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)
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