Notes of an Alchemist
Poems by Loren Eiseley
Illustrated by Laszlo Kubinyi
New York : Charles Scribner’s Sons (1972)
Found in a local used bookstore, after what struck me as a dreary drive past pot stores, fast food joints, and numerous other businesses that have no reason for existing, other than to satisfy a society that prizes bad habits and unhealthy living; past men and women pushing shopping carts bearing all of their earthly belongings; over acres of asphalt and concrete stained with oil and lined with litter and a stray poppy here and there; through traffic that lunged and lurched like a hurt, angry animal.
A promising book, by a writer, thinker, and naturalist some have compared to Thoreau — comparisons, yes, always comparisons, as if we were all putting letters into cubbyholes. And once they’re in, we’re unlikely to take them out again, unless told to do so by someone we respect, someone who makes his living as a literary postmaster.
I’m joking, of course. It’s all good, as the saying goes. It must be, or we wouldn’t be here.
So we / our wise men / in their wildernesses / have sought /
to charm to similar translucence / the cloudy crystal of the mind.
We must understand / that order strives / against the unmitigated chaos lurking /
along the convulsive backbone of the world.
[ from the title poem, pg. 16 ]
~
[ 2142 ]
Categories: Everything and Nothing
Tags: Books, Comparison, Loren Eiseley, Poetry, Society, Thoreau
William Michaelian 
There’s another saying, “It is what it is”.
I’m working to ‘delete the persistent thread’ of thought that rolls through my mind on a loop telling me what a mess it all is. It seems that all thought (born of one’s scant touch-points and experience) is repetitive. We are habitual, robotic critters. But maybe an old dog can learn a new trick by way of insistence?
When my husband and I go out into the asphalt jungle that capitalism built, and to which we contributed in some way, we’re developing another thought-reel that feels life-affirming. We tell ourselves we’re on a Colonel Percy Fawcett jungle adventure (or any such explorer will do). Instead of battling the wilds of nature and creatures and disease and indigenous peoples, we face a different sort of enemy each time we embark upon urban trails…. many of which you have mentioned and I need not repeat.
But through all the anxiety producing muck that awaits us, the greatest danger may be this old bird’s settled mind that resists ‘what is’.
Always, beneath it all, as we dodge errant drivers and look away from the devastation of yet another piece of earth turned over to Arby’s… or fracking, or data centers, I sense we’re searching for a lost city. But that city, perhaps, lay beyond the sky and not amidst the Amazon or asphalt. I suspect (or do I hope?) that one day, as did Fawcett and his team, we’ll just disappear with nary a trace.
With eternity as vantage point (likely a contradiction of terms) the tiny speck that is my monkey-mind, can no longer say with certainty what is bad and what is good.
All that jazz…
Your borrowed poem-byte is wonderful, by the way. We thank you ~
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The funny thing is, our very resistance is what has made all this. Funny in a cosmic sense, of course.
Meanwhile, one still hungers for, and needs, natural surroundings, free of stench and desperation.
The adventure continues! ~
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