I wrote the following poem in 1993 to honor Loren Eiseley, writer, scientist, anthropologist, boneman, seeker, a man wary of his genes, a man who was alive to the tricksters of the Universe.

	LOREN 

how many can say that we
owe a portion of our life to
one person who wrote things that echoed:
that is me; that is how I feel
that is the magic of the world
that is the awe of the universe

I say this about Loren Eiseley:
your words let magic into me
Night Country's loneliness absorbed mine
as I followed you into the echoing canyons
to see sedimentary concretions
that drove men crazy

I wanted to know if the fifth planet was...
those rocks in space circling in an asteroid belt
and the question after Hiroshima "do you understand?"
I understood;

when you saw the sign on that forgotten city corner that asked
"Christ died to save mankind.
Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by?"
you did not scorn
and I began to believe that God could exist

and when the man with the webbed hand cried out to Jesus
and was saved from following the spring time flood
of toads and frogs into the river
I heard the hopelessness and the power

I too wondered as you found a footprint
in the mud and thought it some strange creature
until you fitted your own toes to the print
and recognized that the strangest one
of all is the human being

you plied the boneyards of ancient things
and they burned in your mind
until nights could not to be slept through
and burning lights in unlighted towers
were as unexplained as were the giant Sphex wasps
that burst from your backyard

I saw the dark ragged clouds on the coast of Costabel
as the man stooped and flung starfish
back through the waves
saving them from the shellers' pots on shore
and you pondered the eye in the skull
circling and circling endlessly
and seeing...

you encountered weasel space
delighting in that dimension that fits the world of weasel
intersecting with humans on one plane or another
I began to see those lines about me

you made many things real and unreal
magic and illusory
and haunting

that is the word;

your life was haunted by the ghosts
of times and dimensions near and far

it has made all the difference in mine
          ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ 

Eiseley was a writer who married science and humanity in a particularly thought-provoking (at least to me) manner. Most of his books are comprised of essays, two of them are semi-autobiographical, and four are books of poetry. (I should also point out that he was a frequent contributor to Audubon Magazine.) His books are:

  The Immense Journey (1957)            Darwin's Century (1958)
  The Firmament of Time (1960)          The Unexpected Universe (1969)
  The Invisible Pyramid (1970)          The Night Country (1971)
  The Man Who Saw Through Time (1973)   All the Strange Hours (1975)
  The Star Thrower (1978)               Darwin and the Mysterious Mr. X (1979)
Poetry:
  Notes of an Alchemist (1972)          The Innocent Assassins (1973)
  Another Kind of Autumn (1977)         All the Night Wings (1979)

The Night Country was the first one that I found and read-a little paperback that after several re-readings has fallen apart and is carefully kept together. I was taken with his description of growing up in a town on the prairie, a town big enough, though, to have manhole covers and storm drains under the streets, and by his bone-hunting stories.

A shy boy, he didn't make friends easily until he met a boy who loved the dark places as much as he. They spent time exploring the storm drains, crawling on elbows and bellies through trickles of water, well aware that one cast a eye to the sky before going below. One morning with a clear blue sky, they were playing down below when a sudden gush of water came swarming down the drain. Scared, they rapidly moved to the nearest manhole opening and erupted out onto the street, only to see some men running water into another opening. But his father saw them and put an end to storm-drain exploring. Baking clay heads with his grandmother was another pastime. He stored them on top of the beams in an old barn nearby. In a later book he wondered what thoughts went through some future owner's mind when those heads peered down.

His mother affected him strongly, her deafness and consequently her lack of language, and the madness that seemed to be part of her family. His father would quote Shakespearean plays to Loren, as if to make up for his mother. In his autobiography, All The Strange Hours, he said that it was the fear of passing along her genes that kept he and his wife from having children.

This is not to say that he wrote often of his young family life, but it colored his life perspective in his essays. He was a young man in the Depression and indicated that he rode the rails now and again while trying to put together some college-level schooling. The fact that he not only graduated from college but got post-graduate degrees proved success in that venue, as he became a college professor and Dean at the University of Pennsylvania.

His love was history...oh, not the history of dates and events catalogued through the centuries, but the history of the natural world through the millenia and the humanity within it. He studied and traveled with Frank Speck, his undergraduate professor and mentor, through the wildlands of America and Canada, researching native stories and collecting...items of value to natural historians. He was also collecting his thoughts and perspectives.

Several years after his death in 1977, his editor and friend Kenneth Heuer got Loren's wife's permission to put together material from notebooks which Loren kept sporadically through the years, together with old family letters and photos. The material which Heuer collated was published in a book titled The Lost Notebooks of Loren Eiseley, in 1987 by Little, Brown, and Company, Boston. Heuer included his own personal reminiscences of working with Loren, creating an informal biography. I found this book to be a wonderful glimpse deeper into the writer's soul and into his effects on other writers, for Heuer also included excerpts from their letters to Loren-Lewis Mumford, W.H. Auden, Theodore H. White, and Archibald MacLeish, for instance.

I've also read a biography called Fox at the Wood's Edge which intimated that Loren tended to exaggerate in his essays and autobiography the anecdotes from his life. That may be so. Frankly, it's a rare storyteller that doesn't. But Loren had a way with description and sensory thought that I've found enriching and expanding and evocative. The only drawback in his essays, in this era of inclusive language (and working toward inclusive humanity), is the use of "man" and "he" as generic pronouns for the whole human race. However, just leafing through The Lost Notebooks to write this article has reminded me of the beauty of his language and his imagery.

I think I will close with several bits from The Lost Notebooks and hope that they are intriguing enough to encourage the reading of his books (and if I were to choose a first book, it would be The Star Thrower, which contain essays culled from his earlier books):

There is in the universe a duality of powers in perfect equilibrium. The theme of The Unexpected Universe is how man in the Dark Wood has broken through this duality-so that something is loose and prowling in the fierce wood....Dante saw it long ago when he encountered himself. I saw it as a child under the bed.

I have wandered in canyons so deep that the whole of time seemed to lie above my head rather than beneath me; time through which I, or the life force that led me, must find its way toward some goal in which the present shape I inhabited was a mere vehicle-one of many long since abandoned in these deep alleys where the pretty chalices of what had once been life were tossed and scatted indifferently by the freshets of oncoming springs.

When I climb I almost always carry seeds with me in my pocket. Often I like to carry sunflower seeds, or an acorn, or any queer "sticktight" that has a way of gripping fur or boot tops as if it had a deliberate eye on the Himalayas and meant to use the intelligence of others to arrive at them. More than one lost mountaineer lying dead at the bottom of a crevasse has proved that his sole achievement in life was to inch some plant a half-mile further toward the moon....I have carried such seeds up the sheer walls of mesas and I have never had illusions that I was any different to them than a grizzly's back or a puma's paw....Blake once said that you could not pluck a flower without troubling a star. It can similarly be observed that by planting a seed in a new place you may be running a long shadow out into the future and tampering with the world's axis-it may even have happened the night my pet blacksnake took a notion to live in the neighbor's basement....No doubt man himself may have been the indirect product of a tumbleweed blowing past the eyes of a curious primate hanging poised from a bough to which he forgot to climb back after he had chased the weed out into the grass. Naturally this is a simplification, but if the world hangs on such matters it may be as well to act boldly and realize all immanent possibilities at once. Shake the seeds out of their pods, launch the milkweed down, and set the lizards scuttling. We are in a creative universe. Let us then create. In the spring when a breath of air sets the propellers of the maple seeds to whirring, I always say to myself hopefully, "After us the dragons..."

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 unloosening sun, It is to bear such markings fine and proud As speak of weathers that are long since done.

I thank the soul of Loren Eiseley for the works of his life on this earth.

Cherie Staples Skyearth1@aol.com