The Log From the Sea of Cortez (Penguin Classics) (27 page)
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Authors: John Steinbeck
BOOK: The Log From the Sea of Cortez (Penguin Classics)
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This hypothesis would seem to offset Cooper’s assumption of a channel through ridges some 350 miles to the north which show no signs of Quaternary submergence.
It is interesting that a paleontologist, working in one area, should lay the groundwork for a very reasonable hypothesis concerning the distribution of animals in another. It is, however, only one example among many of the obliqueness of investigation and the accident quotient involved in much investigation. The literature of science is filled with answers found when the question propounded had an entirely different direction and end.
There is one great difficulty with a good hypothesis. When it is completed and rounded, the corners smooth and the content cohesive and coherent, it is likely to become a thing in itself, a work of art. It is then like a finished sonnet or a painting completed. One hates to disturb it. Even if subsequent information should shoot a hole in it, one hates to tear it down because it once was beautiful and whole. One of our leading scientists, having reasoned a reef in the Pacific, was unable for a long time to reconcile the lack of a reef, indicated by soundings, with the reef his mind told him was there. 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.
This is not set down in criticism; it is no light matter to make up one’s mind about anything, even about sea-otters, and once made up, it is even harder to abandon the position. 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. The practice must follow the belief. 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. We have had many examples of law trying to be the well-spring of action; our prohibition law showed how completely fallacious that theory is.
The things of our minds have for us a greater toughness than external reality. One of us has a beard, and one night when this one was standing wheel-watch, the others sat in the galley drinking coffee. We were discussing werewolves and their almost universal occurrence in regional literature. From this beginning, we played with a macabre thought, “The moon will soon be full,” we said, “and he of the beard will begin to feel the pull of the moon. Last night,” we said, “we heard the scratch of claws on the deck. When you see him go down on all fours, when you see the red light come into his eyes, then look out, for he will slash your throat.” We were delighted with the game. We developed the bearded one’s tendencies, how his teeth, the canines at least, had been noticeably longer of late, how for the past week he had torn his dinner apart with his teeth. It was night as we talked thus, and the deck was dark and the wind was blowing. Suddenly he appeared in the doorway, his beard and hair blown, his eyes red from the wind. Climbing the two steps up from the galley, he seemed to arise from all fours, and everyone of us started, and felt the prickle of erecting hairs. We had actually talked and thought ourselves into this pattern, and it took a while for it to wear off.
These mind things are very strong; in some, so strong as to blot out the external things completely.
18
MARCH 28
After the collecting on Coronado Island, on the twenty-seventh, and the preservation and labeling, we found that we were very tired. We had worked constantly. On the morning of the twenty-eighth we slept. It was a good thing, we told ourselves; the eyes grow weary with looking at new things; sleeping late, we said, has its genuine therapeutic value; we would be better for it, would be able to work more effectively. We have little doubt that all this was true, but we wish we could build as good a rationalization every time we are lazy. For in some beastly way this fine laziness has got itself a bad name. It is easy to see how it might have come into disrepute, if the result of laziness were hunger. But it rarely is. Hunger makes laziness impossible. It has even become sinful to be lazy. We wonder why. 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 is excited and breathing through her mouth.” Again he raises his glass, and in a few minutes he picks up the telephone. He is happy; Helen C. may be happy; and the rug is not disturbed at all.
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.
With such a background of reasoning, we slept until nine A.M. And then the engines started and we moved toward Concepcion Bay. The sea, with the exception of one blow outside of La Paz, had been very calm. This day, a little wind blew over the ultramarine water. The swordfish in great numbers jumped and played about us. We set up our lightest harpoon on the bow with a coil of cotton line beside it, and for hours we stood watch. The helmsman changed course again and again to try to bring the bow over a resting fish, but they seemed to wait until we were barely within throwing range and then they sounded so quickly that they seemed to snap from view. We made many wild casts and once we got the iron in, near the tail of a monster. But he flicked his tail and tore it out and was gone. We could see schools of leaping tuna all about us, and whenever we crossed the path of a school, our lines jumped and snapped under the strikes, and we brought the beautiful fish in.
We had set up a salt barrel near the stern, and we cut the fish into pieces and put them into brine to take home. It developed after we got home that several of us had added salt to the brine and the whole barrel was hopelessly salty and inedible.
As we turned Aguja Point and headed southward into the deep pocket of Concepción Bay, we could see Mulege on the northern shore—a small town in a blistering country. We had no plan for stopping there, for the story is that the port charges are mischievous and ruinous. We do not know that this is so, but it is repeated about Mulege very often. Also, there may be malaria there. We had been following the trail of malaria for a long time. At the Cape they said there was no malaria there but at La Paz it was very serious. At La Paz, they said it was only at Loreto. At Loreto they declared that Mulege was full of it. And there it must remain, for we didn’t stop at Mulege; so we do not know what the Mulegeños say about it. Later, we picked up the malaria on the other side, ran it down to Topolobambo, and left it there. We would say offhand, never having been to either place, that the malaria is very bad at Mulege and Topolobambo.
A strong, north-pointing peninsula is the outer boundary of Concepción Bay. At the mouth it is three and a quarter miles wide and it extends twenty-two miles southward, varying in width from two to five miles. The eastern shore, along which we collected, is regular in outline, with steep beaches of sand and pebbles and billions of bleaching shells and many clams and great snails. From the shore, the ascent is gradual toward mountains which ridge the little peninsula and protect this small gulf from the Gulf of California. Along the shore are many pools of very salty water, where thousands of fiddler crabs sit by their moist burrows and bubble as one approaches. The beach was beautiful with the pink and white shells of the murex.
52
Sparky found them so beautiful that he collected a washtubful of them and stored them in the hold. And even then, back in Monterey, he found he did not have enough for his friends.
52
Sparky found them so beautiful that he collected a washtubful of them and stored them in the hold. And even then, back in Monterey, he found he did not have enough for his friends.
Behind the beach there was a little level land, sandy and dry and covered with cactus and thick brush. And behind that, the rising dry hills. Now again the wild doves were calling among the hills with their song of homesickness. The quality of longing in this sound, the memory response it sets up, is curious and strong. And it has also the quality of a dying day. One wishes to walk toward the sound—to walk on and on toward it, forgetting everything else. 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. Perhaps in our pre-humanity this sound of doves was a signal that the day was over and a night of terror due—a night which perhaps this time was permanent. Keyed to the visual symbol of the sinking sun and to the odor symbol of the cooling earth, these might all cause the little spasm of sorrow; and with the long response-history, one alone of these symbols might suffice for all three. The smell of a musking goat is not in our experience, but it is in some experience, for smelled faintly, or in perfume, it is not without its effect even on those who have not smelled the passionate gland nor seen the play which follows its discharge. But some great group of shepherd peoples must have known this odor and its result, and must, from the goat’s excitement, have taken a very strong suggestion. Even now, a city man is stirred deeply when he smells it in the perfume on a girl’s hair. It may be thought that we produce no musk nor anything like it, but this we do not believe. One has the experience again and again of suddenly turning and following with one’s eyes some particular girl among many girls, even trotting after her. She may not be beautiful, indeed, often is not. But what are the stimuli if not odors, perhaps above or below the conscious olfactory range? If one follows such an impulse to its conclusion, one is not often wrong. If there be visual symbols, strong and virile in the unconscious, there must be others planted by the other senses. The sensitive places, ball of thumb, ear-lobe, skin just below the ribs, thigh, and lip, must have their memories too. And smell of some spring flowers when the senses thaw, and smell of a ready woman, and smell of reptiles and smell of death, are deep in our unconscious. Sometimes we can say truly, “That man is going to die.” Do we smell the disintegrating cells? Do we see the hair losing its luster and uneasy against the scalp, and the skin dropping its tone? We do not know these reactions one by one, but we say, that man or cat or dog or cow is going to die. If the fleas on a dog know it and leave their host in advance, why do not we also know it? Approaching death, the pre-death of the cells, has informed the fleas and us too.
The shallow water along the shore at Concepción Bay was littered with sand dollars, two common species
53
and one
54
very rare. And in the same association, brilliant-red sponge arborescences
55
grew in loose stones in the sand or on the knobs of old coral. These are the important horizon markers. On other rocks, imbedded in the sand, there were giant hachas, clustered over with tunicates and bearing on their shells the usual small ophiurans and crabs. One of the masked rock-clams had on it a group of solitary corals. Close inshore were many brilliant large snails, the living animals the shells of which had so moved Sparky. In this area we collected from the skiff, leaning over the edge, bringing up animals in a dip-net or spearing them with a small trident, sometimes jumping overboard and diving for a heavier rock with a fine sponge growing on it.
53
and one
54
very rare. And in the same association, brilliant-red sponge arborescences
55
grew in loose stones in the sand or on the knobs of old coral. These are the important horizon markers. On other rocks, imbedded in the sand, there were giant hachas, clustered over with tunicates and bearing on their shells the usual small ophiurans and crabs. One of the masked rock-clams had on it a group of solitary corals. Close inshore were many brilliant large snails, the living animals the shells of which had so moved Sparky. In this area we collected from the skiff, leaning over the edge, bringing up animals in a dip-net or spearing them with a small trident, sometimes jumping overboard and diving for a heavier rock with a fine sponge growing on it.
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