Three years ago today I woke up in a tent on the Sonoma coast and began to think about bocce more abstractly. We played in and around our campsite and the colorful spheres disappeared into and reappeared out of grasses, bushes and trenches and we followed them and picked them up as though simulating the gathering of firewood, which is outlawed at most California State Parks. This, however, was a Sonoma County Park, which is why the campsite did not cost 40 dollars, but we weren’t gathering firewood anyway, we were playing bocce. Revisiting Bocce Balling on the West Coast, I see that today was a Monday, that Tristan won the game at Stillwater Cove Park where we camped, and that bocce became abstracted in a tape recording made after stopping in Point Arena. To thoughts were alluded to for posterity: that the journey would not fixate on finding idealized bocce courts that we would anticipate—though some research was done to find courts along the way—instead we would take note in moments when we stopped and see if there was an appropriate grass patch or rectangle of dirt. On this day, in addition to the campsite round, we played on a flat space off a trail to the beach in Elk, and on an improvised court framed by driftwood on the beach. Also, when we arrived in Arcata we asked about courts and went to a church west of the train tracks where one was fabled to be. Tristan and I won in the moments before a live-in priest requested we leave. The second thought was that thoughts do not snowball—accumulate a more complete truth as they become compounded into an expanding unity—thoughts bocce ball, they congregate unpredictably around a concept, sometimes touching right on it, sometimes displacing a previous thought, often ten feet short.
The entry in the book for Monday, January 10, 2011, begins with the line from The Log from the Sea of Cortez: “It is advisable to look from the tide pool to the stars and then back to the tide pool again.” I was thinking about Ed Ricketts and John Steinbeck’s thinking about teleological thinking, and its opposite which they championed: non-teleological thinking or “is” thinking. This was the heart of the late-night conversations Steinbeck had with Ricketts and Joseph Campbell had with Ricketts and the center of Ricketts’ research and writings on the marine ecology, this is how to “break through,” a concept they lifted from Robinson Jeffers’ poem “Roan Stallion.” And this was what Steinbeck’s work became, when it was good, an attempt to stop identifying origins, stop prescribing outcomes, stop isolating individuals as heroes and villains—instead to describe evolutions, interconnections, complexities that prove the inevitability of inequity, even if we got everyone to work really hard people would still lack and others would still profit to grotesque excess. Doing away with “what should be, or could be, or might be,” and replacing it “with what actually ‘is’,” provides a “tool in increased understanding,” “the value of [which] cannot be denied.” Joseph Campbell destroyed the mythical hierarchies given to him by his upbringing and saw the stories of this world as they are: an interrelated whole, none culminated into a transcendent truth—everyone describing their unique selves with their unique myths, infused with—again Steinbeck/Ricketts, though historically only credited to Steinbeck—“morphologically inviolable pattern of the macrocosm.” In other words, each game of bocce does not portend toward a greater meaning, each game expresses the greater meaning and it—the mass-manufactured set, the agreed upon rules, the uniformity of gravity, etc.—becomes an example of capital B Bocce taking place, somewhere microscopically, not the intentional or ultimate instance, not culminating from or leading toward, just happening.
However, “Examples sometimes clarify an issue better then explanations or definitions,” as Ricketts writes in “Essay on Non-teleological Thinking,” and Steinbeck makes his own in my copy of the Log From the Sea of Cortez, “Examples sometimes clarify an issue better then explanations or definitions.” Obviously those two lines are the same, but, if there’s one point I want to get across it is this: Ed Ricketts the intellectual superior of Steinbeck and the relationship benefitted Steinbeck with ideas and, after the author’s success and fame, benefitted Ricketts with funding. Financing and embarking on the Western Flyer with Ricketts in 1940 had the added benefit for Steinbeck of escaping a growing mass of assholes and Hollywood types that wanted ever-varying pieces of him. It’s easy to say, “No! The purposiveness of events is real! Monterey was a mystical catalyst that broad the vanguard of biology at the time—ecology—in touch with a born mythologist and a naturally talented writer!” But then what? You study the random alchemy of intellectual and artistic movement and, what reproduce it? Of course not. These men met at these times, Steinbeck accompanied Ricketts south to the Gulf of California and Campbell went with him north to British Columbia. Otherwise I alienate myself from not just who I want to be, but who I am. If I strive to create and live as these denizens of Monterey did before, and they already lived out the ultimate expression of creating and living in Monterey, importantly yet, while it lasted, anonymously, then I am a fool. I am not taking the necessary inevitable steps forward and going to graduate school though that is the acknowledged path toward the acknowledged end that places me officially in the situation that I already inhabit, that is, me, sitting here, writing.
This heartening viewpoint liberates me to waylay regret because whatever happens all of my choices will exist as a scattered cluster unified roughly by time and the consciousness that fell in for the ride, there is no snowball, there is no need to become something you’re not so you can justify being yourself. Why and to what end I was building a rectangular court at Greenwood State Beach in Elk, California at 3:30 PM on Monday, January 10, 2011 doesn’t matter and misses the whole picture. I was and that means something indefinable to me.
Two years ago today I rode in a friend’s van up to Arcata with Tristan from Oakland, on the 101 this time for the sake of time, arriving the same night, the 10th, but this time staying out of town a piece in Indianola by the Cash n Carry. It amazed me the next day to realize that it was, as it was the year before, the birthday of a friend in Arcata.
Last year today I had only made it to Santa Cruz where I met the friend with the van and his friend from Long Beach and we played bocce on a lawn in front of a church downtown that also featured a meditative labyrinth. Then we met their friend named Yes and took Freedom Boulevard to a shooting range in Watsonville where we put on rented ear and eye protection and fired four varieties of rented gun at targets hanging down the way. I had never fired a gun before and I was amazed nobody died. We were all super pleased to be alive and I ended up losing the camera I bought for the trip, still in the same area code I started in. 831, if anyone is super curious.
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