The Peach.

What is the first thing you think of when you hear the word peaches? Georgia? Ty Cobb? Fuzz? Juicy?

They convey the idea of summer to me.

I bought a new variety of peach at the grocery store yesterday. The sales receipt listed it as a "donut" peach. It is also called a Saturn Peach. It is quite small and sort of flattened. It remains to be seen if "donut" peaches will replace coffee shop doughnuts.

The little round sticker tells me everything I need to know about the "donut", and more. They are comparatively small but very beautiful.

You can grow this variety in your home orchard or buy them from a local commercial orchard. Though it seems like a non sequitur, Swiss chard too, can be grown at home, if you want. It is as beautiful, in its own way, as a peach.

The Star Thrower by Loren Eisley, Part 3

This realization brings about a spiritual release.

Now he sees.

He now knows the question. He also knows that there is an answer, but it is not on the predictable prairie plains of modern science that he has made his fortress. Out of the center of his brain, the primitive layers unfolding in his subconscious, the haunted rooms of his mind are unlocked one by one.


On a conscious level he realizes Darwin, Einstein, and Freud might be said to have released the shadows. The barricade to his spiritual illumination has been removed. The way is now open for him to search for the messenger in the rainbow light.



The seed has grown and opened in flower, leaving behind the dark shadows which threatened him. He feels that he has not been a man for a long time, mired down as he had been with his personal and evolutionary past. He is now free to comprehend that it was men as well as starfish that one seeks to save.



He imitates the example of the inestimable beauty of man in the prism light and throws back the starfish that they might live.



Like God, who throws stars in the far-flung heavens, like Jesus who became a fisher of men, like the Messenger from the East, he finds himself also to be a kind of savior, both of himself as well as of stars and starfish.



He has sorted out the conflict of the evolutionary striving to be the fittest at the expense of the weak. He has chosen instead to become a Thrower who loves life itself and not just individual beings, a man who must walk a lonely path on the beach of Costabel. He is not a man who walks in desultory defeat.



He has a second chance, a second wind for the rest of his life. He makes a small but infinite statement when he says, "I understand".


The images of darkness are scattered by an epiphany of enlightened understanding, moving him in a spiritual evolution from his haunted beginning to the joy of discovery, abounding with hope and the breaking of a new day for him.

The Star Thrower: Some Thoughts After Reading Loren Eisley, Part 2

Eisely uses myths and fairy tales to help explain his inner abode. He talks about the witching hour, the twelfth hour which is that time when transformations often occur.

It is at this hour that the coach turns back into a pumpkin and black magic works its ancient art. Instability lies at the heart of the world, he says. This perceived world of instability lies at the root of his perception of "mother". About his actual mother he further states, "She had been deaf. All her life she had walked the precipice of mental breakdown."

His mother's walk on the treacherous bluffs of imagined glacier mountains becomes his burden.

The image of darkness occurs in other cases besides the form of the trickster. The image of a trickster often portrays the unknown, something to be feared. Darkness at the edge of the shore, at the edge of his mind, haunts him as no pale ghost could. He grapples with this idea and with his perceived primeval evolutionary past.

The mysteries of the unadorned human psyche are shrouded in the wrappings of undiscovered darkness. His journey to meet the messenger begins in darkness and progresses as the light increases. He writes, "I arose and dressed in the dark." The dark for him is a kind of psychological blindness. He needs to illuminate his landscape in some way.

The meeting of a savior-like figure, something that his mother could not be, proves to be Eisley's pivotal point, the shifting of Eisley's despair. He dresses in the darkness but feels a faint sense of coming light "somewhere behind me in the east". There is expectation and anticipation.

Morning enters slowly, and a vague figure appears to him in a rainbow light, the covenant symbol of a New World. It appears to be a human figure, although he is not conscious of his place in Eisley's scheme of things.

This image is a messianic one, a fisher of starfish is like a fisher of men, a replacement figure for the rejecting mother.

This symbolic person takes the religious posture of kneeling in the ever-changing light. The Star Thrower hurls a starfish back into the sea saying that it may live, raising the question of whether this is possibility or permission, for he had "the posture of a god".

In this first encounter with the savior-metaphor, a seed is sown in his heart that must filter down from his conscious mind for his heart to accept. The seed will take some time to germinate.

He walks away, not yet a true believer. He thinks that the man on the beach is only a man after all, one man in the midst of all the death washed ashore on the shipwreck-beach of Costabel.

In some ways Eisely's life is a shipwreck washed ashore. He is trying to sort things out there: what to save, what to keep?

He returns to his mother's home after her death, having literal and psychological sorting to do. His mother, like the sea, has been an overwhelming memory for him. He speaks of the sea in this way, "In the end the sea rejects its offspring".

His mother, mute for many years after her death, the originator and sea of primordial life in his embryonic state, breaks the ties of her legacy to him just as the umbilical cord separates mother and child at birth. The spectral mother speaks to him.

He finds Victorian photographs of her relatives with her eyes. They also seem to be speaking to him. "The gaze was mutely clairvoyant and lonely". Her eyes are his eyes, in his imagination and figuratively.

In this repressed Victorianism, in a small town in Iowa he finds that, "Here it all began, her pain and mine".

There is never any mention of a father. It is only his mother who figures into the barren landscape of the photographs. There, in the grainy silver reflections of reality, he discovers the source of his dark images and the source of his eye motif. The eyes in the photograph were remote and shadowed.

This is also the source of the shadow which looms over him. He is his mother's son, and the words and images he uses tell much of the conflict and pain between the two. The agonized eye stays frozen in his mind's portrait even when Eisley closes his own.

Can there be a more haunting image? This conflict results in another portrait in his brain, the torn eye.

The Biblical injunctions, no doubt whispered to him by his mother's Victorian upbringing, exhort him to reject the world and its vulgarities, but he loves worldly things and all its weak creatures. Perhaps his mother thought he was weak and vulgar, mired down in the primal ooze, unable to rise to the level she had envisioned for him. The eye in his room in Costabel discovers yet another eye also present there, searching, penetrating, and looking through him as if he were a transparent jellyfish.

That eye is not one of a dead octopus, not the eye of an ever watchful God, nor the eye of the battered animal from childhood memory. He superimposes external reality over the interior mirage and writes, "Finally, there was an eye that seemed torn from a photograph. I know the eye and the circumstance and the question. It was my mother. She was long dead, and the way backward was lost".

The Star Thrower: Some Thoughts After Reading Loren Eisley, Part 1

A writer such as Loren Eisely can convey his struggles and intellectual quests in complicated and interwoven ways, and that is what he has done in The Star Thrower.

He combines and interlaces images and words from the world's great religions with images of the Messenger and with insight from Zen Buddhism: the skull and the eye, Jesus and the Wandering Jew, the pagan trickster, the djinn and demons cloaked in black magic. He immerses himself in the depths of Freud, Darwin, ancient myth, and even children's fairy tales.

The story is one of personal quest, a quest in which a man seeks the grail of his evolutionary past, diving into the sea of questions and answers that must be found somewhere within his own interior landscape.

He makes a journey to complete his psychological and spiritual growth and to be able to stand to the full height of his humanity. To do this he must overcome personal hurdles such as the real or imagined influence of the memory of an unstable mother. He must make sense of the tangled skein of his conscious and "other-conscious" mind.

Costabel is a village by the seashore, located on the boundary of all opposites. This borderline setting, where water meets sand, is the demarcation of life and death, where evolution marks the change of sea creature to land animal. It is a place of turning points.

It is here, in this place that Eisely says that every form of life is striving to return, the great archetypal mother, who has nourished and protected them, that the protagonist sees the largely symbolic act of throwing the stranded starfish back into the sea.

The archetypal image of "mother" plays a dual role in his mind. It is both a nourishing and protecting figure, as well as an ultimately rejecting type for him.

Costabel is a paradox, both real and imagined, buzzing around in the author's brain. Ideas are like swarms of insects in his thoughts. They whir and buzz, rise to the beam of light that he imagines radiates from his skull, somewhat like a lighthouse beacon, searching for some kind of truth in the dark night.

He pictures himself as the stripped empty skull with eyes orbiting around it. For him, there is a dual meaning, since the eyes are set in the orbital sockets. It is hard to tell how much of a double entendre he intends, since he is writing from a deep need to understand an unconscious perspective. He makes a revealing statement about himself later in the work. "I was the inhumanly stripped skeleton without voice, without hope, wandering alone on the shores of the world."

The shore of Costabel represents his entire universe, and Eisely becomes a star-traveler within. The eye motif is repeated in varying forms throughout this journey, as the idea moves from the revolving eyes of his planetary skull to the torn eye of cosmic judgment to the Reproachful Eye floating upon night and solitude.

As a child, Eisely's mother kept an eye on him, but there is a plethora of conflict in his memories of her. From his perspective, she was a model of instability, and he uses many metaphors to try and explain his view of her to himself and to us. He feels that she was, in a sense, a Christ-like figure, but not as Savior, since she calls her presence on earth "her long crucifixion of life" .

This viewpoint has left him feeling less than secure, as if she had taught him to walk on the precipice of an iceberg rather than on the stable flat land of the prairie.

Even the image of the prairie, that dependable terrain, does not assuage his fears that things are treacherous, for even there, tormenting dust devils could arise out of nowhere to terrorize him.

As a child he dreamed of hiding from the dust devils in caves, in earth cellars he had dug to shelter himself. His efforts at self-preservation do not reassure him, for the Neanderthal caveman of his Id cannot run or hide from the djinn-like dust devils and demons that chase him on the nightmarish flatland of his interior landscape.

As an adult, Eisely is a man of reason, a trained scientist, but he is haunted by the more primitive image of the trickster, a comic and yet sometimes sinister figure found in the fables of many aboriginal peoples.

The figure in Eisely's scenario is a mocker, dancing gleefully behind his back. This is his nemesis personified, a masked and demonic figure.

His trickster is mute, never speaking. He is "nightmare" itself, painted fully in black, taking on all the characteristics and definitions of darkness that he harbors, and there are many such images stored in his brain. The trickster carries a little whip, flicking and punishing him, full of silent laughter and derision. This demon is a spirit that lives metaphorically in his home.

Eisely writes, "In the moment I witnessed that fireside performance, I knew with surety that primitive man had lived with a dark message." He describes this personal demon. The trickster's timed and stylized posturing conveyed derision.

After saying this, he almost immediately describes himself as going out into the dark night as a troubled believer with the shadow of the trickster looming behind him and haunting him always. This demon is perennially near but has not spoken for twenty-five years. It is a mute stalker, and he wonders: Who or what is this trickster?

The Spring

We come here with our ghost children to escape summer heat,
Meeting in a cave of trees herding their heads,
Huddled above the lime rocks.

Walks of step-stones meet in agreement.
From the hill wall a spring issues an invitation to the eyes.

We see that water pours forth,
Acopius rain upon vegetation, from the source:
Poetry,
Song,
A little singing river,
Gracious giver of fountains,
A gift brook alive with the marriage of hydrogen and oxygen,

New creation,
New life, forever flowing,
Forever long and longing for the Father of Waters,
Liquidly revived, a daughter of his laughter,

A jewel of its universe,
Quietly disbursed, dispersed into a pool of the most profound solicitude,

A cistern of sustenance to which all souls yearn
To be born,
To return,
The origin of a love so fierce it is cruel,
Though we are fooled, for the surface is restrained,
Cool in its demeanor.

We are minded, reminded of our own
Turning, tumbling, water fetus days,
Happy rolling ammonite ecstasies,
Oceans to live and drink.

We think we were never so happy as then
And now,
Like snow from mountains,
Like blue water to the spirit,

That, and this spring-brook which dibbles and dabbles,
Filling the laver, lower pool, with refreshment,
Safe from the sibilant sun smoking outside the grove.

This is our cove, our cozy waterfall,
Soft moss-haven.

Our recollected contentment rises high above our heads,
Reaching toward heaven,
Sighs to be seized, released, messenger balloons,

Sea bottles of green fernery, finery,
Poured and stored in this wet rockery.

(May 25, 1988)

How did the Ancients do It?

It is always so mysterious, the Mystery of the Pyramids, the Mystery of the Incas.

How in the heck did they figure out how to build a pyramid that would last? How did those Incas fit those stones together? How did they make mummies? Even with our best technology, it is nearly impossible to even guess.

You may as well ask what life is like for a goldfish whose attention span is three seconds.

The assumption is that we are the latest, the greatest, and the brightest humans ever and that anyone who lived more than one hundred years ago was not much smarter than the common household pet.

It ain't necessarily so.

Take the Incas, for example. How did they ever figure out how to fit stone blocks together so well?

Professor Ivan Watkins of St. Cloud University, Minnesota has theorized that the Inca Pachacutec was wearing the golden discs of the sun for reasons other than just ornamental. He feels that those brilliant discs represented parabolic mirrors that were used to amplify the sun's light to melt rock. He attempted to demonstrate this on Nova's Secrets of Lost Empires - Incas. (NOVA: Secrets of Lost Empires - Inca (1997).

"Consequently, I propose the following hypothesis to explain how the Incas cut and polished their incredible stonework. First, the energy used was solar energy focused with large parabolic gold mirrors (figure 4). The reflectors could be made of any focal length, or combined with plane mirrors to cut in any direction at essentially any distance from the large primary reflector" (Watkins, 1986).

While he was only able to set a Popsicle stick on fire, I think he was on to something. After all, there are all sorts of applications for uses of parabolic mirrors, light, heat, and lasers.

The Wedding


This is where we meet, on this street, in this house of ghosts,
Ghost House, closed to the public, not on view,
Not new, but renewed nightly.

You bought it sight unseen,
For me, for us, for the wedding.

Time collects in the attic and below stairs.

This marriage is, and we are dust, I maintain.
Amused, you turn to my explanation, answering with a strange caress
That this wedding dress is cut from the same cloth as all the others,
Very old lace.

Woven, we are wed in each other's arms.

To go upstairs means that our priest conducts the
Ceremony without ceremony,
Administering the sacraments with every step we climb.

This time we've got it right, have got the right.

You are cruel and very-violet-sweet.
Beneath us, under the bed, under the sheets,
Are the dead, dancing,
Forgetting that this is not their house, their place yet.


There is certain perspicacity in these, our ghosts,
Who will not let us pause, tangled in our sweat,
While this grammar is being taught
As it always has been, ever shall be,
World without end.

Your face inspires a new consideration,
Grace to be said over your body,
Not to be mistaken for all the men
Laid in repose in this room,
Whose widows loved and mourned,
Within these same four walls.

Still, we are certain we hear candle-music, angel-music,
Visions of choirs of children born
And burning with our harmonies,
Those come down to us in myth and legend
And written in our genetic code.

We are intent on explaining ourselves
To these children until we are spent.

While we sleep,
Our ghosts consent to keep vigil
Over our bed.

March 6, 1988