Dillard: A Field of Silence 2

begins to experience some distortion of her perceptions, parallel to
Dillard's speaker's surreal experience of the roosters' cacophony.
Millay's speaker lies down to gather herself from the unsettling
vision of everything becoming small, and when she puts her hand
out to the sky, which should be reassuringly big, she screams "to
feel [her hand] touch the sky."

I screamed, and - lo - Infinity
Came down and settled over me;
Forced back my scream into my chest;
Bent back my arm upon my breast;
And, pressing of the Undefined
The definition on my mind,
Held up before my eyes a glass
Through which my shrinking sight did pass
Until it seemed I must behold
Immensity made manifold;
Whispered to me a word whose sound
Deafened the air for worlds around
And brought unmuffled to my ears
The gossiping of friendly spheres
(Millay 4)

The speaker reports that she saw and heard "of all things, past,/And
present, and forevermore," but though she sees all, she is sickened
by it because she realizes her own corruption: "Mine was the
weight/Of every brooded wrong," she says. The dominant image is
of a tremendous, crushing weight which is itself the revelation or
vision of reality. In Millay's poem, the speaker essentially dies and
is resurrected, and the poem closes with the classic sense of faith in
the reality and redemptive quality of the experience.
Dillard's speaker is struck suddenly, like Millay's, and she
describes the crushing weight of the silence (which may be likened
to "a word whose sound/Deafened the air") as a "world pressed
down on their surfaces, a world battered just within their surfaces,"
where the word "battered," coincidentally or not, echoes Mount
Battie, the mountain in Camden, Maine, that Millay's speaker is
atop. Dillard's speaker wishes to die, while Millay's speaker enters
into a figurative death. Unlike Millay's speaker or St. Paul,
Dillard's narrator willfully resists and turns away, in fear, from the
sudden encounter with reality.
What we gather from this comparison is that there is a version of
the illuminative experience which is terrifying rather than joyful,
peaceful or happy. This contrasts with W.T. Stace's useful analysis
of the mystical experience, in which he sets out a list of
characteristics commonly reported in accounts of the experience.
Stace distinguishes two essential kinds of mystical experience,
introvertive and extrovertive, and he lists among the common
characteristics of the experiences feelings of "blessedness, joy,
happiness, satisfaction, etc." (Stace 79). The introvertive
experience's overriding characteristic is of a unitary consciousness,
in which the mystic feels him or herself to be essentially subsumed
into God or the universe; this is clearly not what is happening in
either "Renascence" or "A Field of Silence." But according to Stace,
the extrovertive experience's overriding characteristic is of a
unifying vision of reality which is "perceived through the physical
senses" (79), and something like this is clearly happening in
Millay's poem and Dillard's essay.
Now, Millay's narrator experiences a vision which not only does
not give feelings of "blessedness, joy, happiness, satisfaction, etc.,"
but which makes her scream out loud (cf. the people screaming on
the hillside in Dillard's "Total Eclipse," another essay in Teaching a
Stone to Talk), and she then undergoes a harrowing process of
regeneration. Dillard's narrator also is shocked and terrified by her
perception of God's unendurable loneliness. In Millay's case, a
unifying vision of reality in which past, present and "forevermore"
are experienced whole and simultaneously, is depicted, but Dillard's
essay is problematic because an experience of unity is not clearly
given.
The foregoing passages from "A Field of Silence" do contain,
however, several other elements Stace identifies as common to
mystical experience. Primary among these in these passages is the
sense of reality or objectivity: "the silent fields were the real
world," Dillard's speaker says, and the experience ends when "the
realness of things disassembled." These remarks occur amid a
clarity and objectivity of perception clearly evoked in the
descriptions of the flies, the road, and the palpability of the silence
itself.
Further, using Stace's terms, the speaker of the essay has the feeling
that what is apprehended is holy, and a third element of the mystical
experience, an "alleged ineffability," is not stated here but seems
implicit in the completeness of the silence: where there is no sound,
there is no expression or verbal meaning. This observation,
however, is difficult and begins to unfold a troubling aspect of the
essay. Where there is no verbal meaning, there is likewise no word,
and in Christian terms, this is a contradiction, as according to the
Gospel of John "the Word was God" (1:1). In Dillard's vision, the
silence is God, and we are in this sense in the midst of a paradox -
paradoxicality being another element frequently associated, in
Stace's view, with the mystical experience.
All the elements of the mystical experience are clearly present in
the essay except, apparently, the sense of joy or peace, and the most
important one: the unifying vision of reality. In fact, the world
appears to be more fragmented than unified. Everything is "stricken
and self-conscious," and the speaker says outright: "I stood in pieces,
afraid I was unable to move. Something had unhinged the world"
(136). The sharpness of the speaker's sensory experience (e.g., the
buzzing flies) and her acute self-consciousness suggest, using Stace's

strict reasoning, that this is not the classic mystical experience, but
an illumination of some kind (cf., again, the terrifying experience in
"Total Eclipse") that falls short of union with God.
On the other hand, "there was only silence," an indication that the
silence itself has subsumed everything. At a critical moment in the
vision, the speaker of the essay hears human whistling: "a woman, I
think, dressed in pink, and pushing a wheelbarrow easily over the
grass. It must have been she who was whistling and heaping on top
of the silence those hollow notes of song" (136). The music is
beautiful but "isolate and detached," and "The notes spread into the
general air and became the weightier part of silence, silence's last
straw." In these sentences, the whistling simultaneously is
"detached" and "became" the silence, as if everything is
simultaneously separate and unified, a paradox difficult to grasp
even in the terms of mysticism, which accept paradox as an element
of the experience.
The whistler bears a clear resemblance to Wordsworth's solitary
reaper - a third text informing these passages - but instead of
"welcome notes," as in Wordsworth, Dillard's speaker "was not able
to bear" the music (echoing T.S. Eliot's line, "Human kind cannot
bear very much reality") because it seems identical with the silence.
The essay inverts the feeling described in Wordsworth's poem in
the same way the feeling of terror inverts the sense of peace or joy
commonly depicted in mystical experiences, and the same way the
experience of silence inverts the traditional Christian understanding
of God as Word. The whole experience, here, is troubling because in
its elements it is manifesting itself as a mystical vision, and yet
these key elements compose exactly the opposite of what we
commonly expect in such a vision.
The most trouble arises from the problem of whether a unifying
vision of reality occurs here. Stace argues for a distinction between
a mystical experience and a vision, and in this sense neither Dillard
nor Millay strictly evinces the mystical experience. But as Joseph
Keller says:

[A]ccording to Stace, the experience called mystical in its purest
form is not a vision; it is without any kind of sensory
accompaniment whatsoever. But Stace's is surely an extreme
position. Sensory input, even efferent reaction in which we
anticipate stimuli, is a constant and integral part of cortical
function. The degree to which such stimuli accompany the unitary
conviction which is the heart of the experience and is nonsymbolic
is a matter of temperament and culture. (Keller 12)

Keller's observation that the form or outward manifestation of the
mystical experience is bound up with the temperament and culture
of the experiencer helps unlock the central difficulty of placing "A
Field of Silence," and perhaps all of Dillard's writings, in the
contemplative tradition. It has been variously repeated that Dillard
is a "modern mystic," but the real meaning of that phrase comes
clear in "A Field of Silence." Her experience or vision is similar to,
but also varies in startling ways from those of her contemplative
predecessors like St. Teresa of Avila and St. Paul; and its
resemblances to Millay's poem (which, despite its adherence to
nineteenth-century poetic form, is a modern poem in its stark
depiction of fear, aloneness, suffering and dread) indicate that
Dillard's version of the experience arises from a temperament and
cultural disposition grounded firmly in the modern world.
The modern mystical experience, as Arthur Clements suggests in
Poetry of Contemplation, finds form less in the introvertive mode
and more often in the extrovertive mode. That is, in the scientific
age which begins, roughly, in the Renaissance, our cultural
predisposition is to take reality's starting point as the natural world;
it follows that the extrovertive vision (which Clements equates with
W.H. Auden's phrase, the "Vision of Dame Kind," or nature) would
be the mystical experience characteristic of the age. Clements says:

[S]ometime after the seventeenth century (coincidentally or
causally, along with the rise of science and the increase of nature
mysticism in the English Romantics, American Transcendentalists,
and others) the transcendent God descended into nature and
humankind ... Most modern poets, from Blake and Whitman on,
who continue contemplative tradition do so almost exclusively in
its extrovertive aspects. (Clements 174-75)

Dillard is shaped essentially by modern Euro-American culture,
and while her literary predecessors are the English Romantics and
American Transcendentalists, she also bears the influences of the
twentieth century: the modern temperament is characterized, that is,
by a sense of cultural and psychological fragmentation, a view of
the self shaped by science in the form of psychology, and an
existential uncertainty or anxiety, together with a sense of
spectacular material comfort and accomplishment through science
and technology. A temperament shaped in this milieu, if we follow
Keller's observation, is not likely to find the same experience as a
temperament shaped in Julian of Norwich's fourteenth-century
England, not to mention St. Paul's Syria. The experience is more apt
to be like that of a modern personality such as Arthur Rimbaud,
who likens his own spiritual illumination to a drunken boat, and
who later, in A Season in Hell, describes the horrors of moving
beyond the Illuminative stage and into the Dark Night of the Soul
(Wilde). Rimbaud in some ways depicts the essential modern
disposition and temperament, and Dillard, as she implies in Holy
the Firm (where she mentions reading The Day on Fire, a
biographical novel about Rimbaud, and alludes directly to Rimbaud
in speaking of the landscape as being "on fire") and perhaps in "A
Field of Silence," is well aware of Rimbaud's influence and
implications.