Loren Eiseley

Drew Kroft

English 370

11 May, 2009

The Eye and the Skull: Reconciling Romanticism and Science In the work of Loren Eiseley

Loren Eiseley was somewhat of an enigma. He refused to be pigeonholed, characterizing himself only as “’fugitive,’ ‘stranger,’ ‘freak’” (Gerber 2). On the one hand, he was an author, writing everything from memoirs to literary criticism. He even wrote poetry and fiction. On the other hand, he was an anthropologist and an archaeologist. The obvious question is: was he a scientist who dabbled in writing, or a writer who dabbled in science? I submit not only that he is neither, but that the question is reductive and ultimately not the point. More intriguing is the fact that these two occupations were often at odds. In writing, he was philosophical, intuitive, and romantic. In his scientific endeavors, he was more cold and clinical. Geldard says, “[He] combined a solid grasp of scientific empiricism with a profound trust in his intuitive insight into the nature and meaning of things” (252). When he wrote about science, though, there was often an inevitable conflict between the two approaches. This conflict takes many shapes and in many cases seems to be the driving force behind Eiseley’s literary output. In this essay, I’ll attempt to explain what may have caused Eiseley’s improbable position, and then I will examine four of the instances in Eiseley’s work where this opposition makes itself the most clear.

First, though, a note on a definition is in order. The word in the title used for Eiseley’s philosophical outlook is “Romanticism,” because it fits slightly better than “transcendentalism,” or “humanism.” Really, though, it is at once all and none of the above. Just as Eiseley could not abide being categorized, his thought and writing style cannot be easily classified. So, while I will continue to use these terms occasionally for lack of better words, they cannot be completely accurate.

In order to gain a thorough understanding of Eiseley’s philosophy, it is best to start with a short and, admittedly, incomplete biography (though the events of his life are a fascinating subject by themselves). With a deaf and difficult mother and a largely absent father, Eiseley spent much of his childhood with only nature and his own mind to keep him company. This gave him a very close psychological connection with nature and anthropology (Gerber 4-5). He was dissuaded from the field of literature during his freshman year in college, during which he was falsely accused of plagiarism, because his essay was “too well written” (5). He was a young man during the Great Depression, and also lived in the Dust Bowl, which seems likely to have contributed to his bouts of melancholy or downright despair in his writing. He said of living in the Dust Bowl, “No matter how far I travel, it will be a fading memory on my tongue in the hour of my death. It is the taste of one dust only, the dust of a receding ice age” (4). During the Depression, he became a drifter and itinerant fossil hunter, hitching on freight trains across the West, and was in continual dire straits and poor health. Eventually, he made his way back east, graduated college, and managed to get a job as a professor at the University of Kansas (9). The rest of his life was spent mostly in academia, moving between universities, research, and writing. The event of his early life remained an important influence on his work, though, for his entire academic career.

Loren Eiseley seems to continue closely in the tradition of his well-known predecessor, Henry David Thoreau. Both were philosophers and poets, and scientists to some degree, though Thoreau was more of an amateur scientist than was Eiseley. In fact, though, this makes all the difference; whereas Thoreau’s writing can become overly theoretical, Eiseley’s more often stays rooted solidly in the world of his scientific experience, making it both more readable and more relevant.

The best place to look for the opposition between Eiseley’s rationalism and romanticism (again, for lack of a better word), of course, is in his writing, where it speaks for itself.

In his essay, “The Long Loneliness,” Eiseley attempts to tackle what is, for him, a seminal issue: the difference between a human and an animal. (I am well aware that Eiseley is dead; however, he is immortalized in his literature. So, henceforth I will use the present tense to avoid confusion). He first illustrates the difference between animals and humans by asserting that humans are self-aware and have the ability to create and record history, which gives them the loneliness of the essay’s title. Then, though, in contradiction, he cites the example of the porpoise as an animal that might complicate this most basic of claims. As Eiseley puts it, “the brain of the porpoise is forty percent larger than man’s and is just as complex in its functional units.” This leads him to quote a leading marine biologist who said that “’man’s position at the top of the hierarchy [of intelligence] begins to be questioned’” (LL 38). The science behind all this is dubious, but it certainly gets Eiseley thinking. Eiseley goes on to talk at length about the methods of communication used by the porpoise, and how complex and adaptive and impressive they are. He wonders about why no porpoise civilization exists, but then immediately concludes that it is because porpoises have no appendages to build and use tools. He says, “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 upon the earth” (39). He goes on to imagine a porpoise with the intelligence of a human, always wandering but never having the ability to influence its own environment.

Admittedly, it does seem far-fetched to imagine a porpoise swimming around, asking existential questions of itself and its friends. Whether it is true or not, though, as a thought experiment it is valid. Eiseley compares the lifestyle of a self-aware porpoise favorably to that of a human. He cites our ability to build testaments to our continued existence early on in the essay, but eventually obverts it, showing something decidedly negative. The concluding paragraph contains two particularly penetrating sentences, the first of which is, “Perhaps man has something to learn after all from fellow creatures without the ability to drive harpoons through living flesh, or poison with strontium the planetary winds” (43), a scathing indictment of mankind’s negative influence on the environment which does not appear so clearly elsewhere in the essay. The second is, “If man had sacrificed his hands for flukes…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” (43). This second quote is especially telling, because of its carefully chosen language. The phrases “devastating power” and “wreak,” (a verb that is normally associated with the word “havoc”), suggest that mankind has inflicted some serious damage on the environment. And, the choice of “body of the world” actually connotes rape – an almost assuredly deliberate choice on Eiseley’s part. Still, though, there is some ambivalence. Eiseley himself cannot seem to wholeheartedly embrace the idea of being a figurant, of being unable to influence the world in any way. As the alternative to being human, he offers “forever the lonely and curious observer of unknown wreckage falling through the blue light of eternity” (43), hardly a more appealing option.

What is his conclusion, then? As far as human beings go, he loves the mind, but fears the hand. At the same time, though, when he imagines life with the mind but without the hand, he has trouble advocating it in any convincing way. At the last second, instead, he veers astray and tries to make a different point, saying, “It is worth at least 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” (44). At this point, then, the jury is still out.

In “Man the Firemaker,” Eiseley continues with the theme that man, as a combination of an intelligent mind and an able hand, is dangerous. In fact, his thesis for the essay is that man “is himself a consuming fire” (MF 45). Much of this article is a sort of archaeological and anthropological history of the use of fire; he mentions first how it changed early man from a scavenger into a hunter, how that change caused the extinction of potentially any number of species of large animals, and how the decreasing amount of available game contributed to the beginning of agriculture. He then gives an elaborate description of how clay pottery is made, carefully making it clear that without fire, the process is impossible. After that, he says, the fires become only hotter (51). He describes the smelting of ore and the current state, wherein heat and fire are everywhere and pervasive, though we do not always see them. Automobiles are a perfect example of fire in use every day, although he does not use that particular example.

Interspersed with this history, though, are passages wherein Eiseley grapples with the question of whether all of this – what seems like “progress” – is in fact a good thing or a bad thing. He calls mankind “Homo duplex” (51) because of mankind’s ability to do good or evil, depending on the circumstances. In the end, he finally concludes that man is “a great, roaring, wasteful furnace devouring irreplaceable substances of the earth,” and then says that “before this century is out, either Homo duplex must learn that knowledge without greatness of spirit is not enough for man, or there will remain only his calcined cities and the little charcoal of his bones” (52). Essentially, then, his view is pessimistic with a glimmer of hope, very much like Bill McKibben in The End of Nature.

Eiseley also wrote fiction. Fiction, as a form, is more insidious than an essay, because the author’s agenda is generally less obvious (and is almost never stated outright), so it is interesting to watch Eiseley, who is used to something like sermonizing, try to write a story. He does succeed, though, if the criteria for success are a message and an engaging plot. “The Dance of the Frogs” is a story about a dry young scientist’s encounter with an eccentric and possibly downright crazy old professor. The young scientist gives a painfully scientific anthropological account of a Native American ritual involving “game lords” – animal deities, briefly – which prompts some provocative questions from the old professor. Later, the professor approaches him and recounts a story of walking down a road at night during a sort of amphibian migration for breeding season, only to be chased (potentially) by many of what may be amphibian game lords – the professor never looked behind him.

The story seems to be fairly allegorical; the younger man and the old professor seem to represent the two warring sides of Eiseley himself, the former being the clinical, scientifically rigorous side, and the latter being the romantic. The essay quite clearly pokes fun at the scientific young man, giving him lines like “’I cannot answer that question,’ I said acidly. ‘My informants failed to elaborate upon it. But they believe implicitly in these monstrous beings, talk to and propitiate them’” ( DF 107) Meanwhile, the professor is getting more serious and penetrating lines like “’The Indians believe it…but do you believe it?’” (108). Still, though, the old man is not presented like an ideal. During the anecdote, one is left with the idea that as he was running from the frog-deities, he was most likely just imagining them. The old man himself seems to consider that a possibility. If Eiseley is advocating anything with this story, it is that neither approach is perfectly apt. David Gamble, in “Loren Eiseley: Wilderness and Moral Transcendence,” says about Eiseley that “the deeper he looked into life, the more he was confounded by it. It seemed to him that while we know life incontrovertibly exists, its origins are ultimately beyond the capacity of the human intellect to fathom” (Gamble 110). This represents Eiseley the philosopher at his best: he believed that the existential answers were not necessarily attainable, but that did not mean there was no reason to try to attain them.

The best example of the opposition between scientific rigor and romantic fervor in Eiseley’s work, though, is in “The Star Thrower.” The beginning of this essay is Eiseley at his most scientific – and his most melancholy. He refers to himself as an “inhumanly stripped skeleton without voice, without hope, wandering alone upon the shores of the world” (ST 169). His melancholy dramatically affects his scientific view of things; he looks at creatures on the beach and considers them doomed. It would be difficult to explain his feeling better than he does: "In the end the sea rejects its offspring. They cannot fight their way home through the surf which casts them repeatedly back upon the shore. The tiny breathing pores of starfish are stuffed with sand. The rising sun shrivels the mucilaginous bodies of the unprotected. The seabeach and its endless war are soundless. Nothing screams but the gulls" (170). He is lamenting their fate, albeit in what seems a very cold and impassive way. The truth is, though, he is not really the impartial eye in the skull; he still has feelings, even if the particular feeling he has at the moment is numbness.

Eventually, during his perambulation along the beach, he notices a solitary man throwing the dying starfish back into the sea. All of a sudden, too, there is a perfect rainbow above the man’s head. He has a brief conversation with the man, his dialogue not indicating any positive impact from the thrower (he mentions that “Death is the only successful collector” (172)). As he walks away, though he mentions the eye and the skull yet again, some of his other language betrays him already: he says, “the sower appeared magnified, as though casting larger stars upon some greater sea. He had, at any rate, the posture of a god” (172). This is not the language of the cool, detached scientist, nor yet the eye in the skull. This is the language and mentality of a romantic, one who believes in the transcendental quality of human nature. Eiseley just doesn’t know it at this point.

He then returns to his room, and embarks on what can only be described as an introspective journey, followed by a sort of re-evaluation of his whole life, going all the way back to early memories of his mother. This sequence eventually culminates with Eiseley rejecting the Biblical phrase “Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world,” in a very secular-humanist way. He responds, “’But I do love the world…I love its small ones, the things beaten in the strangling surf, the bird, singing, which flies and falls and is not seen again…I love the lost ones, the failures of the world.’ It was like the renunciation of my scientific heritage” (182). The image of his mother is less Oedipal than it sounds; being deaf and not functioning particularly well in society, she represents his personal connection to those “lost ones.” The last sentence, though, is of course the most important. Eiseley, here, is giving more weight to the romantic side of the argument than the scientific side; we’ve seen him do this already, but never so overtly.

So, predictably, he leaves his room and goes to find the star thrower once again, and once he does, he begins throwing starfish back into the ocean himself. Despite his scientific certainty that for every starfish he throws back, ten more are washed up somewhere, he does it anyway, and in a decidedly Romantic way: he is doing it in a way that symbolizes more than the act does by itself; it is a redemption of mankind. He says it himself – “The task was not to be assumed lightly, for it was men as well as starfish that we sought to save” (184). Throwing back the starfish, in some small way, is comparable to saving the universe itself, for Eiseley.

Now, we can begin to answer our questions. We know from whence Eiseley’s inner turmoil comes; it comes from his childhood, spent with nature and books and for the most part away from other humans; it comes from his Dust Bowl heritage; it comes from his deaf mother, his absent father; it comes from his time spent in academia. We know what it looks like when it is displayed; it looks like the difference between the streamlined porpoise and the intelligent yet strangely savage fire-wielding man; and it looks like the difference between the multitudes of dying starfish on the beach and the one man who takes time to throw them all back. And given that, we know to which side Eiseley himself leans. As it turns out, he is as much or more Romantic or transcendentalist poet than pure scientist. A line from another of Eiseley’s essays: “The risk is there but the indomitable human spirit will cry ‘assume the risk.’ By it alone man has survived. And only those who know what it is to risk can understand compassion” (Angyal 91).

Works Cited

Angyal, Andrew J. Loren Eiseley. Boston : Twayne, 1983.

Eiseley, Loren. “Man the Firemaker.” The Star Thrower. New York : Times Books,

1978.

-------. “The Dance of the Frogs.” The Star Thrower. New York : Times Books, 1978.

-------. “The Long Loneliness.” The Star Thrower. New York : Times Books, 1978.

-------. “The Star Thrower.” The Star Thrower. New York : Times Books, 1978.

Gamble, David E. “Loren Eiseley: Wilderness and Moral Transcendence.” The Midwest

Quarterly. 33.1 (1991) : 108-123.

Geldard, Richard G. The Essential Transcendentalists. New York : JP Tarcher/Penguin,

2005.

Gerber, Leslie E. Loren Eiseley. New York : F. Ungar Pub. Co., 1983.