El what? Or, what’s in a name

A friend asked about El Camion Vacilador – how on earth I came up with that name for my blog and what in the heck it means. It’s an obscure reference, at least today. But it pays homage to my favorite American writer, John Steinbeck. 

His classic but largely overlooked book, “The Wayward Bus,” published in 1947, was originally written in Spanish and titled El Camion Vacilador. I suppose I could have just as easily titled the blog “Sweetheart,” the name of the bus in Steinbeck’s novel, but that’s a bit too sappy for even my taste, not to mention the shivers that trickle down my spine when a stranger has lassoed me with such pet names. (It’s a funny thing: pet names are OK from those close to you, but they scream “little woman” and carry all of the accompanying baggage when a stranger pelts them. Dad, for instance, can call me Pumpkin all day long and I’ll grin like the little girl I was when he first christened me with that name. Ditto for tincy, tiny, tuncket. But I find it tough to forgive the passing stranger who thrusts a pet name my way. Too familiar. Too condescending. Too assuming.) 

But back to El Camion Vacilador. In Gary Scharnhorst’s introduction in the Penguin Classics edition, he writes…”As for the title: The first synopsis of the story, Steinbeck remembered, ‘was written in Spanish’ and ‘was called El Camion Vacilador. The word vacilador, or the verb vacilar, is not translatable unfortunately, and it’s a word we really need in English because ‘vacilando’ means that you’re aiming at someplace, but you don’t care much whether you get there. We don’t have such a word in English. Wayward has an overtone of illicitness or illegality, based of course on medieval lore where wayward men were vagabonds. But vacilador is not a vagabond at all. Wayward was the nearest English word that I could find.’” 

That summary – and the book’s gentle pace and curious look at people who find themselves and their lives intertwined on a journey together but apart – resonates for me. It reminds me of Shel Silverstein’s “Rosalie’s Good Eats Café,” which Bobby Bare later condensed into a song by the same title. Maybe there’s a hint of desperate melancholy, like in  Edward Hopper’s painting “Nighthawks” (see image below, courtesy of The Art Institute of Chicago), but, to me, it’s a reminder of how intertwined our lives are. And that the journey is the adventure – not the final destination. After all, the final destination, really, is a hole in the ground at our funeral. 

 

On that note, here’s another homage to Steinbeck, a column he wrote in 1954, during McCarthyism: 

I am a Revolutionary 

By John Steinbeck, 1954 

“I read a piece about myself recently written to reassure my readers that I am not a revolutionary. At the same time the Communist Party denounced me in the same terms. I hasten to inform both the extreme right and that the pseudo right which calls itself left that they are both wrong. I am a very dangerous revolutionary. 

“The communists of our day are about as revolutionary as the Daughters of the American Revolution. Having accomplished their coup and established their empire, revolution is their nightmare. They had to hunt down and eliminate everyone with the slightest revolutionary tendency, even those who helped accomplish their own. Where they have absolute power they have established the most reactionary governments in the word, governments so fearful of revolt that they must make every man and informer against his fellows, and layer their society with secret police. And like most insecure organizations, they must constantly enlarge to cover the fact that they are unsound. Any other group following their pattern they would call imperialistic. 

“Me and my work they do not like and have eliminated where they have had the power. My books are forbidden entrance to Soviet centers not because they are not revolutionary but because they are. Indeed any criticism is construed as revolt by the two great wings of reaction. 

“The bait of the Marxist movement was that once free of bourgeois controls the masses would cease to be masses and would emerge as individuals. Authority and power would melt away. This dream has long since been abandoned except in the baited areas. Far from disappearing, power and oppression have increased. The so-called masses are more lumpen than ever. Any semblance of the emergence of the individual is instantly crushed and the doctrine of the party and state above everything has taken the place of the theory of liberated men. 

“The victim of this savagely applied system is the individual. Individuality must be destroyed because it is dangerous to all reactionary plans because the individual is creative and creativeness outside the narrow pattern of the status quo cannot be tolerated. Creativeness has at its foundation in inspection, criticism and rearrangement, and all of these are anathem to reaction. Thought, which is the exclusive property of the individual, must be stamped out. The individual human brain working alone is the only creative organ in nature. The group creates nothing although it sometimes carries out the creation of the individual. Reaction must make its choice – it must eliminate question and criticism as dangerous since such systems must protect themselves from close scrutiny. But by eliminating the individual, they must also give up the work of the individual. They must give up literature, music, art. But they must also give up versatility. They must bring into being a true lumpen human who accepts without question, who works without personal purpose, who does not conceive improvisation. Such systems, by the very nature of their self-protection, destroy any possibility of either greatness or permanence. 

“Herein is my revolt. I believe in and will fight for the right of the individual to function as an individual without pressure from any direction. I am unalterably opposed to any interference with the creative mind. It may be wrong but out of it have come the only rights we know. I am opposed to these pressures and constrictions no matter where they arise in my own country or in any other. This is true revolt, not the robot chanting of brain-washed zombies. I realize the necessity for washing brains. Thought must be washed out, for thought is the present danger to and the inevitable destroyer of reaction. 

“The greatest and most permanent revolution we knew took place when all men finally discovered that they had souls, individually important. This concept permanently changed the face of the world. But it has another step to go. The release of the individual mind to a sense not only of its value but of its preciousness will cause an even greater change. Such a revolution is on the way. No system of policing and conditioning can long survive. And I place myself at the service of this revolutionary cause. The minds of individual men must and will be free.”