Dillard: A Field of Silence 3

For both Dillard and Millay, the experience is terrifying partly because it is so radically different from what conventional religious wisdom and the descriptions of mystical experience - all the way down to Stace's analysis in the 1960s - normally teach about the joys and comforts of God's presence. The screams in "Total Eclipse" and "Renascence" are expressions of uncertainty and anxiety emerging from the modern temperament. The modern world, schooled thoroughly in science's analytical method, views the universe as a multiplicity - exactly what Dillard's speaker in the first section of "A Field of Silence" loves; it is this world which comes "unhinged" during the vision. The roosters' cacophony of unrelated screeches is in a sense exactly what the modern
temperament expects because the world is seen as a concatenation of parts, not a whole. But when the cacophony reveals itself as unitary, and the unifying vision of reality descends suddenly on the modern person, the unification manifests itself as silence: the sounds themselves are nothing. When all the sounds are unified, including the screeches, the buzzing flies and the whistling, the only result is silence, as when all colors of the spectrum blend they produce white. The silence, like the classic mystic figure "light," unifies all.
Another way of thinking of this is to say that these sounds are meaningless because they form no coherent context. The sounds are not words, but merely empty sounds, a blaring silence. Further, they are not "the Word"; since the material world is for the essay's speaker the one graspable context, what should be meaningful - sounds - is meaningless, and what should be meaningless - silence - is meaningful. The Word is silence. The lack of coherence in what should otherwise be meaningful jolts the speaker out of her everyday comforts and exposes her to the force of holiness - "the realness of things."
In Dillard's essay, the experience of unification is identical with a force of holiness, and the unity is shattering - not a fragmenting of reality, but a dispersal of the illusion of fragmentation. The shift from a world which is comfortably fragmented to a world which is unified in silence is frightening and unbearable. The speaker of "A Field of Silence" turns away from it. Like Rimbaud who seems to have been unable to make his way beyond the stage in the mystic way that Evelyn Underhill calls the Dark Night of the Soul, Dillard's speaker also declines, out of fright, to continue. At the moment of turning away she says, "The realness of things disassembled." That is, the unity comes apart and the world returns to its comfortable multiplicity: "The whistling became ordinary, familiar; the air above the fields released its pressure" (137). The speaker indeed momentarily experienced the extrovertive mystical vision, but in modern, untraditional ways.
A few lines from Plotinus sum up, in the classic mystic sense, what has happened here. The really terrifying implication of the silence, for the speaker of the essay, is God's "'loneliness unendurable,'" and this overpowering sensibility points directly to Plotinus' reference to "the flight of the alone to the Alone," or in the translation of
A.H. Armstrong, the "escape in solitude to the solitary" (Enneads VI.9.11). The solitude, however - including its implications of both unity and aloneness - is too much for the speaker of the essay to bear, too radically different from the familiar material world.
The context of Plotinus' phrase is this:

If then one sees that oneself has become this, one has oneself as a likeness of that, and if one goes on from oneself, as image to original, one has reached "the end of the journey." And when one falls from the vision, he wakes again the virtue in himself, and considering himself set in order and beautiful by these virtues he will again be lightened and come through virtue to Intellect and wisdom and through wisdom to that Good. This is the life of gods and of godlike and blessed men, deliverance from the things of this world, a life which takes no delight in the things of this world, escape in solitude to the solitary. (Enneads VI.9.11, Armstrong trans.)

The speaker of "A Field of Silence" cannot bear to make the escape, and truly modern in disposition, insists on her love of the things of this world. This is a way of saying that she experiences a unifying vision, in a construction less strict than Stace's; but like Rimbaud, she does not enter into the unitive life ("of gods and godlike and blessed men") as described here by Plotinus and outlined in Underhill's final stage of the mystic way.
But like the speaker in Wordsworth's poem who says, "The music in my heart I bore,/Long after it was heard no more" - waking again the virtue in himself, perhaps - the experience of Dillard's speaker does not disappear from her life or consciousness:

Several months later, walking past the farm ... I remarked to a friend, by way of information, "There are angels in those fields." Angels! That silence so grave and stricken, that choked and unbearable green! ...
From that time I began to think of angels. I considered that sights such as I had seen of the silence must have been shared by the people who said they saw angels. ... My impression now of those fields is of thousands of spirits - spirits trapped, perhaps, by my refusal to call them more fully, or by the paralysis of my own spirit at that time - thousands of spirits, angels in fact, almost discernible to the eye, and whirling. If pressed I would say they were three or four feet from the ground. Only their motion was clear ... that, and their beauty unspeakable. (137-38)

Compare these amazing remarks to Rimbaud's prose poem "Mystic" from the Illuminations:

On the slope of the embankment angels whirl their woolen robes in steel and emerald pastures.
Close by, flames leap up to the nipple of the hill. To the left the compost-ridge is stamped down by all murders and battles, and all disastrous clamors spin out their curves. Behind the ridge to the right, the line of orients, of progress.

And while the band high in the scene is formed by the whirling roar and leaping seashells, and of human nights,
The florid sweetness of the stars and sky and the rest settles on the embankment, like a basket - close to our face, and reveals the blue, widening chasm there below. (Rimbaud, "Mystic")

Rimbaud's angels are whirling, like Dillard's, above the pasture - here "emerald," in "A Field of Silence" "unbearable green" (perhaps echoing Wallace Stevens' use of "green" as a figure for nature raw as yet unordered by the imagination). Rimbaud's poem focuses on "disastrous clamors," a phrase Dillard might have applied to the roosters' screaming, and like the silence over Dillard's field, Rimbaud's sense of unity "settles on the embankment." The sensibility at this moment of Rimbaud's poem differs in its "florid sweetness" from Dillard's, and is more in line with the classic mystic apprehension of beauty. But "Mystic" also discloses the earthiness, shock and violence that imbue the essay's vision: the compost-ridge recalls the buzzing flies by the henhouse, and even more, it is "stamped down by all murders and battles," images of terror. The speaker of "Mystic" is not crushed by silence, but these are surely the same angels whirling over the fields, and this is the same modern feeling that the mystic vision is a terrifying upheaval of the familiar world before it gives rise to any sense of beauty or "Good" in Plotinus' terms. Rimbaud's poem ends on the image of a chasm, surely deeply modern in its allusion to the great, uncertain, frightening emptiness of the universe. And Dillard's essay ends on a declaration of Christian faith (which essentially is - cf. Plotinus, as well as Wordsworth - the waking of virtue in her) in the presence of the angels, and simultaneously an almost absolute modern uncertainty that could be figured in Rimbaud's chasm:

There are angels in those fields, and, I presume, in all fields, and everywhere else. I would go to the lions for this conviction, to witness this fact. What all this means about perception, or language, or angels, or my own sanity, I have no idea. (138)

In the modern age the mystic vision is, characteristically and appropriately, troubling, and paradoxically, it carries both the conventional certainty described by St. Paul ("the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things unseen" (Hebrews 11:1)) and the modern uncertainty about self and world. This is the sense in which Annie Dillard is a "mystic" and occupies a place in the stream of contemplative literature: her experience carries the same intensity and, most importantly, sense of the unity of the cosmos in God as in the writings of mystics from the ancient world onward, but it takes shape in a distinctly modern context and presents us face-on with the modern age's difficulties of apprehending and experiencing the divine.