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?