In an interview given quite some time ago, philosopher Sir Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997) was asked to comment on the role of models in the history of ideas. The conversation was provoked in part by a discussion of Marx’s models of history and of society. Berlin then gave a short tutorial on the parade of models over time and their usefulness in explaining our world and ourselves as we move from the known to the unknown. He said that our intellectual history is largely the history of changing or competing models, whether mathematical, biological, mechanical, evolutionary, hierarchical, kinship (the family, legal), the social contract, or economic. The consequence of explaining one sort of thing by way of another sort of thing not only transforms both theory and practice but also determines much of our conscious and unconscious thinking and acting.
But sometimes models get in the way of learning to see more directly for ourselves. Any reader of Annie Dillard’s (1945- ) writing will not have forgotten her 1974 Pulitzer Prize-winning book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. At age 27 Dillard wrote for a year while staked out in Virginia’s Blue Ridge valley, near Tinker Creek. There, with no particular models in mind, she set out to see what she could see—praying mantis, wood duck, sky and tree, insect, root, mockingbird, water strider, newt, horsehair worm, dragonfly, snapping turtle, muskrat.
What interferes with seeing is seeing only what we expect to see. For Dillard the expectation, much like the model, is like a fog that won’t burn off and clouds our field of vision. Much better than seeing through something to something else is seeing directly the something itself. To see for ourselves, Dillard believes, requires calling attention to what is seen. Not attending is not seeing. She quotes John Ruskin: “ . . . not merely unnoticed, but in the full, clear sense of the word, unseen.”
Enter the muskrat. Seeing what doesn’t want to be seen in natural settings requires stalking. Dillard was a stalker of the living at Tinker Creek. One of the more notorious critters she stalked was the muskrat, nearly impossible for humans to ever see. Looking like a small beaver, muskrats are more than wary. They are about 12 to 14 inches long, tail included. Close-set black eyes, small ears. They swim with their hind feet only. The first muskrat she ever saw was more luck than stalk. A kit too young to know any better surfaced in the creek while she was standing stock-still in a bush looking at bluegills. The baby turned upside down and floated on its back with its forelegs casually folded across its chest, the sun shining on its upturned belly, lazily wagging its tail for locomotion. It was “an enchanting picture of decadence, dissipation, and summer sloth.” Dillard was hooked, and from then on she set about learning the ways of the muskrat.
But to no avail for a very long time. “That summer I haunted the bridges, I walked up creeks and down, but no muskrats ever appeared. You must just have to be there, I thought. You must have to spend the rest of your life standing in bushes. It was a once-in-a-lifetime thing, and you’ve had your once.” In time, though, Dillard learned to see muskrats by looking for the scant rising ripples from under a creek’s bank, the ever-so-slight side-to-side sculling of its vertically flattened tail, and the very tip of its nose surfacing just above the water line. “The great hurrah about wild animals is that they exist at all, and the greater hurrah is the actual moment of seeing them. . . . They show me by their very wariness what a prize it is simply to open my eyes and behold.” Dillard got so good at muskrat seeing and finding that eventually she could get within a few feet of them while they foraged, but only if she beat them to the forage sight, and was utterly motionless with nary a blink.
What Dillard learned from the muskrats themselves was how to stalk. Above all, self-awareness, the quiet hum of self-consciousness, even much swallowing must give way to becoming mute, quiet, even undignified as necessary. “Stop often ’n’ set frequent” is the rule for stalking. Like playing a sport, stalking is a skill. “I do it right or I do it wrong; the muskrat will tell me, and that right early,” wrote Dillard. “Even more than baseball, stalking is a game played in the actual present. At every second, the muskrat comes, or stays, or goes, depending on my skill.” Holding still, she says, is the secret to stalking.
The lesson? Well, muskrat seeing—and for that matter truly seeing anything anywhere—is touch-and-go. “The heron flaps away; the dragonfly departs at thirty miles an hour; the water strider vanishes under a screen of grass; the muskrat dives, and the ripples roll from the bank, and flatten, and cease altogether.” Studying nature, human or otherwise, calls for the attitude and attention that Dillard, the stalker, speaks of. “The news, after all, is that muskrats are wary, but that they can be seen.” So too for whatever ideas, theories, truths, or dreams we pursue. “You have to stalk everything,” Dillard says. “Everything scatters and gathers; everything comes and goes like fish under a bridge.”
Stalking is no analogy itself. It is a stance, a decision, an embodied action. It is what Thoreau called returning to our senses. The skill depends greatly on letting go of the internal play-by-play announcer or the color commentator streaming in us all. Yet what frustrates us is the utter lack of control we wield in the process of learning to see thusly. Discovered, but not sought, Dillard says. “Although it comes to those who wait for it, it is always, even to the most practiced and adept, a gift and a total surprise.”
If we were to put Dillard’s muskrat hunting into Isaiah Berlin’s language—for he, too, understood the inherent limitations of knowledge by mere analogy—stalking becomes presupposition-hunting in the world of ideas. When we don’t know where to look for an answer to a question we are asking, one place to start is to question what the question itself already presumes to be true in order for it to be answered. For starters, and at the very least, we might discover that we are asking a lousy question. And from then on, who knows where we are led. Learning to find hidden presuppositions, like learning to find wary muskrats, demystifies.
For Berlin, not stalking our presuppositions is a direct cause of ossifying societies. “Beliefs harden into dogma, the imagination is warped, the intellect becomes sterile. If the imagination is to be stirred, if the intellect is to work, if mental life is not to sink to a low ebb, and the pursuit of truth is not to cease, assumptions must be questioned, presuppositions must be challenged.” Even with working models themselves, presumptions need to be identified; otherwise, we become prisoners of the latest fuzz buzz. “Thus the model of your age,” Berlin warns, “or the model of your day, becomes your cage without even realizing it.”
Stop often ’n’ set frequent. This turns out in the end to be awfully good advice, no matter what you are stalking.
