The Invisible Pyramid

by Loren Eiseley

  A monster? My eyes swept slowly over the midnight clearing and its hidden refuse of fallen trunks and cogwheels. This was the pyramid that our particular culture was in the process of creating. It represented energy beyond anything the world of man had previously known. Our first spore flight had burst against the moon and reached, even now, toward Mars, but its base was a slime-mold base—the spore base of the world eaters. They fed upon the world, and the resources they consumed would never be duplicable again because their base was finite. Neither would the planet long sustain this tottering pyramid thrust upward from what had once been the soil of a consumed forest.

  A rising wind began to volley snow across the clearing, burying deeper the rusted wheels and shrieking over the cast-off tree of Christmas. There was a hint in the chill air of a growing implacable winter, like that which finally descends upon an outworn planet—a planet from which life and oxygen are long since gone.

  I returned to the shelter of the oak, my gaze sweeping as I did so the night sky of earth, now dark and overcast. It came to me then, in a lonely surge of feeling, that I was childless and my destiny not bound to my kind. With the tough oak at my back I remembered the feel of my father’s face against my own on the night I had seen Halley’s star. The comet had marked me. I was a citizen and a scientist of that nation which had first reached the moon. There in the ruined wood, remembering the shrunken seedpods of dead cities, I yearned silently toward those who would come after me if the race survived.

  Four hundred years ago a young poet and potential rival of Shakespeare had written of the knowledge-hungry Faust of legend:

  Thou art still but Faustus

  and a man.

  In that phrase Christopher Marlowe had epitomized the human tragedy: We were world eaters and knowledge seekers but we were also men. It was a well-nigh fatal flaw. Whether we, like the makers of stone spearpoints in Wyoming, are a fleeting illusion of the autumn light depends upon whether any remain to decipher Marlowe’s words one thousand years in the future.

  The events of my century had placed the next millennium as far off as a star. All the elaborate mechanisms of communication we have devised have not ennobled, nor brought closer, individual men to men. The means exist. It is Faustus who remains a man. Beyond this dark, I, who was also a man, could not penetrate.

  In the deepening snow I made a final obeissance to the living world. I took the still green, everlasting tree home to my living room for Christmas rites that had not been properly accorded it. I suppose the act was blindly compulsive. It was the sort of thing that Peacock in his time would have termed the barbarism of poets.

  SEVEN

  The Last Magician

  The human heart is local and finite, it has roots, and if the intellect radiates from it, according to its strength, to greater and greater distances, the reports, if they are to be gathered up at all, must be gathered at the center.

  —GEORGE SANTAYANA

  EVERY MAN in his youth—and who is to say when youth is ended?—meets for the last time a magician, the man who made him what he is finally to be. In the mass, man now confronts a similar magician in the shape of his own collective brain, that unique and spreading force which in its manipulations will precipitate the last miracle, or, like the sorcerer’s apprentice, wreak the last disaster. The possible nature of the last disaster the world of today has made all too evident: man has become a spreading blight which threatens to efface the green world that created him.

  It is of the last miracle, however, that I would write. To do so I have to describe my closing encounter with the personal magician of my youth, the man who set his final seal upon my character. To tell the tale is symbolically to establish the nature of the human predicament: how nature is to be reentered; how man, the relatively unthinking and proud creator of the second world—the world of culture—may revivify and restore the first world which cherished and brought him into being.

  I was fifty years old when my youth ended, and it was, of all unlikely places, within that great unwieldy structure built to last forever and then hastily to be torn down—the Pennsylvania Station in New York. I had come in through a side doorway and was slowly descending a great staircase in a slanting shaft of afternoon sunlight. Distantly I became aware of a man loitering at the bottom of the steps, as though awaiting me there. As I descended he swung about and began climbing toward me.

  At the instant I saw his upturned face my feet faltered and I almost fell. I was walking to meet a man ten years dead and buried, a man who had been my teacher and confidant. He had not only spread before me as a student the wild background of the forgotten past but had brought alive for me the spruce-forest primitives of today. With him I had absorbed their superstitions, handled their sacred objects, accepted their prophetic dreams. He had been a man of unusual mental powers and formidable personality. In all my experience no dead man but he could have so wrenched time as to walk through its cleft of darkness unharmed into the light of day.

  The massive brows and forehead looked up at me as if to demand an accounting of that elapsed decade during which I had held his post and discharged his duties. Unwilling step by step I descended rigidly before the baleful eyes. We met, and as my dry mouth strove to utter his name, I was aware that he was passing me as a stranger, that his gaze was directed beyond me, and that he was hastening elsewhere. The blind eye turned sidewise was not, in truth, fixed upon me; I beheld the image but not the reality of a long dead man. Phantom or genetic twin, he passed on, and the crowds of New York closed inscrutably about him.

  I groped for the marble railing and braced my continued descent. Around me travelers moved like shadows. I was a similar shadow, made so by the figure I had passed. But what was my affliction? That dead man and myself had been friends, not enemies. What terror save the terror of the living toward the dead could so powerfully have enveloped me?

  On the slow train running homeward the answer came. I had been away for ten years from the forest. I had had no messages from its depths, such as that dead savant had hoarded even in his disordered office where box turtles wandered over the littered floor. I had been immersed in the postwar administrative life of a growing university. But all the time some accusing spirit, the familiar of the last wood-struck magician, had lingered in my brain. Finally exteriorized, he had stridden up the stair to confront me in the autumn light. Whether he had been imposed in some fashion upon a convenient facsimile or was a genuine illusion was of little importance compared to the message he had brought. I had starved and betrayed myself. It was this that had brought the terror. For the first time in years I left my office in midafternoon and sought the sleeping silence of a nearby cemetery. I was as pale and drained as the Indian pipe plants without chlorophyll that rise after rains on the forest floor. It was time for a change. I wrote a letter and studied time tables. I was returning to the land that bore me.

  Collective man is now about to enter upon a similar though more difficult adventure. At the climactic moment of his journey into space he has met himself at the doorway of the stars. And the looming shadow before him has pointed backward into the entangled gloom of a forest from which it has been his purpose to escape. Man has crossed, in his history, two worlds. He must now enter another and forgotten one, but with the knowledge gained on the pathway to the moon. He must learn that, whatever his powers as a magician, he lies under the spell of a greater and a green enchantment which, try as he will, he can never avoid, however far he travels. The spell has been laid on him since the beginning of time—the spell of the natural world from which he sprang.

  II

  Long ago Plato told the story of the cave and the chained prisoners whose knowledge consisted only of what they could learn from flickering shadows on the wall before them. Then he revealed their astonishment upon being allowed to see the full source of the light. He concluded that the mind’s eye may be bewildered in two ways, either from advancing suddenly into the light of higher things or descending once more from the li
ght into the shadows. Perhaps more than Plato realized in the spinning of his myth, man has truly emerged from a cave of shadows, or from comparable leaf-shadowed dells. He has read his way into the future by firelight and by moonlight, for, in man’s early history, night was the time for thinking, and for the observation of the stars. The stars traveled, men noted, and therefore they were given hunters’ names. All things moved and circled. It was the way of the hunters’ world and of the seasons.

  In spite of much learned discourse upon the ways of our animal kin, and of how purely instinctive cries slowly gave way to variable and muddled meanings in the head of proto-man, I like to think that the crossing into man’s second realm of received wisdom was truly a magical experience.

  I once journeyed for several days along a solitary stretch of coast. By the end of that time, from the oddly fractured shells on the beach, little distorted faces began to peer up at me with meaning. I had held no converse with a living thing for many hours. As a result I was beginning, in the silence, to read again, to read like an illiterate. The reading had nothing to do with sound. The faces in the cracked shells were somehow assuming a human significance.

  Once again, in the night, as I traversed a vast plain on foot, the clouds that coursed above me in the moonlight began to build into archaic, voiceless pictures. That they could do so in such a manner makes me sure that the reading of such pictures has long preceded what men of today call language. The reading of so endless an alphabet of forms is already beyond the threshold of the animal; man could somehow see a face in a shell or a pointing finger in a cloud. He had both magnified and contracted his person in a way verging on the uncanny. There existed in the growing cortex of man, in its endless ramifications and prolonged growth, a place where, paradoxically, time both flowed and lingered, where mental pictures multiplied and transposed themselves. One is tempted to believe, whether or not it is literally true, that the moment of first speech arrived in a star burst like a supernova. To be sure, the necessary auditory discrimination and memory tracts were a biological preliminary, but the “invention” of language—and I put this carefully, having respect for both the biological and cultural elements involved—may have come, at the last, with rapidity.

  Certainly the fossil record of man is an increasingly strange one. Millions of years were apparently spent on the African and Asiatic grasslands, with little or no increase in brain size, even though simple tools were in use. Then quite suddenly in the million years or so of Ice Age time the brain cells multiply fantastically. One prominent linguist would place the emergence of true language at no more than forty thousand years ago. I myself would accord it a much longer history, but all scholars would have to recognize biological preparation for its emergence. What the fossil record, and perhaps even the studies of living primates, will never reveal is how much can be attributed to slow incremental speech growth associated directly with the expanding brain, and how much to the final cultural innovation spreading rapidly to other biologically prepared groups.

  Language, wherever it first appeared, is the cradle of the human universe, a universe displaced from the natural in the common environmental sense of the word. In this second world of culture, forms arise in the brain and can be transmitted in speech as words are found for them. Objects and men are no longer completely within the world we call natural—they are subject to the transpositions which the brain can evoke or project. The past can be remembered and caused to haunt the present. Gods may murmur in the trees, or ideas of cosmic proportions can twine a web of sustaining mathematics around the cosmos.

  In the attempt to understand his universe, man has to give away a part of himself which can never be regained—the certainty of the animal that what it senses is actually there in the shape the eye beholds. By contrast, man finds himself in Plato’s cave of illusion. He has acquired an interest in the whole of the natural world at the expense of being ejected from it and returning, all too frequently, as an angry despoiler.

  A distinction, however, should be made here. In his first symbol making, primitive man—and indeed even the last simple hunting cultures of today—projected a friendly image upon animals: animals talked among themselves and thought rationally like men; they had souls. Men might even have been fathered by totemic animals. Man was still existing in close interdependence with his first world, though already he had developed a philosophy, a kind of oracular “reading” of its nature. Nevertheless he was still inside that world; he had not turned it into an instrument or a mere source of materials.

  Christian man in the West strove to escape this lingering illusion that the primitives had projected upon nature. Intent upon the destiny of his own soul, and increasingly urban, man drew back from too great intimacy with the natural, its fertility and its orgiastic attractions. If the new religion was to survive, Pan had to be driven from his hillside or rendered powerless by incorporating him into Christianity—to be baptized, in other words, and allowed to fade slowly from the memory of the folk. As always in such intellectual upheavals, something was gained and something lost.

  What was gained intellectually was a monotheistic reign of law by a single deity so that man no longer saw distinct and powerful spirits in every tree or running brook. His animal confreres slunk like pariahs soulless from his presence. They no longer spoke, their influence upon man was broken; the way was unconsciously being prepared for the rise of modern science. That science, by reason of its detachment, would first of all view nature as might a curious stranger. Finally it would, while giving powers to man, turn upon him also the same gaze that had driven the animal forever into the forest. Man, too, would be subject to what he had evoked; he, too, in a new fashion, would be relegated soulless to the wood with all his lurking irrationalities exposed. He would know in a new and more relentless fashion his relationship to the rest of life. Yet as the growing crust of his exploitive technology thickened, the more man thought that he could withdraw from or recast nature, that by drastic retreat he could dispel his deepening sickness.

  Like that of one unfortunate scientist I know—a remorseless experimenter—man’s whole face had grown distorted. One eye, one bulging eye, the technological, scientific eye, was willing to count man as well as nature’s creatures in terms of megadeaths. Its objectivity had become so great as to endanger its master, who was mining his own brains as ruthlessly as a seam of coal. At last Ortega y Gasset was to remark despairingly, “There is no human nature, there is only history.” That history, drawn from man’s own brain and subject to his power to transpose reality, now looms before us as future on all the confines of the world.

  Linguists have a word for the power of language: displacement. It is the way by which man came to survive in nature. It is also the method by which he created and entered his second world, the realm that now encloses him. In addition, it is the primary instrument by which he developed the means to leave the planet earth. It is a very mysterious achievement whose source is none other than the ghostly symbols moving along the ramifying pathways of the human cortex, the gray enfolded matter of the brain. Displacement, in simple terms, is the ability to talk about what is absent, to make use of the imaginary in order to control reality. Man alone is able to manipulate time into past and future, transpose objects or abstract ideas in a similar fashion, and make a kind of reality which is not present, or which exists only as potential in the real world.

  From this gift comes his social structure and traditions and even the tools with which he modifies his surroundings. They exist in the dark confines of the cranium before the instructed hand creates the reality. In addition, and as a corollary of displacement, language is characterized by the ability to receive constant increments and modifications. Words drop into or out of use, or change their meanings. The constant easy ingestion of the new, in spite of the stability of grammatical structure, is one of the prime characteristics of language. It is a structured instrument which at the same time reveals an amazing flexibility. This flexibility allows us
a distant glimpse of the endlessly streaming shadows that make up the living brain.

  III

  There is another aspect of man’s mental life which demands the utmost attention, even though it is manifest in different degrees in different times and places and among different individuals; this is the desire for transcendence—a peculiarly human trait. Philosophers and students of comparative religion have sometimes remarked that we need to seek for the origins of the human interest in the cosmos, “a cosmic sense” unique to man. However this sense may have evolved, it has made men of the greatest imaginative power conscious of human inadequacy and weakness. There may thus emerge the desire for “rebirth” expressed in many religions. Stimulated by his own uncompleted nature, man seeks a greater role, restructured beyond nature like so much in his aspiring mind. Thus we find the Zen Buddhist, in the words of the scholar Suzuki, intent upon creating “a realm of Emptiness or Void where no conceptualism prevails” and where “rootless trees grow.” The Buddhist, in a true paradox, would empty the mind in order that the mind may adequately receive or experience the world. No other creature than man would question his way of thought or feel the need of sweeping the mind’s cloudy mirror in order to unveil its insight.

  Man’s life, in other words, is felt to be unreal and sterile. Perhaps a creature of so much ingenuity and deep memory is almost bound to grow alienated from his world, his fellows, and the objects around him. He suffers from a nostalgia for which there is no remedy upon earth except as it is to be found in the enlightenment of the spirit—some ability to have a perceptive rather than an exploitive relationship with his fellow creatures.