Eiseley

1
Eiseleys The Secret of Life

• HMXP 102
• Dr. Fike

2
Extra Credit

• Who will volunteer a paper for our writing
  workshop next Wednesday, November 5th? You would
  need to send a full draft of your paper to the
  class on the listserv, hmxp102002_at_class.winthrop.e
  du, by noon on Tuesday, November 4th. It is
  possible to volunteer a second time but only if
  no one new volunteers. In any case, we need two
  people to share their papers.

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Robert Frosts Birches

• Frost is heir to the Romantic tradition in two
  ways
• First, in Romantic poetry there is a dialectical
  relationship (a give and take) between nature and
  the human mind. They interact. It is as if the
  eye is a lamp.
• Second, there was a structure that we call the
  Greater Romantic Lyric, which has three sections
• Here, there, here now, then, now.
• In the middle section (there, then) the
  imagination is active.
• In the third section, the speaker returns to his
  original time/place but is different the middle
  section is transformative.

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The Structure of Birches

• Lines 1-20 When . . . Here and now.
• Lines 21-40 But . . . Imagination active.
• Lines 41-59 So . . . Here and now but with
  added insight.
• POINT The middle sectionhis imaginative
  reveriehas transformed him.

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Section 1

• When he sees bent-over birches, he likes to
  think some boys been swinging them but
  describes how a winter ice storm bends them over
  permanently. At the end of the section, the
  imagination engages Like girls on hands and
  knees that throw their hair / Before them over
  their heads to dry in the sun.
• This simile is a good hinge into the middle
  section.

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Section 2

• He now returns to the idea in line 3 and imagines
  an alternative scenario in which a lone boy bends
  the birches by riding the upper branches down to
  the ground. The imagination is now fully active.
• Whereas section 1 describes a purely natural
  process, in section 2 the poets mind
  imaginatively interacts with nature by describing
  how a boy physically interacts with birch trees.
• Frost gives the boy a story that hooks in with a
  mythic pattern of father-son antagonism One by
  one he subdued his fathers trees (line 28). The
  words stiffness and limp imply a that swing
  down from the tops of birches takes the edge off
  sexual desire.

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Section 3

• He is back in the present moment. When life is
  tough, he remembers that he was once swinger of
  birches (line 41). (This section echoes
  Williams Wordsworths The World Is Too Much
  with Us and Tintern Abbey.)
• He describes worldly vicissitudes in terms of
  encountering natural impediments (cobwebs, a twig
  in the eye). He would like to take a break from
  earth (get away from his hectic life for a while)
  and then get a fresh start. He does not have a
  death wish.

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Section 3 continued

• In addition, Earths the right place for love
  adds a social dimension (perhaps love of nature
  leads to love of others?).
• As the poem ends, he imagines climbing toward
  heaven (not to heaven) and then swinging down to
  the ground on a birch tree. This is the kind of
  getaway and return he is talking about.
• After all, One could do worse than be a swinger
  of birches (line 59). In other words, there are
  worse ways of dealing with lifes stresses
  (alcohol, drugs).

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The Point

• Birches introduces the idea that the mind
  engages with the natural world. It is Romantic
  in that respect.
• In The Secret of Life, Eiseleys imagination
  does the same thing he engages with the natural
  world in order to examine alternative
  possibilities.
• He deals not only with what Frost calls Truth
  (what is scientifically accurate) but also the
  truth of the imagination.

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Loren Eiseley

• http//www.eiseley.org/biography.php
• Anthropologist
• Professor
• The Immense Journey is his most important book.

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Vocabulary

• iridescent (5)
• desiccated (5)
• slough (7)
• microtomes (15)
• simulacrum (18)
• midge (23)
• dualism (8 12)
• materialism (20 28)
• hobgoblin (20)
• pipette (21)

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First Sentence

• I am middle-aged now, but in the autumn I always
  seek for it again hopefully.
• What points arise from this sentence?
• What is the setting of this text? Hint  Setting
  involves both place and time. 
• Why are both of these elements important in a
  reading of Eiseleys text?

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First SentenceSignificance

• Setting Autumn in a field near the authors
  home, after harvest time when nature is a wreck
  of its summer self.
• Autumn and the authors age suggest the life
  cycle.
• He is 45 years old (23), the time when a man
  begins to sense his mortality and look beyond the
  physical world.
• Whereas all things move forward in time, one must
  move backward in time to discover the secret of
  life.
• The it in line 2 is that secret.
• He will wander around in this essay in much the
  same way he wanders around in the field.
• The author uses hopefully correctly here and in
  par. 7.

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Definition

• The it in line two of the first sentence is
  the secret of life. 
• Find other places where he offers statements
  about this so-called secret. 
• What is the precise definition of the secret that
  the author discusses?

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Definitions of the Secret of Life

• Headnote in the older editions the exact
  chemical processes for making life.
• 7 the mysterious borderline that bounds the
  inanimate
• 14 the greatest missing link of allthe link
  between living and dead matter
• The secret, in other words, is whatever caused
  the transition from inert matter to living matter.

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Question

• What is the opposite of the secret? The answer
  appears in par. 27.

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Answer Death

• At the instant of death, whether of man or
  microbe, that ordered, incredible spinning passes
  away in an almost furious haste of those same
  particles to get themselves back into the
  chaotic, unplanned earth (27).
• The secret life out of inert matter.
• Death inert matter out of living matter.

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Chart

• TIME ?
• Inert Matter
• ..Secret/..
• Living Matter
• 
  Death

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Next Question The Origins of Life

• What explanations does Eiseley imply when he
  mentions supernatural explanations and
  dualism (8, 12)?

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Answers

• supernatural explanations (12) E rejects the
  Genesis story, along with explanations based on
  it (Creationism, Intelligent Design)
• mind-matter dualism and a complete irrational
  break between life and the world of inorganic
  matter (8)

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Related Question

• Does Eiseley believe in evolution?

22
Answer YES!

• 7 Somewhere, somehow, sometime, in the
  mysterious chemistry of carbon, the long march
  toward the talking animal had begun.
• the long march a metaphor for evolution.
• 15 I have come to suspect that this long
  descent down the ladder of life, beautiful and
  instructive though it may be, will not lead us to
  the final secret.
• ladder of life a metaphor for evolution
• 16 Still, in your formless shiftings, the you
  remains the sliding particles, the juices, the
  transformations are working in an exquisitely
  patterned rhythm which has no other purpose than
  your preservationyou, the entity, the ameboid
  being whose substance contains the unfathomable
  future. Even so does every man come upward from
  the waters of his birth.
• In other words, the growth of each of us from
  conception to maturation provides an analogy for
  the evolution of living things from amoebas to
  more complex organisms.
• 17 You cannot describe how the body you
  inhabit functions, or picture or control the
  flights and spinnings, the dance of the molecules
  that compose it or why up the long stairway
  of the eons they dance from one shape to
  another.
• Movement/dance up the long stairway of the eons
  a metaphor for evolution.

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Evolution

• The immense journey in the books title
  evolution.

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But Here Is the Problem

• Note Evolution is about change over time, not
  about ultimate origin.
• Saying that life evolved is not the same as
  explaining why it began in the first place.
• So Eiseley offers two theories.

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Key Question

• What are the only two other possible
  explanations of life upon earth?  See par. 12.

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Answers in pars. 12 13

• 12 life did not arise on this planet, but was
  wafted here through the depths of space. (This
  explanation shunts the secret of life onto
  another planet.)
• In this view, once the seed from another world
  was planted in soil congenial to its
  development, it then proceeded to elaborate,
  evolve, and adjust until the higher organisms had
  emerged.
• seed a metaphor for how life began on Earth
• Panspermia the theory that life exists and is
  distributed throughout the universe in the form
  of germs or spores that develop in the right
  environment (dictionary.com)
• 13 life has actually arisen on this planet.
• POINT One or the other must be the case.

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Here Is the Next Question

• Both views are scientific in nature. Heres the
  question How does Eiseley present science in
  his chapter?
• With a partner, find words and phrases that
  suggest things about science.

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Science

• Page 2 examination, diligence, modern
  biology, dissection and analysis, life as a
  material manifestation, experimentation,
  theories
• Page 3 knowledge of nature, evidence,
  laboratories, microscope
• Page 4 the ultimate chemical, scientific
  effort, analysis, the great powers of the
  mind
• Page 5 materialism
• Last page scientists as gods

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What Is His Point?

• What is the significance of the following
  terms?
• dissection and analysis
• materialism

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Answer

• From a scientific/biological/materialist point of
  view, finding the secret of life requires
  sufficient inquiry into the material world.
• Do you agree with this?
• Can we know all things about the physical world
  if we dissect it sufficiently?
• Are you a scientific materialist?

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Next Question Options?

• What other point of view is there in Eiseleys
  chapter? In other words, if you do not adopt a
  scientific point of view (the primeval soup
  theory), Creationism (you believe in a
  creator-God), or dualism (you duck the question
  altogether by claiming that God and nature are
  separate), what view do you adopt as regards the
  secret of life? What is Eiseleys answer?

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Answer Imagination

• 4 mystery
• 5 nature not as natural as it looks,
  fantastic magic, myth and miracle
• Pages 2 4 imagination
• 14 wandering fruitlessly in pastures
• 26 wonder, marvel

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Thus

• Left brain
• Science
• Dissection
• Analysis
• Physical world
• Nature

• Right brain
• Myth
• Imagination
• Memory
• Mind and spirit
• Supernature
• What is the point of this chart?

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Eiseleys Point

• His point is that the stuff in the left column is
  insufficient, at least at the present time, to
  identify the secret of life. Eiseley does not
  believe that science will uncover the secret of
  life in his lifetime, despite headlines that
  suggest that we are close to such a discovery.
• Given that insufficiency, he turns to the stuff
  in the right column as he muses on the secret of
  life.
• So the question for us is this What can we say
  about it from the standpoint of right-brain
  resources? For example, see the next slide.

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Myth What about Animals in par. 6, left?

• What is the point of the creatures that Eiseley
  mentions?  Here are parts of the relevant
  passages
• The notion that mice can be generated
  spontaneously from bundles of old clothes is so
  delightfully whimsical that it is easy to see why
  men were loath to abandon it.
• One could take life as a kind of fantastic
  magic.
• Is E implying that the Genesis account is also
  delightful whimsy and fantastic magic?

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Eiseleys Concession Myth

• After having chided the theologian for his
  reliance on myth and miracle, science found
  itself in the unenviable position of having to
  create a mythology of its own  namely, the
  assumption that what, after long effort, could
  not be proved to take place today had, in truth,
  taken place in the primeval past (9).
• Here is that scientific myth in par. 8 The
  notion that he the supposedly simple amoeba
  was a simple blob, the discovery of whose
  chemical composition would enable us instantly to
  set the life process in operation, turned out to
  be, at best, a monstrous caricature of the
  truth.
• POINT Science and mythology are not totally
  discrete categories.

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Key Sentences in pars. 17-18

• WHAT CAN A MYTHICAL/METAPHORICAL APPROACH DO FOR
  US?
• WHAT DO THE FOLLOWING SENTENCES SUGGEST?
• The secret, if one may paraphrase a savage
  vocabulary, lies in the egg of night.
• Cf. the next par. night, darkness, and
  egg
• Only along the edges of this field after the
  frost there are little whispers of it the secret
  of life. Once even on a memorable autumn
  afternoon I discovered a sunning blacksnake
  brooding among the leaves like the very
  simulacrum of old night.

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Interpretation

• First sentence The secretlies in the egg of
  night (paradoxnight and egg are unrelated a
  mixed metaphor? certainly an almost impossible
  combination) The secret, in other words, lies
  not in the thing that conceals (night) but in
  its origin, which is itself something that
  conceals (egg). We do not know the secret of
  life because it is at least two removes (night,
  egg) from our perception.
• Second sentence We do, however, receive hints
  (whispers) of the secret of life, which are
  manifested in living things like the blacksnake.
  
• But here is the problem we have only a living
  creature whose whispers (a mixed metaphor
  snakes do not whisper) are like a
  simulacrum/imitation (a simile) of old night (a
  metaphor for something that conceals).
• The next slide puts the two patterns together.

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Thus

• The secret of life inert matter becomes living
  matter.
• ? all of evolutionary history yields living
  creatures
• ? one of them, the blacksnake,
• ? provides a metaphor whispers
• ? which evokes a simile like a simulacrum or
  imitation
• ? of another metaphor old night (something that
  conceals)
• ? within something else that conceals (the egg)
• And this torturous series of removes and figures
  of speech in Eiseleys mind is his best attempt
  to describe the secret. And the fact that it is
  a sunning blacksnake (my emphasis) does nothing
  but highlight the darkness in which the secret is
  cloaked.
• POINT Language enacts the secretness of the
  secret.

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Par. 18

• The snake diverted me, however. It was the
  dissection of a field that was to occupy usa
  dissection in search of secretsa dissection such
  as a probing and inquisitive age demands.
• He ends up brooding among the leaves, much like
  the blacksnake that has distracted him.
• Neither dissection (science) nor brooding
  (imagination, use of language) gets him any
  closer to the secret than he was before, though
  he has generated a provocative series of images
  that emphasizes its remoteness.

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Next Question

• So what does Eiseley, great anthropologist,
  conclude about the secret of life? Where does
  Es thinking come to rest in this text?

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Nature and Supernature?

• What do the following two statements (both
  including quotations) suggest about the secret
  of life?  How do they enact what the headnote
  calls a sense of the sacreda sense of
  transcendence, of divine agencyin the epic of
  evolution?
• I am sure now that life is not what it is
  purported to be and that nature, in the canny
  words of a Scotch theologue, is not as natural
  as it looks (5).
• Rather, I would say that if dead matter has
  reared up this curious landscape of fiddling
  crickets, song sparrows, and wondering men, it
  must be plain even to the most devoted
  materialist that the matter of which he speaks
  contains amazing, if not dreadful powers, and may
  not impossibly be, as Hardy has suggested, but
  one mask of many worn by the Great Face behind
  (28).

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James McCosh

• This is the Scotch theologue whom Eiseley
  mentions by name earlier in The Immense Journey.
• He was a minister, a philosopher, a professor,
  and eventually president of Princeton University.
• Two of his books illuminate Eiseleys reference
• The Supernatural in Relation to the Natural
  (1862)
• The Religious Aspect of Evolution (1887)
• His point Evolution and divine agency are
  compatible.
• Nature manifests the supernatural.
• God is the Final Cause He created matter and
  is responsible for the transition from inert to
  living matter.
• McCosh also attributes evolution to Gods
  powerGod may be a continuous creatorand it
  makes sense to speak of the intelligent
  creation.

44
Litotes

• Litotes stating the negative of the opposite of
  what you want to say. Harmon and Holman, A
  Handbook to Literature A form of
  understatement in which a thing is affirmed by
  stating the negative of its opposite. To say She
  was not unmindful when one means that She gave
  careful attention is to employ litotes (297).
• If you want to suggest that nature has a
  supernatural element, you say that it is not as
  natural as it looks.
• If you want to say that nature may possibly be
  one of the masks of some Great Face behind it,
  you say that nature may not impossibly be such
  a mask.
• The effect in each case is to create a sense that
  this conclusion is tenuous, and it is made more
  tenuous still by the substitution of Great Face
  for God or Prime Mover or Creator or Deity.
• So here he is at the end of his journey,
  scientist to the core but the inability to find
  the secret on his autumn walk has made him
  suspect that there is more afoot than sciences
  pipettes (21) and blue-steel microtomes (15)
  can dissect. He finally arrives at the
  possibility, despite his earlier denial of
  supernatural explanations (12), of Gods role
  in the creation of life. He just cannot bring
  himself to say so that directly.
• In other words, his attempt to inquire
  scientifically has led him out of
  biology/chemistry to the possibility of a
  recognition of scientific myth and finally to a
  realization that life may have had a divine
  catalyst. But his scientific paradigm makes it
  difficult for him to acknowledge this possibility
  with anything more than a literary flourish.
• Thus Eiseleys language enacts his dilemma.

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What Strengthens This Implication

• Why do you think Eiseley uses the word dust in
  par. 26?
• What one word alludes to a theological context in
  which divine agency matters?

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Genesis

• God formed man of dust from the ground (27)
• and dust you shall eat (314)
• In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread,
  till thou return unto the ground for out of it
  wast thou taken for dust thou art, and unto dust
  shalt thou return (319).
• I will make your descendants as the dust of the
  earth (1316)
• I who am but dust and ashes (1827)

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Ultimately, What Does the Text Do?

• How does this text enact a point about human
  consciousness? 
• Hints  Consider the two columns (left brain vs.
  right brain). In particular, Eiseleys use of
  imagination, metaphor, memory, and litotes versus
  the repetition of the word "dissection"
  throughout the piece.

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Thus

• Left brain
• Science
• Dissection
• Analysis
• Physical world
• Nature

• Right brain
• Myth
• Imagination
• Memory
• Mind and spirit
• Supernature
• What is the point of this chart?

49
POINT

• The text celebrates the apex of creation the
  human mindinner space.
• The next slide explains Eiseleys view on the
  mind of the artist.

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The Artist

• Loren Eiseley in his autobiography, All the
  Strange Hours likened the brain of a writer to
  an unseen artist's loft in which pictures from
  the past were stored and brought forth to be
  magnified or reduced in order to form a pattern.
  Many of the patterns he created in his work were
  associated with his experiences during his years
  growing up in his prairie state, Nebraska. The
  land, the people and the institutions left an
  ineradicable mark upon him and colored what he
  did.
• Source http//www.eiseley.org/biography.php

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More Strengthening of the Implication

• Eiseleys face parallels the creators Great
  Face.
• Eiseley (a representative human) is to a field in
  the natural world as some other creator is to
  life itself.
• Each gives life in one sense or another As he
  has woven the inert and living things in the
  field into an elegant inquiry into the origin of
  life, so some kind of creator may have
  transformed inert matter into living matter.
• Eiseley is not certain about divine agency, but
  the implication is there for the reader to
  consider.
• Ultimately, then, the texts futile search for
  the secret of life becomes a celebration of human
  beings place at the apex of evolutionwhat Peter
  Russell calls the global brain. (Note
  Russells film, like Eiseleys chapter, affirms
  evolution but does not have a clue about the
  secret of life, that original transition from
  inert matter to living matter.)
• But in both Russell and Eiseley, WE ARE THE
  EARTHS WAY OF THINKING ABOUT ITSELF.
• END