Reader Response Log For Loren Eiseley’s "The Flow of the River"

1. “If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water. Its least stir, even, as now in a rain pond on a flat roof opposite my office, is enough to bring me searching to the window. A wind ripple may be translating itself into life” (256).

I’m thinking about “a wind ripple… translating itself into life.” I wonder what Eiseley means by this. I can’t help trying to picture it… wind rippling across a puddle. The elements in the air would mix with the elements in the water. What are elements in the air? The wind might be carrying some tiny microorganism which would mix with the water. If the organism is compatible with the elements of water, this might begin the cycle of transformation. On a slightly larger scale, the air carries mosquitoes. Mosquitoes come in contact with water, lay eggs (or something) which turn into those little squiggly worms, which turn into mosquitoes. Yuk! I wish I could think of something that doesn’t just result in the proliferation of pests! (Question, Connection, Interpretation).

2. “Thin vapors, rust, wet tar and sun are an alembic remarkably like the mind; they throw off odorous shadows that threaten to take real shape when no one is looking” (257).

alembic: 1: an apparatus used in distillation 2: something that refines or transmutes as if by distillation (Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary). distillation: 1 a: the process of purifying a liquid by successive evaporation and condensation (Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary).

This passage confuses me because I am trying to think of how “rust” is distilled or refined. But the word in the distillation definition, “process,” helps. Everything, including rust, becomes what it is through process, like that of distillation. In other words, the mind is “alembic” in that, like elements of water, thoughts float in proximity to the surface. Some thoughts are conscious and near the surface; others are subconscious or in the depths. As thoughts evaporate, or leave the surface of our conscious minds, others are brought nearer the surface and undergo the same process. The mind is like a churning sea with thoughts changing places in the constant movement. “Odorous” suggests diffusion of thoughts. Which is what thoughts do when they rise above the surface to consciousness (writing thoughts, speaking thoughts, or conscious consideration). (Question, Summary).

3. “…common water. Its substance reaches everywhere; it touches the past and prepares the future; it moves under the poles and wanders thinly in the heights of air” (257).

In other words, water connects everything. It is through the substance of water that earth meets and physically touches air. Through evaporation, minerals, and pollution (I’m thinking of the acid in rain) rise. Through condensation they fall, and then permeate the soil. For example, the aerosol and Freon of yesterdays hairsprays and refrigerators have eaten a hole in the ozone layer and are therefore part of the present and future. How else does it “touch the past and prepare[…] the future”? As for touching the past, I’m getting images of the seashell fossils in caves which were once beneath the ocean and now rise hundreds of feet above the surface. Touching the future? Well… those fossils are going to be around for a long, long time. (Summary, Interpretation)

4. “… as I was finally edged gently against a sand bar and dropped like any log, I tottered as I rose. I knew once more the body’s revolt against emergence into the harsh and unsupporting air, its reluctance to break contact with that mother element which still, at this late point in time, shelters and brings into being nine tenths of everything alive” (259).

This makes me think of the journey of birth. For months, a human embryo is so small that it can swim/float freely in the mother’s womb. As the baby grows, the space becomes cramped. Still, the baby is surrounded by warmth and wet. When, leaving the tight passage of the birth canal, the baby is born, its arms and legs flail about in the “unsupporting air.” The sudden increase of light and sound, and the sudden decrease of warm support, must be a very foreign environment. (Connection)

5. “At that moment I started to turn away, but something in the bleak whiskered face reproached me, or perhaps it was the river calling to her children. I termed it science, however—a convenient rational phrase I reserve for such occasion” (260).

This reminds me that I used to think of “science” as cold and rational. But I certainly don’t find Eiseley’s essay cold and the rational is mixed with the metaphysical (“the river calling to her children”). And I think scientific fields of inquiry must be full of mystery and all, and involve making blueprints and maps of the invisible. (Connection)

6. “Fishes in the drying shallows of intermittent prairie streams who feel their confinement and have the impulse to leap while there is yet time may regain the main channel and survive. A million ancestral years had gone into that jump, I thought as I looked at him, a million years of climbing through prairie sunflowers and twining in and out through the pillared legs of drinking mammoth” (261).

This makes me think of connection again, and especially the exchange and transformation of elements. A dead body is buried, disintegrates, and mixes with earth. Rain falls, carrying bits of earth and what was body into streams. Streams evaporate and rise with their particles to the clouds. Winds blow the clouds to other regions. Rains fall again and those particles return to earth, are sucked in by roots. As plants bloom the elements are transformed to blossoms which eventually fall, decay, and turn again to earth. It is conceivable that through the course of eternity we could travel everywhere. (Connection) 7) “After a while the skilled listener can distinguish man’s noise from the katydid’s rhythmic assertion, allow for the offbeat of a rabbit’s thumping, pick up the autumnal monotone of crickets, and find in all of them a grave pleasure without admitting any to a place of preeminence in his thoughts” (262).

Is Eiseley trying to imply distinctions here, as well as pointing them out? There is the distinction between “man’s noise” and the rest of nature; but also one between “skilled listener” and an unskilled one. This seems to suggest that there are those who can feel, or intuit the connection of all things, and those who divide nature into hierarchical categories of greater and lesser (with humans, of course, at the top of the chain). Those in this latter category might tend to give attention to whatever is perceived as being at the top of the chain, to what is superior; while the “skilled listener” would be aware of the necessity of all natural beings, and the interdependence which exists between them. (Question, interpretation)

8. “We [Eiseley and his catfish] were both projections out of that timeless ferment and locked as well in some greater unity that lay incalculably beyond us. In many a fin and reptile foot I have seen myself passing by—some part of myself, that is, some part that lies unrealized in the momentary shape I inhabit” (261-62).

This reminds me of children asking questions about the beginning of the world, and how we got here. And though we tend to give answers to these questions (i.e. the sperm and the egg) we’re really only guessing about most of our origins. And we don’t have to go back very far before we can’t even guess (as far as getting the information from our own direct experiences anyway). Our origins are a mystery. Where were the atoms that make up my body 100 years ago? Where will they be 100 years from now? I would love to know!

9. “ People have occasionally written me harsh letters and castigated me for a lack of faith in man when I have ventured to speak of this matter in print. They distrust, it would seem, all shapes and thoughts but their own. They would bring God into the compass of a shopkeeper’s understanding and confine Him to those limits, lest He proceed to some unimaginable and shocking act—create perhaps, as a casual afterthought, a being more beautiful than man. As for me, I believe nature capable of this, and having been part of the flow of the river, I feel no envy—any more than the frog envies the reptile or an ancestral ape should envy man” (262).

My first thought on this is how I dislike people who think they can tell me who/what God is and specifically how God wants me to live. These people seem to know not just the origins of humans, but our destination too. My second thought is that I can certainly understand the comfort of having answers to the mysteries. Sometimes, when I think of death, I feel afraid. And if I thought I could control what ever happens after death by performing some actions here and now… I’d perform. ( I do think our actions and our lives have lasting effects.) But, death is something I just can’t see beyond. There are certain prevalent after death scenarios that I prefer over others. I could really go for reincarnation I think. For one thing, I’d get to have many different experiences of life, and possibly travel the globe!!! But I don’t know what happens after death. As for making “being more beautiful than man”… I am trying to imagine what could be more beautiful. Maybe a creature that only had our good qualities and none of our bad. Is there already being more beautiful than man? (Connection, Question)

10. “There is no logical reason for the existence of a snowflake any more than there is for evolution. It is an apparition from that mysterious shadow world beyond nature, that final world which contains—if anything contains—the explanation of men and catfish and green leaves” (263).

In other words, we glimpse existence in the amazing works of nature, but the explanation for this world is beyond our knowing.