Arlo said:
Pirsig seemed to think a "code of art" was the next emergent level, but I think all I can really say is that "art" moments transcend our socio-intellectual capabilities by pointing us at what Campbell called "always the one, shape-shifting yet marvelously constant story we find, together with a challenging persistent suggestion of more remaining to be experienced than will ever be known or told." (Hero with 1000 Faces) Gav said: the artistic process is the process of creation itself. it is the source of new sq patterns, latched from a continual and purposeful immersion in DQ by the artist....that is, the artist's question/desire/initial idea (or struction as jaynes would say) is interrogated in the silence of meditative contemplation....which allows DQ to interrupt a solution/synthesis, leading to a new struction and so on - a dance of creation, LiLa. dmb says: I think you're both really onto something here. There is a neat summary at the end of chapter 29 where he says that it's just as immoral for intellect to suppress Dynamic Quality as it is for society to suppress intellect. This might give the impression that the code of art was about the next emergent level but I think that he just means that the suppression of DQ will prevent further growth at any given level. But the more interesting way to think about this relationship between DQ and the static patterns of quality, I think, is in terms of how we actually experience them. I think it'll gets at the creative process better anyway. We talk about the distinction between DQ and sq all the time and yet, as James put it, Pure Experience (DQ) in the literal sense of "pure" is something known only to babies, mystics, psychotics and the dude who was under the piano when it fell. Most of us, by contrast, are always already taking experience in through a lifetime of accumulated static patterns. In other words, immediate experience is never literally pure and always is mixed up with conceptualizations that are impossible to untangle from the accompanying pure experience. James uses the museum's diorama as an image of how seamlessly our perceptions and conceptions co-mingle. They "are simultaneously implicated in the constitution of experience", as Hunter Brown puts it. Likewise, James asks, "does the river make its banks or do the banks make the river"? "Does a man walk with his right leg or with his left leg more essentially?" Or, as Gerald Myers puts it, "when it goes very well it is as if thinking and living have merged into a single, harmonious, and vibrant process, as if thinking has found its goal in a newfound health of experiencing. ...By making his own mental pictures reflect the unimpeded flow of pure experience, James felt a restoration, through thought itself, of a healthful fluency of thought that is the mark of rationality." (Brown 144) This must be a lot like Pirsig's notion of replacing SOM's rationality with a new spiritual rationality that includes DQ, or in James's terms, that includes this "unimpeded flow of pure experience" to produce "a healthful fluency of thought". In both cases, you need the static patterns and I'd even go so far as to say that the creativity usually only follows upon a certain mastery of whatever patterns are involved. I think that's when you can really "listen" to the pull of DQ and follow that to wherever it leads. In some ways, I think Pirsig's work is all about this expansion of rationality, this repair job on our ungroovy ways of thinking. To take this power critique of rationality as anti-intellectualism is, I think, a mistake that flies in the face of both the letter and the spirit of the MOQ. In the MOQ, the intellect is both subordinated and improved. Oddly this improvement is achieved through its subordination to DQ. Thanks, dmb _________________________________________________________________ Your E-mail and More On-the-Go. Get Windows Live Hotmail Free. http://clk.atdmt.com/GBL/go/201469229/direct/01/ 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/
