Annie Dillard Comes to Call

Surviving to the other side of Chemotherapy is rather like passing through a dark and stormy night at sea, being tossed overboard and then being asked to sink or swim. You grasp hold of anything in the water to keep you afloat until you wash up on a friendly shore at last, quite the worse for wear but alive. You are surprised by that sudden, solid warmth of shore and simply stare at the sky for a time in the blessed silence. It is over now. The ending is quite abrupt, actually. No more tests, no more doctors, no more appointments, no more touching, poking and prodding crowding the calendar. Your body has now become blessedly your own possession again. But you are not the same. Will you ever be the same again, you wonder? One does not simply survive a shipwreck and carry on as though nothing has happened. There will be memories of a struggle, some wounds that may turn to scars, and a strange residue floating about in the brain that doesn’t easily depart, even by the sheer willing of it.

Chemo leaves behind its physical residue, of course. New aches and pains you did not have before that have decided to stay. The weird and utterly surprising fatigue washing over you at odd times which makes your legs turn to sudden and shocking rubber. That strange feeling that you are living in a body that does not belong to you and will just not do what you have always been able to ask of it before. The learning curve of this “new normal” after chemo stretches before you and must be traveled. There’s nothing for it. You need to get up from the sand and go forward into an odd new world. Patience is key. And alas, patience is not my strong suit, though it dawns on me that it will soon need to be. God, you see, has a sense of humor.

Books read differently during chemo and even now as I recover. I wasn’t counting on that. I thought at least I would be able to turn to my friends lined up on the bookshelves. I really tried. But a brain full of despondency and weariness is no match for a Hopkins, a Dickinson, or a Herbert. Not that they each didn’t know exactly how I felt, given their own lives, but their poetry takes such a given, alert mind and a warmth of sensibility that I simply did not have. In the end, I had to sigh and pat them lovingly on the covers as I walked by my bookcase and promise that if life ever returned to my ‘little gray cells’ they would be the first to know.

I couldn’t follow Theology, either. I drifted through spiritual writings as though in a fog. I had to re-read whole paragraphs three to four times and then I just let the book fall into my lap and I apologized to God that I just did not understand. All I could give Him was a weary soul in a weary body. He lifted the gift graciously to Himself, as He does with any of our gifts, but I was not as gracious to myself. I was morbidly fascinated with an otherwise beautiful book about Monks dying. Tony wouldn’t allow me to read it when I was at my lowest in the chemo cycle. He would take it with his usual good humor and tell me I’d get it back in two weeks. I thanked him profusely later. I must have been quite the odd little mess from the outside looking in. We laugh about that now.

Most shocking of all, though, is that I felt my writing life turn into a black and white shambles of a thing. Not one, new, and creative color to anything. I dipped into my archives and published them as a band aid of sorts to cover the present wound. None of the usual, overwhelmingly “high” feelings that could carry me across the keys of my computer sometimes in a burst of creativity, dancing to the sounds of my own inner, glorious soundtrack. Sometimes I could write until the sun was surprisingly setting outside my window and I would collapse into a deliciously exhausted heap of gratitude to the muses who had come to call. I thought they would always come to call. Silly me.

One terrible week there was, when I truly believed I would never write in the same colors ever again. My senses were dulled beyond recognition. I wandered listlessly about my office and stared at the keyboard as though it were a corpse and I had come to pay my respects. I ran my fingers across the books on the shelves as I wandered. I stopped at the anthology of Emily Dickinson’s poetry and leaned my weary head on my arm, “Oh Emily. Oh Emily. Is it over?” Emily must have laughed a little knowing laugh, for she is eminently sensible. But she must have also felt this way at times, sitting with her chin in her hands on the first step of the hall stairs of her Homestead in Amherst. She reached out in sympathy, but not the way I thought she would. For sitting right next to her on the shelf was Annie Dillard smiling a great grin from a slim, worse for wear copy of The Writing Life. Emily seemed to give me a friendly nod in Annie’s direction and I pulled her off the shelf. It was a gift.

The minute I turned the cover I felt a burst of enthusiasm coming from the pages. It was like having that lively, interesting friend you know over for coffee. You just keep pouring and they just keep talking. About wonderful things. You don’t need so much to think as to simply enjoy the atmosphere they are creating. I let it wash over me in great waves of joy as I sat down at last in my old blue reading chair. For Annie Dillard is a joy. She writes as I assume she lives. And you get the delightful play by play.

This book is filled with random, though profound, thoughts about being a writer. She has a few pages of astute observation about what writers are up to and what they probably shouldn’t be up to. Then she suddenly describes in glorious detail all her writing haunts, sheds, and spaces she has occupied over the years….and you greedily take in every blessed adjective. She wrote, once, in an upper room lined in cinder blocks in a library somewhere in Virginia. At night. When all the library folk had gone home to bed. She describes keeping the blinds closed during the later afternoon so she wouldn’t get distracted by the outside world and then she turns right around and tells you she inevitably peeked and saw a softball game going on below her. She ran downstairs and played an impromptu inning or two with some choir boys taking a break from singing at a choir camp.

She eventually moves her writing life to a small shed on a tiny island in Washington State. She drinks instant coffee - cup after cup. And she often lets the kettle boil to the bottom where it gets burnt on the stove. Sometimes there is one too many cups of coffee feeding her inspiration and she feels as if she has “cranked too far. I could no longer play the recorder while I waited for inspiration; I would need a bugle. I would break a piano. What could I do around the cabin? There was no wood to split. There was something I needed to fix with a hacksaw, but I rejected the work as too fine. Why not adopt a baby, design a curriculum, go sailing?” I started laughing out loud at this point. Tony heard and knew, then, quite relieved, that I wasn’t reading about dying Monks and returned to his work with peace of mind. I have known this manic inner conversation with myself when on my own fourth mug of coffee while writing. Annie and I are one.

She draws in the margins of her writing papers and has a constant bowl of chocolate covered peanuts at hand for inspiration. She gets frustrated and paces around. She points out quite jovially that the writing life is absolute insanity and why, why, why do we do it? “Many writers do little else but sit in small rooms recalling the real world. This explains why so many books describe the author’s childhood. A writer’s childhood may well have been the occasion of his only firsthand experience. Writers read literary biography, and surround themselves with other writers, deliberately to enforce in themselves the ludicrous notion that a reasonable option for occupying yourself on the planet until your life span plays itself out is sitting in a small room for the duration, in the company of pieces of paper.”

Then comes inspiration and suddenly she is lighting the lamp in her dim shed and writing word after glorious word into the wee hours of the morning. No time for coffee. The kettle whistles itself into burnt silence. At last, she blows out the lamp in a triumphant exhaustion and makes her way up to the house for bed. Annie describes the feeling as though she had read my mind. Have I mentioned yet how MUCH I love Annie Dillard?

“When I came home in the middle of the night I was tired; I longed for a tolerant giant, a person as big as a house, to hold me and rock me.”

I have had this exact desire when writing all of a winter afternoon until darkness pushes against my window and Tony calls “Dinner!” Annie simply gave words to it. The complete exhaustion of inspiration leading us to the arms of giants to be renewed. Only giants will do for such an exhausted need. Could there be a more apt or glorious image of a writer completely spent at the end of the night?

This little book went on and on skipping happily from one topic to the next as each came into Annie’s wise little head, and I followed every word. I was not asked to think too much but to nod my head in agreement. And when I got to the end, I was surprised. I felt renewed. I felt happy. I felt as though I could write a twelve volume tome about anything at all, even though I knew that would never happen. Annie Dillard had given me hope and a really good laugh. The writer is weird. I am weird. There are doldrums, distractions, weeks and weeks of black and white nothing. We pace. We lament. We are dog tired. We call out to the muses in embarrassing despair. It’s all part of the glorious thing. Being a writer. Wanting to be nothing else, despite chemo this and chemo that knocking about in my life. Annie Dillard, there on the shore of her island, calling to me: “Hey, don’t give up! Inspiration is right around the corner! Put the kettle on!”

I do not feel inclined at this time to have a paid substack. But if we were together in a cafe discussing all these thoughts, I would not be opposed to you buying me a cup of coffee - with cream, of course. In that spirit, if any of my posts resonate with you and you feel so inclined, you can donate here: buymeacoffee.com/denise_trull