A Gulf Polyphony
Archival recordings from the Persian gulf; pearling vessels would carry a singer (Nahhām) to lead the crew in choral hymns of protection against monsters of the deep.
1.
What is it? That characterizes our waking world? The somnambulant, by contrast, is sleepily familiar and ready-to-hand, marked by fugues of highway hypnosis. We arrive, ahistorical, at our destination, without memory of the drive. We dream-walk through the images projected by our nervous system, unperturbed by frictions and incoherences that might otherwise break us into conscious, sober alertness.
In the Acts of Thomas, a third century Apocrypha, a prince is sent from home with journey-provisions and a compact: to inherit, he must steal a pearl from a cave-coiled, loud-breathing serpent. He travels to Egypt in pursuit of the pearl, and attempts to cloak his presence in surrogates: “And I dressed as they dressed, that I might not seem foreign.” But the locals see through his disguise and dose his meal with narcotics.
And I forgot that I was a King’s son, and became a servant unto their king. I forgot all concerning the Pearl for which my Parents had sent me; and from the weight of their victuals I sank down into a deep sleep.
I’m sitting at a Xi'an Famous Foods and someone says, “In New York you lose your place; in Berlin, you lose your mind.” Which is what Malick’s Knight of Cups is all about: traveling to a distant land on some urgent mission and forgetting why we came. Here it’s the druggy hedonism and amnesia of a honey-trap Hollywood, a way of dealing with the discouragement of ambitions stymied; an ego salve; a convenient forgetting; an island of lost boys; Peggy Lee singing “Is That All There Is?” as the afters fade into dawn. Always falling into another world, always forgetting where we came from, the sleep of pearls, a previous life . . .
When our princely, dozing narrator fails to return home with his object, his parents, and all their Kingdom's nobles, convene to send a message, to awaken him. “From Us: King of Kings, thy Father, And thy Mother, Queen of the Dawn-land; and from Our Second, thy Brother; to thee, Son, down in Egypt, Our Greeting! Up and arise from thy sleep, Give ear to the words of Our Letter!” And the message they wrote said: “Wake up anon. If you're reading this, you've been in a coma. We've tried everything to get through to you. This is a new technique. We don't know where our message will end up in your dream. Please wake up. We miss you.”
Always a sense of lost home, of lost paradise: put your head on the train tracks, ascend a level in dreamland. Gnostic transcendence through suicide: all these things that I’ve done; all these selves that I’ve become. Take them out to pasture, more ways of escaping your history; always the dream of awakening, enlightenment; always the realities of lethargy and darkness. Sleepwalking through habit, awakened by defamiliarization. One level of social reality transcended, zoomed out and contextualized. The loss of consciousness a loss of self; the sense of self a sense of mission over time. Always questing, always seeking a grail on the Other Side. A pearl of wisdom, a nugget of enlightenment; something distilled or compressed, something hidden in the deep; something worth diving for.
2.
What awakens us into the world? The surprising, the remarkable—that which defies our expectations, breaks us from the top-down projections of a model. A message from the other side, from the excess that our worldview fails to account for. Narrative begins with the remarkable, with a deviation from dreamland that’s worth talking about. A story is first and foremost a story of an ecosystem disrupted—and of the protagonists who adapt to the disruption, or fail to. The hero at first refuses the call—in Piagetian terms, he attempts in vain to assimilate what must be accommodated. To ignore anomaly, or justify languor. It would be so much easier to explain away the incoming sense data, rather than update the model. To continue sleepwalking, instead of re-strategize.
For patching a model begins where pride ends, with the admission of a patchwork mind. This admission is one of vulnerability, of the vast and unknown wilderness which surpasses our capacity for understanding. Our habits prove insufficient and must change; old and cherished beliefs, loyal as dogs, must be taken out back. And like the disruption of routine which provokes it—like the alien irritant which disrupts our routine—such admissions are often greeted with superstitious fear. The neighborhood is abuzz, the doors locked but the peepholes occupied; a contagious curiosity spreads throughout town: something queer is afoot.
A few—often by virtue of themselves being queer or alien—see something else in the irritant, the anomaly, the vulnerability: the gleaming potential of a pearl. How a friction—an introduction of the foreign into the familiar—might be the seed for lustrous layering, an accumulative, adaptive beauty. These characters are often the heroes of our stories—even if, at first, they feel only dread at the hymn of the unknown.
Come, and hear the song of Steinbeck’s Pearl, and of the man who wandered from seashore to mountaintop after sacking the oyster beds of their holy treasure. Many were the woes he suffered in his trek from seabed to mountain-peak. Listen to the establishing of themes, the variants introduced—hear the ruptures in its stream, the bringing of dangers and dissonance.
Kino, the Indian hero of our post-war fabular, goes diving in search of a pearl that might pay a doctor to save his scorpion-bitten son. His song begins with venomous peril and ultimate vulnerability, which in turn yields his discovery of ultimate treasure within an ancient, untouched oyster. Visions of the future play on the silvery surface of the pearl, and a chorus of trumpets rise in his ears. There is a music of evil playing below it as well—a deep, pulsing bassline, something ancient and primordial—but he chooses not to hear it, chooses to think only of the canoe the pearl will buy him, of his son educated and well-dressed. And I said, is this not me the author describes? Who thinks with such envy of his friends’ positions, while conveniently bracketing their cost?
And Kino saw Kino in the pearl, Kino holding a Winchester carbine. . . . It was the rifle that broke down the barriers. This was an impossibility, and if he could think of having a rifle, whole horizons were burst and he could rush on. . . . [His wife] Juana looked up, and her eyes were wide at Kino’s courage and at his imagination. And electric strength had come to him now the horizons were kicked out.
This moment costs him his first-born; a simple and satisfied life becomes complicated and perilous. To possess great treasure is to be robbed of it—a lesson known well by the oyster. (To even be suspected of treasure—to be indistinguishable from those who possess treasure—is to become a target. This is the lesson of the oyster.) For the pearl never belonged to Kino. He sees in it a better future for himself, and robs the oyster beds to attain such a future. The men who strive to steal the pearl from Kino in turn are motivated by that same desire, this desire that drives all the events and conflicts of the world.
Juana, Kino’s wife, has a worldly wisdom in her; she does not dare dream as he does, knows that the erasure of limits is the erasure of self. She hides the excitement on her face behind a shawl. She knows that to desire too strongly drives the luck away: you must want it just enough, and you must be very tactful with God or the gods, or they will punish you. She hears the evil music,[1] and she does not disregard it just because it taints her hope, or contradicts what she wishes to believe. But even her husband, after speaking the prophecy of the pearl—of declaring that they would now be married in the church, and that his son would go to school—knows well enough to become afraid of his own speech. His hand instinctively clutches the pearl and closes off its light, possessive. By speaking his dream of the future, he has made it something that can be taken away from him.
Kino’s future was real, but having set it up, other forces were set up to destroy it, and this he knew, so that he had to prepare to meet and attack. . . . And to meet the attack, Kino was already making a hard skin for himself against the world. . . . He could feel a shell of hardness closing over him.
A shell to protect the pearl. He has lost his old world, having declared it dissatisfactory, and now “he must clamber on to a new one.” In the rich soil of his hope, he has planted the seeds of disappointment; in the ownership of the ultimate treasure, he is Gollumized with terror at its possible loss. In possessing that ultimate panacea, which all around him envy and covet, he has made himself an enemy of his neighbors, standing between them and the consummation of their desires. The Catholic priest, coming to bless the gem, brings into Kino’s hut the recurrent music of evil, bending his snake-tongue for a cut of the prize.
It is something strange, to write a parable that punishes hope. It seems to go against the modern spirit, the Christian spirit, the gnostic spirit. What is a Catholic God to an Indian under Spanish colonialism? Where the Apocrypha tell of Thomas’s exile, and his return from exile by way of the pearl, in Steinbeck it is the discovery of the pearl which casts Kino from Eden. It is only in the pearl’s renunciation that some earlier equilibrium may be restored.
The Gospel of Matthew likens the Kingdom of Heaven to the finding of a pearl, a Pearl of the World. He who wishes to gain this ultimate treasure must sacrifice everything on its behalf; it is a final and total solution; a form of transcendence and immortality. All of man’s hopes solved by a single token, by a lottery ticket.[2] Pearl as symbol of the pristine—divine ideality, virginal flawlessness—but also a means of return to lost purity and paradise.[3] Not just the untainted, but the alchemically transfigured, the “gleaming goal of evolution.”[4] Oṃ maṇi padme hūṃ—praise to the jewel of the lotus, a traveling path to perfection.
This is what Kino sees, and it ruins him, pulls him out of the stable ecology of small and everyday practices which have so far lent him a good if modest life. The pursuit of panacea, Steinbeck seems to be telling us, is itself evil. The novel is published two years after the fall of the Final Solution. Kino’s pearl is the size of a gull’s egg, and white as Ahab’s whale.
Divine intervention
Always my intention
So I take my time
I’ve been looking for something
I’ve always wanted
But was never mine
Every goddess a let down
Every idol a bring down
It gets you down
But the search for perfection
Your own predilection
Goes on and on and on and on
Oh mother of pearl[5]
3.
“Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend you.”
—KJB, Matthew 7:6
Your Google News report this week for keyword “pearls”: “Pearl Jewelry Market to Reach $42 Billion, Globally, by 2031: The growth of the global pearl jewelry market is driven by factors such as increasing demand for pearls in fashion jewelry, availability of pearls in various shapes, colors, and sizes, and easy availability of cultured pearls.” “Australia’s Janet Wilson Says It’s Time To Unclutch The Pearls and Start Planning for Immigration.” “Jessie Ware rocks her ‘Pearls’ on the That Feels Good! Tour: On her new track ‘Pearls,’ Jessie Ware sings, ‘La-la-la-la, la-la-la-la, la-la-la-la-la (ooh-ooh-ooh). La-la-la-la-la, Excuse me, I don't know about you, but I think it's time to shake it til the pearls fall.’” “Hailey Bieber Channels Audrey Hepburn in an Elegant Black Dress and Plenty of Pearls.” “How Bahrain Is Preserving Its Centuries-Old Natural Pearl Industry: Qatar's Neighbouring State is the Only Country to Ban the Cultivation of Artificial Pearls to Maintain Its Prized Cultural Tradition. Faten Mattar, who works at her family-run jewelry shop, emphasizes that each pearl is unique.”
At its simplest? A symbol of the beauty wrought by irritation, by the intrusion of the foreign into the familiar. The byproduct of spending on defense infrastructure—like how M&Ms, menstrual pads, and Pringles were born of American military budgets, by DoD and rocket research. Pliny and the ancients believed that pearls formed from tear-drops: if pressure makes diamonds, pain makes pearls.
From Greco-Persian margaritēs or marvarit, for pearl, to the Latin name Margarita, Anglicized to Margarite and Gallicized to Marguerite and Hispanicized to Margarita, from whence we derive the triple sec lime juice tequila cocktail.
Their appearance is somewhat random, incredibly rare, and the fruit of violent prying into the unknown. One in ten thousand oysters, if you’re not picky. One in a million if you’re going for gem-grade. Which means that, for every natural pearl on a necklace, several tons of soft scalpelled “lip-like flesh” sits decaying on a beach somewhere. That’s Steinbeck’s phrase: Pearls inside lips, a kind of fertility metaphor. By “pearl diver,” what I meant to say was “womb-robber.”
Image from The Book of Pearls.
A mollusk has a hard outer shell, an enclosure, a wall built from calcium carbonite; it has a mantle with a cavity for input and output, respiration and excretion. Hair-like cilia act as sensory organs, assessing the environment outside the mollusk and passing information through the nervous system. Gills bring in water, and osphradia gatekeep—careful sensors shutting out unwanted chems and sediment.[6] Mouths and radula bring in algae; nephridia kidneys flush waste out an anus; digestion is done intracellularly. A circulatory system transports nutrients and waste materials throughout the network of organs, each organ itself a network of cells. Perhaps the system is open: blood and and interstitial fluid bathe the interior, a stock of resources made regularly available. Perhaps the system is closed: a branching highway system, a channel-stream of blood—like a river delta, like the deposits of alluvial plains.
Filtering their way through waters, a part that doesn’t belong—an outsider, an alien intruder that doesn't fit, that doesn't cooperate—gets past the pearly gates, is walled off, closed-off and smoothed over. A sort of scar tissue. The pearl is a child of the moon, a lunar symbol, a fertility symbol, the product of a private and pregnant interior. Pearls like tears, pearls like semen, pearls like rice. For thirty-one years, Pham Van Huong of Dong Nai, Vietnam has been perforating young mussel shells and inserting miniature cement sculptures of Buddha and Maitreya and Jesus, a technique dating back at least to seventeenth-century China. As long as a decade may pass before he harvests his coated offspring, which he has sought to register under intellectual property rights. Here is the blood, here is the flesh.
Earthquake epicenter and radiation of force.
What does it take, diving for pearls? Breath-holding, and the navigation of murky darks; pressurization and depressurization and repressurization. Maintaining some kind of equilibrium, an equalization of self to atmosphere, internal to external. Modern diving—anything over thirty feet—risks the infamous bends, though this is less a concern for ancient free divers; the effect comes mostly from the nitrogen used in scuba tanks. Still, hardcover free-divers, like a pearl diver, run the risk over regular ascents, and must take mitigating measures. How do the bends work? “You do it to yourself, just you”—diving deep and coming up too damn fast, rising up too quick from the muck, desperate for air, desperate for sky. They call it divers disease: the pressure decreases too fast, and previously compressed matter becomes decompressed, causing gaseous bubbles in the blood that rip holes in the body, torn flesh yielding hidden spheres. Rising to the surface too quickly: not so different from becoming rich too quickly, from seeking enlightenment too quickly, from advancing your tech-tree too quickly. The danger of a rapid change in atmosphere or environmental conditions. The world changes too fast for you to adapt. There’s an entire academic sub-field dedicated to this temporal lag and mismatch in the culturesphere; it’s called the sociology of disruption.
Pham Van Huong miniatures.
“The ringing of the pail, the motes of sand dislodged / The shucking, quick and bright / The twinned and cast off shells reveal a single heart of white.”[7] The oyster is a factory inside a fortress, which we slurp down by the dozen.
4.
When Kino discovers the Pearl—when routine is broken by the remarkable—news of the event ripples from its epicenter like a terremoto. Prying open the massive oyster in his canoe, barely daring to hope, Kino howls in triumph and his fellow divers dig their paddles into the sea, racing to see what he’s found. Then:
If every single man and woman, child and baby, acts and conducts itself in a known pattern and breaks no walls and differs with no one and experiments in no way and is not sick and does not endanger the ease and peace of mind or steady unbroken flow of the town, then that unit can disappear and never be heard of. But let one man step out of the regular thought or the known and trusted pattern, and the nerves of the townspeople ring with nervousness, and communication travels over the nerve lines of the town. . . . News seems to move faster than small boys can scramble and dart to tell it, faster than women can call it over the fences. Before Kino and Juana and the other fishers had come to Kino’s brush house, the nerves of the town were pulsing and vibrating with the news—Kino had found the Pearl of the World.
A Pearl of the World, the World Navel, the World Egg: the home of pure white light and body-temperature salt water that we long to return to; our Utopia, our Eden; a Pearl of Heaven, O’Dell calls it in The Black Pearl, the utopia of after and before, the paradise of lifelessness. All circles vanish; in everything, we find nothing; in obliteration, we seek salvation. At the end of all quests lies the end of all questing.
Various world eggs & world navels.
And what is “the news”? It is what is new, of course: the remarkable, that which is worth remarking on; that which awakens us from sleep-walking. We do not report that the sun rose or the people went to work, but if the sun fails to rise, it will be reported. The unexpected, the novel, the foreign, the strange. We wake up to the news, and read it in the morning to start our days (though we sometimes feel a lullabye quality to its repetitions, and suspect our paper serves mainly to sing us back asleep).
Let one man step out of the regular thought or the known and trusted pattern, and the nerves of the townspeople ring with nervousness and communication travels over the nerve lines of the town. It is this self-consciousness of the social body which creates normative pressure—the town a site of ongoing surveillance, the punishing of difference, the training of members through feedback. There is a violence in its re-annealing, in its smothering of irritants.
The subject of the news: that difference which makes a difference, relevance our religion. And what a difference a Pearl of the World makes. Suddenly every man became related to Kino and his pearl, taken up by dreams and schemes and futures and needs and wishes and lusts and hungers. A vision of so many possible futures—paths in the labyrinth once thought to be hedged-off, which might at last be traveled.
The colonial doctor now comes to see Kino’s bitten son, dreaming of a past life in Paris—long-departed, much yearned for, an Eden in his memoried mind. The illness of an infant is relevant news, now that the its peasant parents have money to pay him. Maybe he can use his cunning to sense where the primitives have stashed their treasure. Send someone to dig it up where it’s hidden. The toxin from the scorpion has passed, but the doctor is a predator in his own right. He gives a small, white-powdered poison to the baby, which causes little Coyotito to foam at the mouth. Then he claims the scorpion’s toxins have finally set in, and how fortunate he is here now to provide the antidote. Like a newspaper man, he plants the seed of anxiety, furnishes evidence to confirm that anxiety, and then offers himself as final solution. Kino and his wife suspect this, but without medical knowledge, what can they do but trust?
“It is as I thought,” [the doctor] said. “The poison has gone inward and it will strike soon. Come look!” He held the eyelid down. “See—it is blue.” And Kino, looking anxiously, saw that indeed it was a little blue. And he didn't know whether or not it was always a little blue. But the trap was set. He couldn’t take the chance.
Steinbeck is a populist, a defender of the people, and therefore an enemy of “experts” and their weaponization of prestige. The doctor is a scorpion, a parasite, who dreams only of drinking French wine, and of the respect and luxury the Pearl might bring him. Even when Juana successfully makes a traditional poultice for the child’s swollen shoulder—“as good a remedy as any and probably better than the doctor could have done”—her apothecary lacks the doctor’s authority. And when Kino goes to sell the pearl, the dealers collude to weaponize their knowledge against him. How can I get a fair price, when I do not know what the pearl dealer gets or gives for his wares in other towns, wonders Kino. His lack of knowledge makes him vulnerable; his dream of an education and literacy, for Coyotito, is a dream of agency, of escaping the food chain, of avoiding exploitation.
It is an old story. In the mid-2000s, a Filipino fisherman discovered a seventy-five-pound pearl, rippled and curved. Having tossed down anchor during a storm at sea, the fisherman noticed it had become stuck on a giant clam, which he pulled upon his deck. Can we picture the scene? The oyster of the world, still breathing; the knife sliding in through soft flesh to sever beating muscle; a two-handed prying of desperate-clenched lips. The fisherman, we’re told, was ignorant of its monetary value, keeping it only as good luck charm. Now known as the Pearl of Puerto, the pearl was given over to city officials for “safe-keeping” and put on public display; at the time of writing, it is valued at $150 million. What compensation was given to the fisherman? What compensation ought be? Who owns the pearl, if not the clam? What colonial practice is this, claiming ownership in discovery?
Once, Kino’s La Paz was a harbor for Cortés, a failed Spanish extraction point. Today, it is the capital of Baja California, its economy dominated by tourism and silver mining, with seasonal connections to the Dallas and Phoenix International Airports.
The Puerto Pearl on display.
5.
In the Chinese New Year celebration, enormous puppeteered dragons are danced by a coordinating team of performers, led by a pilot holding a large sphere, symbolic of a pearl. Like a carrot to a horse, the pearl leads the pursuing dragon, chasing enlightenment. We ask: Is this freedom? Where the pearl goes, so goes the dragon, a slave to love. Livestock would be sacrificed in these festivals, to appease the gods before a pearl-dive. Legend says that pearls form within dragons and are carried between their teeth: only by slaying the serpent might its pearls be reaped.
In another tale, a young boy discovers a pearl that, when planted beneath crops, causes them to re-grow in abundance overnight. Living with his mother in drought-stricken poverty, he falls asleep dreaming of an end to their hunger. But the townspeople soon learn of the pearl and extract its secret from the mother through violence. And the son swallows the pearl, desperate to keep it safe and hidden. And a flood covers the land so the crops grow abundant. And the boy becomes dragon, taking to the sky.
Steinbeck’s nature—like his men—is always in conflict. There is a biological humanism to Steinbeck’s work, a way of both appreciating human spirit and grounding it in ecology, obeying the same principles as a mollusk or starfish. Over and over, the interplay of birds or insects mirror the same dramas in which Kino and his family are caught, fleeing from those who wish to rob them: “Kino watched with the detachment of God while a dusty ant frantically tried to escape the sand trap an ant lion had dug for him.” Or: “Near the brush fence two roosters bowed and feinted at each other with squared wings and neck feathers ruffed out.” Or: “Out in the estuary a tight woven school of small fishes glittered and broke water to escape a school of great fishes that drove in to eat them.”
This conflict is defined by power and scale, standing for the power and scale disparities of the villagers and the educated imperials of the city. The discrepancy is one of adaptation, action, and alteration; the oppressed, in one arena, become oppressors in another, never integrating the two roles, or recognizing themselves in their casualties. For the oyster was the first victim, its belly torn open, left to desiccate, forgotten in the bed of the rowboat as Kino holds its pearl aloft. Is Kino’s fate not karmic retribution? But then, for a short instant, we sense in Kino’s gaze a momentary recognition as, god-like, he disrupts an anthill, and watches neutrally, curious, as it re-anneals a changed landscape. “Kino sat on the ground and stared at the earth in front of him. He watched the ants moving, a little column of them near to his foot, and he put his foot in their path. Then the column climbed over his instep and continued on its way, and Kino left his foot there and watched them move over it.”
Kino’s fall is a law of nature. Not a metaphysical or theological ideal, a parable of a punished sinner, but a naturalistic description of power’s workings. Pursued by those who desire his pearl, Kino must flee from danger into danger, must rapidly ascend from seashore to mountaintop. His grass hut is burned, his canoe scourged. He runs “for the high place, as nearly all animals do when they are pursued.” He departs under a waning moon, white and glimmering in reflected light.
He will not give up the pearl, though his wife and brother urge him to. It is now his inheritance, like a ring to a Baggins. Cursed riches, misfortune masquerading as fortune. It is now his identity, a part of him. “I have it, and I will keep it. I might have given it as a gift, but now it is my misfortune and my life and I will keep it.” So stubborn, Juana thinks, these men. But possession of the pearl—possession of the prophecies, the visions of his future—has become the central fact of Kino's life: “This pearl is become my soul. If I give it up I shall lose my soul.” So they set out. “It is new ground you are walking on,” Kino’s brother tells him, counseling care. “You do not know the way.”
The wind blew fierce and strong, and it pelted them with bits of sticks, sand, and little rocks. Juana and Kino gathered their clothing tighter about them and covered their noses and went out into the world. . . . Kino could feel the blown sand against his ankles and he was glad, for he knew there would be no tracks. The little light from the stars made out for him the narrow road through the brushy country. . . . There was a rush of exhilaration . . . some ancient thing out of the past of his people was alive in him. The wind was at his back and the stars guided him.
Sand, the wind-flung irritants of the oyster’s pearl, lodging in his soft, fleshy eyes. And the wind is like the tide, that shifting field of forces, of pushing and pulling, against which—to maintain stability, an equilibrium—mussels and oysters buffet themselves by anchor to rock. In nineteenth-century pearl fisheries, thousands of divers would converge on identified beds, dumping oysters ashore by the millions to rot and decompose, the valves relaxing and the pearls tumbling out. The Indians of La Paz pry them off the rocks with knives—pry from the land which grounds and anchors them in the vast, sweeping tidal sea. And when their pearl is robbed, they are dropped back to the bottom, where schools of fish have formed a grift economy off the excess calories dumped by pearlers unused.[8] Is our Kino not such an oyster, homeless and uprooted?[9]
The trackers—these men who “could read a broken straw or a little tumbled pile of dust,” men “as sensitive as hounds”—read the road, discover signs of his wind-swept passage. Up, up they follow him, into the “naked granite mountains, rising out of erosion rubble and standing monolithic against the sky.” Cast from his home, does Kino seek rocks to anchor on, or a heaven in the holy mountain? Does the salvation he seeks lie ahead or behind him? It is the same dream, an eschatology of the womb. His gnostic journey begins at the bottom of the sea-floor, and ends in the sky.
6.
“In that day, the Lord shall punish the piercing serpent . . . and he shall slay the dragon that is in the sea.”
– Isaiah, epigraph to O’Dell’s Black Pearl
Some mythic traditions associate the pearl with immortality and prolonged life, the Vedic “daughter of soma.” Corpses are adorned with pearl necklaces and shrouds to prevent their decay underground. The pearl, they say, is born of Apollonian sky-stuff, lightning or rain or the teardrops of the moon; its celestial essence settles in lakebed muck, to be uncovered and brought to beatific light, as if a gnostic journey.
When Kino and Juana return to their village, they carry the body of Coyotito, killed by a stray bullet from the trackers. Kino, at last convinced to part with his pearl, has cast it into the depths of the sea, and its music has faded—first to a whisper, then out of hearing. It is the Pearl of Heaven, and that is its curse.
Scott O’Dell’s Black Pearl is based on the same Mexican folk story as Steinbeck’s Pearl, set in the same town of La Paz, its peace upset by the discovery of an egg-sized irritant. In O’Dell’s telling, the Pearl of the Universe comes not with a Song of Evil, but with a more embodied twin: the Manta Diablo. A sea serpent, a dragon of the waters, a manta ray which was, perhaps, once real but has now long since passed into legend. And every telling of the legend is different—more teeth, fewer eyes, a different color. Once, the Diablo had been “a thing with claws and a forked tongue” who roamed on land and fouled the air, causing the crops to wither and die—until it was banished to the sea by a Catholic Father. It is a bedtime story, a means of scaring children into household chores, believed and yet disbelieved. But the old stories speak truth in their own fantastic ways; The Black Pearl is a faith narrative, a conversion testimony: “Now that I have seen the Manta Diablo and struggled with him during the whole of one night and part of a day, in the waters of our Vermilion Sea . . . I wonder that I ever doubted. . . . [But] before I tell what I know about the Manta Diablo, I must also tell about The Pearl of Heaven.”
The Pearl of Paradise, which summons the devil; the Garden of Eden, which houses a snake. The manta and the pearl are bound up, brotherly, Janus-faced, the manta “the most beautiful creature” our narrator has ever seen, its cave the location of the pearl’s discovery; and when the gem is taken, the manta ruthlessly pursues its possessors, sinking ships and raising storms.
Where Kino is dirt-poor and indigenous, O’Dell’s Ramón Salazar is something like the descendent of Kino’s dreams for Coyotito. His grandfather was once the most educated man in town, his father a wealthy pearl dealer who owns a six-ship fleet and is renowned from Guaymas to Guadalajara “for the fine pearls he wrested from the sea.” In the sturdy brick walls of his father’s office, there is a slit window—narrow enough that a thief cannot slip through, yet wide enough to surveil the bay: “the men who work there on the beach opening the shells cannot tell whether they are being watched or not, which sometimes is a good thing.”
Kino is driven by a humble desire to save his infant, though pride and ambition slowly corrupt him. Ramón is motivated by spite and pride from the get-go, the desire to live up to his father’s legacy and impress a boastful diver named Gaspar Ruiz. Ramón is insecure about his size and strength, his youth and his thin wrists and his inexperience—the way that his father’s wealth and ambitions for his son’s future have given that son a sheltered life. It is against this backdrop that the Pearl of the World presents itself—as a total panacea for earning his father’s respect, for the admiration of Ruiz, and as an initiation into manhood, a full-fledged member of Salazar & Sons. An old Indian, Luzon, tries to warn Ramón against pursuing the Pearl, counsels him to cast it back in the sea. (His wisdom, contrasted with Ramón’s pride, makes him the analogue to Kino’s Juana.) The Pearl, Luzon says, may promise everything Ramón ever wanted—but it threatens to take everything he has away. But the Old Ways are rarely heeded by the young.
In warning against transcendence, these books are anti-alchemical, anti-utopian. Immortality, they seem to suggest, is equivalent to death. It is the same lesson of Gore Verbinski’s Curse of the Black Pearl, where the titular ship’s crew win immortality through the theft of blood-gold—previously the treasury of Cortés—and seek desperately, then, to undo it. Questing for shortcuts, blinded by possibility, we suppress all thought of risk or cost—and lose what is most valuable to us in the search for Heaven. Transcendence and death are blurred in the esoteric traditions: gnostic ascension, purification by fire, a crossing through to the other side. Break on through (to the other side). But on the other side of the great barrier is obliteration.
After Ramón finds the pearl, his father donates it to the church, and when a storm finds their fleet on the open seas, his father, captaining the ships, pridefully believes himself protected by the Madonna, and refuses to turn in. The ships are broken on rocky reefs; only Gaspar Ruiz survives. Here too, pride breaketh:
[Ruiz] paused and raised his chin, striking a pose to show how my father had looked [when he had made the decision not to seek shelter from the storm]. It reminded me of the moment in the parlor when he had given the pearl to Father Gallardo and afterwards when he told my mother that the House of Salazar would be favored in Heaven, now and forever.
Ruiz, returning from the shipwrecked fleet, attempts to steal the pearl from the church, taking the young Salazar son with him, as his reputable name attached to the gem would raise its price at market. Where Kino flees by land, Ruiz and Salazar flee by sea—but the pair are pursued by a great ray, the Manta Diablo, which Ruiz refuses to recognize as such. He goes down like Ahab with the manta, leaping onto its back, driving a knife deep into its body, and being pulled under when the devil-ray heads for the depths of Hades. Ramón, like Ishmael, is the lone survivor of the manta, the only one to have seen the great monster and live to tell the story.
7.
Today, most pearls are pre-seeded. A non-pearl body is inserted into the oyster, which coats it with nacre, that lustrous layering; artificial pearls, from the outside, are indistinguishable from natural ones—but slice one open, and there is a false core, two-thirds or more of the pearl’s volume. Below the nacre of Christ, a heart of cement.
The technique is relatively recent; while the alchemical search for cultivation, and even some successes, appear to date back as early as seventeenth-century China—perhaps even the third century Red Sea[10]—those techniques necessary for consistent cultivation of rounded (rather than blistered) pearls did not arrive until 1905 in Japan, with what is today called the Mise-Nishikawa method. The technique was still not known to the larger world until the 1950s, when during the post-War American occupation, a marine biologist named Cahn published the first study of the Japanese pearl industry. (Prior to this, a laboratory in La Paz had tried to breed a pearl-bearing oyster—but realized, according to Joan Younger Dickinson, that “it was not healthy conditions, but stress” the oysters needed.)
It was Kokichi Mikimoto, “Pearl King,” who in the early twentieth century had popularized the technique and founded the great Mikimoto house of pearls, around the time of the Mise-Nishikawa breakthrough. Cahn, in his study, narrativized this popularization in similar terms of power which characterize Steinbeck’s Pearl: Mise and Nishikawa, young and powerless when they made their discoveries, were denied patent for their pearl cultivation techniques; Mikimoto’s mercantile interests, meanwhile, aligned with those of the Japanese government, who granted it to him instead, sharing his profits and leasing him coastal land for his pearling beds. This, at least, is the story; Dickinson, tracing the history of the discoveries, finds Cahn’s judgment harsh, and his elevation of the young, tinkerer-scientist underdogs as playing out genius tropes. She argues, first, that Mise and Nishikawa likely derived the inspiration for their technique from other, anonymous Japanese or Australian oystermen; second, that Mikimoto’s commercial perfection of the cultivation technique signified as much an advance as its original discovery.[11]
We have here, regardless, a familiar story of man’s gradual gained mastery over nature, where pearl prices become accessible to the larger public in the way of tech eternal. What had once been the teardrops of the gods, a rare natural beauty, could now be consistently produced in assembly lines. Yet a spiritual hollowness accompanies the literal nacre coating. This is Ramón’s problem: his concern with image, his upset at the braggadocio of Gaspar Ruiz, and the pride which binds it all together. The pride he taketh in the celebratory parade, in being known as the finder of the pearl, all emptied out, all revealed as hollow and dissatisfying once attained. It is an aristocratic flaw, part of the class difference that distinguishes the sheltered adolescent Ramón from Steinbeck’s hardened father Kino.
Something here in the sense of opticratics, something against essences,[12] something about the influence and importance of appearances and their consequence. Something about goldbricking and polishing shit, the false core and the lustrous surface, Young singing “I crossed the ocean for a heart of gold.” Identity not in self-concept but in action. Others dissent: “My whole effort is to remain at the surface. I don’t believe in depth. If you deeply look into a person—in everyone—you find shit. I believe in surface. I think true metaphysics is the metaphysics of surface. If you do something great it’s not deep in you. There is not an undiscovered pearl, no! That pearl is always shit.”[13] The iridescent sheen of a pearl—sometimes called luster—is a strange sort of non-color: where dyes or pigments get their hue from the absorption of light, pearls, like opals and butterfly wings, derive their appearance from so many millions of tiny mineral prisms scattering light. The Heideggerian explainer, Hubert Dreyfus, in his treatment of Moby Dick, argued that the prism—with its refraction of white light into a rainbow spectrum—served as Melville’s inspiration in making the great whale white. What might he make of this “structural” iridescence?
Abalone nacre up close.
Mise-Nishikawa pearl-grafting tools
A dream of treasure, residing in submerged layers and hidden depths—a vision of gnostic ascension, a fantasy of breakthrough—what universal is this, a three-tiered world of heavenly heavens and subsoil hell? Doubloons buried on Caribbean isles; scraps of text and ancient wisdom preserved on Coptic papyrus; the lost secrets of Roman concrete. “The dream of treasure involves a divinatory look into the future to discover a past that will enrich the present.”[14] Not so different from a hero’s journey. Termas and temas: you are reading the pearly coatings of submerged text—spelunked-for, dug up through geological layers, resource and research retrieved from a depth-search. History’s secrets, sedimented and lingered. The tomb of Tutankhamun. The Aztec gold of a sunken Spanish galleon. The dredged Riace bronzes. If they were not secret—if they were not deeply buried—they would not survive the ages to be surfaced.
All these lustrous layers of text—what truths and falsehoods lie hidden beneath their burnished surface? What pearls do we take with us, from spells here cast by words?
When Thomas awakes, he travels to the cave of the serpent and charms it to sleep, snatching the pearl, regaining the House of Heaven. Shedding his filthy dress, he follows the dawning light east, where his royal robe awaits him, its seams fastened by diamond valves. So the Hymn of Judas Thomas the Apostles, which he spake in prison, is here ended.
•
[1] Music is often linked to magic, which makes sense here—the Pearl is glamorizing Kino, has a hypnotic, magical, of-another-world quality. He completes a miniature hero’s journey with his dive loop—down from the surface, into the underworld, bringing back a boon to bestow upon those he loves. And it makes him suffer, and serves no one, and does those he loves no good. The Pearl is an anti-myth.
[2] Pearls (typically crushed and ground) are a literal (i.e. medical) panacea in traditional Indian and Chinese medicine.
[3] Pearls adorn the Sunni dome of Heaven; al-Bukhari's hadiths describe a pavilion, in Paradise, made from a “single hollow pearl sixty miles wide”; and the Quran likens the heavenly virgins which await believers to “Pearls well-guarded.”
[4] Chevalier and Gheerbrant, Dictionary of Symbols.
[5] Roxy Music, “Mother of Pearl”
[6] “At ease in a tranquil sea, the [valve] muscle is relaxed and the oyster gapes; attacked by an enemy or disturbed, the shell is suddenly shut and can be opened only with difficulty. After some time out of water or when overhot or deprived of oxygen, the muscle weakens in control, the shell opens, and the oyster is gasping. When dying and dead, its shell is open” (Joan Dickinson Younger, The Book of Pearls).
[7] Joanna Newsom, “Divers”
[8] To be unmoored: to lose that interlocking fit between environment and self; to be subject only to the fluctuating tides of fortune.
[9] “If he is caught tranquilly eating he is in danger of being eaten himself from the inside out. Among his predators, however, there are none who yearn for oyster shell, and if he senses a threat, the oyster clamps his shell shut and pulls his byssus inside, makes himself almost impregnable. Storms are not as hard on him as are his fellow sea creatures; he can be dashed against rocks and ripped open, he can be smothered by sand, catapulted onto land by earthquakes but in the quiet lagoons where oysters like to live, these disturbances are rare” (Joan Younger Dickison, The Book of Pearls).
[10] In the West, Linnaeus was among the first to inseminate an oyster, though his technique was unreliable and frequently caused the death of the host.
[11] Mikimoto, secretive from the start, established his pearlery on an island, and walled-in his workshop like an oyster shell as he perfected the cultivation methods.
[12] Chevalier & Gheerbrant: “The quest for the pearl stands for the search for the Sublime Essence hidden in the self.”
[13] Žižek
[14] C. Stewart, “Dreams of Treasure: Temporality, Historicization and the Unconscious”