Arlo said to Harding:
In LILA, Pirsig points out the Hippie movement failed because: The Hippie
rejection of social and intellectual patterns left just two directions to go:
toward biological quality and toward Dynamic Quality. The revolutionaries of
the sixties thought that since both are anti-social, and since both are
anti-intellectual, why then they must both be the same. That was the mistake.
Lila, the character, also rejects static patterns, but how do you see her
trajectory as being different than the hippies? How do you see her pursuit as
avoid the mistake of the hippies? How do you see Lila, the character, pursing
Dynamic Quality but the Hippies pursuing biological quality? Can you offer me
reasons to support your implied position that Lila was a mystic of some sort,
and not, like the hippies, confusing biological and Dynamic Quality.
dmb says:
It's not easy to diagnose a complex social movement or a fictional character
and comparing the two gets even more complicated. Despite this difficulty, it
seems pretty clear to me that Lila is nothing like a mystic. She's not Zen.
She's in a great deal of pain, clinging to the doll is clinging to a comforting
delusion. The doll allows her to believe that she is a mother, that she didn't
kill her child, that she didn't wreck homes, that she is not a former
prostitute, that she is not a boat hoping slut, etc.. Her dynamism is not
something to admire or hope for. I mean, her path is the least likely path to
happiness or peace of mind, much less enlightenment. She is disintegrating.
She's dynamic in the degenerate sense, in the negative sense. And it hurts like
hell. It is hell. I think Pirsig is offering DQ as a way out of this nightmare
of a life but this is something she would go through, not a state to be
maintained. In the same way that peyote is not supposed to make you tri
pped out and stoned for the rest of your life, Lila is supposed to go through
the experience and come out "better than cured" on the other side of it. As
with the case of 180 enlightenment, the dynamic phase is only the half way
point and Lila and the peyote eaters are both going to have to come back down
and settle on some kind of static quality. The question is: "What kind"?
"Lila's problem wasn't that she was suffering from lack of Dynamic freedom.
It's hard to see how she could possibly have any more freedom. What she needed
now were stable patterns to encase that freedom. She needed some way of being
reintegrated into the rituals of everyday living."
In the case of the hippies, I like to think that Pirsig's diagnosis is pretty
consistent through both books. In ZAMM, of course, John and Silvia represent
the millions who were also trying to run away from technology and operate on
feelings alone. In the second book, this same basic idea is described as a
rejection of intellectual quality in favor of biological quality, and the
latter was mistaken for a more genuine kind freedom.
In both cases, I think the point is that we ought not confuse freedom OF
intellectual quality with freedom FROM intellectual quality. It's the
difference between genuine creativity and mere empty-headedness, no?
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