Loren Eiseleys The Secret of Life

1
Loren Eiseleys The Secret of Life

• A Slide Show for HMXP Training Session, November
  7, 2009
• Dr. Matthew Fike

2
My Epigraph

• if we reflect upon his essays as a whole, we
  realize that science, religion, and art are not
  compartmentalized in them, that the three seem to
  be aspects of a single mental process (Peter
  Heidtmann, Loren Eiseley A Modern Ishmael 106).

3
Why Study The Secret of Life?

• The essay balances a left-brain deference to the
  scientific method with a right-brain wonder that
  manifests as myth and points toward faith.
  Although it inquires about life from a variety of
  points of view, the text angers no one because it
  critiques rather than commits and because such
  stands as it does take are encoded in a literary
  matrix. Thus the text should enable you and your
  students to cover alternative theories without
  rancor. But first you and your students have to
  understand it.

4
Who Is Loren Eiseley?

• Dates 1907-1977. Archaeologist, anthropologist,
  literary naturalist.
• Fathers take Remember, the boy he is a
  genius, but moody (Hours 16).
• Trained at the U of Nebraska (B.A. in English and
  Geology/Anthropology, 1933) and U of
  Pennsylvania. (M.A. in 1935 Ph.D. in 1937 both
  in anthropology).
• Served on the faculty at U of Kansas, Oberlin
  College, and U of Pennsylvania. Later was
  Provost of U Penn. Finally, Benjamin Franklin
  Professor at U Penn.
• Loren Eiseley, not Loren C. Eiseley Corey was
  his middle name and his mothers maiden name.
  Dropping it signaled that he had found his
  identity as a writer (Carlisle 151).
• The Immense Journey (1957) is his most important
  book. The Secret of Life is its last chapter.
  It was first published in Harpers in 1953.
• As he was finishing it, he began Darwins
  Century Evolution and the Men Who Discovered It
  (1958).
• His other book that deals with evolution is
  called The Firmament of Time (1960).
• POINT Eiseley believed in evolution.

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Title The Immense Journey

• The HMXP anthology gives, as a subtitle, An
  Imaginative Naturalist Explores the Mysteries of
  Man and Nature. This is on the dust jacket, but
  it is not part of the title page.

6
Eiseley as an Essayist

• In short, Eiseley intertwined autobiographical,
  scientific, figurative, and metaphysical elements
  into a new idiom and a unique vision, and that is
  the heart of his literary achievement (Carlisle
  39).
• Autobiography A walk in autumn
• Science Evolution
• Figuration Metaphor, allusion, myth, etc.
• Metaphysics Speculation about first causes

7
A Similar Statement

• Jack Fisher, one of Eiseleys editors at Harper,
  on The Immense Journey
• It is one of the very few works in recent
  years which moves in the borderland between
  science, religion, philosophy, and poetry (qtd.
  in Christianson 282).
• In other words, he leaves out the
  autobiographical and adds the philosophical.

8
More on Eiseley as an Essayist

• The Secret of Life is what Eiseley called the
  concealed essay, in which personal anecdote was
  allowed gently to bring under observation
  thoughts of a more purely scientific nature
  (Hours 182 my emphasis).
• Before we can consider his essay, however, we
  need to know a bit more about the book in which
  it appears.

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What is the immense journey in the title?
Various possibilities

• Evolution. Eiseley called this my history of
  evolution book (qtd. in Christianson 304).
• The development of the science of evolution.
• Eiseleys study of evolution Forward and
  backward I have gone, and for me it has been an
  immense journey (13). He had been studying
  evolution for a quarter of a century by the time
  IJ was published (Christianson 293).
• The search for the final secret Down how
  many roads among the stars must man propel
  himself in search of the final secret? (12).
• It is what man, when he first becomes conscious,
  realizes lies before him Perhaps he knew,
  there in the grass by the chill waters, that he
  had before him an immense journey (125-26).
• Life Life is a journey and eventually a death
  (Hours 52).
• My idea The book itself was an immense journey
  the first of its essays was published in 1947
  the book took 10 years. Eiseley discussed the
  book for years with Harper before signing a
  contract with Random House in 1956. The book
  appeared in 1957.

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The Evolution of the Title

• Manhunt
• The Great Deeps
• Bones and Searches
• The Dark Side of the Planet
• The Crack in the Absolute
• The Night Tide
• The Immense Journey

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Origin of the Title

• Frédéric Amiel It is as though the humanity
  of our day had, like the migratory birds, an
  immense journey to make across space (qtd. in
  Christianson 290).

12
The Order of the Chapters

• In each chapter, Eiseley moves a little further
  up the evolutionary ladder
• Chapters 1-5 Life before man the progression
  from primordial ooze to land animals.
• Chapters 6-10 How human beings came to be we
  are different from other animals because of our
  brains and culture.
• Chapters 11-13 What we humans make of nature
  when we look around nature becomes conscious in
  humans and looks at itself contemplation on the
  mystery of life (Angyal 28).

13
Themes of The Immense Journey

• Thus evolution is the books controlling theme
  and organizing principle.
• The last three chapters oppose scientific
  reductionism we are not merely sentient
  machines (Angyal 32).
• Mystery, miracle, myth, imagination, wonder,
  humility. Blurb Eiseley wrote for the jacket
  In bone pits and through the night skies a
  solitary naturalist contemplates the eternal
  mystery behind man and nature (qtd. in
  Christianson 295 my emphasis).
• In his later work Nostalgia, loneliness,
  melancholy, pessimism. (I think that The
  Secret foreshadows his drift toward these four
  themes.)

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Epigraphs

• Henry David Thoreau Man can not afford to be a
  naturalist, to look at Nature directly, but only
  with the side of his eye. He must look through
  and beyond her.
• William Temple Unless all existence is a
  medium of revelation, no particular revelation is
  possible.
• William Blake Parallel to looking not WITH but
  THROUGH the eye (The Everlasting Gospel, line
  175).
• POINT The Immense Journey is framed by
  statements (these epigraphs and the last sentence
  of The Secret of Life) that suggest what Taylor
  calls the transcendentalist idea of nature as a
  medium of revelation (par. 33).

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Vocabulary

• iridescent (179)
• desiccated
• slough
• microtomes (181)
• simulacrum
• midge (182)
• dualism (179 180)
• materialism (182-83)
• hobgoblin (182)
• pipette

• Get your students to circle vocabulary words and
  write definitions in the margins.
• Vocabulary is often a good place to begin the
  discussion.
• The move on to just the first sentence of The
  Secret of Life.

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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 (192, right), the time when a
  man begins to sense his mortality and look beyond
  the physical world.
• I was born when father was forty, of a marriage
  that had never been happy. I was loved, but I
  was also a changeling, an autumn child surrounded
  by falling leaves (Hours 15 my emphasis).
• Another Kind of Autumn (1977) contains a poem
  called The Black Snake, which resonates with
  the image in The Secret of Life.
• The Hardy poem that he refers to in the final
  sentence is also set in autumn.
• Whereas all things (as the seasons suggest) move
  forward in time, one must move backward in time
  to discover the secret of life.
• The it in line 2 is that secret.
• The author uses hopefully correctly here and on
  179, left bottoma fact worthy of pointing out.

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Definition

• So 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?
• But first, here are statements from earlier in
  The Immense Journey.

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Earlier Mention of the Secret of Life

• Eiseley mentions the discredited theory that
  widespread on the floor of the abyssal plain lay
  the Urschleim, a protoplastic half-living
  matter representing that transition between the
  living and nonliving out of which more complex
  life had, in the course of time, developed. The
  abyss, in other words, was thought to contain not
  only the living record of the past, but the
  ultimate secret of life itself Creation might
  still be in process (IJ 33 my emphasis).
• The secret is the crossing between death and
  life (34).

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Definitions of the Secret of Life

• Headnote the exact chemical processes for
  making life. (An interesting statement Its
  scientific-materialist point is out of sync, as
  we shall see, with Eiseleys conclusions.)
• 179 the mysterious borderline that bounds the
  inanimate
• 180 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, and the link does not have to be a
  chemical formula.

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Question

• Note We can also understand the secret of life
  by what it is not.
• What is the opposite of the secret? The answer
  appears on page 193.

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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 (188, right).
• The secret life out of inert matter.
• Death inert matter out of living matter.

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More on Autumn

• Everything living was falling, disintegrating as
  under the violence of an unseen hurricane (Hours
  251).
• POINT This quotation reinforces the idea that
  death is the opposite of the secret of life.

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Link between Autumn, Age, and Death

• I can only put it that this is the human autumn
  before the snow. It is the individuals last
  attempt to order the meaning of his life before a
  spring breaks in the rusted heart of the dreams,
  the memories, and the elusive chemical domain
  that contains them fly apart in irreparable ruin.
  Oncoming age is to me a vast wild autumn country
  strewn with broken seed-pods, hurrying cloud
  wrack, abandoned farm machinery, and circling
  crows (Hours 233-34 my emphasis).
• POINT Landscape is really an in-scape. That
  is, the field is an image that presents something
  about the man out walking in it.

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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 (180)?

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First Answers

• Alternatives
• supernatural explanations Eiseley seems to
  reject the Genesis story, along with related
  explanations based on it (190). These would
  include Creationism and Intelligent Design.
• mind-matter dualism and a complete irrational
  break between life and the world of inorganic
  matter (189) dualism (190). Dualism
  basically ducks the problem of the secret of
  life.
• (In other words, dualism here means that you
  dont worry about the transition between inert
  and living matter. Life vs. nonlife never the
  twain shall meet.)

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Better Answers

• The man with the pipe shook his head. Men and
  toadsthey all had to come from somewhere, he
  grumbled. Calling em toads or calling em men
  dont answer that. Mark my words, something had
  to have a hand in making us (Hours 58).
• And he believes in unity, not dualism. IOW, he
  doesnt see the physical and the transcendent as
  separate orders (Christianson 310).
• POINT He rules out dualism, but we cannot claim
  that he absolutely rules out a little nudge from
  some Mover beyond nature.

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Eiseleys Conversation with U of Penn Professor,
Frank Speck

• Once, strolling in the Philadelphia Zoo, we came
  upon a wood duck paddling quietly in a little
  pond. These birds are most beautifully
  patterned. We stood watching the ducks. Loren,
  Speck finally said, quite softly and uncertainly
  for him, tell me honestly. Do you believe
  unaided natural selection produced that pattern?
  Do you believe it has that much significance to
  the birds survival? I turned in surprise,
  because unbeknownst to my distinguished teacher,
  the same thought had been oppressing me (Hours
  93-94).
• In other words, Eiseley was open to the
  possibility, much as he is in our essay.

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But Here Is a Qualification

• He is critical of those who would bring God into
  the compass of a shop keepers understanding and
  confine Him to those limits, lest He proceed to
  some unimaginable and shocking actcreate
  perhaps, as a causal afterthought, a being more
  beautiful than man. As for me, I believe nature
  capable of this (IJ 24-25).
• Point Such divine agency as Eiseley will admit,
  is manifested through nature, without direct
  divine intervention in life. This is not
  dualism. It is Oneness/Unity not God OR
  nature but God AND nature or better yet, God IN
  and THROUGH nature.

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So What about Evolution?

• Does Eiseley believe in evolution?
• YES, ABSOLUTELY!
• The Immense Journey (1957), Darwins Century
  Evolution and the Men who Discoved It (1958), and
  The Firmament of Time (1960) all support this
  concept.

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But he supports it metaphorically.

• 189 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
• 190 In one 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
• 190 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
• 191 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.
• 191 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.
• This parallels the organizational strategy of the
  whole book.

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Then He Faces a Problem

• Note Evolution is about change over time, not
  about ultimate origin.
• Saying that life evolved is not the same as
  explaining how it began in the first place.

34
Key Question

• What are the only two other possible
  explanations of life upon earth?  See page 190.
• Eiseley offers two theories.

35
Answers on 190

• Left life did not arise on this planet, but
  was wafted here through the depths of space.
  (This explanation does not determine the secret
  of life but rather shunts it onto another
  planet.)
• Right life has actually arisen on this
  planet.
• Logically, one or the other must be the case.

36
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. It is good to
  divide the essay up and assign a page per group.

37
Science

• 189 examination, diligence, modern biology,
  dissection and analysis, life as a material
  manifestation, experimentation, theories
• 190 knowledge of nature, evidence,
  laboratories, microscope
• 191 the ultimate chemical, scientific
  effort, analysis, the great powers of the
  mind
• 192 materialism
• 193 scientists as gods

38
What Is His Point?

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

39
Answer

• From a scientific/biological/materialist/
  reductionist 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?
• Do you believe only in things that science can
  measure?

40
Here is Eiseleys Position

• Eiseley was critical of scientists for unduly
  compartmentalizing their minds and allowing their
  thoughts to be confined by the scientific method.
  He scorned those who have substituted
  authoritarian science for authoritarian religion
  (Night Country 139) (Berkove 93).

41
Next Question Options?

• A scientific point of view (the primeval soup
  theory) vs. Creationism (you believe in a
  creator-God) is a false dichotomy that rests on
  the matter/spirit dualism that Eiseley rejects.
• Then what view do you adopt as regards the secret
  of life? The answer is that nature provides
  signs of something greater than nature a Mover
  working in and through nature.

42
What Relates to Nature But Is the Opposite of
Science?

• 188 mystery
• 189 nature not as natural as it looks,
  fantastic magic, myth and miracle
• 189 191 imagination
• 190 wandering fruitlessly in pastures (his
  physical wandering represents his imagining mind
  at work) vs. the linear scientific method
• 193 wonder, marvel

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In Other Words Nature is an Interface

• 
  Science
• Mysterious..Nature
• Mover (?)
  Eiseleys
• 
  Imagination
• Veil

44
Lets Look at It Another Way

• Left brain
• Science
• Dissection
• Analysis
• Physical world
• Nature
• Dualism
• Nature signifies itself.
• The secret of life is some chemical process
• SCIENCE CANNOT FIND
• THE SECRET OF LIFE

• Right brain
• Myth
• Imagination
• Memory
• Nature/mind/spirit
• The Transcendent
• Unity/Oneness
• Nature signifies something greater.
• THE SECRET OF LIFE RELATES, AT LEAST PARTLY, TO
  SOME MYSTERIOUS MOVER, AND A DIFFERENT SET OF
  TOOLS IS BETTER SUITED TO CONTEMPLATION OF THAT
  POSSIBILITY.

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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? See the next slide.

46
Myth What about Animals on 179, 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" (189).
• One could take life as a kind of fantastic
  magic (189).
• As I explain on the next slide, Eiseley
  stealthily implies that the Genesis account is
  also delightful whimsy and fantastic magic.

47
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 (189-90).
• Here is that scientific myth on 189 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. There is not a
  hard-and-fast distinction between mice from
  clothes, (Eve from a rib), or life from a blob.

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Key Sentences on Page 191

• 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 (my emphases).

49
FYI Black Snake Image

• Eiseleys poem The Black Snake appeared in
  Another Kind of Autumn, published posthumously in
  1977.
• It is a light-hearted prose poem in which seeing
  a black snake sparks a meditation on Eden and the
  Fall, with Eiseley and his wife as stand-ins for
  Adam and Eve.
• But the black snake in the poem, once it slithers
  away, never came back nor whispered to anybody
  (my emphasis).

50
Re. the Egg and the Snake, Audens Criticism of
Eiseley Is Relevant

• I have one slight criticism of his literary
  style, which I will get over with at once. Like
  Ruskin, he can at times write sentences which I
  would call woozy that is to say, too dependent
  upon some private symbolism of his own to be
  altogether comprehensible to others.
• POINT What Auden misses is the fact that
  wooziness is exactly the point. Eiseley WANTS
  the reader to react that way his language is
  enacting its meaning.

51
Interpretation

• First sentence The secretlies in the egg of
  night (paradoxnight and egg are unrelated a
  mixed metaphor? certainly an almost impossible
  combination). Two possibilities
• The secret lies in the thing that conceals (the
  egg of night as a container that blocks
  perception)
• Or the secret lies in nights origin (egg),
  which is itself something that conceals. Thus
  the secret of life is secret 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 whisperthey hiss) are like a
  simulacrum/imitation (a simile) of old night (a
  metaphor for something that conceals.
• ARE YOU CONFUSED YET? THATS THE POINT!

52
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
  is concealed)
• ? within something else that conceals (the egg)
• 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) ironically
  highlights the darkness in which the secret is
  cloaked.
• POINT Language enacts the secretness of the
  secret.

53
A Step Further Page 191, right, end of middle
par.

• 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 he has
  merely generated a provocative series of images
  that emphasizes its remoteness.

54
Next Question

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

55
Answer On Nature and SupernatureUnity, not
Dualism

• 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 (189).
• 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
  (193).

56
Rev. Dr. James McCosh

• This is the Scotch theologue, whom Eiseley
  mentions earlier in The Immense Journey (152).
• He was a minister, a philosopher, a professor,
  and eventually president of Princeton University.
• Author of two books illuminate Eiseleys
  reference
• The Supernatural in Relation to the Natural
  (1862)
• The Religious Aspect of Evolution (1887).
• Chapter titles in the former book
• The Natural A Manifestation of the
  Supernatural
• The Possibility of a Miracle
• Analogy Between the Natural and Supernatural
  Systems

57
McCoshs Position

• Basic point The natural implies the
  supernatural. In contemplation of the finite
  we are necessitated to believe that there is an
  infinite (Supernatural 82-83).
• God is the Final Cause He created matter and
  is responsible for the transition from inert to
  living matter (Religious Aspect ).
• Evolution then begins, and McCosh attributes this
  too to Gods power (54).
• Thus God may be a continuous creator.
• And it makes sense to speak of the intelligent
  creation (71).

58
McCoshs Position

• The Religious Aspect of Evolution He believed
  that one could see evolution in the works of
  Godthis was not inconsistent with religion
  (ix-x).
• And the theory of Evolution does not undermine
  or interfere in any way with the ordinary
  doctrine of Final Cause (). Nature was
  created by God at the beginning (3).

59
Hardy

• Poem title The Last Chrysanthemum. This is
  an autumn poemset when leaves like corpses
  fall, / And saps all retrocede. The poem
  concludes
• I talk as if the thing were born
• With sense to work its mind
• Yet it is but one mask of many worn
• By the Great Face Behind.
• Both Eiseley and Hardy were suspicious of the
  scientific neatness with which modern Western
  civilization interprets nature. They both
  believed that The simple contains the complex
  (Cornwell-Robinson 52-53). Like the black snake
  that whispers to Eiseley of the secret of life.
• Using the knowledge of the contemporary
  scientist and scholar, Eiseley and Hardy have
  concluded that careful and constant familiarity
  with the commonplace in nature emphasizes the
  mysteries from which the special human animal has
  sprung and which this creature must still accept
  (Cornwell-Robinson 54).

60
The Unexpected Universe

• Eiseley makes a similar point in UU behind
  visible nature lurks an invisible and procreative
  void from whose incomprehensible magnitude we can
  only recoil (31).

61
Ur-Source Melville?

• All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard
  masks. But in each eventin the living act, the
  undoubted deedthere, some unknown but still
  reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its
  features from behind some unreasoning mask. If
  man will strike, strike through the mask!
• --Moby Dick, Chapter 36

62
Hardys Technique Litotes

• Litotes stating the negative of the opposite of
  what you want to say. HH 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 (Harmon
  and Holman 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.

63
The Bottom Line

• 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 (193) and blue-steel microtomes
  (191) can dissect. He finally arrives at the
  possibility, despite his earlier denial of
  supernatural explanations (190), 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.

64
Eiseleys Epistemological Problem

• I am an evolutionist. I believe my great
  backyard Sphexes giant wasps evolved like other
  creatures. But watching them in the October
  light as one circles my head in curiosity, I can
  only repeat my dictum softly In the world there
  is nothing to explain the world (Hours 249).
• Re. how the Sphex can navigate and how it knows
  where to sting the cicada Perhaps that can be
  termed my metaphysical position. I am simply
  baffled (Hours 252-53).
• I was seeking an undiscoverable place, glimpsed
  long ago by the poet Shelley built beyond mortal
  thought far in the unapparent (Hours 254).
  (Eiseley is quoting from Shelleys elegy for John
  Keats, Adonais, stanza 45. Keats is now
  apparently far in the unapparent himself.)
• POINT He suspects that there is something afoot
  beyond nature he just has no idea what it might
  be.

65
What Strengthens the Essays Metaphysical and
Epistemological Problem?

• Ask students one of the following questions
• Why do you think Eiseley use the word dust on
  page 193?
• What one word alludes to a theological context in
  which divine agency matters?
• Answer I will ask once more in what way it is
  managed, that the simple dust takes on a history
  and begins to weave these unique and
  never-recurring apparitions in the stream of
  time.
• He still does not know, but dust is biblical
  allusion and implies the possibility of divine
  agency.

66
Genesis (my emphases)

• 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)

67
An Implication

• Previous hints of evolutionary science are to
  Darwin and his Origin of Species as Darwin and
  Western culture (e.g., the Bible, literature) are
  to Eiseley and The Secret of Life.
• Point The Secret of Life enacts the same
  process of influence that Eiseley charts in
  Darwins Century.

68
God?

• There are no entries in Christiansons biography
  of Eiseley for God, Jesus, or religion.
• But Christianson believes that Eiseley gravitated
  toward the notion of the One, an
  incomprehensible but all-sufficient unity (310).
• Certainly Eiseley does not believe that
  materialism and spirituality are separate realms.
  He believes, with the Transcendentalists and
  McCosh, that God is manifest in nature. But I
  find no evidence that Eiseley believed in Jesus
  as a personal Lord and Savior. And again, he
  cannot manage a direct endorsement of divine
  agency in the origin or evolution of life.

69
What Else 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, allusion, memory, and
  litotes versus the repetition of the word
  "dissection" throughout the piece.
• POINT THE TEXT ENACTS THE MIRACLE OF THE
  CONSCIOUS HUMAN BRAIN.

70
POINT

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

71
The Artist

• In all the questioning about what makes a
  writer, and especially perhaps the essayist, I
  have seen little reference to this fact namely,
  that the brain has become a kind of unseen
  artists loft (Hours 156).
• He goes on to talk about pictures/images, memory,
  time, and pattern.
• POINT The literary artist is a co-creator with
  God.

72
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.

73
So Ultimately the Secret of Life Becomes Human
Thought

• Man was becoming something the world had never
  seen beforea dream animalliving at least
  partially within a secret universe of his own
  creation (IJ 120 my emphasis).
• The dreams Eiseley referred to are
  abstractions of the human mind (Berkove 89-90).

74
Eiseleys Poem

• Behind nothing
• before nothing
• worship it the zero.
• (Hours 12)

75
Possible Interpretation

• Past Present Future
• Behind The Before
• Nothing Zero Nothing
• Points 1) Evolution stretches back to the
  moment when inert matter came alive, but it also
  stretches ahead into the future when God (?)
  might improve on human beings. 2) The zero is
  NOW, the moment of consciousness that The
  Secret celebrates and enacts. 3) But the zero
  is also 0an O-shapethat symbolizes the unity
  that Eiseley sees between nature and whatever
  lies beyond nature.

76
Interpretations (and last slide)

• ONE VIEW The zero may be the moment when
  evolution began. The zero may be that moment
  when inert matter came alivethe crossing point
  of life when, in a sense, time began.
• OR The zero is NOW Evolution stretches back
  to the moment when inert matter came alive, but
  it also stretches ahead into the future when God
  (?) or Nature (?) might improve on human beings.
• THUS The zero is NOW, the moment of
  consciousness that The Secret celebrates and
  enacts.
• BUT the zero is also 0an O-shapethat
  symbolizes the unity that Eiseley sees between
  nature and whatever lies beyond nature.
• END