The Unexpected Universe

by Loren Eiseley

  TWO

  The Unexpected Universe

  Imagine God, as the Poet saith, Ludere in Humanis, to play but a game at Chesse with this world; to sport Himself with making little things great, and great things nothing; Imagine God to be at play with us, but a gamester. . . .

  —JOHN DONNE

  A BRITISH ESSAYIST of distinction, H. J. Massingham, once remarked perceptively that woods nowadays are haunted not by ghosts, but by a silence and man-made desolation that might well take terrifying material forms. There is nothing like a stalled train in a marsh to promote such reflections—particularly if one has been transported just beyond the environs of a great city and set down in some nether world that seems to partake both of nature before man came and of the residue of what will exist after him. It was night when my train halted, but a kind of flame-wreathed landscape attended by shadowy figures could be glimpsed from the window.

  After a time, with a companion, I descended and strolled forward to explore this curious region. It turned out to be a perpetually burning city dump, contributing its miasmas and choking vapors to the murky sky above the city. Amidst the tended flames of this inferno I approached one of the grimy attendants who was forking over the rubbish. In the background, other shadows, official and unofficial, were similarly engaged. For a moment I had the insubstantial feeling that must exist on the borders of hell, where everything, wavering among heat waves, is transported to another dimension. One could imagine ragged and distorted souls grubbed over by scavengers for what might usefully survive.

  I stood in silence watching this great burning. Sodden papers were being forked into the flames, and after a while it crossed my mind that this was perhaps the place where last year’s lace valentines had gone, along with old Christmas trees, and the beds I had slept on in childhood.

  “I suppose you get everything here,” I ventured to the grimy attendant.

  He nodded indifferently and drew a heavy glove across his face. His eyes were red-rimmed from the fire. Perhaps they were red anyhow.

  “Know what?” He swept a hand outward toward the flames.

  “No,” I confessed.

  “Babies,” he growled in my ear. “Even dead babies sometimes turn up. From there.” He gestured contemptuously toward the city and hoisted an indistinguishable mass upon his fork. I stepped back from the flare of light, but it was only part of an old radio cabinet. Out of it had once come voices and music and laughter, perhaps from the twenties. And where were the voices traveling now? I looked at the dangling fragments of wire. They reminded me of something, but the engine bell sounded before I could remember.

  I made a parting gesture. Around me in the gloom dark shapes worked ceaselessly at the dampened fires. My eyes were growing accustomed to their light.

  “We get it all,” the dump philosopher repeated. “Just give it time to travel, we get it all.”

  “Be seeing you,” I said irrelevantly. “Good luck.”

  Back in my train seat, I remembered unwillingly the flames and the dangling wire. It had something to do with an air crash years ago and the identification of the dead. Anthropologists get strange assignments. I put the matter out of my mind, as I always do, but I dozed and it came back: the box with the dangling wires. I had once fitted a seared and broken skullcap over a dead man’s brains, and I had thought, peering into the scorched and mangled skull vault, it is like a beautiful, irreparably broken machine, like something consciously made to be used, and now where are the voices and the music?

  “We get it all,” a dark figure said in my dreams. I sighed, and the figure in the murk faded into the clicking of the wheels.

  One can think just so much, but the archaeologist is awake to memories of the dead cultures sleeping around us, to our destiny, and to the nature of the universe we profess to inhabit. I would speak of these things not as a wise man, with scientific certitude, but from a place outside, in the role, shall we say, of a city-dump philosopher. Nor is this a strained figure of speech. The archaeologist is the last grubber among things mortal. He puts not men, but civilizations, to bed, and passes upon them final judgments. He finds, if imprinted upon clay, both our grocery bills and the hymns to our gods. Or he uncovers, as I once did in a mountain cavern, the skeleton of a cradled child, supplied, in the pathos of our mortality, with the carefully “killed” tools whose shadowy counterparts were intended to serve a tiny infant through the vicissitudes it would encounter beyond the dark curtain of death. Infinite care had been lavished upon objects that did not equate with the child’s ability to use them in this life. Was his spirit expected to grow to manhood, or had this final projection of bereaved parental care thrust into the night, in desperate anxiety, all that an impoverished and simple culture could provide where human affection could not follow?

  In a comparable but more abstract way, the modern mind, the scientific mind, concerned as it is with the imponderable mysteries of existence, has sought to equip oncoming generations with certain mental weapons against the terrors of ignorance. Protectively, as in the case of the dead child bundled in a cave, science has proclaimed a universe whose laws are open to discovery and, above all, it has sought, in the words of one of its greatest exponents, Francis Bacon, “not to imagine or suppose, but to discover what nature does or may be made to do.”

  To discover what nature does, however, two primary restrictions are laid upon a finite creature: he must extrapolate his laws from what exists in his or his society’s moment of time and, in addition, he is limited by what his senses can tell him of the surrounding world. Later, technology may provide the extension of those senses, as in the case of the microscope and telescope. Nevertheless the same eye or ear with which we are naturally endowed must, in the end, interpret the data derived from such extensions of sight or hearing. Moreover, science since the thirteenth century has clung to the dictum of William of Ockham that hypotheses must not be multiplied excessively; that the world, in essence, is always simple, not complicated, and its secrets accessible to men of astute and sufficiently penetrating intellect. Ironically, in the time of our greatest intellectual and technological triumphs one is forced to say that Ockham’s long-honored precepts, however well they have served man, are, from another view, merely a more sophisticated projection of man’s desire for order—and for the ability to control, understand, and manipulate his world.

  All of these intentions are commendable enough, but perhaps we would approach them more humbly and within a greater frame of reference if we were to recognize what Massingham sensed as lying latent in his wood, or what John Donne implied more than three centuries ago when he wrote:

  I am rebegot

  of absence, darknesse, death:

  Things which are not.

  Donne had recognized that behind visible nature lurks an invisible and procreant void from whose incomprehensible magnitude we can only recoil. That void has haunted me ever since I handled the shattered calvarium that a few hours before had contained, in microcosmic dimensions, a similar lurking potency.

  Some years previously, I had written a little book of essays in which I had narrated how time had become natural in our thinking, and I had gone on to speak likewise of life and man. In the end, however, I had been forced to ask, How Natural is Natural?—a subject that raised the hackles of some of my scientifically inclined colleagues, who confused the achievements of their disciplines with certitude on a cosmic scale. My very question thus implied an ill-concealed heresy. That heresy it is my intent to pursue further. It will involve us, not in the denigration of science, but, rather, in a farther stretch of the imagination as we approach those distant and wooded boundaries of thought where, in the words of the old fairy tale, the fox and the hare say good night to each other. It is here that predictability ceases and the unimaginable begins—or, as a final heretical suspicion, we might ask ourselves whether our own little planetary fragment of the cosmos has all along concealed a mocking refusal to comply totally with human conceptions of order and secure
prediction.

  The world contains, for all its seeming regularity, a series of surprises resembling those that in childhood terrorized us by erupting on springs from closed boxes. The world of primitive man is not dissimilar. Lightning leaps from clouds, something invisible rumbles in the air, the living body, spilling its mysterious red fluid, lies down in a sleep from which it cannot waken. There are night cries in the forest, talking waters, guiding omens, or portents in the fall of a leaf. No longer, as with the animal, can the world be accepted as given. It has to be perceived and consciously thought about, abstracted, and considered. The moment one does so, one is outside of the natural; objects are each one surrounded with an aura radiating meaning to man alone. To a universe already suspected of being woven together by unseen forces, man brings the organizing power of primitive magic. The manikin that is believed to control the macrocosm by some sympathetic connection is already obscurely present in the poppet thrust full of needles by the witch. Crude and imperfect, magic is still man’s first conscious abstraction from nature, his first attempt to link disparate objects by some unseen attraction between them.

  II

  If we now descend into the early years of modern science, we find the world of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries basking comfortably in the conception of the balanced world machine. Newton had established what appeared to be the reign of universal order in the heavens. The planets—indeed, the whole cosmic engine—were self-regulatory. This passion for order controlled by a divinity too vast to be concerned with petty miracle was slowly extended to earth. James Hutton glimpsed, in the long erosion and renewal of the continents by subterranean uplift, a similar “beautiful machine” so arranged that recourse to the “preternatural,” or “destructive accident,” such as the Mosaic Deluge, was unnecessary to account for the physical features of the planet.

  Time had lengthened, and through those eons, law, not chaos, reigned. The imprint of fossil raindrops similar to those of today had been discovered upon ancient shores. The marks of fossil ripples were also observable in uncovered strata, and buried trees had absorbed the sunlight of far millennia. The remote past was one with the present and, over all, a lawful similarity decreed by a Christian Deity prevailed.

  In the animal world, a similar web of organization was believed to exist, save by a few hesitant thinkers. The balanced Newtonian clockwork of the heavens had been transferred to earth and, for a few decades, was destined to prevail in the world of life. Plants and animals would be frozen into their existing shapes; they would compete but not change, for change in this system was basically a denial of law. Hutton’s world renewed itself in cycles, just as the oscillations observable in the heavens were similarly self-regulatory.

  Time was thus law-abiding. It contained no novelty and was self-correcting. It was, as we have indicated, a manifestation of divine law. That law was a comfort to man. The restive world of life fell under the same dominion as the equally restive particles of earth. Organisms oscillated within severely fixed limits. The smallest animalcule in a hay infusion carried a message for man; the joints of an insect assured him of divine attention. “In every nature and every portion of nature which we can descry,” wrote William Paley in a book characteristic of the period, “we find attention bestowed upon even the minutest parts. The hinges in the wing of an earwig . . . are as highly wrought as if the creator had nothing else to finish. We see no signs of diminution of care by multiplicity of objects, or distraction of thought by variety. We have no reason to fear, therefore, our being forgotten, or overlooked, or neglected.” Written into these lines in scientific guise is the same humanly protective gesture that long ago had heaped skin blankets, bone needles, and a carved stick for killing rabbits into the burial chamber of a child.

  This undeviating balance in which life was locked was called “natural government” by the great anatomist John Hunter. It was, in a sense, like the cyclic but undeviating life of the planet earth itself. That vast elemental creature felt the fall of raindrops on its ragged flanks, was troubled by the drift of autumn leaves or the erosive work of wind throughout eternity. Nevertheless, the accounts of nature were strictly kept. If a continent was depressed at one point, its equivalent arose elsewhere. Whether the item in the scale was the weight of a raindrop or a dislodged boulder on a mountainside, a dynamic balance kept the great beast young and flourishing upon its course.

  And as it was with earth, so also with its inhabitants. “There is an equilibrium kept up among the animals by themselves,” Hunter went on to contend. They kept their own numbers pruned and in proportion. Expansion was always kept within bounds. The struggle for existence was recognized before Darwin, but only as the indefinite sway of a returning pendulum. Life was selected, but it was selected for but one purpose: vigor and consistency in appearance. The mutative variant was struck down. What had been was; what would be already existed. As in the case of that great animal the earth, of the living flora and fauna it could be said that there was to be found “no vestige of a beginning,—no prospect of an end.” An elemental order lay across granite, sea, and shore. Each individual animal peered from age to age out of the same unyielding sockets of bone. Out of no other casements could he stare; the dweller within would see leaf and bird eternally the same. This was the scientific doctrine known as uniformitarianism. It had abolished magic as it had abolished the many changes and shape shiftings of witch doctors and medieval necromancers. At last the world was genuinely sane under a beneficent Deity. Then came Darwin.

  III

  At first, he was hailed as another Newton who had discovered the laws of life. It was true that what had once been deemed independent creations—the shells in the collector’s cabinet, the flowers pressed into memory books—were now, as in the abandoned magic of the ancient past, once more joined by invisible threads of sympathy and netted together by a common ancestry. The world seemed even more understandable, more natural than natural. The fortuitous had become fashionable, and the other face of “natural government” turned out to be creation. Life’s pendulum of balance was an illusion.

  Behind the staid face of that nature we had worshiped for so long we were unseen shapeshifters. Viewed in the long light of limitless time, we were optical illusions whose very identity was difficult to fix. Still, there was much talk of progress and perfection. 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.” No living thing, not even man, understood upon what journey he had embarked. Time was no longer cyclic or monotonously repetitious.* It was historic, novel, and unreturning. Since that momentous discovery, man has, whether or not he realizes or accepts his fate, been moving in a world of contingent forms.

  Even in the supposedly stable universe of matter, as it was viewed by nineteenth-century scientists, new problems constantly appear. The discovery by physicists of antimatter particles having electric charges opposite to those that compose our world and unable to exist in concert with known matter raises the question of whether, after all, our corner of the universe is representative of the entire potentialities that may exist elsewhere. The existence of antimatter is unaccounted for in present theories of the universe, and such peculiarities as the primordial atom and the recently reported flash of the explosion at the birth of the universe, as recorded in the radio spectrum, lead on into unknown paths.

  If it were not for the fact that familiarity leads to assumed knowledge, we would have to admit that the earth’s atmosphere of oxygen appears to be the product of a biological invention, photosynthesis, another random event that took place in Archeozoic times. That single “invention,” for such it was, determined the entire nature of life on this planet, and there is no possibility at present of calling it preordained. Similarly, the stepped-up manipulation of chance, in the shape of both mutation and recombination of genetic factors, which is one
result of the sexual mechanism, would have been unprophesiable.

  The brain of man, that strange gray iceberg of conscious and unconscious life, was similarly unpredictable until its appearance. A comparatively short lapse of geological time has evolved a humanity that, beginning in considerable physical diversity, has increasingly converged toward a universal biological similarity, marked only by a lingering and insignificant racial differentiation. With the rise of Homo sapiens and the final perfection of the human brain as a manipulator of symbolic thought, the spectrum of man’s possible social behavior has widened enormously. What is essentially the same brain biologically can continue to exist in the simple ecological balance of the Stone Age or, on the other hand, may produce those enormous inflorescences known as civilizations. These growths seemingly operate under their own laws and take distinct and irreversible pathways. In an analogous way, organisms mutate and diverge through adaptive radiation from one or a few original forms.

  In the domain of culture, man’s augmented ability to manipulate abstract ideas and to draw in this fashion enormous latent stores of energy from his brain has led to an intriguing situation: the range of his possible behavior is greater and more contradictory than that which can be contained within the compass of a single society, whether tribal or advanced. Thus, as man’s penetration into the metaphysical and abstract has succeeded, so has his capacity to follow, in the same physical body, a series of tangential roads into the future. Likeness in body has, paradoxically, led to diversity in thought. Thought, in turn, involves such vast institutional involutions as the rise of modern science, with its intensified hold upon modern society.

  All past civilizations of men have been localized and have had, therefore, the divergent mutative quality to which we have referred. They have offered choices to men. Ideas have been exchanged, along with technological innovations, but never on so vast, overwhelming, and single-directed a scale as in the present. Increasingly, there is but one way into the future: the technological way. The frightening aspect of this situation lies in the constriction of human choice. Western technology has released irrevocable forces, and the “one world” that has been talked about so glibly is frequently a distraught conformity produced by the centripetal forces of Western society. So great is its power over men that any other solution, any other philosophy, is silenced. Men, unknowingly, and whether for good or ill, appear to be making their last decisions about human destiny. To pursue the biological analogy, it is as though, instead of many adaptive organisms, a single gigantic animal embodied the only organic future of the world.