In 'Intricacy' Dillard continues her expression of amazement with nature. She is looking closely again at cells of both animals and plants. This time she comes away from her examinations not only with a greater awareness for the variety life, but also a sense that nature's attention to detail is overwhelming. The closer she looks, the more she sees and every layer of detail brings more understanding and yet makes her wonder why 'creation carries on with an intricacy unfathomable and apparently uncalled for' (134). We are no longer looking at masses of animals or plants, but within them to their systems where we find 'two hundred twenty-eight separate and distinct muscles in the head of an ordinary caterpillar... [and] six million leaves on a big elm tree' (134-5). Dillard is finding that the intricacy of form might be the purpose of nature; certainly it is the result of evolution (not its goal because 'there is no one standing over evolution with a blue pencil' making corrections or cuts [138]). 'Form follows function', Dillard says to explain why there is such an abundant variety; 'the creature that functions, however bizarre, survives to perpetuate its form' (138). It is this immense diversity which impresses Dillard on a regular basis. She is amazed by all of the strange systems of creatures produced by evolution.
Nevertheless Dillard often brings the idea of the creator into her musings. We know why there is this variety; evolution has produced it. But Dillard wants to know why. Considering the incalculable number of plants and animals that no longer even exist along with the ones that do, the totals 'yield a profusion that is quite beyond what I consider thinkable. Why so many forms? Why not just that one hydrogen atom?' (140). Alongside the feeling that nature is awesome is the dismay at its apparently unnecessary proliferation and complication of forms.
Dillard takes her realizations of variety and intricacy from the interior back out the to larger world where she re-applies the idea nature's main purpose seems to be an 'extravagance of minutiae' (131). Not only is there intricacy within form, but there is intricacy and abundance in the interaction of forms. Dillard turns to the landscape itself which she considers an 'overlapping [of] intricacies and forms that exist in a given space at a moment in time' (141). The landscape, then is a composite of every intricacy of every insect and every leaf. Piling form upon form builds up the 'texture of intricacy' (141) to the point of becoming overwhelming. But even in all this abundance, Dillard says this built-up texture 'means that there is the possibility for beauty here' (142).
Thinking about evolution, however, in a later chapter, 'Fecundity', Dillard's wonder turns to dismay. She turns from the awesome to the awful. She says that the beautiful complexity she has been sharing up til now is missing a vital point: 'nature is as careless as it is bountiful, and... with extravagance goes a crushing waste' (163).
She turns first to the pressure of growth that acts on all of nature, pushing things on to their deaths. As I touched upon in the last post, the plant world is not so frightening because 'plants are not our competitors; they are our prey and out nesting materials' (165). She brings up the pressure that plants exert, lifting rocks, cracking sidewalks and basement floors and even gives an experiment from 1875 in which a man calculated the lifting force of his vegetables to be 5,000 pounds per square inch. But, she says, these things, even when they interfere with city water pipes, are not particularly troubling to us.
The animal world, on the other hand, Dillard says, is a different story. The language she uses when describing masses of animals makes us disgusted. Her choices here influence us to the view she is building: 'Lemmings blacken the earth and locusts the air... protozoans explode in a red tide stain', 'I have seen the mantis's abdomen dribbling out eggs in wet bubbles like tapioca pudding glued to a thorn', and so on (169,170). Earlier the mantis's egg-laying was the subject of fascination and wonder, now it is the source of repulsion at the sheer numbers of eggs and the knowledge that most will die. The pressure of growth in animals results in their eating of one another; the force of growing plants seems benign in comparison to the many ways in which animals, especially the insects on which Dillard loves to focus, devour and destroy one another in the competition for survival. This variety of deaths is a source of horrid fascination for her and it is the dark side to the intricacy of the living systems to see them destroyed in so many ways from parasites to consumption by a predator.
Death, then, is the awful side to abundance. Dillard paints us a picture of an extravagant and careless world. Evolution encourages what seems to be unthinkable over-production and then destroys the majority of its creation to allows for the survival of the few that the environment can support. But then there comes the question which turns us around again and pulls back the curtain to reveal something even more complex than we thought. Dillard poses two viewpoints. One: 'the world is a monster... the universe that suckled us does not care if we live or die' (180). Two: 'creation itself is blamelessly, benevolently askew by its very free nature, and that it is only human feeling that is freakishly amiss' (181). The chapter so far has been pointing to One, but Dillard says she is inclined to the latter: 'the world's amorality does not make it a monster' (182). The abundance of death, it turns out is the only way for most creatures to ensure survival and this seems strange to us as creatures who value each individual life. The mantis cannot worry about every egg; that is why she lays so many, to ensure the continuation of at least a few beyond her short life. Everything's purpose is the proliferation of the species and we just go about it in a different manner than most of creation.
Abundance becomes understandable, then. We may still be squeamish, as Dillard says she is, about fecundity and waste of life, but we can at least now appreciate it. Dillard summarizes our new view:
The picture of fecundity and its excesses and of the pressures of growth and its accidents is of course no different from the picture I painted before of the world as an intricate texture of a bizarre variety of forms. Only now the shadows are deeper. Extravagance takes on a sinister, wastrel air, and exuberance blithers. When I added the dimension of time to the landscape of the world, I saw how freedom grew the beauties and horrors from the same live branch.
The dimension of time that Dillard has added to the landscape is the idea of death. When we consider now the complexity of life not just how it is when we see it, a snapshot, but as a piece of a continuing film, we know that in the end it must come to death even as it grows in beauty or complexity.
The chapters after this realization and synthesis of ideas return to more observation than abstract thinking as this has been, but now we are seeing with shadows. The end of 'Intricacy' had anticipated this view:
Intricacy is that which is given from the beginning, the birthright, and in intricacy is the hardiness of complexity that ensures against the failure of all life...The wonder is—given the errant nature of freedom and the burgeoning of texture in time—the wonder is that all the forms are not monsters, that there is beauty at all, grace gratuitous... Beauty itself is the fruit of the creator's exuberance that grew such a tangle, and the grotesques and horrors bloom from that same free growth...
And once again as the book closes, Dillard reminds us that in spite of all the parasites, all of the awful abundance of creatures, there is awesomeness as well:
No, I've gone through this a million times, beauty is not a hoax... Beauty is real. I would never deny it; the appalling thing is that I forget it. Waste and extravagance go together up and down the banks, all along the intricate fringe of spirit's free incursions of time...
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