Naval Postgraduate School - Monterey, CA

Facade of the Naval Postgraduate School Administration Building, built in 1926

If one were to run, bike, walk, or drive north from Cannery Row on the seaside pathways or roads of Monterey, the Naval Postgraduate School would eventually become visible to your right (east of the ocean). While the hotel was originally erected in 1880, a series of major fires and natural disasters (the first structure burned in 1887, was rebuilt and then badly damaged in the infamous 1906 California earthquake, and then the hotel burned again in 1924) would reduce the structure to rubble. Famous guests included Theodore and Eleanor Roosevelt, Charlie Chaplin, Ernest Hemingway, Salvador Dali (who threw a massive party in the ballroom...), Clark Gable, Walt Disney, Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, and Charles Lindbergh (among others). In short, at the time, the Hotel Del Monte was the "place to be."

The recently restored "Roman Bath" in front of the main building

In 1942, the Department of Navy leased the hotel and remaining grounds (the original property was around 20,000 acres, including the famous 17 mile drive and what is now the Pebble Beach golf course) to rehouse its burgeoning Postgraduate school and aviator pre-flight school (originally located on the Naval Academy grounds in Annapolis, MD). Today, the facility continues to serve as the only Postgraduate (awarding Masters and Doctoral degrees) facility for the United States Military - all branches of service (Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, Coast Guard) in addition to other Dept. of Homeland Security forces (State Dept., FBI, CIA, etc.) are in attendance as well as foreign diplomatic military students studying engineering, aerospace, mathematics, physics, and other such STEM fields.

Ballroom...

View of the Bay from the roof...

Our tour guide John Sanders is the Special Collections Manager (archivist) for the property (the Dudley Knox Library) and he really brought a passion and intensity to his presentations that transmitted his love and pride for the property... I hope I can continue to bring his level of enthusiasm to my own classrooms for years to come...

A fantastic photo of Jon blinking. Nice. 

The Del /monte Hotel Cookbook Steinbeck connection!:

The beautiful and the sublime... Robinson Jeffers

The beautiful Tor House in Carmel, stones quarried by hand by Jeffers...

This past Monday, the group loaded into the vans and headed to Carmel-by-the-Sea, California (south of Monterey) for an in depth look into the life of the revered California poet Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962). Jeffers, an academic child prodigy (by his teens he could read and speak German, French, Hebrew, Latin, and Greek) was the son of a doctoral degree-holding Presbyterian minister who taught Biblical studies extensively at colleges in antebellum America. Jeffers' mother Annie was a direct descendant of Jonathan Edwards, famed Calvinist and Puritan reformer.

In spite of his rigid academic and stringent religious upbringing, Robin found himself at odds with his father's religion and ultimately adopted (although he seems to portray it more as "accepted" or "understood") a personal religion of "Calvinist pantheistic inhumanism" ("inhumanism" being an intentional distinction by Jeffers from the transcendentalist notion of humanism seen throughout the work and philosophies of Emerson and Whitman). Jeffers saw humanity's collective sense of consciousness as the intangible thing that allowed for our unique experience of "beauty and the sublime" while also distancing us hopelessly and terminally from our "true" and more fundamentally animal nature. The hawks soaring overhead his Tor House or the granite rocks on the Carmel cliff shore had, for Jeffers, a closer association with God or oneness or eternity and more to do with truthfulness and authenticity than the other major philosophical schools of thought championed by others in his time.

Jeffers' notion of the holistic ecological framework (pantheism...) of life put him in close touch with the beauty and significance of everything around him. For quite a while, I have grappled with the notion of distinguishing the "beautiful" from the "sublime" (thinking back to my lit crit classes as an undergrad) and I think Jeffers (and the killer Jeffers anthology of poetry I purchased from the Tor House bookstore!) and his Hawk Tower (and a recent excursion to Big Sur) have finally created a palpable image in my head that helps to distinguish one from the other as well as clarifying the importance of "the experience of the sublime" in life. I'm paraphrasing in a major way from the Jeffers anthology:

Beauty: think "maternal"--warmth, sunshine, security, with a profound sense of serenity... e.g. where Wordsworth's "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" from Lyrical Ballads might take place:

freakin' beautiful, right?

Another type of beauty... HOME...

Part 2:

Sublimity: think "paternal"--steely, robust, powerful, and a profound sense of what Steinbeck called "a violence just below the surface..." In other words, something breathtaking but also terrifying.

The waves of Big Sur are gorgeous, but they will kill you... 

Jeffers would applaud this family (front center)... you do need to experience the sublime... just at safe distance...

Jeffers seemed to celebrate the idea of living perpetually on the verge of the sublime... so much so that he built his Tor House and Hawk Tower on the edge of a rocky precipice (that leads down to the Carmel seaside). Literally and figuratively, Jeffers "lived on the edge."

By maintaining some proximity to scenes of sublimity, we are reminded of how insignificant we are... an experience which can, in Jeffers' own terminology, unhumanize (lead us away from our individual sense of importance, our ego) us to a degree. 

Much like buddhist monks might reject all material belongings in an attempt to ready themselves for higher states of enlightenment, Jeffers seems to ask us to contemplate and appreciate the smallness of "the self" and the importance of situating ourselves within the world (the "I" to the "we"?). The birds (hawks!) have it right... no contemplation of mortality or meaning, just experience and acceptance.

Jeffers and his poetry were (in spite of early celebration of his work and a front page feature in Time magazine) ultimately eschewed by canon scholars due to his controversial rejection of American military involvement and open criticism of the U.S. in World War II. In addition to his political vociferousness, much of Jeffers' work is dark, brooding, and melancholy (depending how you view his perspective) and it seems likely that because of these "issues" he has been widely ignored outside of California's literary scene (with a few exceptions, of course).

Jeffers' tribute to his wife, quarried all by hand, and a major feat of stonemasonry, is his "Hawk Tower," a massive stone structure (massive when you realize it is hand built!) that is a sublime experience in  itself... from the exterior, it seems almost menacing and powerful in its medieval grandiosity... and once up on the balcony and finally at the nadir of the structure on the roof, it is simultaneously exhilarating and terrifying... a perfect (at least for a city dwelling land-lubber like me) lesson in sublimity.

From the beauty of his family home (Tor House) to the sublimity of Hawk Tower, the property is a must-see for literary folk of any ilk... prior to this institute, I had never been exposed to Jeffers and I'm quite glad I did....

While the Steinbeck connection is arguably tenuous (the two men never physically met to my knowledge an they do not really seem to share much in the way of literary structure) in a way, Jeffers was the Steinbeck of Carmel (even though he was not raised in California) and the two men did share a penchant for pantheistic philosophy. As a man steeped in the land (quite literally, having moved tons of granite boulders in his day) Jeffers said that the Carmel coast reminded him of Homer's Ithaca... A fitting scene for a rather epic life. I wonder what Jeffers would say about Carmel today--strolling from expensive boutique to art gallery to upscale restaurant--and what he would have to say about the transformations it has undergone. I imagine he would avert his gaze seaward, out toward oblivion.

The sublime Hawk Tower... 

Quarried by hand from the beach below....

A premature retrospective, part 1

This will have to be something of a post-mortem Steinbeck Institute entry (or series of entries)--I caught a bit of the Steinbeck journaling ennui (as seen in Journal of a Novel and Working Days from time to time) with my writing--but I still have a few days of pictures, information, songs, and (hopefully) insights to share.

As I reflect on the past three weeks with my colleagues and the fabulous proctors of the institute, I'm sure more tidbits of things I've forgotten will begin to surface... so I'll make a point to jot them down here. I do, perhaps most importantly, intend to publish a "required reading list," or some sort of compilation of the amazing book recommendations I have amassed while here (invariably the byproduct of being around a group of English, history, and science academics...). 

First, for all of you in the throes of deep nostalgia for Monterey, perhaps this photo will send you reeling back to our memorable mornings together:

Best enjoyed listening to the "Best Western Inn" song by Jim and Dan

I plan to publish entries detailing our visit to Robinson Jeffers' Tor House in Carmel, our stop at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, the sea voyage whale watching in the Monterey Bay, and an epic group excursion down to Phieffer Beach in Big Sur.

Also on the list--loading up a photobucket/flickr site with all of my pictures for those that would like to download them... so many of us nabbed fantastic shots here, I fully plan to beg, borrow, and steal as much as I possibly can manage. 

"Jim and Dan in the Can," the debut album (recorded right here in Monterey!) from my nefarious roommate and I, will be made available via YouTube over the next few days... so stay tuned!

Thanks again to all of the participants and proctors of the institute for the mountain of memories that will last a lifetime! 

More to come...

Big Sur!!!!