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".