[ I am back working through my prison journal. It is out of order… Well, the order is as I have opened boxes. The date in the title is the date it was written. I hope this is not confusing. What you are reading is what you get for your tax dollars. sch 10/11/2025]
I lack Zen.
Tried a bright idea for landscaping. [The idea was using grass clippings for much.sch 10/11/2025] Fell flat - not enough grass clipping to do anything with. Did pull some grass. I figured what was done justified my 12 cents per day pay. So here I go with Robert M. Pirsig's Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
I never read this book when we were both young. The printing history has Zen appearing in 1974. My Bantam Book paperback looks like it is the fourth printing from 1980. I remember the book was everywhere when I was a teenager. Back then, I had no interest in Zen. Or motorcycles.
I knew one person who read the book: LAH. She was not impressed, as I recall her reaction. Then, too, philosophy was never her strong suit.
Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance reads like a novel, but is actually part memoir and partially philosophy primer, with a strong emphasis on the interplay of technology in our lives. I reached the halfway point last night with three questions and two problems. The biggest problem concerns the character Phaedrus.
The plot: Father, son, and a married couple take a motorcycle trip from Minnesota into Montana with a destination of Bozeman. Along the way, the father narrates his thoughts on technology and classicism and romanticism; he also begins telling the story of a shadowy character, Phaedrus. I assume Phaedrus is actually the narrator before some psychotic break and the narrator is also Robert M. Pirsig, the author. Phaedrus seems to have dropped in from some gothic novel - the madman upstairs - by way of Percy Shelley. I hope Pirsig breaks through the wall separating him from Phaedrus (he has but not yet identified himself as Phaedrus.)
Question #1: did Steve Jobs read Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance? That seems possible with the distinction between the classical and the romantic:
A classical understanding sees the world primarily as underlying form itself....
***
The romantic mode is primarliy inspirational, imaginative, creative, intuitive....
p. 61
Question #2: who is/was Robert M. Pirsig? No authorial information accompanied the paperback. But he presents himself as a philosopher who writes thus:
The classic mode by contrast, proceeds by reason and by laws - which are themselves underlying forms of thought and behavior. In the European cultures it is primarily a masculine mode and the fields of science, laws and medicine are unattractively to women largely for this reason. Although motorcycle maintenance is purely classic. The dirt, the grease, the mastery of underlying form required all give it such a negative romantic appeal that women never go near it.
p. 61
I have an ex-wife and ex-girlfriend who would have no problem with motorcycle maintenance. I suspect there exist many women who would contradict Pirsig's assertion. Maybe this shows the difference between 1974 and 2015? I see why LAH would not be impressed with this book.
I also do not understand how Pirsig, who writes of Phaedrus as a scientist turned philosopher, can keep writing of Columbus showing the world was not flat. The ancient Greeks knew the world was not flat - by mathematics. Columbus was wrong about the width of the world, and his critics were right. That there was land instead of lots and lots of ocean was the real shock to Europe.
Yet, I do find some of Pirsig's purposes and insights interesting. As to his purposes:
This is the source of the trouble. Persons tend to think and feel exclusively in one mode or the other and in doing so tend to misunderstand and underestimate what the other mode is all about. But no one is willing to give up the truth as he sees it, and as far as I know, no one now living has any real reconciliation of these truths or modes. There is no point at which these visions of reality are unified.
p. 62
Note he specifies living So far, no mention of William James, Nietzsche, Bergson, or Camus; all of whom were in the ground by 1974. No idea who is doing what now - I was out of that particular stream ages ago.
Maybe Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance helped quell the idea of a beneficial revolution. Mutterings here at prison about revolution all die out in dead ends like and for the reasons described below:
But to tear down a factory or to revolt against a government or to avoid repair of a motorcycle because it is a system is to attack effects rather than causes; and as long as the attack is upon effects rather than causes; and as long as the attack is upon effects only, no change is possible. The true system, the real system, is our present construction of systemic thought itself, rationality itself, and if a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then the rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced the government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government. There's so much talk about the system. And so little understanding.
p. 88
So, workers of the world, you've got more than your physical chains to throw off.
The following diagnosis is even more applicable to 2015:
"But what's happening is that each year our old flat-earth of conventional reason becomes less and less adequate to handle the expressions we have and this is creating widespread feelings of topsy-turviness. As a result, we're getting more and more people in irrational areas of thought-occultism, mysticism, drug changes, and the like - because they feel the inadequacy of classical reason to handle what they know are real experiences.
pp. 151 - 52
I will try to finish the book this weekend. I'm off the reading list and back to the locker until 9/14. Not really up for David Foster Wallace. Also writing "The Overreacher".
sch
[I have no idea ten years later why I referenced Steve Jobs. The romantic mode makes more sense now than also involving the classical. Having ten years of Elon Musks and Mark Zuckerbergs, there seems like of the romantic mode in the tech side of the world that I do think Jobs does seem to have incorporated. At least, in what was presented to the world.
On the other hand, this is the paragraph ending his Wikipedia entry:
His use of an Apple II
and relationship with the company led to him being honored by 'the
Pirsig Meeting Room', at one of Apple's Cupertino offices, being named
after him.[42][41][when?
Please understand one thing about prison: information is tightly regulated. Not is the body incarcerated, but also must be the mind. The federal Bureau of Prisons was deeply fearful of granting internet access to its prisoners. No Google. No Wikipedia. I do not disagree that unfettered access would have been a dangerous thing - I know of one fellow who got access from the head of the education department at Fort Dix FCI and went on a spree of fraud. If additional information on a book, author, and/or topic was not available within the barbwire fences of Ft. Dix, then it was not available. Working on this post, following the link above to Pirsig's Wikipedia page gave me this information:
Pirsig had a mental breakdown and spent time in and out of psychiatric hospitals between 1961 and 1963. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia and treated with electroconvulsive therapy on numerous occasions,[7] a treatment he discusses in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Nancy sought a divorce during this time;[26] they formally separated in 1976 and divorced in 1978.[11] On December 28, 1978, Pirsig married Wendy Kimball in Tremont, Maine.
As far as the Earth being known as round, any skeptics check out: June, ca. 240 B.C. Eratosthenes Measures the Earth.
Other
Greek scholars repeated the feat of measuring the Earth using a
procedure similar to Eratosthenes’ method. Several decades after
Eratosthenes measurement, Posidonius used the star Canopus as his light
source and the cities of Rhodes and Alexandria as his baseline. But
because he had an incorrect value for the distance between Rhodes and
Alexandria, he came up with a value for Earth’s circumference of about
18,000 miles, nearly 7,000 miles too small.
Ptolemy
included this smaller value in his treatise on geography in the second
century A.D. Later explorers, including Christopher Columbus, believed
Ptolemy’s value and became convinced that Earth was small enough to sail
around. If Columbus had instead known Eratosthenes larger, and more
accurate, value, perhaps he might never have set sail.
This I learned more than 50 years ago.
Perhaps we should get kids reading Pirsig before we allow them to use a smartphone.
Links I turned up typing this post:
Why Robert Pirsig's 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance' Still Resonates Today (Smithsonian Magazine).
If such experiences feel less available to us now, Pirsig would not be surprised. Already, in 1974, he offered this story as a meditation on a particular way of moving through the world, one that felt marked for extinction. The book, which uses the narrator’s road trip with his son and two friends as a journey of inquiry into values, became a massive best seller, and in the decades since its publication has inspired millions to seek their own accommodation with modern life, governed by neither a reflexive aversion to technology, nor a naive faith in it. At the heart of the story is the motorcycle itself, a 1966 Honda Super Hawk. Hondas began to sell widely in America in the 1960s, inaugurating an abiding fascination with Japanese design among American motorists, and the company’s founder, Soichiro Honda, raised the idea of “quality” to a quasi-mystical status, coinciding with Pirsig’s own efforts in Zen to articulate a “metaphysics of quality.” Pirsig’s writing conveys his loyalty to this machine, a relationship of care extending over many years. I got to work on several Hondas of this vintage when I ran a motorcycle repair shop in Richmond, Virginia. Compared to British bikes of the same era, the Hondas seemed more refined. (My writing career grew out of these experiences—an effort to articulate the human element in mechanical work.)
Returning, Again, to Robert M. Pirsig (The New Yorker)
"In Quality,” a collection of Pirsig’s speeches, fiction, letters, and musings that was posthumously published last month, might not satisfy the reader seeking a nostalgic return to the road or the mechanic’s shop. The text, instead, reads like a notebook from a life spent pondering: What does “quality” mean? Why are some things better than others? What is it about humans that causes us to recognize the difference? His answer is that quality “is a characteristic of thought and statement that is recognized by a non-thinking or intuitive process.” He continues, “Because definitions are a product of rigid reasoning, quality can never be rigidly defined. But everyone knows what it is.”
As in “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” Pirsig mostly defines “quality” by what it is not. That book starts with a dichotomy: on one side is the narrator, who maintains his own motorcycle and understands its every function; on the other is his riding partner John, who owns a high-priced BMW and can’t even be bothered to learn how to fix it. The narrator doesn’t understand John’s relationship to his machine and realizes that, whereas the narrator can see the Buddha in the gears of an engine, John believes that technology or man-made things are anathema to the spiritual reasons why he rides his bike. Who, then, is correct—the logician or the romantic? Who is closer to quality? The answer, according to Pirsig, is neither, but also everything:
Quality is the Buddha. Quality is scientific reality. Quality is the goal of Art. It remains to work these concepts into a practical, down-to-earth context, and for this there is nothing more practical or down-to-earth than what I have been talking about all along—the repair of an old motorcycle.
There’s a very good chance that unless you spent a decent portion of your life thinking about dharma, reading the Upanishads, or discussing the works of Shunryu Suzuki, there will be very little in “On Quality” that will be of interest to you. The collection almost reads like a scientific proof that tries to identify the exact location of quality while also arguing, somewhat more convincingly, that such a task is impossible. What the reader is left with, then, are a series of word puzzles and contradictions that can be frustrating, but which reveal a lifelong search for what moves Pirsig in a way he cannot explain. In the book’s preface, Wendy Pirsig tells the story of what happened when her late husband joined the army and was stationed in Korea:
Stepping off the train in South Korea when the troops first arrived, he saw a dusting of snow over the nearby mountains that was so beautiful and strange and reflected such a different culture that he became almost ecstatic. “I walked around. It was like Shangri La,” he recalled years later. “I think I was crying. I just stared at the roofs wondering what kind of culture could have built roofs like that,” he said.
In the lineage of Eastern philosophy in American letters—see the works of Pirsig, J. D. Salinger, Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder, or Jack Kerouac—you’ll often find a desire to negate the innate hunger of life. The authors try to find something better in the image of, say, a red wheelbarrow glazed with rain water next to white chickens. This country, they say, is dull and greedy and always misses the point. The possibility of a new type of ecstatic vision and a life filled with meaningful tasks, I imagine, is what drew me and so many other readers to “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.” We believed Pirsig could see the Buddha in a well-maintained carburetor. We wanted to see it, too, and we wanted to work as he did, perhaps in large part because we saw very little future for ourselves in the striving world.
sch 10-11-2025]
