Free The Log from the Sea of Cortez by John Steinbeck, Richard Astro Page A

ocean with monsters and one wonders whether they are there or not. In one sense they are, for we continue to see them. One afternoon in the laboratory ashore we sat drinking coffee and talking with Jimmy Costello, who is a reporter on the Monterey Herald. The telephone rang and his city editor said that the decomposed body of a sea-serpent was washed up on the beach at Moss Landing, half-way around the Bay. Jimmy was to rush over and get pictures of it. He rushed, approached the evil-smelling monster from which the flesh was dropping. There was a note pinned to its head which said, “Don’t worry about it, it’s a basking shark. [Signed] Dr. Rolph Bolin of the Hopkins Marine Station.” No doubt that Dr. Bolin acted kindly, for he loves true things; but his kindness was a blow to the people of Monterey. They so wanted it to be a sea-serpent. Even we hoped it would be. When sometimes a true sea-serpent, complete and undecayed, is found or caught, a shout of triumph will go through the world. “There, you see,” men will say, “I knew they were there all the time. I just had a feeling they were there.” Men really need sea-monsters in their personal oceans. And the Old Man of the Sea is one of these. In Monterey you can find many people who have seen him. Tiny Colletto has seen him close up and can draw a crabbed sketch of him. He is very large. He stands up in the water, three or four feet emerged above the waves, and watches an approaching boat until it comes too close, and then he sinks slowly out of sight. He looks somewhat like a tremendous diver, with large eyes and fur shaggily hanging from him. So far, he has not been photographed. When he is, probably Dr. Bolin will identify him and another beautiful story will be shattered. For this reason we rather hope he is never photographed, for if the Old Man of the Sea should turn out to be some great malformed sea-lion, a lot of people would feel a sharp personal loss—a Santa Claus loss. And the ocean would be none the better for it. For the ocean, deep and black in the depths, is like the low dark levels of our minds in which the dream symbols incubate and sometimes rise up to sight like the Old Man of the Sea. And even if the symbol vision be horrible, it is there and it is ours. An ocean without its unnamed monsters would be like a completely dreamless sleep. Sparky and Tiny do not question the Old Man of the Sea, for they have looked at him. Nor do we question him because we know he is there. We would accept the testimony of these boys sufficiently to send a man to his death for murder, and we know they saw this monster and that they described him as they saw him.

    We have thought often of this mass of sea-memory, or sea-thought, which lives deep in the mind. If one ask for a description of the unconscious, even the answer-symbol will usually be in terms of a dark water into which the light descends only a short distance. And we have thought how the human fetus has, at one stage of its development, vestigial gill-slits. If the gills are a component of the developing human, it is not unreasonable to suppose a parallel or concurrent mind or psyche development. If there be a life-memory strong enough to leave its symbol in vestigial gills, the preponderantly aquatic symbols in the individual unconscious might well be indications of a group psyche-memory which is the foundation of the whole unconscious. And what things must be there, what monsters, what enemies, what fear of dark and pressure, and of prey! There are numbers of examples wherein even invertebrates seem to remember and to react to stimuli no longer violent enough to cause the reaction. Perhaps, next to that of the sea, the strongest memory in us is that of the moon. But moon and sea and tide are one. Even now, the tide establishes a measurable, although minute, weight differential. For example, the steamship Majestic loses about fifteen pounds of its weight under a full moon. 1 According to a theory of