Dave T said:
Remember the passage about hearing a new song on the radio being indicative of
DQ? Doesn't that put the kibosh on your last statement? Or was RMP was
mistaken? Oh I know, it's only any analogy.
Steve replied:
... With respect to listening to music, it is more like the absurdity of
deciding whether to play song A over song B on your iPod at a given moment
because song A is somehow the more _dynamic_ and therefore _free_ option.
dmb says:
That seems like an awfully strange way to construe the point Pirsig was making.
I'm sure he did not mean to suggest that the song itself is somehow more
dynamic than all the other songs. The experience is dynamic because the song is
new to you, because you are hearing it for the first time. It's like the bad
writers who couldn't think of anything to say because they couldn't think of
anything to imitate or mimic. the cure for this stuckness, this lack of
creative freedom, was cured by getting these dull student to look freshly with
their own eyes. How different is that from hearing freshly with your own ears?
In the hot stove example, Pirsig says the negative face of Quality that gets
you off the stove is not some crypto-religious metaphysical abstraction. It is
an immediate empirical reality. In that sense, following DQ is not
otherworldly, precious or rare. It's the capacity to respond to the primary
empirical reality without getting confused by a lot of abstractions. It's about
being present right here and right now.
On top of all that, why is it absurd to decide on song A over song B? It might
be a rather trivial example of following an undefined sense of betterness and
it's hard to imagine that such a choice would be very important. But why can't
a simple thing like that be conceived in terms of following DQ? I've been
surprized and blown away by songs that weren't particularly new to me or anyone
else. It's not the freshness of the song so much as the way you take. When you
put fresh ears on a thing it really is quite striking how different that
experience is. But it's not unconscious or automatic, it's just unpremeditated
and spontaneous, which isn't the same thing at all.
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