Nature Worship

Holy the Firm is a metaphysical prose poem that doesn’t do what metaphysical poetry is usually meant to do, namely to suggest that which is beyond language. Religion is metaphysics ‘with intent.’ And Dillard certainly has intent. She wants us to be aware of her religion, which is neatly contained in her language.

Dillard’s book, like much of her other writing, is religious but with a difference. Religious poetry typically goes further than a statement of an abstract ‘beyondness’ by providing proper names, identities, like God, or Allah, or Jesus, or Vishnu or Zeus. All descriptions of such properly named entities are figurative, and, by definition, wrong because incomplete or misleading. Dillard’s poem does not do this. She doesn’t point elsewhere, beyond language; she points to the generic vocabulary which is within language already, things as they are experienced. This is a special kind of metaphysical poetry, and justifiably, I think, considered also as prose; and it says everything it needs to say. It points to Nature but only a collection of material beings, inanimate as well as living.

The use of proper names to ‘objectify’ the divine is what religious language, polytheistic as well as monotheistic, is traditionally about. Such objectification suggests an alternative world, perhaps material or perhaps spiritual, inhabited by creatures like us - only better, purer, stronger, and longer-lived. This is true for all religions except one: the religion of nature. For those who worship nature, the divine is not represented figuratively; it is simply what is already here and for which existing vocabulary is just fine for pointing to it directly. Animals, mountains, clouds, insects, whatever exists already within language itself is sacred. These are not called God, but gods or spirits or daemons, and they all exist as generic species not identities. For the nature worshipper, natural language conforms very nicely to the way the world is organised. There is nothing beyond language because language is natural and there is nothing beyond the natural world.

Nature worship has some intriguing properties. Because it is not dependent upon a fixed language, there can be no heresy. Because it can use any language, it is as culturally diverse as the world in which it is practiced. Because it evolves as the culture in which it occurs evolves, it is never out of date. And because it has no proper name for the divine, it is hated by other religions as a threat to their credibility. In one of the great religious ironies, proper name religions must single out language and deify it as something superior to all other things. Nature worshippers take language as it comes, equitably, along with everything else.

Annie Dillard is a nature worshipper. Her gods are everywhere - in the wren caught by her cat, in the cat itself, in the smells of the forest, in the presence of an infant, in the weather. There is no end to the detailed classifications of the deities that are there directly in front of us. She wants us to see these gods for what they are, manifestations of the divinely self-created World of Nature.

Nature-worshippers don’t pray; one can’t pray without an identity to which to direct one’s prayers. Nature-worshippers can only direct respect toward that which is - life, pain, death. “No gods have power to save.” Any proper name God who could save but didn’t could only be called a brutish monster. Nature doesn’t have monsters. Nature has materiality and it has forcefulness. “Matter and spirit are of a piece but distinguishable... ”

Dillard, of course, doesn’t call herself a nature-worshpper. That would be impolitic. She is an environmentalist, a Green, an advocate for the natural world, a rejector of the Anthropocene, or any of a dozen or so other euphemisms. Since nature-worship doesn’t rely on doctrine, her religion is probably unique. As far as religions go, there are many worse than hers.

Oh, Ms. Dillard. I heart you. From the first time I opened Pilgrim At Tinker Creek in a nature writing class as Grays Harbor College in 1994, you have consistently demonstrated the ability to take my breath away and give it back over and over again. They way you take your observations of nature and experiences of the world and use them to explore the biggest questions amazes me. You are not for the bored or faint-hearted.
I took this little book with me to Flapjack Lakes and read it until I fell asleep and then finished it sitting on a mossy rock overlooking a lake while I drank my morning coffee out of a blue titanium camping mug. The moth! The girl! You explore the question of why there is such suffering in the world if there is a God and add that the existence of suffering is the reason for art. Well, that's what I think anyway. You sometimes go over head in the most gorgeous way.

‫ثلاثة أيام تقضيها الكاتبة الأمريكية آني ديلارد في عزلة، تكتب ما تراه كما هو (كالعنكبوت في الحمام مع فرائسه وكحشرات العث التي تحترق في ضوء الشمعة) بإسلوب نثري جميل. قبل سنوات قرأت لآني ديلارد كتابها (تعليم الكلام للحجر) ووجدتها كتابة تأملية وممتعة. أتمنى أن تترجم بقية أعمالها. ‬

This is one of the most beautiful books I've ever read. Annie Dillard at her mesmerizing, rambling, inscrutable best. The theme of this book (and from what I've heard, she's claimed only one reviewer from Harvard has managed to figure it out) is less concrete than Pilgrim or An American Childhood, so it might be a frustrating read for those of us that require some...um...logical point to a book. (Personally, I'm not one of them. I'll happily float along, immersed in her amazing words and phrases, untroubled with thoughts of 'So, what exactly are you trying to say?' or 'Jeez! Not another foray into ancient Jewish law! Get on with it already!') This book is for people who enjoy the trip, not the destination. This is a book you meditate about rather than understand. Don't let the slight appearance fool you.
So many of the images have stayed with me over the years: the moth scene, Julie Norwich. These scenes are so well written, that they reach the level of incantations. You feel that you are in the vicinity of something otherworldly and foreign. Immense and Terrible. Something that could burn your eyes out or warp your soul.
An awe-inspiring book.

Three days in the life of Annie Dillard.

Day One, November 18, "Newborn and Salted." She wakes up in a god ("every day is a god"), alone in her small dwelling in Puget Sound, Washington State, nature all around her. She has a cat named Small and a spider in her bathroom. She reads often. She writes what she sees: the moths dying into her burning candles, her cat, the spider in her bathroom and its kills, the land, the trees, the mountains, islands and the sea. She muses about time ("eternity's pale interlinear, as islands are the sea's. We have less time than we knew and that time bouyant, and cloven, lucent, and missile, and wild."). November 18 is a day, so it is a god, a god-child, newly-born and, like what the Armenians and the Levites of old did to their babies, salted. This god is a boy, "pagan and fernfoot," whose power is enthusiasm and whose innocence is mystery.

Day Two, November 19, "God's Tooth." A small plane falls to the earth, hits the ground, fuel explodes. Julie Norwich, seven years old, a neighbor's child, she who likes to play with Small and is learning to whistle, gets her face burnt off by the ignited plane fuel. With such horrifying third-degree burns, maybe she'll die. Or live dead to the world, never learning how to whistle, or kiss, and be kissed by a man who loves her, for her lips are gone. Faith wobbles. What kind of god is this day, asks Dillard. Maybe days are not really gods at all. "There are only days. The one great god abandoned us to days, to time's tumult of occasions, abandoned us to the gods of days each brute and amok in his hugeness and idiocy." A bewildered cry like Job's--

"The great ridged granite millstone of time is illusion, for only the good is real; the great ridged granite millstone of space is illusion, for God is spirit and worlds his flimsiest dreams: but the illusions are almost perfect, are apparently perfect for generations on end, and the pain is also, and undeniably, real. The pain within the millstones' pitiless turning is real, for our love for each other--for world and all the products of extension--is real, vaulting, insofar as it is love, beyond the plane of the stones' sickening churn and arcing to the realm of spirit bare. And you can get caught holding one end of a love, when your father drops, and your mother; when a land is lost, or a time, and your friend blotted out, gone, your brother's body spoiled, and cold, your infant dead, and you dying: you reel out love's long line alone, stripped like a live wire loosing its sparks to a cloud, like a live wire loosed in space to longing and grief everlasting."

That day Dillard espies a new island. She names it Terror, the Farthest Limb of the Day, God's Tooth.

Day Three, Friday, November 20, "Holy the Firm." Here is a thought, while reading about Esoteric Christianity. It is said that there is a substance--in the "spiritual scale"--lower than all the metals, minerals and earths known to anyone. Its name is Holy the Firm. It is in touch with the Absolute at base, and in touch with everything else upwards ascending to the Absolute. An unbroken circle of reality, eternity sockets twice into time and space curves, God having a stake guaranteed in all the world. Julie Norwich is in the hospital, fate uncertain, salted with fire. Dillard holds on to these ideas, by the single handful, of the Absolute, in touch with Holy the Firm, at its base, the latter in touch with everything, even those which appears senseless, seeing all the possibilities for the young child Julie Norwich: dead, alive and consecrated to God, or living a fairly normal life like everyone else.

I'm happy reading Annie Dillard just for the words most of the time, but this book asks difficult questions about pain and about the presence of God in the world. It's probably her least focused book (other than Pilgrim At Tinker Creek), not surprising since it's only her second, but it got down inside me somehow and I haven't been the same since.

A small book, but by no means an easy read. Dillard's meditations jump from the profane to the profound as she ponders life and death, joy and suffering and the presence or absence of God in it all. Definitely a book that requires numerous readings, perhaps in small chunks, in order to appreciate what she is trying to convey.

Dillard's writing is often beautiful, though occasionally overwrought, but left me mostly unmoved, the exception being the better part of the third and final part, where she most successfully joins her exploration of the physical and the metaphysical, combining earnest philosophizing and theologizing with a more subdued and grounded prose style than is featured previously, as if she's successfully brought herself down to earth and eliminated her vanity, until she losing her grasp on the material a bit in the last nine pages, allowing the writing to become too thesisistic and implicitly self-aggrandizing. It's a different flaw from that of most of the first two parts, where she exerts herself a bit too transparently in her reach for the transcendent; she foregrounds too much the transcendent in an effort to show what we take for granted, perhaps due to the impossibility of highlighting that which is taken for granted without bringing overtly jolting attention to it. One of her primary concerns is the way in which we are not just unaware of our surroundings, but are unaware even as we convince ourselves of our awareness, having chosen the wrong focal points. Nevertheless, her approach for exposing God in everything and everything as creation somehow takes away the wonder of it all, implausibly having the effect of flattening the majesty instead of enhancing it. There's an extended metaphor of writing as act of creation, which probably could have been more pleasingly rendered in just a few of her passages on the topic (such as "the day discovers itself, like the poem"), and is a bit unseemly in its ennoblement of her calling. It was an interesting juxtaposition to read this immediately following Transparent Things, as Holy the Firm explicitly invokes a similar concept of universal transparency, though in a more exclusively and overtly theological context, and much more ponderously than Nabokov. Despite its flaws, it's not taxing lengthwise, and is a read I'd consider worthwhile and would recommend widely; if nothing else, the scenario she describes on pages 41-42 will make it all worth one's time.

i was captivated by the first page of this book, which opens "Every day is a god, each day is a god, and holiness holds forth in time. I worship each god, I praise each day splintered down, splintered down and wrapped in time like a husk ... This is the one world, bound to itself and exultant. It fizzes up in trees, trees heaving up streams of salt to their leaves..."

but the book mostly continues like this, fizzing up and splintering down and not telling me much i could sink my teeth into. dillard is effusive about the world around her and it makes me want to be her friend, read her novels (in which effusion is combined with narrative, characters, interactions), live as her roommate in a bare room on the puget sound with one cat a huge windows over the water. but it doesn't really make me want to go on reading this book (though i finished it). i loved some of the images and intense descriptions of moments, like watching a moth consumed by a candle flame. i liked how well-read she seems to be about religion and the way she interwove ideas from esoteric christianity, psalms, saints. but i didn't finish the book feeling inspired or looking at the world around me in the new way the first page of the book seemed to promise.

“Every day is a god, each day is a god, and holiness holds forth in time. I worship each god, I praise each day splintered down, splintered down and wrapped in time like a husk, a husk of many colors spreading at dawn fast over the mountain split”

“How could I have forgotten? Didn't I see the heavens wiped shut just yesterday, on the road walking? Didn't I fall from the dark of the stars to these senselit and noisome days? The great ridged granite millstone of time is illusion for only the good is real. […] The pain within the millstones pitiless turning is real, for our love for each other—for world and all the products of extension—is real, vaulting, insofar as it is love, beyond the plane of the stones' sickening churn and arcing to the realm of spirit bare. […] you reel out love's long line alone, stripped like a live wire loosing its sparks to a cloud, like a live wire loosed in space to longing and grief everlasting.”

“And learn power, however sweet they call you, learn power, the smash of the holy once more, and signed by its name. Be victim to abruptness and seizures, events intercalated, swellings of heart. You’ll climb trees. You won’t be able to sleep, or need to, for the joy of it. […] Held, held fast by love in the world like the moth in wax, your life a wick, your head on fire with prayer, held utterly, outside and in, you sleep alone, if you call that alone, you cry God.”

"Every day is a god."

A lovely and challenging book. Each page needs time to savor and digest.