Apes were to become men, in the inscrutable wisdom of nature . . .Down on the grass by a streamside, one of those apes with inquisitive fingers turned over a stone and hefted it vaguely. The group clucked together in a throaty tongue and moved off through the tall grass foraging for seeds and insects. The one still held, sniffed, and hefted the stone he had found. He liked the feel of it in his fingers. The attack on the animal world was about to begin.
If one could run the story of that first human group like a speeded-up motion picture through a million years of time, one might see the stone in the hand change to the flint ax and the torch.
-- Loren Eiseley -- "How Flowers Changed the World"
first published in The Immense Journey, 1957
The Star Thrower
Does this sound familiar?
And from the back cover of The Star Thrower:
"The book will be read and cherished in the year 2001. It will go to the MOON and MARS with future generations. Loren Eiseley's work changed my life. -- Ray Bradbury --
Curious. Why that year of all the years he could have picked?
Showing posts with label EISELEY Loren. Show all posts
Showing posts with label EISELEY Loren. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 9, 2018
Tuesday, December 12, 2017
Loren Eiseley: The Long Loneliness (from The Star Thrower)
Loren Eiseley
"The Long Loneliness"
an essay in The Star Thrower
The first two paragraphs of "The Long Loneliness," one of the essays in The Star Thrower.
There is nothing more alone in the universe than man. He is alone because he has the intellectual capacity to know that he is separated by a vast gulf of social memory and experiment from the lives of his animal associates. He has entered into the strange world of history, of social and intellectual change, while his brothers of the field and forest remain subject to the invisible laws of biological evolution. Animals are molded by natural forces they do not comprehend. To their minds there is no past and no future. There is only the everlasting present of a single generation--its trails in the forest, its hidden pathways of the air and in the sea.
Man, by contrast, is alone with the knowledge of his history until the day of his death. When we were children we wanted to talk to animals and struggled to understand why this was impossible. Slowly we gave up the attempt as we grew into the solitary world of human adulthood, the rabbit was left on the lawn, the dog was relegated to his kennel. Only in acts of inarticulate compassion, in rare and hidden moments of communion with nature, does man briefly escape his solitary destiny. Frequently in science fiction he dreams of world with creatures whose communicative power is the equivalent of his own.
Later in the essay, he introduces the research of Dr. John Lily and his studies on the porpoise. So far, we haven't been able to determine whether porpoises actually communicate as we do or whether they have simply evolved a complex signaling system with little or no flexibility. Maybe, some day, we will find that we aren't as alone as we think. What will it be like to encounter another sentient species in the universe?
I wonder if this sense of isolation has anything to do with the prevalence of talking animals and fairies and trolls and dragons and all sorts of talking creatures that don't exist. Most cultures have myths and legends and tales filled with talking animals, some of whom actually exist, while others are products of creative and imaginative minds.. Tradition has it that King Solomon owned a ring of power that enabled him to understand and communicate with animals.
Eiseley's comments also resonate with much of SF. Stories about aliens are very common in SF, and there's even a subgenre called "First Contact." How will we communicate with them? Or, can we? And, what is behind the belief in UFOs so prevalent today? Is that another sign of that loneliness?
In many SF tales of contact with aliens, it is often observed by someone in the story that this will be the most important event in human history. Is it and why?
It seems to me that we as a species spend a considerable amount of time fantasizing about communicating with other species, real or imagined. In addition we also spend a lot of time trying to communicate with other species here on this planet and attempting to detect signs of communication out there among the stars.
Eiseley states, There is nothing more alone in the universe than man. Is he right?
"The Long Loneliness"
an essay in The Star Thrower
The first two paragraphs of "The Long Loneliness," one of the essays in The Star Thrower.
There is nothing more alone in the universe than man. He is alone because he has the intellectual capacity to know that he is separated by a vast gulf of social memory and experiment from the lives of his animal associates. He has entered into the strange world of history, of social and intellectual change, while his brothers of the field and forest remain subject to the invisible laws of biological evolution. Animals are molded by natural forces they do not comprehend. To their minds there is no past and no future. There is only the everlasting present of a single generation--its trails in the forest, its hidden pathways of the air and in the sea.
Man, by contrast, is alone with the knowledge of his history until the day of his death. When we were children we wanted to talk to animals and struggled to understand why this was impossible. Slowly we gave up the attempt as we grew into the solitary world of human adulthood, the rabbit was left on the lawn, the dog was relegated to his kennel. Only in acts of inarticulate compassion, in rare and hidden moments of communion with nature, does man briefly escape his solitary destiny. Frequently in science fiction he dreams of world with creatures whose communicative power is the equivalent of his own.
Later in the essay, he introduces the research of Dr. John Lily and his studies on the porpoise. So far, we haven't been able to determine whether porpoises actually communicate as we do or whether they have simply evolved a complex signaling system with little or no flexibility. Maybe, some day, we will find that we aren't as alone as we think. What will it be like to encounter another sentient species in the universe?
I wonder if this sense of isolation has anything to do with the prevalence of talking animals and fairies and trolls and dragons and all sorts of talking creatures that don't exist. Most cultures have myths and legends and tales filled with talking animals, some of whom actually exist, while others are products of creative and imaginative minds.. Tradition has it that King Solomon owned a ring of power that enabled him to understand and communicate with animals.
Eiseley's comments also resonate with much of SF. Stories about aliens are very common in SF, and there's even a subgenre called "First Contact." How will we communicate with them? Or, can we? And, what is behind the belief in UFOs so prevalent today? Is that another sign of that loneliness?
In many SF tales of contact with aliens, it is often observed by someone in the story that this will be the most important event in human history. Is it and why?
It seems to me that we as a species spend a considerable amount of time fantasizing about communicating with other species, real or imagined. In addition we also spend a lot of time trying to communicate with other species here on this planet and attempting to detect signs of communication out there among the stars.
Eiseley states, There is nothing more alone in the universe than man. Is he right?
Wednesday, September 27, 2017
Loren Eiseley: "The Innocent Fox"
This is an excerpt from an essay in Loren Eiseley's collection, The Star Thrower. The essay is titled "The Innocent Fox." Perhaps it could have been called "The Innocent Fox and the Innocent Human"?
The episode occurred upon an unengaging and unfrequented shore, It began in the late afternoon of a day devoted at the start to ordinary scientific purposes. There was the broken prow of a beached boat subsiding in heavy sand, left by the whim of ancient currents a long way distant from the shifting coast. Somewhere on the horizon wavered the tenuous outlines of a misplaced building, growing increasingly insubstantial in the autumn light.
A fog suddenly moved in, and he is trapped. Rather than wander about, he decides to stay by the beached boat until the fog lifts or morning comes.
. . . It was then I saw the miracle. I saw it because I was hunched at ground level smelling rank of fox, and no longer gazing with upright human arrogance upon the things of this world.
I did not realize at first what it was that I looked upon. As my wandering attention centered, I saw nothing but two small projecting ears lit by the morning sun. Beneath them, a small neat face looked shyly up at me. The ears moved at every sound, drank in a gull's cry and the far horn of a ship. They crinkled, I began to realize, only with curiosity, they had not learned to fear. The creature was very young. He was alone in a dread universe. I crept on my knees around the prow and crouched beside him It was a small fox pup from a den under the timbers who looked up at me. God knows what had become of his brothers and sisters. His parent must not have been home fro hunting.
He innocently selected what I think was a chicken bone from an untidy pile of splintered rubbish and shook it at me invitingly. There was a vast and playful humor in his face. "If there was only one fox in the world and I could kill him. I would do." The words of a British poacher in a pub rasped in my ears. I dropped even further and painfully away from human stature. It has been said repeatedly that one can never, try as he will, get around to the front of the universe Man is destined to see only its far side, to realize nature only in retreat.
Yet here was the thing in the midst of the bones, the wide-eyed, innocent fox inviting me to play, with the innate courtesy of it two forepaws placed appealingly together, along with a mock shake of the head. The universe was swinging in some fantastic fashion around to present its face, and the face was so small that the universe itself was laughing.
It was not a time for human dignity. It was a time only for the careful observance of amenities written behind the stars. Gravely I arranged my forepaws while the puppy whimpered with ill-concealed excitement. I drew the breath of a fox's den into my nostrils. On impulse, I picked up clumsily a whiter bone and shook it in teeth that had not entirely forgotten their original purpose. Round and round we tumbled for one ecstatic moment. We were the innocent thing in the midst of the bones, born in the egg, born in the den, born in the dark cave with the stone ax close to hand, born at last in human guise to grow coldly remote in the room with the rifle rack upon the wall.
But, I had seen my miracle. I had seen the universe as it begins for all things. It was, in reality, a child's universe, a tiny and laughing universe. I rolled the pup on his back and ran, literally ran for the neared ridge. The sun was half out of the sea, and the world was swinging back to normal. The adult foxes would be already trotting home.
A little farther on, I passed one on a ridge who knew well I had no gun, for it swung by quite close, stepping delicately with brush and head held high. Its face was watchful but averted, It did not matter. It was what I had experienced and the fox had experienced, what we had all experienced in adulthood. We passed carefully on our separate ways into the morning, eyes not meeting.
. . . . .
For just a moment I had held the universe at bay by the simple expedient of sitting on my haunches before a fox den and tumbling about with a chicken bone. It is the gravest, most meaningful act I shall ever accomplish, but, as Thoreau once remarked of some peculiar errand of his own, there is no use reporting it to the Royal Society.
Perhaps we should, at times, forget our status as lords of creation. I read somewhere the creativity is strongest in those who have never quite completely grown up. Something to think about anyway.
I suppose this will be seen by many as just a cute story, of little consequence and to be quickly forgotten or ignored. I think it's very significant in that it tells us a lot about the type of person Loren Eiseley was and much about the way he saw the world. I wonder how many other scientists would act as he did and also reveal it to their fellow scientists. Eiseley had mentioned once or twice that some of his colleagues actually reprimanded him for his non-scientific outlook as expressed in his essays and poetry.
I am reminded of many SF stories I had read in the past that pushed the idea that the world would be a better place, a more open and tolerant world if run by scientists and technologists, for they were free of prejudice and would be more willing to forgo past ways of thinking and rely on evidence. I don't see much of that anymore in SF. Perhaps SF writers have also read the accounts of the difficulties that new ideas, in spite of the evidence, had in being accepted. As usual, it's a case of yesterday's heresies are today's truths and will be tomorrow's dogmatic barrier to new ideas.
Wednesday, September 6, 2017
Loren Eiseley and Robert Silverberg: a strange pairing?
Robert Silverberg
Downward to the Earth
an SF novel
Loren Eiseley
The Star Thrower
essays
I found the following conversation in Downward to the Earth, a science fiction novel by Robert Silverberg. It is set on an alien planet which Earth had colonized and then had to leave because it was discovered that there was a sentient/intelligent race native to the planet, something that should have been obvious from the beginning. Why it wasn't is explained in the discussion between Gunderson, once head of the Company's operation on the planet and a tourist.
"Watson asked, 'Why don't they have a civilization, then?'
'I've just told you that they do.'
'I mean cities, machines, books--'
'They're not physically equipped for writing, for building things, for any small manipulations,' Gunderson said. 'Don't you see, they have no hands? A race with hands makes one kind of society. A race built like elephants makes another.'''
At about the same time I read Downward to the Earth, I also read a collection of essays, The Star Thrower, by Loren Eiseley--anthropologist, poet, essayist. In one of the essays, he brought up the research findings by Dr. John Lilly about the intelligence of the porpoise. Eiseley asked an interesting question.
"We are forced to ask ourselves whether native intelligence in another form than man's might be as high as or even higher than his own, yet be marked by no such material monuments as man has placed on the earth."
Eiseley then proposes a thought experiment. We will trade in our hands for flippers and the land for the ocean, bringing with us only our intelligence.
"The result is immediately evident and quite clear. No matter how well we communicate with our fellows through the water medium we will never build drowned empires in the coral . . . Over all that region of wondrous beauty we will exercise no more control than the simplest mollusk. Even the octopus with flexible arms will build little shelters that we cannot imitate. Without hands we will have only the freedom to follow the untrammeled sea winds across the planet."
And later, Eiseley paraphrases Melville's commentary about the sperm whale and in which he substitutes the porpoise: "'Genius in the porpoise? Has the porpoise ever written a book, spoken speech? No, his great genius is declared in his doing nothing particular to prove it. It is proved in his pyramidal silence.' "
"If man had sacrificed his hands for flukes, the moral might run, he would still be a philosopher, but there would have been taken from him the devastating power to wreak his thought upon the body of the world. Instead he would have lived and wandered, like the porpoise, homeless across currents and wind and oceans, intelligent, but forever the lonely and curious observer of unknown wreckage falling the through the blue light of eternity. This would now be a deserved penitence for man. Perhaps such a transformation would bring him once more into that mood of childhood innocence in which he talked successfully to all things living but had no power and no urge to harm. It is worth at last a wistful thought that someday the porpoise may talk to us and we to him. It would break, perhaps, the long loneliness that has made man a frequent terror and abomination even to himself."
It is coincidence, of course, to find a similar topic in an SF novel and in a collection of essays. But, finding the same topic in both made me think about it in a way that wouldn't have happened if I hadn't encountered it in two such different works.
It is a fascinating question; what would my life be if I had flippers instead of hands and feet and if I lived in the sea?
Downward to the Earth
an SF novel
Loren Eiseley
The Star Thrower
essays
I found the following conversation in Downward to the Earth, a science fiction novel by Robert Silverberg. It is set on an alien planet which Earth had colonized and then had to leave because it was discovered that there was a sentient/intelligent race native to the planet, something that should have been obvious from the beginning. Why it wasn't is explained in the discussion between Gunderson, once head of the Company's operation on the planet and a tourist.
"Watson asked, 'Why don't they have a civilization, then?'
'I've just told you that they do.'
'I mean cities, machines, books--'
'They're not physically equipped for writing, for building things, for any small manipulations,' Gunderson said. 'Don't you see, they have no hands? A race with hands makes one kind of society. A race built like elephants makes another.'''
At about the same time I read Downward to the Earth, I also read a collection of essays, The Star Thrower, by Loren Eiseley--anthropologist, poet, essayist. In one of the essays, he brought up the research findings by Dr. John Lilly about the intelligence of the porpoise. Eiseley asked an interesting question.
"We are forced to ask ourselves whether native intelligence in another form than man's might be as high as or even higher than his own, yet be marked by no such material monuments as man has placed on the earth."
Eiseley then proposes a thought experiment. We will trade in our hands for flippers and the land for the ocean, bringing with us only our intelligence.
"The result is immediately evident and quite clear. No matter how well we communicate with our fellows through the water medium we will never build drowned empires in the coral . . . Over all that region of wondrous beauty we will exercise no more control than the simplest mollusk. Even the octopus with flexible arms will build little shelters that we cannot imitate. Without hands we will have only the freedom to follow the untrammeled sea winds across the planet."
And later, Eiseley paraphrases Melville's commentary about the sperm whale and in which he substitutes the porpoise: "'Genius in the porpoise? Has the porpoise ever written a book, spoken speech? No, his great genius is declared in his doing nothing particular to prove it. It is proved in his pyramidal silence.' "
"If man had sacrificed his hands for flukes, the moral might run, he would still be a philosopher, but there would have been taken from him the devastating power to wreak his thought upon the body of the world. Instead he would have lived and wandered, like the porpoise, homeless across currents and wind and oceans, intelligent, but forever the lonely and curious observer of unknown wreckage falling the through the blue light of eternity. This would now be a deserved penitence for man. Perhaps such a transformation would bring him once more into that mood of childhood innocence in which he talked successfully to all things living but had no power and no urge to harm. It is worth at last a wistful thought that someday the porpoise may talk to us and we to him. It would break, perhaps, the long loneliness that has made man a frequent terror and abomination even to himself."
It is coincidence, of course, to find a similar topic in an SF novel and in a collection of essays. But, finding the same topic in both made me think about it in a way that wouldn't have happened if I hadn't encountered it in two such different works.
It is a fascinating question; what would my life be if I had flippers instead of hands and feet and if I lived in the sea?
Thursday, August 10, 2017
Loren Eiseley: The Star Thrower
The blurb on the back page says it better than I can:
Long admired for his compassionate, probing meditations on the natural world, Loren Eiseley completed this volume of his favorite writings shortly before his death in 1977. In includes many selections never before published in book form and spans Eiseley's entire writing career--from his early poems through The Immense Journey and The Unexpected Universe to his most recent essays--providing a superb sampling of the author as naturalist, poet, scientist, and humanist.
If there is an overriding theme in the twenty-three essays and ten poems that comprise this work, it is that the facts and data elicited by science are not the final statement of our view of the natural world. Those facts are the frontiers that we must go beyond in our study of the natural world. His essays show us just what this means if we are to gain a fuller understanding, even if it is only a limited understanding of the natural world.
The Judgment of the Birds
It is a commonplace of all religious thought, even the most primitive, that the man seeking visions and insight must go apart from his fellows and live for a time in the wilderness. If he is of the proper sort, he will return with a message. It may not be a message from the god he set out to seek, but even if he has failed in that particular, he will have had a vision or seen a marvel, and these are always worth listening to and thinking about.
The world, I have come to believe, is a very queer place, but we have been part of this queerness for so long that we tend to take it for granted. We rush to and fro like Mad Hatters upon our peculiar errands, all the time imagining our surroundings to be dull and ourselves to be quite ordinary creatures. Actually, there is nothing in the world to encourage this idea, but such is the mind of man, and this is why he finds it necessary from time to time to send emissaries into the wilderness in the hope of learning of great events, or plans in store for him, that will resuscitate his waning taste for life. His great news services, his worldwide radio network, he knows with a last remnant of healthy distrust will be of no use to him in this matter. No miracle can withstand a radio broadcast, and it is certain it would be no miracle if it could. One must seek, then, what only the solitary approach can give--a natural revelation.
The above are the opening paragraphs of some thoughts about several experiences he had involving ravens, pigeons, and various species of small birds in the countryside and from his room on the twentieth floor of a hotel in New York City.
Normally I don't bother with the back cover blurbs, except to wonder frequently whether the author(s) of the blurbs had actually read the work, but I have to quote another one:
This book will be read and cherished in the year 2001. It will go to the MOON and MARS with future generations. Loren Eiseley's work changed my life. -- Ray Bradbury --
As I have said before, numerous times I believe, Loren Eiseley is an author who has been a major influence on my ideas, beliefs, and philosophy. His works are those that would join me on that famous (infamous?) desert island.
The essays in The Star Thrower are too varied to try to summarize it, so I will limit myself to posting quotations from and brief commentaries on various essays in the book over the next few weeks or months.
Long admired for his compassionate, probing meditations on the natural world, Loren Eiseley completed this volume of his favorite writings shortly before his death in 1977. In includes many selections never before published in book form and spans Eiseley's entire writing career--from his early poems through The Immense Journey and The Unexpected Universe to his most recent essays--providing a superb sampling of the author as naturalist, poet, scientist, and humanist.
If there is an overriding theme in the twenty-three essays and ten poems that comprise this work, it is that the facts and data elicited by science are not the final statement of our view of the natural world. Those facts are the frontiers that we must go beyond in our study of the natural world. His essays show us just what this means if we are to gain a fuller understanding, even if it is only a limited understanding of the natural world.
The Judgment of the Birds
It is a commonplace of all religious thought, even the most primitive, that the man seeking visions and insight must go apart from his fellows and live for a time in the wilderness. If he is of the proper sort, he will return with a message. It may not be a message from the god he set out to seek, but even if he has failed in that particular, he will have had a vision or seen a marvel, and these are always worth listening to and thinking about.
The world, I have come to believe, is a very queer place, but we have been part of this queerness for so long that we tend to take it for granted. We rush to and fro like Mad Hatters upon our peculiar errands, all the time imagining our surroundings to be dull and ourselves to be quite ordinary creatures. Actually, there is nothing in the world to encourage this idea, but such is the mind of man, and this is why he finds it necessary from time to time to send emissaries into the wilderness in the hope of learning of great events, or plans in store for him, that will resuscitate his waning taste for life. His great news services, his worldwide radio network, he knows with a last remnant of healthy distrust will be of no use to him in this matter. No miracle can withstand a radio broadcast, and it is certain it would be no miracle if it could. One must seek, then, what only the solitary approach can give--a natural revelation.
The above are the opening paragraphs of some thoughts about several experiences he had involving ravens, pigeons, and various species of small birds in the countryside and from his room on the twentieth floor of a hotel in New York City.
Normally I don't bother with the back cover blurbs, except to wonder frequently whether the author(s) of the blurbs had actually read the work, but I have to quote another one:
This book will be read and cherished in the year 2001. It will go to the MOON and MARS with future generations. Loren Eiseley's work changed my life. -- Ray Bradbury --
As I have said before, numerous times I believe, Loren Eiseley is an author who has been a major influence on my ideas, beliefs, and philosophy. His works are those that would join me on that famous (infamous?) desert island.
The essays in The Star Thrower are too varied to try to summarize it, so I will limit myself to posting quotations from and brief commentaries on various essays in the book over the next few weeks or months.
Friday, May 22, 2015
Loren Eiseley: "The Sandburs Say No"
Life is persistent and patient. I think Life is the source of the saying, "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again." Loren Eiseley's poem is an example of this.
The Sandburs Say No
Along the edge of the airfield between the jet blasts
from ascending bombers,
low life, the tougher
seeds from the far Cretaceous, surreptitiously test the concrete,
with the old mindlessness
sow crevices and and wait.
The blue devil's darning needles
dance their mating ecstasy across the bombing targets--
nature's archaic first streamlining,
still magnificent in a small way but useless,
the guns ships deadlier, more purposeful, but
the sandburs say no, the sandburs
are older, the sandburs
toughen the seed containers, the life bombs,
against thermite, napalm, tear gas. The sandburs
like spendthrift governments pack the little brown
bullets and send them
out on each wind.
Each season they test the concrete and the bomber's targets.
The explosions are soundless but the stone fractures.
The sandburs say no with the life bombs,
the sandburs say no.
I like the juxtaposition Eiseley chooses here: the destructive power of the bomber's weaponry and the life affirming actions of the sandburs. Although the sandburs' life bombs are at first destructive, the fracturing of the concrete, this destruction then makes life possible as it frees the soil for various plants and animals and insects and provides nutrients and a habitat for other creatures. It's a duel between the destructive thermite and napalm bombs and the sandburs' life bombs.
A bit of trivia here:
"Field sandbur (grassbur) is a summer annual grassy weed that can be found in home lawns, sports fields, parks and along roadsides. This weed is especially adapted to dry, sandy soils but can be found growing in other types of soils as well. The big problem with this weed is the sharp, spiny burs that are part of the inflorescence. These burs can be painful and are difficult to remove from clothing material. Field sandburs (grassburs) generally start germinating in late spring and will continue to germinate until late summer or early fall months. This weed will continue to grow until the first hard frost or freeze occurs in the fall."
James A. McAfee, Ph.D.
Associate Professor and Extension Turfgrass Specialist
Dallas, Texas
"In their 2005 book A Dazzle of Dragonflies
,
Forrest Mitchell and James Lasswell explain that the dragonfly-epithet
“devil’s darning needle” has its origins in the Europe of the Middle
Ages. The long and slender shape of the insect’s body, combined with the
superstitious belief that it, like the fly—consort
of Beelzebub—was in league with the darkest of forces, produced a myth
durable enough to make the journey with the colonists to the United
States. Today in Iowa, the authors write, “devil’s darning needles sew
together the fingers or toes of a person who falls asleep…in Kansas,
they may sew up the mouths of scolding women, saucy children…and profane
men.”
The Sandburs Say No
Along the edge of the airfield between the jet blasts
from ascending bombers,
low life, the tougher
seeds from the far Cretaceous, surreptitiously test the concrete,
with the old mindlessness
sow crevices and and wait.
The blue devil's darning needles
dance their mating ecstasy across the bombing targets--
nature's archaic first streamlining,
still magnificent in a small way but useless,
the guns ships deadlier, more purposeful, but
the sandburs say no, the sandburs
are older, the sandburs
toughen the seed containers, the life bombs,
against thermite, napalm, tear gas. The sandburs
like spendthrift governments pack the little brown
bullets and send them
out on each wind.
Each season they test the concrete and the bomber's targets.
The explosions are soundless but the stone fractures.
The sandburs say no with the life bombs,
the sandburs say no.
I like the juxtaposition Eiseley chooses here: the destructive power of the bomber's weaponry and the life affirming actions of the sandburs. Although the sandburs' life bombs are at first destructive, the fracturing of the concrete, this destruction then makes life possible as it frees the soil for various plants and animals and insects and provides nutrients and a habitat for other creatures. It's a duel between the destructive thermite and napalm bombs and the sandburs' life bombs.
A bit of trivia here:
"Field sandbur (grassbur) is a summer annual grassy weed that can be found in home lawns, sports fields, parks and along roadsides. This weed is especially adapted to dry, sandy soils but can be found growing in other types of soils as well. The big problem with this weed is the sharp, spiny burs that are part of the inflorescence. These burs can be painful and are difficult to remove from clothing material. Field sandburs (grassburs) generally start germinating in late spring and will continue to germinate until late summer or early fall months. This weed will continue to grow until the first hard frost or freeze occurs in the fall."
James A. McAfee, Ph.D.
Associate Professor and Extension Turfgrass Specialist
Dallas, Texas
"In their 2005 book A Dazzle of Dragonflies
,
Forrest Mitchell and James Lasswell explain that the dragonfly-epithet
“devil’s darning needle” has its origins in the Europe of the Middle
Ages. The long and slender shape of the insect’s body, combined with the
superstitious belief that it, like the fly—consort
of Beelzebub—was in league with the darkest of forces, produced a myth
durable enough to make the journey with the colonists to the United
States. Today in Iowa, the authors write, “devil’s darning needles sew
together the fingers or toes of a person who falls asleep…in Kansas,
they may sew up the mouths of scolding women, saucy children…and profane
men.”
Wednesday, February 25, 2015
Loren Eiseley: Coyote Country
COYOTE COUNTRY
If you should go, soft-footed and alert,
Down the long slope of shale
Into a tumbled land of scarp and butte
Beyond the pale
Of the herding men, where water is under stone,
You would be in coyote country. It is the place
Where tumbleweed is blown
Four ways at once, and your neighbors are not seen
Except as loping shapes
Or tangible dust.
Once, if you're lucky, something may pause and lift
One paw and two grey ears
In a moment's trust
That is gone like wind.
This is the road. Go downOver the harsh way. If you dare, go down
Into the waste, where lonely and apart
The road runs north. Somewhere here is my heart,
If anywhere, I spy
Nothing at all--and you in turn may try
The thistle and subtle stones,
Or you may go
Southward tonight--be certain you will not know
More of me than is found
In two poised ears
Or feet gone without sound.
-- Loren Eiseley --
All the Night Wings
I don't know where Loren Eiseley spent most of his time--out in the field or behind a desk or in a classroom--but I think I know where his heart was.
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?
Tuesday, July 8, 2014
Loren Eiseley: Meaningless Voices
Loren Eiseley (1907-1977), as you may have noticed, is one of my favorite essayists and prose writers, possibly my favorite, if I ever took the time to think about it. He writes clearly and succinctly--his essays are a joy to read. His poetry, though, is quite different--enigmatic, and puzzling at times, many times actually. Something there, however, resonates with me, even if I don't understand just what it is. Here is one of those poems.
Meaningless Voices
Water that comes endlessly from the blue mountain lakes unvisited save by deer
and the deer themselves,
bugling faint calls through the aspen thickets in high autumn.
all talk in meaningless voices.
The valley is filled with cricket chirps and leaf whispers
and whatever it is comes crying
on the rain squalls from the northeast.
Even the grasshoppers have been here a long time and click songs
without the bright, sinister meanings of
the mountain rattlers, whose voice, like death, is purposeful.
All of these have been here for ages, but later
horns rasp in the valley and the voice of dynamite
splits boulders and the roads come, all purposeful, all strident with meaning,
while red-winged blackbirds
fly away to new pools.
Nevertheless the meaningless voices are also significant
in what is past and to come.
-- Loren Eiseley --
from The Lost Notebooks of Loren Eiseley
Are the only meaningful voices those that signify death or destruction? Yet, those "meaningless voices are also significant/in what is past and to come." In what way were they significant in the past and, again, will be significant in what is "to come"?
Meaningless Voices
Water that comes endlessly from the blue mountain lakes unvisited save by deer
and the deer themselves,
bugling faint calls through the aspen thickets in high autumn.
all talk in meaningless voices.
The valley is filled with cricket chirps and leaf whispers
and whatever it is comes crying
on the rain squalls from the northeast.
Even the grasshoppers have been here a long time and click songs
without the bright, sinister meanings of
the mountain rattlers, whose voice, like death, is purposeful.
All of these have been here for ages, but later
horns rasp in the valley and the voice of dynamite
splits boulders and the roads come, all purposeful, all strident with meaning,
while red-winged blackbirds
fly away to new pools.
Nevertheless the meaningless voices are also significant
in what is past and to come.
-- Loren Eiseley --
from The Lost Notebooks of Loren Eiseley
Are the only meaningful voices those that signify death or destruction? Yet, those "meaningless voices are also significant/in what is past and to come." In what way were they significant in the past and, again, will be significant in what is "to come"?
Friday, June 6, 2014
Loren Eiseley: THE NIGHT COUNTRY
"To an anthropologist, the social reception of invention reminds one of the manner in which a strange young male is first repulsed, then tolerated, upon the fringes of a group of howler monkeys he wishes to join. Finally, since the memories of the animals are short, he becomes familiar, is accepted, and fades into the mass. In a similar way, discoveries made by Darwin and Wallace were at first castigated and then by degrees absorbed. In the process both men experienced forms of loneliness and isolation, not simply as a necessity for discovery but as a penalty for having dared to redraw the map of our outer, rather than inner, cosmos."
-- Loren Eiseley --
from The Night Country
Perhaps among the majority of scientists and perhaps the general population, this might be true, but there still are groups of howler monkeys out there who haven't accepted evolution, even after some 150+ years of evidence. Other groups, and there is considerable overlap here, still deny the existence of global warming, again in spite of overwhelming evidence. Other groups, again with considerable overlap, still believe the world is only 6000 years old, having been created in 4004 B. C.
I wonder how many members of these groups also belong to the Flat Earth Society. Yes, they still exist and here's their web site: http://theflatearthsociety.org/cms/
Friday, May 30, 2014
Loren Eiseley: from THE NIGHT COUNTRY
"It is frequently the tragedy of the great artist, as it is of the great scientist, that he frightens the ordinary man. If he is more than a popular story-teller it may take humanity a generation to absorb and grow accustomed to the new geography with which that scientist or artist presents us. Even then, perhaps only the more imaginative and literate may accept him. Subconsciously the genius is feared as an image breaker; frequently he does not accept the opinions of the mass, or man's opinion of himself. He has voiced through the ages, in one form or another, this very loneliness and detachment which Dewey saw so clearly at the outcome of our extending knowledge. The custom-bound, uneducated, intolerant man projects his fear and hatred upon the seer. The artist is frequently a human mirror. If what we see there displeases us, if we see all too clearly our own insignificance and vanity, we tend to revolt, not against ourselves, but in order to martyrize the unfortunate soul who forced us into self-examination.
In short, like the herd animals we are, we sniff warily at the strange one among us. If he is fortunate enough finally to be accepted, it is likely to be after a trial of ridicule and after the sting has been removed from his work by long familiarization and bowdlerizing, when the alien quality of his thought has been mitigated or removed. Carl Schneer recounts that Einstein made so little impression on his superiors, it was with difficulty that he obtained even a junior clerkship in the Swiss Patents office at Bern, after having failed of consideration as a scholar of promise. Not surprisingly, theoretical physicists favored his views before the experimentalists capitulated. As Schneer remarks: It was not easy to have a twenty-six-year-old clerk in the Swiss Patent office explain the meaning of experiments on which one had labored for years." Implacable hatred, as well as praise, was to be Einstein's lot.
-- Loren Eiseley --
from The Night Country
I have one small quibble here with what Eiseley is arguing--he says "uneducated" as a characteristic of those who fear the genius or one who goes beyond the accepted dogma. I would remove "uneducated" because I see many "educated" people in the ranks of those terrified by the new or the original.
Just because it is new or original or unique does not make it bad or wrong or good or right. It is hard to judge something that is novel objectively or fairly, for our biases and prejudices immediately come into play. For this reason, we should always wait a while before passing judgement.
Too many times those first immediate snap judgements are proved wrong later. Some are able to reevaluate their position and admit they were wrong, facing unfortunately, derision and even isolation from those around them--wobbling is unacceptable to many. Others unable to admit their errors then search out evidence that appears to support their position while ignoring, avoiding, or ridiculing contrary evidence. Mocking or ridiculing those who disagree is also a common tactic employed to protect oneself from having to admit one made an error.
It is unfortunate for a country or other political entity when the leaders, elected or appointed, are among those who are shackled by the past and unable to consider new ways of doing things or new ways of thinking, simply because they are new. We should wait before dismissing the new, for there just might be something there worth thinking about, something better than today's universal truths.
It's been said in many ways: Yesterday's heresies are today's revelations and tomorrow's dogmatic truths.
Saturday, February 15, 2014
Loren Eiseley: In the Tales to Come
In The Tales To Come
"I have met the echo people, coyotes,
once in my youth, deep in a badland canyon, coming
upon them unaware. They vanished
before I could speak. Esahcawata, Old-man-coyote's people
quick of foot, hunted by all, surviving
traps and poison bait, surviving
where the great wolves have vanished, admirable
tricksters in an endless war. I would have spoken
peace, but my kind know it not. They did well
not to trust me--the trap-shy scurriers at midnight.
Their songs are few now. They live by the thoughts
of Esahcawata and no other thinking is
possible for them.
Their songs echo the wind. They are echo people
but all
under the sky are echoers and the millennia listen
and are silent.
It will be so with us. I have remembered
all my life how fast they scampered. We the laughers
do not understand fear because of our numbers
and when we vanish
no one will tell stories about our cleverness, the night wind
will not long echo laughter for Old-man, the trickster
married the whirlwind and myth will have us
as part of the singular spinning of a dust-devil
on a dry prairie. They are the echoers, we
a jumble of leaves and dust
quickly gone by. Lovers of form we will be formless
in the tales to come."
-- Loren Eiseley --
from Another Kind of Autumn
Eiseley's poem, I think, can be seen as prophetic--a prophecy of the differing fates of the coyote and humanity. The coyote will be remembered because it is part of the natural world. In spite of all we can do, the coyote is flourishing, in spite of "traps and poison bait" or hunters with guns, be they on foot or on horseback or in a helicopter. According to the Nationale Geographic article, "These members of the dog family once lived primarily in open prairies and deserts, but now roam the continent's forests and mountains. They have even colonized cities like Los Angeles, and are now found over most of North America. Coyote populations are likely at an all-time high."
Humanity can claim credit for this for it is likely that wiping out large predators, such as the wolf and large cats, allowed the coyote to move into the vacancy thus created.
The poet surmises that in the future the coyote's call will be echoed long after the coyote has disappeared (I suspect that the coyote will outlive humanity if it can avoid being completely exterminated by civilized humans). On the other hand, humanity is busily working on cutting its link with the natural world (destroying the natural world might be more accurate) and eventually will live in a digital, virtual world, electronic bits of 0s and 1s. Humanity is like a dust devil which appears suddenly, rushes about with great energy, causing disruption where it goes, and then just as suddenly disappears, leaving no sign of its passing.
"They are the echoers, we
a jumble of leaves and dust
quickly gone by. Lovers of form we will be formless
in the tales to come."
"I have met the echo people, coyotes,
once in my youth, deep in a badland canyon, coming
upon them unaware. They vanished
before I could speak. Esahcawata, Old-man-coyote's people
quick of foot, hunted by all, surviving
traps and poison bait, surviving
where the great wolves have vanished, admirable
tricksters in an endless war. I would have spoken
peace, but my kind know it not. They did well
not to trust me--the trap-shy scurriers at midnight.
Their songs are few now. They live by the thoughts
of Esahcawata and no other thinking is
possible for them.
Their songs echo the wind. They are echo people
but all
under the sky are echoers and the millennia listen
and are silent.
It will be so with us. I have remembered
all my life how fast they scampered. We the laughers
do not understand fear because of our numbers
and when we vanish
no one will tell stories about our cleverness, the night wind
will not long echo laughter for Old-man, the trickster
married the whirlwind and myth will have us
as part of the singular spinning of a dust-devil
on a dry prairie. They are the echoers, we
a jumble of leaves and dust
quickly gone by. Lovers of form we will be formless
in the tales to come."
-- Loren Eiseley --
from Another Kind of Autumn
Eiseley's poem, I think, can be seen as prophetic--a prophecy of the differing fates of the coyote and humanity. The coyote will be remembered because it is part of the natural world. In spite of all we can do, the coyote is flourishing, in spite of "traps and poison bait" or hunters with guns, be they on foot or on horseback or in a helicopter. According to the Nationale Geographic article, "These members of the dog family once lived primarily in open prairies and deserts, but now roam the continent's forests and mountains. They have even colonized cities like Los Angeles, and are now found over most of North America. Coyote populations are likely at an all-time high."
Humanity can claim credit for this for it is likely that wiping out large predators, such as the wolf and large cats, allowed the coyote to move into the vacancy thus created.
The poet surmises that in the future the coyote's call will be echoed long after the coyote has disappeared (I suspect that the coyote will outlive humanity if it can avoid being completely exterminated by civilized humans). On the other hand, humanity is busily working on cutting its link with the natural world (destroying the natural world might be more accurate) and eventually will live in a digital, virtual world, electronic bits of 0s and 1s. Humanity is like a dust devil which appears suddenly, rushes about with great energy, causing disruption where it goes, and then just as suddenly disappears, leaving no sign of its passing.
"They are the echoers, we
a jumble of leaves and dust
quickly gone by. Lovers of form we will be formless
in the tales to come."
Wednesday, September 11, 2013
Loren Eiseley: the unpredictable, pt. 3
"A few years ago I chanced to write a book in which I had expressed some personal views and feelings upon birds, bones, spiders, and time, all subjects with which I had some degree of acquaintance. Scarcely had the work been published when I was sought out in my office by a serious young colleague. With utter and devastating confidence he had paid me a call in order to correct my deviations and to lead me back to the proper road of scholarship. He pointed out to me the time I had wasted--time which could have been more properly expended upon my own field of scientific investigation. The young man's view of science was a narrow one, but it illustrates a conviction all too common today: namely, that the authority of science is absolute.
To those who have substituted authoritarian science for authoritarian religion, individual thought is worthless unless it is the symbol for a reality which can be seen, tasted, felt, or thought about by everyone else. Such men adhere to a dogma as rigidly as men of fanatical religiosity. They reject the world of the personal, the happy world of open, playful, or aspiring thought."
-- Loren Eiseley --
from The Night Country
I am not launching an attack on science, nor is Loren Eiseley. Science is one of several methods humans use to understand their environment and their place in the universe. Science is not perfect nor are scientists superior thinkers. They are expert in their field of research, but even there one finds disagreements among the researchers with considerable expertise and knowledge. Science can tell us how things came about and how to do many interesting or curious things, but it can't tell us if we should and why we should do these things. Science showed us how to build an atomic bomb or how to create chemical weapons, but science can't tell us if we should build that bomb or develop those weapons.
The answer to a "why" question requires a different mind set, a different knowledge, a different perspective that can't be tested, tasted, felt, or measured. It requires a way of thinking that combines a knowledge of the human past, present, and projections into the future. Should we build an atomic bomb? What are the consequences of creating such a weapon? Once something is created, its very existence seems to promote its use. That's the next question: should we use it? Why? How? When? Science can not be expected to provide the answer to these all important questions.
To those who have substituted authoritarian science for authoritarian religion, individual thought is worthless unless it is the symbol for a reality which can be seen, tasted, felt, or thought about by everyone else. Such men adhere to a dogma as rigidly as men of fanatical religiosity. They reject the world of the personal, the happy world of open, playful, or aspiring thought."
-- Loren Eiseley --
from The Night Country
I am not launching an attack on science, nor is Loren Eiseley. Science is one of several methods humans use to understand their environment and their place in the universe. Science is not perfect nor are scientists superior thinkers. They are expert in their field of research, but even there one finds disagreements among the researchers with considerable expertise and knowledge. Science can tell us how things came about and how to do many interesting or curious things, but it can't tell us if we should and why we should do these things. Science showed us how to build an atomic bomb or how to create chemical weapons, but science can't tell us if we should build that bomb or develop those weapons.
The answer to a "why" question requires a different mind set, a different knowledge, a different perspective that can't be tested, tasted, felt, or measured. It requires a way of thinking that combines a knowledge of the human past, present, and projections into the future. Should we build an atomic bomb? What are the consequences of creating such a weapon? Once something is created, its very existence seems to promote its use. That's the next question: should we use it? Why? How? When? Science can not be expected to provide the answer to these all important questions.
Saturday, September 7, 2013
Loren Eiseley: the unpredictable, pt. 2
This quotation follows directly after the quotation included in the earlier post titled "Loren Eiseley: the unpredictable." I had planned on a series of sequential posts from this section of Eiseley's The Night Country, but it didn't work out that way. Reality sometimes barges in and upsets "the best laid plans of mice and me."
"It is through the individual brain alone that there passes the momentary illumination in which a whole human countryside may be transmuted in an instant. 'A steep and unaccountable transition,' Thoreau has described it, 'from what it called a common sense view of things, to an infinitely expanded and liberating one, from seeing things as men describe them, to seeing them as men can not describe them.' Man's mind, like the expanding universe itself, is engaged in pouring over limitless horizons. At its heights of genius it betrays all the miraculous unexpectedness which we try vainly to eliminate from the universe. The great artist, whether he be musician, painter, or poet, is known for this absolute unexpectedness. One does not see, one does not hear, until he speaks to us out of that limitless creativity which is his gift."
I find this startling and illuminating. I have heard many scientists defend what they do to be as beautiful and stirring as as any work of art--that science is not the enemy of the arts. But now I read Eiseley's comment here:
"At its heights of genius it betrays all the miraculous unexpectedness which we try vainly to eliminate from the universe."
Isn't that the task of science--to remove the unexpectedness and unpredictability of the universe? I am reminded of Poe's "Sonnet--to Science."
Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art!
Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.
Why preyest thou thus upon the poet's heart,
Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?
How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise,
Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering
To seek for resurrect in the jewelled skies,
Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing?
Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car,
And driven the Hamadryad from the wood
To seek a shelter in some happier star?
Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood,
The Elfin from the green grass, and from me
The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?
I think Poe and Eiseley would agree here. After all, what is science about--it is an attempt to explain all things and reduce it to predictability, to do away with surprises and the unexpected. What happens when scientists stumble across something unexpected? They greet it with joy and then go about trying to eliminate it. Scientists, some day, may be able to tell us from what parts of the brain a poem or a symphony emerges, but they will never be able to predict the next poem or symphony that emerges.
The next paragraph in Eiseley's essay:
"The flash of lightning in a single brain also flickers along the horizon of our more ordinary brains. Without that single lightning stroke in a solitary mind, however, the rest of us would never have known the fairyland of The Tempest, the midnight world of Dostoevsky, or the blackbirds on the yellow harvest fields of Van Gogh. We would have seen blackbirds and endured the depravity of our own hearts, but it would not be the same landscape that the act of genius transformed. The world without Shakespeare's insights is a lesser world, our griefs shut more inarticulately in upon themselves. We grow mute at the thought--just as an element seems to disappear from sunlight without Van Gogh. Yet these creations we might call particle episodes in the human universe--acts without precedent, a kind of disobedience of normality, unprophesiable by science, unduplicable by other individuals on demand. They are part of that unpredictable newness which keeps the universe from being fully explored by man."
all quotations:
-- Loren Eiseley --
from The Night Country
This is probably one of the clearest and most succinct comments on the value and importance of the arts that I have ever read. And, as I read it, what Eiseley says about the flash of genius that illuminates others, is equally true of what he writes here, for he has changed my thinking about the value of the arts and also about the value of science and their roles in human culture. The arts can not do nor should they be expected to do that which science can, but on the other hand, science can not do what the arts do for humanity--transport us out of mundane reality into a new unexpected and unpredictable world. Science attempts to reduce all to a mathematical formula--The Grand Theory of Everything--while the arts seek to maintain the sense of wonder, of surprise, of unpredictability that makes us human.
Sunday, September 1, 2013
Loren Eiseley: the unpredictable
"Physicists, it now appears, are convinced that a principle of uncertainty exists in the submicroscopic realm of particles and that out of this queer domain of accident and impact has emerged, by some kind of mathematical magic, the sustaining world of natural law by which we make our way to the bank, the theater, to our homes, and finally to our graves. Perhaps, after all, a world so created has something still wild and unpredictable lurking behind its more sober manifestations. It is my contention that this is true, and that the rare freedom of the particle to do what most particles never do is duplicated in the solitary universe of the human mind.
The lightning flashes, the smashed circuits through which, on occasion, leaps the light of unverses beyond our ken, exist only in rare individuals. But the flashes from such minds can fascinate and light up through the arts of communication the intellects of those not necessarily endowed with genius. In a conformist age science must, for this reason, be wary of its own authority. The individual must be re-created in the light of a revivified humanism which sets the value of man the unique against that vast and ominous shadow of man the composite, the predictable, which is the delight of the machine. The polity we desire is that ever-creative polity which Robert Louis Stevenson had in mind when he spoke of each person as containing a group of incongruous and ofttimes conflicting citizenry. Bacon himself was seeking the road by which the human mind might be opened to the full image of the world, not reduced to the little compass of a state-manipulated machine."
-- Loren Eiseley --
from The Night Country
Does this sound at all familiar? Large corporations, as well as governments, are happiest with the composite person, predictable and manageable. The art of communication can be used or misused to manipulate and indoctrinate citizen-consumers as well as illuminate and enlighten. It's a race to see who wins. I'm not optimistic for the forces of conformity have the financial and the political resources to silence the odd and irregular messages that come from those lacking the official stamp of approval.
The lightning flashes, the smashed circuits through which, on occasion, leaps the light of unverses beyond our ken, exist only in rare individuals. But the flashes from such minds can fascinate and light up through the arts of communication the intellects of those not necessarily endowed with genius. In a conformist age science must, for this reason, be wary of its own authority. The individual must be re-created in the light of a revivified humanism which sets the value of man the unique against that vast and ominous shadow of man the composite, the predictable, which is the delight of the machine. The polity we desire is that ever-creative polity which Robert Louis Stevenson had in mind when he spoke of each person as containing a group of incongruous and ofttimes conflicting citizenry.
-- Loren Eiseley --
from The Night Country
Does this sound at all familiar? Large corporations, as well as governments, are happiest with the composite person, predictable and manageable. The art of communication can be used or misused to manipulate and indoctrinate citizen-consumers as well as illuminate and enlighten. It's a race to see who wins. I'm not optimistic for the forces of conformity have the financial and the political resources to silence the odd and irregular messages that come from those lacking the official stamp of approval.
Saturday, August 10, 2013
Loren Eiseley: on stability
"Life is never fixed and stable. It is always mercurial, rolling and splitting, disappearing and re-emerging in a most unpredictable fashion. I never make a journey to a wood or a mountain without experiencing the temptation to explode a puffball in a new clearing or stopping to encourage some sleepy monster that is just cracking out of the earth mold. This is, of course, an irresponsible attitude, since I cannot tell what will come of it, but if the world hangs on such matters it may be well to act boldly and realize all immanent possibilities at once. Shake the seeds out of their pods, I say, launch the milkweed down, and set the lizards scuttling. We are in a creative universe. Let us then create. After all, man himself is the unlikely consequence of such forces. In the spring when a breath of wind sets the propellers of the maple seeds to whirring, I always say to myself hopefully, "After us the dragons.
To have dragons one must have change; that is the first principle of dragon lore. Otherwise everything becomes stale, commonplace, and observed. I suspect that it is this unimaginative boredom that leads to the vulgar comment that evolution may be all very well as a theory but you can never really see anything in the process of change. There is also the even more obtuse and less defensible attitude of those who speak of the world's creative energies as being exhausted, the animals small and showing no significant signs of advance. 'Everything is specialized in blind channels,' some observers contend. 'Life is now locked permanently in little roadside pools, or perching dolefully on television aerials.'
Such men never pause to think how they might have looked gasping fishily through mats of green algae in the Devonian swamps, but that is where the homunculus who preceded them had his abode. I have never lost a reverent and profound respect for swamps, even individually induced ones. I remember too well what, on occasion, has come out of them. Only a purblind concern with the present can so limit men's views, and it is my contention that sympathetic observer, even at this moment, can witness such marvels of transitional behavior, such hoverings between the then and the now, as to lay forever to rest the notion that evolution belongs somewhere the witch world of the past."
-- Loren Eiseley --
from The Night Country
Loren Eiseley is not the first to talk about unending change in the world: Taoists, Heraclitus, and Montaigne among many others had also noted this, but we forget and we need to be reminded of this regularly. In textbooks that discuss evolution, how many end the exposition with the present day and never go on to talk about future evolutionary modifications.
The same is true of human affairs. I remember when the Soviet Union collapsed and the Iron Curtain came down in the early '90s. The wise ones talked about peace, the end of the arms race, the reduction of military forces now that the Cold War had ended. The money spent on weaponry could now be put to peaceful uses to benefit humanity. And now. . .
To have dragons one must have change; that is the first principle of dragon lore. Otherwise everything becomes stale, commonplace, and observed. I suspect that it is this unimaginative boredom that leads to the vulgar comment that evolution may be all very well as a theory but you can never really see anything in the process of change. There is also the even more obtuse and less defensible attitude of those who speak of the world's creative energies as being exhausted, the animals small and showing no significant signs of advance. 'Everything is specialized in blind channels,' some observers contend. 'Life is now locked permanently in little roadside pools, or perching dolefully on television aerials.'
Such men never pause to think how they might have looked gasping fishily through mats of green algae in the Devonian swamps, but that is where the homunculus who preceded them had his abode. I have never lost a reverent and profound respect for swamps, even individually induced ones. I remember too well what, on occasion, has come out of them. Only a purblind concern with the present can so limit men's views, and it is my contention that sympathetic observer, even at this moment, can witness such marvels of transitional behavior, such hoverings between the then and the now, as to lay forever to rest the notion that evolution belongs somewhere the witch world of the past."
-- Loren Eiseley --
from The Night Country
Loren Eiseley is not the first to talk about unending change in the world: Taoists, Heraclitus, and Montaigne among many others had also noted this, but we forget and we need to be reminded of this regularly. In textbooks that discuss evolution, how many end the exposition with the present day and never go on to talk about future evolutionary modifications.
The same is true of human affairs. I remember when the Soviet Union collapsed and the Iron Curtain came down in the early '90s. The wise ones talked about peace, the end of the arms race, the reduction of military forces now that the Cold War had ended. The money spent on weaponry could now be put to peaceful uses to benefit humanity. And now. . .
Thursday, December 27, 2012
Loren Eiseley: Darwin's Century
Actually, the full title of this book by Loren Eiseley is Darwin's Century: Evolution and the Men Who Discovered It. The most significant word is "Men" which spells outs Eiseley's thesis that there were many threads in the tapestry of the development of evolution. Darwin's book, The Origin of Species, published in 1859, did not appear in a vacuum, but was the culmination of several centuries of theorizing and debating the origin of the various types of plants and animals found on this planet. Eiseley does not present a defense or a detailed explanation of evolution: that is not his purpose here but rather to spell out the various forerunners and then the defenders of evolution against various attacks made against it.
Eiseley begins with the early theories about the creation of life including that from The Bible in Genesis and hints of a evolutionary process by various thinkers, including those from Charles Darwin's grandfather, Erasmus Darwin. Eiseley points out the irony that the Great Chain of Being, created by Christian thinkers, which was designed to demonstrate the completeness of God's creation by presenting creatures in an ascending sequence from the lowliest creatures at the "bottom level of creation" to humans at the top. Evolutionists later borrowed this scheme and used it for their own purposes. Eiseley then discusses many thinkers and theorists who had put forth their own small piece of the puzzle: Lamarck, Linnaeus, and Malthus, among numerous others.
Eiseley then brings in one of the most important works for the further development of evolutionary theory; Charles Lyell, whose incredibly influential Principles of Geology, first published in 1834, argued for a much much longer time span for the existence of the earth than the six thousand years many Christian theologians and thinkers had postulated based on their study of the Old Testament. Now, with many millions of years to work in, random selection now had the time available to be effective.
Darwin's seminal work, The Origin of Species, does not, as Eiseley argues, appear out of a vacuum. Rather it draws together many differing threads and ideas, all viewed by Darwin through a perspective gained by his voyage on the Beagle which visited various parts of the world, especially South America, where both new animals and plants appeared along with many that were to be found in Europe and Africa. This raised the question: why did some creatures, plants and animals, appear in the Old and New Worlds and why were there creatures unique only to the New World.
After the publication of The Origin of Species, Darwin faced considerable opposition from both the Christian defenders of Genesis and from scientists of considerable repute. He also gained the strong support of Alfred Lord Wallace, who also published a work on evolution shortly after Darwin, and Thomas Huxley, who became known as Darwin's Bulldog. His grandson, Aldous Huxley, is the author of Brave New World and The Doors of Perception. The opposition of the scientists was quelled by the discovery of Mendel's work on genetic inheritance and by a greater understanding of the sun. Some scientists argued that the world couldn't have lasted millions of years because the sun would have consumed itself in much less time. This was caused by an inadequate appreciation of the sun and its processes.
The only weakness in Eiseley's work is his overly optimistic belief that the opposition to evolution has disappeared. Darwin's Century was published in 1958, approximately a century after Darwin's Origin of Species, and at that time he could not foresee the rise of religious opposition once again to evolutionary theory to the point where a significant portion of the US population does not accept evolution nor any span of time longer than six thousand years of existence for the universe.
Highly recommended for those interested in the early history of evolution and for those who just en;joy reading anything by Loren Eiseley (readers like me).
Eiseley begins with the early theories about the creation of life including that from The Bible in Genesis and hints of a evolutionary process by various thinkers, including those from Charles Darwin's grandfather, Erasmus Darwin. Eiseley points out the irony that the Great Chain of Being, created by Christian thinkers, which was designed to demonstrate the completeness of God's creation by presenting creatures in an ascending sequence from the lowliest creatures at the "bottom level of creation" to humans at the top. Evolutionists later borrowed this scheme and used it for their own purposes. Eiseley then discusses many thinkers and theorists who had put forth their own small piece of the puzzle: Lamarck, Linnaeus, and Malthus, among numerous others.
Eiseley then brings in one of the most important works for the further development of evolutionary theory; Charles Lyell, whose incredibly influential Principles of Geology, first published in 1834, argued for a much much longer time span for the existence of the earth than the six thousand years many Christian theologians and thinkers had postulated based on their study of the Old Testament. Now, with many millions of years to work in, random selection now had the time available to be effective.
Darwin's seminal work, The Origin of Species, does not, as Eiseley argues, appear out of a vacuum. Rather it draws together many differing threads and ideas, all viewed by Darwin through a perspective gained by his voyage on the Beagle which visited various parts of the world, especially South America, where both new animals and plants appeared along with many that were to be found in Europe and Africa. This raised the question: why did some creatures, plants and animals, appear in the Old and New Worlds and why were there creatures unique only to the New World.
After the publication of The Origin of Species, Darwin faced considerable opposition from both the Christian defenders of Genesis and from scientists of considerable repute. He also gained the strong support of Alfred Lord Wallace, who also published a work on evolution shortly after Darwin, and Thomas Huxley, who became known as Darwin's Bulldog. His grandson, Aldous Huxley, is the author of Brave New World and The Doors of Perception. The opposition of the scientists was quelled by the discovery of Mendel's work on genetic inheritance and by a greater understanding of the sun. Some scientists argued that the world couldn't have lasted millions of years because the sun would have consumed itself in much less time. This was caused by an inadequate appreciation of the sun and its processes.
The only weakness in Eiseley's work is his overly optimistic belief that the opposition to evolution has disappeared. Darwin's Century was published in 1958, approximately a century after Darwin's Origin of Species, and at that time he could not foresee the rise of religious opposition once again to evolutionary theory to the point where a significant portion of the US population does not accept evolution nor any span of time longer than six thousand years of existence for the universe.
Highly recommended for those interested in the early history of evolution and for those who just en;joy reading anything by Loren Eiseley (readers like me).
Monday, December 3, 2012
Loren Eiseley: Some short poems and a haiku by Roka
Footnote to Autumn
Old boulders in the autumn sun and wind,
Settling a little, leaning toward the light
As if to store its summer--these remain
The earth's last gesture in the falling night.
This then is age: It is to have been worked
By the forces of frost and the unloosing sun,
It is to bear such markings fine and proud
As speak of weathers that are long since done.
The second stanza: could that refer to people? I have seen photographs of people whose faces seem to tell the stories of their lives.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Night Snow
Nothing
Is lovelier
Than snowflakes at midnight
Drifting out of the dark above the
Streetlamps.
-- Loren Eiseley --
I can remember winter nights in Chicago, looking out the window at the snow coming down in the light of the streetlight in front of our house.
- - - - - - - - - - -
Old Wharf at Midnight
Under
All decay sounds
The restless monotone
Of the sea at midnight creeping beneath
Old piers.
- - - - - - - - - - -
The Dark Reader
Old moons
these nights and years,
and moss on broken stones . . .
Who stoops by glow-worm lamps to read
your name?
-- Loren Eiseley --
from The Lost Notebooks of Loren Eiseley
- - - - - - - - - - -
Winter rain deepens
Lichened letters on the grave . . .
And my old sadness
-- Roka --
from A Little Treasury of Haiku
Old boulders in the autumn sun and wind,
Settling a little, leaning toward the light
As if to store its summer--these remain
The earth's last gesture in the falling night.
This then is age: It is to have been worked
By the forces of frost and the unloosing sun,
It is to bear such markings fine and proud
As speak of weathers that are long since done.
The second stanza: could that refer to people? I have seen photographs of people whose faces seem to tell the stories of their lives.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Night Snow
Nothing
Is lovelier
Than snowflakes at midnight
Drifting out of the dark above the
Streetlamps.
-- Loren Eiseley --
I can remember winter nights in Chicago, looking out the window at the snow coming down in the light of the streetlight in front of our house.
- - - - - - - - - - -
Old Wharf at Midnight
Under
All decay sounds
The restless monotone
Of the sea at midnight creeping beneath
Old piers.
- - - - - - - - - - -
The Dark Reader
Old moons
these nights and years,
and moss on broken stones . . .
Who stoops by glow-worm lamps to read
your name?
-- Loren Eiseley --
from The Lost Notebooks of Loren Eiseley
- - - - - - - - - - -
Winter rain deepens
Lichened letters on the grave . . .
And my old sadness
-- Roka --
from A Little Treasury of Haiku
Saturday, October 13, 2012
Immersion: Wendell Berry and Loren Eiseley
"I have been walking in the woods, and have lain down on the ground to rest. It is the middle of October, and around me, all through the woods, the leaves are quietly sifting down. The newly fallen leaves make a dry, comfortable bed, and I lie easy, coming to rest within myself as I seem to do nowadays only when I am in the woods.
And now a leaf, spiraling down in wild flight, lands on my shirt at about the third button below the collar. At first I am bemused and mystified by the coincidence--that the leaf should have been so hung, weighted and shaped, so ready to fall, so nudged loose and slanted by the breeze, as to fall where I, by the same delicacy of circumstance, happened to be lying. The event, among all its ramifying causes and considerations, and finally its mysteries, begins to take on the magnitude of history. Portent begins to dwell in it.
And suddenly I apprehend in it the dark proposal of the ground. Under the fallen leaf my breastbone burns with imminent decay. Other leaves fall. My body begins its long shudder into humus. I feel my subtstance escape me, carried into the mold by beetles and worms. Days, winds, seasons pass over me as I sink under the leaves. For a time only sight is left me, a passive awareness of the sky overhead, birds crossing, the mazed interreaching of the treetops, the leaves falling--and then that , too, sinks away. It is acceptable to me, and I am at peace.
When I move to go, it is as though I rise up out of the world."
-- Wendell Berry --
from Autumn: A Spiritual Biography of the Season
edited by Gary Schmidt and Susan M. Felch
Skylight Paths Publishing
Loren Eiseley has been walking for many hours and has come to the Platte River in Nebraska, which stretches from the Rockies to the Missouri and then to the Gulf of Mexico. He is hot and dry and dusty. The River is cold yet inviting and only a few inches deep in most places, but still there are dangerous holes and quicksands. He is alone and he can't swim and he is afraid of water as the result of a childhood incident. Yet, the sight of the River stirs him "with a new idea. I was going to float."
"I thought of all this, standing quietly in the water, feeling the sand shifting away under my toes. Then I lay back in the floating position that left my face to the sky, and shoved off. The sky wheeled over me. For an instant, as I bobbed into the main channel, I had the sensation of sliding down the vast tilted face of the continent. It was then that I felt the cold needles of the alpine springs at my fingertips, and the warmth of the Gulf pulling me southward. Moving with me, leaving its taste upon my mouth and spouting under me in dancing springs of sand, was the immense body of the continent itself, flowing like the river was flowing, grain by grain, mountain by mountain, down to the sea. I was streaming over ancient sea beds thrust aloft where giant reptiles had once sported; I was wearing down the face of time and trundling cloud-wreathed ranges into oblivion. I touched my margins with the delicacy of a crayfish's antennae, and felt great fishes glide about their work.
I drifted by stranded timber cut by beaver in mountain fastnesses; I slid over shallows that had buried the broken axles of prairie schooners and the mired bones of mammoth. I was streaming alive through the hot and working ferment of the sun, or oozing secretively through shady thickets. I was water and the unspeakable alchemies that gestate and take shape in water, the slimy jellies that under the enormous magnification of the sun writhe and whip upward as great barbeled fish mouths, or sink indistinctly back into the murk out of which they arose. Turtle and fish and the pinpoint chirpings of individual frogs are all watery projections, concentrations--as man himself is a concentration--of that indescribable and liquid brew which is compounded in varying proportions of salt and sun and time. It has appearances, but at its heart lies water, and as I was finally edged gently against a sand bar and dropped like any log, I tottered as I arose. I knew once more the body's revolt against emergence into the harsh and unsupporting air, its reluctance to break contact with that mother element which still, at this late point in time, shelters and brings into being nine tenths of everything alive."
-- Loren Eiseley --
from The Immense Journey
While the circumstances are different, and the ideas and the tones are different, the experiences, I think, are the same--the loss of self into the world about. Berry's is about the ultimate end of all of us--death--and he concludes that "It is acceptable to me, and I am at peace." Eiseley's theme is about the unity of all--water, life, the continent. He recapitulates in a way the emergence of life out of non-life.
I've had only three experiences that could be considered somewhat similar, although the overall tone was one of an overwhelming sense of peace and unity. The first time was while I was driving along the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. I had been there for several hours and had made several stops at various viewpoints along the road. I had a tape in the player and it was playing one of Beethoven's symphonies when I was filled with a sense of peace and belonging? The feeling is indescribable. The second occurred years later, when I was returning from another trip to the Grand Canyon and I was driving south from Prescott, Arizona when it happened again, and this time I was listening to Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. There seems to be a pattern here: the Grand Canyon, driving, and Beethoven.
The third and last time was, again, years later when I was driving through the upper part of Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado. The road wound among the peaks with a deep valley to one side and around each corner was another spectacular vista. This time I was playing a tape of Beethoven's 6th Symphony.
Patterns?
I'm hoping for a fourth, but . . .
And you?
And now a leaf, spiraling down in wild flight, lands on my shirt at about the third button below the collar. At first I am bemused and mystified by the coincidence--that the leaf should have been so hung, weighted and shaped, so ready to fall, so nudged loose and slanted by the breeze, as to fall where I, by the same delicacy of circumstance, happened to be lying. The event, among all its ramifying causes and considerations, and finally its mysteries, begins to take on the magnitude of history. Portent begins to dwell in it.
And suddenly I apprehend in it the dark proposal of the ground. Under the fallen leaf my breastbone burns with imminent decay. Other leaves fall. My body begins its long shudder into humus. I feel my subtstance escape me, carried into the mold by beetles and worms. Days, winds, seasons pass over me as I sink under the leaves. For a time only sight is left me, a passive awareness of the sky overhead, birds crossing, the mazed interreaching of the treetops, the leaves falling--and then that , too, sinks away. It is acceptable to me, and I am at peace.
When I move to go, it is as though I rise up out of the world."
-- Wendell Berry --
from Autumn: A Spiritual Biography of the Season
edited by Gary Schmidt and Susan M. Felch
Skylight Paths Publishing
Loren Eiseley has been walking for many hours and has come to the Platte River in Nebraska, which stretches from the Rockies to the Missouri and then to the Gulf of Mexico. He is hot and dry and dusty. The River is cold yet inviting and only a few inches deep in most places, but still there are dangerous holes and quicksands. He is alone and he can't swim and he is afraid of water as the result of a childhood incident. Yet, the sight of the River stirs him "with a new idea. I was going to float."
"I thought of all this, standing quietly in the water, feeling the sand shifting away under my toes. Then I lay back in the floating position that left my face to the sky, and shoved off. The sky wheeled over me. For an instant, as I bobbed into the main channel, I had the sensation of sliding down the vast tilted face of the continent. It was then that I felt the cold needles of the alpine springs at my fingertips, and the warmth of the Gulf pulling me southward. Moving with me, leaving its taste upon my mouth and spouting under me in dancing springs of sand, was the immense body of the continent itself, flowing like the river was flowing, grain by grain, mountain by mountain, down to the sea. I was streaming over ancient sea beds thrust aloft where giant reptiles had once sported; I was wearing down the face of time and trundling cloud-wreathed ranges into oblivion. I touched my margins with the delicacy of a crayfish's antennae, and felt great fishes glide about their work.
I drifted by stranded timber cut by beaver in mountain fastnesses; I slid over shallows that had buried the broken axles of prairie schooners and the mired bones of mammoth. I was streaming alive through the hot and working ferment of the sun, or oozing secretively through shady thickets. I was water and the unspeakable alchemies that gestate and take shape in water, the slimy jellies that under the enormous magnification of the sun writhe and whip upward as great barbeled fish mouths, or sink indistinctly back into the murk out of which they arose. Turtle and fish and the pinpoint chirpings of individual frogs are all watery projections, concentrations--as man himself is a concentration--of that indescribable and liquid brew which is compounded in varying proportions of salt and sun and time. It has appearances, but at its heart lies water, and as I was finally edged gently against a sand bar and dropped like any log, I tottered as I arose. I knew once more the body's revolt against emergence into the harsh and unsupporting air, its reluctance to break contact with that mother element which still, at this late point in time, shelters and brings into being nine tenths of everything alive."
-- Loren Eiseley --
from The Immense Journey
While the circumstances are different, and the ideas and the tones are different, the experiences, I think, are the same--the loss of self into the world about. Berry's is about the ultimate end of all of us--death--and he concludes that "It is acceptable to me, and I am at peace." Eiseley's theme is about the unity of all--water, life, the continent. He recapitulates in a way the emergence of life out of non-life.
I've had only three experiences that could be considered somewhat similar, although the overall tone was one of an overwhelming sense of peace and unity. The first time was while I was driving along the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. I had been there for several hours and had made several stops at various viewpoints along the road. I had a tape in the player and it was playing one of Beethoven's symphonies when I was filled with a sense of peace and belonging? The feeling is indescribable. The second occurred years later, when I was returning from another trip to the Grand Canyon and I was driving south from Prescott, Arizona when it happened again, and this time I was listening to Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. There seems to be a pattern here: the Grand Canyon, driving, and Beethoven.
The third and last time was, again, years later when I was driving through the upper part of Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado. The road wound among the peaks with a deep valley to one side and around each corner was another spectacular vista. This time I was playing a tape of Beethoven's 6th Symphony.
Patterns?
I'm hoping for a fourth, but . . .
And you?
Tuesday, October 9, 2012
Loren Eiseley: "Wind Child"
WIND CHILD
They have just found where Monarch butterflies go
in autumn
those red-gold drifters edged in black
that blow like leaves but never
quite coming to rest,
always fluttering
a little out of reach,
disapearing
over the next house, or just making it
above the hedge
flickering evasively through the last sunlight,
the attrition tremendous,
thousands die,
blown to sea, lost to children, lost to enemies but
beating, beating on,
speed fourteen miles an hour on a three-thousand mile
course to Mexico.
Where is the compass?
We don't know.
How did the habit start?
We don't know.
Why do the insects gather
in great clumps on trees
in the Sierra Madre?
We don't know.
They are individualists. They fly alone. Who wouldn't
in autumn
like to rock and waver southward like an everblowing leaf
over and through forests and hedges,
float in the glades
sip the last nectar?
What a way to go, you make it, or you don't, or the winds
snatch you away.
Fly Monarchs and then, if your wings are not too old and frayed,
start the long road back in the spring. Nature is
prodigal in numbers
prodigal of her milkweed children (did they learn to travel
from milkweed down?)
But I was overlooked, am really not human,
would be first a tiger-striped caterpillar
and then a Monarch, elusive, flickering, solitary
blowing on storms and beating, always beating
to go somewhere else, to another flower.
Over the fence then. Out of humanity.
I am a wind child.
-- Loren Eiseley --
from Another Kind of Autumn
This, to me, is the most evocative part of the poem. I can close my eyes and see them, remember them doing exactly this. I don't know if they were Monarchs, but I do remember butterflies fluttering over rooftops and then barely clearing a low hedge, pausing briefly at a blossom or a brightly colored shirt on a clothesline, and then moving on, always moving on. It is hard to believe that they are hardy enough to make a journey of thousands of miles and then some able to come back several seasons later. .
those red-gold drifters edged in black
that blow like leaves but never
quite coming to rest,
always fluttering
a little out of reach,
disapearing
over the next house, or just making it
above the hedge
flickering evasively through the last sunlight,
Shakespeare has Hamlet at one point say "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."--even such an ordinary, commonplace creature as a butterfly is a marvel, once we look closely at it.
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