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"?

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

Loren Eiseley on empathy

I don't think the following statement could be any clearer:


No, it is not because I am filled with obscure guilt that I step gently over, and not upon, an autumn cricket.  It is not because of guilt that I refuse to shoot the last osprey from her nest in the tide marsh.  I possess empathy;  I have grown with man in his mind's growing.  I share that sympathy and compassion which extends beyond the barriers of class and race and form until it partakes of the universal whole.  I am not ashamed to profess this emotion, nor will I call it a pathology.   Only through this experience many times repeated and enhanced does man become truly human.  Only then will his gun arm be forever lowered.  I pray that it may sometime be so.

Loren Eiseley (1907-1977)
from The Lost Notebooks of Loren Eiseley   

Most people, I believe, have reached that stage where they have empathy for others who are like them in culture and beliefs and color and economic status.   Going beyond that to embrace all humans is a long way off as anyone can see from reading the latest headlines.  Loren Eiseley has gone beyond that stage to have empathy for all life--two evolutionary stages beyond most of us. Who knows?  Maybe in a few centuries, the human race might be only one stage behind him.  Unfortunately, I don't believe I shall be around to see it.