Unpeachable

Seeing deeply can be mind-bending, enlightening, and sometimes requires invoking the help of a certain fruit.

It is one of those days. Every stretch of shoreline looks the same. The flat profiles of the islands in the distance look like “thin mints” as my friend and mentor Layne Kennedy likes to say. The greens are just greens, the blues are just blues, and every horizon has the look of worn out edges rubbed by too many eyeballs. Nature, it seems, has lost its luster.

“Unfortunately, nature is very much a now-you-see-it, now-you-don't affair,” Annie Dillard has written. I seem to be stuck in the “now you don’t” part of that equation. Something has to give.

I think it is time for the peaches.

Annie Dillard is one of the greatest living American writers. Her first book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, won the Pulitzer Prize for its mystical tone and otherworldly prose, But that same mysticism caused so many people to seek her out as a prophet, a seer, that Dillard withdrew from the public eye for years.

I never staked out Dillard’s house or chased her down seeking the secrets keys to the universe but Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is one of the few books I keep aboard the Little Dipper, one of the small constellation of near-holy works that I read and reread. In the case of Dillard’s book, I’ve read it so often that the cover literally fell off of my original copy. I went directly to the bookstore and bought three more.

The whole book is a wonder but the chapter that draws me most strongly is chapter two. It bears the deceptively simple title “Seeing” yet it is as profound and useful a treatise on paying attention to the world around you as I’ve ever encountered in the written word, a dazzling kaleidoscope of hidden pennies, trees with lights, mountains slamming and more. And then, there are the peaches.

In one particularly fascinating part of the essay Dillard muses about how difficult it is to see reality as anything but categories and utilitarian structures using a bowl of peaches as an example. When the mind is trained to see a peach, she argues, it is difficult to see it any other way, difficult to “unpeach” the peaches.

But, still, she concludes, it is worth trying, particularly if you long to see more deeply into the things around you.

And I do. So, on days aboard the Little Dipper when everything at first glance seems flat and eye-worn, the same old postcard vistas, I think to myself, “peaches.”

I begin to look away from the postcard scenery, beyond the categories my normal everyday mind and let my abstract mind blur the edges.

Only when I do that, only when I push myself beyond the obvious, can I begin to really see the relationship of one thing with another. Only then do I begin to see how two things — sunlight and water, sand and birch bark — play off of each other, combine in lines and shapes that speak not simply to what those things are alone but what they are together, a sum greater than their individual parts.

Some people think of abstract art and photography as a kind of “Where’s Waldo” visual puzzle. They want to find the face of Jesus in a tortilla or Lincoln’s profile in a potato. I understand that penchant but the Where’s Waldo crowd is missing the point. Abstraction is not about seeing what is hidden. It is about seeing what is revealed, what you see when you see purely, without the confines and limitations of categories. It is like stepping through a doorway, a doorway without frame, a kind of portal to something more.

If you can push yourself across that portal, the fuzz of lichen and moss on a jaw of sandstone becomes a symbiosis of time living and time long gone. A stand of trees near the shoreline becomes more than just the glimmer of white birch trunks reflecting on wind-ruffled water but the shimmer of the inner light that shines in everything made visible in a way that neither trees nor water could alone. Seeing then becomes not so much just noticing what is there but an exercise in the power of relationships, of interdependence. It is not so much separating things into categories as connecting them into something greater, a place where mere “sight” can become “insight” into nature’s deeper connections.

And, if you stay at it long enough, this attempt at true seeing, and, if you are lucky, the categories dissolve, the lines that tether you to rigid boundaries of form and function let go. What is left is a kind of flow, an energy, and a clarity that Dillard likens to a ringing bell. “I had been my whole life a bell,” she wrote of one such encounter, “and never knew it until that moment I was lifted and struck.”

It can be dizzying. “This seeing business is risky,” Dillard warns. “When I see this way, I see truly,” she writes. “I return to my senses … But I can't go out and try to see this way. I'll fail, I'll go mad. All I can do is try to gag the commentator, to hush the noise of useless interior babble that keeps me from seeing.”

So when I am stuck in a visual rut I try to quiet both the inner babble and the overstimulation of the calendar page views. I turn away from the grand horizons and seek out a single feather adrift on the water.

Or the dot-dash messages on the bark of a birch tree fallen over on the beach.

I try to reset my vision, to see it all again as if for the first time, naively, purely, raw.

And sometimes, it even seems to work. I slowly begin to see again, the bell begins to ring and I understand that, if nothing else there is a kind of beauty everywhere, in everything, if only we learn how to unpeach the peaches.

— Jeff Rennicke (all photos by the author unless otherwise noted)

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