We can make fast-motion films of the growth of plants and flowers in which they seem to come and go like gestures of the earth. If we could film civilizations and cities, mountains and stars, in the same way, we would seem them as frost crystals forming and dissolving and as sparks on the back of a fireplace. The faster the tempo, the more it would appear that we were watching, not so much a succession of things, as the movement and transformation of one thing--as we see waves on the ocean or the movements of a dancer.
Alan Watts, Tao: The Watercourse Way (94)
In an intriguing B-movie of the 1950's, The Man With the X-Ray Eyes, an individual becomes miraculously able, due to a freak accident, to perceive behind the visible; his vision penetrates through mere appearances and probes at the very heart of things. Where others see flesh, he sees internal organs. Where others see a finished city, he sees through its walls to the girders and beams and rivets which uphold its seeming solidity. Where others merely gaze in wonder at the night sky full of stars, his vision, knowing no limits, reaches to the heart of the universe and beholds the mysteries of the cosmos. His "gift" turns him into a near mystic, but the perspective on reality which it offers to him becomes, in time, a curse. For the world as it is revealed to him is too much for one man: he feels himself lost in the unfathomable immensity of space--a sci-fi Pascal who has come to know the terror inherent in the silence of the infinite--and by the movie's close he has been driven to the edge of madness.
Like the "man with the x-ray eyes," Loren Eiseley seemed to see behind the visible, and like that film's hero, his powers caused him torment, but to Eiseley's x-ray eyes, it was time, not space, which appeared illusory. "My sense of time," he explained, "is so heightened that I can feel the first frost at work in stones, the first creeping advance of grass in a deserted street (The Night Country 158). Eiseley once claimed to have known a distinguished (but unnamed) 20th century physicist who took his discipline's conception of the nature of ultimate reality so seriously that he began wearing oversized rubber boots in the hope they would somehow keep him from falling through the interstices in things into the inner "quantum" space of matter (The Star Thrower 280). Eiseley took the discoveries of modern biology and anthropology with equal literalness, and his frequent sense of vertigo before the phenomenal world stemmed, it would seem, from the dizzying prospect on physical reality offered him by evolutionary time. As the result of his unceasing exploration and unquenchable, Faustian pursuit of ultimate knowledge, modern man, Eiseley feared, has finally "intruded," with the discovery of the true immensity of time, "upon some gigantic stage not devised for him" (The Invisible Pyramid 12). The drama of Loren Eiseley's intellectual life, however, was enacted on that stage.
"One exists," Eiseley explains, "in a universe convincingly real, where the lines are sharply drawn in black and white. It is only later, if at all, that one realizes the lines were never there in the first place. But they are necessary in every human culture, like a drill sergeant’s commands, something not to be questioned" (All the Strange Hours 100). Yet questions remain, foremost among them, two interrelated ones: "How should we see? In what world are we?" These doubts constituted for Eiseley "the very terror of our age," for "we have fallen out of nature and see sometimes more and sometimes less" (The Star Thrower 249). Eiseley saw more; he possessed a visionary "archaeological eye" (Firmament of Time 168) through which he witnessed everyday reality with "terrible deja vu of the archaeologist" (The Night Country 156):
a man who has once looked with the archaeological eye will never see quite normally. he will be wounded by what other men call trifles. It is possible to refine the sense of time until an old shoe in the bunch grass or a pile of nineteenth-century beer bottles in an abandoned mining town tolls in one's head like a hall clock. This is the price one pays for learning to read time from surfaces other than an illuminated dial. it is the melancholy secret of the artifact, the humanly touched thing. (The Night Country 81)
The effects of Eiseley’s vision are thus double-edged. Although his archaeological eye is a medium of potential revelation capable of overpowering the attraction of the archaiological, and the very means by which to acquire the evolutionary sense, it is also the wellspring of his Mark of Cain in its phylogenic aspect; for it provides a profoundly sobering perspective on human and personal destiny--one to which neither he nor the species has yet become accustomed--in which all of man’s longing appears to be for nothing and all hopes of establishing faith in the distance seems futile.
Because the archaeologist uncovers as remnants of the vanished civilizations "both our grocery bills and the hymns to our gods" (The Unexpected Universe 29), he looks on with an acute skepticism at human endeavors, knowing that all projects, whatever their momentary efficacy, will one day become merely fodder for the investigation of future archaeologists. All of mankind's good and all of our evil, the archaeologist knows, finally amount to nothing; for they are all swallowed up by time again and again in "terrible deja vu."
As a result of his archeological eye, therefore, Eiseley seems to always hear, like the nomadic people of Old Testament times, behind all ordinary occurrences that “voice howling over the mounds of dead and vanished civilizations” that they called “Lilith--Adam’s first wife and a scoffer at all male vanities (Thompson, Darkness and Scattered Light 46). In a poem entitled "Confrontation," Eiseley explains that as a teacher and leader of men, he "had no followers/but the wind that fills abandoned cities with dust . . . (Note of an Alchemist 98). He found it not at all unusual to "in some unwary instant . . . telescope fifty thousand years," but often his archaeological eye saw but a short distance into the past, "looking through a little window in time . . ." (The Night Country 85), as in this instance recorded in All the Strange Hours (150):
Man is a strange creature. I look upon this great building with its inner fountains and amenities and though it is well over ten years since it was constructed, I see right through it to the bare field left by the demolition of the slum.
It is essential to understand that Eiseley does not mean here that he remembered the vacant lot. He insisted that he saw it, as if he were, like Sir Francis Bacon in the ambiguous title of his book on him, a "man who saw through time." Through the power of his archaeological eye, the "long centuries wavering past" are never entirely lost. For to his vision they still retain a sense of presence, "with the curious distortion of things seen through deep sea water" (The Night Country 154). As the epigraph of his first published book, The Immense Journey, Eiseley had quoted the words of Henry David Thoreau: "Man can not afford to be a naturalist, too look at Nature directly, but only with the side of his eye. He must look through and beyond her" (2). Eiseley's archaeological eye made it possible for him to heed Thoreau's admonition.
Bacon, a man Eiseley admired above all others, once noted that "He that cannot contract the sight of the mind as well as disperse and dilate it, wanteth a great faculty" (The Man Who Saw Through Time 76-77). Able to contract and dilate his vision and understanding to an extraordinary degree, Eiseley possessed as a result an instrument whose unique power enabled him to "see" with an almost mystical clarity the interconnectedness of man, consciousness, and history with cosmic, geological, and biological evolution. "That which exceeds a single life span," customarily only available to man in the eye of collective memory, became for Eiseley an ordinary object of his vision.
Even as a child, Eiseley insists, he had already learned the ultimate lesson which the study of time could teach: that time is in reality "a series of planes existed superficially in the same universe," that the tempo which we perceive "is a human illusion, a subjective clock ticking in our own kind of protoplasm" (IJ 183). But experience, and his knowledge of evolution, taught him as his mind matured that although man is, in a sense, only one "subjective clock," one moment, among many, "he is the most curious of all; he fits no plane, no visible island" (The Unexpected Universe 161). For in man all the planes interpenetrate; he dwells in the momentous; that he does so is part of his mandate as a Primate Autobiographer.
As the result of his archaeological eye, Eiseley is like Billy Pilgrim in Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s Slaughterhouse Five, a "time tripper." But while Vonnegut's anti-hero can only jump back and forth between the events of his own life span, Eiseley often found himself transported out of the present moment into past and future eons. In its simplest form, Eiseley's time-tripping merely catapulted him back into moments of his past life so vividly real in long-term memory that they eclipse the incident triggering them in the present. In “The Rat That Danced” in All the Strange Hours, for example, the flash of camera lights during a lecture he is trying to deliver becomes a railroad switchlight and triggers a memory of a time during Eiseley’s hobo days in the 1920s when a security guard tried to push him from moving train. As a result, the talk he intends to deliver becomes confused, “lost in the incoherence of a split personality . . . (All The Strange Hours 12)--split between past and present.
The human mind, Eiseley recognizes, is an unfathomable compendium of experience, memory, and instinctual knowledge. It is an artist's loft, where "pictures . . . hang askew, pictures with outlines barely chalked in, pictures torn, pictures the artist has striven unsuccessfully to erase, pictures that only emerge and glow in a certain light." During Eiseley's time-tripping this light becomes, for the moment, constant, and pictures which have been "teleported, stolen, as it were, out of time," become vivid. It is, he senses, his duty as a writer to give these pictures a voice--to "drag them about, magnify or reduce them as . . . artistic sense dictates." But he cannot destroy them (All the Strange Hours 151). Their presentation to his mind remains random; his time-tripping is uncontrollable:
Make no mistake. Everything in the mind is in rat's country. It doesn't die. They are merely carried, these disparate memories, back and forth in the desert of a billion neurons, set down, picked up, and dropped again by mental pack rats. Nothing perishes, it is merely lost till a surgeon's electrode starts the music of an old player piano who scrolls are dust Or you yourself do it, tossing in the restless night, or even in the day on a strange street when a hurdy-gurdy plays. Nothing is lost, but it can never be again as it was. You will only find the bits and cry out because they were yourself. (All the Strange Hours 3).
But among those "billions of neurons" Eiseley sometimes finds stored pictures that teleport him far beyond the few decades of his own actual experience of time.
In "The Crevice and the Eye” (also in All the Strange Hours), Eiseley tells of an archaeological expedition into an underground cave in New Mexico, during which Eiseley and a companion descended into a hidden subterranean chamber and nearly became lost without a light. But this journey down through geological strata is to Eiseley (as is a similar adventure in “The Slit" in The Immense Journey) really a journey back into time, for as he emerges from the mouth of the cave into the open air, he realizes that his "angle of vision" has somehow become twisted underground, and he finds himself "time-tripping" over thousands of years, not decades:
I was looking at life [Eiseley realizes], at my companions at the traffic below on the road, as though I had just arisen, a frozen man from a torrent of melting ice. I wiped a muddy hand across my brow. The hand was ten thousand years away. So were my eyes, so would they always be. . . . (104; my italics)
So distant does the present moment then seem to him, so dwarfed by the awesomeness of time, that he remembers the experience as being "like a glimpse through the slitted bone with which Eskimos protect their eyes from snow blindness" (ASH 105).
Yet, among Eiseley's forays into time, even this "trip" cannot count as his longest. In "The Cosmic Prison" in The Invisible Pyramid he recounts yet another time-trip, this time into the future. While attending a lecture in a planetarium he falls asleep in a seat in the back of the room, eventually awakening to an empty auditorium. On the planetarium's ceiling, however, a last image from the lecture remains: a picture of “the conformation of the heavens as they might exist in the remote future of the expanding universe.” Like a cosmic Rip Van Winkle, Eiseley at first wonders how long he has slept; thinking that he is really out-of-doors and gazing at a real night sky, he feels a "queer sense of panic" come over him, "as though transported out of time. n Even after he realizes what has actually happened, he remains under the spell of the illusion, lost in reverie, "waiting upon the inevitable, the great drama and surrender of the inward fall, the heart contraction of the cosmos." Like H.G. Wells' time traveler, he finds himself a witness to the end of the universe, watching in his archaeological eye stretched to the limit of its capacity, the "first faint galaxy of a billion suns race like a silverfish across the night and vanish" with no more commotion than "the slightest leaf movement on a flooding stream . . ." (The Invisible Pyramid 37).
Often Eiseley's journeys through time took on another less disorienting, less alienating form in which things appear, as in time-lapse photography, as if they are "gestures of the earth”--as part of an unbreakable unity, an unfolding which is time. Eiseley often tends to envision any given objects as if it were the last frame of a moving series of images in which the object's entire emergence into being is somehow instantaneously revealed.
In its simplest form, this time-lapse vision caused him to see a childhood episode (recalled in All the Strange Hours)--in which a nearly dead woodpecker comes back to life under his care--as his "first glimpse of unconsciousness, resurrection, and time-lapse presented in bright colors" (151-52). But more often this unique capacity of his archaeological eye alters the very appearance of things, so that the "scratched pebble" beneath his feet comes to denote an "ice age, n and an ordinary summer cloud "changes form in one afternoon as an animal might do in ten million years" (The Unexpected Universe 106).
The possibility of such time-lapse vision always lay implicit in the theory of evolution. George Bernard Shaw noted long ago in Back to Methusaleh that inherent in evolution is the startling realization that species are
an illusion produced by the shortness of our individual lives, and that they are constantly changing and melting into one another and into new forms as surely as the hand of a clock is continually moving, though it moves so slowly that it looks stationary to us.13
And so, like Einstein, Eiseley recognized, "if our tempo of seeing could be speeded, life would appear and disappear as a chaos of evanescent . . . forms, possessing the impermanence of the fairy mushroom circles that spring up on our lawns at midnight" (The Unexpected Universe 134). Because he possessed an evolutionary sense, there were times when Eiseley was, in fact, a witness in the flesh to such chaos.
Eiseley's visionary gift, I hasten to add, need not be thought of as a solely "mystical" power (although Eiseley, it is true, did trace its source back to the "clairvoyant" artistic eye of his mother); his time-lapse eye was, in a sense, a natural outgrowth of his scholarship, especially his study of evolution, as the above passages make clear. “Certain knowledges,” Hugh Kenner (pictured) has observed, “have simply become so central we need to stop evading them, so as to get free from not knowing what we are doing. . . . We need to know all the time certain things we know doing. some of the time" (9). Because Eiseley knew all of the time what many other evolutionary thinkers have taken to be only "idols of the study,” he saw differently.
Once, Geoffrey Hartman notes in The Unmediated Vision, mysticism was believed to be excessus menti; now, it seems clear, it is instead an accessus menti, the product of a panentheism in which the mind becomes fully conscious of its own life (172). Eiseley's mysticism was, clearly, an accessus menti, but it accessed not just his own subjectivity but the external world, the physical reality that science knows. His understanding of evolution, as it colored his quotidian perception of things, brought him to understand privately a truth which, lamentably, has not become common knowledge for either Darwin's contemporaries or for us: the realization that, as a result of the discovery of evolutionary emergence and descent through modification,
creation and its mystery [can] no longer be safely relegated to the past behind us. It might now reveal itself to man at any moment in a farmer's pasture or a willow thicket. . . . The common day had turned marvelous. -willow thicket. Creation--whether seen or unseen--must be even now about us everywhere in the prosaic world of the present. (FT 58; my italics)
This peculiar capability of Eiseley's vision can be thought of as having, moreover, a physiological source.
Like Karl Marx, Eiseley knew that "the development of the five senses is the work of the entire history of the world up to now (quoted in Rothenberg, America 486), and thus within those senses must lie--potentially recoverable by the mind--the record of that history. Eiseley's time-laspe vision resulted in part from his ability to raise this buried record to the level of consciousness. Man, Eiseley knew, has brought "almost the same body through two realms" (The Invisible Pyramid 151)--the natural and the cultural--and the primordial knowledge the body thus contains came to provide for him a major source of insight. The paths which his perception, and consequently his thinking, followed were not those of his contemporaries. Because “the roots of our phylogenetic tree pierce deep into the earth's past," human consciousness in general, and his own consciousness in particular, are, Eiseley recognizes, "similarly embedded in, and in part constructed of, pathways which were laid down before man in his present form existed" (the Invisible Pyramid 22); as Eiseley was fond of saying, man is, in reality, a “palimpsest,” on which the marks left by the history of his and life's evolution have not been and can not be entirely erased. His own eye remained faithful to these prehistoric paths and not to the routes of the present.
Following these paths to their source, Eiseley was able to see, as he did once in the Badlands of South Dakota (pictured above), that the birds he observed flying over such a lifeless place are, like all living things, the miraculous reincarnation of chemicals--carbon, calcium, and iron--which lie on the ground around him devoid of the spirit which then animated their flight (The Immense Journey 171-72); to imagine himself able to "drift into the lower cadences of the frost, or the crystalline life that glistens in pebbles, or shines in a snowflake, or dreams in the meteoric iron between the worlds" (The Immense Journey 185); to realize that a museum hall of various Crustacea, all with the "sea change" upon them, are really "one, one great plan that flamed there on its pedestal in the sinister evening light, but . . . also many and the touch of Maya, of evening light, but illusion, lay on them" (Firmament of Time 82-83); to grasp that "birds are intense, fast living creatures--reptiles, I suppose one might say, that have escaped out of the heavy sleep of time, transformed fairy creatures dancing over sunlit meadows" (The Immense Journey 185); to notice that, "if you look closely," you can not only "see the singing reptile in the bird" but "some ancient amphibian fondness for the ooze where the child wades in the mud" (Firmament of Time 57);
to understand that although one billion years of evolutionary development have gone into the construction of the technological eye of Mount Palomar's 200 inch reflector telescope, its function may really be no different, as the ultimate eye of the slime mold colony of human history, from the primitive eye of the Philobus fungus: both scan the territory ahead into which the "spores" are about to fly as the "spore cities" die--for somehow, Eiseley sees, "in the mysterium behind genetics, the tiny pigmented eye of the Philobus and the rocket capsule were evolved together" (The Immense Journey 45; The Invisible Pyramid 76); to think of the impersonality and general confusion of a modern bureaucracy as "merely the giant background noise of the universe . . .” in its present earthly manifestation (All the Strange Hours 203); to accept the humbling realization that "someone in another galaxy, watching the evolution of the Earth would have observed only one significant change in the color of light emanating from it--with the advent of plants, the light turned green" (The Immense Journey 61-62); to perceive boulders as "beasts . . . of a kind man ordinarily lived too fast to understand" which appear inanimate because the tempo of the life in them [is] slow" (Firmament of Time 173); to be always aware of "some dark and passing shadow within matter, [which] cups out the eyes' small windows or spaces the notes of a meadow lark's song in the interior of a mottled egg," a "principle . . . [that] was there before the living in the deeps of water" (The Immense Journey 26).
Perhaps the most stunning instance of Eiseley's time-lapse vision appears in "The Flow of the River" in The Immense Journey. There Eiseley tells how on a scientific expedition in Nebraska he became possessed by a spirit of adventure and began to float, lying on his back, down the Platte River. But in his time-lapse vision the scene is transformed and he feels himself becoming one with the river itself. He identifies himself with "the meandering roots of a whole watershed," senses his "outstretched fingers touching, by some kind of clairvoyant extension, the brooks of snow-lined glaciers, n while he flows "toward the Gulf over the eroded debris of worn-down mountains" (16):
I was streaming alive through the hot and working ferment of the sun, or oozing secretively through shady thickets. I was water and the unspeakable alchemies that gestate and take shape in water. (19)
And he begins to realize that
Turtle and fish and the pinpoint chirping of individual frogs are all watery projections, concentrations--as man himself is a concentration--of the indescribable and liquid brew which is compounded in varying proportions of salt and sun and time.
Finally emerging from the river, he feels
the body's revolt against emergence into the harsh and unsupporting air, its reluctance to break contact with that mother element which still, at this late point in time, shelters and brings into being nine tenths of everything alive. (20)
But man, Eiseley knows, has not really left the water; men, he perceives, are really "myriad detached ponds with their own swarming corpuscular life," and he himself remains "a microcosm of pouring rivulets and floating driftwood gnawed by the mystery of his own creation" (20). He understands, like the Italian fiction writer Italo Calvino, that "once we swam, now we are swum” (T-zero 49); that, like the pickerel Thoreau observed in Walden Pond, we are only "animalized water.”
Eiseley's time-lapse vision thus made it impossible for him to see himself as permanently separate from the natural order, his emergence from it being an everyday perceptual fact; through it he sees, in effect. his previous reincarnations. But it reveals to him more than just ceaseless change in a world of total flux. For at the heart of the writhing, metamorphosing, seemingly chaotic forms of Earth he detects, in the "subcellars of the mind," an underlying unity:
a little green in a fulminating spring, some strange objects floundering and helpless in the ooze on the tide line, something beating, beating, like a heart until a mounting thunder goes up through the towering drum that ever was can produce its strata, until no rhythm, until no mind can contain it, until it rises, wet and seaweed-crowned, an apparition from marsh and tide-pool, gross with matter, gurgling and inarticulate, ape and man-ape, grisly and fang-scarred, until the thunder is in oneself and is passing--to the ages beyond--to a world unknown, forever being born. (Firmament of Time 55-56)
For there exists, as "Mendel [pictured] had learned from those tiny intricate units that shape a flower's heart . . . [an] elemental patience that holds a living organism to its Seeing through course while mountains wear away" (Darwin's Century 231). time, Eiseley sought to discover this "elemental patience," but not just for scientific purposes; he sought to emulate it. And this stability, this timelessness, he knew, is exemplified best not by the organic world but by the geological.
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