I recall this book as having had a big impact on me during high school, though in looking at the copyright the soonest I would have read it would have been the last semester of my senior year. Looking back, I have only vague recollections of what was striking about it. Three impressions stand out: I remember resonating with the discussion of quality, and the connection between technology and what I then would have called mysticism; the sharpest memory I have remains the revelation, in the middle of the book, about Phaedrus; and many of the descriptions of landscapes and moving through them stayed with me – in particular, there is a passage I hope to encounter again (assuming I did not imagine it), about riding along a road and the landscape dropping away before them and opening a vast vista…
The Beginning
C1: The cast and setting and circumstances
I can see by my watch, without taking my hand from the left grip of the cycle, that it is eight-thirty in the morning. The wind, even at sixty miles an hour, is warm and humid. When it’s this hot and muggy at eight-thirty, I’m wondering what it’s going to be like in the afternoon.
In the wind are pungent odors from the marshes by the road. We are in an area of the Central Plains filled with thousands of duck hunting sloughs, heading northwest from Minneapolis toward the Dakotas. This highway is an old concrete two-laner that hasn’t had much traffic since a four-laner went in parallel to it several years ago. When we pass a marsh the air suddenly becomes cooler. Then, when we are past, it suddenly warms up again.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, R. Pirsign, 1974, page 11
So it begins. Looking at the beginning with a writer’s eye, I am impressed. The reader is immediately immersed in the world: on a motorcycle, at 60 miles an hour, feeling the warm humid wind, and smelling the warm pungent odors from the marshes passing by. The view expands, from the rider’s view to a description of the region, and to commentary on the pleasure of riding small roads.* Continuing, the view expands to capture how the regional landscape changes with seasons. The immersion in the landscape means that when the narrator comments that “On a cycle the frame is gone. You’re in contact with it all. …You’re in the scene… the sense of presence is overwhelming” there is no need to explain.
Amidst the unfolding description of the surrounding world, Pirsig introduces the book’s principal characters, his son Chris and his companions John and Sylvia. John and Sylvia are the foils for the book’s exploration; they represent alienated city dwellers longing to escape the bewildering complexity of the modern world — the complexity symbolized by the machinery upon which they ride in their attempts at escape. The narrator’s fruitless attempts to talk to them about how to maintain their motorcycles is, to him, a mystifying failure, and his attempt to think through the source of this difficulty and how to resolve it constitute one of the themes of the book.
I disagree with them about cycle maintenance, but not because I am out of sympathy with their feelings about technology. I just think that their flight from and hatred of technology is self-defeating. The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower.
ibid, page 26
*I wonder when Blue Highways by William Least Heat Moon, a book that explores this theme, came out.
C2: Caring vs. Going through the motions
While I don’t intend to keep notes on every chapter, I am tracking things more closely at the beginning because I am interested in seeing how he sets up the book. After the first chapter, where he’s introduced some of the principal themes and the cast of characters, he is using the second chapter to introduce tension. He sees a storm in the distance; the group misses a turn, and he forgets to mention the storm to the others, and wonders what is wrong with his thinking. I believe that this is the first point where he alludes to Phaedrus, who will become inreasingly present until the revelation of his relationship to the author at the end of the first part. As the chapter continues, he describes his early introduction to motorcycle maintenance via a mistake of his own, and then a series of mistakes made by not very competent and uncaring mechanics who seemed more like spectators than involved agents. Reflecting, he realizes that this is a symptom of a pervasive attitude towards technology.
But what struck me for the first time was the agreement of these manuals with the spectator attitude I had seen in the shop. These were spectator manuals. It was built into the format of them. Implicit in every line is the idea that “
ibid, page 34-35Here is the machine, isolated in time and in space from everything else in the universe. It has no relationship to you, you have no relationship to it, other than to turn certain switches, maintain voltage levels, check for error conditions . . .” and so on. That’s it. The mechanics in their attitude toward the machine were really taking no different attitude from the manual’s toward the machine, or from the attitude I had when I brought it in there. We were all spectators. And it occurred to me there is no manual that deals with the real business of motorcycle maintenance, the most important aspect of all. Caring about what you are doing is considered either unimportant or taken for granted.
C3,4 & 5: Meaning vs. Appearance
The storm arrives, and as they ride through the storm to get to shelter in the next town. In a flash of lightening the narrator sees a place that Phaedrus knew, and slows down. Discussions of ghosts, and of scientific laws as ghosts. Another allusion to Phaedrus, and to a frightening ghost story.
The morning after the storm: narrator gets everybody up to ride in the early morning: it’s very cold, and afterwards everyone else is mad at him. Discussion of how artifacts — old gloves, a motorcycle — can have their own personalities: an accumulation of wear-induced imperfections that hold meaning for the one who knows them. They decide they will camp out that night.
Chris is having a difficult time; the narrator does not seem very compassionate towards him, though perhaps experience has shown that ‘tough love’ is best. A discussion of tidiness, and the inapplicability of tidiness or messiness to a natural landscape. More reflection on motorcycle maintenance, and how his proposal to use a beer-can-shim to fix John’s motorcycle was rebuffed: “He isn’t so interested in what things mean as what they are.” This broadens into a discussion of differing worldviews, and their apparent incompatibility.
You follow these little discrepancies long enough and they sometimes open into huge revelations.
ibid., pages 59-60
[…]
Some things you miss because they’re so tiny you overlook them. But some things you don’t see because they’re so huge.
The trip continues, and the day ends up with camping, but that is something of a debacle. People are tired and make mistakes and have a not-very-good-dinner. Chris goes off in a snit. Discussion after Chris’ departure reveals that his stomach pains are thought to be the first signs of mental illness in Chris; but narrator can’t bring himself to engage psychiatry. There is an allusion to a story by Goethe where a man loses his son to a ghost. Later, after Chris’s return, now in a cheerful mood, the narrator is mean to him. In his sleep he has a dream in which the Goethe story is remixed, with Phaedrus – ‘Evil spirit. Insane. From a world without life or death.‘ –who is calling for Chris.
C6&7: Analysis; Introducing Phaedrus
The next morning promises an intensely hot day, and RP begins to do his Chataqua; he had intended to start Phaedrus’ ideas, but after last night’s dream he decides to include Phaedrus himself. There is a brief interlude where RP does a repair on his motorcycle with John watching, and John asks how he knew what to do, and RP says “You just have to figure it out.” Neither a helpful nor sympathetic answer, in my view, particularly in light of this apparent opening in John’s unwillingness to talk about motorcycle maintenance.
Proceeding with the Chataqua, we learn about Phaedrus’ analytic approach to the world, and how the process of using the analytic knife to break things down simultaneously results in building up a structure. I remember, on my long-ago first reading of this book, finding this description of what I would call the aesthetics of analytic process and structure revelatory: that the way in which I often thought about things was legitimate and even beautiful.
The narrator — though as he later confesses, these are really Phaedrus’ ideas (“I haven’t had an original thought in years.”) — makes three observations about the analytical perspective:
The first is that the motorcycle, so described, is almost impossible to understand unless you already know how one works. The immediate surface impressions that are essential for primary understanding are gone. Only the underlying form is left.
The second is that the observer is missing. The description doesn’t say that to see the piston you must remove the cylinder head. “You” aren’t anywhere in the picture. Even the “operator’ is a kind of personalityless robot whose perfor mance of a function on the machine is completely mechani cal. There are no real subjects in this description. Only objects exist that are independent of any observer.
The third is that the words “good” and “bad” and all their synonyms are completely absent. No value judgments have been expressed anywhere, only facts.
ibid. page 78
Chapter 7 continues, as they ride through an intensely bright and hot landscape, on the same theme, noting that when analytic thought is applied to experience, something is always killed in the process. Mentions Mark Twain’s remark that after he learned enough to navigate the Mississippi as a river boat pilot, the river lost its beauty. We learn more about Phaedrus, his analytical abilities, and his intelligence and isolation. He sounds like someone we would now call autistic. Phaedrus’ mission is laid out as an effort to reconcile the classical and romantic perspectives, perhaps, the text hints, by including the observer who is doing the analysis in the analysis. The chapter ends with an account of Phaedrus’ commitment, the electroshock therapy that destroyed (so they thought) his personality, and the aftermath. In the world of the novel, they emerge from the heat and the valley into a cool high place, and things seem better.
No one then would see the ghost that Phaedrus pursued, but I think now that more and more people see it, or get glimpses of it in bad moments, a ghost which calls itself rationality but whose appearance is that of incoherence and meaninglessness, which causes the most normal of everyday acts to seem slightly mad because of their irrelevance to anything else.
ibid. page 85
Part 2: Phaedrus…
C8&9: Induction, deduction and systems
[C8] RP walks through the process of running his cycle to verify and hopefully fix a problem. As he does so he talks more about rationality, and systems analysis. He argues that tuning a motorcycle engine does not require any sort of mechanical ‘knack’ — rather it is an almost entirely rational process. I disagree, a bit, in that good mechanics can notice cues that not-so-good ones miss, especially if working on a machine with which they’re familiar. This harks back to what RP said about machines, including motorcycles, having their own personalities — that is, particular ways in which that system has adapted to the dynamic materiality of its environment and history. I think a good mechanic would be aware of that, and able to make use of it. Another comment that is made is that it is not artifacts, per se, which are rational, but the fact that they are produced by rationality, which, as a system, will structure its artifacts in particular ways. In particular, he says
The true system, the real system, is our present construction of systematic thought itself, rationality itself, and if a factory is torn down, but the rationality that produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government. There’s so much talk about the system. And so little understanding.
ibid., 102
This is why I am skeptical of proposals to defund the police department. Unless you do the social and policy work to change the attitudes and approaches and perspectives, any new department seems likely to recapitulate the old.
[C10.] A discussion of logic and inductive and deductive inference, and how the scientific method is complex interweave of induction and deduction. Short: an abstract recapitulation of what was demonstrated in the walk-through of motorcycle running.
[C11]