Loren Eiseley

The nature of literacy, the history of reading, the process by which books become sacred texts -- these are areas which we'll visit today. It is my hope that this will deepen our understanding of the need to expand the context within which we study the book if we are going to maximize our harvest of meanings and values.

It is the scorched shoulder blade of a hare

or a beaver;

the cracks made by the fire are like palm prints

over the surface of the bone

pointing the way to tomorrow's hunting;

a charred cluster of lines

marks a rockfall up country and a herd of caribou,

--things to be seen on the morrow

inscribed here by the fire.

This cosmos of a little band of hunting Indians

has meaning.

Every rock, every stream, every animal

is accounted for

and the deep underlying

rhythm of things

can inscribe the message of the forest

on the cracked bone of a hare.

It is true that instructions for getting one's food,

for hunting,

might seem the sole issue here;

but the shaman's reading

extrapolated

becomes mathematics and systems analysis

in the modern state.

I envy this man sitting by his fire.

His magic is not small, he is reading

something permanently bound into his universe

that he can decipher,

a code that can be read by the informed seer,

a voice from the universe reassuring for man,

hungry, enfeebled,

but knowing

there is a message to be read and one can find it

any time in the fire.

The world is held together

and man has his place:

that is the message; the food comes after and is acceptable.

Passing beyond the asteroids toward Saturn,

watched by radio telescopes and directed by the earth's great computers,

doomed to leave the solar system

and wander the far void of the galaxy,

our latest space probe whispers its messages among the stars.

A great triumph of the intellect, surely, but the whispers are only of our own devising.

They are lost

in infinitude and vanish

leaving us no equivalent of what the shaman

quietly accepts by the fire,

aiding himself, perhaps, in understanding

by a small song and the tapping of a skin drum.

He knows about the daily renewing of a pact with man;

we hear nothing

except the electrons beamed back to us

by our fragile probe.

Quite frankly, I do not know how to judge this matter,

sitting here in my study with my books and my computer,

but I believe I envy him,

the wrinkled old shaman

summoning his inner one for guidance,

with a little offering of tobacco leaves.