Searching for Loren Eiseley:
An Attempt at Reconstruction from a Few Fragments

Gene V Glass
Arizona State University

Literati often view scientists with mixed feelings of awe, envy and perhaps pained disappointment. Loren Corey Eiseley might have won the admiration of poets sooner had he not first appeared in scientist's clothing. To regard him as a scientist who wrote well (a Bronowski, a Snow) or a tinkerer with the left hand, however, would be a misapprehension, and worse, a condescension.

Many onlookers were slow to recognize Eiseley's talent. W. H. Auden was one who was not. They met once, in the early 1970s in New York City. The conversation was recalled by Eiseley in his autobiography, All The Strange Hours, published in 1975. Auden could be short with scientists. He had once written, "Thou shalt not sit/ With statisticians nor commit/ A social science." (Note 1) He would not have long suffered a foolish scientist, not for all the ardent pleas to bridge the two cultures. Their one meeting was warm; they spoke of childhood and earliest memories. A poem soon appeared dedicated to Auden. Eiseley probably wrote it on the train ride back to Philadelphia after their meeting. Auden looked forward eagerly to the first published volume of Eiseley's poems, The Innocent Assassins: "I know that whatever else they may be, they are not going to sound like anybody else." He was proud that "And As For Man" was dedicated to him.

In 1970, Auden published a critical appreciation of Eiseley's work in The New Yorker. He praised Eiseley; he had read everything Eiseley had written. The subject of Eiseley's work evoked the gnostic, the mystical in Auden. "I must now openly state my own bias and say that I do not believe in Chance; I believe in Providence and Miracles." "I do not personally believe there is such a thing as a 'random' event. 'Unpredictable' is a factual description; 'random' contains, without having the honesty to admit it, a philosophical bias typical of persons who have forgotten how to pray. Though he does use the term once, I don't think Dr. Eiseley believes in it either." Yet, for all the vicarious satisfaction one might feel to see one poet so honored by another, Auden's praises fail to illuminate one side of Eiseley, perhaps the more important side. Eiseley was no prayerful man, short of some vague pantheistic sense of the word. The side of Eiseley that was left untouched by his admirer would not have been neglected by the early Auden, the Auden whom Edward Mendelson has shown to have been one of the first poets to read and be moved artistically by Freud. (Note 2) Auden could hardly have lost altogether his early fascination with the dynamics of inner emotional life. Perhaps for all its apparent cosmological rapture, Auden's response to Eiseley's work came in part from the understanding they shared: that the child lives on in the man. For, in spite of the numinous quality of his writings, Eiseley was no mystic. In the end, he revealed himself to be a psychologist--a student, an observer of the mind--with extraordinary gifts.
       

To regard Eiseley as a mystic does him no particular honor. The tag hangs awkwardly on a man who labored as a paleontologist during the most rigid and positivist half century of the science. Edward Hoagland read The Night Country and called Eiseley's imagination "transcendent." Robert Kirsch heard "a poetic cry, even a mystical one" in The Invisible Pyramid. In the foreword to The Innocent Assassins, Eiseley's first book of poetry, he declared his allegiances and gently reflected the aura of mysticism to its proper source:

As is readily observable, these are the poems of a bone Hunter and a naturalist, or at least those themes are Predominant in the book. Some have called me Gothic in my tastes. Others have chosen to regard me as a Platonist, a mystic, a concealed Christian, a midnight optimist. Like most poets I am probably all these things by turns, or such speculations are read into me by those who are pursuing some night path of their own.

No matter how much one might see in Eiseley's work, in the end to call it "mystical" is faint-hearted, a withholding of comprehension, perhaps even a staunching of an emotional response. One wishes to bar from conscious experience the unwelcome thoughts of death and love that Eiseley evokes with tangible objects and common actions. Mysticism is that which can not be rationally grasped; a work deemed mystical need not be fully apprehended and may be forgotten more easily. In this respect, an attitude toward literature may imitate an attitude toward dreams. A dreamer may transform his dreams into psychodrama or pick through them in search of archetypes and residue of the collective unconscious of the race; both routes bypass the terror of the dream, the terror that justifies the work of disguise that is characteristic of many dreams and some art. The inclination of mind that too quickly relegates either a dream or work of art to the category of mysticism may fail to understand either.
       

I wish most to dispell any notion that Eiseley was some sort of cosmic guru, a seer with eyes trained on the empty darkness beyond the solar system about which he wrote so much. He was a scientist with a poet's gifts. As he grew older, his scholarly writings grew more evocative and poetic, and he dared to publish more poetry. He died in 1977, less than two months short of his seventieth birthday; in 1975, he published an autobiography, All the Strange Hours. For twenty years, Eiseley had been digging at the site of his past life. In a poem or an essay, he would uncover a bone, regard it contemplatively, then toss it aside. In All the Strange Hours, he excavated an entire life. To understand Eiseley's writings, they must be read in reverse sequence. The autobiography is the key to the images and reflections that make up his ten books and few hundred poems. Eiseley's autobiography is easily one the most psychologically penetrating works to be published in a generation. It is built out of the reflections of an insomniac, from the recollections and night thoughts that come to a melancholic after the television set is shut off and the night grows too late for friends to telephone.

Autobiography

A paradox surrounds All the Strange Hours, as well as most of Eiseley's later writings. Although they may rightly be claimed among the most personally revealing portrayals of a life, Eiseley remains in conventional ways a private figure throughout and in the end. He has a wife, one can infer from two off-hand remarks. About his marriage no more is said. There may have been children, or there may not. The people who walked through his adult life are blurred, their conventional lineaments indistinct, seen through aged window panes, half hidden in shadows. Only his mother and his father are clearly drawn. The anonymity is appropriate, since persons in his adult life served in one way or another to help him hold onto an image of his parents and eventually understand them. Colleagues and friends must not be seen too clearly so that they may serve in place of those so clearly seen and never forgotten.

Eiseley explored and revealed those parts of his life so private that lesser writers run from them into numbing activity or drink. And yet he remained a private person. The paradox turns on precisely what it is he disclosed. He revealed nothing superficial that would give one the sense of acquaintance that marks a neighbor, say, as an individual. Did he prefer the Phillies to the Philadelphia Symphony? Did he always wear his hair in that dated pompadour the publicity photos reveal? All that one knows of him in conventional terms must be gathered from the dust covers and "About the Author" inscriptions, which must have embarrassed him painfully. In All the Strange Hours, Eiseley excavated the emotions of a painful life, yet he preserved privacy and dignity. He wrote of those things that now bind men together and always have: the wonder at life, the search for uncertain love, the fear of death. He revealed about himself that which is shared by all persons but which few can feel and fewer still can express. He betrayed nothing that was individual or that should have remained private.

The understanding and appreciation of Eiseley's poetry and expressive essays is enhanced when they are viewed psychoanalytically. Like a dream or an analytic hour, they are constructions of a rich unconscious reservoir, which Eiseley was extraordinarily capable of tapping. The seemingly illogical sequence of images is strung on a thread of unconscious need and conflict. Properly viewed, the images are coherent and complete, a logical expression of the child and man Eiseley was. He is Richard Jones's "dream poet," (Note 3) or Keats's man with vision, "well nurtured in his mother tounge"("For Poesy alone can tell her dreams, / with the fine spell of words alone can save / Imagination from the sable charm / and dumb enchantment.") His essays no less that his poems reflect the qualities of dreams: scenes shift rapidly through no apparent logical sequence; individuals are not developed as complete personalities, rather they are invoked to symbolize a single quality; and the images are visual scenes projected on a soundless background, as dreams are predominantly visual hallucinations. Through his own efforts, I assume, Eiseley struggled throughout his adult life to find a place beside his dream censor for a dream poet. He succeeded as few have.

The Hidden Teacher

One literary effort may serve as well as another to illustrate how Eiseley crafted poetry from his inner world. "The Hidden Teacher," an essay of some 5,000 words, which Eiseley wrote in about 1963, was first published in The Unexpected Universe (1969). It was republished in The Star Thrower (1978), which contains an introduction by Auden. It appears as the eleventh essay in the first section of The Star Thrower, which carried the title "Nature and autobiography." "The Hidden Teacher" seems a particularly challenging choice for analysis because of its opacity and mystical quality. The dramatis personae are unusual: a spider, a filamentous seed, the Hindu god Krishna, an eccentric professor raised by a Pequot-Mohegan squaw, a novelist haunted by a dream of a mirror.
       

The essay opens with a brief recounting of a portion of scripture (roughly, the 32nd through the 42nd chapters of the Book of Job). Job is questioned pitilessly by God, the voice in the whirlwind; he feels tormented and betrayed because God neither provided the answers nor manifested Himself. Wisdom is spoken by the young by-stander, Elihu: ". . . if the old are not always wise, neither can the teacher's way be ordered by the young whom he would teach." ("THT," p. 117) (Note 4) Eiseley's thesis is over 2,000 years old: ". . . our teachers may be hidden, even the greatest teacher" (p.116). Like Job, Eiseley may have felt old and put upon when he wrote this essay. He was in his late fifties; soon he would sit in the Provost's chair of his university. Students had begun to seek him out. He felt anger toward some of them; it intrudes once or twice in this essay. His message is ostensibly directed at those who loudly demanded the right to "evaluate" their professors and who, given the power, would have turned true education into something shallow and obvious. The introduction is a self-conscious reflection on the essay itself. It stands like a frame outside the rapid flow of images and scenes that soon follow. One can imagine its having been written last and tacked onto the essay proper, something of an apology, perhaps, for what might have struck even its author as opaque. The essay then rushes for 4,500 words through a sequence of five visual memories with interpolated reflections on the mystery and unpredictability of learning.
         

Eiseley is hunting fossils on a rainy morning in his beloved Badlands or Wild Cat Hills. He encounters a hug orb spider tending her web in the buffalo grass. He touches a strand of the web with a pencil; the spider tends her guy-lines, and tries to read the movements but the message is incomprehensible.

A pencil point was an intrusion into this universe for which no precedent existed. Spider was circumscribed by spider ideas; its universe was spider universe. All outside was irrational, extraneous, at best raw material for spider. As I proceeded on my way along the gully, like a vast impossible shadow, I realized that in the world of spider I did not exist. ("THT," p.117)

As he tramps on his way, he contemplates the white blood cells racing through his body, as indifferent to their host and ignorant of him as the spider is unknowing of the universe beyond her web. Thoughts rush in on Eiseley and the reader: the evolution of human life, the tenuous hold of the individual and the species to a place on the earth. Then, Eiseley offers his own analysis:

I saw, at last, the reason for my recollection of that great Spider on the arroyo's rim, fingering its universe against the sky. The spider was a symbol of man in miniature. The wheel of the web brought the analogy home clearly. Man, too, lies at the heart of a web, a web extending through the starry reaches of sidereal space, as well as backward into the dark realm of prehistory. His great eye upon Mount Palomar looks into a distance of millions of light-years, his radio ear hears the whisper of even more remote galaxies, he peers through the election microscope upon the minute particles of his own being. It is a web no creature of earth has ever spun before. Like the orb spider, man lies at the heart of it, listening. ("THT," p.119) What is it we are a part of that we do not see, as the spider was not gifted to discern my face, or my little probe into her world? ("THT," p.120)

True Learning, but more, begins in a sense of wonder. "Man . . . is at heart a listener and a searcher for some transcendent realm beyond himself . . . . he searches as the single living cell in the beginning must have sought the ghostly creature it was to serve. ("THT," p.121)

The scene shifts. Eiseley is standing in shopping center near his Philadelphia home. He sees what appears to be a long legged spider climbing down a wall. It swings into the air, rides the wind into the parking lot and then back toward him.

With great difficulty I discovered the creature was actually a filamentous seed, seeking a place to hide and scurrying about with the uncanny surety of a conscious animal. In fact, it did escape me before I could secure it. Its flexible limbs were stiffer than milkweed down, and, propelled by the wind, it ran rapidly and evasively over the pavement. It was like a gnome scampering somewhere with a hidden packet--for all that I could tell, a totally new one: one of the jumbled alphabets of life. ("THT," pp.121-2)

The "jumbled alphabet of life" is the DNA code, and Eiseley's brief meeting with this second spider causes him to wonder what strange mutations may lie in common places. He drops this thought without reflecting further on it. The third scene is introduced with two curious sentences.

It is told in the Orient of the Hindu god Krishna that his mother, wiping his mouth when he was a child, inadvertently peered in and beheld the universe, though the sight was mercifully and immediately veiled from her. In a sense, this is what happened to me. ("THT," p.122)

He recalls a scene from elementary school. The principal parades a young child from classroom to classroom. He is a calculating prodigy, perhaps more. Huge arithmetic problems are written on the chalkboard; the child, soon removed from school by his parents, was a missionary to the paleanthropes, sent to teach a moral lesson. Eiseley learned from him what none of them had intended to teach. . . we collapse inward with age. We die. Our bodies . . . are dismissed into their elements. What is carried onward, assuming we have descendants, is the little capsule of instructions such as I encountered hastening by me in the shape of a running seed. We have learned the first biological lesson: that in each generation life passes through the eye of a needle . . . As the ages pass, so too variants of the code . . . or the code changes by subtle degrees through the statistical altering of individuals; until I, as the fading Neanderthals must once have done, have looked with still-living eyes upon the creature whose genotype was possibly to replace me. ("THT," p. 234)

That which happened to Deva Ki was not what happened to Eiseley. She saw perfection and remained ignorant of it; he saw genius and recognized it. The similarity on which he first remarks must be found in some different meaning.
 

Eiseley pauses between the third and fourth recollections in a contemplation on the evolution of civilization, carried as it is on "invisible puffs of air known as words, which like the genetic code, are shuffled and reshuffled as they hurry through eternity. Like a mutation, an idea may be recorded in the wrong time, to lie latent like a recessive gene and spring once more to life in auspicious era." ("THT," p. 124)

He reaches back thirty years for the fourth scene. A young man, who later came to play a central role in Eiseley's life, sits in a university classroom; the intricacies of Hebrew linguistics are being deciphered. He speaks to his professor:   "I believe I can understand that, sir. It is very similar to what exists in Mohegan."  The linguist paused and adjusted his glasses. "Young man," he said, "Mohegan is a dead language. Nothing has been recorded of it since the eighteenth century. Don't bluff." "But sir," the young student countered hopefully, "it can't be dead so long as an old women I know still speaks it. She is Pequot-Mohegan. I learned a bit of vocabulary from her and could speak with her myself. She took care of me when I was a child." ("THT," pp.125-6)

Within months, the young man had published a paper on Mohegan linguistics; for the rest of his life he studied the language and culture of the northeastern Indians. He was changed by a hidden teacher.  But just who was the teacher? The young man himself, his instructor, or that solitary speaker of a dying tongue who had so yearned to hear her people's voice that she had softly jabbled it to a child?   Later, this man was to become one of my professors. I absorbed much from him . . . . I have regarded this man as an extraordinary individual, in fact, a hidden teacher. ("THT," p.126)

The final scene concerns a dream. A friend of Eiseley's, a writer, relates a dream that came to him while he was working on a novel. It might have been Eiseley's dream; it probably was, for he heard it recounted with "a sympathetic shudder" and asked "out of a comparable experience" of his own whether the writer ever dreamed it again.  

The writer dreams of walking a snowy path through an orchard that led to the porch of his childhood home. He peers through a window:  “I was drawn by a strange mixture of repulsion and desire to press my face against the glass. I knew intuitively they were all there waiting for me within, if I could by see them. My mother and my father. Those I had loved and those I hated. But the window was black to my gaze. I hesitated a moment and struck a match. For an instant in that freezing silence I saw my father's face glimmer wan and remote behind the glass. My mother's face was there, with the hard, distorted lines that marked her later years . . . . As the match guttered down, my face was pressed almost to the glass. In some quick transformation, such as only a dream can effect, I saw that it was my own face into which I stared, just as it was reflected in the black glass. ("THT," p. 127)