Close Readings – Modern Technique and Tradition

1. Close Readings – Modern Technique and Tradition A teleological argument is an argument about design and purpose. Teleology is the study of the purpose, design, or goal of all things. The word has its root in the Greek telos which means ‘end, or final purpose’. Plato’s idea about the essence of things existing in an idealized FORM, is a classic teleological argument toward order in our world. Even though material things are mere imperfect copies or shadows of the FORM of the thing, the abstract ideal has an independent existence that is shared with a particular quality in the thing-itself.

2. Eidos: ancient Greek, “FORM” is used by Plato to refer to the perfect and unchanging Ideals or Forms, of which the things in the world are but copies.

3. “The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars..."-- "On The Road” What is real may be thought, what is thought may be said. Reality may be known through rational inquiry or thinking. The FORMS speak to the design of rationality. Can we ever know BEAUTY? We can point to a beautiful object and say that it shares certain aspects of the idealized FORM of BEAUTY, yet knowing a beautiful thing in the world is only a portion of BEAUTY itself. We can know the image but not the ideal. There are underlying realities that can be thought about, yet not perceived.

4. The word is a symbol and a delight which sucks up men and scenes, trees, plants, factories, and Pekinese. Then the Thing becomes the Word and back to Thing again, but warped and woven into a fantastic pattern. The Word sucks up Cannery Row, digests it and spews it out, and the Row has taken the shimmer of the green world and the sky reflecting seas. Lee Chong is more than a Chinese grocer. He must be. Perhaps he is evil balanced and suspended by good—an Asiatic planet held to its orbit by the pull of Lao Tze and held away from Lao Tze by the centrifugality of abacus and cash register—Lee Chong suspended, spinning, whirling among groceries and ghosts. A hard man with a can of beans—a soft man with the bones of his grandfather. from Chapter 2 of Cannery Row

5. Mack and the boys, too, spinning in their orbits. They are the Virtues, the Graces, the Beauties of the hurried mangled craziness of Monterey and the cosmic Monterey where men in fear and hunger destroy their stomachs in the fight to secure certain food, where men hungering for love destroy everything lovable about them. Mack and the boys are the Beauties, the Virtues , the Graces. In the world ruled by tigers with ulcers, rutted by strictured bulls, scavenged by blind jackals, Mack and the boys dined 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 to come to his property with a gastric ulcer, a blown prostate, 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 and overwhelming love for no-goods and blots-on-the-town and bums, and Mack and the boys. Virtues and graces and laziness and zest. Our Father who art in nature. from Chapter 2 of Cannery Row Paintingf Hemingway as ‘Kid Balzac’ By artist pal Waldo Pierce

6. “Imagine not being able to distinguish the real cause from that without which the cause would not be able to act as a cause. It is what the majority appear to do, like people groping in the dark; they call it a cause, thus giving it a name that does not belong to it. That is why one man surrounds the earth with a vortex to make the heavens keep in place, another makes the air support it like a wide lid. As for their capacity of being in the best place they could possibly be put, this they do not look for, nor do they believe it to have any divine force, but they believe that they will some time discover a stronger and more immortal Atlas to hold everything together more, and they do not believe that the truly good and ‘binding’ binds and holds them together.” from Plato’s Phaedo If we try to attempt to explain Nature in terms of nature alone we are forced to deny the ultimate binding Good in the universe. A thing may strive for perfection of its form for its own sake, or for the sake of the larger purpose of the Good. Absolute Truth exists in the idealized world of the forms for the classic greek teleologists. For Ed Ricketts and Steinbeck by extension… teleology leads to trouble… they see men(society) interpreting the ultimate purpose for things in a destructive and non-sustainable manner… leading to war, the destruction of our environment, etc. Ricketts wrote about a non-teleological view of the world… a world that avoided the cognitive hubris that saturated the 20th C.

7. “And 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 inextricably 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… “ Ed Ricketts by asserting that they all are of value, advocates a non-teleological stance… he saw himself on a search for a transcendent view of the natural world and our place within… compare him to Siddhartha Ricketts is ‘half-Christ and half-satyr’ as Doc in Cannery Row

8. Ricketts in his own way wanted to reconcile the differences between Religion and Science. One of his fascinations was with art, literature and poetry. He believed that one could predict all scientific discoveries by looking at the poems of the preceding generation…

9. Kingdom Phylum Class Order Family Genus Species Ricketts classified organisms as being part of an ecology: relationship to the outer world, and its biotic (social relationships) and physical environment. An interconnected web of life. Habitat plays an important role in the development of species. Non Hierarchical Non Teleological Classic Linnaean Taxonomy Hierarchical Teleological

10. of the race; I say • Humanity is the mould to break away from, the crust to break through, the coal to break into fire, • The atom to be split • Tragedy that breaks man’s face and a white fire flies out of it; vision that fools him • Out of his limits, desire that fools him out of his limits, unnatural crime, inhuman science, • Slit eyes in the mask; wild loves that leap over the walls of nature, the wild fence-vaulter science, • Useless intelligence of far stars, dim knowledge of the spinning demons that make an atom, • These break, these pierce, these deify, praising their God shrilly with fierce voices; not in a man’s shape • He approves the praise, he that walks lighting-naked on the Pacific, that laces the suns with planets, • The heart of the atom with electrons: what is humanity in this cosmos? For him, the last • Least taint of a trace in the dregs of the solution; for itself, the mould to break away from, the coal • To break into fire, the atom to be split. • from Robinson Jeffers’s “Roan Stallion” • Jeffers idea of ‘inhumanism’ reflects some of the ideals of Ricketts, Steinbeck, Campbell… mankind has defiled nature… they came to different conclusions about the fate of man, but all were concerned with nuclear destruction… remember Cannery Row was published in 1945… the year the nuclear age began.