Prying Open Our Eyelids
Prying Open Our Eyelids
Lauren Bentley
Author’s note: Questions in italics are taken from Annie Dillard’s essay collection, The Abundance, which includes excerpts from more than four decades of her writing.
Did you see…? Did you see…?
I have been a Christian since before I was born. In summary: white, millennial, Evangelical, American expat in Canada. Roughly every five years, I have a terrible crisis of faith. Perhaps it’s the exhaustion that comes from one too many news stories of the antics of my compatriots in my home country; or the friendly Canadian disdain for religious fervor; or too much divine silence; or too much noise of everything else.
Regardless, every five years, I am torn in two. I can’t look at the glorious mountains edging my city or a dappled leaf fallen artfully on the lawn without despair. Am I seeing a world charged with God’s grandeur? Or... happenstance? It’s such a classic existential dilemma I’m embarrassed to be so cliché (again, millennial). Suddenly, everything I see turns into a question mark, like a cartoon in which a starving person starts seeing people with turkeys for heads. It’s unbearable. I look to classic arguments about the existence of altruism; I consider determinism and its incalculable ramifications. If the pattern holds, in about a year I will come out of the crisis—the news will calm down, or God will show up, like an old friend driving unexpectedly into town on a motorcycle—and I will still have faith. But it will be reshaped, less clear, more worn at the edges by observing the world around me and being surprised, once again, at how untidy it can be.
*
When I have spent my brain attempting to answer my own questions, I let Annie Dillard ask me hers. She has a way of prying open eyelids that isn’t entirely unpleasant. For example:
Why do we people in churches seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute?
Is beauty itself an intricately fashioned lure, the cruelest hoax of all?
Why does death so catch us by surprise, and why love?
Would I eat a frog’s leg if offered?
Why is there sand in deserts?
(And, for good measure:)
How?
Annie looks at gratuitous roses. She sees Orion arching, ready to pierce. She contemplates waterbugs and weasels and emptied frog bodies. After all her inquisition, I still have one question of my own: how much can I trust my own eyes?
In order to attract a mate, the Japanese pufferfish works for a week, without rest, to create an ornate monastic labyrinth at the bottom of the sea. He beats his body into the sand, into the act of creation, out-acting the current that threatens to sweep it all away. I watch a video of the phenomenon some kind soul has posted online, eyes wide. When the fish goes so far as to decorate the ridges with shells, I do cry, just a little. The camera pans out on the intricate, perfect maze, edges lined with seashells, all created where the light hardly shines. It is either the most spectacular argument for divine existence (beauty requires a witness) or the extent of the absurd (all this, for the dull-eyed female) I’ve ever seen.
Is this beauty, these gratuitous roses, or a mere display of force?
Annie too seems to have an uneasy relationship with sight. She demands it, constantly, almost overwhelmingly. Many budding essayists I’m sure have been beleaguered by the idea that they might be missing something imbued with great meaning after reading Pilgrim at Tinker Creek—the angle of a leaf in relation to the light, perhaps, or the specific pattern a waterbug makes on an otherwise still pond.
How many days have I learned not to stare at the back of my hand when I could be looking out at the creek?
She is, in fact, relentless. But she has no patience for fundamentalism: for the certainty of the eyes.
Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke?
*
Last night, Orion vaulted and spread all over the sky, pagan and lunatic, his shoulder and knee on fire, his sword three suns at the ready—for what?
Meanwhile, down here, I put my daughter in the bath. I dump water on her hair from a small yellow bucket that looks like a bee while she chews on one of her older brother’s bath toys. I stay in case she falls. My knees are wet, as are my arms up to elbows and many portions of my shirt. (More dappled things.) She lives for the bath. When I bring her into the bathroom for any other purpose, she lunges from my arms and whines, willing her small body into the tub. To get the same enjoyment from a water splash, an adult would need to river raft during the spring thaw.
How long, I wondered, could you stretch this out?
I wrap her in a mint green towel with a hood that looks like a bear. All good things must end, or maybe they go on for eternity. To live in a world where either one is plausibly true makes me hold on to her harder and wonder what I’ll teach her about pleasure, love, duty, faith, and suffering. And if I will figure out any answers before she starts learning anyway.
She, my daughter, does teach me about joy, the thing small children are uniquely capable of illuminating for tired grown-ups. She invites me to share in her pleasure, and I feel gratitude toward this small thing I got to be part of creating. It was C.S. Lewis who said we couldn't fully feel a pleasure until it was shared with another. Picture this: God, outside of time, waits (a paradox). At night, he lies back on his cloudy bed and fondly looks forward to the time when humans create the underwater camera. He smiles, almost giddy, looking forward to the moment when his joy will be shared. “You guys have got to see this pufferfish!”
How boldly could you push an audience...to please them in some way?
Then again, maybe he doesn’t. In which case:
Why should I open my eyes?
*
Most human eyes have three color-receptor cones. A butterfly eye has four, as does a goldfish eye and in rare cases, a woman’s. These tetrachromats see the world infused with colors most of us will never be able to perceive (this clandestine world of color is thought to be universally hidden from men).
Is this what we live for?
While Annie encourages us to look, to keep looking, interrogating with her endless questions (so often rhetorical), it’s humbling to consider our deep inability to perceive the allness of anything. We have eyes, but though seeing, so often we cannot see.
After every crisis of faith, I find myself even more in the middle of knowing, existing between the poles of certainty. Simone Weil defines saintliness as “balance that leans both ways at once,” but I’m still not comfortable in this in-between space where faith is less of a solid, stone monument to belief that may suffer erosion but never destruction. For many years, I thought it was realistic, holy even, to climb that monument until my head was above the clouds. Ironically, faith to me meant seeing everything, all at once.
No, in this space, faith is a gauzy veil that lets in much light but embraces some level of obfuscation. There is some risk here; it doesn’t leave the door for doubt merely cracked. It throws it wide open to questions, some posed in my own mind, some gracefully penned by iconoclast essayists who get a thrill from interrogation. But I have come to believe that risk is a necessary condition for magic.
Why knock yourself out describing a dream?
Magic, as I define it for this essay: Experiencing the present with all the benefits of it being past. Hear me out. Not “living in the moment” with only thoughts of the present, as too many people require; but living in a moment while already appreciating the resonance it will have on your future—eternal or otherwise. A magic moment is one where you experience the present with an immediate, intrinsic understanding of its grandness, its meaning, without the mediation of reflection or memory.
The last year they allowed Halloween fireworks in Vancouver (a tradition, as far as I can tell, unique to British Columbia), I put my pirate-dressed four-year-old son in his car seat and drove the two blocks to Gray’s Park. It is already dark at 7 p.m., the beginning of that time of year when you have to remind yourself to be awake.
We park across the street and run to the park holding hands, no cars on the road, just clusters of costumed families. We stand at the edge of the abandoned lawn bowling club, when suddenly the dark park is lit from within and the sky explodes. What can I say? It’s fireworks (the expensive ones, I can hear my frugal mom saying in my head). We all know how they make our hearts explode too.
The City has banned fireworks in Vancouver starting November 1, so people are really going all out. It is the year of the pandemic, of massive wildfires that a month before had choked us with smoke, of political unrest and astronomical gun sales and the horror of I-Can’t-Breathe, and people seem desperate to redeem this fire, to blow something up with gleeful purpose. To charge the sky with grandeur.
Was this not grand?
We’d already gone up and down the street once to trick-or-treat, many more houses dark this year but a few offering candy via PVC pipes taped to handrails, individual bags set out on self-serve tables, and cups on walkways lit by Jack-o-lanterns. The ones who celebrate really celebrate. I am grateful for these life-livers, these creative minds who put in the extra effort for four-year-old pirates who don’t have any idea how strange this year of their childhood is.
The next day, we will learn about the half-a-million dollars in damage across the city, burned shingles, obscene litter. And yet, there is magic here, neighbors coming together, this collective dedication to creating bright bursts of joy.
What else can you risk with all your might but your life?
A week later, I read my son a children’s book, The Last Stop on Market Street, by Matt de la Peña. A grandmother, Nana, takes her grandson on the bus, saying, “Boy, what do we need a car for?” Her goal is to teach him to witness their city in its darkness and light, not zoom past it blind.
To what end?
It reminds me of John Steinbeck in Travels with Charley, his 1960s travelogue about driving across America in his camper, Rocinante, eschewing the then-new interstate system for 30-mile-per-hour back roads. When I read Travels with Charley in my late teens, the thought of creeping across those 10,000 miles in a camper with a poodle filled me with dread. Nana would disagree.
As they ride down Market Street, a blind man gets on the bus.
“Nana, how come that man can’t see?” the boy asks.
“What do you know about seeing? Some people watch the world with their ears,” Nana replies.
Across the aisle, a guitarist begins to play. The blind man leans over to the grandmother and whispers, “To feel the magic of the music, I like to close my eyes.”
When the music was going, who could resist?
*
When I find myself in the middle part of faith, or of knowing, I long less for answers and more for peace. Annie’s questions provide a level of comfort as my raft drifts away from the poles of certainty. At the very least, she offers a commitment to the act itself—a hope that comes from knowing questions are worth asking in the first place. Here’s one more, my favorite:
Quick! Why aren’t you dusting?
Dusting is an act of faith, in the same vein as giving birth to another human, brushing one's teeth, and owning a lawn mower. Annie does indeed offer an answer to this one: we, the dust-to-dust, dust to forestall burial. Dusting is an act that says there is a reason to pursue order in the chaos. In that way, every human, or most every I suppose, is a person of faith. We act as our answer to the questions of life. We dust anyways.
What else is there, or was there, or will there ever be?
Lauren Bentley
Writer & Editor
Lauren is a writer/editor living in Vancouver, BC. She is currently earning an MA in English, Philosophy, and History. Find her editing business here: www.bentleywordsmith.com
Photography by Colin Lloyd