130102 04:35 Annie Dillard
It is my nature to love. Something I think we all have yet lose in the process of dealing with life itself; perhaps trained so, or gained so by experience?
I am humiliated to realize that I have loved women unreasonably in ways that were initially erotic, yet now intellectual/spiritual, the urge to the merge long lost in tragedy. Add now: Improbability.
Admittedly in love with God. Knowing what that means to me exclusively. Manifest daily & providentially. I sense this true in my encounter with M and so now with Annie Dillard. I am reminded of the several times I’ve drowned, or nearly so, being hurled from death upward having given up the struggle to live. . . .And haunted by Jim Thorpe’s choice to drown himself in three inches of water. Or Jerzy Kosinski's suicide by self suffocation with a plastic grocery bag. Possibly I am doing the same thing, virtually, by smoking cigarettes? I know very well what death looks like and have no fear.
To love this way is naive, humbly childish, and most often unrequited in any sense save the satisfaction of being within the same universe and time we inhabit. An accolade I seldom give. To some I’ve said, of their writing, I would read them as avidly as I might the Manhattan Telephone Directory should I know them the author of it. But then it is true of me: I inhale people with my eyes and ears. I always have since infancy. And then for forty-five years I had the legitimacy of doing so as a photojournalist.
I think this permission, the validation and enfranchisement, is something best discovered in Eric Hoffer but better articulated through the only medium I though previously impossible: writing.
Obscenely intimate in that I am unable to shrug my shoulders, shuffle my feet and grin when asked; “what did you mean by this!?”
Face on, bold, I ask questions. Now remembering a man whose frontal profile was oblong. Why? He ran his motorcycle into a traffic jam, hurled over five cars, he landed on his face and survived. And happy to relate the cause.
Why do I love Annie Dillard? She details a universe in macro/micro dimensions. With astonishing candor weaving the experience in ways tactile. Replete with doubts and conclusions implied. Add. She loves and has read the same people from history’s wisdom and their trivial as well.
She is like, to me, all those whose confessions I’ve heard regarding their love of life. (Tearing up!) Since I never forget and will count them amongst those embossed upon my prayer wheel beyond death.
At that there are now added the many, daily sought, through quotes, who by intuition are whole and complete enough to know them as fellow travelers and I am less alone. Having found a home, finally. Wherever I go they accompany me along with the Author of Life.
There is about Dillard an elasticity and terminal contraction, potent in collision with the narrative . . . stunning and exquisite. In a very personal preoccupation with The Last Supper, I have sought, and sometimes found, as in Hopper’s Night Hawk, the Terminal Lunch.
I love playing with my perceptions; conclusions, the why, the what, the when, towards what ends? Dillard has broken me of a conceit learned long ago from a very beautiful Daugherty of a very beautiful mother, both editors: never to use the same word in any sentence or paragraph. Yet, occasionally, Dillard does in reminiscent ways of roofing a home with shingles; each repetition a nail driven home to remain until blown away in the next hurricane.
She, Dillard, lulls me with descriptions of normalcy; then shocking with death. Being which part of life. The before, during and afterward, expansive from grain of sand to a desert universe.
M does the same with silence punctuated by observation . . . I love them both and yet it is my nature to love unreasonably . . . while skidding face down across the concrete of life.
© 2013 by Jack Spratt - All Rights Reserved
