LS Waiting and Watching

From: David Buchanan (DBuchanan@ClassicalRadio.org)
Date: Sat Jun 10 2000 - 23:29:41 BST


Slow readers:

"WHERE DOES THIS METAPHYSICS OF THE UNIVERSE BEGIN?"

Aren't you glad someone finally posted something about chapter two?

Thanks for the "Alchemy" post, Miv. You've started the ball rolling with
another excellent contribution. I'd also noticed the references to basic
elements like water and fire, cold and heat, darkness and light. It seems
that this is the basic stuff we learn about after birth, and only supports
your "birth canal-born out of the sky" theme.

He makes biological references in a similar fashion. Its early dawn, he's
shivering and naked, leaks in the creek, moves with the grace of spider
monkey, feels the icy coldness of the deck and the warm glow of the stove,
and a bunch of other basic sensations.

And we see foreshadowing of the social level too. Lila's suitcase crash as
she's boarding the boat is perfectly consistent with her low-brow behavior
in the bar. Beer held off the Captain's discomfort with all that until he
sobered up a little. Oh, how it hurts the morning after. And he contrasts
his drunken failure to tighten the lines with gratitude for having already
loaded the stove so that it was ready to provide some heat. And its probably
no accident that those lines he failed to attend were tied to Rigel's boat.
Beer does that. He was too drunk to care about Victorian judgement. His ties
to it were loose.

It's as if he were putting the "metaphysics of the universe" into a context
wide enough to cover it all. Heat. Lust. Shame and anger. Ideas and methods.
There are four long trays of slips, which is perhaps a reference to the four
levels, a foreshadowing of the structure of the MOQ. Its about the shape of
things to come.

The chapter is largely about his metaphysical construction methods, or
rather his methods for letting it grow, letting it emerge Dynamically. There
is a rational structure involved. The slips, tabs and trays are used to
store and order his thoughts in a way that is reasonable and logical enough,
but there is also a sense that the creative process is not entirely within
his control. He waits for it to emerge. He is fascinated to watch it grow,
as if it had a life of its own. I get the impression that the MOQ is bigger
than the author of Lila.

"But he felt sure that sooner or later some sort of a format would have to
emerge and it would be a better one for his having waited." (Page 24)

"The slips kept expanding in every direction so that the more he saw the
more he saw there WAS to see." (24)

"..this metaphysics of the universe..." (24)

"It was fascinating to watch this thing grow. No one that he knew had ever
written a whole metaphysics before and there were no rules for doing it and
no way of predicting how it would progress." (Page 25)

His dynamic, yet simple method of comparing slips and asking "which comes
first" treats the metaphysics as if it were something to be seen and heard,
rather than built, nurtured rather than constructed. Pirsig's description of
its loss and rediscovery seems to suggest that such things exist in their
own right. Its there for anyone to dig up and see, even if its not a
physical or objective thing.

"The buildings out there on the shore were in one world and these slips were
in another. This "slip-world" was quite a world and he'd almost lost it once
because he hadn't written any of it down and incidents came along that had
destroyed his memory of it. Now he had reconstructed what seemed like most
of it on these slips and he didn't want to lose it again. But maybe it was
a good thing that he had lost it because now, in the reconstruction of it,
all sorts of new material was flooding in - ..." (Page 22)

BUT THEN HE GOT DRUNK AND DID THE DIRTY DEED.

"After a while he took a blank pad from the back of the tray and wrote on
the top of the slip, PROGRAM," and then under it, "Hang up everything until
Lila gone."

MOQ.org - http://www.moq.org



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