The Star Thrower, by Loren Eiseley
Once upon a time, there was a wise man who used to go to the ocean to
do his writing. He had a habit of walking on the beach before he began
his work. One day, as he was walking along the shore, he looked down
the beach and saw a human figure moving like a dancer. He smiled to
himself at the thought of someone who would dance to the day, and so,
he walked faster to catch up.
As he got closer, he noticed that
the figure was that of a young man, and that what he was doing was not
dancing at all. The young man was reaching down to the shore, picking
up small objects, and throwing them into the ocean. He came closer
still and called out "Good morning! May I ask what it is that you are
doing?"
The young man paused, looked up, and replied "Throwing starfish into the ocean."
"I must ask, then, why
are you throwing starfish into the ocean?" To this, the young man
replied, "The sun is up and the tide is going out. If I don't throw
them in, they'll die."
Upon hearing this, the wise man
commented, "But, young man, do you not realize that there are miles and
miles of beach and there are starfish all along every mile? You can't
possibly make a difference!"
At this, the young man bent down,
picked up yet another starfish, and threw it into the ocean. As it met
the water, he said, "It made a difference for that one."
Loren
Eiseley died in 1977. He was a scientist and humanist greatly alarmed
at the accelerating destruction of our planet in the last century, and
would, I am sure, have been horrified at the setbacks at the start of
the 21st century. Eiseley wrote several books on anthropology and
natural philosophy, and, in a very different style, some dense, complex
and (to me) inaccessible poetry.
What I find astonishing is
that his prose seems more lyrical, more moving and profound and
passionate than his verse. So, below, I'm taking the liberty of
presenting some excerpts from his scientific and philosophical writing
as poetry, parsing them as I think they would flow if Eiseley himself
were to read them aloud. The 'titles' are my own ostentation.
our reputation precedes us
I have never entered a wood
but what I hear
footsteps in the leaves
tiptoeing
away
dying to remember
Man would kill for shadowy ideas
more ferociously than other creatures
kill for food,
then,
in a generation or less,
forget what bloody dream
had so oppressed him
"the notion of some infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing"
Let men beat men, if they will,
but why do they have to beat and starve
small things?
Why? -- Why? I will never forget that dog's eyes,
nor the
eyes of every starved mongrel I have fed from Curacao to Cuernavaca.
Nor the drowning one I once fished out of an irrigation ditch in
California,
only to see him limp away with his ribs showing
as mine
once showed in that cabin long ago in Manitou.
This is why I am a
wanderer forever in the streets of men,
a wanderer in mind,
and, in
these matters, a creature of desperate impulse.
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
posses 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.
nothing sacred
Modern man, the world eater,
respects no space
and no thing green or
furred as sacred.
The march of the machines has entered his blood.
And if inventions of power outrun understanding,
as they now threaten to
do,
man may well sink into a night
more abysmal than any he has yet
experienced.
on playing with a young fox
for just a moment
I 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
how we learn
The teacher must teach men
not alone to dream,
but to dream so
substantially
that they will never in after years
capitulate through
the demands of a passing and ephemeral materialism.
It has ever been my
lot,
though formally myself a teacher,
to be taught surely by none.
There are times
when I have thought to read lessons in the sky,
or in
books,
or from the behavior of my fellows,
but in the end my
perceptions
have been frequently inadequate or betrayed.
Nevertheless,
I venture to say
that of what man may be
I have caught a fugitive
glimpse,
not among multitudes of men,
but along an endless wave-beaten
coast at dawn.
re discovery
Every time we walk along a beach
some ancient urge disturbs us
so that
we find ourselves shedding shoes and garments
or scavenging among
seaweed and whitened timbers
like the homesick refugees of a long war.
other
one does not meet oneself
until one catches the reflection
from an eye other
than human
pacing
many of us
who walk to and fro upon our usual tasks
are prisoners
drawing mental maps of escape
the secret
there are things
down
there
still
coming ashore
the gift
The power to change is both creative and destructive --
a sinister gift,
which,
unrestricted,
leads onward toward the formless and inchoate void
of the possible.
Mostly the animals understand their roles,
but man,
by comparison,
seems troubled by a message that,
it is often said,
he
cannot quite remember,
or has gotten wrong.
a difficult re-entry
The nature of the human predicament
is how nature is to be reentered;
how man,
the relatively unthinking and proud creator of the second
world --
the world of culture --
may revivify and restore the first world
which cherished and brought him into being.
For what, increasingly, is
required of man
is that he pursue the paradox of return.
Yet man
does not wish to retrace his steps
down to the margins of the reeds and
peer within,
lest by some magic he be permanently recaptured.
Instead,
men prefer to hide
in cities of their own devising.
alchemy
I have lifted up a fistful of that ground.
I held it
while that wild
flight of south-bound warblers
hurtled over me into the oncoming dark.
There went phosphorus, there went iron,
there went carbon, there beat
the calcium
in those hurrying wings.
"and time future contained in time past"
we lack the penetration
to see the present and the onrushing future
contending for the soft feathers of a flying bird,
or a beetle's armor,
or shaking painfully
the frail confines of the human heart
man is himself a flame --
he has burned through the animal world
and appropriated its vast stores of protein for his own
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
and if it should turn out
that we
have mishandled our own lives
as several civilizations before us have
done,
it seems a pity that we should involve the violet
and the tree
frog in our departure
the mystery
In the world
there is nothing
below a certain depth
that is truly
explanatory:
It is as if matter dreamed
and muttered in its sleep.
But
why,
and for what reason it dreams,
there is no evidence.
A couple of readers have asked me to explain the expression après nous les dragons
that I have used in several of my essays and one of my poems. It's
adapted from this excerpt from Eiseley's book The Night Country:
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, humans are the unlikely consequence or such forces.
In the spring when a breath of wind sets the propellers of the maple
tree whirring, I always say to myself hopefully, "After us the
dragons." It is not out of sadistic malice that I have carried
cockleburs out of their orbit or blown puffball smoke into new worlds.
One out of these seeds may grope forward into the future and writhe out
of its current shape. It is similarly so on the windswept uplands of
the human mind.
When
Eiseley says "After us the dragons" I take this to mean that, as an
anthropologist (as fellow anthropologist Stephen Jay Gould explained so
well in Full House) he understands that the emergence of humans (and even animals with backbones) on the planet
was an improbable accident, a one in many million unlikelihood, and
that the emergent forms of previous evolutions of life on our planet
and all the other planets that support it in the universe were/are
undoubtedly strange, unimaginable, perhaps even unrecognizable to us as
life. He would be aware, too, of the evolution of birds
from the dinosaurs, and their ability to survive when the dinosaurs
perished. Are his "dragons" birds, strange flying reptiles? Or perhaps
dragonflies, a member of the other genus, insects, that thrives on
catastrophe and is so adaptable it is likely to outlive us and do well
in the next phase of life on Earth? Or is he being metaphorical and
referring to dragons as any strange, unimaginable, wonderful species
that will rise after our fall? Or all three?
I
have translated Eiseley's phrase into French a bit mischievously, since
the word 'dragon' in French has the additional connotations of monster,
demigogue, or soldier. Another inspiration for the translation to
French: It was Louis XV, the end of a line, the king who presided over
a horrifically inegalitarian empire, bankrupted, its treasury looted by
the rich (sound familiar?), who, realizing its instability and unsustainability, said "Après moi le deluge" -- after me come the floods (as an additional historical irony, part of his empire at that time was New Orleans).
If
I haven't been sufficiently pretentious so far, I'd like to conclude
with a concatenation of another quote from Eiseley, in italics below
(which I only just discovered yesterday, from his 1978 book The Star Thrower),
followed by one of my own poems, written 35 years ago, dream-inspired, after a night
sleeping under the stars. I think they just go together, almost eerily:
With time,
the bony fin is transformed into a paw,
a round, insectivorous eye
into the near-sighted gaze of a scholar.
At night the forest is not what it seems,
The wolf, in the shadows of half-sleep, evolves into a dragonfly,
the fire into a clown, the owl into a junkie, the lady into a child in
rags.
The forest becomes a desert, then a city. The clown offers a balloon to
the child,
watches it rise into the crimson sky,
pulsing with ventricular booms.
The junkie becomes a priest.
Child becomes a surgeon.
Clown becomes a voodoo magician, laughs the laugh of birth and death.
Dragonfly into hypodermic, into the arm of the Patient Lover.
In the heart of the night come the mating calls.
The rapturous moans of the opium den.
On the beach of no footprints,
by the night lit by lightning,
is a scorpion with wolf's tattered claws.
Becomes a sea-snake
rising to the song of a flute
played by a woman clothed in strips of ragged fur.
Then the shadow of a vulture,
wearing the cloth of last rites,
and the snake's devoured.
Thanks to the many Loren Eiseley fan sites for the quotes above, especially Tom Thomson's wonderful Earth Talk and, for the starfish story, MuttCats. |
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