The Unexpected Universe — Loren Eiseley on Star Throwers and Incidental Triumphs

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The Unexpected Universe — Loren Eiseley on Star Throwers and Incidental Triumphs

“The universe is not only queerer than we suppose,
but queerer than we can suppose.”

J.B.S. Haldane (1927)

Ghosts through doors

In his book, The Unexpected Universe, the anthropologist Loren Eiseley recalls watching an orb spider amidst the tall grass in an arid gully. Suspended on the intricate spiral-wheels that she weaved some time ago, sensing and interpreting the vibrations that course through her silk and lines, the spider waits unanimated for some forlorn moth to enter her snare. But ever the cheeky observer, Eiseley takes a pencil and prods her web, springing the creature into a frantic reaction.

In the spider’s confused frenzy, Eiseley realizes at that moment that he did not exist in the “world of spiders”. After all, the “pencil point was an intrusion… for which no precedent existed”, he writes. “[The] spider was circumscribed by spider ideas. Its universe was a spider universe. All outside was irrational.” This poor creature, which vaulted up and down with the oscillations of its prodded web, would have had little sense of the rhyme and purpose behind the anthropologist’s idling curiosity. 

How much of humanity’s knowing, we must wonder, is just like that of the orb spider? What might we fail to see in the depths of nature and the abysses of our minds? While Mother Earth is a shared home to a wondrous variegation of peculiar lifeforms, all of us are ultimately inhabitants to our own personal universe. To Eiseley, “we [are] creatures of many different dimensions passing through each other’s lives like ghosts through doors.” 

“Nature contains that which does not concern us… [It] has no intention of taking us into its confidence… [and] contains the roiling unrest of a tornado… Nature does not simply represent reality. In the shapes of life, it prepares the future… [It] teaches, though what it teaches is often hidden and obscure.”

Loren Eiseley. (1972). The Unexpected Universe.

World machine

Of course, many enterprising souls have begun to pull at life’s curtains and to peek at the great beyond. Today we build infrared telescopes to gaze upon the birth and formation of galaxies, and electron microscopes to spy on the busy lives of cells and organelles.

Closer to home are the paleontologists and archaeologists who infer from the records of fossils and artifacts the rich and bewildering annals of nature and culture itself. As Eiseley writes, “knowledge has given [humanity] the memory of earth’s history beyond the time of [our] emergence.”

Indeed, we glimpsed at the “world machine” before us when Isaac Newton pondered upon the apple tree in the garden of Woolsthorpe Manor and conceived of the law for universal gravitation. The pedestal on which ancient magics, rituals, and superstitions once rested began to crumble as the natural philosophers learned to plot the paths of heavenly bodies.

Tangled bank

Another giant, by the name of Charles Darwin, some centuries later, would raise the veil of a different kind. Where Newton pictured a “whole cosmic engine”, Darwin found it more “interesting to contemplate a tangled bank… [and] war of nature.” Like Newton, Darwin had brought his own order into natural history by proposing that the assortment of life itself, from the snow leopards in the Himalayas to the mangrove finches in the Galapagos, share a common ancestry. 

However, as Eiseley writes, “only later did we begin to realize that what Charles Darwin had introduced into nature was not Newtonian predictability but absolute random novelty. Life was bent, in the phrase of Alfred Russel Wallace, upon ‘indefinite departure.’” Natural selection, random mutation, and the unending struggle for existence tends to produce the strange and the fantastic. Eiseley likens it to “a shifting chimera… [that] encloses living creatures in specialized prisons [or]… opens amazing doorways into unsuspected worlds.”

The star thrower

In another essay, Eiseley writes about his encounter with a star thrower on the beaches of Costabel—a peculiar man who spent his time skipping star fishes across the water, saving the poor creatures from suffocation after crashing ashore. Because “the stars throw well”, the man said, “one can help them.”

This passage has since nestled its way into my memory for it is, I think, the most emblematic of the unexpected. Surely no starfish or human or supercomputer could predict, in the long lines and twists of evolutionary history, that some plodding species would be saved from time to time by the hurling of another.

Incidental triumphs

Even the ascent of humankind, as Eiseley observes, is “a story of only incidental triumphs.” Travel back a million years and you will find that our early ancestors were less than twenty thousand in number, walking narrowly along “the knife-edge of extinction.”

Back then, the search for food, warmth and safety propelled us. As individually feeble creatures, we had little hope of outrunning the tropic cougars or giant hyenas that once surrounded us. Instead, our ancestors found their survival in groups, language, and simple tools.

While early humans began to walk upright as far back as six million years, the earliest evidence we have for our taming of fire is found in the caves of Israel. They date back to just around four hundred thousand years ago. As Eiseley writes, “a major portion of the world’s story appears to be that of fumbling little creatures of seemingly no great potential.”

Ghost continent

Yet somehow, Homo sapiens emerged from the cold and quiet of the last ice age, some twenty-five thousand years ago, as the last hominin on Earth. Tearing away the vines and shoots of nature’s tangled bank, we “abandoned instinct… [for] a confused and troubled cultural realm…, much as in the old theology [when] man fell from a state of innocence into carnal knowledge.”

Since then, we humans have gone on to terraform the world—tilling crops, building monuments, raising empires, and birthing machines. We now go as far as to hurtle tonnes upon tonnes of metal and circuitry, and the occasional lifeform, into outer space, well beyond the reaches of our atmosphere and the imaginations of our ancestors—all in the name of purpose and progress.

Today, we are “marked” threefold, Eiseley writes, “by a restless inner eye”, the “social mirror” of others, and the “mind-destroying drug of constant action.” Much of this, he believes, has led us to an “increasingly chaotic present… [and] quality of illusion about all of us.”

“Man is himself, like the universe he inhabits, like the demoniacal stirrings of the ooze from which he sprang, a tale of desolations. He walks in his mind from birth to death the long resounding shores of endless disillusionment… But out of such desolation emerges the awesome freedom to choose—to choose beyond the narrowly circumscribed circle that delimits the animal being.”

Loren Eiseley. (1972). The Unexpected Universe.

The Wizard of Oz

In the end, Eiseley suspects that the history and unfolding of humankind is similar to the story and cast of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Indeed, one wonders just how far we might go on this yellow brick road to discovery, and if we will ever dispel ourselves of the wickedness that afflicts the human condition.

Perhaps with some courage and heart we might. But of most interest to Eiseley, unsurprisingly, is that of our “straw-filled heads.” Like the scarecrow in the children’s novel, we often have “nothing to think of, having been made such a little while before.” And so we fill the void with all sorts of tales and notions. Some are wise, while much is nonsense.

A child’s universe

So I am inclined to ask again: like the scarecrow of Oz, or Eiseley’s spider, what don’t we see? What don’t we know about this unexpected universe? The anthropologist himself does not have an answer.  But he is reminded of the views of an Alaskan shaman who once noted, in Eiseley’s words, that “the soul of the universe, the Upholder,… is never seen. Its voice, however, may be heard on occasion, through innocent children.” Of course, most of us grow up only to lose the childlike far sight of unprejudiced imagination. 

As Eiseley surmises:

“As adults, we are preoccupied with living. As a consequence, we see little. At the approach of age some [of us] look about… and discover the hole in the hedge leading to the unforeseen. By then, there is frequently no child companion to lead [us] safely through… I had seen the universe as it begins for all things. It was, in reality, a child’s universe, a tiny and laughing universe… I would say that [we] must find a way to run the arrow backward. Doubtless it is impossible in the physical world, but in the memory and the will [we] might achieve the deed if [we] would try.”

Loren Eiseley. (1972). The Unexpected Universe.

Sources and further reading

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