Thursday, 4 June 2009

Alchemy - turning digression into an artform

It's time to get worried when it doesn't matter where in the world it happens, it has something to do with Derry or Donegal. Or both. This phenomenon is known as local journalism.

For instance, the US painter James Fitzgerald, not particularly well-known but worthy of note, and the writer John Steinbeck used to meet up in Ed Rickett's wooden house in Monterey. Both were part of the famous circle of friends and characters used as a basis for Steinbeck's book 'Cannery Row'. (I think the character of Henri the painter may have been based partly on James but can't remember for sure.)

So what's that got to do with the price of ointment? Well, we recently carried an article in the Journal about John Steinbeck's visit to the Derry area and his family roots in Eglinton. These links seem to have been pretty special for him.(Was reminded of the comments of Jim McLaughlin, Moville geographer, in his excellent introduction to his anthology 'Donegal - The Making of a Northern County' - "Even today people and places in Donegal often acquire the characteristics of urban myths. They are talked about, often by outsiders, city-dwellers and 'compulsive weekenders', in terms than render them infinitely more magical, and attractive, than the county's 'real places' and 'real people' could ever possibly be." Sort of like the alternative society that Steinbeck creates through Mack and the boys in 'Cannery Row'. Of course, before leaving the subject, we all know just how special Donegal and Derry people really are . . )

Meantime the art of James Fitzgerald has been the subject of an exhibition at the Regional Cultural Centre in Letterkenny, and the Irish premiere of a documentary of his life was screened there on Sunday week in the presence of its director Frederick Lewis (thanks to the man himself, John Cunningham). And while it doesn't seem that James Fitzgerald had family connections with the North West, it did have a certain significance for him - he died of a heart attack on a visit to Arranmore Island in 1971. (He might have enjoyed the job description on the death cert - 'retired amateur artist'.) His expedition to Donegal may have come about through his friendship with the painter, traveller and writer Rockwell Kent, who loved his time staying in Glenlough near Glencolumbkille (then again, he managed to survive the experience).

So far, so local. But since there is a certain amount of time available, why not surf around the connection? And before long, you could be discussing the significance of the Tibetan Book of the Dead ("Of course we had the Dalai Lama here last year . .") in the life of the US mythologist Joseph Campbell.

First let's look briefly at a remarkable man who welcomed a remarkable set of individuals into that wooden house between two canneries on Ocean View Avenue (since renamed Cannery Row) in Monterey. He is now regarded as an eminent marine biologist, and in a book review online (http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/mavericks-on-cannery-row)
Bruce H. Robison, Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, California, writes -

Ricketts's lab on Cannery Row was a magnet for scientists, writers, prostitutes, musicians, artists, academics and bums. Gatherings there included discussions of the interplay of philosophy, science and art, and often evolved into raucous, happy parties that went on for days.

From http://www.amazon.com/Renaissance-Man-Cannery-Row-Ricketts/dp/0817311726 is the following -

Renaissance Man of Cannery Row: The Life and Letters of Edward F. Ricketts (Hardcover)

Marine biologist Edward F. Ricketts is perhaps best known as the inspiration for John Steinbeck's most empathic literary characters - "Doc" in Cannery Row, "Slim" in Of Mice and Men, Jim Casy in The Grapes of Wrath, and Lee in East of Eden. The correspondence of this accomplished scientist, writer, and philosopher reveals the influential exchange of ideas he shared with such prominent thinkers and artists as Henry Miller, Joseph Campbell, Ellwood Graham, and James Fitzgerald, in addition to Steinbeck - all of whom were drawn to Ricketts's Monterey Bay laboratory, a haven of intellectual discourse and Bohemian culture in the 1930s and 1940s.

From http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1252560 -

Some of the most vivid fodder for the novel [Cannery Row] came from Ed Ricketts and his biology lab. In the weathered wooden building, squeezed between two enormous canneries, Ricketts stored the specimens he sold to school labs -- frogs and cats and the tiny marine creatures he collected during hours spent in the tide pools off Monterey.

"By the time John Steinbeck met him in 1930, Ricketts was more or less living in his lab and in the company of caged snakes. To the sounds of Leadbelly, or a Gregorian chant, one could enjoy jug wine, arty women, and -- most of all -- marathon sessions of philosophizing," Montagne says.

[ . . .] Rodger [Montagne] says it wasn't just John Steinbeck who appreciated Ricketts' mind. Those who partied and swapped ideas at the lab included the young composer John Cage, the budding mythologist Joseph Campbell and the writer Henry Miller.


Moving on, this is famously how Steinbeck started '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.

At http://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=6096
Michael J. Meyer, DePaul University Chicago, has this to say, and refers to a philosophical approach shared by Steinbeck and Ricketts (and which has a certain attractiveness)
-

In typical Steinbeck experimentation, the text of Cannery Row mixes Biblical language with the language of heroic myth (a return to the Arthurian imagery of Tortilla Flat), while also using the non-teleological principles that Steinbeck and Ricketts had speculated on during the voyage and that they believed were the essential tenets of universal existence.
Non-teleology or lack of causation was a philosophical theory which suggested that the questions of why and how a situation occurred were not really important, and that, as an observer of so-called “facts”, the user must be careful not to impose any value systems other than what “is”. In other words, Steinbeck and Ricketts espoused a philosophy according to which whatever “is” is right, thus hoping to eliminate the human guilt or regret.

The character Doc is certainly something of a philosopher, and some of his observations may ring true to those who've been puzzled during discussions on business ethics -

"It has always seemed strange to me," said Doc. "The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second."

Joseph Campbell, one of the Cannery Row circle, was a fascinating man. For those philosophically or mythically inclined, his entry in Wikipedia seems a good starting point. Which eventually brings us to Bardo Thodol, tonight's bedtime reading . . .

And we haven't even got on to Martha Graham, Henry Miller or John Cage yet. Begin there with an interesting little article by Dave Brubeck (had no idea he is so old - the 'Take Five' man was born in 1920) - http://www.montereycountyweekly.com/archives/2006/2006-Sep-14/Article.cover_story_

Yes, back in the old days they used to talk about the microcosm of the macrocosm, or maybe it was the macrocosm of the microcosm. With Google, it all starts to make sense. The world is getting smaller, everything is local, and you don't have to be Benedict Kiely to summon up Kavanagh in an instant -

Epic

I have lived in important places, times
When great events were decided, who owned
That half a rood of rock, a no-man's land
Surrounded by our pitchfork-armed claims.
I heard the Duffys shouting "Damn your soul!"
And old McCabe stripped to the waist, seen
Step the plot defying blue cast-steel -
"Here is the march along these iron stones."
That was the year of the Munich bother. Which
Was more important? I inclined
To lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin
Till Homer's ghost came whispering to my mind.
He said: I made the Iliad from such
A local row. Gods make their own importance.

Patrick Kavanagh

The moral - Google is dangerous . . . and like so many things, in a beautiful sort of a way . . .

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