Are you looking up to saints or sinners?

Who do we revere in public and private, and why?

Oscar Wilde once said that when you are not on your pedestal, you are not interesting. 

As a young girl, I spent a lot of time looking up, and not just because I’m une petite femme. Coming from a religious part of the American south, I looked upward. I revered authors of the books I read, boys I dated, celebrities, religious figures, elders. For much of my life, I situated myself that way - constantly reverent, reflexively assuming others had it figured out and were worthy of my upward gaze and attention. 

When I became an author and a professor, people began to turn that gaze on me, and I felt uncomfortable with it - had I earned it? Should I actively discourage it and reveal to them all the ways I’m flawed and still figuring out how to be a decent human? 

Reverence is a funny thing. I want to say that we simultaneously need more and less of it. I feel much less reverence for accumulated wealth, generational wealth, thinness, celebrity. As I age I’m more impressed with people who are self-made, who have endured pain and made something from it. People who are real students of science, art, the planet, life. I feel increased reverence for character and action - people out in this aching world trying to reduce suffering. I feel deep reverence for the natural world and wish I could make this feeling contagious. Lately that feels like teaching others how to communicate their love for place and other species. 

I’ve been teaching a Coastal Climate course in Monterey, California for the month of January. We’ve been deep in field work - on the water, observing otters, seals, the tension between the built human environment and the gnawing forces of climate change. I am in the unique position of serving as an interpreter - how do we make meaning from these observations? What conversations are we joining? Part of this happens in course design. 

Whenever I draft a syllabus, I ask myself the question: whose work am I elevating? 

And whenever I walk around a town and look at their public monuments, I ask: what hometown hero are they elevating? (and why is it always a man?)

In Monterey, California, John Steinbeck is on the pedestal. Or, officially, a million dollar privately-funded rock statue in the heart of Cannery Row, which he elevated to mythological status through literature, and his eco-philosophical relationship with amateur biologist Ed Ricketts. 

Steinbeck on top, January 2024, Cannery Row

It’s hilarious to me, the ways we memorialize those we revere. There’s a Walt Whitman rest stop complex in New Jersey. Here in Monterey, I regularly pass a Steinbeck Jewelers and a Steinbeck shopping plaza. 

I actually like Steinbeck. He cared about the working man, about popularizing science, about decentralizing humans in the grand scheme of the universe. His private letters reveal him to be decidedly anti-racist, though his work from the 40s doesn’t fully hold up to contemporary scrutiny - and I feel this particularly with his treatment of women. 

And the opening paragraph of Cannery Row is astounding - energetic, sensory, poetic - a true conjuring: 

Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses. Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, “whores, pimps, gamblers and sons of bitches,” by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, “Saints and angels and martyrs and holymen” and he would have meant the same thing.

I also admire Steinbeck’s relationship with biologist Ed Ricketts. Together - and in a friendship which included scholar Joseph Campbell (the hero’s journey) - they theorized that life was like a tidepool, radically interconnected and shaped by place. 

Ricketts had charisma - a whisky-fueled charm that could start cults. He infused his eco-philosophy into his friendships and professional life and by standing on the bridge between science and the humanities, he had a profound influence on the accessibility of scientific thinking and communication, especially around fisheries and ocean health. 

And then there’s Julia Platt - a rare female scientist who studied at UVM, Harvard’s Annex, and Woods Hole - and moved to Germany for a time to complete a PhD. She made massive strides in embryology related to the neural crest, which were discounted by male colleagues until proven correct 50 years later. After moving to Pacific Grove - and being denied jobs despite having a PhD - she devoted herself to ocean health, as the Monterey coastline was heavily polluted by the 25+ working canneries. Fisheries were decimated, the tourism industry was blunted by the horrendous smell and waste, and native species like otters and whales were dwindling. Platt demanded public beach access for citizens, literally taking a hammer to a private fence at iconic Lover’s Point. Intent on making progress, she became the mayor of Pacific Grove at the age of 74 (!) and nearly singlehanded enacted the marine protected area credited with saving the coastline (and the otter). She preserved ecological systems, the possibility of tourism, and access to the natural world for the general public. 

Platt is like the person in the group project who actually did the work. She played the long game - the harder game - making legal progress she wouldn’t even live to see the beauty of. She has a small rock monument you could easily miss at Lover’s Point and most people have never heard of her.

To be honest, I like all three characters - and see a little of all three in myself - but it’s hard not to notice who got the gravitas and the mythology. And the shopping plaza.

I guess what I’m saying is - notice where your gaze is pointed. Who are we looking up to, and why? And I think this is a useful concept for our personal relationships, our professional heroes, our public monuments.

Who looms over us in the public square, the private sphere, or lives on in our hearts and imagination? Who remains in the literary canon, taught to students year over year? Who is out there doing the real work that improves our lives? Who benefits from our reverence - the quality and intensity of our attention? Some people court and accumulate praise and wealth - others reciprocate and distribute it. 

Notice whose feet you’ve placed yourself at, and question where the light and attention might be better spent, or divided - or if it’s time to get off of your knees and do your own meaningful work. 

xo

MMB