Hi Diana and Foci,
> The question is "Re-read the first three chapters of LILA and discuss
> what Pirsig is saying and what it means"
[snip]
> I know it's tempting to go ahead and discuss the whole book but
> that rather defeats the purpose of the excercise. It was suggested that
> we take the major themes of the book one at a time, but we decided
> against that because it was considered preferable to contemplate the
> elements of the MOQ IN THE ORDER that Pirsig introduces them.
>
Thanks Diana for some necessary refocussing. I agree with a lot of your comments
about European mysticism, and agree that Pirsig definitely does not propose
mysticism as the centrepiece of his MoQ, even though he recognises and respects
mysticism.
My problem with looking at Lila is that I get the same "flashes of recognition"
of MoQ concepts reading many different things. These patterns are so ubiquitous,
that I don't know for sure that Pirsig put them in intentionally or not. For the
sake of argument, I assume that every aspect in the book is intended to be
illustrative. I'm not even sure if it matters whether or not this is true!
I see a few major themes in the opening chapters:
1. The descent through the locks as the boat drops to sea-level may be a
metaphor for what Pirsig is trying to do philosophically. He is sweeping away
the philosophical edifices of thousands of years. Much later in the book, he
delves into the semantic origins of words, going down to the deepest roots he
can.
2. Has he seen Lila before? The "hard facts" here are less important than
Phaedrus' feeling that he has seen her before. It is the latter feeling that
determines how he reacts to her - the belief is more important than the
"objective" truth.
3. The card catalogue and Random vs. Serial access. This is the difference
between a book and a scroll. Imagine a phone directory printed as a scroll! I
have years of experience with chart paper from lab. recorders - have collected
hundreds of feet of the stuff. One trick I learned was to fan-fold the paper
rather than simply roll it up. Once it is folded, one can clip it into a file,
and then page through the folds, much easier than unrolling through several feet
to find what you are looking for!!
Phaedrus' card index provides an additional advantage - the freedom to revise
the order. This is great for some applications, bad for others (e.g. the phone
directory again). This is because humans aren't very good at random access on
huge databases. The phone book and dictionaries work because we can do
alphabetical searching. The yellow pages work because we can also handle a few
dozen categories. For more complicated database searching, we use a computer.
However, the experiences of everyday life are thrown at us in "natures order".
The only way of making any sense of it is via our own classification patterns
(that Pirsig later develops as the SQ idea).
Pirsig goes to some lengths explaining the problems or organizing and
classifying the card index. He makes it clear that whatever POTENTIAL value it
has, this can only be REALIZED by organizing it, and sometimes its value is
increased by reorganizing it.
4. Scientific "objectivity" as in anthropology.
In the other forum, somone started off saying "I should probably sit
on the sidelines and review more before jumping in but there's just not much
Quality in that for me". Imagine some outsider writing an "objective" review of
the Lila Squad. Surely an insider understands this Lila "society" much better. I
know that the popular anthropological books and documentaries of modern times
aren't aloof - we tend to be much more interested in the view from the inside,
by "natives" who have learned the skills to tell us ousiders, or by outsiders
who have found their way in. Dusenbury is an example of someone who tried to
find his way IN; furthermore this became his primary goal, and telling the world
about it was relegated to second.
I'm still disappointed that nobody really followed up on my mythology post. Was
Pirsig really ignorant of the Lilith myth when he published Lila?
Jonathan
MOQ.org - http://www.moq.org
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