Last Tuesday, Arlo said:
I took the opportunity on a train ride this past weekend to revisit the
Partially Examined Life podcast about Pirsig's ZMM. I wanted to take the
opportunity to (1) re-encourage those who may have missed this to give this a
listen, and (2) use the dialogue (below) from the podcast to draw the above
point out explicitly.
dmb says:
Thanks for doing that, Arlo. It's kinda cool to see it in print form.
Flattering and convenient. (I've reproduced the dialog below for easy
reference.)
Arlo said:
... A Zen monk (who, say, has never repaired or fixed or even ridden a
motorcycle) is not going to be able to figure out what the problem is with a
motorcycle by just 'killing static patterns'. There has to be this oscillation
(to build off your use of 'momentum') between acquiring static knowledge and
being open to Dynamic Quality. The present moment is this center point being
'push' and 'pull', between where the train has been and where the train is
headed. This is why a caveman could not have written ZMM, his train did not
have sufficient 'momentum' to allow for that possibility. It's also why I am
unsure about the use of meditation (quieting static patterns) without any
discernible post-meditative improvement (to yourself or to the world). In every
case I see in ZMM/LILA, the purpose of clearing the mind, of meditating, of
habituated ritual, is to foster some 'bettering' of either one's abilities or
one's insights. You're stuck, and you can't see a way out, so you clea
r your mind, you quiet the static patterns that have you blocked, and that
moment of Dynamic Quality provides the way out. You habituated your repair
activity so that you are open to little hints about problems you may not have
otherwise seen. You respond to the materials better. The end result is a
"well-maintained motorcycle".
dmb says:
Yea, as Pirsig says, the point of meditation is bring yourself closer to
reality, to get more in touch with the actual living experience. One can get
this from Wikipedia, even. It's an attentive awareness of the reality of the
moment. "This faculty becomes a power in particular when it is coupled with
clear comprehension of whatever is taking place." Pirsig's artful mechanic
certainly understood the meaning of the screw with the torn slot. Since no
repairs could even begin without first getting that cover plate off, that
damaged little screw meant the motorcycle was totally useless and worthless.
That trivial little hangup, a fastener worth just a few cents, completely shut
him down. The solution is going to come out of a very careful inspection of
that particular, individual detail of reality, not just a general understanding
of screws. The solution will involve an exploration of the available tools, the
available options or even the invention of a new option or tool. What t
he solution will not entail is some evacuation of the mind, an empty-headed
staring off into space, and I doubt if candles or chanting would help much
either. An artful mechanic brings knowledge and experience to the immediate
task and very much cares about doing it right.
Arlo said:
I think 'momentum' also brings out one of the things I don't like about the
term 'static'. In fact, I'm pretty sure you can just say 'patterns' without any
need for the qualifier 'static'. But, these patterns are not just sitting
there, they are going somewhere. Or, maybe more accurately, they are carrying
us somewhere, and without them, and without the evolution built into the model,
all the meditating and 'killing patterns' in the world won't make you a better
mechanic (any more than being stuck in patterns that have brought the train to
a stop will make you a better mechanic).
dmb says:
Right, these patterns are not only moving along right behind the cutting edge
of experience as in the train analogy, according to the migrating forest
analogy in LILA we ARE these patterns. Those boxcars contain all the products
of our collective history and we are a product of that same history. On either
scale, further advances in growth or evolution depend on the already preserved
advances. You know, we stand on the shoulders of giants - some of whom were
cavemen.
Arlo said:
The passage Mark alludes to, I think, is important. "The names, the shapes and
forms we give Quality depend only partly on the Quality. They also depend
partly on the a priori images we have accumulated in our memory. We constantly
seek to find, in the Quality event, analogues to our previous experiences. If
we didn't we'd be unable to act. ... The reason people see Quality differently,
he said, is because they come to it with different sets of analogues." I think
this underscores the importance of intellectual patterns (not to mention the
social, biological, and inorganic patterns that inform our analogues). It is
why the train is not 'dead weight' holding back the engine, but is the weight
that provides the momentum that moves the train forward, as I said above it is
what makes possible the forms that emerge in the wake of that present moment.
dmb says:
Right, aren't we going to be better off bringing a wide variety of analogies
along with us so that we have more options as we "seek to find, in the Quality
event, analogues to our previous experiences". If we simply eliminate static
patterns, "we'd be unable to act" but the capacity to choose from a wide range
of analogs means a greater range of freedom to act. And that's what not being
stuck is all about.
Thanks again for your transcription efforts and for the kind words.
---------------------------Partial Podcast Transcript [approximately 34:10 -
37:28]-----------------[Dylan]
There's experience embedded in there, in some way, your experience with
literature. On the face of it, while I understand the notion that 'well these
students, they know what Quality is, they know what the Quality of these essays
are', and they can judge it by pointing out to it. And you see the evidence of
it because there's a kind of general ascension about it. Okay, I can buy that.
But if I ask them all to go judge whether or not, well let's just say a
motorcycle is operating correctly, they're not going to be able to do that
unless they get some experience with that. They're going to have to go take it
for a ride. They're going to have to do all kinds of things and gather
experience with it and then maybe based upon that they're going to formualte a
judgement about that Quality. But it seems to be there's got to be something
happening and its not clear to me that its exactly pre-intellectual about
processing that experience and maybe that's what he means by the Quality, b
> ut its not clear to me that its as simple as it being manifest in 'oh any
> freshman can judge whether its good writing or not' because that has along
> with it a whole bunch of baggage about their own experience with writing...
[Mark]
...Which he admits, but yeah I have trouble also reconciling that with the
notion that these judgements are pre-intellectual. You have to recognize that
it is an essay in order to judge that its a good essay. You have to understand
the language. There's so many things, intellectually, that are going into,
before this judgement comes up, that to say this has anything to do with the
pre-intellectual just seems strange to me.
[DMB]
This is an excellent point. I've heard this objection many times, and I don't
know if I've really come up with a very good reply to it. But there's a point
where he uses a train as an analogy for the difference between theoretic
knowledge, the things that you know, conceptual ideas and all that stuff, and
then this pre-intellectual cutting edge experience. He asks us to image a huge
freight train moving across the landscape, and this thing is like a mile long,
and all the box cars are filled with all the concepts that we've inherited from
the past, that we inherit from the language, you know the context of our
culture. And that freight, that's got a lot of momentum, there's a lot of
weight behind it. But at the cutting edge of that train, that's the
pre-intellectual experience, and there's something about that whole train
behind the front edge that informs the way you take the present moment. In
other words, the present moment, that dynamic cutting edge of experience, that
pr
> e-intellectual experience, is well-funded, not only by your own personal
> experience, but also by the collective experience of the culture in which
> you learn to think and speak. So you have a mile long train full of freight,
> and that always comes to bear on the present moment. Like you say, you know,
> a motorcycle mechanic, he's got to know how to use the tools, he's gotta
> know what the shape of this machine is, what it can do on the road, he's
> gotta have a lot of experience with motorcycles and machines to be a good
> enough motorcycle repairman to be considered an artist. ==========
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