Dan said to Marsha:
As I read it, your question is explained right here in the snippet Dave
provided: "For our ability to describe or report a wide-range of tastes and
smells lags far behind our capacity to actually have an experience of a nearly
infinite spectrum of tastes and smells. In other words, the deliverances of our
senses continually run ahead of both our descriptive vocabularies as well as
our conceptual abilities."
dmb says:
Right, I gave up after 3 or 4 of these moves wherein Marsha asks the question
after it's already been answered once or twice. Pirsig says very much the same
thing in ZAMM so that it's not just a quote I hoped she'd understand but also a
Pirsigian idea that she'd recognize and remember. THE EMPHASIS IS MINE...
"... at the cutting edge of time, before an object can be distinguished, there
must be a kind of non-intellectual awareness, which he called awareness of
Quality. You can't be aware that you've seen a tree until after you've SEEN the
tree, and between the instant of VISION and instant of awareness there must be
a time lag. We sometimes think of that time lag as unimportant, But there's no
justification for thinking that the time lag is unimportant... none
whatsoever." --Pirsig in ZAMM
"...The tree that you are aware of intellectually, because of that small time
lag, is always in the past and therefore is always unreal. Any INTELLECTUALLY
CONCEIVED object is always in the past and therefore unreal. REALITY is always
the MOMENT OF VISION BEFORE the intellectualization takes place. There is no
other reality. This PRE-INTELLECTUAL REALITY is what Phædrus felt he had
properly identified as Quality. Since all intellectually identifiable things
must emerge from this pre-intellectual reality, Quality is the parent, the
source of all subjects and objects." --Pirsig in ZAMM
"The central reality of mysticism, the reality that Phaedrus had called
'Quality' in his first book, is not a metaphysical chess piece. Quality doesn't
have to be defined. You understand it without definition, ahead of definition.
Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to INTELLECTUAL
ABSTRACTION. Quality is indivisible, undefinable and unknowable IN THE
SENSE that there is a KNOWER AND A KNOWN, but a metaphysics can be none of
these things. A metaphysics must be divisible, definable, and knowable, or
there isn't any metaphysics." --Pirsig in LILA
These are Pirsig's central ideas, the MOQ's core concepts. I can see how a
new-comer might have questions about this but few have been here as long as
Marsha. She must have been exposed to these ideas over a thousand times by now.
This level of incorrigibility has to be some kind of miracle, some kind of evil
magic spell that blocks the capacity to learn. Maybe it's a piece of
performance art? An experiment to see how long a person can remain in the dark?
I don't know. But one thing is for sure; it's definitely never been about
exchanging ideas. She wants nothing to do with anything like that. Apparently.
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