not ready for a life of sorrow, sorrow deriving from knowledge I could just as well stop at the gate.
I turned away, willful, and the whole show vanished. The realness of things disassembled. (136-37)

Paul, on the other hand, accepts the weight of his blindness, is taken to Damascus where he fasts for three days and Ananias is sent to restore his sight. In Dillard's essay, the speaker fears and rejects the opportunity.
A second text informing the incident is Edna St. Vincent Millay's poem "Renascence." The speaker of this poem, while looking from a mountaintop over other mountains and the horizon of the ocean,