Hi Dave,
I apologize that it took me so long to attend to your responses. I got
swept away in the other branch of the conversation that broke out.
I've consolidated here my attempts to respond to the three recent
posts sent in my direction.
Matt said:
An extrapoloation of the train analogy of ZMM might help to make
plausible my contention that one cannot go around one's SQ glasses.
If we think in those terms, the front edge of the train is DQ and
everything behind it--i.e., the train--is SQ. If we posit a person
moving about the train (don't worry about what this metaphysically
corresponds to), then the only way to get up to that leading edge is
by being right behind it, on the train. If one thinks to get around the
train to the front, the only way I can imagine doing so is to leap off
the train. But if this train is moving fast, as I imagine it is, that
means death. (If it doesn't mean certain death, it also means no
front edge of the train, as it sweeps past you: can you run as fast
as a train?) This analogy, then, explains the relationship between
small self and Big Self in a way that distinguishes a bad death of the
small self from a good death. Leaping from the train is leaping away
from your small self into the terra incognita of Big Self, but it is a
pure and total death, or movement into pure chaos. Enlightenment,
however, keeps your small self in its capacity to live and move in
society/static-patterns, though _solely_ (as I read it) as a vehicle to
pursue Big Self _at the front of the train_, not _off_ the train.
DMB said:
DQ is fragment of light that comes through a crack or small hole in
the static glasses? The only way to DQ is to leap off the train and
into death and chaos? Maybe you don't agree that these are
problematic characterizations. Maybe you don't see exactly why I
find them so objectionable but they are exactly the sort of thing I'm
criticizing. These are the kinds of characterizations that portray DQ
as something trivial, inert or meaningless.
Matt:
Yeah, I don't get how I've rendered DQ as trivial, inert, or
meaningless in my version of the glasses analogy, or train analogy.
Though I do understand that that has been your claim about what I
do with DQ for these many years, in whatever I try and do with DQ.
I understand why those three epithets seem relevant in response to
the "DQ as compliment" slogan, but I don't think your assimilation
of my every handling of DQ to that response is sensitive to my own
distinctions in context. Think of it this way: most recently, I've been
talking about Dynamic Quality. The slogan, however, is better
spelled out this way: "the phrase 'Dynamic Quality' is a compliment
we pay to past experiences that have proven to be direct
experiences of Dynamic Quality, and not degenerate or mistakenly
static." These are two different contexts of rendering DQ's many
sides, and I see the epithets as only having purchase in one of them.
(And since the slogan is not at issue presently, I pass over my
estimation of that plausible objection.)
My version of the train analogy was meant to articulate how chaos
fits together with Dynamic Quality. (I must also add here that your
assimilating "a crack in the glasses" to "jumping off the
train" is a
reading mistake on your part, or an injudicious collapse of a
distinction I wanted to maintain. I'm unclear about whether that
was
an honest mistake or intentional, but if it was intentional, I'm
unclear
as to what legitimates the collapse.) I don't see what is
"jarring" or "incongruous," as you say, between the work Pirsig sees
DQ as handling and my version of what that work is. And you don't
really offer an explanation of the incongruity, except what I have to
infer is the difference between what your impression of the
_magnitude_ of the "primary" in "primary reality" is and the opposite
impression of magnitude from my word "fragment" (when describing
the glasses analogy).* However, I can't help but perceive that as a
superficial rhetorical difference in the words, and not the conceptual
position I was describing. After all, a "fragment" of molten lava
burns the shit out of you. A more congenial understanding of these
"fragments" would understand them to be quite powerful as they
are. This, then, dovetails with the train analogy: taking off the
glasses would blind your eyes (bad death/chaos), just as leaping
from the train would kill you.
A direct engagement with my conceptual position, rather than
haggling over the analogies and metaphors with which we work, I
think would address what I've gotten wrong in this relationship
between DQ and chaos, or as I put it otherwise, "good" or "bad"
death. I'm not sure I've obviously screwed up this relationship, but it
was what I was trying to draw into the picture of our understanding
of Dynamic Quality as it is elaborated by analogies that didn't,
explicitly, seem to have it in view as they were deployed in Pirsig's
writings.
DMB said:
This helps to reinforce the idea of man being a participant in the
creation of all things, the measure of all things, and it helps to put
the landscape analogy back in it's original context. But I also think
this helps to push back against Matt's contention that we have limited
access to DQ, that it can only be seen through a crack in the glasses
or by jumping off the train and into death and chaos. I think the idea
here is that DQ is the endless landscape of OUR awareness. We not
only have access, we are inseparable from it. It is in that sense that
Quality has us, rather than the other way around.
Matt:
I'm unclear where the pushing occurs. For one, I reject the premise
that I've suggested that "we have limited access to DQ." I've, rather,
tried to describe the difference between DQ and chaos. (And what I
take to be the unwarranted assimilation of "a crack in the glasses" to
"jumping off the train" occurs again here.) And secondly, I do not
see how the slogans in the last two sentences are unavailable to
either of my analogies: we, with our glasses, are inseparable from
the landscape (just, I might add, as we are in _Pirsig's_ use of the
analogy, which if there were a push would seem to hit Pirsig in the
same way); we-the-train are inseparable from the tracks.
DMB said:
Okay, gents. Let me try this another way.
Matt:
You quoted a lot of David Scott after this, but I was entirely unclear
as to its purport, how it intersected with the conversation between
Ron, Dan, Steve, and myself. Too oblique, one might say.
Matt
*There are two other objections, though I only take up the
"magnitude" implication. A second objection is roughly that I can't
understand Quality/DQ as the "source and substance of everything"
or as a "focal point." However, I don't understand how my analogies
can disbar those conceptual understandings. Pirsig has to deploy
many analogies to describe DQ in order to see its many sides, and
we generally don't ask how, e.g., the tracks the train runs on is the
source of the train or how the world on the other side of the glasses
is the substance of the glasses. One has to modulate to different
analogies to explain what seems absurd from the inside of the
(wrong) analogy. This doesn't mean that analogy comparison and
contrasting can't highlight interesting conceptual valences, but I do
think that this particular objection finds no solace in my elaborated
analogy itself. One would have to, rather, assume previously that I
do not or cannot hold that Quality/DQ is the source and substance
of everything.
However, as I have conceded several times recently, the perpetual
difficulty for me, and the third of the objections, is the hot stove
analogy. At present, however, I'm not sure I can't take it into
account, only that I haven't yet done so though also expressed a
dislike for it. I'm not trying to be cagey, only precise. For on the
one hand, it is my responsibility, if I want to claim to have supplied a
full and complete interpretation of how Pirsig's philosophy fits
together, to take the hot stove analogy into account somehow. But
on the other side from this, it isn't clear to me that I _cannot_ do this.
I.e., I haven't a sense of _how_ you've leveled the hot stove analogy
_as_ an objection. It looks to me, rather, that you were taking
advantage of known facts about my distaste for it (or simply not
revealing what precisely the shape of its problem is for me). Your
objection there seems to have been that I _haven't_ accounted of it,
rather than that I _can't_. And, I confess again, I don't have that
account yet, but it's only a damning objection in the "can't" form. (In
the "haven't" form it is rather an ongoing suspicion.) It's not your
responsibility to tell me what my problems are, but you can't take
advantage either of things I've sensed as potential problems, but not
given any definition to. It would be a boon to me if you did help give
that definition, but I haven't yet a sense of what that shape is.
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