Annie Dillard's "Some Questions and Answers about Natural History"
Thoughts on wonder, play, and the imagination.
Some Questions and Answers about Natural History
Some Questions with Answers Question: What do fish do when floods come over— kiss onto a tree root and squeeze? Answer: There are no fish in our rivers and streams. The fauna you see were bank and basement dwellers. Fresh-water fish all live in the ocean; salt-water fish fall as rain. Question: What causes the wind? Why do I feel some way in wind? Answer: Trees fan the wind as they sway. Bushes help. Your heart fills up. Question: What color are fish? Answer: No one has ever seen fish. Fish secrete highly reflective compounds that act as a skin of mirror. It is thought that fishes' sides are painted in landscapes, mountainous. Question: Clouds? Answer: Mare's-tails, nocti- luminescent, camel—signs of storm, fresh air, a heartbreaking journey. Aurora australis not a cloud. Caused by hidden moon's glare on the highest ice reflected on sheer atomic curtains, otherwise invisible. Did you think it was a cloud? Some Questions Without Answers Question: Why do fireflies, the spring ones, always say "J"? Who is this J? Where should I go? Questions: Can birds move eggs? Will you come if I walk to the rivertree and back? The skin on your eyelids is one cell deep. Some Answers Without Questions Answer: Drawn by your sweet breath. Sing or call by the edge of the water at night. Aim between the shoulders. Answer: Contrary to common opinion, most birds are blind. Their highly developed sense of touch, however, is pulled, so to speak, like a stream. Possibilities include: Polaris, wistfulness, sudden memories, ionization, and neap tides such as are found here, on the Bay of Fundy, and elsewhere. from Tickets for a Prayer Wheel (Harper Perennial, 1974)
This is a fun one, isn’t it? Fun and playful and from Dillard’s first (and I believe only) collection of poetry, Tickets for a Prayer Wheel. I bought the book at a used bookstore in Gloucester the other week, and, when I opened the front cover, I read the name of the previous owner, stamped on the inside as if she had her own personal library. It was a lovely stamp, with what looked like a finch alighting upon it, and I googled the person’s name, and soon found myself reading the relatively recent obituary of a 92 year old woman, someone who wrote her own poems and let goats roam by her garden and birds perch on her shoulder, someone who worked alongside her husband as they crafted little tables and pieces of furniture. The guestbook of the online obituary was filled with comments from neighbors, townspeople — anyone and everyone, all saying the same thing. How grateful they were to be allowed into this woman’s act of living her life.
And so that was my introduction to this unexpected book of poems. And what a lovely one for such a lovely book. I am now in a bit of a Dillard-moment as a result, and am re-reading Dillard’s Teaching a Stone to Talk, which opens with her seminal essay, “Total Eclipse,” an essay I feel I’ve read countless times but even still surprised me just the other day as I read it in bed.
This paragraph, about the burgeoning feeling of the eclipse, as the moon tracks across the sun, is what I think of as a “perfect paragraph,” a phrase I write in the margin of any book that produces one:
I turned back to the sun. It was going. The sun was going, and the world was wrong. The grasses were wrong; they were platinum. Their every detail of stem, head, and blade shone lightless and artificially distinct as an art photographer’s platinum print. This color has never been seen on Earth. The hues were metallic; their finish was matte. The hillside was a 19th-century tinted photograph from which the tints had faded. All the people you see in the photograph, distinct and detailed as their faces look, are now dead. The sky was navy blue. My hands were silver. All the distant hills’ grasses were finespun metal which the wind laid down. I was watching a faded color print of a movie filmed in the Middle Ages; I was standing in it, by some mistake. I was standing in a movie of hillside grasses filmed in the Middle Ages. I missed my own century, the people I knew, and the real light of day.
Surreally and gorgeously written. It plays and jumps and attempts toward something indescribable. Sometimes I think that is what wonderful writing does. It tries so hard and so playfully to say something that is impossible to say that it reminds you, in its attempt, that there are things that truly are impossible to describe, that the world itself is beyond description. Playful in its humility. Achingly lovely and heartbreaking in its result.
Today’s poem plays in that same way, doesn’t it? It owns that act of play at face value. And I think that’s one of the first things I loved about it. I could feel Dillard having fun with this one. Can’t you? The title, the subtitles? The questions, the answers? The little jabs at the reader — Did you think it was a cloud?
I think I first loved this poem when I read this set of questions and answers:
Question: What causes the wind? Why do I feel some way in wind? Answer: Trees fan the wind as they sway. Bushes help. Your heart fills up.
I love that initial question — What causes the wind? I love how it comes from a place of childlike wonder, that simple and even joyous feeling of not knowing and then wanting to know. And I love that second question — Why do I feel some way in wind? I love how it moves from that desire for knowledge expressed in the first question to a centering of feeling, a longing to understand the self as it relates and reacts to the world.
Dillard plays in her answer choices. That’s the joy of this poem. It’s the wide reach of the imagination, the elasticity of it. The way that wind can come from trees fanning the air as they sway and move. The way bushes are of some help. And the way that the wind becomes this accumulating force inside the heart, inside the soul. Our relationship to the world, Dillard suggests here, is soul-enriching, is heart-filling. When the wind touches our face, it fills our hearts.
And it’s funny, because the real answer to the original question — What causes the wind — is that the air, well, moves. It moves from areas of high pressure to areas of low pressure. It does so because the heating mechanism of this world is an imperfect and uneven one. It does so, too, because at almost all times, nature is striving for some sort of equilibrium, some way of balancing or being or managing itself in the world, which it also is. Nature is the world.
And what’s funny is that such an answer — the real answer, you might say — is also a wild and somewhat playful one, even in its truth. It’s a playful thing to think of air moving from one place to another, sometimes as quickly as it can, sometimes at a hurried pace (think: a rush of wind, think: a gust of wind) to even itself out, to settle nature down. I think of running back into my apartment when I realize, just as I’ve left, that I forgot something. I think of running to meet someone I see just ahead. I think of rushing and running — and doing such things out of love or forgetfulness or anxiety, trying to figure out my emotions and calm them or ease them or support them as I move from one place to the next. In such a way, maybe, I am — and you are, too — like the wind.
I guess what I’m saying is that there’s room for wonder everywhere. There’s room for wonder in curiosity. There’s room for wonder in knowledge. There’s room for wonder, at all times, in the imagination that leads us from one to the other, and lets us linger in between.
That sense of wonder is evident in Dillard’s section “Some Questions Without Answers,” which begins:
Question: Why do fireflies, the spring ones, always say "J"? Who is this J? Where should I go?
There’s something magical about a question like the first one in this stanza. It’s a question that takes a simple observation — the sound of a firefly, which is this kind of high-pitched clicking thing — and connects it to the limited resources we have within us. That connection is a kind of imagination. To say that a firefly is, over and over again, singing the letter J is an imaginative thing. It’s unanswerable; it lingers in that space between truth and fiction where mystery is.
But I think, also, what this poem exposes in me is the belief that there is something magical about both curiosity and its satiation. Tossed lightly into this section of questions is a statement:
The skin on your eyelids is one cell deep.
This is not a true statement, but I didn’t know that at first, and so, upon reading it, this statement led me toward figuring out if it was true, and that act of figuring out led me to an actually true statement — that the skin on our eyelids is the thinnest skin on our bodies. This realization — sitting as it does on the other side of curiosity — is a special one, isn’t it? Try never thinking about it again, once you’ve known it. Try spending a life where you touch your eyelid, paint it with makeup, glance at it in a bathroom mirror and not think — at least once! — of the fact that it is the thinnest skin on your body. I bet you won’t be able to. Find me in fifty years if you are. I’ll be an amazed man. And so, what I think I’m getting at is that even knowing harbors its own form of wonder — magic, you might say. Sometimes what is real doesn’t feel real. But it is. And that’s beautiful. We carry that beauty with us every day.
I think that people sometimes separate the feeling of searching and the feeling of knowing into two distinct categories. And then, in making that distinction, other things are polarized — science and spirituality, fact and myth, wonder and certainty. But today’s poem — in all its playful question-and-answering — unites these feelings and these polarities. There is something wonderful, in other words, about the search for something and the fact of finding it. Both actions — at least, in my experience — remind me that I am living in a world that cannot diminished, one that is forever turning in the state of being enlivened. The diminishment only comes through me, through my refusal to be curious or through my willingness to let newfound knowledge lead to some kind of excessive form of pride. I believe in the willingness of the former and the refusal of the latter.
Another way of putting it is that I believe in centering this moment that I recently read in Jane Mendelsohn’s lovely and also playful novel, I Was Amelia Earhart, which reimagines the story of Earhart and shapes it into something approaching poetry. There’s a passage where Mendelsohn writes of the relationship between Earhart and her navigator:
During this time we spent many hours without exchanging a word, and this, probably more than anything else, is what brought us closer together. We saw the same sights and felt the same breezes. We watched the same sun and the same moon dip in and out of the same clouds. We felt the same rain and heard the same silences. It was like sharing a dream with someone else.
That final line — It was like sharing a dream with someone else — is such an apt way to describe this life. It is also, I feel, a worthy sentiment to center, a kind and generous thing to remind myself about everyone else in this life, not just those I am close to. That we are sharing a dream together. Watching the same sun and seeing the same moon. When I was little and my mother went away for the first time, she sent me a note that said look up at the sky and know we are both looking at the same sun and moon. I will never forget that. To extend that sentiment to everyone is, like all good things, an act of expansive wonder and generosity and solidarity.
And yes, I think part of that expansive wonder is the reminder today’s poem offers — that we might never know everything. That it is fun to play with the little we know and to be curious about everything we don’t. That such acts and feelings — play and curiosity and imagination — are heart-filling and enlivening and the opposite of diminishing.
I love how today’s poem ends. These answers without questions. I spent some of today thinking about what the questions to some of the answers below might be. This was a joyful task.
Drawn by your sweet breath. Sing or call by the edge of the water at night. Aim between the shoulders.
Here are three questions, one for each of those answers:
Why, in the morning, do two mourning doves and a steady litany of pigeons flock to your fire escape and alight on the railing closest to where you sit inside?
How can I reach the man you’ve talked about so often, the one you say lives in the little house that floats upon the water, the house painted sky blue, the house you can see when you cross the bridge above the river, the house with the two deck chairs perched out upon it — this man, who I’ve heard can talk to birds or can ferry me wherever I want to go — how can I reach him?
If I wanted to send my kiss through the skin and into the heart of the person I love at the speed of a million miles an hour, so fast that they couldn’t feel it until they felt it, and if I wanted to send it through this high speed pneumatic tube I’ve constructed that I know is almost entirely safe — where would I have to aim?