The Writing LIFE???

I have to admit that when Annie Dillard, in her essay “The Writing Life,” mentioned that she had written a “complex narrative essay about a moth’s flying into a candle, which no one had understood but a Yale critic,” a part of me (probably the pride/self-esteem part) wondered if, indeed, the essay was too deep for a mere non-Yaleian (yes, I made that word up) to appreciate. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the article in its entirety online without having to pay for it, but I did manage to find an excerpt at http://poetryparsnip.blogspot.com/2003_05_01_archive.html , in case any of you are interested in checking it out.

So here are some of my raw thoughts and reactions to the snippet of the essay that I was able to read. Granted, I’m not “trained as a critic” (to quote Dillard in “The Writing Life”), but, as a writer myself, I have a natural tendency to analyze anything I read. I’d like to start off by noting that I think Dillard may have underestimated her readers when she claimed that her work is “too obscure, too symbolic, too intellectual…[and] not available to people.” True, the underlying message of her moth essay is a little obscure and perhaps difficult to extract, but I think it is safe to make the assumption that most people who read it realize that it has something to do with death; even the simplest of readers probably realize that Dillard would not devote her time and effort to writing about a burning moth without some kind of underlying message. From there, I think the essay really becomes a matter of personal interpretation. That’s the great thing about writing: its ambiguous nature allows readers to interpret it in different ways depending on what makes the most sense to them. It’s beautiful, really, how one essay, one sentence, one word, can affect so many different people in so many different ways.

That being said, here are some of my interpretations of the excerpt from “Death of a Moth,” and if you disagree with them, I encourage you to refute them with your own. My initial gut reaction (and we are often encouraged to trust our guts) was that Dillard is not being as obscure as she thinks she is. Sometimes in our society, especially among writers, death is kind of glorified. Sanders, in his essay “Writing from the Center,” goes so far as to say that “[w]e have often taken moodiness, madness, or suicide to be evidence of genius.” In “Death of a Moth,” Dillard describes the moth flying into the candle and burning in a descriptively grotesque manner. I don’t want to type out the entire essay for you--if you are interested you can follow the link above--but take the following passage as an example: “[The moth’s] six legs clawed, curled, blackened, and ceased, disappearing utterly. And her head jerked in spasms, making a spattering noise; her antennae crisped and burnt away and her heaving mouthparts cracked like pistol fire.” What is Dillard doing here? I think that she is refuting that glorified image of death by, as the old saying goes, “saying it like it is.” Death is not pretty; it’s as simple as that. My interpretation is either very enlightening or embarrassingly simple-minded. Of course, this is just one tiny aspect of Dillard’s essay; there are plenty of other themes to be analyzed, but for the sake of time (as well as for the sake of not swaying your opinions), I’ll leave that up to you.

I just want to make one quick final note about the “Death of a Moth” essay in relation to Dillard’s “The Writing Life” essay—a connection that I saw between the two. In “The Writing Life,” Dillard compares writing to visiting a dying friend or taming a wild animal, saying, in both cases, that “[i]f you skip a visit or two, a work in progress will turn on you.” This implies the necessity of returning to your writing every day if you want to keep it under control, if you want to avoid “death” (whether it be the death of that “dying friend” or your own death when attacked by the “feral” beast that your writing becomes). Interestingly enough, however, in “Death of a Moth,” Dillard implies that writing every day will also result in death. While the moth is burning, she says its head becomes “a hole lost to time” and that “[t]he moth’s head was fire.” She later adds that “Rimbaud in Paris burnt out his brain in a thousand poems.” It seems Dillard is giving us mixed messages here. We imply from “The Writing Life” that neglecting to write often will result in a “death” of sorts, while “Death of a Moth” suggests that the writing itself results in death. Is Dillard suggesting that the nature of the life of a writer sentences her to a life of misery, a “death” of sorts, no matter how she approaches her work? As you consider this, keep in mind another quote from Dillard’s “The Writing Life”: “The mind of a writer does indeed do something before it dies, and so does its owner, but I would be hard put to call it living.”

I have more thoughts, but this is already getting rather lengthy. I want to hear yours.