The Log from the Sea of Cortez (43 page)

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Authors: John Steinbeck,Richard Astro

BOOK: The Log from the Sea of Cortez
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He thought of music as something incomparably concrete and dear. Once, when I had suffered an overwhelming emotional upset, I went to the laboratory to stay with him. I was dull and speechless with shock and pain. He used music on me like medicine. Late in the night when he should have been asleep, he played music for me on his great phonograph—even when I was asleep he played it, knowing that its soothing would get into my dark confusion. He played the curing and reassuring plain songs, remote and cool and separate, and then gradually he played the sure patterns of Bach, until I was ready for more personal thought and feeling again, until I could bear to come back to myself. And when that time came, he gave me Mozart. I think it was as careful and loving medication as has ever been administered.
Ed’s reading was very broad. Of course he read greatly in his own field of marine invertebratology. But he read hugely otherwise. I do not know where he found the time. I can judge his liking only by the things he went back to—translations of Li Po and Tu Fu, that greatest of all love poetry, the
Black Marigolds
—and
Faust,
most of all
Faust.
Just as he thought the Art of the Fugue might be the greatest music up to our time, he considered Faust the greatest writing that had been done. He enlarged his scientific German so that he could read Faust and hear the sounds of the words as they were written and taste their meanings. Ed’s mind seems to me to have been a timeless mind, not modern and not ancient. He loved to read Layamon aloud and Beowulf, making the words sound as fresh as though they had been written yesterday.
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 after life in any sense other than chemical. He was suspicious of promises of an after life, believing them to be sops to our fear or hope artificially supplied.
Economics and politics he observed with the same interested detachment he applied to the ecological relationships and balances in a tide pool.
For a time after the Russian Revolution he watched the Soviet with the pleased interest of a terrier seeing its first frog. He thought there might be some new thing in Russia, some human progression that might be like a mutation in the nature of the species. But when the Revolution was accomplished and the experiments ceased and the Soviets steadied and moved inexorably toward power and the perpetuation of power through applied ignorance and dogmatic control of the creative human spirit, he lost interest in the whole thing. Now and then he would take a sampling to verify his conclusions as to the direction. His last hope for that system vanished when he wrote to various Russian biologists, asking for information from their exploration of the faunal distribution on the Arctic Sea. He then discovered that they not only did not answer, they did not even get his letters. He felt that any restriction or control of knowledge or conclusion was a dreadful sin, a violation of first principles. He lost his interest in Marxian dialectics when he could not verify in observable nature. He watched with a kind of amused contempt while the adepts warped the world to fit their pattern. And when he read the conclusions of Lysenko, he simply laughed without comment.
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 Politburocontrolled 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 non-creative. 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 spoke sometimes of a period he valued in his life. It was after he had left home and entered the University of Chicago. He had not liked his home life very well. The rules that he had known were silly from his early childhood were finally removed.
“Adults, in their dealing with children, are insane,” he said. “And children know it too. Adults lay down rules they would not think of following, speak truths they do not believe. And yet they expect children to obey the rules, believe the truths, and admire and respect their parents for this nonsense. Children must be very wise and secret to tolerate adults at all. And the greatest nonsense of all that adults expect children to believe is that people learn by experience. No greater lie was ever revered. And its falseness is immediately discerned by children since their parents obviously have not learned anything by experience. Far from learning, adults simply become set in a maze of prejudices and dreams and sets of rules whose origins they do not know and would not dare inspect for fear the whole structure might topple over on them. I think children instinctively know this,” Ed said. “Intelligent children learn to conceal their knowledge and keep free of this howling mania.”
When he left home, he was free at last, and he remembered his first freedom with a kind of glory. His freedom was not one of idleness.
“I don’t know when I slept,” he said. “I don’t think there was time to sleep. I tended furnaces in the early morning. Then I went to class. I had lab all afternoon, then tended furnaces in the early evening. I had a job in a little store in the evening and got some studying done then, until midnight. Well, then I was in love with a girl whose husband worked nights, and naturally I didn’t sleep much from midnight until morning. Then I got up and tended furnaces and went to class. What a time,” he said, “what a fine time that was.”
It is necessary in any kind of picture of Ed Ricketts to give some account of his sex life since that was by far his greatest drive. His life was saturated with sex and he was to a very great extent preoccupied with it. He gave it a monumental amount of thought and time and analysis. It will be no violation to discuss this part of his life since he had absolutely no shyness about discussing it himself.
To begin with, he was a hyper-thyroid. His metabolic rate was abnormally high. He had to eat at very frequent intervals or his body revolted with pain and anger. He was, during the time I knew him, and, I gather, from the very beginning, as concupiscent as a bull terrier. His sexual output and preoccupation was or purported to be prodigious. I do not know beyond doubt about the actual output. That is hearsay but well authenticated; but certainly his preoccupation with sexual matters was very great.
As far as women were concerned, he was completely without what is generally called “honor.” It was not that he was dishonorable. The word simply had no meaning for him if it implied abstemiousness. Any man who left a wife in his care and expected him not to try for her was just a fool. He was compelled to try. The woman might reject him, and he would not be unreasonably importunate, but certainly he would not fail for lack of trying.
When I first met him he was engaged in a scholarly and persistent way in the process of deflowering a young girl. This was a long and careful affair. He not only was interested in a sexual sense, but he had also an active interest in the psychic and physical structure of virginity. There was, I believe, none of the usual sense of triumph at overcoming or being first. Ed’s physical basis was a pair of very hot pants, but his secondary motive was an active and highly intellectual interest in the state of virginity and the change involved in abandoning that state. His knowledge of anatomy was large, but, as he was wont to say, the variation in structure is delightfully large, even leaving out abnormalities, and this variation gives a constant interest and surprise to a function which is basically pleasant anyway.
The resistance of this particular virgin was surprising. He did not know whether it was based on some block, or on the old-fashioned reluctance of a normal girl toward defloration, or, as he thought possible, on a distaste for himself personally. He inspected each of these possibilities with patient care. And since he had no shyness about himself, it did not occur to him to have any reluctance about discussing his project with his friends and acquaintances. It is perhaps a fortunate thing that this particular virgin did not hear the discussions. They might have embarrassed her, a matter that did not occur to Ed. Many years later, when she heard about the whole thing, she was of the opinion that she might still be a virgin if she had heard herself so intimately discussed. But by then, it was fortunately, she agreed, far too late.
One thing is certain. Ed did not like his sex uncomplicated. If a girl were unattached and without problems as well as willing, his interest was not large. But if she had a husband or seven children or a difficulty with the law or some whimsical neuroticism in the field of love, Ed was charmed and instantly active. If he could have found a woman who was not only married, but a mother, in prison, and one of Siamese twins, he would have been delighted.
It will be impossible to put down much anecdote concerning his activities. The more interesting affairs were discussed with such freedom, not only by Ed but by any number of amateur referees, that they acquired a certain local fame. This may be perfectly acceptable as confirmed gossip, but in print the protagonists might be inclined to consider the histories libelous, and they surely are.
His taste in women was catholic as long as there were complications and no thin lips. Complexion, color of hair and eyes, shape or size, seemed to make no difference to him. He was singularly open to suggestion.
Ordinarily Ed was able to view his fellow humans with the clear sight of objectivity only slightly warped by like or dislike. He could give the best and most valuable advice based on great knowledge and understanding. However, when the strong winds of love shook him, all this was changed. Then his objectivity was likely to blow sky-high.
The object of his affection herself contributed very little to his picture of her. She was only the physical frame on which he draped a woman. She was like those large faceless dolls on which clothes are made. He built his own woman on this form, created her from the ground up, invented her appearance and built her mind, furnished her with talents and sensitivenesses which were not only astonishing but downright untrue. Then the woman in process was likely to come with surprise to the conclusion that she loved poetry she had never heard of, and could not understand if she had, that she breathed shallowly over music the existence of which was equally unknown to her. She became beautiful but not necessarily in any way that was familiar to her. And her thoughts—these would be likely to surprise her most of all, since she might not have been aware that she had any thoughts at all.

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