From: MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Tue Sep 16 2003 - 21:24:13 BST
DMB said:
Pointing out his antiessentialist passages for a year? I don't recall you ever posting a Pirsig passage.
Matt:
Mon Nov 11 2002 - 22:37:00 GMT, Mon Oct 14 2002 - 03:33:50 BST, Mon Oct 14 2002 - 22:34:39 BST, Sun Sep 08 2002 - 23:21:07 BST
I cheated. I went back to a year ago and found posts where I quoted Pirsig. And I didn't dig around that long because I think DMB is full of bunk. I know, for all the times I have talked about Pirsig in the last couple of months, I don't quote him very much, though I do reference portions of the book. There are two reasons 1) I haven't been able to e-mail from home with my books since May and 2) like I just said in another post, I'm usually apologizing for my project then actually conducting a project.
However, one thing I did find was the time I typed up verbatim Pirsig's Forward to "Zen Environment" by Marian Mountain (the September post from above). Not only do I quote him, but I'm interested in bringing new stuff on Pirsig that is rare.
So, I went back to a year ago when I actually conducted projects. And if you really want documentation, go to my essay. My footnotes are pretty detailed.
But I tell you, looking back, its really hard to say that I never talk about Pirsig. Or even rarely.
Matt
p.s. Here's the Foreward to Zen Environment:
------------------------------
Zen literature seems at times to divide into two groups of works: those
that are about zen; and those that are zen itself, talking. The first
group is often precise, authoritative, and highly pedigreed but lacks a
certain warmth and settledness. The second is often inaccurate, poorly
composed, vague at times but has a special sound which you can recognize as
the real thing. It is the sound of someone singing a song he himself has
composed and which no one else can ever quite imitate. That is what we
have here.
Zen is nothing other than what happens to individual people, and zen
accounts which stay close to personal circumstances are truer than those
which generalize. When Marian keeps her accounting close to what she sees
and remembers, she avoids the academic objectification of zen which becomes
controversial and misleading.
My own academic, English teacher's narrow mind always bridles at rambling
zen disquisitions of this sort, but if you want to read real zen you have
to put up with it. The best of zen masters ramble on and on without any
apparent central point. This is caused by the slippery nature of what they
are trying to convey. You can't read a zen discourse the way you read a
detective story, trying to figure out the plot. There isn't any. You have
to read this book like a giant catalog, line by line, looking for items to
buy and keeping the rest on hand in case you might want to buy them later.
When you finish this book, you can start right in again on the first
chapter and discover much more than you saw the first time.
That, after all, is how one learns about life itself.
--Robert M. Pirsig
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