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The man with the pickled fish

One of the highlights of my California tour was a visit to the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas.

Initially disturbed by confronting the ghastly modernist architecture totally out of place with the region and the author’s writing, I was pleased to enter into the exhibits and immerse in Steinbeck’s works.

After spending the morning, I toured the Valley, then drove out to Monterey.

Since returning, I’ve gone back and started re-reading, beginning with Cannery Row (1945).

Last night I opened The Log From The Sea Of Cortez (1941) and, after the homage to Ed Ricketts, was just blown away by the superb Introduction, one of the finest summaries on the scientific method and ways of seeing the world, thinking, travel, and living I’ve come across. Here’s an extended excerpt of that:

The Design of a book is the pattern of a reality controlled and shaped by the mind of the writer. This is completely understood about poetry or fiction, but it is too seldom realized about books of fact. And yet the impulse which drives a man to poetry will send another man into the tide pools and force him to try to report what he finds there. Why is an expedition to Tibet undertaken, or a sea bottom dredged? […]

We have a book to write about the Gulf of California. We could do one of several things about its design. But we have decided to let it form itself: its boundaries a boat and the sea; its duration a six weeks’ charter time; its subject everything we could see and think and even imagine; its limits – our own without reservation.

We made a trip into the Gulf; sometimes we dignified it by calling it an expedition. Once it was called the Sea of Cortez, and that’s a better sounding and more exciting name. We stopped in many little harbors and near barren coasts to collect and preserve the marine invertebrates of the littoral. One of the reasons we gave ourselves for this trip – and when we used this reason, we called the trip an expedition – was to observe the distribution of invertebrates, to see and record their kinds and numbers, how they lived together, what they ate, and how they reproduced. That plan was simple, straightforward, and only a part of the truth. But we did tell the truth to ourselves. We were curious. 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. We knew that what we would see and record and construct would be warped, as all knowledge patterns are warped, first, by the collective pressure and stream of our time and race, second by the thrust of our individual personalities. But knowing this, we might not fall into too many holes – we might maintain some balance between our warp and the separate thing, the external reality.The oneness of these two might take its contribution from both. For example, the Mexican sierra has “XVII – 15 – IX” spines in the dorsal fin. These can easily be counted. But if the sierra strikes hard on the line so that our hands are burned, if the fish sounds and nearly escapes and finally comes in over the rail, his colors pulsing and his tail beating the air, a whole new relational externality has come into being – an entity which is more than the sum of the fish plus the fisherman. The only way to count the spines of the sierra unaffected this second relational reality is to sit in the laboratory, open an evil smelling jar, remove a stiff colorless fish from formalin solution, count the spines, and write the truth “D. XVII – 15-IX.” There you have recorded a reality which cannot be assailed – probably the least important reality concerning either the fish or yourself.

It is good to know what you are doing. The man with the 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, nor does he smell that way.

Such things we had considered in the months of planning our expedition and we were determined not to let a passion for unassailable little truths draw in the horizons and crowd the sky down on us. We knew that what seemed to us true could be only relatively true anyway. There is no other kind of observation. The man with his pickled fish has sacrificed a great observation about himself, the fish, and the focal point, which is his thoughts on both the sierra and himself.

We suppose this was the mental provisioning of our expedition. We said, “Let’s go wide open. Let’s see what we see, record what we find, and not fool ourselves with conventional scientific strictures. We could not observe a completely objective Sea of Cortex anyway, for in that lonely and uninhabited Gulf our boat and ourselves would change the moment we entered. By going there, we would bring a new factor to the Gulf. Let us consider that factor and not be betrayed by this myth of permanent objective reality. If it exists at all, it is only available in pickled tatters or in distorted flashes. “Let us go” we said “into the Sea of Cortez, realizing that we become forever a part of it; that our rubber boots slogging through a flat of eel grass, that the rocks we turn over in a tide pool, make us truly and permanently a factor in the ecology of the region. We shall take something away from it, but we shall leave something too.” […]

We determined to go doubly open so that in the end we could, if we wished, describe the sierra thus: “D. XVII-15-IX.” but also we could see the fish alive and swimming, feel it plunge against the lines, drag it threshing over the rail, and finally eat it. And there is no reason why either approach should be inaccurate. Spine-count description need not suffer because another approach is also used. Perhaps out of the two approaches, we thought, there might emerge a picture more complete and even more accurate than either alone could produce. And so we went.