A Whole Bunch of Annie Dillard, Your Wings, and Why I Do Write or Die

My friend called me crying the other day, and I told her to hang up and to write down the things she was saying to me. She sighed, and I waited for her to tell me, yet again—we’ve been doing this for almost ten years—that these were not things she could write about without hurting others.

She said, “Okay,” and hung up. Thirty minutes later she called me and read me work that was spine-strong and risky and powerful. I thought it was the best thing she’d ever written. She read it as if she was on the top of a mountain, making a declaration.

Amazing things happen when you let your voice free.

I’ve been reading Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek yet again. I read it the way I imagine other people might read The Bible. I try to commit it to memory. I read it slowly, listening carefully, looking for how I could live my life differently, more in alignment with all that is morally good and true.

Annie Dillard reminds me again and again that we have this one life and that being alive is wild, dangerous, exciting business. Pam Cordano and I were talking last night about the filthy part of metamorphosis that doesn’t get much coverage: the part between when a caterpillar becomes a butterfly. The soup part. The gunky part that can’t be shown without killing the creature-in-waiting.

The secret to becoming a butterfly or a moth is that the creature has to become this soupy shit that if you got it on your hands you would immediately want to wash off.

So many people want to have a creative life; they want to be painters or writers or singers, but because they focus on the butterfly and not the soupy shit, they get discouraged and quit because they judge their dirty, disorganized selves harshly before they give themselves time to wing.

I am living the soupy shit now. Right now I don’t even really know who I am. I feel like a jumped off a cliff three years ago when I decided to go to New York and write my book and I still haven’t landed on the other side. How will I know I landed? Maybe I won’t feel anxious most of the time. Maybe I will have a really clear sense of purpose. A place I can put my books without thinking that soon I will be packing them up to move yet again.

But maybe this is the butterfly stage. Maybe life is this uncertain and anxiety-provoking because I see it that way. I don’t know yet.

But I do know this: when my friends and the people I work with show me their true selves, their deepest fears and dreams and talents, my body gets weightless and I can not wait to see what they will do next. It’s thrilling to touch talent, vision, to see it, to watch it bloom.

The first time my daughter drew a line with a crayon, it was like the seas parted and a new world came into being. I did not judge her drawing. Her wobbly crayoned line was not for me to evaluate. It was for me to experience. Teaching in school was the worst because of the grading part. It’s such bullshit. The A and the F are the death of the self. I love love love doing Write or Die with people because it’s not about evaluating the quality of another person’s creative life. It’s about celebrating it, collaboratively seeing the person and his or life and dreams as clearly as possible.

Anyway.

Here’s Annie Dillard showing you why I do Write or Die.

Once, when I was ten or eleven years old, my friend Judy brought in a Polyphemus mother cocoon. It was January, there were doily snowflakes taped to the schoolroom panes. The teacher kept the cocoon in her desk all morning and brought it out when we were getting restless before recess. In a book we found what the adult moth would look like; it would be beautiful. With a wingspread of up to six inches, the Polyphemus is one of the few huge American silk moths, much larger than, say, a giant or tiger swallowtail butterfly. The moth’s enormous wings are velveted in a rich, warm brown, and edged in bands of blue and pink delicate as a watercolor wash. A startling “eyespot,” immense, and deep blue melding to an almost translucent yellow, luxuriates in the center of each hind wing. The effect is one of a masculine splendor foreign to the butterflies, a fragility unfurled to strength. The Polyphemus moth in the picture looked like a mighty wraith, a beating essence of the hardwood forest, alien-skinned and brown, with spread, blind eyes. This was the giant moth packed in the faded cocoon. It was an oak leaf sewn into a plump oval bundle; Judy had found it loose in a pile of leaves.

We passed the cocoon around; it was heavy. As we held in in our hands, the creature within warmed and squirmed. We were delighted, and wrapped it tighter in our fists. The pupa began to jerk violently, in heart-stopping knocks. Who’s there? I can still feel those thumps, urgent through a muffling of spun silk and leaf, urgent through the swaddling of many years, against the curve of my palm. We kept passing it around. When it came to me again it was hot as a bun; it jumped half out of my hand. The teacher intervened. She put it, still heaving and banging, in the ubiquitous Mason jar.

It was coming. There was no stopping it now, January or not. One end of the cocoon dampened and gradually frayed in a furious battle. The whole cocoon twisted and slammed around in the bottom of the jar. The teacher fades, the classmates fade, I fade. I don’t remember anything but that thing’s struggle to be a moth or die trying. It emerged at last, a sodden crumple. It was a lame, his long antennae were thickly plumed, as wide as his fat abdomen. His body was very think, over an inch long, and deeply furred. A gray, furlike plush covered his head; a long, tan furlike hair hung from his wide thorax over his brown-furred, segmented abdomen. His multi jointed legs, pale and powerful, were shaggy as a bear’s. He stood still, but he breathed.

He couldn’t spread his wings. There was no room. There was no room. The chemical that coated his wings like varnish, stiffening them permanently, dried, and hardened his wings as they were. He was a monster in a Mason jar. Those huge wings stuck on his back in a torture of random pleats and folds, wrinkled as a dirty tissue, rigid as leather. They made a single nightmare clump still wracked with useless, frantic convulsions.

The next I remember, it was recess. The school was in Shadyside, a busy residential part of Pittsburgh. Everyone was playing dodgeball in the fenced playground or racing around the concrete schoolyard by the swings. Next to the playground a long delivery drive sloped downhill to the sidewalk and street. Someone—to must have been the teacher—had let the moth out. I was standing in the driveway, alone, stock-still, but shivering. Someone had given the Polyphemus moth his freedom, and he was walking away.

He heaved himself down the asphalt driveway by infinity degrees, unwavering. His hideous crumpled wings lay glued and rucked on his back, perfectly still now, like a collapsed tent. The bell rang twice; I hate to go. The moth was receding down the driveway, dragging on. I went; I ran inside. The Polyphemus moth is still crawling down the driveway, crawling down the driveway hunched, crawling down the driveway on six furred feet, forever.

We are so much more powerful than we know.

We can heave ourselves to the hinterlands or we can unfold and do what we want with the wings we grew.

When my mom was dying, I asked her if she was going to come back as something I would recognize. She didn’t even have to think about it. “A monarch,” she said.

Dying, she was in the shit soup stage, but she and I both knew she’d lived her whole life aching to fly, and that, eventually, she would do it.

She just had to die first.

Do you?