Artifacts and Illuminations: Critical Essays on Loren Eiseley

10. In a Dark Wood

10 In a Dark Wood Dante, Eiseley, and the Ecology of Redemption anthony lioi Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, Che la diritta via era smarrita. In the middle of our life’s road I found myself in a dark wood, The right way lost. dante alighieri, inferno The legend had come down and lingered that he who gained the gratitude of animals gained help in need from the dark wood. loren eiseley, “the star thrower” 211 On a midsummer night in 1985, I sit around a campfire with a dozen other high school students on the beach of Hardwood Island in the Bay of Maine, listening to professors from Case Western and the Yale School of Forestry read an essay: “The Star Thrower,” by Loren Eiseley. Eiseley, we learn, was an anthropologist who moonlighted as one of the finest nature writers of the twentieth century. Natural history is important to us. For the last two weeks, we have been through ecology boot camp all over Maine. We have caught the stench of anaerobic decomposition in a freshwater bog; recorded reproduction statistics in a heron rookery; and climbed Mount Katahdin just for the hell of it. Now, after passing through a dark wood at the heart of the island, we sit under the stars to hear what it all means. It is clear that our teachers believe a thing they would never even whisper on campus: biology is not just an assemblage of facts and theories, but a worldview, a species of gnosis, a kind of revelation. Eiseley is a vector of that revelation, the scientist as shaman, the shaman as prophet. “The Star Thrower” is a sacred text. We have been ushered into a secret society, where the esoteric meaning of ecology can be uttered among illuminati. If it is possible to locate a moment when I became an ecocritic, this is it. I suspect that many people have had this experience, whether or not they first encountered “The Star Thrower” around a campfire. Eiseley invites this kind of encounter; one of his acts as prophet and shaman was to declare himself prophet and shaman, after all. It is not the subtext of his writing, but the text, though he sometimes employs epithets, like “chresmologue,” that would daunt a kabbalist (Carrithers, Mumford 247–71). This is one secret to his popularity among general readers, and, I suspect, the reason many critics avoid him. In some important sense, Eiseley�like his predecessor Dante Alighieri�transgressed against the In a Dark Wood 212 cabal of criticism by defining his own lineage and specifying the principles for the interpretation of his work. He draws a hermeneutic circle around himself. As a result, readers feel a sureness of intimacy with the scribe from Nebraska, even as academics feel slightly superfluous. The strength of Eiseley’s self-conception has almost guaranteed that several generations of critics would feel obliged to approach his work primarily through the charism of autobiography.1 It is no small thing to break this hammer hold with the power of a stronger poet acting as critic. In a review of The Unexpected Universe that would become the introduction to The Star Thrower anthology, W. H. Auden dares to trump Eiseley as arbiter of his literary lineage: Rather oddly, I first heard of Dr. Loren Eiseley not in this country but in Oxford, where a student gave me a copy of The Immense Journey, since which time I have eagerly read anything of his I could lay my hands on. His obvious ancestors, as both writers and thinkers, are Thoreau and Emerson, but he often reminds me of Ruskin, Richard Jefferies, W. H. Hudson, whom, I feel sure, he must have read, and of two writers, Novalis (a German) and Adalbert Stifter (an Austrian), whom perhaps he hasn’t. But I wouldn’t be sure. Some of the quotations in The Unexpected Universe surprised me. I would not have expected someone who is an American and a scientist to have read such little-known literary works as the Voluspá, James Thomson’s The City of Dreadful Night, and Charles Williams’s play Cranmer. (15) Expectations of scientists and Americans aside, Auden began a process that Eiseley’s critics have yet to address properly. He placed Eiseley in a transatlantic conversation about science, literature, and myth, of which Emerson and Thoreau, his “obvious...