Picasso, Steinbeck, and Johnny Goddamn Cash.

A Piscasso selfie. Long have they been fabled in song and story.

John Steinbeck excerpt:

Night scene I

The Hamiltons at the well rig had finished their lunch of Liza’s bread and rat cheese and venomous coffee cooked in a can over the fire. Joe’s eyes were heavy and he was considering how he could get away into the brush to sleep for a while.

Samuel knelt in the sandy soil, looking at the torn and broken edges of his bit. Just before they had stopped for lunch the drill had found something thirty feet down that had mangled the steel as though it were lead. Samuel scraped the edge of the blade with his pocketknife and inspected the scrapings in the palm of his hand. His eyes shone with a childlike excitement. He held out his hand and poured the scrapings into Tom’s hand.

“Take a look at it, son. What do you think it is?”

Joe wandered over from his place in front of the tent. Tom studied the fragments in his hand. “Whatever it is, it’s hard,” he said. “Couldn’t be a diamond that big. Looks like metal. Do you think we’ve bored into a buried locomotive?”

His father laughed. “Thirty feet down,” he said admiringly.

“It looks like tool steel,” said Tom. “We haven’t got anything that can touch it.” Then he saw the faraway joyous look on his father’s face and a shiver of shared delight ame to him. The Hamilton children loved it when their father’s mind went free. Then the world was peopled with wonders.

Samuel said, “Metal, you say. You think, steel. Tom, I’m going to make a guess and then I’m going to get an assay. Now hear my guess – and remember it. I think we’ll find nickel in it, and silver maybe, and carbon and manganese. How I would like to dig it up! It’s in sea sand. That’s what we’ve been getting.”

Tom said, “Say, what do you think it is with – nickel and silver –”

“It must have been long thousand centuries ago, “ Samuel said, and his sons knew he was seeing it. “Maybe it was all water here – an inland sea with seabirds circling and crying. And it would have been a pretty thing if it happened at night. There would come a line of light and then a pencil of white light and then a tree of blinding light drawn in a long arc from heaven. Then there’d be a great water spout and a big mushroom of steam. And your ears would be staggered by the sound because the soaring cry of its coming would be on you at the same time the water exploded. And then it would be black night again, because of the blinding light. And gradually you’d see the killed fish coming up, showing silver in the starlight, and the crying birds would come up to eat them. It’s a lonely, lovely thing to think about, isn’t it?

He made them see it as he always did.

Tom said softly, “You think it’s a meteorite, don’t you?”

From EAST OF EDEN (Chapter 17)