The ringing phrase comes up in the gorgeous chapter "Seeing," as Dillard writes about a book she found describing the experience of people born blind whom a German doctor had found a way to help see, Marius von Senden's Space and Sight (1932, translated in 1960). One little girl, taken to a garden and asked what she sees, von Senden writes, "is greatly astonished, and can scarcely be persuaded to answer, stands speechless in front of the tree, which she only names on taking hold of it, and then as 'the tree with the lights in it.'" (31)
This is but one of a number of other striking quotations from von Senden's book (Another: One girl was eager to tell her blind friend that "men do not look like trees at all" (31)!), but it's the image that stays with Dillard. She returns to the first girl when she wraps up the chapter a few pages later:
I have to look at the landscape of the blue-green world again. Just think: in all the clean, beautiful reaches of the solar system, our planet alone is a blot; our planet alone has death. I have to acknowledge that the sea is a cup of death and the land is a stained altar stone. We the living are survivors huddled on flotsam, living on jetsam. We are escapees. We wake in terror, eat in hunger, sleep with a mouthful of blood. ... Evolution loves death more than it loves you or me. This is easy to write, easy to read, and hard to believe. ... Are my values then so diametrically opposed to those that nature preserves? ...
When her doctor took her bandages off and led her into the garden, the girl who was no longer blind saw “the tree with the lights in it.” It was for this tree I searched through the peach orchards of summer, in the forests of fall and down winter and spring for years. Then one day I was walking along Tinker creek and thinking of nothing at all and I saw the tree with the lights in it. I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame. I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly fire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed. It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance. The flood of fire abated, but I’m still spending the power. Gradually the lights went out in the cedar, the colors died, the cells un-flamed and disappeared. I was still ringing. I had been my whole life a bell and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck. I have since only very rarely seen the tree with the lights in it. The vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but I live for it, for the moment the mountains open and a new light roars in spate through the crack, and the mountains slam. (35-36)
As a struck bells continues to vibrate for a long time, the image of the tree with the lights in it comes back and back as the book proceeds.
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek - fifty years old next year! - is ostensibly an account of spending a year closely observing nature at a house on a creek in the Roanoke Valley, Virginia, although it was clearly the work of several years. (Still, she was but twenty-nine when it was published!) It overflows with exquisite descriptions of every kind of life, and by turns literate and visionary reflections on what she sees that compass science, philosophy and theology, but the most memorable are the most upsetting. The book begins with Dillard watching a frog who appears strangely listless, only to see its eyes go blank and its insides be sucked out by a giant water bug - another image that reverberates through the book. Tinker's topic is the mysterium tremendum et fascinans of the natural world, its wonder and its horror. In an afterword from 1999, she describes the book as a theodicy of nature, a movement from a via positiva to via negativa (279).
Perhaps the most powerful chapter, called "Fecundity," is the segue from positive accounts of nature's splendor and intricacy to a deep dive into its cruelty: a grand tour of the staggering waste of seeds and eggs in nature, and parasitic insects - 10% of all known species when she wrote in 1974 - and the variously appalling ways they make life out of the death of their hosts. A theodicy problem indeed! (I included the place where Darwin stumbles on the theodicy problem in a parastic wasp in my Problem of Evil anthology - because of Dillard?)
Dillard is always worth quoting at length:
This direction of thought brings me abruptly to a fork in the road where I stand paralyzed, unwilling to go on, for both ways lead to madness.
Either this world, my mother, is a monster, or I myself am a freak.
Consider the former: the world is a monster. Any three-year-old can see how unsatisfactory and clumsy is this whole bsuiness of reproducing and dying by the billions. ... This view requires that a monstrous world running on chance and death, careening blindly from nowhere to nbowehre, somehow produced wonderful us. ...
Or consider the alternative,
Julian of Norwich, the great English anchorite and theologian, cited, in the manner of the prophets, these words from God: "See, I am God: see, I am in all things: see, I never lift my hands off my works, nor ever shall, without end.... How should anything be amiss?" But now not even the simplest and best of us sees things the way Julian did. It seems to us that plenty is amiss. So much is amiss that I must consider the second fork in the road, that creation itself is blamelessly, benevolently askew by its very free nature, and that it is only human feeling that is freakishly amiss. The frog that the giant water bug sucked had, presumably, a rush of pure feeling for about a second, before its brain turned to broth. I, however, have been sapped by various strong feelings about the incident almost every day for several years. (177-80)
Dillard finds a wonderful way - a via negativa way - beyond this dilemma, in no way resolving it.
Of the two ridiculous alternatives, I rather favor the second. Although it is true that we are moral creatures in an amoral world, the world's amorality does not make it a monster. Rather, I am the freak. Perhaps I don't need a lobotomy, but I could use some calming down, and the creek is just the place for it. ...
Let me pull the camera back and look at that fork in the road in the distance, in the larger context of the speckled and twining world. It could be that the fork will disappear, or that I will see it to be but one of many interstices in a network, so that it is impossible to say which line is the main part and which is the fork. (181-82)
In case we imagine that the trees with the lights in them offer an assurance of a purer world beyond this one - she's earlier asserted On the cedar tree shone, however briefly, the steady inward flames of eternity (81) - she wonders if she can trust her experience.
That the world is old and frayed is no surprise; that the world could ever become new and whole beyond uncertainty was, and is, such a surprise that I find myself referring all subsequent kinds of knowledge to it. And it suddenly occurs to me to wonder: were the twigs of the cedar I saw really bloated with galls? They probably were; they almost surely were. I have seen these “cedar apples” swell from that cedar’s green before and since: reddish gray, rank, malignant. All right then. But knowledge does not vanquish mystery, or obscure its distant lights. I still now and will tomorrow steer by what happened that day, when some undeniably new spirit roared down the air, bowled me over, and turned on the lights. I stood on grass like air, air like lightning coursed in my blood, floated my bones, swam in my teeth. I’ve been there, seen it, been done by it. I know what happened to the cedar tree, I saw the cells in the cedar tree pulse charged like wings beating praise. Now, it would be too facile to pull everything out of the hat and say that mystery vanquishes knowledge. Although my vision of the world of the spirit would not be altered a jot if the cedar had been purulent with galls, those galls actually do matter to my understanding of this world. Can I say then that corruption is one of beauty’s deep-blue speckles, that the frayed and nibbled fringe of the world is a tallith, a prayer shawl, the intricate garment of beauty? It is very tempting, but I cannot. But I can, however, affirm that corruption is not beauty’s very heart and I can I think call the vision of the cedar and the knowledge of these wormy quarryings twin fjords cutting into the granite cliffs of mystery and say the new is always present simultaneously with the old, however hidden. The tree with the lights in it does not go out; that light still shines on an old world, now feebly, now bright. (244-45)The earlier passages about the experience, unadulterated by galls, have understandably taken on a life of their own. There are moments of transport and ecstasy in nature which haunt and sustain us, even as we search in vain to regain them, and we remain grateful to have been opened up by them: I had been my whole life a bell and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck. But the complete thought is more complex, like a creek flowing through forks and eddies and back. And the book, going through the cycle of a year (while a writer's decision Dillard later said she regretted) reminds us that the story's not over.
I'm very happy to have reread the book. It remains for me unparalleled in its fearless acknowledgment of the beauty and the difficulty of the world, and the mismatch between our human valuings and the prodigality of death-dealing nature. What to do with such awareness? Later in her life Dillard converted to Catholicism, and then left. Our religions are exploded by the gory glory of life.
But, while the tree with the lights in it is a central character in Pilgrim on Tinker Creek, I have to admit that trees are not. (Any more than Moses' burning bush was primarily a bush.) In Dillard's eyes trees host wonders - especially birds - but are not themselves wonders. 1974 was perhaps too early for a settler American to consider that trees might be persons. (But I too sought the divine shimmering fleetingly through rather than pulsing steadily within trees at Church of the Woods last week...)
Dillard's sense of life is animal. In one place, noticing a tiny translucent leaf on a tulip tree sapling - it reminds her of a newborn gerbil she'd seen recently - she acknowledges being fascinated by the "leafing of trees."
There's a real power here. It is amazing that trees can turn gravel and bitter salts into these soft-lipped lobes, as if I were to bite down on a granite slab and start to swell, bud and flower. Every year a given tree creates absolutely from scratch ninety-nine percent of its living parts. Water lifting up tree trunks can climb one hundred and fifty feet an hour; in full summer a tree can, and does, heave a ton of water every day. A big elm in a single season might make as many as six million leaves, wholly intricate, without budging an inch; I couldn't make one. A tree stands there, accumulating deadwood, mute and rigid as an obelisk, but secretly it seethes, it splits, sucks and stretches; it heaves up tons and hurls them out in a green, fringed fling. No person taps this free power; the dynamo in the tulip tree pumps out even more tulip tree, and it runs on rain and air. (113)
Later on she'll note that each of these six-million leaves has untold crenellations! But does the tree offer a relationship with the mysteries of life? She continues:
John Cowper Powys said, "We have no reason for denying to the world of plants a certain slow, dim, vague, large, leisurely semi-consciousness." He may not be right, but I like his adjectives. The patch of bluets in the grass may not be long on brains, but it might be, at least in a very small way, awake. The trees especially seem to bespeak a generosity of spirit. I suspect that the real moral thinkers end up, wherever they start, in botany. (113-14)
I'm a little stupidly flattered by that last line, but Dillard's spiritualizing isn't really botanical. She has long stopped writing (apparently she paints now), but perhaps a Dillardian sensibility might become more attuned to the lives of trees in our day? In the half century since she wrote, our (well, some of our) understanding of nature has expanded to include symbiosis as well as competition. (But Google in 2023 also tells me that the percentage of known animal species which are parasitic is closer to 50%.) All those mockingbirds and dragonflies and muskrats and locusts and water bugs and horsehair worms and snakes and barnacles are still doing their thing, eating others, reproducing and dying, but they do it with other species, in webs and networks of which, in some way, we may be a part. It's easier to develop awareness of these webs with trees, perhaps?
Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (HarperPerennial, 2013 [1974])
