Steve said to dmb:
...Your defensiveness is so strange to me. It isn't even a criticism that I was
making unless you can take it as a criticism that Pirsig didn't write three
other books. Plus, even if it had been a criticism it would have been a
criticism of the MOQ, of _Pirsig's_ philosophy not yours.
dmb says:
Man, you just don't get me. I never took this as a personal criticism and so
I'm not being defensive. I fully realize that you're talking asking about
"love" in the MOQ and that's exactly what my complaints are aimed at. I told
you WHY your criticism struck me as very weak and idiotic (sorry, that's too
harsh) but you have not addressed those complaints. It seems they did not even
register.
Imagine if someone criticized Einstein's description of everything because
E=mc2 doesn't tell us anything about love. Wouldn't you just scratch your head
and wonder if that critic had any clue as to what Einstein was doing? That's an
exaggerated version of what this looks like to me. As the quoted article said
in the opening paragraphs, some of Pirsig's readers don't understand the nature
of his book and they tend to ask the wrong questions about it as a result. I
assume you read the article. The line you quoted from it is just the last line
and it sort of brings the theme back around to that opening.
And I really do think it would be nearly impossible to talk about love as such
without producing a very objectionable Hallmark greeting card aesthetic. The
word is just too loaded up with Valentines Day and Churchianity and it's
otherwise become a tired old cllche. Pirsig is very consistent in saying, with
various analogies and images, that the old channels have filled with silt, the
old paths over the spiritual mountain no longer take us where we're going, the
old signposts leading to DQ have been choked and strangled with vines. He wants
to cut new channels, new paths up the mountain and paint new signposts. Some
words frustrate that purpose because they are so loaded, love and god being
among the most loaded.
In some sense I think it's true that God is love. But you can't say that
without sounding like an idiot sermonizer. It's the Cheeze Wiz of all english
phrases. It's downright Spammy, tacky, the essence of inanity. Its profundity
and sincerity can only be match but gems like, "have a nice day". Not that
anyone has used the phrase around here, I'm just saying that a person would
have to find a brand new way to say such a thing, unless they want to be
immediately dismissed by anyone with more than two brain cells.
Here's the point, Steve. If you ask about love in the MOQ, you risk treating
Lila like a romance novel or a self-help book. If I seem defensive, it's
probably because such treatment would be deeply insulting and total misreading
of what the guy is doing.
If Pirsig were to write another book extending the MOQ even further, I sure
hope he doesn't use "love" or "God" as anything like a central term. That would
be a disaster. It would be hard to make a case that those would be the worst
possible choices, but I always think they are obviously not good terms by which
to further explore the MOQ. I mean, Lila is his attempt to be taken seriously
by academic philosophers and to that end he considers it to be politically
expedient to identify the MOQ as a form of mainstream American pragmatism. He
does this precisely because it's mainstream and American. He's trying to shake
the reputation of having written a "cult" favorite, like the Rocky Horror
Picture Show. Pirisg ends the book saying Americans don't have to go to the
Orient to find mysticism, that it's been here along. If he wrote a third book,
maybe it should be about Native American worldviews and ways of life and expand
the MOQ in that direction. "Zen" or "Art" could be the cen
tral term in a third book by Pirsig.
If you wanted it to be about love but also wanted to avoid the term, I suppose
words like Quality, value, worth, and the like are pretty darn.
And finally, I'd point out that the article you quoted has Pirsig explaining
that he chose the name "Lila" because for him it represented an ambiguous
allure, a lovely scent that lures you forward. It's a way to depict Whitehead's
notion that we are led forward by a "dim apprehension of we know not what".
What's so powerful about this is the way it lines up with Jungian psychology,
which says that there is such an archetype and she plays a very active role in
every person's dream life - unless they're psychotic or something. For men,
this figure appears in female form and for women it appears as a man, which
makes sense given the archetypes role as an powerfully attractive force. This
is called the anima in the case of men and animus figure in the case of women.
(These rules may not apply to gay and lesbian dreamers, I just don't know.)
This figure is in some sense an ideal vision of everything that you are yet to
become, a lure to lead you to what you might be, toward your i
deal self AND, very interestingly I think, this figure is also erotically
charged. She is felt as the woman of your dreams, as your soul-mate and perfect
lover. As a matter of fact, Mark Twain wrote a non-ficional piece about his own
dream-time girlfriend. I kid you not. It's called "My Platonic Sweatheart".
It's astonishing, but that's taking us off the topic. Let's just say the man
loved, loved, loved to sleep because dreams were among his best friends in
life.
It would be a huge stretch to suggest that Lila is anybody's ideal self and so
she doesn't play the role of an anima figure in the book either. But he does
use perfume as an analogy for DQ and Lila evokes the overly-perfumed Lilac bush
as well as the overly-perfumed working girl she used to be. And I think the
point is that yes, Quality has Lila too. Maybe not social or intellectual
quality, but even she is not exempt entirely. Guys like Rigel are very
squeamish about admitting it, but her allure is quite real and powerful enough
to wreck homes indeed. And thanks to the DQ that also has her, we can hope for
her future. Even she is being led forward by a dim apprehension and maybe
she'll come out on the other side of her psychosis "better than cured".
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