Sea of Cortez, Steinbeck, the religious.

An early posting today, as I'm not sure if I'll have time to write later today (saturday, that is).

Here is  a passage from John Steinbeck's The Log from the Sea of Cortez, a book I quite extensively studied while writing my thesis, and a book I very much like.

"...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 inexplicably to all reality, known and unknowable. This is a simple thing to say, but the profound feeling of it made a Jesus, a St. Augustine, a St. Francis, a Roger Bacon, a Charles Darwin, and an Einstein. Each of them in his own tempo and with his own voice discovered and reaffirmed with astonishment the knowledge that all things are one thing and that one thing is all things--plankton, a shimmering phosphorescence on the sea and the spinning planets and an expanding universe, all bound together by the elastic string of time. It is advisable to look from the tide pool to the stars and then back to the tide pool again."

Exactly. This has been the best articulation of what I feel as religious. That I'm connected to the whole, and that the interconnection is alive, rather than static.

Steinbeck was an amateur marine biologist, and would spend hours observing various life forms interact with each other in tide pools. Hence the references to plankton and such. For him, the 'true' biologist is an ideal human being who deals directly with life, with "teeming boisterous life," and understands the life he is observing--whether a starfish or a human being--in the whole system surrounding it, perceiving it as interconnected to others. On the other hand, the "dry-ball" biologist is one who exhaustively studies his dead object, a 'pickled' sample.

So:

"...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, the 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 by this second relational reality is to sit in a 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."

"The whole new relational externality." That's where the religious sprouts. Something that is neither the fish nor the fisher. You, the fisher, the true biologist, perceives "the elastic string of time" between yourself and the living sierra, between yourself and fish eaten by the sierra or any others of the kind, between yourself and people who catch those fish, .... That's how it goes for Steinbeck. That's how you come to be struck by the feeling of religiousness. The feeling of being in a great flow of life, and of living into it. Living into it--that was part of the title of my thesis, of course.