“Via negativa” is Annie Dillard’s term for a way of stalking wild animals that she finds very effective. She describes it in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and names after one of Neoplatonic Christianity’s two routes to God: Via Positiva and Via Negativa, which is the route that stresses God’s unknowability.
Dillard’s empties herself out in this way by retreating “not inside myself, but outside myself, so that I am a tissue of senses.” It is a way that she has learnt through practice, although she does not specify how.
“The first is not what you think of as true stalking, but is is the Via Negativa, and as fruitful as actual pursuit. When I stalk this way I take my stand on a bridge and wait, emptied. I put myself in the way of the creature’s passage, like spring Eskimos at a seal’s breathing hole. Something might come; something might go.”
The ‘put myself in the way of the creature’s passage’ stalking method is usually how I see deer. One afternoon I was sitting quietly on a plank bench near to Climbing Oak, just daydreaming with the tree and sweating in the heat, when a young deer stepped out of the dense yaupon about ten yards away on my left. I was mostly looking that way but had to hold my head still and turn my eyes towards the movement. It sniffed the air, it knew something unusual was around. I remained as still as I could manage, barely breathing. It stepped delicately and quickly across the open trail into dappled shade where it was almost invisible again. All the time watching me watching it, curious with youth. It crossed behind Climber’s Oak and through some more dense yaupon before finally emerging on the trail to my right, having kept me at a careful distance.
I wonder if deer hold themselves as tense, as quiet as I did when they are hiding in the woods, watching me go blundering past them.