Artifacts and Illuminations: Critical Essays on Loren Eiseley

1. “ The Bay of Broken Things”

1 “The Bay of Broken Things” The Experience of Loss in the Work of Loren Eiseley susan hanson 17 When he was a boy, Loren Eiseley recalls in All the Strange Hours, he for a time had the habit of whittling small crosses out of wood, decorating them with liquid gilt, and then erecting them atop the graves of birds he’d buried in the lot behind his house. He even went so far as to inter the printed obituaries of people who had died in heroic or tragic circumstances . These graves, too, were marked with a golden cross. “One day,” he writes, “a mower in the empty lot beyond our backyard found the little cemetery and carried off all of my carefully carved crosses. I cried but I never told anyone. How could I? I had sought in my own small way to preserve the memory of what always in the end perishes: life and great deeds.” The person to whom Eiseley revealed this secret shame�and he always associated loss with shame�was his friend W. H. Auden, who responded, “Yes, it was a child’s effort against time. . . . And perhaps the archaeologist is just that child grown up” (All 27). The comparison is apt. A man to whom solitude, darkness, and the absence of sound were simply givens, Loren Eiseley could not escape the reality of loss. He was, he knew, the product of an unhappy marriage, the son of a deaf, mentally unbalanced mother and a loving but often absent father. Like other children in such circumstances, he grew up fast. He also developed a need to confront the dissolution he saw as part of life�the “elemental night of chaos” represented by the erosion of the earth, the breakup of families, the slow but certain unraveling of his own mortal flesh�and a hunger to redeem it. Hearing the surf crash into the cliff below his window one night, he despairs of what he calls “the bay of broken things” that it leaves behind (Night 172). He responds to this chaos by imagining the waves to be the faces of the dead he once knew. Later, after dressing in the dark, Eiseley leaves his room and walks down to the rocky beach. There he “The Bay of Broken Things” 18 confronts both an injured sea gull, which darts away from him, and a duck with a shattered wing, languishing on the sand. Unable to run away as the gull had, the duck “waddles painfully from its brief refuge into the water.” Acting on instinct, the bird dives, then heads to sea. It is a gesture of futility: “A long green roller, far taller than my head, rises and crashes forward. The black head of the waterlogged duck disappears. This is the way wild things die, without question, without knowledge of mercy in the universe, knowing only themselves and their own pathway to the end. I wonder, walking farther up the beach, if the man who shot that bird will die as well” (173). He will, of course, as Eiseley knows, and so will the homeless old men of whom he later writes, and the pigeons pecking dumbly at their feet. While a melancholy, even depressive undercurrent flows through his writing, Loren Eiseley somehow makes peace with the darkness in his life. In this regard he is reminiscent of the apophatic mystics who, like himself, suffer from an unnaturally strong awareness of the transience of things. In their “dark night,” they find God; Eiseley, in contrast, finds repose. For these individuals, human limitations�imposed by time, by intellectual failure, by the inability of words to communicate the numinous �are not to be reviled but, rather, understood as a place of sacred demarcation. They signify the precipice from which the mystic�or the poet�falls. “Beyond,” Eiseley writes in “The Hidden Teacher,” “lies the great darkness of the ultimate Dreamer, who dreamed the light and the galaxies. Before act was, or substance existed, imagination grew in the dark” (Unexpected 55). Just as the mystic must endure periods of spiritual dryness before finding consolation, so did Loren Eiseley have to navigate a series of losses on his way to finding solace in the natural world. This is not to say that he had no appreciation of nature as a child or young adult; indeed, just the opposite is true. What is also true, however, is that...