The Log from the Sea of Cortez Read Online Free PDF Page A

thing.”

     

    The working out of a script for the “other side” might correspondingly be achieved through the figure of some wise and mellow old man, who has long ago developed beyond the expediencies of economic drives and power drives, and to whom for guidance in adolescent troubles some grandchild comes.... A wise old man, present during the time of building a high speed road through a primitive community, appropriately might point out the evils of the encroaching mechanistic civilization to a young person.
     
    In his best fiction, Steinbeck worked out the conflict between primitivism and progress, between his own view of the world and that of Ricketts—both of which were based, of course, on a scientific view of life organized around the concept of wholeness which is as spiritual as it is biological. And the Ed Ricketts characters in Steinbeck’s fiction (they are several and are usually named “Doc”) are those who are somehow cut off. They see and understand, but they cannot act on the basis of that understanding for the betterment of the species. Doc Burton in In Dubious Battle sees and understands the plight of the striking apple pickers in the Tor-gas Valley, but he wanders off into the night, frustrated by his inability to act on their behalf. He is “reincarnated” as Jim Casy in The Grapes of Wrath, who returns as Christ from the wilderness, and, seeing life whole, realizing that “all that lives is holy,” gives his life to aid the dispossessed and disinherited. And there is Doc in Cannery Row, who wants only to “savor the hot taste of life,” even as the Row itself (which for Doc and his friends is “a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream”) is really an island surrounded by an encroaching society which will ultimately destroy it. Little wonder the book is dedicated “to Ed Ricketts, who knows why or should.” And there is its sequel, Sweet Thursday, where the Ricketts character seems even more isolated in a book which is less sweet than bittersweet. And finally there is that strange play-novelette, Burning Bright, in which the Ricketts character (named Friend Ed) teaches the Steinbeck character (Joe Saul) how to see and understand things whole and then how to receive (a trait which, in “About Ed Ricketts,” Steinbeck identified as among Ricketts’s greatest talents).

    In the Log, Steinbeck writes a passage which could easily have been taken from the work of William Emerson Ritter (it appears nowhere in Ricketts’s notes on the trip), in which he reflects that “there are colonies of pelagic tunicates which have a shape like the finger of a glove.” Steinbeck remarks that “each member of the colony is an individual, but the colony is another individual animal, not at all like the sum of its individuals.” And, says Steinbeck, “I am much more than the sum of my cells and, for all I know, they are much more than the division of me.” There is “no quietism in such acceptance,” notes the novelist, “but rather the basis for a far deeper understanding of us and our world.” This is Ritter’s organismal conception, which Steinbeck learned at Hopkins and discussed for so many years with Ricketts. At the core of the argument is the premise that, since given properties of parts are determined by or explained in terms of the whole, the whole is directive, is capable of directing the parts. In other words, the whole acts as a causal unit—on its own parts. As stated above, W. C. Allee’s doctrine of social cooperation among animals was unconscious and involuntary; the process of cooperation was automatic. What appealed to Allee and to Ricketts was that this concept offered them an approach to reality that enabled them to break through to a view of the total picture. But seeing and understanding the whole picture, what Jim Casy calls “the whole shebang,” and acting on the basis of that understanding, are two different