Arlo said to David Harding:
...Creation builds off existing patterns, the impetus to create, the
pre-intellectual source of the creation, is Dynamic Quality, but the forms that
emerge in its wake are made possible by the existing static patterns. It would
not have been possible, for example, for a caveman to write ZMM. Phaedrus'
insights, inspired by Dynamic Quality, built upon the existing strata of
patterns of his experience.
"Our scientific description of nature is always culturally derived. Nature
tells us only what our culture predisposes us to hear. The selection of which
inorganic patterns to observe and which to ignore is made on the basis of
social patterns of value, or when it is not, on the basis of biological
patterns of value." (LILA)
dmb says:
Yes, I think we see a version of this idea in ZAMM's train analogy. Pirsig is
still talking in terms of romantic and classic knowledge instead of Dynamic and
static quality but in this analogy the two sets of terms are close enough. "I
want to call this railroad train 'knowledge' and subdivide it into two parts,"
Pirsig says.
Classic (static) knowledge is the engine and all the boxcars and everything
that's in the boxcars. "So far the definition of the train is static and
purposeless," he says, because "Romantic Quality, in terms of this analogy,
isn't any 'part' of the train. It's the leading edge". This is where it gets
very interesting, I think.
This leading edge (DQ or Romantic Quality) is "of no real significance unless
you understand that the train isn't a static entity at all. A train really
isn't a train if it can't go anywhere. ...The real train of knowledge isn't a
static entity that can be stopped and subdivided. It's always going somewhere.
On a track called Quality. ...The leading edge is where absolutely all the
action is. The leading edge contains all the infinite possibilities of the
future. It contains all the history of the past. Where else could they be
contained? ...The cutting edge of this instant right here and now is always
nothing less than the totality of everything there is."
These lines might be a bit too familiar but I think it's important to notice
what he's saying about the relation between the leading edge and our static
knowledge. In this analogy, all that freight and weight - 120 boxcars full of
knowledge, full of the static patterns accumulated since we left the caves - is
brought along to each moment. It enriches each moment, funds it with the
evolutionary advances of the past. I think this is a crucial feature of
Pirsig's thought and yet it's being tragically overlooked by the would-be
killers of static patterns.
In LILA, where Pirsig says that following DQ all by itself only leads to chaos,
this is what he means, I think. When the whole train is moving, the box cars
are following right behind that leading edge. They move along the track
together. There are very important distinctions between static and Dynamic
quality but they are both called "quality" for a reason and they're not enemies
of each other. Stagnation, degeneration, and chaos are the enemies of
evolution, the enemies of life. That's what the DQ/sq balance and the moral
codes are supposed to protect: the ongoing evolution of life. (This is not
confined to biology, of course, but includes the evolution of culture and
yourself.)
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