There's Nothing I Wouldn't Do

I want to lick your stamps
I want to squeeze your fruit
I want to copy your keys
I want to polish your skis
I want to dry clean your suit
I long to renew your passport
I want to walk your collie
Get you Nova Scotia salmon you can put on your bialy
'Cause baby, when it comes to you,
There's nothing I wouldn't do
I wouldn't do

"There's Nothing I Wouldn't Do"

Music by Marcy Heisler, words by Zina Goldrich

When I first heard it at the concert last night, it made me laugh so hard right on beat. The words are so thoughtful and funny and the nouns are unexpected. I want to write like that. 

Oh, How I Loved You

I could think about the unimpressive way you said goodbye
Relief and immaturity combined
I could recollect the nothing that you made of what we shared
Chalk it up to being young and scared and blind
I could summon all the grace inside me, surely,
And maturely I could leave the past behind
But when I think about you
And I think about you
There's only one small thing that comes to mind

Oh, how I loved you
Oh, how I loved you
Strange and unfamiliar
Ridiculous and true
Oh how I loved you

And you can look at me and tell me I am crazy
It's true I can be crazy now and then
And I can take advantage of the comfort, and believe me,
There is comfort in the arms of other men
On the wall there is a China's worth of writing
And it's citing all the reasons we should part
I can put the past behind me
It's behind me
Save for one small thing that lingers in my heart

Oh, how I loved you
Oh, how I loved you
Dumb and unrelenting
And as the sky is blue
Oh how I loved you

Seasonless and reasonless and infinite and strong
Frightening, enlightening and pure
Cautionless and logicless and limitless and long
Wondrous, all-consuming
And impossible

I could think of your rejection, how it shook me to the core
How your unexpected exit broke my heart
How I learned that love you lose feels like a gently slamming door
A door you keep a lock on if you're smart
I could look into the mirror, and could rightly place some blame
On the histrionic games I love to win
But if I write the story
And I will write the story
I know just how the story will begin

Oh, how I loved you
Oh, how I loved you
Sweet and unbelievable
And if you only knew
Oh, how I loved you

"Oh, How I Loved You"

Words by Marcy Heisler, music by Zina Goldrich

Met Marcy and Zina yesterday and today. During our master class, Zina told us this is her favorite song. 

I love her adjectives, her rhymes, her simile of love to door. How this is a song and yet a poem in itself. 

Afterword

Because a great many otherwise admirable men do not read books American women write, I wanted to use a decidedly male pseudonym. ... Still i intended to publish the book as A. Dillard, hoping--as we all hope, and hope in vain--someone might notice only the text, not considering its jacket, its picture, or the advertising; and not remembering someone else's impression of the book, or its writer, or its other readers; and not knowing the writer's gender, or age, or nationality--just read the book, starting cold with the first sentence.

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Chapter 15: The Waters of Separation, Revisited

Spend the afternoon. You can't take it with you.

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

I will. 

Chapter 15: The Waters of Separation

"For the Heavenly Father desires that we should see," said Ruysbroeck, "and that is why He is ever saying to our inmost spirit one deep unfathomable word and nothing else." But what is that word? ... A cast-iron bell hung from the arch of my rib cage; when I stirred it rang, or it tolled, a long syllable pulsing ripples up my lungs and down the gritty sap inside my bones...

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

"Pulsing ripples up my lungs and down the gritty sap inside my bones"--that's how you say "up and down my spine" in Dillard. 

Chapter 14: Northing

One entomologist says that walking sticks, along with monarch butterflies, are able to feign death--although I don't know ho you could determine if a walking stick was feigning death or twigginess.

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

The word is funny--twigginess. The idea is funnier. That's what makes me laugh. Even in her poetic, meditative prose, Dillard can make me laugh, make me write "funny" and "cute" in the margins. 

Chapter 13: The Horns of the Altar

"We are all of us clocks," says Eddington, "whose faces tell the passing years." The young man proudly names his scars for his lover; the old man alone before a mirror erases his scars with his eyes and sees himself whole.

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Don't you just love Dillard? I had to read the last sentence twice to fully appreciate it. The imagery is solidary, lovely, and--my favorite word I learned from Dillard--eidetic. Because I see an old man. Because I see the young man through the old man's eyes. And I see myself, countless times before a mirror, erasing away my scars and tears weather-beaten by the passing years. Then you're perfect, aren't you, to yourself and no one else, in that unselfish self-consciousness. 

Chapter 12: Nightwatch

A bobwhite who is still calling in summer is lorn; he has never found a mate. When I first read this piece of information, every bobwhite call I heard sounded tinged with desperation, suicidally miserable. But now I am somehow cheered on my way by that solitary signal. The bobwhite's very helplessness, his obstinate Johnny-two-notedness, takes on an aura of dogged pluck. God knows what he is thinking in those pendant silences between calls. God knows what I am. But: bobwhite.

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

In the margin I had written, "a sad, scientific truth." But as I type Dillard here, I think again. Sadness is no longer; hope replaces sadness. I imagine a bobwhite singing, singing, singing for his love and when he is not, he is hoping, hoping, hoping. You still sing because of hope. Without it you would stop singing altogether. (And you'd be called bobblack or bobbrown or bobguacamole or some other bob-hopelessness.) But what extra breath and chance you're taking to sing-- with that "dogged pluck"! 

Chapter 11: Stalking Part III

Rather, we know now for sure that there is no knowing. ... physicists are saying that they cannot study nature per se, but only their own investigation of nature.

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Dillard's response to Werner Heisenberg's Principle of Indeterminacy: "you cannot know both a particle's velocity and position." I've been looking for this idea for some time, trying to recall whose it was, for I only remembered what he said. (It's funny how one day a name came to me and that was Bohr.) But Heisenberg--when he was only twenty-six! 

Chapter 11: Stalking

I found out the hard way that waiting is better than pursuing.

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

In stalking, that is. Otherwise, I would pursue first and wait later. But what do you stalk? Whom do you stalk? Dillard stalks muskrats. I stalk Dillard. 

Chapter 10: Fecundity

A scientist calls it the Second Law of Thermodynamics. A poet says, "The force that through the green fuse drives the flower / Drives my green age."

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

And Dillard calls it a contract: "if you want to live, you have to die." F=ma. The iterated algorithm. The last waltz of Stoppard's Arcadia. 

Chapter 9: Flood

I expect to see anything at all.

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

In Chapter 2: Seeing Dillard writes, "I see what I expect." Now she is seeing more, being seen less. She has mastered the art of sight. 

Chapter 8: Intricacy, revisited

If you analyze a molecule of chlorophyll itself, what you get is one hundred thirty-six atoms of hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen arranged in an exact and complex relationship around a central ring. At the ring's center is a single atom of magnesium. Now: If you remove the atom of magnesium and in its exact place put an atom of iron, you get a molecule of hemoglobin. The iron atom combines with all the other atoms to make red blood, the streaming red dots in the goldfish's tail.

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Why haven't AP biology and AP chemistry taught me this? I learn from Dillard in so many other dimensions. I drew five stars and wrote "Love Love Love!!!" in the margins. Here is the middle ground I've been looking for--between literature and science.

Chapter 8: Intricacy

I was awake, with my eyes closed, when I had a dream.

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

This happens to me, particularly when it's one of those happier, luckier dreams--I don't want to wake up, but I am, either almost or already. So I just lay there with eyes shut and try to beckon that lovely dream. Let nothing wake me. Don't find me. But I'm losing my dream. I can't see him anymore. Come back. Please? Come back inside my eyes. I'm awake. Oh, dear. When I close my eyes again, he's not there. I am found, but I lost him. 

The rest of the day I walk around this world looking for him. 

Gravity, to Copernicus, is the nostalgia of things to become spheres.

Arthur Koestler

Meditation on Seeing / Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty wrote a review on Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Here, click and read it. Published March 24, 1974. Just after the arrival of Pilgrim.

Chapter 6: The Present Part II, Revisited

Oh, but what about that heave in the wrist when I saw the tree with the lights in it, and my heart ceased, but I am still there?

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Mrs. Bell let me see the tree with the lights in it. That was three years ago. Do you think I can see it again--come across that breathing picture? 

Chapter 6: The Present Part II

Thomas Merton wrote, in a light passage in one of his Gethsemane journals: "Suggested emendation in the Lord's Prayer: Take out 'Thy Kingdom come' and substitute 'Give us time!'" But time is the one thing we have been given, and we have been given to time.

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Yes--what we have and lack, at the same time, is time. And in Tom Stoppard's Arcadia, Valentine and Septimus, each at different times, are talking about time, at the same time! 

Chapter 6: The Present Part I

This is it, I think, this is it, right now, the present, this empty gas station, here, this western wind, this tang of coffee on the tongue, and I am patting the puppy, I am watching the mountain. ... as you look at a still-beautiful face belonging to a person who was once your lover in another country years ago: with fond nostalgia, and recognition, but no real feeling save a secret astonishment that you are now strangers.

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

This vaguely certain kind of recognition to an almost forgotten lover. There is a delight and there is a sadness. The present will always slip away. But the memories will not. You can hold on to them, at least, for as long as time allows you to. 

Consciousness itself does not hinder living in the present. Self-consciousness, however, does hinder the experience of the present. It is the glimpse of oneself in a storefront window, the unbidden awareness of reactions on the faces of other people--the novelist's world, not the poet's. ... Innocence is a better world. What I call innocence is the spirit's unself-conscious state at any moment of pure devotion to any object. 

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek 

As an afterthought I add this in. It's so me, the glimpse I cast myself on a storefront window, how we are constantly turning around to see if we're being seen. But what does it matter--as long as you're living in the present and at that moment? You're true then. 

Chapter 5: Untying the Knot

Time is the continuous loop, the snakeskin with scales endlessly overlapping without beginning or end, or time is an ascending spiral if you will, like a child's toy Slinky. Of course we have no idea which arc on the loop is our time, let alone where the loop itself is, so to speak, or down whose lofty flight of stairs the Slinky so uncannily walks.

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

In a five-page chapter I found this paragraph about time. 

The thing is: I can't seem to add anything more than what Dillard has already put down. My ideas and thoughts seem meaningless next to hers. 

It's winter break. I should keep writing. I should write like I've never done before, for I have all the time in the world now that I'm committed to this lovely college called Dartmouth and this lovely town called Hanover. What keeps me from writing more? I had thought I abandoned the fear of being wrong a long time ago. I should just keep writing nevertheless.