Artifacts and Illuminations: Critical Essays on Loren Eiseley

8. Artifact and Idea

8 Artifact and Idea Loren Eiseley’s Poetic Undermining of C. P. Snow mary ellen pitts 175 Loren Eiseley often scrawled questions and poems in the margins of texts that he read. Indeed, two years before the publication of Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which footnotes The Firmament of Time, Eiseley wrote that “the intellectual climate of a given period may unconsciously retard or limit the theoretical ventures of an exploring scientist” (Firmament 61). Keenly aware of the limitations imposed by a worldview,Eiseleyrespondedformallyin“TheIllusionoftheTwoCultures” to C. P. Snow’s pronouncement that scientific and literary cultures are so polarized that they fail utterly to communicate. Thus began an ongoing dialogue with Snow’s argument. Although Snow was purportedly reporting, rather than advocating, the bifurcation of the world of learning, he emerged as spokesperson for what Eiseley considered an oversimplified view, for Snow argued that literary intellectuals and scientists represent separate poles, each unable to understand the other. Famously, Snow declared that literary intellectuals could not explain the Second Law of Thermodynamics, a failure that Snow equates with a scientist’s never having read anything by Shakespeare. This dichotomy Eiseley dismisses as an “illusion” born out of “a peculiar aberration of the human mind” that fails to recognize “the whole domain of value, which after all constitutes the very nature of man, as without significance” (Star 268–69). Eiseley argues that the highest intellectual power is the human ability to stretch “an invisible web of gossamer . . . into the past as well as across [living] minds and . . . [to respond] to the vibrations transmitted through these tenuous lines of sympathy” (267). Perceiving science itself not as an end, but as a means to what Francis Bacon calls “the uses of life”�all life�Eiseley perceives that the greatest danger of Snow’s dichotomizing lies Artifact and Idea 176 in the human perception of self, for “the tool user grows convinced that he is himself only useful as a tool, that fertility except in the use of the scientific imagination is wasteful and without purpose” (269). Eiseley’s essay is a powerful argument, extended by an analysis of an arrowhead as a link between utility and beauty, between techne and poiesis. His writing is highly allusive and invokes Leonardo, Darwin, Einstein, and Newton, all of whom “show a deep humility and an emotional hunger which is the prerogative of the artist.” Indeed, the essay is a tour de force for Eiseley, urging reexamination of both science and art as “constructs” of human beings, subject “to human pressures and inescapable distortions ” (276, 277). But effective as this essay is, Eiseley’s wily extension of his dialogue with Snow into his first collection of poems, Notes of an Alchemist, may be an even greater feat. Eiseley takes Snow’s own exemplar, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, as the underlying concept in poetry and juxtaposes entropy�that tendency toward randomness, disorder, or mixing of molecules that characterizes all systems of energy �and the force that Eiseley (anticipating writers such as Ilya Prigogine and Isabel Stengers, who write about “self-organizing systems”) calls “organization.”1 His poems undermine Snow’s position through art created from scientific observation and knowledge. Four poems in Notes of an Alchemist accomplish Eiseley’s master stroke: “Notes of an Alchemist,” “The Striders,” “The Beaver,” and “Arrowhead.” In his guise as alchemist, Eiseley transmutes into poetic understanding not only entropy itself but its opposite�organization, or negentropy. Eiseley moves from the dialogue between the two in natural phenomena to the human quest for organization�a quest that is both physical and intellectual, the quest of “wise men” to “charm . . . / the cloudy crystal of the mind” (lines 60–61). With an approach that is at once serious and playful, in these four poems Eiseley begins with chemistry�the formation of crystals through the action of a catalyst. He moves then to a simple principle of physics�the surface tension of water that provides a platform for a light-bodied insect, the water strider. He turns next to the dialogue of biological entropy and organization in the form of the beaver and its effects on the geography mary ellen pitts 177 of a continent. The fourth poem draws together the forces that compose cultural entropy versus organization, in the setting of a cemetery where diggers have uncovered an...