Blue Plums and Smoke: Loren Eiseley’s Perception of Time

R O B E R T G. F R A N K E Central Michigan University Blue Plums and Smoke: LorenEiseley’sPerception ofTime In his essay “The Last Neanderthal,” Loren Eiseleywrites of revisiting a wild-plum thicket in Nebraska, during a time of autumn fires. He says he “half closed [his] eyes against the blue plums and the smoke drifting along the draw,”1leaning back in thought, ostensibly contemplating the role of oxidation in life and consciousness. But as he reflects on ripe plums falling, he reveals a deeper preoccupation with time itself. The autumn smoke drifts along the draw, and Eiseley fingers a flint knife, symbol of mankind’s past. He reflects on the site where he had earlier collected this legacy of ancient mankind, an escarpment where “. . . there was sand blowing and the past mingling with the present in more ways than professional science chose to see.”2 The autumn smoke encircles him as he contemplates his life’s journey. Rising in his memory isthe image of a circle, a symbol representing life without beginning or end, drawn in the dusty ground by a primitive, Neanderthal-like young woman encountered on a past field trip. Then, preoccupied with memories, he follows the blue smoke swirling before him. He limps slowly down the ravine, leaving the reader with a nostalgic sense of past events, and past time tied somehow to timelessness. This event represents well Eiseley’s complex view of time. It includes a sense of historical chronology, and simultaneously a moving sense of mythic or ahistorical time, the two concepts deftly interwoven. The mythic time, which might also be termed sacred, primordial, infinite, cosmic, cyclical, horizontal, or, as Mircea Eliade has it, “Great Time,”3overrides in the end profane time. It may be that Eiseley’s ability to move his readers to a sense of sacred time is a key to his success as a writer. Robert W. Glasgow says that Eiseley “has managed to fuse elements of past and present into a sort of awesome timelessness.”4James Olney has written of 148 Western American Literature Eiseley’s apparent need to dream into a deep state “where the human face disappears—and where there isonly life, one, continuous, unconscious, and eternal.”5 The emotional impact of Eiseley’s evocation of the time that passes all understanding should not be underestimated, for it is here that this writer most clearly disrupts the quotidian. The transcendence into sacred time awakens poetic and spiritual sensi­ tivity. Eiseley writes in The Invisible Pyramid that poets have both a “yearning for the country of the unchanging autumn light” and “a preter­ natural sensitivity to the backward and forward reaches of time,”6and it seems clear that Eiseleywanted his readers to share in this wider awareness. In the elevation from linear to mythic time he offered a kind of religious or sacred experience. Eiseley suggests this movement in several ways. He carefully describes the beginnings of events, notably the origins oflife on earth and of mankind. But he tells the story with such a strong emphasis on becoming that the historical sense of time is transcended, and the reader develops a sense of events as living and present. Nothing is relegated to a “dead” past. At the same time, Eiseley moves the reader by deliberately allowing his own feeling for the supernatural to break through into descriptions ofthe natural world. Any serious reader of Eiseley soon realizes that this writer believes in a divine impetus for the actions seen in the universe—“The Great Face Beyond.” Eiseley’s approach corresponds with Mircea Eliade’s claim that the mythic plays a vital role in human life, that from primitive mankind for­ ward, humans have had a strong desire to re-experience the sense of sacred time, the time of origins, to be reminded that the supernatural operates in the universe, and to witness again the spectacle of divine activity. Eliade believes that we can re-learn or at least be reminded of basic truths regard­ ing our existence. Eiseley’s affirmation of the mythic elements in human life is perhaps most clearly embodied in his predilection for symbols. Symbolic language carries feelings not easily defined...