Loren Eiseley

2011-04-23T15:11:00.000-04:00

Earth Day, 2011 It was a short hop on the social network tree from James Fallows to the New America Foundation, and then to a 2006 NPR interview with Michael Lind on Eisley's Immense Journey essay on flowers. Lind was struck by Eiseley's essay "How Flowers Changed the World," in which Eiseley recounts the remarkable point on the Earth's timeline at which a new, encased-seed (angiosperm) technique for spreading genetic information arrived.

The fantastic seeds skipping and hopping and flying about the woods and valleys brought with them an amazing adaptability. If our whole lives had not been spent in the midst of it, it would astound us. The old, stiff, sky-reaching wooden world changed into something that glowed here and there with strange colors, put out queer, unheard of fruits and little intricately carved seed cases, and, most important of all, produced concentrated foods in a way that the land had never seen before, or dreamed of back in the fish-eating, leaf-crunching days of the dinosaurs.

Lind wisely identifies the risks Eiseley and other poet-scientists like him take when they use "figurative language with mystical or theological overtimes," yet we are still moved by those leaps to accept Eiseley's inspirational cinematic imagery. Eiseley considered the importance seeds came to have for humans and concluded that "the weight of a petal changed the face of the world and made it ours."

Keillor's "Writer's Almanac" Remembers Eiseley

2009-09-03T20:40:00.006-04:00

There's little newsmaking in a "102nd" birthday for a dead person, but Garrison Keillor's team at the APR Writer's Almanac remembered Eiseley on today's broadcast. The brief bio of Eiseley highlighted the troubled and solitary prairie childhood, and quoted several thoughts abridged from Eiseley's ruminations about "the birds taking over New York [City] after the last man has run away to the hills."

The show's writers Betsy Allister and Margaret Boehme singled out The Immense Journey as his "most famous" and reprise the graveside inscription, "We loved the earth but could not stay", the oft-quoted line from the rarely read poem "The Little Treasures."

I was also moved on this day of remembrance by a Wright letter quoted in biographer Gale Christianson's Fox at the Wood's Edge:

O Mabel dear for those who were there it was a good rich life, savory as peanut brittle, deserving of our affection and celebration, the pleasures and torments of our emotions. We think of you, we love you, and we continue to cherish our much shared lives.

Auden and Eiseley: Poet v. Poet or Poet v. Scientist?

2009-08-26T21:47:00.000-04:00

All the Strange Hours was Eiseley's autobiography, which was published in 1975, only two years before his death. One essay that tries to interpret Eiseley's writing using material drawn from Hours and elsewhere begins with a recollection of a New York City meeting between W.H. Auden and Eiseley in the early 1970's. Was that event an occasion for two poets to meet, or did Auden sense that Eiseley's was a different sort of intellect, informed by science in ways other poets were not?

Auden himself had begun his academic career with a scholarship in natural science at Christ Church College, Oxford, but seems not to have staked out a position on the banister along the long corridor connecting the humanities to the sciences. In "Moon Landing," he is dismissive of the achievement, yet in Eiseley's later reports on their meeting, Eiseley reported Auden to be personable and generous. Eiseley's poem "And As For Man" is dedicated to Auden. Auden's remark that ""Thousands have lived without love, not one without water" could well be misattributed to Eiseley.

The essay's author, Gene V. Glass, a professor of Education at the Arizona State, but whose undergraduate degree was from Eiseley's University of Nebraska, seems to sense the quicksand beneath the feet of a mind straddling science and art.

To regard Eiseley as a mystic does him no particular honor. The tag hangs awkwardly on a man who labored as a paleontologist during the most rigid and positivist half century of the science.

Auden, writing in the New Yorker in 1970, appeared to have read everything Eiseley had written, yet biographies of Auden may not have fully grasped the meaning of his interest (guessing here; I haven't read the biographies myself). When the two poets met, one wonders whether the two sensed their divergent instincts for abstraction and greater meaning. Did Eiseley's years of dedication to science bring a more persuasive, more specific insight? As Glass writes, it probably brought no comfort. "Eiseley's thoughts were constantly drawn through sidereal time to empty space."

Stream Energy

2009-05-11T00:01:00.003-04:00

In reality, I am not of this persuasion. We are not to be found among the stones, we have been the stream. And it is the stream, not the colliding boulders, that metaphor. Only the way, only makes up a life. Without the torrent the boulders do not clash, nothing moves or is bound anywhere. The stream . . . is the life energy that sets events to reeling and colliding. If the boulders are big enough they may momentarily impede the stream, but the stream, life, is the energizing power. Events are its creation.

-All The Strange Hours, 1975

Firemaker

2009-05-10T23:47:00.004-04:00

Scholaris Erratus was inspired in part by Eiseley's essay "Man the Firemaker," found in The Star Thrower.

Man . . . is himself a flame. He has burned through the animal world and appropriated its vast stores of protein for his own.

"Erratus" wrote several poems that he/she says engage a similar metaphor.

Inner Galaxy Sighting

2009-05-10T23:23:00.005-04:00

The Red Star Cafe excerpts The Inner Galaxy:

Here -- not with the ax, not with the bow --man fumbled at the door of his true kingdom. Here, hidden in times of trouble behind silent brows, against the man with the flint, waited St. Francis of the birds -- the lovers, the men who are still forced to walk warily among their kind.

The image of Caravaggio's Saint Francis Receiving the Stigmata accompanies the article.

Wetland Scientist an Early Eiseley Follower

2009-05-10T23:02:00.006-04:00

Bill Lattrell pens WildRamblings, "a New England Ecologist's Writings . . ." Latrell recently confided with readers that Eiseley had been a major influence in his late teenage years. Lattrell read The Immense Journey before his career began, then read Eisley's other works, and was greatly moved by them. But when Eiseley's All the Strange Hours was released, Lattrell was saddened to find that Eiseley had, in Lattrell's understanding of the book, decided that "there was no hope for the human race, that we would never understand our place in the natural world . . ."

Lattrell says he revived his hope for the species through the writings of James Lovelock and later Janine Benyus, all the while conceding that neither had the literary prowess that Eiseley possessed.