BOOK CLUB: Zen & The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Part IV (Patreon)

[Pictured: Mendocino Headlands, California's Pacific Ocean Coast]

This is a discussion thread to post quotes and feelings and thoughts on the FOURTH & FINAL part of Zen & The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

The conclusion is spent in Aristotle character assassination,  catatonic schizophrenia (or maybe enlightenment?), and suicidal-mind-collapsing-father-son catharsis. How fun!

(Some of) My Personal Conclusive Thoughts:

Made me cry this time! I think it is beautifully constructed and deeply satisfying, and reading now my second time I was able to appreciate the subtleties leading up to the end.

I was ripping through this book so ravenously the first time I read it I didn't take the time to notice the progression between the four parts of him coming back to himself, I was nervous about how everything would conclude, and the intellectual stuff at the end especially was whizzing by my head while I didn't fully compute it. 

I also want to acknowledge the complex intersection between Pirsig admitting he was never crazy, just a genius rejected by academia, while also very obviously having serious mental health issues. Even as he comes back together and realizes where he's gone wrong with his son, he sees this return as a sign he needs to kill himself or go back into an asylum. He's very traumatized by his institutionalization, and fearful of himself. I think this is ultimately all intentional character work designed to express.

Pirsig had a complicated relationship with the concept of insanity, which you might too if you'd been sentenced to electroshock therapy after having the best idea of your life. 

I offer up this excerpt from an interview he did in 2006 about what happened to him in Chicago:

'This is described in the psychiatric canon as catatonic schizophrenia. It is cited in the Zen Buddhist canon as hard enlightenment. I have never insisted on either - in fact I switch back and forth depending on who I am talking to.'

So. There's a lot of emotional, gushy personal messiness, but I love it. I think it's important. He couldn't communicate this story in pure essay form because fundamentally it's not a purely rational, classical message. He had to douse it in his emotion and intuition and individualistic personal romance.

Also, worth noting, Chris in real life kind of hated the book, because he claimed he had a great time on that trip and his suffering was too fictionalized. So make of that what you will. I think it can be true that Pirsig dramatized these genuine issues in their relationship to all happen intensely and confined within one trip, when it was really over a longer period of time, and also that Chris maybe simply didn't remember or feel things quite the same. The story still speaks its truth.

ANNOUNCEMENT CONCERNING BOOK CLUB SCHEDULE:

Admittedly that was a really breakneck pace reading we just did of this! Proud of you psychos who stayed with it weekly! And full love to everyone catching up, checking in on the threads when they cross a threshold. I'll keep monitoring those and engaging w anyone who comes through them. I do think these books are worth a read, and I'm happy to facilitate that process for anyone interested in them.

In my initially pitched schedule, at this point we would be immediately moving on directly to the sequel and maintaining this ≈100 page a week pace. But instead we're going to take a 2 week break. This gives your brain a little rest, gives some time to process, and also importantly, buffer time for anyone who desires to catch up! 

So what's coming is two weeks of no book club so that anyone who wants to can read up and relax. 

Then on Wednesday July 13, we'll start back up reading the second and final book Pirsig ever wrote, Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals. 

If you decide you want to strategically begin that book early, have at it, but you're doing so without my caveats and contextualization. That book is far more fictionalized and has got some #problematic elements, but is nonetheless the continuation of the philosophy of Quality.

Now, discussion.

I will be responding to comments!

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Quality isn't a substance. Neither is it a method. It's outside of both. If one builds a house using the plumb-line and spirit-level methods he does so because a straight vertical wall is less likely to collapse and thus has higher Quality than a crooked one. Quality isn't method. It's the goal toward which method is aimed. (p. 347)

Normally when you have a new idea to present in an academic environment you're supposed to be objective and disinterested in it. But this idea of Quality took issue with that very supposition - of objectivity and disinterestedness. These were mannerisms appropriate only to dualistic reason. Dualistic excellence in achieved by objectivity, but creative excellence is not. (p. 354)

What he said was megalomaniacal, but suppose it was true? (p. 355)

Religion isn't invented by man. Men are invented by religion. Men invent responses to Quality, and among these responses is an understanding of what they themselves are. You know something and then the quality stimulus hits and then you try to define the Quality stimulus, but to define it all you've got to work with is what you know. So your definition is made up of what you know. It's an analogue to what you already know. It has to be. It can't be anything else. (p. 360)

"Yaaas...." says the Professor of Philosophy slowly. (p. 372) 

"Yaaas," the Professor says. (p. 379)

"Man is not the source of all things. Nor is he the passive observer of all things, as the objective idealists and materialists would say. The Quality which creates the world emerges as a relationship between man and his experience. He is a participant in the creation of all things. (p. 383)

"Happiness and good are not objective terms. We cannot deal with them scientifically. And since they aren't objective they just exist in your mind. So if you want to be happy just change you mind. Ha-ha, ha-ha." (p. 390)

He has never confronted a living Sophist. Only dead ones. (p. 399)

When a shepherd goes to kill a wolf, and takes his dog to see the sport, he should take care to avoid mistakes. The dog has certain relationships to the wolf the shepherd may have forgotten. (p. 399)

Dialectic, which is the parent of logic, came itself from rhetoric. Rhetoric is in turn the child of the myths and poetry of ancient Greece... The poetry and the myths are the response of a prehistoric people to the universe around them made on the basis of Quality. It is Quality, not dialectic, which is the generator of everything we know. (p. 401)

I can imitate the father he's supposed to have, but subconsciously, at the Quality level, he sees through it and knows his real father isn't here. In all this Chautauqua talk there's been more than a touch of hypocrisy. Advice is given again and again to eliminate subject-object duality, when the biggest duality of all, the duality between me and him, remains unfaced. A mind divided against itself. (p. 412)

...when they arrive at the ocean and the conscious images are compared with the subconscious dream there is a sense of defeat at having come so far to be so stopped by a mystery that can never be fathomed. The source of it all. (p. 414)

And Finally:

"Were you really insane?"

Why should he ask that?

"No!"

Astonishment hits. But Chris's eyes sparkle.

"I knew it," he says. (p. 422)

One More Sad Thing:

If you have read the afterward, you know the gut punch that Chris was murdered in Pirsig's lifetime.

5 years after the publication of Zen & The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, 2 weeks before his 23rd birthday, Chris was stabbed to death in a random mugging.

In the afterward reflecting on this, Pirsig is obviously deeply mournful. He is in all of his interviews every time it comes up. In trying to reckon with it, he starts to talk about patterns, intellectualizing in the only way how what the exact nature of the hole in his heart that Chris's death left. He settles on patterns. Patterns of people, patterns of love, patterns of Quality. These patterns are the subject of the next book, and Chris's death can explain some of the darkness and strangeness of Pirsig's only other book, released 23 years after ZMM and 12 years after the death of his son.

Now. All that being said.

 Thoughts & Feelings below.