Artifacts and Illuminations: Critical Essays on Loren Eiseley

3. “ The Places Below”

3 “The Places Below” Mapping the Invisible Universe in Loren Eiseley’s Plains Essays susan n. maher 57 During the 1940s and 1950s, essayist Loren Eiseley was conscious that he was inventing a new form of nonfiction essay, one that could embrace the depths of time that geology, evolutionary biology, and astrophysics had revealed to the modern world. Trained in anthropology, with expertise in paleontology and archaeology, Eiseley often finds himself pondering the mysteries of time and space, the shifting landscapes of epic gestation, the “strange transmutation” of cartographic imagination, and “the inner forest” of the collective unconscious (Night 206, 207). Positioning himself within a literary line of descent that commences with Thoreau, Eiseley aligns himself to a “new geography” that “may take humanity a generation to absorb” (208). Keenly attentive to the smallest details of life lived in the present yet inextricably connected to the past, Eiseley absorbs this truth: “Life is never fixed and stable. It is always mercurial, rolling and splitting, disappearing and re-emerging in a most unpredictable fashion” (69). How then to map this mutable, illegible space, this variable life, when we “are in a creative universe” (70)? How does one enter a landscape that always keeps something from the truth seeker, “that glistens and invites [one] from below,” that keeps one “on the edge of a country,” that projects “distances . . . greater than they seem,” he queries in his essay “The Places Below” (17). This desire to map life’s transfigurations is one of the central impulses in Eiseley’s writing and would reshape the contemporary nonfiction essay. Biographer Gale E. Christianson notes that Eiseley’s invention of the “concealed essay” guides him toward an assembled form that could expand through geologic time and evolutionary history or contract focus onto a minute, ephemeral artifact of the present. This adaptable structure allows Eiseley to integrate “fictional and autobiographical material . . . merged with scientific fact, literary allusion, and poignant quotations” (Introduc- “The Places Below” 58 tion xi). He is able to negotiate multiple dimensions of time and space, to meditate over vexing philosophical and scientific questions, and to connect his teeming materials to one life, one mind�Eiseley himself�in transit. Eiseley, ever aware of human frailty, incompletion, and mortality, projects the creative imagination as his most forcible counterstroke against erasure. In his imagined worlds, as Dimitri N. Breschinsky explains, “the time frame can be considerably broader, extending back indefinitely into prehistoric times. Such an atavistic experience,” Breschinsky concludes, “can be breathtaking, opening up new vistas of space and long-forgotten dimensions of being” (“Reaching” 78). At the same time, Robert G. Franke argues that Eiseley charts “mythic” dimensions, “which might also be termed sacred, primordial, infinite, cosmic, cyclical, horizontal, or as Mircea Eliade has it, ‘Great Time.’” Franke notes Eiseley’s “complex view of time,” in which historical and ahistorical time frames are “deftly interwoven” (147). From an early age, Eiseley was drawn to spaces and objects that elicited hissenseofmultipledimensions.Indeed,IwouldarguethatEiseley’sformative years on the Great Plains shaped his distinctive response to the world and his ability to map “new vistas.” Eiseley himself has commented on the significant alignment of time and place in 1907, his birth year, explaining that “I was born in the first decade of this century, conceived in and part of the rolling yellow cloud that occasionally raises up a rainy silver eye to look upon itself before subsiding into dust again. That cloud has been blowing in my part of the Middle West since the Ice Age” (Night 197). Kathleen Boardman recalls the author’s early years, when “he spent hours exploring the fields, hedgerows, and wooded creeks at the edge of town,” bonding with place. Eiseley would remember these early years “vividly,” Boardman continues, and the map of that formative, childhood geography underlies many of his most significant essays. “In later writings,” she elucidates , “he referred to himself as a son of the middle border, descendant of pioneer immigrants” (“Loren Eiseley,” Dictionary 130). As a teenager, Eiseley took to the rails, hoboing across the American West, expanding his map of place. At both the University of Nebraska and the University of Kansas, he joined field expeditions that took him from the Badlands of western Nebraska to Doniphan and Smith Counties in northeastern and susan n. maher 59 north-central Kansas. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Great Plains had begun to reveal its ancient secrets...