The strong survive. The ones who are strong and lucky. You can take that back as far as you want to go. Everybody needs one father, two grandfathers, four great-grandfathers, eight great-great-grandfathers, sixteen great-great-great-grandfathers, then thirty-two, then sixty-four, and that’s only eight generations backward in time, eight generations linked directly, intimately with what you are. Less than 150 years ago, 128 men made love to 128 women, not all in the same hotel or on the same day but within a relatively short expanse of time, say twenty years, in places as distant as Igboland, New Amsterdam, and South Carolina. Unknown to each other, probably never even coming face to face in their lifetimes, each of these couples was part of the grand conspiracy to produce you. Think of a pyramid balanced on one of its points, a vast cone of light whose sides flare outward, vectors of force like the slanted lines kids draw to show a star’s shining. You once were a pinprick of light, a spark whose radiance momentarily upheld the design, stabilized the ever-expanding V that opens to infinity. At some inconceivable distance the light bends, curves back on itself like a ram’s horn or conch shell, spiraling toward its greatest compass but simultaneously narrowing to that needle’s eye it must enter in order to flow forth bounteously again. You hovered at that nexus, took your turn through that open door.
The old people die. Our grandfathers, Harry Wideman and John French, are both gone now. The greatest space and no space at all separates us from them. I see them staring, dreaming this ravaged city; and we are in the dream, it’s our dream, enclosed, enclosing. We could walk down into that valley they saw from atop Bruston Hill and scoop up the houses, dismantle the bridges and tall buildings, pull cars and trucks off the streets, roll up roads and highways and stuff them all like toys into the cotton-picking sacks draped over our shoulders. We are that much larger than the things that happen to us. Accidents like the city poised at the meeting of three rivers, the city strewn like litter over precipitous hills.
Did our grandfathers run away from the South? Black Harry from Greenwood, South Carolina, mulatto white John from Culpepper, Virginia. How would they answer that question? Were they running from something or running to something? What did you figure you were doing when you started running? When did your flight begin? Was escape the reason or was there a destination, a promised land exerting its pull? Is freedom inextricably linked with both, running from and running to? Is freedom the motive and means and end and everything in between?
I wonder if the irony of a river beside the prison is intentional. The river was brown last time I saw it, mud-brown and sluggish in its broad channel. Nothing pretty about it, a working river, a place to dump things, to empty sewers. The Ohio’s thick and filthy, stinking of coal, chemicals, offal, bitter with rust from the flaking hulls of iron-ore barges inching grayly to and from the steel mills. But viewed from barred windows, from tiered cages, the river must call to the prisoners’ hearts, a natural symbol of flight and freedom. The river is a path, a gateway to the West, the frontier. Somewhere it meets the sea. Is it somebody’s cruel joke, an architect’s way of giving the knife a final twist, hanging this sign outside the walls, this river always visible but a million miles away beyond the spiked steel fence guarding its banks?
When I think of the distance between us in terms of miles or the height and thickness of walls or the length of your sentence or the deadly prison regimen, you’re closer to me, more accessible than when I’m next to you in the prison visiting room trying to speak and find myself at the edge of a silence vaster than oceans. I turned forty-three in June and you’ll be thirty-three in December. Not kids any longer by any stretch of the imagination. You’re my little brother and maybe it’s generally true that people never allow their little brothers and sisters to grow up, but something more seems at work here, something more damaging than vanity, than wishful thinking that inclines us to keep our pasts frozen, intact, keeps us calling our forty-year-old cronies “the boys” and a grown man “little brother.” I think of you as little brother because I have no other handle. At a certain point a wall goes up and easy memories stop.
When I think back, I have plenty of recollections of you as a kid. How you looked. The funny things you said. Till about the time you turned a gangly, stilt-legged, stringbean thirteen, we’re still family. Our lives connect in typical, family ways: holidays, picnics, births, deaths, the joking and teasing, the time you were a baby just home from the hospital and Daddy John French died and I was supposed to be watching you while the grown-ups cleaned and cooked, readying the house on Finance Street for visitors, for Daddy John to return and lie in his coffin downstairs. Baby-sitting you in Aunt Geraldine’s room while death hovered in there with us and no way I could have stayed in that room alone. Needing you much more than you needed me. You just zzz’ed away in your baby sleep, your baby ignorance. You couldn’t have cared less whether death or King Kong or a whole flock of those loose-feathered, giant birds haunting my sleep had gathered round your crib. If the folks downstairs were too quiet, my nerves would get jumpy and I’d snatch you up and walk the floor. Hold you pressed in my arms against my heart like a shield. Or if the night cracks and groans of the house got too loud, I’d poke you awake, worry you so your crying would keep me company.
After you turned thirteen, after you grew a mustache and fuzz on your chin and a voluminous Afro so nobody could call you “Beanhead” anymore, after girls and the move from Shadyside to Marchand Street so you started Westinghouse High instead of Peabody where the rest of us had done our time, you begin to get separate. I have to struggle to recall anything about you till you’re real again in prison. It’s as if I was asleep for fifteen years and when I awakened you were gone. I was out of the country for three years then lived in places like Iowa City and Philly and Laramie, so at best I couldn’t have seen much of you, but the sense of distance I’m trying to describe had more to do with the way I related to you than with the amount of time we spent together. We had chances to talk, opportunities to grow beyond the childhood bonds linking us. The problem was that in order to be the person I thought I wanted to be, I believed I had to seal myself off from you, construct a wall between us.
Your hands, your face became a man’s. You accumulated scars, a deeper voice, lovers, but the changes taking place in you might as well have been occurring on a different planet. The scattered images I retain of you from the sixties through the middle seventies form no discernible pattern, are rooted in no vital substance like childhood or family. Your words and gestures belonged to a language I was teaching myself to unlearn. When we spoke, I was conscious of a third party short-circuiting our conversations. What I’d say to you came from the mouth of a translator who always talked down or up or around you, who didn’t know you or me but pretended he knew everything.
Was I as much a stranger to you as you seemed to me? Because we were brothers, holidays, family celebrations, and troubles drew us to the same rooms at the same time, but I felt uncomfortable around you. Most of what I felt was guilt. I’d made my choices. I was running away from Pittsburgh, from poverty, from blackness. To get ahead, to make something of myself, college had seemed a logical, necessary step; my exile, my flight from home began with good grades, with good English, with setting myself apart long before I’d earned a scholarship and a train ticket over the mountains to Philadelphia. With that willed alienation behind me, between us, guilt was predictable. One measure of my success was the distance I’d put between us. Coming home was a kind of bragging, like the suntans people bring back from Hawaii in the middle of winter. It’s sure fucked up around here, ain’t it? But look at me, I got away. I got mine. I didn’t want to be caught looking back. I needed home to reassure myself of how far I’d come. If I ever doubted how good I had it away at school in that world of books, exams, pretty, rich white girls, a roommate from Long Island who unpacked more pairs of brand-new jockey shorts and T-shirts than they had in Kaufmann’s department store, if I ever had any hesitations or reconsiderations about the path I’d
chosen, youall were back home in the ghetto to remind me how lucky I was.
Fear marched along beside guilt. Fear of acknowledging in myself any traces of the poverty, ignorance, and danger I’d find surrounding me when I returned to Pittsburgh. Fear that I was contaminated and would carry the poison wherever I ran. Fear that the evil would be discovered in me and I’d be shunned like a leper.
LOREN EISELEY (1907-1977)
Loren Eiseley, an anthropologist, was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, and received his B.A. from the University of Nebraska. He took his Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania, and in 1944 he returned to Philadelphia to teach there.
The best of his narrative essays appear in The Immense Journey (1957), The Unexpected Universe (1969), and The Night Country (1971). His autobiography, All the Strange Hours, shows why his friend Wright Morris called him “Schmerzy”—for Weltschmerz. W. H. Auden—who wrote the approving introduction for The Star Thrower (1978), Eiseley’s own collection of his works—called him “a melancholic.” Eiseley named his collection after this autobiographical essay, which first appeared in The Unexpected Universe.
“The Star Thrower” shows Eiseley’s versatility and symbolic power. For all its Weltschmerz, it is a great essay. It clearly takes place on Sanibel Island, Florida. (Eiseley claimed he picked up the name Costabel by listening to a seashell.)
The Star Thrower
I
It has ever been my lot, though formally myself a teacher, to be taught surely by none. There are times when I have thought to read lessons in the sky, or in books, or from the behavior of my fellows, but in the end my perceptions have frequently been inadequate or betrayed. Nevertheless, I venture to say that of what man may be I have caught a fugitive glimpse, not among multitudes of men, but along an endless wave-beaten coast at dawn. As always, there is this apparent break, this rift in nature, before the insight comes. The terrible question has to translate itself into an even more terrifying freedom.
If there is any meaning to this book [The Unexpected Universe], it began on the beaches of Costabel with just such a leap across an unknown abyss. It began, if I may borrow the expression from a Buddhist sage, with the skull and the eye. I was the skull. I was the inhumanly stripped skeleton without voice, without hope, wandering alone upon the shores of the world. I was devoid of pity, because pity implies hope. There was, in this desiccated skull, only an eye like a pharos light, a beacon, a search beam revolving endlessly in sunless noonday or black night. Ideas like swarms of insects rose to the beam, but the light consumed them. Upon that shore meaning had ceased. There were only the dead skull and the revolving eye. With such an eye, some have said, science looks upon the world. I do not know. I know only that I was the skull of emptiness and the endlessly revolving light without pity.
Once, in a dingy restaurant in the town, I had heard a woman say: “My father reads a goose bone for the weather.” A modern primitive, I had thought, a diviner, using a method older than Stonehenge, as old as the arctic forests.
“And where does he do that?” the woman’s companion had asked amusedly.
“In Costabel,” she answered complacently, “in Costabel.” The voice came back and buzzed faintly for a moment in the dark under the revolving eye. It did not make sense, but nothing in Costabel made sense. Perhaps that was why I had finally found myself in Costabel. Perhaps all men are destined at some time to arrive there as I did.
I had come by quite ordinary means, but I was still the skull with the eye. I concealed myself beneath a fisherman’s cap and sunglasses, so that I looked like everyone else on the beach. This is the way things are managed in Costabel. It is on the shore that the revolving eye begins its beam and the whispers rise in the empty darkness of the skull.
The beaches of Costabel are littered with the debris of life. Shells are cast up in windrows; a hermit crab, fumbling for a new home in the depths, is tossed naked ashore, where the waiting gulls cut him to pieces. Along the strip of wet sand that marks the ebbing and flowing of the tide, death walks hugely and in many forms. Even the torn fragments of green sponge yield bits of scrambling life striving to return to the great mother that has nourished and protected them.
In the end the sea rejects its offspring. They cannot fight their way home through the surf which casts them repeatedly back upon the shore. The tiny breathing pores of starfish are stuffed with sand. The rising sun shrivels the mucilaginous bodies of the unprotected. The seabeach and its endless war are soundless. Nothing screams but the gulls.
In the night, particularly in the tourist season, or during great storms, one can observe another vulturine activity. One can see, in the hour before dawn on the ebb tide, electric torches bobbing like fireflies along the beach. This is the sign of the professional shellers seeking to outrun and anticipate their less aggressive neighbors. A kind of greedy madness sweeps over the competing collectors. After a storm one can see them hurrying along with bundles of gathered starfish, or, toppling and overburdened, clutching bags of living shells whose hidden occupants will be slowly cooked and dissolved in the outdoor kettles provided by the resort hotels for the cleaning of specimens. Following one such episode I met the star thrower.
As soon as the ebb was flowing, as soon as I could make out in my sleeplessness the flashlights on the beach, I arose and dressed in the dark. As I came down the steps to the shore I could hear the deeper rumble of the surf. A gaping hole filled with churning sand had cut sharply into the breakwater. Flying sand as light as powder coated every exposed object like snow. I made my way around the altered edges of the cove and proceeded on my morning walk up the shore. Now and then a stooping figure moved in the gloom or a rain squall swept past me with light pattering steps. There was a faint sense of coming light somewhere behind me in the east.
Soon I began to make out objects, up-ended timbers, conch shells, sea wrack wrenched from the far-out kelp forests. A pink-clawed crab encased in a green cup of sponge lay sprawling where the waves had tossed him. Long-limbed starfish were strewn everywhere, as though the night sky had showered down. I paused once briefly. A small octopus, its beautiful dark-lensed eyes bleared with sand, gazed up at me from a ragged bundle of tentacles. I hesitated, and touched it briefly with my foot. It was dead. I paced on once more before the spreading whitecaps of the surf.
The shore grew steeper, the sound of the sea heavier and more menacing, as I rounded a bluff into the full blast of the offshore wind. I was away from the shellers now and strode more rapidly over the wet sand that effaced my footprints. Around the next point there might be a refuge from the wind. The sun behind me was pressing upward at the horizon’s rim—an ominous red glare amidst the tumbling blackness of the clouds. Ahead of me, over the projecting point, a gigantic rainbow of incredible perfection had sprung shimmering into existence. Somewhere toward its foot I discerned a human figure standing, as it seemed to me, within the rainbow, though unconscious of his position. He was gazing fixedly at something in the sand.
Eventually he stooped and flung the object beyond the breaking surf. I labored toward him over a half-mile of uncertain footing. By the time I reached him the rainbow had receded ahead of us, but something of its color still ran hastily in many changing lights across his features. He was starting to kneel again.
In a pool of sand and silt a starfish had thrust its arms up stiffly and was holding its body away from the stifling mud.
“It’s still alive,” I ventured.
“Yes,” he said, and with a quick yet gentle movement he picked up the star and spun it over my head and far out into the sea. It sank in a burst of spume, and the waters roared once more.
“It may live,” he said, “if the offshore pull is strong enough.” He spoke gently, and across his bronzed worn face the light still came and went in subtly altering colors.
“There are not many come this far,” I said, groping in a sudden embarrassment for words. “Do you collect?”
“Only like this,” he said softly, gesturing amidst t
he wreckage of the shore. “And only for the living.” He stooped again, oblivious of my curiosity, and skipped another star neatly across the water.
“The stars,” he said, “throw well. One can help them.”
He looked full at me with a faint question kindling in his eyes, which seemed to take on the far depths of the sea.
“I do not collect,” I said uncomfortably, the wind beating at my garments. “Neither the living nor the dead. I gave it up a long time ago. Death is the only successful collector.” I could feel the full night blackness in my skull and the terrible eye resuming its indifferent journey. I nodded and walked away, leaving him there upon the dune with that great rainbow ranging up the sky behind him.
I turned as I neared a bend in the coast and saw him toss another star, skimming it skillfully far out over the ravening and tumultuous water. For a moment, in the changing light, the sower appeared magnified, as though casting larger stars upon some greater sea. He had, at any rate, the posture of a god.
But again the eye, the cold world-shriveling eye, began its inevitable circling in my skull. He is a man, I considered sharply, bringing my thought to rest. The star thrower is a man, and death is running more fleet than he along every seabeach in the world.
I adjusted the dark lens of my glasses and, thus disguised, I paced slowly back by the starfish gatherers, past the shell collectors, with their vulgar little spades and the stick-length shelling pincers that eased their elderly backs while they snatched at treasures in the sand. I chose to look full at the steaming kettles in which beautiful voiceless things were being boiled alive. Behind my sunglasses a kind of litany began and refused to die down. “As I came through the desert thus it was, as I came through the desert.”