Six Billion People

I really enjoyed today's Writer's Almanac poem, and I thought you would, too.

Six Billion People

by Tom Chandler

And all of you so beautiful
I want to bring you home with me
to sit close on the couch.

My invitation inserted in six billion bottles,
corked with bark from the final forest
and dropped in the ocean of my longing.

We would speak the language of no words,
pass the jug of our drunken joy
at being babies growing into death.

Sometimes, I know, life is stupid, pointless,
beside the point, but here's the point —
maybe we would fall

in love, settle down together,
share the wine, the bills,
the last of the oxygen and the remote.

"Six Billion People" by Tom Chandler, from Toy Firing Squad. © Wind Publications, 2008. Reprinted with permission.

Zen in the Morning

I keep a little Pocket Poets book of Zen poems on my desk at the office. Sometimes I read one as I'm starting my day, and I like to think they give me a better perspective on life and work. Here's one of my favorites:

Green Creek
To get right down to Yellow Flower River
I often follow the waters of Green Creek.
They wind around the mountains endlessly--
A path straight there would run a few score miles.

There are sounds of water crashing on tumbled stones;
Scenes of silence deep within the pines.
Water chestnut and water fringe float on the ripples;
Still limpid waters mirror the reeds.

My mind is unencumbered now,
Clear and tranquil, as the river is.
Come, stay a while, rest here upon this stone--
Cast out a fishing line and let things be.

Wang Wei
Trans. Peter Harris

I remember this poem when I am overwhelmed with the petty details of day to day life, and I offer it to others when they seem to be feeling overwhelmed as well. Perhaps when we pause to reflect we ultimately make better decisions and lead happier lives.

"A Faint Tracing on the Surface of Mystery"

I, along with my husband and two cats, live on top of a mountain in one of the most beautiful parts of the country I have ever seen. Our living quarters aren't elegant, but they are set in the midst of exquisite natural beauty. Living in such a place, I feel more connected than ever with the aptly named "Nature Writers;" how could I not, living only a short trip away from John Muir's Woods or the state park named for Robert Louis Stevenson?
Lately I've been reading Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. I suppose I haven't posted about it because I haven't been able to pick out a single passage to post--every word of the first chapter is an integral part of the overall message. To exclude the smallest conjunction would be to risk obfuscating the beauty of Dillard's prose. However, the Heresy of the Ellipsis (close cousin to the Heresy of Paraphrase) will be only one more literary heresy heaped upon my head when the great day of English Major Reckoning comes. So here I go:

I used to have a cat, an old fighting tom, who would jump through the open window by my bed in the middle of the night and land on my chest. I'd half-awaken. He'd stick his skull under my nose and purr, stinking of urine and blood. Some nights he kneaded my bare chest with his front paws, powerfully, arching his back, as if sharpening his claws, or pummeling a mother for milk. And some mornings I'd wake in daylight to find my body covered with paw prints in blood; I looked as though I'd been painted with roses.

It was hot, so how the mirror felt warm. I washed before the mirror in a daze, my twisted summer sleep still hung about me like sea kelp. What blood was this, and what roses? It could have been the rose of union, the blood of murder, or the rose of beauty bare and the blood of some unspeakable sacrifice or birth. The sign on my body could have been an emblem or a stain, the keys to the kingdom or the mark of Cain. I never knew. I never knew as I washed, and the blood streaked, faded, and finally disappeared, whether I'd purified myself or ruined the blood sign of the passover. We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence. . . . "Seem like we're just set down here," a woman said to me recently, "and don't nobody know why."

(These are the opening lines of the book--it just gets better from here!)

[Dillard describes watching a frog be deflated by a giant water bug].

That it's rough out there and chancy is no surprise. Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac. But at the same time we are also created. In the Koran, Allah asks, "The heaven and earth and all in between, thinkest thou I made them in jest?" It's a good question. What do we think of the created universe, spanning an unthinkable void with an unthinkable profusion of forms? Or what do we think of nothingness, those sickening reaches of time in either direction? If the giant water bug was not made in jest, was it then made in earnest? Pascal uses a nice term to describe the notion of the creator's, once having called forth the universe, turning his back to it: Deus Absconditus. Is this what we think happened? Was the sense of it there, and God absconded with it, ate it, like a wolf who disappears round the edge of the house with the Thanksgiving turkey? "God is subtle," Einstein said, "but not malicious." Again, Einstein said that "nature conceals her mystery by means of her essential grandeur, not by her cunning." It could be that God has no absconded but spread, to a fabric of spirit and sense so grand and subtle, so powerful in a new way, that we can only feel blindly of its hem. In making the thick darkness a swaddling band for the sea, God "set bars and doors" and said, "Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further." But have we come even that far? Have we rowed out to the thick darkness, or are we all playing pinochle in the bottom of the boat? (Dillard. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. "Heaven and Earth in Jest." 1985 Perennial Library ed., p.1-2, 6-7.)

The Rainy Season Begins

In California, it either rains or doesn't rain. The land was parched all summer as the sun matured the thirsty grapes, bestowing complex flavors in exchange for all their pains. Now it is winter, and the barren vines drink their fill.

I finished reading The Last Tycoon--the part the Fitzgerald actually wrote, anyway. The editors have created a summary of what they think Fitzgerald had in mind for the end of the novel, but I'm actually considering skipping it. I'm usually the sort of person who demands closure, who will not rest until knowing "how the story ends;" however, the writing style is strikingly different than Fitzgerald's , and I could never be sure if the artificially constructed ending is actually what Fitzgerald himself would have written. After all, who can emulate the man who wrote The Great Gatsby, or (one of my favorites) Tender is the Night? I'll just have to be satisfied with these rough sketches of the polished portrait he intended to paint.

The strongest guard is placed at the gateway to nothing. . . Maybe because the condition of emptiness is too shameful to be divulged. (Fitzgerald. Tender is the Night.)

Pilgrimage

Today I did something I've been dying to do since moving to California: I visited Ken Kesey's house at La Honda. If you haven't read The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, please make tonight's post your excuse to read it at once. It's a trippy / fun introduction to the world of Gonzo Journalism, and it paints an spectacular "landscape" of the counterculture as a whole in the 1960s, as well as some exceptional "portraits" of a few of its giants like Kesey and Neal Cassady.



Preparations for the trip were minimal. After searching on the internet for, oh, 10 minutes without finding the address of the La Honda ranch, I was beginning to worry that I'd never find it. Then I saw someone's off-hand comment that Kesey's house is about a mile west of Applejack's Saloon. Go on, check out the reviews on this fine establishment. It's a fantastic dive. It looks like someone had their wedding reception there and posted pictures of it on the review site. . . let me just note that those pictures make it look a bit nicer inside than it really is. But it was unquestionably a fantastic stop, and we were very lucky to find a friendly if spaced out bartender in a tye-dye t-shirt who was more than happy to tell us that not only did he know where the Kesey house was, he had ALMOST bought it. He said once when he was talking to Kesey on the phone (presumably about the house) he asked, "How are ya, Ken?" And Kesey replied, "Feelin blue." The two words came out like poetry.

So we drove down the road about a mile, and there it was, just as the bartender said it would be, just as it was in the book. I'd post the address here since it doesn't seem to be available anywhere else, but I think that to find the house without asking directions at Applejack's would be to waste the entire experience. There were no drug-addled Pranksters, Beats, or bikers around; only a few pilgrims come to see where it all happened so many years ago.

Something Triumphantly American

I'm currently reading F. Scott Fitzgerald's unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon. Because it is unfinished, there are little gaps where the editors explain that Fitzgerald meant to come back to a certain point in the story and introduce a character or something important like that. One such gap, in my opinion, makes the story even more amusing in its absurdiuty--I can't imagine how Fitzgerald was going to work in this introduction:

[Stahr (my note: a producer, the protagonist) was to have received the Danish Prince Agge. who "wanted to learn about pictures from the beginning" and who was in the author's cast of characters as an "early Fascist."]
"Mr. Marcus calling from New York," said Miss Doolan.
"What do you mean?" demanded Stahr. "Why, I saw him here last night."
"Well, he's on the phone--it's a New York call and Miss Jacobs' voice. It's his office."
Stahr laughed.
"I'm seeing him at lunch," he said. "There's no aeroplane fast enough to take him there."
Miss Doolan returned to the phone. Stahr lingered to hear the outcome.
"It's all right," said Miss Doolan presently. "It was a mistake. Mr. Marcus called East this morning to tell them about the quake and the flood on the back lot, and it seems he asked them to ask you about it. It was a new secretary who didn't understand Mr. Marcus. I think she got mixed up."
"I think she did," said Stahr grimly.
Prince Agge did not undertand either of them, but, looking for the fabulous, he felt it was somethinng triumphantly American. Mr. Marcus, whose quarters could be seen across the way, had called his New York office to ask Stahr about the flood. The Prince imagined some intricate relationship without realizing that the transaction had taken place entirely within the once brilliant steel-trap mind of Mr. Marcus, which was intermittenly slipping. (Scribner 1969 ed., p.55-6)

Pondering "The Precious"

I haven't posted in a few days, but I have been using my time wisely: I just finished watching the extended versions of Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers. Each film is about four hours long . . .
So the film reminded me of one particular session in my Nature Writers class. We were discussing e. e. cummings' "In Just" when one of the girls in my class found that the poem took on deeper shades of meaning--and was way creepier--when she read it in the voice of Gollum from the Lord of the Rings films. Imagine the desperate, schizophrenic, terrified, gritty voice of the balloonman uttering the following lines

in Just-
spring when the world is mud-
luscious the little lame baloonman


whistles far and wee


and eddyandbill come
running from marbles and
piracies and it's
spring


when the world is puddle-wonderful


the queer
old baloonman whistles
far and wee
and bettyandisbel come dancing


from hop-scotch and jump-rope and


it's
spring
and
the
goat-footed

baloonMan whistles
far
and
wee

(To illustrate her version of the poem, she drew the picture above)

This reading always made me wonder if Gollum and the baloonman are similar in some other way, since the voice of one seems to lend insight to the character of another. When the poem is read as cummings wrote it, pausing at the larger spaces and hurrying through words squashed together, it seems that the children are moving with the speed of youthful excitement, but the (lame/queer old/ goat-footed) baloonman trudges behind with the determination of a killer in a horror movie. No matter how fast the children run, he knows he will catch them. He whistles eerily as he goes, confident he will get what he is after in the end. The poem itself does not indicate that the baloonman is moving at all--I didn't get that idea until my classmate read in in Gollum's voice. Now I picture the baloonman following the children as Gollum follows his Precious. And what is the baloonman's Precious? It's dancing, laughing children in springtime. It's innocence.

and
the
goat-footed


baloonMan whistles
far
and
wee

New Historicist Stephen Greenblatt on the Colbert Report!

Kesey's Great Notion, My Humble Ones

This summer I trudged my way through Ken Kesey's Sometimes a Great Notion, the novel he wrote after One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest made him famous, but before the Acid Tests made him infamous. It was a slow but ultimately rewarding read, with some real gems that show off Kesey's vast literary knowledge--he did go to Stanford, after all.

Look . . . Reality is greater than the sum of its parts, and a damn sight holier. And the lives of such stuff as dreams are made of may be rounded with a sleep but they are not tied neatly with a red bow. Truth doesn't run on time like a commuter train, though time may run on truth. And the Scenes Gone By and the Scenes to Come flow blending together in the sea-green deep while Now spreads in circles on the surface. (Bantam 1965 ed., p.14)

Here's a little self- referential snippet I was excited to find: Leland Stamper, the emotionally unstable academic, recalls his mother's suicide, then remarks dismissively, "Besides, there are some things that can't be the truth even if they did happen" (p.70). Compare Leland's statement to Chief Bromden's famous claim about his visions in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest: "It's the truth even if it didn't happen."

It's been almost a year now since I graduated with a B.A. in English and Philosophy. I can still remember exactly how I felt that night after commencement--like I hadn't spent as much time as I should have on anything, hadn't poured my heart and soul into anything. Sure, I chose my majors and I loved them, but I wished I had spent more time reading just because I was interested, or that I had written an essay weeks in advance because I was so excited about the subject. It seemed that even when I was studying something I loved, I became bogged down in the day-to-day, and the rules and rigor of academia too quickly drained my enthusiasm for literature. As Leland is discussing his college days with Viv, his seductee-to-be, he expresses some of the same sentiment I felt:

"Lee, if it isn't prying . . . was it always dull, your studies? Or did something happen to take the life out of it?" . . . .
"No, it wasn't always dull. Not at first. When I first discovered the worlds that came before our world, other scenes in other times, I thought the discovery so bright and blazing I wanted to read everything ever written about these worlds, in these worlds. Let it teach me, then me teach it to everybody. But the more I read . . . after a while . . . I began to find they were all writing about that same thing, this same dull old here-today-gone-tomorrow scene . . . Shakespeare, Milton, Matthew Arnold, even Baudelaire, even this cat whoever he was that wrote Beowulf . . . the same scene for the same reasons and to the same end, whether it was Dante with his pit of Baudelaire with his pot: . . . the same dull old scene . . . "
"What scene is that? I don't understand."
"What? Oh, I'm sorry; I didn't mean to come on so jaded. What scene? This one, the rain, those geese up there with their hard-luck stories . . . this, this same world. They all tried to do something with it. Dante did his best to build himself a hell because a hell presupposes a heaven. Baudelaire scarfed hashish and looked inside. Nothing there. Nothing but dreams and delusion. They all were driven by the need for something else. But when the drive was over, and the dreaming and the deluding worn out, they all ended up with the same dull old scene. But look, you see, Viv, they had an advantage with their scene, they had something we've lost . . . .
"They had a limitless supply of tomorrows to work with. If you didn't make your dream today, well there was always more days coming, more dreams full of more sound and fury and future: what if today was a hassle? There was always tomorrow to find the River Jordan, or Valhalla, or that special providence in the fall of a sparrow . . . we could believe in the Great Gettin'-up Morning coming someday because if it didn't make it today there was always tomorrow."
"And there isn't any more?"
I looked up at her and grinned. "What do you think?"
"I think it's pretty likely . . . that the alarm will go off at four-thirty, and I'll be down making pancakes and coffee, just like yesterday." (Bantam 1965 ed., p.414-5)

I do miss the days where I could always say, "I'll do it tomorrow. I'll research tomorrow. I'll write tomorrow. I'll reach literary nirvana sometime Tuesday evening." And then all of a sudden my tomorrows were gone, I was done with school, and I had not only no more tomorrows but nothing to postpone. Sure, I don't get up at four-thirty, but I do find myself doing the same thing one day as I did the day before, without really considering the search for my personal Valhalla. This blog is an attempt to make use of my todays and tomorrows and to recover my enthusiasm for literature before re-entering the academic world.

Ah, poor Kesey. He lost the respect of the his fellow scholars when he stepped outside the bounds of fiction into the world of drug-induced art and poetry. Sure it may have worked for Coleridge, but Kesey lived in a different era. His reputation as a literary giant was unfairly maligned for the publication of the following fascinating works:


Kesey's Garage Sale. There's a signed first edition of this on Amazon for $300. Would someone buy it for me?


























I saw this at City Lights Books and was absolutely mesmerized by the art. Kesey went from Stanford writing student to psychedelic activist in a matter of a few years. Did LSD expand his mind or simply warp it? The debate continues.













Your Ginsberg-of-the-day: [From Howl]
"who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot
for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks
fell on their heads every day for the next decade"

The stars are close and dear

And always, if he had a little money, a man could get drunk. The hard edges gone, and the warmth. Then there was no loneliness, for a man could people his brain with friends, and he could find his enemies and destroy them. Sitting in a ditch, the earth grew soft under him. Failure dulled and the future was no threat. And hunger did no skulk about, but the world was soft and easy, and a man could reach the place he started for. The stars came down wonderfully close and the sky was soft. Death was a friend, and sleep was death's brother. . . .And the stars down so close, and sadness and pleasure so close together, really the same thing. Like to stay drunk all the time. Who says it's bad? Who dares to say it's bad? Preachers--but they got their own kinda drunkenness. Thin, barren women, but they're too miserable to know. Reformers--but they don't hit deep enough into living to know. No--the stars are close and dear and I have joined the brotherhood of the worlds. And everything's holy--everything, even me.
(Steinbeck. The Grapes of Wrath. 1972 Bantam ed., p.362)

Sometimes literature speaks for itself and needs no explanation. And sometimes it speaks for our own hearts, and it can have no explanation.

Happy Birthday, T.S. Eliot

In honor of one of my favorite poets (my cats are named Bustopher Jones and Edmund Growltiger), here's a little poem to brighten your day.

Cousin Nancy
by T.S. Eliot
Miss Nancy Elliott
Strode acrsss the hills and broke them,
Rose across the hills and broke them--
The barren New England hills--
Riding to hounds
Over the cow-pasture.

Miss Nancy Elliott smoked
And danced all the modern dances;
And her aunts were not quite sure how they felt about itt,
But they knew that it was modern.

Upon the glazen shelves kept watch
Matthew and Waldo, guardians of the faith,
The army of unalterable law.
(The Complete Poems and Plays, 1971 ed., p.17-18)

Holy! Holy! Holy!

Here's another passage from The Grapes of Wrath that resonated with something in my own soul.

"I'm gonna work in the fiel's, in the green fiel's, an' I'm gonna be near to folks. I ain't gonna try to teach 'em nothin. I'm gonna try to learn. Gonna learn why the folks walks in the grass, gonna hear 'em talk, gonna hear 'em sing. Gonna listen to kids eatin' mush. Gonna hear husban' an' wife a-poundin' the mattress in the night. Gonna eat with 'em an' learn." His eyes were wet and shining. "Gonna lay in the grass, open an' honest with anybody that'll have me. Gonna cuss an' swear an' hear the poetry of folks talkin'. All that's holy, all that's what I didn't understan'. All them things is the good things. (Bantam 1972 ed., p.101-2)

The image of Casy lying "open an' honest" in the grass and working in the fields with the people brought to mind Whitman's recurring image of grass, not only in Leaves of Grass, but especially in Song of Myself:

6
A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more
than he.

I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green
stuff woven.

Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt,
Bearing the owner's name someway in the corners, that we may see
and remark, and say Whose?

Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the
vegetation.

Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,
And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,
Growing among black folks as among white,
Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I
receive them the same.

And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.

Tenderly will I use you curling grass,
It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men,
It may be if I had known them I would have loved them,
It may be you are from old people, or from offspring taken soon out
of their mothers' laps,
And here you are the mothers' laps.

This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers,
Darker than the colorless beards of old men,
Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.

O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues,
And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for
nothing.

I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and
women,
And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken
soon out of their laps.

What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and children?

They are alive and well somewhere,
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the
end to arrest it,
And ceas'd the moment life appear'd.

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.

(Thanks, www.princeton.edu, for the easy access copy&paste!)

To Whitman, the grass is a symbol of all men--especially of the men who work the land--and of the great equality we find in Death, when we are all turned to grass. I think Steinbeck was certainly using grass as a symbol of the men who worked the land, whom Casy desired to be close to, and if we consider Casy's monologue in light of Whitman's multi-dimensional symbolism of the grass, then the passage becomes even richer than it seemed to be at first glance.

Finally, I couldn't possibly end this entry without recognizing another tie-in to Ginsberg. When Casy deems "folks" and everything about them to be "holy," my minds turns to the "Footnote to Howl."

Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!
Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!
The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy!
The nose is holy! The tongue and cock and hand
and asshole holy!
Everything is holy! everybody's holy! everywhere is
holy! everyday is in eternity! Everyman's an
angel!
The bum's as holy as the seraphim! the madman is
holy as you my soul are holy!
The typewriter is holy the poem is holy the voice is
holy the hearers are holy the ecstasy is holy!
Holy Peter holy Allen holy Solomon holy Lucien holy
Kerouac holy Huncke holy Burroughs holy Cas-
sady holy the unknown buggered and suffering
beggars holy the hideous human angels!
Holy my mother in the insane asylum! Holy the cocks
of the grandfathers of Kansas!
Holy the groaning saxophone! Holy the bop
apocalypse! Holy the jazzbands marijuana
hipsters peace & junk & drums!
Holy the solitudes of skyscrapers and pavements! Holy
the cafeterias filled with the millions! Holy the
mysterious rivers of tears under the streets!
Holy the lone juggernaut! Holy the vast lamb of the
middle class! Holy the crazy shepherds of rebell-
ion! Who digs Los Angeles IS Los Angeles!
Holy New York Holy San Francisco Holy Peoria &
Seattle Holy Paris Holy Tangiers Holy Moscow
Holy Istanbul!
Holy time in eternity holy eternity in time holy the
clocks in space holy the fourth dimension holy
the fifth International holy the Angel in Moloch!
Holy the sea holy the desert holy the railroad holy the
locomotive holy the visions holy the hallucina-
tions holy the miracles holy the eyeball holy the
abyss!
Holy forgiveness! mercy! charity! faith! Holy! Ours!
bodies! suffering! magnanimity!
Holy the supernatural extra brilliant intelligent
kindness of the soul!
(Thanks, www.fort.org)

The holiness of all aspects of human existence is a strong theme in all three of these selections. I think I love them so much and remember them so well because this is how I feel, too, on my better days. As a humanist, if I can truly celebrate everything about humanity, perhaps I will find the joy and beauty in everyday life that these three authors did.

The Pennycandystore Beyond the El

This poem was featured on the Writer's Almanac yesterday, and my friend Old Bull Lee forwarded it to me. I love it because it's more than the sum of it's parts. The pennycandystore is so many images tied together, creating an overwhelming sensory buffet of potential meaning.

The Pennycandystore Beyond the El

by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

The Pennycandystore beyond the El
is where I first
fell in love
with unreality
Jellybeans glowed in the semi-gloom
of that september afternoon
A cat upon the counter moved among
the licorice sticks
and tootsie rolls
and Oh Boy Gum

Outside the leaves were falling as they died

A wind had blown away the sun

A girl ran in
Her hair was rainy
Her breasts were breathless in the little room

Outside the leaves were falling
and they cried
Too soon! too soon!

"The Pennycandystore Beyond the El" by Lawrence Ferlinghetti from A Coney Island of the Mind. © New Directions Publishing, 1958. Reprinted with permission.

The Grapes of Wrath : Nietzsche, the Buddha, and the Beats

I stumbled across some fascinating and beautiful passages as I read The Grapes of Wrath recently. Perhaps I simply view literature through too skewed a beat/existential lens, but it seemed as though Steinbeck himself was musing on humanity beyond good and evil.

Well, I was layin' under a tree when I figured that out, and I went to sleep. And it come night, an' it was dark when I come to. They was a coyote squawkin' near by. Before I knowed it, I was sayin' out loud, "The hell with it! There ain't no sin and there ain't no virtue. There's just stuff people do. It's all part of the same thing. And some of the things folks do is nice, and sone ain't nice, but that's as far as any man got a right to say.' " He paused and looked up from the palm of his hand, where he had laid down the words. . . .
Casy spoke again, and his voice rang with pain and confusion. "I says, 'What's this call, this sperit?' An' I says, 'It's love. I love people so much I'm fit to bust, sometimes.' An' I says, 'Don't you love Jesus?' Well I thought an' thought, an' finally I says, 'No, I don't know nobody name' Jesus. I know a bunch of stories, but I only love people. An' sometimes I love 'em fit to bust, an' I want to make 'em happy.' An' then--I been talkin' a hell of a lot. Maybe you wonder about me using bad words. Well, they ain't bad to me no more. They're jus' words folks use, an' they don't mean nothing bad with 'em. Anyways, I'll tell you one more thing I thought out; an' from a preacher it's the most unreligious thing, and I can't be a preacher no more because I thought it an' I believe it. . . ."
"I figgered about the Holy Sperit and that Jesus road. I figgered, "Why do we got to hang it all on God or Jesus? Maybe,' I figgered, 'maybe it's all men an' all women we love; maybe that's the Holy Sperit--the human sperit--the whole shebang. Maybe all men got one big soul ever'body's a part of.' Now I sat there thinkin' it, an' all of a suddent--I knew it. I knew it so deep down that it was true, and I still know it." (Bantam 1972 ed., p.24-25)

Casy, a former country preacher, comes to spitirual enlightenment under a tree, just as Gautama Buddha did. After Casy's Bodhi tree revelation, he no longer finds faith in an intangible God or the morality He/his followers created. Instead he finds that there is neither sin nor virtue in the world, only human action. Did Steinbeck read Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil?

He, however, has discovered himself who says, “This is my good and evil”; with that he has reduced to silence the mole and dwarf who say “Good for all, evil for all.”

To be part of a universal soul is certainly a Hindu/Buddhist concept, though to attribute the concept man's rise above morality solely to Nietzsche may be a stretch. But years after Steinbeck Allen Ginsberg echoed Casy's sentiment of loving people "fit to bust," refusing to believe that man is an imperfect creature but instead celebrating every element of human existence:

You were never no locomotive, Sunflower, you were a sunflower!
And you Locomotive, you are a locomotive, forget me not!
So I grabbed up the skeleton thick sunflower and stuck it at my side like a scepter,
and deliver my sermon to my soul, and Jack's soul too, and anyone who'll listen,
--We're not our skin of grime, we're not our dread bleak dusty imageless locomotive, we're all beautiful golden sunflowers inside, we're blessed by our own seed & golden hairy naked accomplishment-bodies growing into mad black formal sunflowers in the sunset, spied on by our eyes under the shadow of the mad locomotive riverbank sunset Frisco hilly evening sitdown vision. (City Lights Books, Pocket Poet Series, p.38)