America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction (31 page)

He had no religion in the sense of creed or dogma. In fact he distrusted all formal religions, suspecting them of having been fouled with economics and power and politics. He did not believe in any God as recognized by any group or cult. Probably his God could have been expressed by the mathematical symbol for an expanding universe. Surely he did not believe in an afterlife in any sense other than chemical. He was suspicious of promises of an afterlife, believing them to be sops to our fear or hope artificially supplied.

 

 

 

Very many conclusions Ed and I worked out together through endless discussion and reading and observation and experiment. We worked together, and so closely that I do not now know in some cases who started which line of speculation since the end thought was the product of both minds. I do not know whose thought it was.

We had a game which we playfully called speculative metaphysics. It was a sport consisting of lopping off a piece of observed reality and letting it move up through the speculative process like a tree growing tall and bushy. We observed with pleasure how the branches of thought grew away from the trunk of external reality. We believed, as we must, that the laws of thought parallel the laws of things. In our game there was no stricture of rightness. It was an enjoyable exercise on the instruments of our minds, improvisations and variations on a theme, and it gave the same delight and interest that discovered music does. No one can say, “This music is the only music,” nor would we say, “This thought is the only thought,” but rather, “This is a thought, perhaps well or ill formed, but a thought which is a real thing in nature.”

Once a theme was established we subjected observable nature to it. The following is an example of our game—one developed quite a long time ago.

We thought that perhaps our species thrives best and most creatively in a state of semi-anarchy, governed by loose rules and half-practiced mores. To this we added the premise that over-integration in human groups might parallel the law in paleontology that over-armor or over-ornamentation are symptoms of decay and disappearance. Indeed, we thought, over-integration might be the symptom of human decay. We thought: there is no creative unit in the human save the individual working alone. In pure creativeness, in art, in music, in mathematics, there are no true collaborations. The creative principle is a lonely and an individual matter. Groups can correlate, investigate, and build, but we could not think of any group that has ever created or invented anything. Indeed, the first impulse of the group seems to be to destroy the creation and the creator. But integration, or the designed group, seems to be highly vulnerable.

Now with this structure of speculation we would slip examples on the squares of the speculative graphing paper.

Consider, we would say, the Third Reich or the Politburo-controlled Soviet. The sudden removal of twenty-five key men from either system could cripple it so thoroughly that it would take a long time to recover, if it ever could. To preserve itself in safety such a system must destroy or remove all opposition as a danger to itself. But opposition is creative and restriction is noncreative. The force that feeds growth is therefore cut off. Now, the tendency to integration must constantly increase. And this process of integration must destroy all tendencies toward improvisation, must destroy the habit of creation, since this is sand in the bearings of the system. The system then must, if our speculation is accurate, grind to a slow and heavy stop. Thought and art must be forced to disappear and a weighty traditionalism take its place. Thus we would play with thinking. A too greatly integrated system or society is in danger of destruction since the removal of one unit may cripple the whole.

Consider the blundering anarchic system of the United States, the stupidity of some of its lawmakers, the violent reaction, the slowness of its ability to change. Twenty-five key men destroyed could make the Soviet Union stagger, but we could lose our Congress, our President, and our general staff and nothing much would have happened. We would go right on. In fact we might be better for it.

That is an example of the game we played. Always our thinking was prefaced with “It might be so!” Often a whole night would draw down to a moment while we pursued the fireflies of our thinking.

 

 

 

Ed's scientific notebooks were very interesting. Among his collecting notes and zoological observations there would be the most outspoken and indelicate observation from another kind of collecting. After his death I had to go through these notebooks before turning them over to Hopkins Marine Station, a branch of Stanford University, as Ed's will directed. I was sorry I had to remove a number, a great number, of the entries from the notebooks. I did not do this because they lacked interest, but it occurred to me that a student delving into Ed's notes for information on invertebratology could emerge with blackmail material on half the female population of Monterey. Ed simply had no reticence about such things. I removed the notes but did not destroy them. They have an interest, I think, above the personalities mentioned. In some future time the women involved may lovingly remember the incidents.

In the back of his car Ed carried an ancient blanket that once had been red but that had faded to a salmon pink from use and exposure. It was a battle-scarred old blanket, veteran of many spreadings on hill and beach. Grass seeds and bits of seaweed were pounded and absorbed into the wool itself. I do not think Ed would have started his car in the evening without his blanket in the back seat.

Before love struck and roiled his vision like a stirred pool, Ed had a fine and appraising eye for a woman. He would note with enthusiasm a well-lipped mouth, a swelling breast, a firm yet cushioned bottom, but he also inquired into other subtleties—the padded thumb, shape of foot, length and structure of finger and toe, plump-lobed ear and angle of teeth, thigh and set of hip and movement in walking too. He regarded these things with joy and thanksgiving. He always was pleased that love and women were what they were or what he imagined them.

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 never 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 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.”

He was walled off a little, so that he worked at his philosophy of “breaking through,” of coming out through the back of the mirror into some kind of reality which would make the day world dreamlike. This thought obsessed him. He found the symbols of “breaking through” in Faust, in Gregorian music, and in the sad, drunken poetry of Li Po. Of the Art of the Fugue he would say, “Bach nearly made it. Hear now how close he comes, and hear his anger when he cannot. Every time I hear it I believe that this time he will come crashing through into the light. And he never does—not quite.”

And of course it was he himself who wanted so desperately to break through into the light.

We worked and thought together very closely for a number of years so that I grew to depend on his knowledge and on his patience in research. And then I went away to another part of the country but it didn't make any difference. Once a week or once a month would come a fine long letter so much in the style of his speech that I could hear his voice over the neat page full of small elite type. It was as though I hadn't been away at all. And sometimes now when the postman comes I look before I think for that small type on an envelope.

Ed was deeply pleased with the little voyage which is described in the latter part of this book [The Log from the “Sea of Cortez”], and he was pleased with the manner of setting it down. Often he would read it to remember a mood or a joke.

His scientific interest was essentially ecological and holistic. His mind always tried to enlarge the smallest picture. I remember his saying, “You know, at first view you would think the rattlesnake and the kangaroo rat were the greatest of enemies since the snake hunts and feeds on the rat. But in a larger sense they must be the best of friends. The rat feeds the snake and the snake selects out the slow and weak and generally thins the rat people so that both species can survive. It is quite possible that neither species could exist without the other.” He was pleased with commensal animals, particularly with groups of several species contributing to the survival of all. He seemed as pleased with such things as though they had been created for him.

With any new food or animal he looked, felt, smelled, and tasted. Once in a tide pool we were discussing the interesting fact that nudibranchs, although beautiful and brightly colored and tasty-looking and soft and unweaponed, are never eaten by other animals which should have found them irresistible. He reached underwater and picked up a lovely orange-colored nudibranch and put it in his mouth. And instantly he made a horrible face and spat and retched, but he had found out why fishes let these living tidbits completely alone.

On another occasion he tasted a species of free-swimming anemone and got his tongue so badly stung by its nettle cells that he could hardly close his mouth for twenty-four hours. But he would have done the same thing the next day if he had wanted to know.

 

Although small and rather slight, Ed was capable of prodigies of strength and endurance. He could drive for many hours to arrive at a good collecting ground for a favorable low tide, then work like a fury turning over rocks while the tide was out, then drive back to preserve his catch. He could carry heavy burdens over soft and unstable sand with no show of weariness. He had enormous resistance. It took a train to kill him. I think nothing less could have done it.

His sense of smell was very highly developed. He smelled all food before he ate it, not only the whole dish but each forkful. He invariably smelled each animal as he took it from the tide pool. He spoke of the smells of different animals, and some moods and even thoughts had characteristic odors to him—undoubtedly conditioned by some experience good or bad. He referred often to the smells of people, how individual each one was, and how it was subject to change. He delighted in his sense of smell in love.

With his delicate olfactory equipment, one would have thought that he would be disgusted by so-called ugly odors, but this was not true. He could pick over decayed tissue or lean close to the fetid viscera of a cat with no repulsion. I have seen him literally crawl into the carcass of a basking shark to take its liver in the dark of its own body so that no light might touch it. And this is as horrid an odor as I know.

Ed loved fine tools and instruments, and conversely he had a bitter dislike for bad ones. Often he spoke with contempt of “consumer goods”—things made to catch the eye, to delight the first impression with paint and polish, things made to sell rather than to use. On the other hand, the honest workmanship of a good microscope gave him great pleasure. Once I brought him from Sweden a set of the finest scalpels, surgical scissors, and delicate forceps. I remember his joy in them.

His laboratory practice was immaculate and his living quarters were not clean. It was his custom to say that most people paid too much for things they didn't really want, paid too much in effort and time and thought. “If a swept floor gives you enough pleasure and reward to pay for sweeping it, then sweep it,” he said. “But if you do not see it dirty or clean, then it is paying too much to sweep it.”

I think he set down his whole code or procedure once in a time of stress. He found himself quite poor and with three children to take care of. In a very scholarly manner, he told the children how they must proceed.

“We must remember three things,” he said to them. “I will tell them to you in the order of their importance. Number one and first in importance, we must have as much fun as we can with what we have. Number two, we must eat as well as we can, because if we don't we won't have the health and strength to have as much fun as we might. And number three and third and last in importance, we must keep the house reasonably in order, wash the dishes, and such things. But we will not let the last interfere with the other two.”

Ed's feeling for clothes was interesting. He wore Bass moccasins, buckskin-colored and quite expensive. He loved thick soft wool socks and wool shirts that would scratch the hell out of anyone else. But outside of those he had no interest. His clothing was fairly ragged, particularly at elbows and knees. He had one necktie hanging in his closet, a wrinkled old devil of a yellow tint, but no one ever saw him wear it. His clothes he just came by, and the coats were not likely to fit him at all. He was not in the least embarrassed by his clothes. He went everywhere in the same costume. And always he seemed strangely neat. Such was his sense of inner security that he did not seem ill dressed. Often people around him appeared overdressed. The only time he ever wore a hat was when there was some chance of getting his head wet, and then it was likely to be an oilskin sou'wester. But whatever else he wore or did not wear, there was invariably pinned to his shirt pocket a twenty-power Bausch and Lomb magnifying glass on a little roller chain. He used the glass constantly. It was a very close part of him—one of his techniques of seeing.

Always the paradox is there. He loved nice things and did not care about them. He loved to bathe and yet when the water heater in the laboratory broke down he bathed in cold water for over a year before he got around to having it fixed. I finally mended his leaking toilet tank with a piece of chewing gum which I imagine is still there. A broken window was stuffed with newspaper for several years and never was repaired.