Loren Eiseley’s Poem… as Promised Last Week

“Winter Light” has four stanzas with four lines in each. Dr. Eiseley’s words spoke to me last week, and yet even more now, following the presidential election.

A spider web pulled tight between two stones

With nothing left but autumn leaves to catch

Is maybe a winter sign, or the thin blue bones

Of a hare picked clean by ants. A man can attach

Meanings enough to the wind when his luck is out

But, having stumbled into this season of grief,

I mean to reflect on the life that is here and about

In the fall of the leaves—not on the dying leaf.

Something more tough, reliable, and stark

Carries the blood of life toward a farther spring—

Something that lies concealed in the soundless dark

Of burr and pod, in the seeds that hook and sting.

I have learned from these that love which endures the night

May smolder in outward death while the colors blaze,

But trust my love—it is small, burr-coated, and tight.

It will stick to the bone. It will last through the autumn days.

In contrast to this poem, please note that on November 6th, the day after the election, I saw this when I first opened my computer. 

  STEP INTO THE VIRTUAL AREA OF DIGITAL GAMEPLAY, AN ELECTRIFYING WORLD WHERE LEGENDS ARE BORN.

  And at the bottom of the page?

IT’S NATIONAL NACHOS DAY.

Then beside my computer, I found in an old journal the following words:

The value of having an inner map of the world as it is (not as it’s broadcast) is this: it allows you to know that your task is larger than yourself. If you choose, just by virtue of being a decent person, you are entrusted with passing on something of value through a dark, crazy time—preserving your integrity, in your way, by your acts and your very breathing for those who will build when the chaos exhausts itself. Persons who assume the burden of their own integrity are free—because integrity is freedom, and its force can’t be quelled.  The future lives in our individual, often lonely, and certainly unprofitable acts of integrity, or it doesn’t live at all.

Next week: Wherever that inner voice takes me.

Between a Rock and a Hard Place

I use this cliché, despite an echo from poet T.S. Eliot, who said a cliché begins as heartfelt and then loses its heart. Yes, linguistic death through repetition, words spoken from habit, little thought behind them. Yet this photo speaks to my worried and weary heart.

Impatiens, a colorful shade lover, meant for well-draining, nutrient-rich soil. So…what was it doing between rock turned to gravel and the hard cement lip of a three-bay garage? I noticed this plucky Impatiens the same day I stopped on the path to the cottage and looked at a spider web: one audaciously connected from a wind-blowing Pampas to a Knock-Out Rose. The web is gone now. But this inspiring flower, despite my mate accidently dragging a hose across it, survives with a few pink pedals. I’ve given the flower water (no rain lately) and weeks ago, the day I first noticed it, I moved the wheelbarrow in the garage to give my tiny Miata more space. Which has kept me from driving over this ardent survivor.

From an insignificant beginning in one tiny, black-plastic container, countless Impatiens have returned each spring, spreading throughout our garden, especially in front of the cottage by the garage. This survivor, all by itself, was the first to speak to me about a rock and a hard place. And this cliché speaks for both Aging and technological Future Shock in my life.

Today, the “survivor” sent me to my library for Loren Eiseley’s The Star Thrower.

This collection of essays and poems from his many books & notebooks is one Eiseley compiled before his death in 1977.  I recalled that one of the book’s essays is, “How Flowers Changed the World.” But I had forgotten that the late W.H. Auden, a famous British poet, wrote the introduction to The Star Thrower.

A lovely conjunction, as earlier I’d thought of a line from Auden’s poem, “One Evening.” Two lines from it have haunted me since junior year in college.

 “And the crack in the teacup opens? A lane to the land of the dead.”

The words speak loudly to me in our fraught political times. And with the election in two days, to lessen my fear of an anti-democratic outcome, I will quote words from Eiseley’s essay on flowers.

“A little while ago—about one hundred million years, as the geologist estimates time in the history of our four-billion-year-old planet, flowers were not to be found anywhere on the five continents. Wherever one might have looked, from the poles to the equator, one would have seen only the cold dark monotonous green of a world whose plant life possessed no other color.

Somewhere, just a short time before the close of the Age of Reptiles, there occurred a soundless, violent explosion. It lasted millions of years, but it was an explosion, nevertheless. It marked the emergence of the angiosperms—the flowering plants.

Image of the First Flower

Even the great evolutionist Charles Darwin called them “an abominable mystery,” because they appeared so suddenly and spread so fast.

Flowers changed the face of the planet. Without them, the world we know—even man himself—would never have existed. Francis Thompson, the English poet, once wrote that one could not pluck a flower without troubling a star.  Intuitively, he had sensed like a naturalist, the enormous interlinked complexity of life. Today we know that the appearance of the flowers contained also the equally mystifying emergence of man. (Please note the cheek of AI to keep trying to change Eiseley’s prose.)

Next week: A poem by Loren Eiseley, “Winter Sign,” that links in my mind, both spider  from an earlier posting and  Impatiens from this week. 

Trumpery is a Synonym for Tawdry

This morning, e-mail from a California friend, someone I have been pals with since seventh grade. After college, marriage, and two children, she attended law school at night, earned her law degree, and later was appointed a judge to a California court, and served on the bench until her retirement. Then Sue dove into the art world and has created arresting works in fabric, with her creations garnering prizes and hanging in noteworthy places. I mention Sue because of what she shared with me. She reads my blog and few do. No matter.  I write this blog because I love literature and the English language.

The e-mail Sue sent me was from a blog she’d read, which was borrowed from another blogger. (Truly I dislike this word. No matter # 2). Sue wrote of the rabbit hole she fell into related to me. Recently, I spent weeks writing about William from Old Miss. The blog my friend read   mentioned Faulkner. Thus, the conjunction with me and why my old friend sent e-mail today.

The blogger Sue referenced asked readers if it was important to read Faulker. 

The writer then admitted dislike of him and said William was not going to make you a better person. Next the writer moved into her blog’s intent. If the larger world “wants you to be optimized, productive, monetized” then sitting around and reading a work of art is a rebellious act that insists, “I am a human being and not a cog, not a good little worker, not a cozy girl eating the slop… fed to me.” This declaration ended by calling such a stance of doing difficult things like reading, “a beautiful act of rebellion.”

I smiled while reading this phrase, remembering when I and other junior high girls like Sue, somehow secured a copy of the tawdry Peyton Place and passed it around. Yet I remember no time when I felt the rebel while reading a book. I kept Gone with the Wind in my desk at school in fourth grade and felt sneaky, not rebellious. From the day I read The Yearling in third grade, I found in literature a way to wander in unknown worlds. Since then, my literary search has not ended for seventy-three years.

Yet if the “commercial internet is the capture and commodification of life,” as Rebecca Solnit writes “In the Shadow of Silicon Valley” (London Review of Books, 8 February 2024 ), then in this sense, I am a rebel bound to books in print, books that I hold in my hands, that I underline with a pen, that I return to often for another voyage.  Didn’t Emily Dickinson claim there is no frigate like a book?  So yes, I rebel in our brummagem times and keep reading fine literature.

Next week… what was promised last week -😊