The Star Thrower by Loren Eiseley

  In the inbox: "Sometimes the starfish story is the best we've got."  

The Star Thrower 

   I was the inhumanly stripped skeleton without voice, without hope, wandering alone upon the shores of the world. I was devoid of pity, because pity implies hope.

   He was starting to kneel again. In a pool of sand and silt a starfish had thrust its arms up stiffly and was holding it's body away from the stifling mud.

“It's still alive,” I ventured.

“Yes,” he said, and with a quick yet gentle movement he picked up the star and spun it over my head and far out into the sea. It sank in a burst of spume, and the waters roared once more.

“It may live,” he said, “if the offshore pull is strong enough.” He spoke gently, and across his bronzed worn face the light still came and went in subtly altering colors.

“There are not many come this far,” I said, groping in a sudden embarrassment for words. “Do you collect?”

“Only like this,” he said softly, gesturing amidst the wreckage of the shores. “And only for the living.” He stooped again, oblivious of my curiosity, and skipped another star neatly across the water.

“The stars,” he said, “throw well. One can help them.”

He looked full at me with a faint question kindling in his eyes, which seemed to take on the far depths of the sea.

   There is a difference in our human outlook, depending on whether we have been born on level plains, where one step reasonably leads to another, or whether, by contrast, we have spent our lives amidst glacial crevasses and precipitous descents. In the case of the mountaineer, once step does not always lead rationally to another save the desperate leap over a chasm, or by an even more hesitant tiptoeing across precarious snow bridges.

   Instability lies at the heart of the world.

   Or might there be  a great order?

   The power to change is both creative and destructive – a sinister gift, which unrestricted, leads onward toward the formless and inchoate void of the possible.

  Only a few guessed that the retreat of darkness presaged the emergence of an entirely new and less tangible terror. Things, in the words of G.K. Chesterton, were to grow incalculable by being calculated.

   Nevertheless, through war and famine and death, a sparse mercy had persisted. Like a mutation whose time had not yet come. I had seen the star thrower cross that rift , and in so doing, he had reasserted the human right to define his own frontier.

   It was as though at some point the supernatural had touched hesitantly, for an instant, upon the natural.

   It was as though I, as man, was being asked to confront, in all its overbearing weight, the universe itself. There was, at last, an utter stillness, a waiting as though for cosmic judgement. The eye, the torn eye, considered me.

   "But I do love the world," I whispered to a waiting presence in the empty room. “I love its small ones, the things beaten in the strangling surf, the bird, singing, which flies and falls and is not seen again." I choked and said, with the torn eye still upon me, "I love the lost ones, the failures of the world." It was like the renunciation of my scientific heritage.

   In the widening ring of human choice, chaos and order renew their symbolic struggle in the role of the titans. They contend for the destiny of the world. 

  The act was, in short, an assertion of value arisen from the domain of absolute zero.

     Somewhere far up the coast wandered the star thrower beneath his rainbow. 

 

   I found the star thrower. In the sweet rain-swept morning, that great many-hued rainbow still lurked and wavered tentatively beyond him. Silently, I sought and picked up a still-living star, spinning it far out into the waves. I spoke once briefly. “I understand,” I said. “Call me another thrower.”

   It was like sowing - the sowing of life on a infinitely gigantic scale. I looked back across my shoulder. Small and dark against the receding rainbow, the star thrower stooped and flung once more. I never looked again. The task we had assumed was to immense for gazing. I flung and flung again while all about us roared the insatiable waters of death.

  The task was not to be assumed lightly, for it was men as well as starfish that we sought to save. 
 
   We had lost our way, I thought, but we had kept, some of us, the memory of a perfect circle of compassion from life to death and back again to life – the completion of the rainbow of existence. 
 
   I cast again with an increasingly remembered sowing motion and went my lone way up the beaches. Somewhere, I felt, in a great atavistic surge of feeling, somewhere the Thrower knew. Perhaps he smiled and cast once more into the boundless pit of darkness. 
 
   I picked up the star whose tube feet ventured timidly among my fingers, while, like a true star, it cried soundlessly for life. 

    There are two narratives at war within The Star Thrower, within Eiseley, one of insatiable death and one of enduring life. Eiseley walks, torn between the two. Torn between adherence to the darkness of a humanistic/scientific chaos consuming all, and conversely, a universal ocean of love. 

 

    The starfish wait, as do we. Is there a Thrower who is for us?

 

    Eiseley walks away from darkness: the eye, the self determining, and self-destructive way, and embraces a universe of life, a thrower, and the Thrower. Eiseley released his dark narrative pushing past the darkness. He opens himself up to the Thrower; a Thrower who fights daily against the surging tide of darkness for life. 

 

    Am I desolate seeker on the shores of this planet or a thrower? Is my stock in chaos or order? Do I rely upon the eye, or upon the Thrower? 

   Eiseley articulates beauty and blackness. He reminds: science and life are not always, but often, opposing forces. The heart must choose: the wisdom of men, who often collect death, or the wisdom of the thrower. A poet, writer, scientist, and anthropologist, articulate for our time, Eiseley brings us to the brink of his decisioning on the shores of life or death. We must decide.

   We may journey with Eiseley, if we wish. We too, may find a thrower and recognize the unseen Thrower amidst us. We too, may become a thrower. Eiseley will not tell us. What to do? 

Is becoming a thrower and seeking a Thrower, the more intelligent, humane, and life filled journey? 
 

 The Starfish Throwers Movie