The Ghost of Tom Joad Knocking at the Door: A Pilgrim's Journey into the CaliforniAmerican Heartland--29. One Moment Reading the First Paragraph of Cannery Row

Cannery Row, April 12, 2022, Steve Brown

For me the most perfect paragraph ever written is the one that starts Cannery Row.

Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream.  Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses.  Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, "whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches, by which he meant Everybody.  Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, "Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men," and he would have meant the same thing.

If that paragraph was the only paragraph John Steinbeck ever composed, in my mind he would remain forever the preeminent chronicler of Americana and one of the world's most profound philosophers.

When I read Cannery Row for the first time, it felt like it would change my life forever.  I'm not sure it did, but it should have.  It definitely changed moments, but I think I am now beginning to really comprehend that jewel at the cellular level, like sunlight, where it counts.

Like he so often did so well, Steinbeck captured the universal through the particular.  Cannery Row is both a specific place at a specific moment in history, and it is also everywhere at all times.  It is stepping into a moment and place completely unfiltered by bias and preconceptions and enjoying whatever that quality is on its own terms.  It is becoming the transparent eyeball Emerson talks about; it is Buddha sitting under the fig tree, and then standing up an enlightened being, no longer that man who sat down.

Cannery Row is not just a study of a particular place and time; it's not just a juicy, dripping, generous slice of life, although it clearly is that.  Ultimately, it's an essay on how to live life--not so much through the examples of characters, although they do get a lot of things profoundly right, even in their drunken states.  Rather, through the open, loving, compassionate way Steinbeck films that little neighborhood in his mind's eye, he shows us how to view the world around us through the lens of love.  Steinbeck sees Cannery Row the way God must see Cannery Row.  Steinbeck would never word it that way himself.  He was far more atheist than believer, and he was far too humble to ever associate his view of the world as godly.  Still, Steinbeck saw the world through Christ-like eyes, and he did that by entering a moment fully, on its own terms, open, and unbiased by preconceptions, studying it objectively like a scientist.  Oddly, doing so, aligns you more with all the qualities of Christ--compassion, understanding, wisdom, letting-go--more than does narrowing your vision to the holy, and then frothing and foaming at the mouth, razor-back hair on your head, growling at all the evil you encounter around you.  The reason most Christians, including myself, aren't very Christian is because we can't get out of ourselves.  Everything is an ego-driven comparison, a judgement that places us above the world we are viewing, a disdainful eye towards humanity, and thus all of creation.  All vision stems from a selfish need to be better than everyone else.  In that state, pity passes for compassion, and self-indulgent "understanding" for love, which is why the world judges Christians so harshly.  The hate we often get back is an opposite force in equal reaction to the distain the world receives from us.

Obviously, especially in The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck did make judgement, and he certainly was angered by what he saw.  I would say the same is true of Christ as depicted in the New Testament.  Both were incredibly angered by social systems of injustice that stifle the individual's capacity to grow and become all they can be.  They were angered by the caste systems that those in power designed to keep the game unfair and the advantaged always advantaged.  But that anger grew out of compassionate eyes that saw all of humanity as equally human rather than from self-centered eyes that needed somehow to see themselves as better than those around them.  Ultimately, Christ only judges one type of person--he who judges others, especially the displaced and the de-privileged.  Everyone else is given grace once they have repented.  His only intolerance is of self-righteousness and self-centeredness.  I think the same can be said of Steinbeck.  By entering a moment, a place, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, objectively and completely, he is able to understand the motivations of its inhabitants, and that understanding builds compassion which fosters love, to where the "whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches" are transformed into "Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men":  

Mack and the boys are the Beauties, the Virtues, the Graces.  In a world ruled by tigers with ulcers, rutted by strictured bulls, scavenged by blind jackals, Mack and the boys dine delicately with the tigers, fondle the frantic heifers, and wrap up the crumbs to feed the sea gulls of Cannery Row.   What can it profit a man to gain the whole world and come to his property with a gastric ulcer, a blown prostrate, and bifocals?  Mack and the boys avoid the trap, walk around the poison, step over the noose while a generation of trapped, poisoned, and trussed-up men scream at them and call them no-goods, come-to-bad-ends, blots-on-the-town, thieves, rascals, bums.  Our Father who art in Nature, who has given the gift of survival to the coyote, the common brown rat, the English sparrow, the house fly and the moth, must have a great overwhelming love for no-goods and blots-on-the-town and bums, Mack and the boys.  Virtuess and graces and laziness and zest.  Our Father who art in nature.

Because Steinbeck understands Mack and the boys completely, and sees how they fill a niche in society, he also loves them completely.   His objective observations create that love.  When you view a situation intensely enough, objectively enough, you become one with it.  You are no longer separated by your ego.  That's what Emerson felt as a transparent eyeball.  That's what Sidhartha found when he sat under the fig tree.  When we lose ourselves--whether that be through observation or service to others--we find ourselves.  The ego sets up false walls--ungodly walls of separation between us and the world around us.  That is counter to the two great commandments:  to love God, the creator of all, with all your heart, and to love others even as yourself.  Even in his insistence that Nature is the only god, Steinbeck comes closer to the core of Christianity than most Christians do because he sees each individual as part of the fabric of whole through an empathetic eye that understands how they became that way, and what they contribute the world by simply trying to survive.  So, the villains in The Grapes of Wrath are not individuals, but rather a Satanic system of injustice that unnaturally keeps people in castes and castrates their natural talents and abilities and makes them unnaturally impotent in the world.  It's the system that turns free agency into an illusion for those at the bottom that is evil, not the various individuals on different rungs of the ladder.  The Grapes of Wrath is ultimately an inditement of the American caste system.  

Being in a moment, sitting completely under that tree and just being, walking through those woods and becoming all eye, transparent in your surroundings, forces a confrontation with that false wall of separateness and superiority, and breaking through that sets the soul free, if only for a moment.  But once that illusion has been fully observed for what it is, an illusion, one can never fully retreat back to a place of hate and distain for the world around you.  That ego-driven sense of superiority is forever damaged, and with it, your fear--and then, one begins to, for the first time ever, to actually be cable of love.

This is what we need so desperately now.  The ability to enter a moment completely and see it objectively on its own terms, unbiased, undistorted by the ego erecting scaffolding to hold the observer high on a tower of distain.  And this is what Steinbeck teaches us.  We are part of the tidepool, and the tidepool is whatever we make of it.  The better we understand it, the less likely we will unwittingly do permanent harm.  We are at a place in history where we definitely need to learn to do less harm.  The tidepool has been pushed to its limits.  We either learn to live together, or we learn to vanish together (at least in this realm).  It is time to enter the moment and at least attempt to understand it before it's too late.  Anyone who preaches separateness, division, and hate is a false-prophet--petroleum to our shared water, Earth.  We are far too connected now to ever make it alone on our own.  There is no us against the world.  The world is crammed full of only us--not only us humans, but us, everything.  We are either here all together, or we will soon be all together not at all.   It's so simple, so real, so scary--which is why the world is seeking desperately anything but this moment.  There is a reason almost every big movie in the last twenty years is a comic strip or a fantasy.  There is a reason we are glued to our computers, our phones, our virtual "lives".  We are a species that thinks we can survive by feasting on denial.  Although we can't, of course.  We can't.  Sooner or later, we will be forced to engage in the moment and the world we collectively created, and together we will reap what we've sown.  And the judgement will be our own because denial always has its end.  When that hits with force, it's a brutal blow.   

However, when we cultivate being in the moment, on our own, and see those ties that unite and bond us together in a shared fabric and future, there is a transcendent release of the I, that selfish iron grip of the ego that proclaims that we are separate and superior to those around us, ant that release in turn allows us to empathize, and through that empathy perhaps create common solutions, which, because of our numbers, are the only options at this point that have a chance of working.  And we need those options to work.  Oh, how we need them to work.  Like never before.

Steinbeck doesn't necessarily provide the solutions, but he does give us the tools to start earnestly looking, which starts with entering a moment completely, and simply observing a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream objectively and compassionately as is possible.