I am not a busy man. I am lazy. Thankfully!

The expedition that resulted in The Log from the Sea of Cortez was in 1940.  John Steinbeck was well aware of the war that had broken out in Europe; remember the following from a previous post?

Hitler marched into Denmark and into Norway, France had fallen, the Maginot Line was lost--we didn't know it, but we knew the daily catch of every boat within four hundred miles. It was simply a directional thing; a man has only so much. ...
This was not a matter of ignorance on their part, but of intensity. All the directionalism of thought and emotion that man was capable of went into sardine-fishing; there wasn't room for anything else.

The expedition returned to California, and Steinbeck worked on the book "throughout the spring and summer of 1941."

It was finally published during the first week of December 1941.  But the reviews in the papers of Sunday, December 7, were hardly noticed as readers were distracted by events of much more immediate importance.

Japan's surprise attack on Pearl Harbor happened.  America was now at war.

Everybody was suddenly busy with the war effort.  Busy people don't have the time and the inclination to read books like The Log from the Sea of Cortez.  An army of lazy ones is needed if we want people to read and think.  Oddly enough, in the book, Steinbeck had written about war and human behavior and how "it has even become sinful to be lazy":

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.

I love how Steinbeck has phrased "a weighing of oneself against the world and the world against itself."  In many posts I have attempted to articulate such an idea, but the incapable wannabe-writer that I am, I could never have strung those words together, even in a million years.

All of a sudden, "all the directionalism of thought and emotion that man was capable of" went into the war.  Even Rosie flexed her muscles.  I would think that the fishers found time for war and not only for sardines.  There were not many lazy people around to read the newly published book.

The older I get, the more I wonder what exactly everybody is rushing around for.  As Steinbeck puts it, "to what end?"  Why can't more people be lazy like I am, or even lazier than me?  As they rush from one meeting to another, do they wonder about the loss from not having read some of the greatest books that have ever been written?  As people shift their attention from the television screens to their iPads,do they pause to wonder whether they might gain a lot more from life by simply not doing anything at all?  Are people busy because they are worried that laziness might force them to think about their own existence and send them down a rabbit-hole of emotions?  Or is it as Steinbeck notes:

 [Man] is the only animal who lives outside of himself, whose drive is in external things—property, houses, money, concepts of power. He lives in his cities and his factories, in his business and job and art. But having projected himself into these external complexities, he is them. His house, his automobile are a part of him and a large part of him.  

A "modern" life in which we answer "who am I?" with comments about our work, the home and cars that we own, the money that we have invested, the places that we have traveled to.  But, unless death is that rare expected cardiac event or an accident, at some point the cosmos will force us into laziness.  We won't be able to travel. We won't be able to drive. Even walking will become difficult.  The eyes and ears will fail.  In that laziness, the "external complexities" will be reduced to the simple questions of "who am I?" and "what is this life all about?"

I like to think that I have gathered more views to construct my own answer to those questions, through my lazy summer approach to acquiring wisdom.

In search of that cosmic identity

Serious believers, of which there are far fewer than those who reflexively mouth their faiths in their gods, think about their existence by reading the holy books and reading commentaries on them.  They contemplate on what their gurus have to say.  They might go on pilgrimages, even if the holy places are on hills, in their quest to understand how all these came about.

I remember how reverential the old and frail Japanese tourists were at Ajanta.  A Korean tourist, who didn't seem to have any friends or family with him, was at one point sitting quietly as if he was meditating in that setting.  In this post, after the visit to Costa Rica, I wrote:

With every step, the spray from the falls increased.  It was delightful. Soothing. Comforting. Welcoming. Peaceful. I was overjoyed.
I reached the railing at the end. I could feel a lot of the spray. I felt the waterfalls washing away my pain. My disappointments. My problems. My worries. I stood there with my arms stretched outwards on the sides.  I remember feeling one with the waterfalls. There was a strange sense of oneness with the world.
Perhaps that is what the faithful feel when they go for a holy dip in the Ganges. The river washes away the problems if they feel that oneness. Oneness with the water. With the world.
I had always speculated, tongue-in-cheek, that most of my travels are my own versions of pilgrimages. In this case, it seemed so much to be the case.  It was bliss as I stood there getting damp from the spray from the falls.

I suppose the difference between the holy scriptures that the believers read and the great literature that I read is this: the holy books claim that they have the answer.  Which is when the follow-up question arises; to quote Tolstoy:

You say to yourself, "It can't be that it is so simple and that still people do not see that if two affirmations contradict each other, then neither one nor the other can hold the unified truth that faith must be.  There is something here.  There is some explanation." ... Why is the truth held not by Lutheranism, not by Catholicism, but by Orthodoxy?

We struggle.  Or, as John Steinbeck puts it:

We continue to ask "why?"  The Hindu philosophy contends that taking the cause-and-effect route will never get us to the answer, which is also what Steinbeck writes as "an answer is invariably the parent of a great family of new questions."  The Hindu philosophy, therefore, directs us to turn the inquiry inward, which is also what the Buddha did in trying to sort out the whole damn thing ;)  I am not willing to trust any book that claims to have the definitive answer, nor any mortal who claims to have the definitive answer.  I will, therefore, continue on with my pilgrimages and scriptures, though it doesn't seem like I can become the Path itself.

What would Steinbeck say about Singapore?

John Steinbeck uses the rich backdrop of marine creatures in order to think about humans and humanity.  I will, in turn, use his musings in the context of Singapore in order to think about humans and humanity and, in the process, to perhaps even convince this skeptic that deep reading is a worthwhile effort ;)

On Good Friday, while looking at marine animals in Baja California, Steinbeck thinks about disease and suffering and genetics and, therefore, how the species changes to "another animal entirely."  And why the elimination of diseases might trigger discomfort to "religionists":

For it is through struggle and sorrow that people are able to participate in one another--the heartlessness of the healthy, well-fed, and unsorrowful person has in it an infinite smugness.

There is something in pain and suffering and sorrow that makes us reflect on life and cosmos as more than merely about ourselves, right?  During those tough times, those who believe turn to their gods.  They pray. When everything is going well, most believers that I know not only forget their own gods but go one step more and claim that all the success was theirs and theirs alone.

The dystopian science fiction also suggests that a future with abundance and free of diseases is not one that we might enjoy.  One of the Swedish girls whom we hosted during the California years remarked about depression and suicide among teenagers in her country along the lines of "we have everything, but there is no meaning, and so the kids invent troubles."  It is a rather strange notion that troubles, pain, suffering, help provide us with meaning to our lives.

Singapore, which recently celebrated its 50th birthday, is the closest contemporary example that we have of a place on earth where troubles, suffering, and diseases, have all been pretty much wiped out.  To such an extent that the government has even preempted potential troubles that could otherwise arise from people freely expressing thoughts--a notion that always makes me uncomfortable.

Pankaj Mishra puts a spin on it and argues that if the authoritarian leaders put their minds to it, they could make the country "an exemplar of that much-invoked but nearly extinct thing: democracy."

Rule by and for the people seems to have been replaced in many formal democracies with rule by and for the rich and powerful. It’s clear now, after decades of rhetoric about democracy, that its original ideal -- a community where human beings live together without holding power over another -- can only be realized, imperfectly if at all, in small states. ... Singapore has a huge advantage over centralized and dysfunctional democracies. It's actually a functional city-state with a relatively small (5.5 million) and highly literate population, and it has no enemies.

But then, maybe the leaders are like those in Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451--they worry that if people are allowed to think and express their thoughts, then they will get depressed and become unhappy.  The two-legged paradox haunts Singapore, too!  If only we would understand that a happy life does not mean a life of nothing but happiness.

Holothuria, and the human condition as a two-legged paradox

You, dear reader, perhaps are not stumped by the word "holothuria."  I was.  In fact, the chances are high that a couple of days later I will not remember what holothuria means.  Because, that word and what it means is not a part of my every day life.  That is perhaps how somebody in a small town in the Dakotas might feel about the Mahabharata, eh. ;)

John Steinbeck casually writes about the holothurians, and even gives the Latin name of the marine dweller he and the expedition people observed: Holothuria lubrica.  He does because he was a marine biologist, too.  There is a chance you know about those creatures by their other name; but even that doesn't stir any image in my mind.  Steinbeck writes:

The dominant species on this beach was a sulphury cucumber, a dark, almost black-green holothurian which looks as though it were dusted with sulphur.  

Steinbeck uses words and uses them with a purpose.  He notes the "dominant species" because that provides him with the context to write about how certain species dominate in certain areas.  And then there is that species that seems to dominate everywhere: homo sapiens.

How wonderfully he weaves this in, with the holothuria lubrica practically serving as a MacGuffin!

Steinbeck's expedition was in 1940, and the book itself was published in 1941.  What a clarity in understanding the dynamic of fewer children over the generations, which we--who protect ourselves with "robes, emblems and degrees"--now refer to as demographic transition!  Whether or not the hungry wanderer will dominate over us in the future has been covered well by the dystopian science fiction and even by a C-grade movie with a wonderful title of Idiocracy.

But then, don't you wonder why humans can't seem to understand these dynamics and, therefore, why we don't seem to get our act together?  Do you feel like I am setting you up for more from Steinbeck?  Yes, I am ;)  He sums up man as a two-legged paradox:

There is a strange duality in the human which makes for an ethical paradox. We have definitions of good qualities and of bad; not changing things, but generally considered good and bad throughout the ages and throughout the species. Of the good, we think always of wisdom, tolerance, kindliness, generosity, humility; and the qualities of cruelty, greed, self-interest, graspingness, and rapacity are universally considered undesirable. And yet in our structure of society, the so-called and considered good qualities are invariable concomitants of failure, while the bad ones are the cornerstones of success… In an animal other than man we would replace the term "good" with "weak survival quotient" and the term "bad" with "strong survival quotient." Thus, man in his thinking or reverie status admires the progression toward extinction,, but in the unthinking stimulus which really activates him he tends toward survival. Perhaps no other animal is so torn between alternatives. Man might be described fairly adequately, if simply, as a two-legged paradox.

A paradox, indeed!

What are we searching for?

John Steinbeck writes about creatures that I have not even heard of.  The older I get, and the more I read, the more do I understand that I know nothing.  And, therefore, I am all the more surprised when I run into people who behave as if they know it all and I wonder from where they draw that erroneous conclusion in order to act that way.

Steinbeck's lengthy "sidebar" commentaries are wonderful.  Sea of Cortez is really two different books: one is on the marine specimens and the other is a compilation of essays on life.  Steinbeck is a genius and, thus, easily weaves the two together.  Oil and water do mix, it seems.

What a contrast to those self-professed experts, who love to pose as college professors (haha!), who simply cannot explain anything to anybody.  Steinbeck has some choice words for them, which makes me jump up and celebrate with joy.  As one who is fully committed to public scholarship, I kept smiling as I read the following sentences:

It is usually found that only the little stuffy men object to what is called "popularization," by which they mean writing with a clarity understandable to one not familiar with the tricks and codes of the cult.  ... A dull man seems to be a dull man no matter what his field, and of course it is the right of a dull scientist to protect himself with feathers and robes, emblems and degrees, as do other dull men who are potentates and grand imperial rulers of lodges of dull men.

Those sentences I shall certainly use when I prepare my annual report of service next year and submit it to those who protect themselves with "robes, emblems and degrees." ;)  Over the past few years, I have brought into my annual reports quite a bit of such choice quotes.  My all-time favorite is this one from Kafka.

What drives us to such pursuits in the first place?  Steinbeck muses about that too:

We search for something that will seem like truth to us, we search for understanding; we search for that principle which keys us deeply into the pattern of all life; we search for the relation of things, one to another.

I suppose it will be an eternal search for truth.  Or, maybe sometime in the distant future, humans--or whatever our species mutates into--might figure it out.  Or, perhaps those intelligent aliens that we are searching for will explain the truth.  The truth behind how all these came about.

But then, maybe nobody--even the superhumans of the future--will ever figure it out.  Or, perhaps there is no truth after all.  I will never know; that's for sure.  Yet, I will continue on with the rest of the third of my life.

The killing fields ... and waters ... and ...

John Steinbeck's descriptions are so vivid that it is almost as if I am right there with him.  I am there as they are getting ready for the expedition to the Sea of Cortez.  I am there as they get going. No wonder he is a celebrated author, eh!

A phenomenal thinker and writer like Steinbeck is not one-dimensional.  These are people who easily convey to an idiot like me that they know quite a bit about quite a bit.  Consider the following sentences, for instance:

There is philosophy, literature, music, oceanography, physics, and mathematics.  And, of course, the writing.  Now, that is liberal education at its best, don't you agree?  Nabokov, whose troubling Lolita was the earlier deep-read, was an accomplished multi-dimensional intellectual, and so was Tolstoy.  The deep-reads are mighty humbling experiences.

As I expected the book to be, it is not only about marine biology, but also the backdrop for Steinbeck to muse about life.  He writes about porpoises, who seem to "change course to join us, these curious animals."  Steinbeck writes:

Of our crew, Tiny and Sparky, who loved to catch every manner of fish, to harpoon any swimming thing, would have nothing to do with porpoises.  "They cry so," Sparky said, "when they are hurt, they cry to break your heart." This is rather a difficult thing to understand; a dying cow cries too, and a stuck pig raises his protesting voice piercingly and few hearts are broken by those cries.  But a porpoise cries like a child in sorrow and pain.  And we wonder whether the general seaman's real affection for porpoises might not be more complicated than the simple fear of hearing them cry.

Steinbeck returns to this theme later on when they pull into San Diego where "all about us war bustled" and he talks with "a naval officer who had won a target competition with big naval guns":

"Have you thought about what happens in a little street when one of your shells explodes, of the families torn to pieces, a thousand generations influenced when you signaled Fire?"  "Of course not," he said.  "Those shells travel so far that you couldn't possibly see where they land."

Killing, whether it is a porpoise or a human, is not easy even for those who choose to be in those very professions.  Steinbeck continues about that naval officer:

And he was quite correct.  If he could really see where they land and what they do, if he could really feel the power in his dropped hand and the waves radiating from his gun, he would not be able to perform his function. ... The whole structure of his world would be endangered if he permitted himself to think.

When they pause to think, soldiers could become haunted by the visions, the sounds, the cries the smells, and when they can't stand it anymore, they even kill themselves.  

But, kill we do every single day.  We kill fish.  We kill cows. We kill lions.  We kill humans.  And we even debate about how to kill humanely.  What a strange killing species we are!

Steinbeck is not the Saint of Sardines?

Only a few pages into the final one in my deep reads for this summer and I am left wondering why I hadn't read The log from the Sea of Cortez before and why it had to be in the final third of my life.  I suppose there is always a time for everything!

Keep in mind that the book first came out in 1941 when you read the following lines:

In time of peace in the modern world, if one is thoughtful and careful, it is rather more difficult to be killed or maimed in the outland places of the globe than it is in the streets of our great cities ...

It was just before World War II snagged the US also.  Since then, as Steve Pinker has documented, life has never been so peaceful.  The number who die in the US every year from gunshots and automobile accidents is vastly greater than the number who died on that fateful 9/11. One would, therefore, think that people will worry about the death and violence in their own backyards, so to speak.   Yet, we don't worry about our streets and our homes!  In a post a couple of days ago, I, yet again, expressed my disappointment that people do not seem to be want to spend time and effort on more pressing questions and complained about the supremacy of entertainment in our lives.  But then this human behavior is not anything new.  Steinbeck writes in the context of fishing and fishermen:

Hitler marched into Denmark and into Norway, France had fallen, the Maginot Line was lost--we didn't know it, but we knew the daily catch of every boat within four hundred miles.  It was simply a directional thing; a man has only so much. ...
This was not a matter of ignorance on their part, but of intensity.  All the directionalism of thought and emotion that man was capable of went into sardine-fishing; there wasn't room for anything else.

There is only so much that we can be bothered about.  As many students have often commented, while they fully understand that the issues and ideas that I bring to their attention are urgent and important, well, they are maxed out.  It is not that they are ignorant nor are they apathetic; according to them, there isn't room for anything else in their lives.

Of course, if everybody went about doing their own thing, then the world could be a better place.  However, the question is whether all our thought and emotion that we are capable of is dharma.  Or, as Spike Lee put it, "do the right thing."  But, we don't always do the right thing.

All the energy and emotion into fishing led to the collapse of the fishing industry in Stenibeck's own backyard.  That intensity and emotion hit even harder, resulting in this a few months ago, in early spring:

Federal regulators on Wednesday approved an early closure of commercial sardine fishing off Oregon, Washington and California to prevent overfishing.
The decision was aimed at saving the West Coast sardine fishery from the kind of collapse that led to the demise of Cannery Row, made famous by John Steinbeck’s novel of the same name set in Monterey, Calif.

Source

Of course, what happens to sardines is not restricted to sardines alone:

“We have been seeing the impacts of a collapsing sardine population on sea lions and seabirds for years now,” said Ben Enticknap, Pacific campaign manager and senior scientist with Oceana.“Sardine are also prey for recreationally and commercially important species like Chinook salmon and albacore tuna, so the effects of a lack of sardine could have much wider impacts.”

The virtue of selfishness and self-interest, which is the cornerstone in an economic system that has a global appeal, comes with its downside as well because doing the right thing is not about self-interest.  Dharma requires us to make room in our lives for more than the singular directionalism to which we direct all our energy and emotion. Not even the Saint of Sardines can convince a few more people and a few more students about all these, right?

A "modeled imitation of the observed reality"

In The Matrix, Morpheus reminds Neo that it is our brains that tell us what we think a smell is, what a taste is, what the world is.  Based on all that, we then think of the universe in a certain way.  What if it is all a figment of our imagination?

Ancient Hindu philosophers provided even the illiterate like me to conveniently refer to all that figment of our imagination as Maya.  It is all a grand illusion.  We think the red hot chili pepper is insanely spicy and pungent.  But, does that mean it really is?  What exactly is real and what is not real?  Am I real?   What if the "insane" descriptions of the world that those in the cuckoo's nests offer are the real descriptions of the world?  What if we are the ones trapped in an asylum and we don't even know it?

Some day, when we figure out where consciousness comes from, maybe we will sort those questions out once and for all.  Until then, we struggle through.  And we have to make a conscious effort to deal with these tough questions especially now when it is becoming increasingly difficult to identify the real from the virtual.  You think you are listening to a cello being played, when it turns out that a kid is producing those sounds through a computer.  Friends are virtual. Even that most primal of all--sex--doesn't have to be real anymore!

I had designed for myself deep reads for this summer so that I can engage with those questions for a while and continue to chip away at my existential struggle of "who am I?" and "what the heck is all this about?"  The final one in the list is John Steinbeck's The Log from the Sea of Cortez.  Yes, a non-fiction work by the great storyteller.  As is noted in the introduction in the Penguin edition that I am reading:

If we read and consider Sea of Cortez in all its complexity, we see John Steinbeck fusing science and philosophy, art and ethics by combining the compelling if complex metaphysics of Ed Ricketts with his own commitment to social action by a species for whom he never gave up hope, and whom he believed could and would triumph over the tragic miracle of its own consciousness.

The travel adventure is, to use Alfred Hitchcock's favorite, a MacGuffin.  Yes, Steinbeck the marine biologist will give me details about invertebrates and I would not really care about that.

"We were curious" writes Steinbeck in the introduction:

Our curiosity was not limited, but was as wide and horizonless as that of Darwin or Agassiz or Linnaeus or Pliny.  We wanted to see everything our eyes would accommodate, to think what we could, and, out of our seeing and thinking, to build some kind of structure in modeled imitation of the observed reality.

And he gives an example of the reality versus what we construct it to be:

The man with his pickled fish has set down one truth and has recorded in his experience many lies.  The fish is not that color, that texture, that dead, not does he smell that way.  

The travel adventure is a MacGuffin.  I don't want my entire life to be a MacGuffin.