First MF post by a new MF subscriber (though long time MD reader):
I'd like to begin with Dave Buchanan's comment with which he ends the
initial post on the MF March discussion: "the MOQ was spun and woven that
night in the teepee, right?" As Buchanan earlier points out, Phaedrus
himself had suggested the connection between the religious ceremony of the
Native American Church and his book: ". . .at one time it would look like
the whole book would center around the long night's meeting. . . . The
ceremony would be a kind of spine to hold it all together"(36). Thus
Phaedrus could "branch out and show in tangent after tangent the analysis
of complex realities and transcendental questions that first emerged in his
mind there"(37). Just like "spiders on LSD who spin perfect webs,"
Phaedrus describes his reaction to the de-hallucinogenic peyote experience:
he "slowly began to spin an enormous symmetrical intellectual web, larger
and more perfect than any it had ever spun before"(39). Buchanan
rhetorically asks: "Notice how the language mirrors the preformance [sic]
of the spiders on LSD, just so there's no way you can miss the fact that he
was tripping his brains out the night Lila was born?"
We can continue to pursue productively the idea that Phaedrus' night with
the Native American Church is at the center of the web which not only
constitutes the book Lila, but which also intimately links it to Pirsig's
earlier book. In Lila, Phaedrus mentions the textbook description of the
vision quest experience of "feeling a union with nature associated with a
dissolution of personal identity, engendering a state of beatitude or even
ecstasy,"(35) spinning a connecting thread back to the climactic scene of
Zen enlightenment in ZAMM, where Phaedrus, holed up in his bedroom for
three days and three nights and facing the sanitarium, "feels himself
extending into the universe with no limit . . . .But before help comes,
slowly, imperceptibly at first, the entire consciousness . . . begins to
come apart . . . to dissolve and fade away. . . . And the Quality, the
arete he has fought so hard for . . . now makes itself clear to him and his
soul is at rest" (Morrow hardcover 396).
The arachnoid imagery is extremely interesting, subtle and pervasive.
Pirsig points out that across Indian cultures the whites were thought of as
spiders ("wihio" in Cheyenne, "niatha" in Arapaho), white spiders who
"smiled and said things they didn't mean, and all the time their mind was
spinning a web around the Indian"(46). And here isn't Lila herself,
forever "like children, naÔve, immature, and tending toward violence" (45)
and "restless, unattached, unbelieving in . . . pompousness . . . wanting
more than anything else just to be free"(48) as equally as well described
as the ostensible object of this description, the American Indian?
Phaedrus, the spinner of webs, hopes to build a perfect web. But spider
webs, after all, are to catch prey. So doesn't this imagery nicely begin
setting us up for the triumph of Lila's (and Phaedrus') release at the end
of the book?
Phaedrus has written his book about Indians, but it's not until the end
that he really learns how to do Indian anthropology with the main Indian
subject his fieldwork.
MOQ.org - http://www.moq.org
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