Pilgrim

"But everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn't flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames." (Dillard, 11)

I've been well and truly hooked. I was from the first paragraph, when bloody paw prints became roses on her chest late at night. Her language is so incredibly well-crafted, poetic, that so far this read has actually been just that - a read, one to curl up with in my chair. Not because it's a book that was assigned for class, but because there is something about the way she strings together her words that speaks to me. And I think that might be because I love poetry - as I read this, I swear you could take anyone of her paragraphs and turn it into a poem. Such as this passage:

"I saw color patches for weeks after I read this wonderful book. It was late summer; the peaches were ripe in the valley orchards. When I woke in the morning, color patches wrapped round my eyes, intricately, leaving not one unfilled spot. All day long I walked among the shifting color-patches that parted before me like the Red Sea and closed again in silence, transfigured, wherever I looked back." (Dillard, 31)

And then I do this:

"I saw color patches for weeks after
I read this wonderful book. It was late
summer; the peaches were ripe in the valley
orchards. When I woke in the morning, color
patches wrapped round my eyes, intricately,
leaving not one unfilled spot. All day long
I walked among the shifting color-patches
that parted before me like the Red Sea
and closed again in silence, transfigured,
wherever I looked back."

Annie Dillard, in almost perfect iambic (with the exception of two lines, I think) pentameter. I guess I'm interested in what it is that supposedly makes certain language or certain prose "poetic" - what "poetic" language does Annie Dillard have that other authors, let's take Metphors for instance, may not necessarily have? Or more importantly, how does form change the way we look at things?

I remember Doug saying something earlier this year about how he wouldn't necessarily know a good poem from a bad poem - but isn't it a matter of perspective, of how we decide to look at things? If we can recognize that the above passage by Dillard is beautiful, poetic writing, while in prose, what makes us less sure about it in pentameter (if we indeed have a hard time with poetry)? It makes me think about that question we've been thinking about - about whether or not there is a difference between "writing" and "creative writing" - and I wonder if, given what I'm thinking about as I'm reading this book, it's about how you approach something. I wonder how much easier Metaphors would have been for me to read if I'd gone into reading not thinking that the subject matter was way over my head, that I wouldn't be able to ever understand or discuss it "intelligently." How would I have felt about it if it had been presented to me in a different form?

Ironic that perspective is part of what Dillard is going for in Pilgrim. It's about how we look at things. And so I relate to this passage quite a lot: "But I don't see what the specialist sees, and so I cut myself off, not only from the total picture, but from various forms of happiness" (Dillard, 18).