The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New

by Annie Dillard

  Okay, and then what? Say you manage to scale your own weft and see time’s breadth and the length of space. You see the way the fabric both passes among the stars and encloses them. You see in the weave nearby, and aslant farther off, the peoples variously scandalized or exalted in their squares. They work on their projects—they flake spear points, hoe, plant; they kill aurochs or one another; they prepare sacrifices—as we here and now work on our project. What, seeing this spread multiply infinitely in every direction, would you do differently? Would you change your project? To what? Whatever you do, it has likely brought delight to fewer people than either contract bridge or the Red Sox.

  However hypnotized you and your people are, you will be just as dead in their war, our war. However dead you are, more people will come. However many more people come, your time and its passions, you yourself and your passions, weigh but equally in the balance with those of any dead who pulled waterwheel poles by the Nile or Yellow Rivers, or painted their foreheads black, or starved in the wilderness, or wasted from disease, then or now. Our lives and our deaths surely count equally, or we must abandon one-man-one-vote, dismantle democracy, and assign seven billion people an importance-of-life ranking from one to seven billion.

  What would you do differently, you up on your beanstalk looking at scenes of all peoples at all times in all places? When you climb down, would you dance any less to the music you love, knowing that music to be provisional as a bug? Somebody has to make jogging shoes, to turn the soil, fish. If you descend the long rope ladders back to your people, your own time in the fabric, if you tell them what you have seen, and should someone care to listen, then what? Everyone knows times and cultures are plural. If you come back a shrugging relativist or a stiff-tongued absolutist, then what? If you spend hours a day looking around, high astraddle the warp or woof of your people’s wall, then what new wisdom might you take to your grave for worms to untangle? Well, maybe you will not go into advertising. But what work suits? You might know your own death better, though dread it no less. Will you try to bring people up the wall—carry children to see it—to what end? Fewer golf courses? What’s wrong with golf? Nothing at all. Equality of wealth? Sure; how?

  The woman watching sheep over there, the man who carries embers in a pierced clay ball, the engineer, the girl who spins wool into yarn as she climbs, the smelter, the babies learning to recognize speech in their own languages, the man whipping a slave’s flayed back, the man digging roots, the woman digging roots, the child digging roots—what would you tell them? And the future people—what are they doing? What excitements sweep peoples here and there from time to time? Into the muddy river they go, into the trenches, into the caves, into the mines, into the granary, into the sea in boats. Most humans who were ever alive lived inside a single culture that had not changed for hundreds of thousands of years.

  Over here, the rains fail; they are starving. There, the caribou fail; they are starving. Corrupt leaders take the wealth. Not just there, but here. Rust and smut spoil the rye. When pigs and cattle starve or freeze, people die soon after. Disease empties a sector, a billion sectors.

  People look at the sky and at the other animals. They make beautiful objects, beautiful sounds, beautiful motions of their bodies beating drums in lines. They pray; they toss people in peat bogs; they help the sick and injured; they pierce their lips, their noses, ears; they make the same mistakes despite religion, written language, philosophy, and science. They build, they kill, they preserve, they count and figure, they boil the pot, they keep the embers alive; they tell their stories and gird themselves.

  Will knowledge you experience directly make you a Buddhist? Must you forfeit excitement per se? To what end?

  Say you have seen an ordinary bit of what is real, the infinite fabric of time that eternity shoots through, and time’s soft-skinned people working and dying under slowly shifting stars. Then what?

  ENCOUNTERS WITH CHINESE WRITERS

  DISNEYLAND

  IT IS A SUNNY SEPTEMBER MORNING in Disneyland. Bands are playing; people walk with their children and take pictures.

  The Chinese writers, the UCLA Chinese-American writers’ conference hosts, and Allen Ginsberg and I—for we stayed on to accompany our foreign guests—have just seen the film America the Beautiful. Along with the standard scenic tourist shots, the film offered a healthy dose of American militarism. Tanks rolled on parade, soldiers fired salutes, cadets trained with weapons at Annapolis and West Point—all to swelling music and rising choruses.

  We have emerged, blinking, from this film and entered again the bright Disneyland streets. The Chinese writers seem content, perfectly familiar with Disney paraphernalia. In China you can buy Donald Duck on pink thermos bottles, Mickey Mouse and Goofy on handkerchiefs. Nearly everyone has seen Disney cartoons.

  A sophisticated and cosmopolitan Chinese writer named Liu Binyan is strolling down the street with Allen Ginsberg. At home in Beijing, Liu Binyan is a muckraking journalist. He revealed corruptions in high places. He is in the United States on a six-month visit, he says. In fact, this visit will prove to be the start of his lifelong exile from China. The party disliked corruption as a topic. Liu Binyan’s English is perfect. And his upright, forceful carriage enhances the grandeur of his leonine head, with its curved forehead, wide cheekbones, and strong jaw. He is young, at home in the world; his dark suit, remarkably, fits him. For twenty-two years in China, no longer permitted to write, he worked at forced labor. Now, he is in Disneyland.

  Allen Ginsberg, beside Liu Binyan, is walking with his head down. He is sensibly dressed for a hot September day in a white, short-sleeved shirt and green chinos. The spectacle of the movie we just screened has left him gloomy. He says he considers all that military emphasis in the film to be Mickey Mouse.

  Liu Binyan, walking so erectly in his fine suit, cocks an ear and says, “Mickey Mouse?”

  “You know,” Ginsberg says. He is preoccupied. “Mickey Mouse. With the ears?” He wags his fingers desolately over his head. “A little mouse?”

  Liu Binyan stands on his dignity. “Yes,” he says slowly, in his careful English, “I know Mickey Mouse. Yes. But the film?”

  Ginsberg is emphatic. “That was a Mickey Mouse film.”

  It is all breaking down for Liu Binyan. He has probably seen dozens of Mickey Mouse films. Incredulity raises his voice: “The film we just saw was a Mickey Mouse film?”

  Ginsberg, still shaking his head over the film, chooses another tack. “You know,” he explains. “Hallucinatory. Delusional.”

  Liu Binyan slowly lights a cigarette and lets the subject go.

  We all come around a corner and a band is playing. We are alone on a broad intersection under blue eucalyptus trees that cast pale and wobbling lines of shadow on the street. Two of us Americans begin to dance.

  One of the Chinese men, with debonair smoothness, as if this were what one did every lunch hour on the streets of Beijing, lightly taps one of the women, and they dance. The band is playing Duke Ellington—“Mood Indigo.” They dance lightly, formally, grandly, seriously, until the song is over; we all continue on, without comment.

  Things are always jolly when people misunderstand one another. I have made ludicrous mistakes in many places, in a number of the many languages I do not speak. In China people often looked at me aghast when I tried to pronounce a simple hello; I have no idea what I was actually saying. Several of the Chinese writers we are with, on the other hand, speak excellent English. Still, people will misunderstand one another.

  We are luncheon guests at Disneyland’s “Club 33.” We have a private dining room, with access to a lavish and excellent buffet. With us are three Disneyland hostesses, each dressed in a red tailored suit. The hostess at my table, to my right, is a gracious and shining young woman whose enormous name tag reads SUSI. Her blond hair is blunt cut and curled in a flip. She has a wide, friendly smile; she has worked as a hostess in Disneyland for seven years.

  To my left sits a Chinese offic
ial, one Mr. Fu, whose English is very good; we have all often relied on this man’s patient good nature and perfect sense of propriety to ease conversation along. Just now he seems to be engaged in catching his breath a bit, and in parsing the edibles on his plate. The Chinese are apt to take eating rather more seriously than we do, and they are not so given as we to social chatter at table.

  SUSI, having ascertained the excellence of her lunch companion’s English, opens the luncheon conversation. “Well, Mr. Fu! Are you enjoying your visit to Disneyland?”

  Mr. Fu looks up from his plate and smiles. “No,” he says.

  SUSI freezes. Fu goes back to his plate, spears a smoked oyster on his fork, and adds conversationally, “This is my very first visit.”

  Ah, a simple misunderstanding. Easily explained to everyone. After that is straightened out, we all resume eating with a certain concentration. Following a decent interval, SUSI, with commendable pluck, gives it another go.

  “Well, Mr. Fu!”

  Fu looks up brightly, as if eager to reestablish himself in the good graces of his hostess.

  “How do you find Disneyland?”

  Fu smiles broadly, raises his eyebrows for emphasis, and says clearly, quite pleasantly, “I find it very messy.”

  “Messy?” SUSI’s smile has fallen, along with her fork.

  “Messy,” Fu repeats, alarmed. “A’messy. Yes? A’mess-ing.”

  Ah!! . . .

  Seldom have I enjoyed a luncheon more.

  Accompanying the delegation as its “secretary” is a middle-aged woman named Fan Baoci—“Madame Fan.” She speaks English, rooms with Zhang Jie in every hotel, and, I believe, enjoys herself. She is a tidy, small woman in glasses, and seems a sober, responsible person. I am charmed to hear about her unexpectedly spirited home life: “My husband loves children, and he loves me of course! And he has a good sense of humor. He plays the piano, and the guitar, and the accordion. Often at my house in the evening, after work, we start to dance.”

  Now in Disneyland Madame Fan and I are alone on the street. The restaurant has chilled her a bit, and we are warming her in the sun. People are passing along the narrow street, which is modeled after a street in New Orleans’s French Quarter.

  A little boy approaches us. He is about five years old, a blond little boy with long bangs. He is wearing blue shorts, a green T-shirt, and a gun belt with two holsters. Madame Fan leans over and addresses him warmly: “What’s your name?”

  The little boy draws his two six-shooters and, with a grim “I-hate-to-do-this” expression, shoots us, one and then the other: Pow! Pow! I keel over, so he concentrates on Madame Fan: Pow!

  “What’s your name?” says Madame Fan, leaning down along the line of fire.

  The boy steps back and draws a bead on her forehead: Pow pow pow! This goes on. I suggest to Madame Fan that she clutch at her breast and die a bit, in the interest of goodwill, and if she wants the killing to stop; and so she does. The boy pops his guns back into their holsters and stalks on down the street without a word.

  The head of the delegation is a literary critic named Feng Mu. He is a rather shy, formal bachelor of sixty-four. He has an impressive gift for giving beautifully structured complimentary speeches off the cuff. Like the other writers, who perhaps take their cue from him, he seems game for any strange thing the United States may throw at him.

  Feng Mu is so formal in his bearing that he manages, at all times, to stand with his spine at once perfectly aligned and canted backwards, away from the world, like a raked mast. Because of this posture, Feng Mu, who is not tall, nevertheless looks down his nose at things, and seems somewhat taken aback. Among his own delegation he is a favorite, not only for his personal qualities, but for the relative liberality of his politico-literary criticism and the honor it has brought him. Among us Americans he is a favorite as well for a quality in his formality that I can only call sweetness.

  Feng Mu and some others try the wildest ride at Disneyland: “Space Mountain.” It is like a roller coaster, only its cars, instead of dropping, jerk and veer through hairpin turns in the dark. When it is all over, Feng Mu and the others climb from their cars breathless, and compose themselves on terra firma. Feng Mu pats a hand over his hair and restores it to order. He stands absolutely straight and tilted backwards; his legs are formally together; his expression is at once serene and exalted. “I think,” he says severely, as if addressing the press, “that unless one has ridden ‘Space Mountain,’ one cannot truly claim to have been to Disneyland.”

  At some point we have managed to lose one of the Chinese. Chen Baichen is seventy-four years old and speaks no English. He must have been missing for quite a while before anyone noticed; in the meantime, we have taken a train ride across the park.

  Chen Baichen is a playwright whose plays came out in the thirties and forties. He is a short, dignified man, broadly built, with large features and a long chin that touches his top collar button. Usually he wears, as do most of the Chinese, a rather long-sleeved trench coat. Apparently their briefings stressed American rains.

  This morning Chen Baichen and I were alone together briefly at the breakfast table in our hotel. While we waited for our scrambled eggs, he got up to leave for a minute. (He was fetching, it turned out, one of his books for a present.) Politely, he explained in Chinese that he was leaving for just a minute and would be right back. I understood, I said; fine, sure—for all this was evident—but then he remembered that I don’t understand Chinese, and took this to mean that I didn’t understand him.

  So, quickly, leaning over his place mat, he did what Chinese people are constantly doing during verbal misunderstandings: He sketched the character with a finger. On his place mat he drew the Chinese characters for, I guess, “I’m just going upstairs for a minute and will be right back.” In the middle of this exercise he awoke to its absurdity. I had been, in spite of myself, following the Chinese characters’ forms raptly, but now he quickly wiped away the imaginary characters with his palm, made a wonderfully disgusted “Bah!” gesture with both hands, and left. I like everything about Chen Baichen, although I cannot claim to know him, and think it careless of us to have lost him.

  A disagreement ensues in Disneyland: Are we to assume that Chen Baichen, wherever he is, is frantic, or at least upset? Some people think that Chen Baichen, having been through two world wars, occupation, liberation, famine, the anti-rightist campaign, and the Cultural Revolution, can probably handle Disneyland. In fact, as we learn later, he has calmly made his way to the park’s exit and is waiting on a bench.

  I have been assigned to comb a section of the park. By the time I meet up with the group, Chen Baichen has been “found” for twenty minutes. Nevertheless I am so happy to see him that I forget all the warnings in the guidebooks and hug him rather enthusiastically. As we part, I see, disheartened, that his enormous eyes are full of tears.

  So he had been upset to be lost in Disneyland. I was wrong. Of course he had been upset, and was now relieved—who wouldn’t be?

  Later, however, I learn that Chen Baichen, on his own account, was not in the least ruffled by being lost in Disneyland. But the warmth of our relief and embraces when we joined him—that had moved him to tears. Chinese men lose no face by weeping.

  PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK

  ON FOOT IN VIRGINIA’S ROANOKE VALLEY

  I USED TO HAVE A CAT, an old fighting tom, who would jump through the open window by my bed in the middle of the night and land on my chest. I’d half awaken. He’d stick his skull under my nose and purr, stinking of urine and blood. Some nights he kneaded my bare chest with his front paws, powerfully, arching his back, as if sharpening his claws, or pummeling a mother for milk. Some mornings I’d wake in daylight to find my body covered with paw prints in blood; it looked as though I’d been painted with roses.

  It was hot, so hot the mirror felt warm. I washed before the mirror in a daze, my twisted summer sleep still hung about me like sea kelp. What blood was this, and what roses? It
could have been the rose of union, the blood of murder, or the rose of beauty bare and the blood of some unspeakable sacrifice or birth. The sign on my body could have been an emblem or a stain, the keys to the kingdom or the mark of Cain. I never knew. I never knew as I washed, and the blood streaked, faded, and finally disappeared, whether I’d purified myself or ruined the blood sign of the Passover. We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence. . . . “Seem like we’re just set down here,” a woman said to me recently, “and don’t nobody know why.”

  These are morning matters, pictures you dream as the final wave heaves you up on the sand to the bright light and drying air. You remember pressure, and a curved sleep you rested against, soft, like a scallop in its shell. But the air hardens your skin; you stand; leave the lighted shore to explore some dim headland, and soon you’re lost in the leafy interior, intent, remembering nothing.

  I still think of that old tomcat, mornings, when I wake. Things are tamer now; I sleep with the window shut. The cat and our rites are gone and my life is changed, but the memory remains of something powerful playing over me. I wake expectant, hoping to see a new thing. If I’m lucky I might be jogged awake by a strange birdcall. I dress in a hurry, imagining the yard flapping with auks, or flamingos. This morning it was a wood duck, down at the creek. It flew away.

  I live by a creek, Tinker Creek, in a valley in Virginia’s Blue Ridge. It’s where I make myself scarce. An anchorite’s hermitage is called an anchor-hold; some anchor-holds were simple sheds clamped to the side of a church like a barnacle to a rock. I think of this house clamped to the side of Tinker Creek as an anchor-hold. It holds me at anchor to the rock bottom of the creek itself and it keeps me steadied in the current, as a sea anchor does, facing the stream of light pouring down. It’s a good place to live; there’s a lot to think about.