Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

VROOM, YAWN, RONF



Mi piacerebbe usare il tempo che ho a disposizione per parlare di alcune cose che mi sono venute in mente. Il più delle volte abbiamo tanta fretta che le occasioni per parlare sono ben poche.

Tempo a disposizione Pirsing ne aveva abbastanza: in moto, col figlio undicenne seduto dietro, dal Minnesota attraversando Dakota, Wisconsin, Montana, fino alla California, fino all’oceano Pacifico, scegliendo le back street, le strade secondarie. E quindi, senza fretta, godendo e assaporando l’andare.

Sulla carta ‘sto libro si presentava come una manna per me che ho cominciato a guidare, sia due ruote che quattro ruote, a dodici anni. Ed ero così fortunato da avere un fratello maggiore munito di Ducati Scrambler che doveva lasciare a casa durante i lunghi mesi di collegio veneziano: e quindi a dodici anni ho iniziato a guidare una Ducati e tuttora mi muovo principalmente su due ruote con motore.



Peccato che invece di godersi davvero il viaggio, o di fermarsi a far manutenzione della moto, e magari parlarmi di cilindri e pistoni, Pirsing, che di professione oltre lo scrittore fa soprattutto il filosofo, dibatta a lungo di Socrate, Platone, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Einstein, Lao Tzu, che a me piacevano molto al liceo, ma dopo non ho più voluto saperne.

Come se non bastasse, Pirsig avvolge tutto nel buddismo zen. Di male in peggio.
E quindi queste parti del libro non le ho godute affatto, gran voglia di saltarle, di passare a quelle sul suono del motore, il senso di una piega, l’aria in faccia, che sono poche, purtroppo, davvero poche. Abbondano e vincono quelle dedicate alla teoria della Qualità, quelle riempite di metafisica.



E la colpa è tutta di John e Sylvia, i due amici di Pirsig che viaggiavano con padre e figlio: due motociclette in viaggio per 80/100 pagine. Una meraviglia. Poi la coppia di amici, John e Sylvya, si fermano a casa di altri amici, restano lì, e son solo Pirsig e il figlio a ripartire. E da quel punto, forse perché sente la mancanza della coppia d’amici, forse perché la conversazione dell’undicenne era poco stimolante – ma in moto si tace, mica si chiacchiera – Pirsig si mette a fare il filosofo e sbrodolare di filosofia e peggio ancora di zen, e così mi ha perso. O io ho perso lui.
Peccato.

Col seguito uscito ventisette anni dopo non ho voluto ritentare: anche perché da quel che ho capito nel secondo la moto è scomparsa, anche solo come scusa. Ma è rimasta la filosofia. Tanta (Lila: un’indagine sulla morale).
Mi chiedo se i diari di viaggio del malefico Dibba nazionale si siano ispirati a questo tomo mattoncino.

I worked in a bookstore for two years of my youth, and, though I have many memories of my time in that store, I don't remember too many of our customers.

I remember one, though. He was kind of a weird dude, just a few years older than I was, with a certain intensity and a really deep voice. He shopped regularly in our store, typically in the sci-fi section, and one day, as I was taking inventory at the register, he picked up ZEN AND THE ART OF MOTORCYCLE MAINTENANCE and said, “Oh, a must-read.”

I looked at it, and I'm sure I was thinking “Really?” but I said something instead, like “Why?”

He looked down at it with affection and said something like, “I've already read it a few times. It's brilliant. Make sure you read it at some point in your life.”

Well, “at some point” during this 1970s reading project of mine, I had a flashback of this conversation, and, because I'm trying to embrace more non-fiction these days, I added it.

Grumble. . . grumble. . . grumble.

Look, I feel for this author, Robert Pirsig. At one point in his life, he had a complete psychotic breakdown and was treated for paranoid schizophrenia and received electroconvulsive therapy. Apparently he struggled to keep those wolves at bay for the rest of his life.

  

He has my compassion, but the thing is. . . I might have a complete psychotic breakdown if I keep reading this.

This book deserves to be read by someone far wiser and far more mechanical than I am.

I thought it was a metaphor, this motorcycle maintenance thing. Seriously. I didn't realize that the book would involve actual motorcycle maintenance.

God, help me.

I mean. . . even a shirtless Viggo Mortensen might bore me if he turned to me and asked me to adjust his “tappet” and whatnot. I'd be like, “Dude, I'll be inside the air conditioned diner, looking for alcohol.”



(I take it back, Viggo, I take it back!!)

And what's with this Robert Pirsig, talking to the grown-ass woman, Sylvia, on their road trip, like she's a 12-year-old? She's like a freaking college professor and he keeps telling her when to look at the scenery and when to rest. Ugh! She's not your child, she's a grown woman. Shut up!

There's some fabulous philosophical reflections here, and some great one-liners, but I've hit the halfway mark, and I must be done.

I'm grouchy now and I'm reminded of all of the loud motorcycles that woke me up on my beach “vacation” last week. Shut up!

Maybe I am just not spiritual enough to appreciate Pirsig's critically acclaimed best selling cult classic? A fictional account centred on a philosophical look at the idea of quality, a motorcycle journey and the nature of the main character. 3 out of 12, One Star read.

2013 read

I feel like Robert M. Pirsig has wronged me personally.

There are three threads weaving through this book, none of which, as is cheerfuly owned in the text, has much to do with eastern philosophy or motorcycle maintenance. (And I have no problem with that intentional irony.)

The first thread is a straightforward narration by a man riding cross-country with his young son and two friends (a married couple). This travelogue is evocative and engaging and by far the most enjoyable aspect of the novel. It had me fantasizing about buying a Harley and riding Route 66.

The second element is a mystery story. It's gradually revealed that the narrator is struggling with amnesia; his road trip is an attempt to escape something terrible in his past but ironically, also to stimulate his memory and remember that past.

So far, so good.

Sigh.

The last thread is where the book just falls apart. Through the narrator's dialogue with himself, Pirsig puts forward his "philosophy of quality," which essentially holds that "quality," whatever that might be, is somehow the fundamental essence of Reality. Uhm. What? The only part of the Universe that isn't instant death is a thin film on the surface of an infinitesimal pebble, but Reality exists to appeal to the sensibilities of the apes living on that pebble? Again, what?

Anyway.

When we find out why the narrator had lost his memory in the first place, the answers are just ... disappointing.

I learned from this book that you can sell a billion copies of a book that no one should ever waste three minutes reading. This is just another neo-philosophy book disguised as a novel. I'm almost convinced that the only reason people buy this book is so that their pseudo-intellectual (read: pompous scumbag) friends will accept them into the hippie circle. Although I know about twenty people who claim to have read this book, I have yet to meet a single person who actually knows what it's about. This book is a bigger hoax than the bible. So I have written, and so, therefore, must it be.

Okay, I confess I haven't finished it yet. But I'm finding it so irksome I don't know if I'll be able to get all the way through it. Here's what I wrote on my bookmark 50 pages in:
"the author's logic is self-contained, entirely self-referential and so his argument is self-sustaining! He can set up armies of logical strawmen and have them elaborately duke it out in massive rhetorical battles taking place entirely without any grounding in reality.
He has the manic ADDH intelligence of the kind that experiences UFO abductions, never finishes his degree, judges everyone as hopelessly inferior from behind the counter of the sporting goods store. Self-satisfied and superior with a fake Indian name he took on from the time he made deep eye-contact with a timber wolf. The kind of guy who never made it all the way back from 'Nam."

So that was 100 pages ago and I've had to change my evaluation a little. He went to Korea, not Vietnam.

He's driving me NUTS! It's one false premise and false conclusion after another-- astonishing leaps of logic (e.g. the more I do experiments, the more ideas for future experiments I have, therefore science only leads to more questions, therefore scientific pursuit is meaningless since the purpose of science is to know everything, and if I always have more questions, I'll never know everything. AAARGH!)

He's an irritating narrator: his female companions ooh and aah at his speechifying. "Gee, Bob, how do you think of this stuff!" while bringing him steaks. His male companions are awed and impressed with his technical knowledge and mystical skills. He wasn't kicked out of school for "laziness and immaturity" as the official reason went-- it was because his ideas were so RADICAL the whole university system would have come toppling down!

The only expert he cites is Phaedrus....who turns out to be himself! Before a nervous breakdown! He talks about discovering the beautiful power of Phaedrus' logic and writing. And it's himself, all along. Very annoying.

Ugh. I just want to say to him, yes, you're very smart. Yes, technology and art are a false dichotomy. But no, saying that does not turn the world inside out and make your the smartest person in the universe.

I must start by saying that this is one of my favorite books ever. Although it is deep and complicated and takes a lot of focus to read, I feel that there are a lot of great messages here in the author’s search for Quality. This was my second time reading this book, and I liked it more this time.
tInterlaced with stories from an across-the-west motorcycle trip with his son and some friends, Pirsig tells the story of his past in an almost former life before being admitted to a mental institution after going crazy in his pursuit of Quality. He often uses the motorcycle as an analogy, as well as climbing mountains. With what many would see as too much depth and detail (but not me), he dissects the ideas of rhetoric, quality, the scientific method, technology and many ideas of the ancient Greek philosophers and tries to take down an entire academic department in the search of a unifying truth/god/connecting force.
I don’t really feel that there is a lot that I can say to do this book justice in a short review form like this. I’ll just write up a bunch of underlined quotes instead.

“…physical discomfort is important only when the mood is wrong. Then you fasten on to whatever thing is uncomfortable and call that the cause. But if the mood is right, then physical discomfort doesn’t mean much.”

“Caring about what you are doing is considered either unimportant or taken for granted.”

“That’s the first normal thing I’ve said in weeks. The rest of the time I’m feigning twentieth-century lunacy just like you are. So as to not draw attention to myself.”

“Nobody is concerned anymore about tidily conserving space. The land isn’t valuable anymore. We are in a Western town.”

“But to tear down a factory or to revolt against a government or to avoid repair of a motorcycle because it is a system is to attack effects rather than causes; and as long as the attack is upon effects only, no change is possible. 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 which 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.”

“If the purpose of scientific method is to select from among a multitude of hypotheses, and if the number of hypotheses grows faster than experimental method can handle, then it is clear that all hypotheses can never be tested. If all hypotheses cannot be tested, then the results of any experiment are inconclusive and the entire scientific method falls short of its goal of establishing proven knowledge.”

“Sometimes it’s a little better to travel than to arrive.”

“You look at where you’re going and where you are and it never makes sense, but then you look back at where you’ve been and a pattern seems to emerge. And if you project forward from that pattern, then sometimes you can come up with something.”

“But what’s happening is that each year our old flat earth of conventional reason becomes less and less adequate to handle the experiences we have and this is creating widespread feelings of topsy-turviness. As a result we’re getting more and more people in irrational areas of thought – occultism, mysticism, drug changes and the like – because they feel the inadequacy of classical reason to handle what they know are real experiences.”

“The trouble is that essays always have to sound like God talking for eternity, and that isn’t the way it ever is. People should see that it’s never anything other than just one person talking from one place in time and space and circumstance. It’s never been anything else, ever, but you can’t get that across in an essay.”

“The allegory of a physical mountain for the spiritual one that stands between each soul and its goal is an easy and natural one to make. Like those in the valley behind us, most people stand in sight of the spiritual mountains all their lives and never enter them, being content to listen to others who have been there and thus avoid the hardships. Some travel into the mountains accompanied by experienced guides who know the best and least dangerous routes by which they arrive at their destination. Still others, inexperienced and untrusting, attempt to make their own routes. Few of these are successful, but occasionally some, by sheer will and luck and grace, do make it. Once there they become more aware than any of the others that there’s no single or fixed number of routes. There are as many routes as there are individual souls.”

“He was just stopped. Waiting. For that missing seed crystal of thought that would suddenly solidify everything.”

“Any effort that has self-glorification as its final endpoint is bound to end in disaster… When you try to climb a mountain to prove how big you are, you almost never make it. And even if you do it’s a hollow victory. In order to sustain the victory you have to prove yourself again and again in some other way, and again and again and again, driven forever to fill a false image, haunted by the fear that the image is not true and someone will find out. That’s never the way.”

“The holiness of the mountain infused into their own spirits enabled them to endure far more than anything he, with his greater physical strength, could take.”

“Care and Quality are internal and external aspects of the same thing. A person who sees Quality and feels it as he works is a person who cares. A person who cares about what he sees and does is a person who’s bound to have some characteristic of quality.”

“They have patience, care and attentiveness to what they’re doing, but more than this – there’s a kind of inner peace of mind that isn’t contrived but results from a kind of harmony with the work in which there’s no leader and no follower. The material and the craftsman’s thoughts change together in a progression of smooth, even changes until his mind is at rest at the exact instant the material is right.”

“Or if he takes whatever dull job he’s stuck with – and they are all, sooner or later, dull – and, just to keep himself amused, starts to look for options of Quality, and secretly pursues these options, just for their own sake, thus making an art out of what he is doing, he’s likely to discover he becomes a much more interesting person and much less of an object to the people around him because his Quality decisions change him too. And not only the job and him, but others, too, because the Quality tends to fan out like waves. The Quality job he didn’t think anyone was going to see is seen, and the person who sees it feels a little better because of it and is likely to pass that feeling on to others, and in that way the Quality tends to keep on going.
My personal feeling is that this is how any further improvement of the world will be done: by individuals making Quality decisions and that’s all.God, I don’t want to have any more enthusiasm for big programs full of social planning for big masses of people that leave individual Quality out. These can be left alone for a while. There’s a place for them but they’ve got to be built on a foundation of Quality within the individuals involved. We’ve had that individual quality in the past, exploited as a natural resource without knowing it, and now it’s just about depleted. Everyone’s just about out if gumption. And I think it’s about time to return the rebuilding of this American resource – individual worth. There are political reactionaries who’ve been saying something close to this for years. I’m not one of them, but to the extent they’re talking about real individual worth and not just an excuse for giving more money to the rich, they’re right. We do need a return to individual integrity, self-reliance and old-fashioned gumption. We really do.”

“What is good, Phaedrus, and what is not good – need we ask anyone to tell us these things?”