The Sea of Cortez

Humpback whales sighted off the shore of Hopkins today...

Week three continues to deliver the rigor! On monday, Susan and Gilly coaxed us into the philosophically inviting waters of The Log from the Sea of Cortez, a collection of journalistic musings kept by John Steinbeck and his comrade-in-arms, Edward F. Ricketts (Doc from Cannery Row) that narrated, to a certain extent, their epic six-week marine animal collecting expedition down the Baja peninsula and into the Sea of Cortez. In the originally published format (The Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research), Steinbeck's Log was followed by Ricketts' extensively annotated catalog of marine specimens. For our purposes, the narrative content provided more than enough material for debate, discussion, and dissection. The format of The Sea of Cortez can be daunting; from chapter to chapter, shifts in voice, perspective, and content occur, which (to put it plainly) can drive many readers absolutely crazy. It should be noted that Steinbeck goes so far as to alert his readers to the narrative differences of this work:

"The design of a book is the pattern of a reality controlled and shaped by the mind of the writer. This is completely understood about poetry or fiction, but it is too seldom realized about books of fact. And yet the impulse which drives a man to poetry will send another man into the tide pools and force him to try to report what he finds there...We have a book to write about the Gulf of California. We could do one of several things about its design. But we have decided to let it form itself: its boundaries a boat and sea; its duration a six weeks' charter time; its subject everything we could see and think and even imagine; its limits--our own without reservation" (Sea of Cortez, page 1).

There you have it... he warned you--life will "form itself...."

In 1945, Steinbeck would publish Cannery Row, and with it an invocation that resonates with the above passage:

"How can the poem and the stink and the grating noise--the quality of light, the tone, the habit and the dream--be set down alive? When you collect marine animals there are certain flat worms so delicate that they are almost impossible to capture whole, for they break and tatter under the touch. You must let them ooze and crawl of their own will onto a knife blade and then lift them gently into your bottle of sea water. And perhaps that might be the way to write this book--to open the page and to let the stories crawl in by themselves" (Cannery Row, pages 3-4). 

Again, life will form/fix itself organically...

What Sea of Cortez lacks in traditional structural integrity it more than makes up for with its engaging philosophical content. Throughout the book, little "nuggets" of epistemological goodness pop up and force some seriously deep thoughts (by Jack Handey!) to the surface:

"The safety-valve of all speculation is: 'it might be so'. And so long as that remains, a variable deeply understood, then speculation does not easily become dogma, but remains the fluid creative thing it might be. Thus, a valid painter, letting color and one, observe, sift into his eyes, up the nerve trunks, and mix well with his experience before it flows down his hand to the canvas, has made his painting say, 'it might be so'... Perhaps his critic, being not so honest and not so wise, will say, 'it is NOT so. The picture is damned.' If this critic could say, 'it is not so with ME,' but that might be because my mind and experience are not identical with those of the painter,' that critic would be the better critic for it, just as that painter is a better painter for knowing he himself is in the pigment" (Sea of Cortez, page 219). 

I read this as an interesting Steinbeck-Ricketts discussion that might very well be some degree of a prototype for future intellectual explorations into what Steinbeck's East of Eden calls "timshel"--thou mayest. It might be so... 

As a work of creative non-fiction, memoir, philosophy, marine biology, or whatever else you want to call it, Sea of Cortez offers an incredible abundance of personal anecdotes and insights into who Steinbeck and Ricketts were (and perhaps more importantly) as men and to what extent they played supporting roles in each others' creative growth. The loneliness, alienation, and melancholia imbedded in many of Steinbeck's books might be best articulated through his description of Ricketts from About Ed Ricketts, a biographical essay on his friend that would be included in the editions of The Sea of Cortez after Ricketts' tragic death:

But for all of Ed's pleasures and honesties there was a transcendent sadness in his love--something he missed or wanted, a searching that sometimes approached panic. I don't know what it was he wanted that was not there, but I know he always looked for it and never found it. He sought for it and listened for it and looked for it and smelled for it ad listened for it in love. I think he found some of it in music. It was like a deep and endless nostalgia--a thirst and passion for "going home" (from About Ed Ricketts). 

This desperate grasping for something beyond comprehension seems to be an identifiably universal human theme, but Steinbeck's consistent visitation of it (nostalgia for the home) throughout his works establishes it as a touchstone of his, and obviously Ricketts', personal experience. It makes me happy to imagine, as existentially isolated as they must have felt at times, Steinbeck and Ricketts together, musing, writing, exploring, and sharing their philosophical truths with one another over a cold can of Acme beer. Even misfit toys have an island to share!

As our time here in Monterey winds down, I find myself revisiting a certain quote (that many others (Bill!) have already pointed out) that seems to be one of the more powerful observations within the text. Jim, my roommate, mentioned that it would "really be unfortunate to forget this place..."

Ephemeral as it may be on one level, I'm certain I (we!) will remember this experience--through shared memories and our own records, it will persist, and it will be passed down through future generations of Steinbeck aficionados, teachers, and students.

Leave-taking (parting is such sweet sorrow!) may very well be the fixative agent needed to properly preserve what we have experienced here:

The moment or hour of leave-taking is one of the pleasantest times in human experience, for it has in it a warm sadness without loss. People who don't ordinarily like you very well are overcome with affection at leave-taking. We said good-by again and again and still could not bring ourselves to cast off the lines and start the engines. It would be good to live in a perpetual state of leave-taking, never to go nor to stay, but to remain suspended in that golden emotion of love and longing; to be missed without being gone; to be loved without satiety. How beautiful one is and how desirable; for in a few moments one will have ceased to exist..." (Sea of Cortez, page 25). 

A fortune found on the grounds of the Naval Post Grad facility today...