Searching for innocence in color-patches

*Note: Sorry this post is a day late. I was really sick yesterday and was unable to finish it.

“How can an old world be so innocent?” asks Annie Dillard (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek 43). Read out of context, one would have strong grounds to argue with her. “Haven’t you glanced at a newspaper headline or flipped on a news station lately? You don’t have to look far to conclude that the world is very much not an innocent place.” And yet, Dillard asks this question after perusing the newspaper and noting the annual photographs of cute animals, the cliché Valentine or proposal, and child waiting for a push down the hill on a sled. Perhaps Dillard means that the world is not so much “innocent” as that it looks for innocence, or a fresh take and angle on something that would give respite from all the drudgery and gloom.

One of my favorite bands is Switchfoot, and they wrote a song called “The Shadow Proves the Sunshine.” (The chorus is basically the title, ha). But after watching this music video that some of Switchfoot’s fans created, I was reminded of Dillard’s chapter titled “Seeing” and her mention of the experiences of previously-blind people when they gained their sight. If you watch this video, try to watch it in terms of the “color-patches” that Dillard describes. At least for me, the video really did seem to illustrate a confusing mass of color-patches and disorienting lack of spatial reference points—which helped me better sympathize with those people who newly received their sight.

 

I promise I’m not mindlessly rambling; here’s my point: we can interpret Dillard’s story of the “color-patches” and “seeing” as a metaphor for people’s search for innocence. If shadows prove the sunshine, then perhaps we can seek hope behind the seemingly unending scenes of hopelessness. Dillard writes, “But the color-patches of infancy swelled as meaning filled them” (32). We’re so used to encountering articles which are swelled with “meaning”—with agendas of all sorts. What is more agenda-less than a picture of “an utterly bundled child crying piteously on a sled at the top of a snowy hill” and captioned “‘Needs a Push’”? At first glance, maybe not much. But then again, what if the photographer means to spread awareness about parental abandonment or to promote familial values? How might we interpret the photo as a symbol for a political statement or issue? What if the photo implies the changing trends of technology and how most children entertain themselves nowadays?

And so we search for the sunshine casting the shadows, for the color-patches free from agenda, for a reversion back to our nostalgic idea of idyllic, childhood “happiness.”  But “[y]ou have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it—tantalising glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest—if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself—you would know it” (C.S. Lewis The Problem of Pain). We search anyway. I think perhaps this is why science features on animals are so popular. Yes, these animals are fascinating, but the features don’t often have a “so what” in terms of how this information affects people personally. Case in point: when trying to YouTube a video of the “giant water bug” Dillard writes about (8), I discovered a video on the sidebar called “Biggest Snakes in the World! SnakeBytes TV.” Upon finishing that video, I seriously watched probably four or five other videos from the same channel (this is why I typically don’t go on YouTube). The entire time I was thinking, “What am I doing? I am wasting so much time! All these videos are basically about the same thing: showing the viewer different snakes and explaining the genetics behind each. And besides, I’m scared of snakes!” But I kept watching. Why? Well…the snakes were pretty cool-looking. And maybe I was drawn to the color-patches which weren’t really color-patches at all. At any rate, I thought the “search for innocence” might be yet another reason (among the myriads) why people are drawn to science writing.