Nick DeHoust: Seeing Like Annie Dillard

Mythopoesis allows us to enter into truth in a way we couldn’t otherwise. It suspends our preconceptions and gifts us with a new way of seeing. It relieves us of our self-consciousness and instead places us in a different world where we experience ourselves anew. This brings to mind Annie Dillard’s brilliant investigation of what it means to be alive in her Pulitzer Prize winning Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (if you haven’t read it, read it!). “Self-consciousness,” she writes, “is the curse of the city and all that sophistication implies. It is the glimpse of oneself in the storefront window, the unbidden awareness of reactions on the faces of other people — the novelists’s world, not the poet’s” (82). (This quote also reminds me of how Tolkien describes the way myth is considered today. That is, myth is best left to the nursery.) Bustling cities have no use for myth and its seeming childishness, yet mythopoeia has the power to disrupt this monotony and encourage a stepping-out into a new way of seeing. Elsewhere in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Dillard tells us that “there is another kind of seeing that involves a letting go. When I see this way I sway transfixed and emptied” (33). Let go, make yourself transparent, and see. I am convinced that mythopoesis encourages just such a confusing, beautiful, wondrous kind of letting-go.