Hello Foci, There have been some great posts this month! I think this slow read has proved successful. David, Marco and Andrew have impressed me very much with a few of their posts and comments on such things as: ritual, space, emptying, & perceptions Now as for my input this month, I will try to present a sort of "behind the scene" view that will show a creative process with themes such as motion, randomness, feedback (both positive and negative), spontaneity and of course my personal favorite hidden force of nature: Opposition! The closer I look the whole Q thing is in every chapter. Nothing really needs to be built because it's already there. But at the same time the need is to build "it"; individually for the sake of the whole. An Un-needed Need! Ok now for Lila quotes: "Your head is like that cup. It has a limited capacity and if you want to learn something about the world you should keep your head empty in order to learn it" "The reason Phaedrus used slips - of paper is that a card-catalog tray full of slips provides a more RANDOM ACCESS. When Info is organized in small chunks that can be accessed and sequenced at random IT BECOMES MUCH MORE VALUABLE than when you have to take it in serial form." "Some of the slips were actually about this topic: random access and Quality. The two are closely related. RANDON ACCESS is at the ESSENCE of -- GROWTH, in which cells, like post office boxes are RELATIVELY INDEPENDENT." "by keeping sequential formatting to a minimum, no fresh new unexplored idea would be forgotten or shut out." " There were NO IDEOLOGICAL Joes to kill an idea because it didn't fit into what he was already thinking" Now my commentary: The ideas presented here are subtle and powerful. Indeed Pheadrus found them to be so Creative that for him they were essentially Destructive. He claims to be "snowed under" and "submerged in chaos". So much in fact that he thinks of freedom by way of destruction. And he knows that this freedom is true. I mean, he's been here before and in much worse ways. "He is not fooling me". Oh sure, he felt some sort of a format would emerge eventually. Of course it would, I mean were talking about someone as skilled as a Jedi with an analytical knife. So skilled that he slew Aristotle in "Episode 1 / The SOM Menace". So again I say, "he is not fooling me". The pattern or format that emerged is his (Pirsigs) "first person Narrative"; NOT the MOQ! Phaedrus reminds me of old master of mine that once "brought me the skeleton of a body, which was Aristotle's Analytics." And told me that it was "wasted time to converse with one whose works are only Analytics". Again I say "he is not fooling me". What I see is that he is subtlety advocating the seeds of 'Chaos Theory', not fully developed. Diana is very right to choose Dusenberry for a dinner partner and it is natural that we all have a tendency to see him as the hero of these first chapters. Because he is the better half of a spilt-character that is trying to show us Reality. It's bullshit that Dusenberry needs to seek out Phaedrus for his Analytic mind "because that's what he doesn't have". Dusenberry and Phaedrus are of course complementary to each other and Pirsig is using them BOTH (as a split-character) to destroy Analytics, Deductive Logic, Mechanism, Rationalization & Skeletal Law and slowly replacing it with Mysterious Action, Chaotic Flow, Repeating Structure, Energetic Decay, Poetic Genius, Imaginative Beauty and the Reality of Thought. (this is why we have all the threads about mysticism and drug expansion) This is the power of Pirsig as a writer, his first person narrative style. He destroys by building something that doesn't need to be built. An Un-needed Need. The MOQ is just a "flippin" road sign pointing the way to the goal, & not the goal itself. Ok, Ok, Maybe it's a little more than a road sign, maybe it's a "flippin" global positioning system, but it still only points to the goal. And It points very subtlety and powerfully by way of Pirsigs Narrative style. Which is very cool! Although, the MOQ is a very accurate reflection of the whole. More to come, my next post will address the title slips and present my second theme of Feedback as the seeds of the levels. The Slips are not solely Intelectual. Peace, Todd MOQ.org - http://www.moq.org
