The Log from the Sea of Cortez

by John Steinbeck

The little boys ran to and fro with full hands, and our buckets and tubes were soon filled. The ten-centavo pieces had long run out, and ten little boys often had to join a club whose center and interest was a silver peso, to be changed and divided later. They seemed to trust one another for the division. And certainly they felt there was no chance of their being robbed. Perhaps they are not civilized and do not know how valuable money is. The poor little savages seem not to have learned the great principle of cheating one another.

The world needs a little less civilization then, doesn’t it.

They carried packages, ran errands, directed us (mostly wrongly), tried to anticipate our wishes; but one boy soon emerged. He was not like the others. His shoulders were not slender, but broad, and there was a hint about his face and expression that seemed Germanic or perhaps Anglo-Saxon. Whereas the other little boys lived for the job and the payment, this boy created jobs and looked ahead. He did errands that were not necessary, he made himself indispensable. Late at night he waited, and the first dawn saw him on our deck. Further, the other small boys seemed a little afraid of him, and gradually they faded into the background and left him in charge. Some day this boy will be very rich and La Paz will be proud of him, for he will own the things other people must buy or rent. He has the look and the method of success. Even the first day success went to his head, and he began to cheat us a little. We did not mind, for it is a good thing to be cheated a little; it causes a geniality and can be limited fairly easily. His method was simple. He performed a task, and then, getting each of us alone, he collected for the job so that he was paid several times. We decided we would not use him any more, but the other little boys decided even better than we. He disappeared, and later we saw him in the town, his nose and lips heavily bandaged. We had the story from another little boy. Our financial wizard told the others that he was our sole servant and that we had said that they wer...

There is no certainty that the Easter of the Resurrection will really come. We were probably literarily affected by the service and the people and their feeling about it, the crippled and the pained who were in the church, the little half-hungry children, the ancient women with eyes of patient tragedy who stared up at the plaster saints with eyes of such pleading. We liked them and we felt at peace with them. And strolling slowly through the streets we thought a long time of these people in the church. We thought of the spirits of kindness which periodically cause them to be fed, a little before they are dropped back to hunger. And we thought of the good men who labored to cure them of disease and poverty. And then we thought of what they are, and we are—products of disease and sorrow and hunger and alcoholism. And suppose some all-powerful mind and will should cure our species so that for a number of generations we would be healthy and happy? We are the products of our disease and suffering. These are factors as powerful as other genetic factors. To cure and feed would be to change the species, and the result would be another animal entirely. We wonder if we would be able to tolerate our own species without a history of syphilis and tuberculosis. We don’t know.

As much as things change they stay the same.

Paz. People and children came from everywhere; a mob collected, first to give excited advice and then to help. A pillar of dust arose out of that yard. Small boys hurled themselves at the chickens like football-players. We were bound to catch them sooner or later, for as one group became exhausted, another took up the chase. If we had played fair and given those chickens rest periods, we would never have caught them.

On board it was Sparky’s job to kill them, and he hated it. But finally he cut their heads off and was sick. He hung them over the side to bleed and a boat came along and mashed them flat against our side. But even then they were tough. They had the most highly developed muscles we have ever seen. Their legs were like those of ballet dancers and there was no softness in their breasts. We stewed them for many hours and it did no good whatever. We were sorry to kill them, for they were gallant, fast chickens. In our country they could easily have got scholarships in one of our great universities and had collegiate careers, for they had spirit and fight and, for all we know, loyalty.

Being unable to sleep, we talked and Tiny told us a little of his career, which, if even part of it is true, is one of the most decoratively disreputable sagas we have ever heard. It is with sadness that we do not include some of it, but certain members of the general public are able to keep from all a treatise on biology unsurpassed in our experience. The great literature of this kind is kept vocal by the combined efforts of Puritans and postal regulations, and so the saga of Tiny must remain unwritten.

During the depression there were, and still are, not only destitute but thriftless and uncareful families, and we have often heard it said that the country had to support them because they were shiftless and negligent. If they would only perk up and be somebody everything would be all right. Even Henry Ford in the depth of the depression gave as his solution to that problem, “Everybody ought to roll up his sleeves and get to work.” This view may be correct as far as it goes, but we wonder what would happen to those with whom the shiftless would exchange places in the large pattern—those whose jobs would be usurped, since at that time there was work for only about seventy percent of the total employable population, leaving the remainder as government wards.

is.” No matter what the ability or aggressiveness of the separate units of society, at that time there were, and still there are, great numbers necessarily out of work, and the fact that those numbers comprised the incompetent or maladjusted or unlucky units is in one sense beside the point. No causality is involved in that; collectively it’s just “so”; collectively it’s related to the fact that animals produce more offspring than the world can support. The units may be blamed as individuals, but as members of society they cannot be blamed. Any given individual very possibly may transfer from the underprivileged into the more fortunate group by better luck or by improved aggressiveness or competence, but all cannot be so benefited whatever their strivings, and the large population will be unaffected. The seventy-thirty ratio will remain, with merely a reassortment of the units. And no blame, at least no social fault, imputes to these people ; they are where they are “because” natural conditions are what they are. And so far as we selfishly are concerned we can rejoice that they, rather than we, represent the low extreme, since there must be one.

What we personally conceive by the term “teleological thinking,” as exemplified by the notion about the shiftless unemployed, is most frequently associated with the evaluating of causes and effects, the purposiveness of events. This kind of thinking considers changes and cures—what “should be” in the terms of an end pattern (which is often a subjective or an anthropomorphic projection); it presumes the bettering of conditions, often, unfortunately, without achieving more than a most superficial understanding of those conditions. In their sometimes intolerant refusal to face facts as they are, teleological notions may substitute a fierce but ineffectual attempt to change conditions which are assumed to be undesirable, in place of the understanding-acceptance which would pave the way for a more sensible attempt at any change which might still be indicated.

In the non-teleological sense there can be no “answer.” There can be only pictures which become larger and more significant as one’s horizon increases.

1. Van Gogh’s feverish hurrying in the Arles epoch, culminating in epilepsy and suicide. Teleological “answer”: Improper care of his health during times of tremendous activity and exposure to the sun and weather brought on his epilepsy out of which discouragement and suicide resulted. Spiritual teleology: He hurried because he innately foresaw his imminent death, and wanted first to express as much of his essentiality as possible. Non-teleological picture: Both the above, along with a good many other symptoms and expressions (some of which could probably be inferred from his letters), were parts of his essentiality, possibly glimpsable as his “lust for life.”

Spiritual teleology: The neurosis is causative. Something psychically wrong drives the patient on to excess mental irritation which harries and upsets the glandular balance, especially the thyroid, through shock-resonance in the autonomic system, in the sense that a purely psychic shock may spoil one’s appetite, or may even result in violent illness. In this connection, note the army’s acceptance of extreme homesickness as a reason for disability discharge.

Teleological thinking may even be highly fallacious, especially where it approaches the very superficial but quite common post hoc, ergo propter hoc

Post hoc ergo propter hoc (Latin: "after this, therefore because of this") is an informal fallacy that states: "Since event Y followed event X, event Y must have been caused by event X." It is often shortened simply to post hoc fallacy

pattern. Consider the situation with reference to dynamiting in a quarry. Before a charge is set off, the foreman toots warningly on a characteristic whistle. People living in the neighborhood come to associate the one with the other, since the whistle is almost invariably followed within a few seconds by the shock and sound of an explosion for which one automatically prepares oneself. Having experienced this many times without closer contact, a very naive and unthinking person might justly conclude not only that there was a cause-effect relation, but that the whistle actually caused the explosion. A slightly wiser person would insist that the explosion caused the whistle, but would be hard put to explain the transposed time element. The normal adult would recognize that the whistle no more caused the explosion than the explosion caused the whistle, but that both were parts of a larger pattern out of which a “why” could be postulated for both, but more immediately and particularly for the whistle.

When a person asks “Why?” in a given situation, he usually deeply expects, and in any case receives, only a relational answer in place of the definitive “because” which he thinks he wants.

quanta.

quan·tum /ˈkwän(t)əm/ noun plural noun: quanta 1. PHYSICS a discrete quantity of energy proportional in magnitude to the frequency of the radiation it represents. 2. a required or allowed amount, especially an amount of money legally payable in damages.

effort—answers

etiology—

e·ti·ol·o·gy /ˌēdēˈäləjē/ noun 1. MEDICINE the cause, set of causes, or manner of causation of a disease or condition. "a group of distinct diseases with different etiologies" 2. the investigation or attribution of the cause or reason for something, often expressed in terms of historical or mythical explanation.

The criterion of validity in the handling of data seems to be this: that the summary shall say in substance, significantly and understandingly, “It’s so because it’s so.” Unfortunately the very same words might equally derive through a most superficial glance, as any child could learn to repeat from memory the most abstruse of Dirac’s equations. But to know a thing emergently and significantly is something else again, even though the understanding may be expressed in the self-same words that were used superficially.

The factors we have been considering as “answers” seem to be merely symbols or indices, relational aspects of things—of which they are integral parts—not to be considered in terms of causes and effects. The truest reason for anything’s being so is that it is. This is actually and truly a reason, more valid and clearer than all the other separate reasons, or than any group of them short of the whole. Anything less than the whole forms part of the picture only, and the infinite whole is unknowable except by being it, by living into it.

apperceivable

What does this word mean?? apperceive. transitive verb. ap·per·ceived, ap·per·ceiv·ing, ap·per·ceives. To perceive (something) while being conscious of perceiving. To perceive (something) in terms of past experience.

The whole picture is portrayed by is, the deepest word of deep ultimate reality, not shallow or partial as reasons are, but deeper and participating, possibly encompassing the Oriental concept of being.

I feel like I need to read and reread these chapters on teleological and non-teleological thinking over and over again so that I begin to understand them at something more than just mere words upon a page. They seem to contain much more than I’ve been able to scratch from them. Pg. 109-125?

“Cómo no?”

There are colonies of pelagic tunicates39 which have taken a shape like the finger of a glove. Each member of the colony is an individual animal, but the colony is another individual animal, not at all like the sum of its individuals. Some of the colonists, girdling the open end, have developed the ability, one against the other, of making a pulsing movement very like muscular action. Others of the colonists collect the food and distribute it, and the outside of the glove is hardened and protected against contact. Here are two animals, and yet the same thing—something the early Church would have been forced to call a mystery. When the early Church called some matter “a mystery” it accepted that thing fully and deeply as so, but simply not accessible to reason because reason had no business with it. So a man of individualistic reason, if he must ask, “Which is the animal, the colony or the individual?”’ must abandon his particular kind of reason and say, “Why, it’s two animals and they aren’t alike any more than the cells of my body are like me. 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, but rather the basis for a far deeper understanding of us and our world. And now this is ready for the taboo-box.

It is not enough to say that we cannot know or judge because all the information is not in. The process of gathering knowledge does not lead to knowing. A child’s world spreads only a little beyond his understanding while that of a great scientist thrusts outward immeasurably. An answer is invariably the parent of a great family of new questions. So we draw worlds and fit them like tracings against the world about us, and crumple them when they do not fit and draw new ones. The tree-frog in the high pool in the mountain cleft, had he been endowed with human reason, on finding a cigarette butt in the water might have said, “Here is an impossibility. There is no tobacco hereabouts nor any paper. Here is evidence of fire and there has been no fire. This thing cannot fly nor crawl nor blow in the wind. In fact, this thing cannot be and I will deny it, for if I admit that this thing is here the whole world of frogs is in danger, and from there it is only one step to anti-frogicentricism.” And so that frog will for the rest of his life try to forget that something that is, is.

We seems greatly involved in this at this point of time in our country—Denying that which doesn’t fit how we want to see life.

We have never understood why men mount the heads of animals and hang them up to look down on their conquerors. Possibly it feels good to these men to be superior to animals, but it does seem that if they were sure of it they would not have to prove it. Often a man who is afraid must constantly demonstrate his courage and, in the case of the hunter, must keep a tangible record of his courage. For ourselves, we have had mounted in a small hardwood plaque one perfect borrego dropping. And where another man can say, “There was an animal, but because I am greater than he, he is dead and I am alive, and there is his head to prove it,” we can say, “There was an animal, and for all we know there still is and here is the proof of it. He was very healthy when we last heard of him.”

It’s not like we hang cow heads above the mantel for every hundred hamburgers we eat.

The young males watched us from the safe shade of the cantina and passed greetings as we went by, and a covey of young girls grew tight-faced and rushed around a corner and giggled. How strange we were in Loreto! Our trousers were dark, not white; the silly caps we wore were so outlandish that no store in Loreto would think of stocking them. We were neither soldiers nor sailors—the little girls just couldn’t take it. We could hear their strangled giggling from around the corner. Now and then they peeked back around the corner to verify for themselves our ridiculousness, and then giggled again while their elders hissed in disapproval. And one woman standing in a lovely garden shaded with purple bougainvillaea explained, “Everyone knows what silly things girls are. You must forgive their ill manners; they will be ashamed later on.” But we felt that the silly girls had something worthwhile in their attitude. They were definitely amused. It is often so, particularly in our country, that the first reaction to strangeness is fear and hatred; we much preferred the laughter. We don’t think it was even unkind—they’d simply never seen anything so funny in their lives.

The proper way to see the world is with a smile and a giggle. What other way do we display the joy of discovery?

As usual, a good serious small boy attached himself to us. It would be interesting to see whether a nation governed by the small boys of Mexico would not be a better, happier nation than those ruled by old men whose prejudices may or may not be conditioned by ulcerous stomachs and perhaps a little drying up of the stream of love.

I love these philosophizing aside by Steinbeck. Too often, I tend to agree with the idea despite it’s ridiculousness. Were we to do away with the old guard and put injure youth to the test, I wonder how long it would take to have them become their predecessors.

A parallel occurred some years ago. A learned institution sent an expedition southward, one of whose many projects was to establish whether or not the sea-otter was extinct. In due time it returned with the information that the sea-otter was indeed extinct. One of us, some time later, talking with a woman on the coast below Monterey, was astonished to hear her describe animals living in the surf which could only be sea-otters, since she described accurately animals she couldn’t have known about except by observation. A report of this to the institution in question elicited no response. It had extincted sea-otters and that was that. It was only when a reporter on one of our more disreputable newspapers photographed the animals that the public was informed. It is not yet known whether the institution of learning has been won over.

A decision has been made, we will no let facts effect it or change it in any way no matter how loudly they prove they decision incorrect. Now we run countries this way.

When a hypothesis is deeply accepted it becomes a growth which only a kind of surgery can amputate. Thus, beliefs persist long after their factual bases have been removed, and practices based on beliefs are often carried on even when the beliefs which stimulated them have been forgotten.

It is often considered, particularly by reformers and legislators, that law is a stimulant to action or an inhibitor of action, when actually the reverse is true. Successful law is simply the publication of the practice of the majority of units of a society, and by it the inevitable variable units are either driven to conform or are eliminated.

One could argue, particularly if one had a gift for laziness, that it is a relaxation pregnant of activity, a sense of rest from which directed effort may arise, whereas most busy-ness is merely a kind of nervous tic. We know a lady who is obsessed with the idea of ashes in an ashtray. She is not lazy. She spends a good half of her waking time making sure that no ashes remain in any ashtray, and to make sure of keeping busy she has a great many ashtrays. Another acquaintance, a man, straightens rugs and pictures and arranges books and magazines in neat piles. He is not lazy, either; he is very busy. To what end? If he should relax, perhaps with his feet up on a chair and a glass of cool beer beside him—not cold, but cool—if he should examine from this position a rumpled rug or a crooked picture, saying to himself between sips of beer (preferably Carta Blanca beer), “This rug irritates me for some reason. If it were straight, I should be comfortable; but there is only one straight position (and this is of course, only my own personal discipline of straightness) among all possible positions. I am, in effect, trying to impose my will, my insular sense of rightness, on a rug, which of itself can have no such sense, since it seems equally contented straight or crooked. Suppose I should try to straighten people,” and here he sips deeply. “Helen C., for instance, is not neat, and Helen C.”—here he goes into a reverie—“how beautiful she is with her hair messy, how lovely when she ...

How can such a process have become a shame and a sin? Only in laziness can one achieve a state of contemplation which is a balancing of values, a weighing of oneself against the world and the world against itself. A busy man cannot find time for such balancing. We do not think a lazy man can commit murders, nor great thefts, nor lead a mob. He would be more likely to think about it and laugh. And a nation of lazy contemplative men would be incapable of fighting a war unless their very laziness were attacked. Wars are the activities of busy-ness.

Undoubtedly there are sound symbols in the unconscious just as there are visual symbols—sounds that trigger off a response, a little spasm of fear, or a quick lustfulness, or, as with the doves, a nostalgic sadness.

There was another reason for anchoring outside; in the open Gulf where the breeze moves there are no bugs, while if one anchors in still water near the mangroves little visitors come and spend the night. There is one small, beetle-like black fly which crawls down into bed with you and has a liking for very tender places. We had suffered from this fellow when the wind blew over the mangroves to us. This bug hates light, but finds security and happiness under the bedding, nestling over one’s kidneys, munching contentedly. His bite leaves a fiery itch; his collective soul is roasting in Hell, if we have any influence in the court of Heaven. After one experience with him, we anchored always a little farther out.

cap-a-pie

Definition: head to toe.

Food is hard to get, and a man lives inward, closely related to time; a cousin of the sun, at feud with storm and sickness. Our products, the mechanical toys which take up so much of our time, preoccupy and astonish us so, would be considered what they are, rather clever toys but not related to very real things. It would be interesting to try to explain to one of these Indians our tremendous projects, our great drives, the fantastic production of goods that can’t be sold, the clutter of possessions which enslave whole populations with debt, the worry and neuroses that go into the rearing and educating of neurotic children who find no place for themselves in this complicated world; the defense of the country against a frantic nation of conquerors, and the necessity for becoming frantic to do it; the spoilage and wastage and death necessary for the retention of the crazy thing; the science which labors to acquire knowledge, and the movement of people and goods contrary to the knowledge obtained. How could one make an Indian understand the medicine which labors to save a syphilitic, and the gas and bomb to kill him when he is well, the armies which build health so that death will be more active and violent. It is quite possible that to an ignorant Indian these might not be evidences of a great civilization, but rather of inconceivable nonsense.

But when two people, coming from different social, racial, intellectual patterns, meet and wish to communicate, they must do so on a logical basis. Clavigero discusses what seems to our people a filthy practice of some of the Lower California Indians. They were always hungry, always partly starved. When they had meat, which was a rare thing, they tied pieces of string to each mouthful, then ate it, pulled it up and ate it again and again, often passing it from hand to hand. Clavigero found this a disgusting practice. It is rather like the Chinese being ridiculed for eating twenty-year-old eggs who said, “Your cheese is rotten milk. You like rotten milk—we like rotten eggs. We are both silly.”

We ate fish nearly every day: bonito, dolphin, sierra, red snappers. We made thousands of big fat biscuits, hot and unhealthful. Twice a week Sparky created his magnificent spaghetti. Unbelievable amounts of coffee were consumed. One of our party made some lemon pies, but the quarreling grew bitter over them; the thievery, the suspicion of favoritism, the vulgar traits of selfishness and perfidy those pies brought out saddened all of us. And when one of us who, from being the most learned should have been the most self-controlled, took to hiding pie in his bed and munching it secretly when the lights were out, we decided there must be no more lemon pie. Character was crumbling, and the law of the fang was too close to us.

Pie does that to me, too. Pie can bring out the evil in the best of us.

Dr. Rolph Bolin, ichthyologist at the Hopkins Marine Station, found in our collection what we thought to be a new species of commensal fish which lives in the anus of a cucumber, flipping in and out, possibly feeding on the feces of the host but more likely merely hiding in the anus from possible enemies. This fish later turned out to be an already named species, but, carrying on the ancient and disreputable tradition of biologists, we had hoped to call it by the euphemistic name Proctophilus winchellii.

Named after Walter Winchell

The disappearance of plankton, although the components are microscopic, would probably in a short time eliminate every living thing in the sea and change the whole of man’s life, if it did not through a seismic disturbance of balance eliminate all life on the globe. For these little animals, in their incalculable numbers, are probably the base food supply of the world.

And it is a strange thing that most of the feeling we call religious, most of the mystical outcrying which is one of the most prized and used and desired reactions of our species, is really the understanding and the attempt to say that man is related to the whole thing, related inextricably to all reality, known and unknowable.

It is advisable to look from the tide pool to the stars and then back to the tide pool again.

Some of the ships we saw at Guaymas and La Paz floated in violation of every law of physics. There must be in Heaven a small pilot-house where a worried and distraught St. Christopher spends a good deal of his time looking after the shipping of the Gulf of California with a handful of miracles.

We had been washing our clothes in salt water, and we felt sticky and salt-crusted; and, being less comfortable and clean than the sportsmen, we built a whole defense of contempt. With no effort at all on their part we had a good deal of dislike for them. It is probable that Sparky and Tiny had a true contempt, uncolored by envy, for they are descended from many generations of fishermen who went out for fish, not splendor. But even they might have liked sitting in a swivel chair holding a rod in one hand and a frosty glass in the other, blaming a poor day on the Democrats, and offering up prayers for good fishing to Calvin Coolidge.

We sailed in the morning on the short trip to Guaymas. It was the first stop in a town that had anything like communication since we had left San Diego. The world and the war had become remote to us; all the immediacies of our usual lives had slowed up. Far from welcoming a return, we rather resented going back to newspapers and telegrams and business. We had been drifting in some kind of dual world—a parallel realistic world; and the preoccupations of the world we came from, which are considered realistic, were to us filled with mental mirage. Modern economies; war drives; party affiliations and lines; hatreds, political, and social and racial, cannot survive in dignity the perspective of distance. We could understand, because we could feel, how the Indians of the Gulf, hearing about the great ant-doings of the north, might shake their heads sadly and say, “But it is crazy. It would be nice to have new Ford cars and running water, but not at the cost of insanity.” And in us the factor of time had changed: the low tides were our clock and the throbbing engine our second hand.

We liked the people on this boat very much. They were good men, but they were caught in a large destructive machine, good men doing a bad thing. With their many and large boats, with their industry and efficiency, but most of all with their intense energy, these Japanese will obviously soon clean out the shrimps of the region. And it is not true that a species thus attacked comes back. The disturbed balance often gives a new species ascendancy and destroys forever the old relationship.

Our history is as much a product of torsion and stress as it is of unilinear drive. It is amusing that at any given point of time we haven’t the slightest idea of what is happening to us. The present wars and ideological changes of nervousness and fighting seem to have direction, but in a hundred years it is more than possible it will be seen that the direction was quite different from the one we supposed. The limitation of the seeing point in time, as well as in space, is a warping lens.

Why do we so dread to think of our species as a species? Can it be that we are afraid of what we may find? That human self-love would suffer too much and that the image of God might prove to be a mask? This could be only partly true, for if we could cease to wear the image of a kindly, bearded, interstellar dictator, we might find ourselves true images of his kingdom, our eyes the nebulae, and universes in our cells.