Arlo, John and all MOQers: I'd like to add the quote below to what Arlo is saying about the difference between artful living and the fine arts. The dark portrait of "the citidel of form and substance" without Quality is a portrait of Chicago in the very early 60's, before the hippies became a cultural force. As we all learned in Liverpool, it was during this period that Pirsig saw himself as Orpheus wandering through the land of the dead. The sort of man who can more or less adapt himself to this dead world is the sort of guy who wears a grey flannel suit, even in summer. Looking at his haircut, you don't get the impression that he's well-groomed so much as shorn like a sheep. He's a square man, man. By contrast, just a few years later, you see the hippie dude in brightly colored comfortable clothes, long hair, maybe even some beads around his neck. He's sensual, colorful, playful, spontaneous, groovy and everything that the man in the grey suit could never be. The whole hippie aesthetic is like a deliberate reversal of this squareness. Even if all you had to go on was a picture of each man set side by side, you could talk about their differences all day long. I might begin by suggesting that the guy in the suit was the salesman who died in Henry Miller's play and we could probably talk about it just in those terms all day long. Or, I could suggest his suit is really a suit of armor that's designed to protect him from the world but ends up cutting him off from that world and we could talk about that all day long too. I'd even say that those two simple images represent a conflict of values that could be explored for a lifetime without exhausting the topic.
> "The citadel not of Quality, the citadel of form and substance. > Substance in the form of steel sheets and girders, substance in the > form of concrete piers and roads, in the form of brick, of asphalt, > of auto parts, old radios, and rails, dead carcasses of animals that > once grazed the prairies. Form and substance without Quality. That is > the soul of this place. Blind, huge, sinister and inhuman: seen by > the light of fire flaring upward in the night from the blast furnaces > in the south, through heavy coal smoke deeper and denser into the > neon of BEER and PIZZA and LAUNDROMAT signs and unknown and > meaningless signs along meaningless straight streets going off into > other straight streets forever. ... Along the streets that lead away > from the apartment he can never see anything through the concrete and > brick and neon but he knows that buried within it are grotesque, > twisted souls forever trying the manners that will convince > themselves they possess Quality, learning strange poses of style and > glamour vended by dream magazines and other mass media, and paid for > by the vendors of substance. He thinks of them at night alone with > their advertised glamorous shoes and stockings and underclothes off, > staring through the sooty windows at the grotesque shells revealed > beyond them, when the poses weaken and the truth creeps in, the only > truth that exists here, crying to heaven, God, there is nothing here > but dead neon and cement and brick." (ZMM) > > > > > Moq_Discuss mailing list > Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. > http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org > Archives: > http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ > http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/ _________________________________________________________________ Windows Live™: Keep your life in sync. http://windowslive.com/explore?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_BR_life_in_synch_062009 Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
