Month: August 2007

There are whole sites devoted to ZAMM,and this site is not one of them, even though it may seem that way to recent visitors. In fact, if it hadn’t been unseasonably overcast the last week, there would have been a lot more outdoor pictures than ZAMM commentary, but I’ve been spoiled by recent sunshine and am waiting for the clouds to disappear before going out camera in hand.

Since I’ve also been playing grandpa and driving Gavin to soccer lessons this week, I’ve even managed to read the first 100 pages of Pirsig’s Lila. Commentary on that book will follow, but this will be my last entry on ZAMM, despite the fact that I still have an awful lot of strong opinions about the book, scattered ones, at that, running through my head.

Though I still remain unconvinced by Pirsig’s main point that Quality is the ultimate reality, I identify with most of what he writes about. I certainly agree that

You’ve got to live right too. It’s the way you live that predisposes you to avoid the traps and see the right facts. You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It’s easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally. That’s the way all the experts do it. The making of a painting or the fixing of a motorcycle isn’t separate from the rest of your existence. If you’re a sloppy thinker the six days of the week you aren’t working on your machine, what trap avoidances, what gimmicks, can make you all of a sudden sharp on the seventh? It all goes together.

But if you’re a sloppy thinker six days a week and you really try to be sharp on the seventh, then maybe the next six days aren’t going to be quite as sloppy as the preceding six. What I’m trying to come up with on these gumption traps, I guess, is shortcuts to living right.

The real cycle you’re working on is a cycle called Yourself. The machine that appears to be “out there” and the person that appears to be “in here” are not two separate things. They grow toward Quality or fall away from Quality together.

I’ve tried to live my whole life this way, and I’ve even had ulcers to prove it. I had great parents who wanted me to do whatever I wanted to do, but always expected me to do my best at whatever I did, just as they did everyday, a point I emphasized in my earlier discussion of Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea, Hopefully this blog is a testament to the fact that I’m still working on a cycle called Myself.

Though this idea of “living right” is shown throughout the novel, I think it’s best exemplified through Pirsig’s idea of areté, or excellence

“What moves the Greek warrior to deeds of heroism,” Kitto comments, “is not a sense of duty as we understand it-duty towards others: it is rather duty towards himself. He strives after that which we translate ‘virtue’ but is in Greek areté, ‘excellence’ …… shall have much to say about aretê. It runs through Greek life.”

There, Phaedrus thinks, is a definition of Quality that had existed a thousand years before the dialecticians ever thought to put it to word-traps. Anyone who cannot understand this meaning without logic definiens and definendum and differentia is either lying or so out of touch with the common lot of humanity to be unworthy of receiving any reply whatsoever. Phaedrus is fascinated too by the description of the motive of “duty toward self’ which is an almost exact translation of the Sanskrit word dharma, sometime described as the “one” of the Hindus. Can the dharma of the Hindus and the “virtue” of the ancient Greeks be identical?

Then Phaedrus feels a tugging to read the passage again, and he does so and then … what’s this?!

“That which we translate ‘virtue’ but is in Greek ‘exellence.’”

Lightning hits!

Quality! Virtue! Dharma! That is what the Sophists were teaching! Not ethical relativism. Not pristine “virtue.” But aretê. Excellence. Dharma! Before the Church of Reason. Before substance. Before form. Before mind and matter. Before dialectic itself. Quality had been absolute. Those first teachers of the Western world were teaching Quality, and the medium they had chosen was that of rhetoric. He has been doing it right all along.

Kitto had more to say about this aretê of the ancient Greeks. “When we meet aretê in Plato,” he said, “we translate it ‘virtue’ and consequently miss all the flavour of it. ‘Virtue,’ at least in modern English, is almost entirely a moral word; aretê, on the other hand, is used indifferently in all the categories, and simply means excellence.”

I’m tempted to say that Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea conveys this same idea more succinctly, even more convincingly, but I doubt that Old Man and the Sea is as effective in making the reader think about the concept of Quality, and why so much of modern life seems to lack it.

I must admit, though, that I was more than a little put off by Phaedrus’ attempts to prove that there was a conspiracy by ancient, and not-so-ancient of philosophers, to discredit the importance of Quality:

Plato hadn’t tried to destroy aretê. He had encapsulated it; made a permanent, fixed Idea out of it; had converted it to a rigid, immobile Immortal Truth. He made aretê the Good, the highest form, the highest Idea of all. It was subordinate only to Truth itself, in a synthesis of all that had gone before.

That was why the Quality that Phaedrus had arrived at in the classroom had seemed so close to Plato’s Good. Plato’s Good was taken from the rhetoricians. Phaedrus searched, but could find no previous cosmologists who had talked about the Good. That was from the Sophists. The difference was that Plato’s Good was a fixed and eternal and unmoving Idea, whereas for the rhetoricians it was not an Idea at all. The Good was not a form of reality. It was reality itself, ever changing, ultimately unknowable in any kind of fixed, rigid way.

First, I have no real way of verifying that this is historically accurate, since I’ve never had access to the pre-Socratic philosophers he refers to. In the end, though, I began to see this as a red-herring. Who really cares if ancient philosophers conspired to make Quality seem less important than earlier philosophers had made it seem? Isn’t the important thing to prove that Quality is the ultimate reality?

I’ll also have to admit that Pirsig’s preface where he seems to reject the narrator and emphasize that Phaedrus is the real hero of the novel, — a little strange since they are one and the same — also caused some problems for me since I preferred the narrator who seemed to live a more zen-like existence than Phaedrus, who seemed anything but Zen-like, obsessed with ideas, obsessed with proving that everyone else was wrong.

In fact, when I first read the novel I tended to see the climactic description of Phaedrus wandering the streets

The city closes in on him now, and in his strange perspective it becomes the antithesis of what he believes. The citadel not of Quality, the citadel of form and substance. … Form and substance without Quality. … Blind, huge, sinister, and inhuman …

as Phaedrus’s “dark night of the soul,” the final moment preceding enlightenment if only one can pass through it. In my novel, it is the narrator, once he finally becomes one with himself, that is enlightened, not Phaedrus.

For me, Pirsig is most interesting not when he is trying to justify his philosophical argument that Quality is the ultimate reality but, rather, when he suggests ways to bring Quality into our everyday lives and argues that doing so will begin to repair the rift between technologists and antitechnologists (terms I much prefer to classical and romantic, as suggested earlier).

I think he’s right on when he argues:

There has been a haze, a backup problem in this Chautauqua so far; I talked about caring the first day and then realized I couldn’t say anything meaningful about caring until its inverse side, Quality, is understood. I think it’s important now to tie care to Quality by pointing out that care and Quality are internal and external aspects of the same thing. A person who sees Quality and feels it as he works is a person who cares. A person who cares about what he sees and does is a person who’s bound to have some characteristics of Quality.

Thus, if the problem of technological hopelessness is caused by absence of care, both by technologists and antitechnologists; and if care and Quality are external and internal aspects of the same thing, then it follows logically that what really causes technological hopelessness is absence of the perception of Quality in technology by both technologists and antitechnologists. Phaedrus’ mad pursuit of the rational, analytic and therefore technological meaning of the word “Quality” was really a pursuit of the answer to the whole problem of technological hopelessness. So it seems to me, anyway.

Both those who produce crap and those who consume it because they get it cheaper and can buy more of it ultimately suffer from the lack of caring and the lack of quality. Craftsmen who were forced to compete with factories that massfactured furniture rather than making them by hand (manu-facture) bemoaned the loss of quality, while those who took their job by working in the factory complained of the deadly boredom from mindlessly reproducing a single part. Buyers usually get an inferior product that looks cheaper and doesn’t last as long.

Quality was sacrificed in the name of cost, a tradeoff that probably made sense when most people squatted or sat on the ground because they could not afford furniture, but makes little sense today when people repeatedly replace their furniture because it falls apart or, worse yet, because it is out of style. In the end, both the consumer and those consumed by massfacturing lose.

Looking back, way back to junior high, I strongly felt quality was more important than quantity. I earned the only “D” I ever got in grades 1-12 in Woodshop because I wanted to produce something I could be proud of and the teacher rewarded quantity rather than quality. The more projects students turned out in the quarter, the higher their grade. I threw more projects away than some students made, but I wasn’t about to give my parents something I wasn’t proud of. The shop teacher, seemed more interested in producing students to work in a factory than craftsmen who could make a good piece of furniture.

I’d also like to believe that Pirsig’s correct when he says that

Quality, or its absence, doesn’t reside in either the subject or the object. The real ugliness lies in the relationship between the people who produce the technology and the things they produce, which results in a similar relationship between the people who use the technology and the things they use.

Phaedrus felt that at the moment of pure Quality perception, or not even perception, at the moment of pure Quality, there is no subject and there is no object. There is only a sense of Quality that produces a later awareness of subjects and objects. At the moment of pure quality, subject and object are identical. This is the Tat tvam asi truth of the Upanishads, but it’s also reflected in modern street argot. “Getting with it,” “digging it,” “grooving on it” are all slang reflections of this identity. It is this identity that is the basis of craftsmanship in all the technical arts. And it is this identity that modern, dualistically conceived technology lacks. The creator of it feels no particular sense of identity. with it. The owner of it feels no particular sense of identity with it. The user of it feels no particular sense of identity with it. Hence, by Phaedrus’ definition, it has no Quality.

Making a good piece of furniture is an awful lot like playing a good game of basketball where things just fall into place without ever really thinking about them. Of course, that only happens once you’ve practiced enough to reach a certain skill level. People used to ask me why I didn’t make furniture to sell, and I might have if I’d needed the money, but I felt a real closeness to the best pieces I made, and, the more I live with them the more they are a part of me. I think that’s the reason that traditional craftsmen took pride in their work, it was a part of them.

I agree with when Pirsig when he says that

The way to solve the conflict between human values and technological needs is not to run away from technology That’s impossible. The way to resolve the conflict is to break down the barriers of dualistic thought that prevent a real understanding of what technology is — “not an exploitation of nature, but a fusion of nature and the human spirit into a new kind of creation that transcends both.

I do know that most of the artistic things I’ve done have been made possible because of advances in technology. Working full time as a high school teacher, I didn’t have time to learn skills the way traditional craftsmen did. If I had had to use just hand tools, I could never have made the furniture that I did. I envied Vietnamese carpenters who could create handsome pieces of furniture from packing crates using only the hand tools they carried with them, but it takes a lifetime to learn how to do that and I didn’t have a lifetime.

Nor could I have produced the photos that I post here without a digital camera and Photoshop. I’ve studied watercolors in a junior college, but I didn’t have the time to maintain those skills while teaching and raising kids. Without my computer, not to mention my digital camera, I’d be pretty much limited to snapshots as my parents were.