Reading: Loren Eisley.
2026-01-30 15:12![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
asher553This morning I picked up my old copy of Loren Eisley's 'The Invisible Pyramid' (1970) and began reading, from the Prologue through the end of section III (p. 22). Eisley begins by recalling being held aloft as a young boy by his father to see Halley's Comet in 1910; there are some meditations on the immensity of time and space. He reflects on the revelation during the 19th century of the antiquity of the world and the universe; the voyage of Lewis and Clark was a journey in time as much as in space. "Tell us what is new," the explorers were enjoined, but really they were telling us what is old; and yet, that in itself is new. Evolution as described by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace (who is profiled extensively in TAOM, ch. 9) was a great stage play in which the actors, one by one, would each expire, "pinched out of existence in a grimy corner". Man, uniquely, developed a brain "whose essential purpose was to evade specialization" (p.19). This brain could use language with the "tongue and hand, so disproportionately exaggerated in the motor cortex", as illustrated by the iconic "homunculus" diagram of Penfield that's reproduced in my LSL book on 'The Mind' (p. 38).
"About ourselves there always lingers a penumbral rainbow - what A.L. Kroeber [the father of U.K. LeGuin] termed the superorganic - that cloud of ideas, visions, institutions which hover about, indeed constitute human society, but which can be dissected from no single brain. This rainbow, which exists in all heads and dies with none, is the essential part of man. Through it he becomes what we call human, and not otherwise." (p. 21)
Loren Eisley (1907 - 1977) would not live to see the return of Halley's Comet in 1986. The Wikipedia entry on Eisley has a generous section on his early life. Growing up on the outskirts of Lincoln, Nebraska in the early 20th century, he would have memories of the "far-off train headlight ... on the prairies of the West" (p. 9). On the early ancestors of man, Eisley writes (p. 10), "We talked, but the words we needed were fewer. ... We meant well, but we were terrifyingly ignorant and given to frustrated anger. There was too much locked up in us that we could not express." Perhaps he was thinking of his own deaf and mentally disturbed mother when he wrote these words.
Eisley himself proved to be a man of words from early on, publishing in the then-new 'Prairie Schooner', which sees its centennial this year. The bio lists him as an anthropologist, but the Wiki article clarifies that "he came to anthropology from paleontology, preferring to leave human burial sites undisturbed", which sheds light on the numerous knowledgeable references to paleontology, archaeology, and prehistoric burial practices already evident in the few pages of the book I've read so far. [483]
"About ourselves there always lingers a penumbral rainbow - what A.L. Kroeber [the father of U.K. LeGuin] termed the superorganic - that cloud of ideas, visions, institutions which hover about, indeed constitute human society, but which can be dissected from no single brain. This rainbow, which exists in all heads and dies with none, is the essential part of man. Through it he becomes what we call human, and not otherwise." (p. 21)
Loren Eisley (1907 - 1977) would not live to see the return of Halley's Comet in 1986. The Wikipedia entry on Eisley has a generous section on his early life. Growing up on the outskirts of Lincoln, Nebraska in the early 20th century, he would have memories of the "far-off train headlight ... on the prairies of the West" (p. 9). On the early ancestors of man, Eisley writes (p. 10), "We talked, but the words we needed were fewer. ... We meant well, but we were terrifyingly ignorant and given to frustrated anger. There was too much locked up in us that we could not express." Perhaps he was thinking of his own deaf and mentally disturbed mother when he wrote these words.
Eisley himself proved to be a man of words from early on, publishing in the then-new 'Prairie Schooner', which sees its centennial this year. The bio lists him as an anthropologist, but the Wiki article clarifies that "he came to anthropology from paleontology, preferring to leave human burial sites undisturbed", which sheds light on the numerous knowledgeable references to paleontology, archaeology, and prehistoric burial practices already evident in the few pages of the book I've read so far. [483]
