A person wouldn't have to read much more than the title of ZAMM to notice that
bike repair is Pirsig's central metaphor. There is a moment in the book wherein
a torn slot on the head of a screw becomes the center of that central metaphor.
The function of that particular screw is to keep the engine's cover plate in
place until you need to get inside the engine for repairs. Without that screw,
you're totally screwed. And if the slot is torn, the screw won't turn, which
means the cover plate can't removed, which means you're stuck. No repairs can
even begin until that tiny little problem is solved. All of a sudden, Pirsig
says, that little slot becomes the most important thing in the world. It stops
the whole show. As I read it, SOM is that torn slot. Until that is taken care
of, the repairman can't even get started. In other words, the solution offered
by the MOQ begins only after addressing that stuck screw, only after rejecting
the "dualistic reason" that has turned "the worl
d into a stylized garbage dump".
"The answer is Phaedrus' contention that classic understanding should not be
*overlaid* with romantic prettiness; classic and romantic understanding should
be united at a basic level. ...We have artists with no scientific knowledge and
scientists with no artistic knowledge and both with no spiritual sense of
gravity at all, and the result is not just bad, it is ghastly. The time for
real reunification of art and technology is really long overdue."
"I think that when this concept of peace of mind is introduced and made central
to the act of technical work, a fusion of classic and romantic quality can take
place at a basic level within a practical working context. I've said you can
actually *see* this fusion in skilled mechanics and machinists of a certain
sort, and you can see it in the work they do. To say that they are not artists
is to misunderstand the nature of art. ... The mechanic I'm talking about
doesn't make this separation. One says of him that he is "interested" in what
he's doing, that he's "involved" in his work. What produces this involvement
is, at the cutting edge of consciousness, an absence of any sense of
separateness of subject and object. "Being with it," "being a natural,"
"taking hold" - there are a lot of idiomatic expressions for what I mean by
this absence of subject-object duality, because what I mean is so well
understood as folklore, common sense, the everyday understanding of the shop
. But in scientific parlance the words for this absence of subject-object
duality are scarce because scientific minds have shut themselves off from
consciousness of this kind of understanding in the assumption of the formal
dualistic scientific outlook."
dmb says:
This is what is means to "care" about what you're doing. Pirsig is not talking
about love and affection or anything sweetly sentimental. This type of Zen
mechanic is deeply engaged in his work such that the "duality of self and
object doesn't dominate [his] consciousness". "When one isn't dominated by
feelings of separateness from what he's working on", he says, "then one can be
said to 'care' about what he's doing. That is what caring really is, a feeling
of identification with what one's doing. When one has this feeling then he also
sees the inverse side of caring, Quality itself." And of course this is just as
true for any other task, including philosophical tasks. The first thing to do
is get rid of that damaged screw, to get rid of the metaphysical assumptions
that stop us "taking hold" or "being with it".
This grooving mechanic doesn't get to ignore the demands of all those precision
parts. Caring is going to include a respect for their purpose and function of
each part as well as it's relation to all the other parts. The classical
understanding is very much a part of what it means to have a feel for the work.
In other words, rejecting SOM is not at all the same as rejecting rationality
or conceptual understandings. It's just that we change our relationship to
those intellectual quality patterns. We are not longer separate from them. They
are not external realities but human creations that help to make us what we
are. Even that screw is a work of art, not the starting point of reality, and
if that creation no longer serves our purposes we are allowed to drill it out
and get a new one.
And that's why it is so objectionable to equate intellect with SOM. It would
prevent Pirsig's repair job from going forward. That equation says that getting
unstuck is impossible. It says the cover plate will never come off again, which
means the bike will never be repaired or ridden again. It's says we can't care
and intellect itself is condemned to be forever flawed.
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