Pittsburgh Alpha to Omega

If you’re into Dillard, Thoreau, pop sci, SF, memoirs and/or “creative nonfiction”, you might dig anthropologist Loren Eiseley‘s 1957 collection of linked essays, The Immense Journey.

Rating: 4/5 stars

Over the years I’ve picked up four books by Loren Eiseley, purely on the basis of their cool-sounding titles: The Firmament of Time, The Invisible Pyramid, Notes of an Alchemist and the subject of today’s review. While I can’t say if the others live up to their titles, The Immense Journey, though a quick read, delivers a visceral, vertiginous sense of life’s journey through its various environments and through time, while recounting episodes from the history of science in which ways of explaining this journey were proposed, exulted over, then ultimately scrapped.

Eiseley’s main subject here is arguably evolutionary theory; but he spends so many pages discussing the value of reflection and contemplation in the “wilderness” (which can be found, he comforts the urban reader, anywhere from the Badlands to New York City) for understanding both life in general and one’s own life, and describing his own solitary sojourns, that Eiseley has more in common with Thoreau than, say, with Dawkins.  In many of the essays, Eiseley drops a broad problem or question, then hikes somewhere and encounters some aspect of nature, the experience of which leads back, with detours into the primordial past, to his originally-stated philosophical preoccupation, illuminating it from a fresh angle.  The comparison to Thoreau, too, is not just structural; I find Eiseley’s writing to be comparably eloquent.  He writes, for instance, of the Palomar Observatory’s Hale telescope:

A billion years have gone into the making of that eye; the water and the salt and the vapors of the sun have built it; things that squirmed in the tide silts have devised it.  Light-year beyond light-year, deep beyond deep, the mind may rove by means of it, hanging above the bottomless and surveying impartially the state of matter in the white-dwarf suns.

Yet whenever I see a frog’s eye low in the water warily ogling the shoreward landscape, I always think inconsequentially of those twiddling mechanical eyes that mankind manipulates nightly from a thousand observatories.  Someday, with a telescopic lens an acre in extent, we are going to see something not to our liking, some looming shape outside there across the great pond of space.

Whenever I catch a frog’s eye I am aware of this, but I do not find it depressing.  I stand quite still and try hard not to move or lift a hand since it would only frighten him.  And standing thus it finally comes to me that this is the most enormous extension of vision of which life is capable: the projection of itself into other lives.  This is the lonely, magnificent power of humanity.  It is, far more than any spatial adventure, the supreme epitome of the reaching out.

Eiseley is fond of speculation, but makes it clear when he’s waxing poetic or being coy and when he’s presenting data drawn from research.  As a fan of speculative fiction, I thought he struck a fine balance.  Eiseley even discusses the form itself, lovingly if critically, focusing on its trope (already well-worn in 1957), and the actual likelihood, of humanoid ETs, in the essay “Little Men and Flying Saucers”.

Though the essays contain much religious terminology, it is used rhetorically rather than literally; and, though accounts of scientific goofs (there’s a great section on Haeckel, Huxley and Thomson’s artifactual Urschleim, and he devotes more time to the Piltdown Man hoax than to any other single topic) are woven throughout, Eiseley’s profound respect for scientific empiricism and desire to see it done right are more in evidence than the technophobic mysticism of which he has occasionally been accused.

It can be great fun for a layman to read of prominent scientists, impassioned about a particular interpretation of some theoretical model, jumping the gun and claiming conclusions they really want to be so, and which turn out to be bogus.  Eiseley takes these luminaries to task for investing a degree of faith in their models unwarranted by close observation of nature’s complex processes.  As just one example, here’s an extended passage from the book’s final essay, “The Secret of Life”:

A hundred years ago men spoke optimistically about solving the secret, or at the very least they thought the next generation would be in a position to do so.  Periodically there were claims that the emergence of life from matter had been observed, but in every case the observer proved to be self-deluded.  It became obvious that the secret of life was not to be had by a little casual experimentation, and that life in today’s terms appeared to arise only through the medium of preëxisting life.  Yet, if science was not to be embarrassed by some kind of mind-matter dualism and a complete and irrational break between life and the world of inorganic matter, the emergence of life had, in some way, to be accounted for.  Nevertheless, as the years passed, the secret remained locked in its living jelly, in spite of larger microscopes and more formidable means of dissection.  As a matter of fact the mystery was heightened because all this intensified effort revealed that even the supposedly simple amoeba was a complex, self-operating chemical factory.  The notion that he was a simple blob, the discovery of whose chemical composition would enable us instantly to set the life process in operation, turned out to be, at best, a monstrous caricature of the truth.

With the failure of these many efforts science was left in the somewhat embarrassing position of having to postulate theories of living origins which it could not demonstrate.  After having chided the theologian for his reliance on myth and miracle, science found itself in the unenviable position of having to create a mythology of its own: namely, the assumption that what, after long effort, could not be proved to take place today had, in truth, taken place in the primeval past.

My use of the term mythology is perhaps a little harsh.  One does occasionally observe, however, a tendency for the beginning zoological textbook to take the unwary reader by a hop, skip, and jump from the little steaming pond or the beneficent chemical crucible of the sea, into the lower world of life with such sureness and rapidity that it its easy to assume that there is no mystery about this matter at all, or, if there is, that it is a very little one.

In 2009, despite all the advances in genetics, neuroscience, biophysics, chaos/complexity theory and so forth, the emergence of life and of consciousness remain mysterious.  To paraphrase Achewood’s Roast Beef, what we need more of is the exemplary type of science which acknowledges its own inevitable blind spots (the better to fill them in) and limitations (the better to transcend them) while attending, rigorously and without bias, to the actual mysteries it strives to solve; the type of science, in other words, that Eiseley champions.

Here’s another bit from “The Secret of Life”:

It really is a matter, I suppose, of the kind of questions one asks oneself.  Some day we may be able to say with assurance, “We came from such and such a protein particle, possessing the powers of organizing in a manner leading under certain circumstances to that complex entity known as the cell, and from the cell by various steps onward, to multiple cell formation.”  I mean we may be able to say all this with great surety and elaboration of detail, but it is not the answer to the grasshopper’s leg, brown and black and saw-toothed here in my hand, nor the answer to the seeds still clinging tenaciously to my coat, nor to this field, nor to the subtle essences of memory, delight, and wistfulness moving among the thin wires of my brain.

I suppose that in the forty-five years of my existence every atom, every molecule that composes me has changed its position or danced away and beyond to become part of other things.  New molecules have come from the grass and the bodies of animals to be part of me a little while, yet in this spinning, light and airy as a midge swarm in a shaft of sunlight, my memories hold, and a loved face of twenty years ago is before me still.  Nor is that face, nor all my years, caught cellularly as in some cold precise photographic pattern, some gross, mechanical reproduction of the past.  My memory holds the past and yet paradoxically knows, at the same time, that the past is gone and will never come again.  It cherishes dead faces and silent voices, yes, and lost evenings of childhood.  In some odd nonspatial way it contains houses and rooms that have been torn timber from timber and brick from brick.  These have a greater permanence in that midge dance which contains them than ever they had in the world of reality.  It is for this reason that Academician Olga Lepishinskaya has not answered the kind of questions one may ask in an open field.

If the day comes when the slime of the laboratory for the first time crawls under man’s direction, we shall have great need of humbleness.  It will be difficult for us to believe, in our pride of achievement, that the secret of life has slipped through our fingers and eludes us still.  We will list all the chemicals and the reactions.  The men who have become gods will pose austerely before the popping flashbulbs of news photographers, and there will be few to consider – so deep is the mind-set of an age – whether the desire to link life to matter may not have blinded us to the more remarkable characteristics of both.

As for criticism, I found myself disputing two of his provisional conclusions: that panspermia is essentially a dead-end model as, even if true, it “simply removes the inconvenient problem of origins to far-off spaces or worlds into which we will never penetrate” (while a valid point, panspermia has much more to offer our understanding of life than Eiseley acknowledged in ’57; big-shots Dawkins, Hawking and Dyson currently endorse some version of panspermia, and the recent experiments with tardigrades have proven, thrillingly, that higher-order forms than spores and bacteria can indeed survive in space), and that, rather less generously and less provisionally, “Of men elsewhere, and beyond, there will be none forever.”  This is not the place to air my own views on humanoid ETs, but suffice to say that, by the standards he establishes elsewhere in the book and mercilessly applies to other scientists, Eiseley’s degree of certitude here comes off as obnoxious enough for me to dock him one star. Still, it’s the only slip of its kind I noticed in The Immense Journey and its source, “Little Men and Flying Saucers,” is still a blast to read.

Quibbles aside, Eiseley asks consistently solid questions, and approaches the search for answers from a charming and unique perspective.  For a writer of popular science, or of speculative fiction, I can think of no higher praise.  Eiseley also wins bonus points from me for ending his book with a line from a Thomas Hardy poem.

Free PDFs of two chapters, “The Snout” and “How Flowers Changed the World”, are available at Global MindShift.

Happy reading and cuídate.