Focus group:
In "The Paradise of Bombs", Scott Russell Sanders wrote...
"There is a mystical virtue in right angles. There is an unspoken morality
in seeking the level and the plumb. A house will stand, a table will bear
weight, the sides of a box will hold together only if the joints are square
and the members are upright. When the bubble is lined up between two marks
etched in the glass tube of the level, you have alighned yourself with the
forces that hold the universe together."
The way I see it, Pirsig would like the references to mystical virtue and
unspoken moarlity, and he is interested in precision and certainty
represented by right angles. Sure, he admits the limits of human knowledge.
He says over and over that DQ is not definable. Yet he's driven to build a
new vision based on that mystery. He's a mystic, but he's also a mechanic, a
chemist and a philosopher. He's the expert surgical slicer, the wielder of a
knife sharp enough to cause a Copernican revolution in metaphysics.
Such a thing simply CAN NOT be acheived with dull instruments or broad
strokes. It takes great precision to do metaphysics or motorcycle
maintainence. Show me a sloppy chemist and I'll show you a guy who is badly
scarred and burned, if he's not dead. From ZAMM, page 86 of the Bantam
paperback edition,...
"Precision instruments are designed to achieve an IDEA, dimensional
precision, whose perfection is impossible. There is no perfectly shaped part
of the motorcycle and never will be, but when you come as close as these
instruments take you, remarkable things happen, and you go flying across the
countryside under a power that would be called magic if it were not so
completely rational in every way. It's the understanding of ths rational
intellecutal IDEA that's fundamental. John looks at the mototcycle and he
sees steel in various shapes and turns off the whole thing. I look at the
shapes of steel now and I see IDEAS. He thinks I'm working on PARTS. I'm
working on CONCEPTS."
That's the entire paragraph just as it is in the book and the emphasis on
ideas and concepts is Pirsig's too. On page 88 he continues by broadening
the parts to "systems" of interrelated ideas...
"The true system, the real system, is our present construction of systematic
thought itself, rationality itself, ... there's so much talk about the
system. And so little understanding.
That's all the motorcycle is, a system of concepts worked out in steel.
There's no part in it, no shape in it, that is not out of someone's mind...
These shapes are all out of someone's mind. That's important to see. The
STEEL? Hell, even the seteel is out of someone's mind. There's no steel in
nature. Anyone from the bronze age could have told you that...That's really
what Phaedrus was talking about when he said it's all in your mind. It just
sound insane when you just jump out and say it without reference to anything
specific like an engine. But when you tie it down to something specific and
concrete..."
This quote is edited for simplicity, not distortion. All through this
explaination Pirsig is also describing nearly everything in terms of
systems. (This is before he develped STATIC PATTERNS or the four LEVELS.) He
talks about the structure of Kingdoms, empires, churches, armies,
businesses, machines, computers, science, even knowledge and concepts
themselves are described as systems. And I think he's like prescision
instruments applied with care to all of those different kinds of systems. So
we can fly across the countryside as if by magic...
Thanks for your time. DMB
MOQ.org - http://www.moq.org
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