Hello Foci,
There have been some great posts this month! I think this slow read has
proved successful.
David, Marco and Andrew have impressed me very much with a few of their
posts and comments on such things as: ritual, space, emptying, & perceptions
Now as for my input this month, I will try to present a sort of "behind the
scene" view that will show a creative process with themes such as motion,
randomness, feedback (both positive and negative), spontaneity and of course
my personal favorite hidden force of nature: Opposition!
The closer I look the whole Q thing is in every chapter. Nothing really
needs to be built because it's already there. But at the same time the need
is to build "it"; individually for the sake of the whole. An Un-needed Need!
Ok now for Lila quotes:
"Your head is like that cup. It has a limited capacity and if you want to
learn something about the world you should keep your head empty in order to
learn it"
"The reason Phaedrus used slips - of paper is that a card-catalog tray full
of slips provides a more RANDOM ACCESS. When Info is organized in small
chunks that can be accessed and sequenced at random IT BECOMES MUCH MORE
VALUABLE than when you have to take it in serial form."
"Some of the slips were actually about this topic: random access and Quality.
The two are closely related. RANDON ACCESS is at the ESSENCE of -- GROWTH, in
which cells, like post office boxes are RELATIVELY INDEPENDENT."
"by keeping sequential formatting to a minimum, no fresh new unexplored idea
would be forgotten or shut out." " There were NO IDEOLOGICAL Joes to kill an
idea because it didn't fit into what he was already thinking"
Now my commentary:
The ideas presented here are subtle and powerful. Indeed Pheadrus found
them to be so Creative that for him they were essentially Destructive. He
claims to be "snowed under" and "submerged in chaos". So much in fact that he
thinks of freedom by way of destruction. And he knows that this freedom is
true. I mean, he's been here before and in much worse ways. "He is not
fooling me". Oh sure, he felt some sort of a format would emerge eventually.
Of course it would, I mean were talking about someone as skilled as a Jedi
with an analytical knife. So skilled that he slew Aristotle in "Episode 1 /
The SOM Menace". So again I say, "he is not fooling me". The pattern or
format that emerged is his (Pirsigs) "first person Narrative"; NOT the MOQ!
Phaedrus reminds me of old master of mine that once "brought me the
skeleton of a body, which was Aristotle's Analytics." And told me that it was
"wasted time to converse with one whose works are only Analytics".
Again I say "he is not fooling me". What I see is that he is subtlety
advocating the seeds of 'Chaos Theory', not fully developed. Diana is very
right to choose Dusenberry for a dinner partner and it is natural that we all
have a tendency to see him as the hero of these first chapters. Because he is
the better half of a spilt-character that is trying to show us Reality. It's
bullshit that Dusenberry needs to seek out Phaedrus for his Analytic mind
"because that's what he doesn't have". Dusenberry and Phaedrus are of course
complementary to each other and Pirsig is using them BOTH (as a
split-character) to destroy Analytics, Deductive Logic, Mechanism,
Rationalization & Skeletal Law and slowly replacing it with Mysterious
Action, Chaotic Flow, Repeating Structure, Energetic Decay, Poetic Genius,
Imaginative Beauty and the Reality of Thought. (this is why we have all the
threads about mysticism and drug expansion)
This is the power of Pirsig as a writer, his first person narrative style.
He destroys by building something that doesn't need to be built. An Un-needed
Need. The MOQ is just a "flippin" road sign pointing the way to the goal, &
not the goal itself.
Ok, Ok, Maybe it's a little more than a road sign, maybe it's a "flippin"
global positioning system, but it still only points to the goal. And It
points very subtlety and powerfully by way of Pirsigs Narrative style. Which
is very cool! Although, the MOQ is a very accurate reflection of the whole.
More to come, my next post will address the title slips and present my second
theme of Feedback as the seeds of the levels. The Slips are not solely
Intelectual.
Peace, Todd
MOQ.org - http://www.moq.org
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