From: Joe (jhmau@sbcglobal.net)
Date: Sat May 22 2004 - 21:47:24 BST
Hi All: a few thoughts
"When Phaedrus first read this passage he felt a kind of eerie feeling-a feeling he might have had if he had passed in front of a strange mirror and suddenly seen a reflection of someone he'd never expected to see. It was the same feeling he got at the peyote meeting. This Zuni Indian was not exactly someone else. Chapter 9
"What made all this so formidable to Phaedrus was that he himself had insisted in his book that Quality cannot be defined. Yet here he was about to define it. Was this some kind of sell-out?........
The trouble was, this was only one part of himself talking. There was another part that kept saying, "Ahh, do it anyway. It's interesting." This was the intellectual part that didn't like undefined things, and telling him not to define Quality was like telling a fat man to stay out of the refrigerator, or an alcoholic to stay out of bars. To the intellect the process of defining Quality has a compulsive quality of its own. It produces a certain excitement even though it leaves a hangover afterward, like too many cigarettes, or a party that has lasted too long. Or Lila last night. It isn't anything of lasting beauty; no joy forever." LILA Chapter 5
The law of gravity, for example, is perhaps the most ruthlessly static pattern of order in the universe. So, correspondingly, there is no single living thing that does not thumb its nose at that law day in and day out. One could almost define life as the organized disobedience of the law of gravity. One could show that the degree to which an organism disobeys this law is a measure of its degree of evolution. Thus while the simple protozoa just barely get around on their cilia, earthworms manage to control their distance and direction, birds fly into the sky, and man goes all the way to the moon. LILA Chapter 11
joe: Pirsig identifies the lure of Dynamic Quality in the Intellect "Ahh do it anyway", ('unfinished' I call it) and in the Organic "fat man or alcoholic" order ('purpose' I call it). In another place the describes how the intellect cannot control the biological order, but the social order can ( I see 'order', 'existence' in the social order).
To gravity he attributes a ruthlessness. Dynamic Quality is movement to and away from something. I can't be neutral about it.
Joe Maurer
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