There is something about experiencing a good museum that is difficult to put into words. When writing about nature or a bustling city, all you have to do is focus on a few details precisely and you can place your reader there because we have all seen early morning dew glisten on blade of grass with diamonds dancing off a brook or ditch in the background. We have all stood on a corner and taken in the heavy, thick whiff of exhaust as the light turns green as either a city bus or delivery truck rumbles forward and you look at the red Do Not Walk sign that appears and vanishes behind trucks and busses.
Because we all know these things, the writer can take short cuts. Each place is both its own place and universal simultaneously. There is only one Las Vegas (even though technically, there are at least two), but there are enough ingredients in a Las Vegas street corner common to an intersection in Salt Lake City or San Antonio that the writer can still have the reader fill in most the details while he or she focuses on those unique qualities that separate Las Vegas from other places.
I'm not sure you can do the same with museums. Even art museums all have such a different feel. The Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth Texas, even with though it is a pure piece of modern architecture without one single classical column, makes you feel like you're stepping back in time to ancient Greece with its calm, cool fountains, thick travertine walls, and long vaulted concrete ceilings. Everything feels hushed and sacred, and you expect to find philosophers sitting at the water's edge expanding on the meaning of life. The DMA, on the other hand, just next door in Bid D, feels like a favorite neighborhood diner--someplace you hang out and relax at after a hard day's work. It's casual, known. Even if it's your first time there. That's because the architect and art collection determine the feel of a museum. Time and evolution determine the feel of a city. Time and evolution have a similar play on all of us as the universe marches forward. Cities are cosmopolitan in nature. Museums are individuals within that cosmopolitan setting.
So, how do I capture on particular museum well enough to put you there--especially a museum dedicated to something pretty hard to display adequately--words and ideas. Most museum are designed to display objects, not the rhythms of phrases and the slow gathering of thoughts until a philosophy is formed, not the deep ties of a life-long friendship between two visionary thinkers.
Yet, that moment I stepped into the National Steinbeck Center was profound. I don't know what effect that space has on other visitors, but for me, it was coming home to a place I've always known. There is something about Steinbeck's writing that takes me back to who I already I am. It has always been like that since I first read The Grapes of Wrath back in the late 1980s. I don't read him frequently, and these days, when I do, it's extremely leisurely, with big spaces and other books, other images, other voices and ideas between readings, but with each and every paragraph that is specifically his, I always feel I know this. Often that is literally true. I've read The Grapes of Wrath and Cannery Row multiple times. But it's more than that. Every book with the exception of East of Eden has felt that way from the very first paragraph read for the very first time. And the same with stepping into The National Steinbeck Center. I knew instantly that I was home.
Perhaps it is because they let the books do the talking. The covers, the font of the text, the feel of the words in those perfect sentences--they're all enlarged, many on large sheets of glass suspended, made three-dimensional, casting shadows. That's just what his books do too. Steinbeck writes in vignettes, in little scenes, in these visually perfect little slices of life, that tell a specific story and all stories simultaneously. I'm not exactly sure how he does--how he seamlessly moves from the narrative into these astonishingly real stage-sets of life so that you as the reader aren't really aware of when you're in the narrative, hearing that very narrative voice, full of humor and tenderness, full of oral history and the art of good story telling, and when he's moved you onto his stage and surrounded you in a magnificently complete world based on just a few perfectly placed stage props. I don't know exactly how he does it--tells one very specific story while simultaneously telling all stories. But I do know it was intentional and that he was aware that he was doing it, that he knew it was part of his art for he tells us so.
The curators of the National Steinbeck Center have digested his words deeply enough that they have done the same thing. By selecting just the right words, phrases and images, they've created these wonderful little vignettes that capture Steinbeck's world marvelously. They even have Ronchamp; the truck and camper Steinbeck took across country in Travel's with Charlie. I especially love the model of Cannery Row in Monterey that lets you see the setting of the book from above. I think if one was visiting the National Steinbeck Center and had never opened one of his books that one would make sure to pick up one on your way out to make sure that no longer remained true. I can't know that for sure, of course, as I was already at home in Steinbeck's books many times, but that museum has done such a fine job I can't imagine it would be any other way.
For me though, specifically on that trip in 2022, no travel destination could have meant more. I had been diagnosed with kidney disease but hadn't yet found out what type. My dad had died pretty quickly from amyloidosis, and my doctor hadn't ruled that out for me. I was keenly aware there was a greater than normal chance I might not have too many years left. At times like that you think thoughts like What's it all been about? I knew for me, even though I didn't and still don't have a book published, part of it has been about words. Not just words in general though. I've never been an avid reader. I'm incredibly slow, and it takes me a long time to get through a book. Because of that, I'm pretty selective about what I read. Not out of some type of snobbery, but because I know the time involved. Yet words matter deeply to me. A thing said Well moves me. In particular, I like words that capture three things: time, place, and vulnerability. Whatever I got right or wrong in my life, I knew I had tried my best to do that: be here now in this place and be vulnerable enough to experience whatever this particular experience means. I spent most of my life terrified of people, which is sad. I'm sure I let that fear rob me of a lot of living. But I also knew that I'd been true to moments and not afraid see deeply and be present in my emotions rather than running from them. And I had wrote those experiences down. I knew that was good. That in itself is a noble cause: to capture one street corner in one city at one moment, open and vulnerable enough to explore exactly what that is instead of chopping the hell out of that experience and plugging it into socially predetermined paradigms, needing to find some meaning, some moral, some metaphor beyond this moment now.
Steinbeck, along with William Carlos Williams and John Lennon, first gave me that: what I already knew is what really mattered to me in life: now. That has always been enough of a life for me. When I've been in the moment, I've been happy--even when I've been incredibly sad. After my dad died, I drove the Oregon coast, his coast, and took in again all the places he'd taken me. I cried deeply, but I was also totally there, totally alive. Not numb. Present. Now always does that for me. Yet, when I haven't been in the moment, I've been lost in my head: envious, anxious, distracted, dull, distanced, removed.
Steinbeck gave me back that sense of connection, what I already knew as a child. Life is about floating an empty pop can down an irrigation ditch and watching light dance dart off the ripples. If you understand that deeply, and live it well, you understand all moments, all places, all times, and can just naturally be that you, you were meant to be. In such a place you comfortably arise to whatever the occasion calls for without ego, without enterprise, just as you are. Out of that place though, everything is always a constant struggle. It has to be. Because you are no longer home.
Steinbeck takes me back to being vulnerable, to being human, to being home. The world needs that like never before.
