At least this is the advocacy I find in Eiseley and how deeply his writing has impacted my life."The Rope" by Loren Eiseley (From Notes of an Alchemist) I used to carry a frayed rope in my hand upon the speaker's rostrum, try to tell my students this: that there was a similar rope as loosely frayed that bound them to the past, a rope that somewhere ran to an old salt-oozing eye in the deep sea, and that strange eye still stared from underneath their brows full at me, just as the interlocked vertebrae of their dextrous spines was long ago a fish's gift, just as their lungs had labored gasping in a swamp to serve a fish's needs, and these frayed strands of the rope I held ran back and back to individual and diverse times in sea and swamp and forest, twisted finally into our living substance, hidden in ourselves that code of DNA, that secret spiral ladder made up of bits and pieces of the past that never dies but lives entwined in us, our spines up-tilted in a forest attic our foot, so tendon-bound and twisted over, a re-engineered bent climbing pad renewed to walk on grass our fingers quick with stones our brains dreaming lost ancient dreams as well as throwing ropes in the air as though to catch what is uncatchable - the future. But to that we need to stop, to listen deeply, to watch with all our senses attuned, to seek out the small and out of the way or overlooked, to redeem with the witness and hand of our love, of God's love all creation as far as our wisdom and ability may carry us and not let politics or other such transitory and manufactured worries block such empathy. Association Member: ABAA ILAB Quantity: 1. From Yesterdays Gallery, ABAA (East Woodstock, CT, U.S.A.) AbeBooks Seller Since NovemSeller Rating. Such empathy and respect are timeless lessons, if only we could learn them. Published by Charles Scribners Sons, New York, 1972. The Star Thrower, Notes of an Alchemist, The Night Country by Loren Eiseley and Fox at the Woods Edge a biography of Loren Eiseley by Gale E, Christianson. Yet there is also dignity and honor toward those who have come before and the connection between such previous lives and our own is a constant theme in Eiseley's writings as is the dignity and value of each life on it's own no matter how unknown or isolated, brief or small. The fragility and dynamism of this life, our life, all life, is fully on display in this poem. After growing up in Nebrasks, he became an anthropologist, naturalist, professor (at Penn State), philosopher, environmentalist, essayist and poet. Eiseley was one of those renaissance people. Eiseley published The Cabin in his book of poems - Notes of an Alchemist (1972).
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