An Explanation of Why I Can’t Contribute to This Narrative

It has been one of the great, unexpected pleasures of the Western Flyer restoration process that I get to work with notable scientists and authors. When one of them graciously asked if I would write an explanation as to why I’m involved in this project, I said yes before I thought about it. I was caught up in the excitement of hanging out with this group, before the truth fought forward and reminded me why I wanted to decline this assignment. I can’t write. I have an incomplete education and am the very personification of the problem E. O. Wilson described in his 1998 book Consilience. Being schooled in things technical and precise, I lack almost completely a sufficient exposure to the humanities, social discourse, and artist-y things. I am, in fact, a perfect exemplar of the problem of separation of art and science. My co-contributors, on the other hand, are examples that exceptions are, and should be, made. They are not only skilled scientists and scholars, but also philosophical thinkers and lyrical writers.

Our societal house has long been too divided between art and science. Artistic creativity has not been rewarded in the scientific milieu, and precision and validation are rarely valued in art. It has been said (not by me—I was doing math) that Mona Lisa’s smile came not from divine intervention per Giorgio Vasari, but as the result of da Vinci’s exacting and painstaking anatomical research—so he was an early exception, blending scientific curiosity with artistic brilliance. But, alas, there are few da Vincis. In seeking a career, we are asked to separate into two camps, like a schoolyard game of Red Rover. In choosing the technical path, we are made to abandon the personal and egocentric view of things in favor of an ordered set of impersonal and dogmatic constructs. The artists, conversely, are told to abandon the group view and interpret the world through their own eyes and sensibilities. For the artist, the ordered process is anathema, and group approval and peer review the road to ruin.

Science has sought to suppress spurious creativity in its formulation. It rewards repetition and exactness, while art specifically frowns on anything that appears derivative.

And yet, Piero Scaruffi noticed that all major scientific revolutions have coincided with a climate of creativity. This fact was also graphed by Ed Ricketts on butcher paper hung on the walls of his lab. He (without Google or Wikipedia) mapped all major events in human history throughout the world and noticed that similar patterns emerge in countries far removed from one another. Periods of great advances in both art and science were followed by long periods of quiescence—that was true in Japan and in Europe. This is what Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge called “punctuated equilibrium” in 1972. This is contrasted against phyletic gradualism—the idea that evolution occurs as a slow and steady transformation.

One of these rapid steps forward seems to have occurred on the Western Flyer in 1940. For Steinbeck and Ricketts—an artist and a scientist—the dichotomy of art and science could be bridged by immersive observation. That is what Ricketts and Steinbeck did on their 6-week voyage. They observed. Deeply. The science that followed gave truths about nature. The art generated a series of notable books and essays.

By listening to ribald stories from the crew about life in Monterey (and from living “down on his soles” in the 1930s on the “Row”), Steinbeck—a notorious “lint picker” of facts—penned Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday. Many nights during the voyage, Steinbeck huddled close to the Flyer’s shortwave radio and listened to the unfolding drama of the Nazi invasion of Norway and the brave resistance that became the material for The Moon Is Down. Their self-described Homeric journey also included a story gathered in La Paz, which became The Pearl, as well as greater familiarity with Mexican history and culture—which may have inspired Steinbeck to write the film scripts for Viva Zapata, and The Forgotten Village...