Wednesday, November 5, 2014
Loren Eiseley: "Fly Falcon"
Fly Falcon
All of the falcon kind, the hard travelling
talon-clawed ones
that for so many years I have seen
go over Hawk Mountain on thousand-mile journeys--
at heart I go with them, but I also travel
with the fluttering Monarch butterflies,
toss on gales lost at sea, or cross the Gulf
with humming birds.
You think this impossible? not with the mind's eye
my friend
the ever widening eye
of the living world, the eye that someday
will see all as one, the eye of the hurricane,
the eye
at the heart of the galaxy with the spinning
arms of the suns about it.
Fly falcon, fly Monarch, fly gull
and you in the invisible night-tiger's eye
going somewhere in reed grass. I am there
padding softly with you, fly albatross
that sleeps on the Cape Horn winds. We are all
the terrible eye that sees the galaxy,
we make it real.
Without us multiplied, what really exists?
Fly falcon, stare tiger in the night grass,
stare that the universe may find itself living
beyond the immortal fires.
-- Loren Eiseley --
from Another Kind of Autumn
I think this is the core or heart of the poem--the eye of the imagination or the mind's eye.
You think this impossible? not with the mind's eye
my friend
the ever widening eye
of the living world, the eye that someday
will see all as one, the eye of the hurricane,
the eye
at the heart of the galaxy with the spinning
arms of the suns about it.
But it suggests also something more--" the ever widening eye/of the living world, the eye that someday/will see all as one." I think this goes beyond a reference to the imagination. In the Upanishads, correct me if I'm wrong, Brahman is the unchanging reality both in the midst of and beyond reality. Brahman is all, it looks out of the tiger's eye and out of the eye of that tiger's prey.
And how can one understand the very last part of the poem?
We are all
the terrible eye that sees the galaxy,
we make it real.
Without us multiplied, what really exists?
Fly falcon, stare tiger in the night grass,
stare that the universe may find itself living
beyond the immortal fires.
The "us"? All living beings perhaps? Again, there is that eye that sees the galaxy--that makes it real. And somehow this eye must
stare that the universe may find itself living
beyond the immortal fires.
Living beyond the immortal fires?
It's a poem to puzzle over. Eiseley hints in his prose works a belief in something more than the material world, but he only hints at it, points at things that seem strange once one looks closely at them. I don't read Eiseley for answers, but for questions and perhaps a rattling of my cage when I begin to think I really know what's going on.
I suspect that after reading this poem, I will see Dusky, my cat whom I have shared my quarters with for almost seventeen years now, and wonder how much I really know about her. What does she see that I don't?
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If the formatting in your posting is accurate -- true to the original -- perhaps the key is in the words and phrases that are separated from the left margin, catching the eye and forcing attention. It is just a thought.
ReplyDeleteRT,
ReplyDeleteI followed the formatting in the book, as closely as possible.
Yes, the formatting does result in pauses and hesitations, forcing one to linger a bit at specific places in the poem.
The "eye" is a common element in many of those spots separated from the left margin.
My re-readings of the poem cause me to think of another poet, a true vision-ary and probable mystic: William Blake. (Do you see the similarities? Or am I just "seeing things"?)
ReplyDeleteI guess my thoughts lead me to this understanding: Some people -- poets included -- have ways of "seeing" that I cannot comprehend because I lack the special "vision."
RT,
ReplyDeleteCould be. Blake always struck me as working within a Christian framework, even though he usually had his own vision of just what that framework was. Eiseley doesn't seem, to me anyway, to be that specific--almost Taoist in some ways.
"We are all the terrible eye that sees the galaxy, we make it real. Without us multiplied, what really exists."
ReplyDeleteFor his part of the poem, I thought about quantum mechanics in physics and the Shrodinger's Cat experiment (http://tinyurl.com/oatltav) that says our observation determines the ultimate outcome. So this part of the poem makes me think that what our world is - its existence - is caused by the observations of its inhabitants. Seeing makes it exists. (I hope I expressed this right. It's hard to put into words.)
Cheryl,
DeleteYes, I thought of that also. I also read, many years ago, a theory that expressed the view that the universe could actually be similar to a holographic photograph and that the human brain is an interpreter or projector of that information at the quantum level, or something like that.
You know, Fred, sometimes I wonder if there are any real differences between pure Christian (i.e., 1st century A.D.) and Taoist thought. But I know too little about the latter to make the statement with any credibility. Still, I wonder.
ReplyDeleteRT,
DeleteI know a little about Taoism and very little about 1st century Christianity, except for some comments that it was quite different from present day Christianity.
Briefly, Taoism does not have a Divine power. The tao is simply a label for ease of conversation.
The tao is the way things are in the universe. Things come out of the void and go back into the void. There are no concepts of an afterlife since we don't know what happens to creatures after they die. There are intelligent ways of acting and unintelligent ways.
This is my understanding of taoism, subject to revision, of course.