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 dying to remember Man would kill for shadowy ideas “the notion of some infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing” Let men beat men, if they will, This is why I am a wanderer forever in the streets of men, It is not because I am filled with obscure guilt I am not ashamed to profess this emotion, nor will I call it a pathology. Only then will his gun arm be forever lowered. nothing sacred Modern man, the world eater, The march of the machines has entered his blood. And if inventions of power outrun understanding, on playing with a young fox for just a moment by the simple expedient it is the gravest, most meaningful act I shall ever accomplish, there is no use reporting it to the Royal Society how we learn The teacher must teach men It has ever been my lot, Nevertheless, I venture to say but along an endless wave-beaten coast at dawn. re discovery Every time we walk along a beach other one does not meet oneself until one catches the reflection from an eye other than human pacing many of us the secret there are things the gift The power to change is both creative and destructive — Mostly the animals understand their roles, or has gotten wrong. a difficult re-entry The nature of the human predicament For what, increasingly, is required of man Yet man does not wish to retrace his steps Instead, men prefer to hide alchemy I have lifted up a fistful of that ground. There went phosphorus, there went iron, “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 — it has been said repeatedly that one can never, and if it should turn out it seems a pity that we should involve the violet the mystery In the world It is as if matter dreamed But why, A couple of readers have asked me to explain the expression apr®s 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 “Apr®s 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, At night the forest is not what it seems, 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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Brief note on the formatting of the ‘poems’: My HTML editor has automatically stripped leading blanks at the start of lines, and multiple blanks between words, somewhat diminishing the effect of my formatting. Anyone suggest a way to put these blanks back in? Poetry needs S P A C E!
“otherone does not meet oneself until one catches the reflection from an eye other than human”This reminds me of something the medium George Anderson has said—that animals are the eyes of God.
Here is a reference for spaces in poems:http://www.webdevelopersnotes.com/tips/html/11.php3A Christmas present.
Nice.
Echoing the prophecy…..a poem for your readers….more can be found on my site http://on-michael,sophisticaworld.silkblogs.com“a new beginning”I stood upon the hillwrapped in my frockthe dampness filled my lungsand all I could see was barren landThere was no movementexcept the heaving of my chest when I breathedThere was no colorfor I had been blinded by the flashThe silence was unbearableuntil I heard a raven in the distanceand I knew he had found meand I himHe feared not Inor I himand he landed on my shoulderand I could hear him restlessI reached into my pocketand pulled out a handful of dried cornand I fed himWe spent eternity togetherand when I walked away from this placehe circled high and lowand I followed himMy sight over the next few weeks improvedand one day when the corn ran outand Arias was flying high and lowI came upon a forest greenand heard a spring riverbedI drank from the water Arias had found for usand he drank toomy parched lips cracked and bleadingand I heard the voices singingwe followed the melodic melancholyuntil we came to a waterfalldeep within the forestand the voices went silentand I fearedThen I felt a hand on my shoulderand Arias was not to be foundand the hand turned me aroundand I saw her standing therewith Arias upon her shoulderand she sang for me and AriasThe others came out of hidingand joined us in song and friendshipand I swear I could see Arias smiling at meI never gave it a second thought againand Arias and I lived out our livesamongst our new found friendsand joined often in songas we shared a new beginning together_mp 2005
lovely. thank you. …. how do you find a balance between this awareness of the grandeur of the natural world, and the sort of dry intellectual putting-things-in-boxes of the business/KM world? i am struggling with this myself, as i work in the software industry but my hobbies/passions range far afield…
Eiseley is a poetic writer who was recognized as such by the likes of W. H. Auden. (Auden wrote the intro to Star Thrower.) Eiseley did write several volumes of poetry. Here is a sonnet dedicated to Eiseley and written by Dennis Hammes:Your loved land lay beneath a scalding skyWhere time itself solidifies to rockThat whitewigged rivers swear into the dockTo spill its guts on how things come to die.Your questions even made it tell us why.How can the mayfly ear know stones’ own talkThat does not understand the soul in hockTo lives beyond itself the hour may buy? And yet you moaned the minutes of the livesThat pressed the clay to purpose, seeing brokenAll the bluebrushed bowls, the careful knives,The vanquished bone or daisytwisted tokenVanished boys bragged to their grinning wives –When you were what they wrote, now to be spoken.http://www.the-rathouse.com/DMHammes.html
Thanks, everyone. And Narr, thanks for the present. I’m already having trouble uploading my posts because of the size of my pages (I’ve switched from displaying the last 5 days instead of the last 7) — all I need is a few hundred ‘ ’s thrown in to really strain Userland to the max. Lawrence, waking up hungry helps me focus half my time on the dry stuff ;-)