From: David Buchanan (DBuchanan@ClassicalRadio.org)
Date: Mon Dec 13 2004 - 00:27:52 GMT
Steve, Mark, Sam and all MOQers:
Steve Peterson wrote:
I don't interpret Code of Art to be a level as in a type of pattern.
Pirsig uses the term "moral codes" frequently in Lila. I think he
uses it to refer to rules for establishing moral supremacy between
levels rather than saying that the code itself is a specific level.
Mark Steven Heyman replied:
Thanks for the clarification. I was going to ask Platt where the
Code of Art was discussed, but you've cleared that up. Sounds like
it's just a different way of referring to the perpetual tension
between DQ and SQ.
dmb says:
Right. This final code is like the rest of them in that they're all aimed at
protecting the process of evolution except that the code of art doesn't
define the relationship between one static level and the next, but rather
the relationship between Dynamic change and all static patterns. It is
higher than intellectual static patterns, but not because there is some new
level emerging wherein we all become painters or any such ridulous thing.
Its about freshness being better that staleness at any level. The changes
brought about by the Brujo and other contrarians need not have anything to
do with intellect or the arts. It has to do with evolution. In that
particular case, it was about the evolution of social patterns and pretty
picture pictures had nothing to do with it. (Sorry. but Platt's ideas on
this issue are even worse than his politics.)
Mark said:
Of course Pirsig himself said there's no reason to limit the number
of levels to four; and I kind of like the idea of an Art level, maybe
between the Social and Intellectual, just ti irk my friend Platt.
OTOH, as you reminded us, Quality is Realty and everything we do is
art: philosophy, motorcycle maintenance, kicking stones and raking
leaves; so a separate Art level becomes redundant.
dmb says:
Well, we would hope that all our doings are artful, but I definately get the
impression that this idea has been widely underestimated. The ideas about
having both gumption and peace of mind, of working in a clean and well
lighted places, is certainly connected to this idea. Evolutionary impulses
might come out of such stillness. But I think the code of art, if we really
want call it that, is more connected to dramatic conflicts and powerful
feelings. Remember the descriptions of evolutionary contrarians as people
who feel like they'll just die if they don't get out of the static prison,
that they are working out their own problems and just happen to be working
out the culture's problems too? Or how, despite their apparent outsider
status, these change-making contrarians are actually an integral part of the
culture? This is Shaw's unreasonable man, no? These are the ones who are
following the code of art. Some such figure are literally artists and in
fact lots of them are, but let's not let that be a source of confusion.
Evolution is the point and the particular vehicle is of secondary importance
at best. Its open to whatever makes things better and that openness is sort
of the point.
Campbell speaks to this issue, by way of Nietzche, in surprizingly Pirsigian
terms. It might be helpful to share some gems from his MYTHS TO LIVE BY...
"Let me recall at this point Nietzsche's statements regarding classic and
romantic art. He identified two types or orders of each. There is the
romanticism of true power that shatters contemporary forms to go beyond
these to new forms; and there is, on the other hand, the romanticism that is
unable to achieve form at all, and so smashes and disparages out of
resentment. And with respect to classicism likewise, there is the classicism
that finds an achievement of the recognized forms easy and can play with
them at will, expressing through them its own creative aims in a rich and
vital way; and there is the classicism that clings to form desperately out
of weakness, dry and hard, authoritarian and cold. The POINT I WOULD MAKE -
and which I believe was also Nietzsche's - is that form is the medium, the
vehicle, through which life becomes manifest in its grand style, articulate
and grandiose, and that the mere shattering of form is for human as well as
for animal life a disaster, ritual and decorum being the structuring forms
of all civilization."
dmb explains:
Yes, Sam, you're gonna be surprized and delighted, but don't get too excited
yet. Campbell is talking about ritual in the broad sense, the way Pirsig
talks about cashing paychecks. In any case, I hope you see all the MOQisms
in Campbell's paragraph. Pirsig went we the classic/romantic split in ZAMM
and then went to the static/Dynamic split in LILA. Its a little funny to get
them both at the same time, but it still works. I think we can also see
Pirsig's distinction between degenerates and revolutionaries in this
paragraph too. That's the main point, no? And Cambell reads our history the
same way Pirsig does in this respect. For extra fun, you can count the
Pirsigisms along the way...
"One cannot help remarking, however, that since about the year 1914 there
has been evident in our progressive world an increasing disregard and even
disdain for those rital forms that once brought forth, and up to now have
sustained, this infinitely rich and fruitfully developing civilizaton. There
is a ridiculous nature-boy sentimentalism that with increasing force is
taking over. Its beginnings date back to the 18th century of Rousseau, with
its artificial back-to-nature movements and conceptions of the Noble Savage.
Americans abroad, from the time of Mark Twain onward, have been notorious
exemplars of the ideal, representing as conspicuoulsly as possible the
innocent belief that Europeans and Asians, living in older, stuffier
enviroments, should be refreshed and awakened to their own natural
innocences by the unadulterated boorishness of a product of God's Country,
our sweet American soil, and our Bill of Rights. In Germany, between the
wars, the Wandervogel, with their knapsacks and guitars, and the later
Hitler Youth, were representatives of the reactionary trend in modern life.
And now, right here in God's Country itself (published in 1972) idyllic
scenes of barefoot white and black 'Indians' camping on our sidewalks with
their tomtoms, bedrolls, and papooses are promising to turn entire sections
of our cities into fields for anthropological research. For, as in all
societies, so among these, there are distinguishing costumes, rites of
initiation, required beliefs and the rest. They are here, however,
explicitly reactionary and reductive, as though in the line of biological
evolution one were to regress from the state of the chimpanzee to that of
the starfish or even amoeba. The complexity of social patterning is rejected
and reduced, and with that, life freedom and force have not been gained but
lost."
dmb says:
I think Pirsig's comments on the topic express the very same idea. They even
mention the same particulars even down to the starting date. And the
remarkable thing is that they are doing this independently and are even
working in different fields of inquiry. This is what Pirsig was saying when
he refuted the idea that "man is born free, yet is everywhere in chains" as
disasterous fiction. He and Campbell are saying that society's forms allow
us a greater freedom than does nature. They're both making the case for the
kind of conservatism even a liberal like me can respect. But that's still
not the end of the story. You don't think I forgot about the code of art do
you? No way. I'm getting to that...
"The first requirement of any society is that its adult membership should
realize and represent the fact that it is they who constitute its life and
being. And the first function of the rites of puberty, accordingly, must be
to establish in the individual a system of sentiments that will be
approproate to the society in which he is to live, and on which that society
itself must depend for its exitence. In the modern Western world, moreover,
there is an additional complication; for we ask of the adult something still
more than that he should accept without personal criticism and judgement the
habits and inherited customs of his local social group. We ask and we are
expecting, rather, that he should develop what Sigmund Freud has called his
'reality function'; that faculty of the independently observant, freely
thinking individual who can evaluate without preconceptions the possibilites
of his enviroment and of himself within it, criticizing and creating, not
simply reproducing inherited patterns of thought and action, but becoming
himself an innovating center, an active, creative center of the life
process. Our ideal for a society, in other words, is not that it should be a
perfectly static organization, founded in he age of the ancestors and to
remain unchanging through all time. It is rather a process moving toward a
fulfillment of as yet unrealized possiblities; and in this living process
each is to be an initiating yet cooperating center. We have, consequestly,
the comparatively complex problem in educating our young, of training them
not simply to assume uncritically the patterns of the past, but to recognize
and cultivate their own creative possibilites; not to remain on some proven
level of earlier biology and sociology, but to represent a movement of the
species forward."
dmb says:
That, my friends, explains the code of art. When you are cooperating with
the process of evolution as a creative force, that's walking the way. That's
getting right with god. And of course its much easier said than done. One
can see that some kind of mastery has to preceed creativity. You gotta know
those forms to get beyond them. There is no going around them, even if the
point is to shatter them. This is what I think its really all about. The
code of art is the big one, the one that trumps all others. This is why I
think the notion has been so misunderestimated. While I have to admit that
I've never seen one of Platt's paintings, and are probably kinda nice, I
suspect they have nothing to do with any of this.
"......This last, the Dynamic-static code, says what's good in life
isn't defined by society or intellect or biology. What's good is
freedom from domination by any static pattern, but that freedom
doesn't have to be obtained by the destruction of the patterns
themselves."
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