Hello all,
Maybe I'm in a minority, but I think this "slow reading" experiment has
gone quite well - maybe even better than some previous months. However,
I feel that we are very far from done with Chapters 1-3, and suggest
that we continue for another month.
The month started with several observations people brought forward, but
two topics are clear winners in terms of popularity:
1. The Native American ceremony (and Peyote)
2. Phaedrus' slips of paper
I will concentrate on these two topics with a couple of other ideas
thrown in.
One thing I found useful was 3WD's attempt to put Pirsig's life and
writing into a timeline.
I don't know how accurate his dates are, but it certainly is an
important consideration in dealing with topics.
Clearly, the whole MoQ presented in ZAMM and Lila has its origins in the
1950s and 1960s. In the early 60s, Pirsig was teaching in the English
department of a relatively minor college. English professors are
typically free to pursue very wide academic
interests. Thus we have Dusenbury pursuing his interest in Native
Americans and Pirsig his philosophy. Very probably neither of them were
taken very seriously by Anthropology and Philosophy Departments
respectively. That may be unjustified, but it does explain Pirsig's
NOVEL ;-) approach to publishing his ideas.
The Peyote experience Pirsig had during his Montana years was in the
midst of a young culture of drug experimentation. Pirsig must have seen
this all around him, yet he brings us the example of the Native American
ceremony and the Peyote. If this experience was so important to Pirsig,
why did he wait 30 years to tell us about it in Lila, and why not in
ZAMM? Furthermore, he tells us very little about the actual experience.
There's no detail, no colour. It's completely bland in comparison, for
example, to Huxley's description of a drug experience ("Soma medicine")
in his novel "Island". Glenn, Cory and others pursued the discussion on
drug and alcohol use and social context, which leads me to make a
comparison with Pirsig's other description of a drug-related ceremony,
where he gets high on alcohol, picks up Lila, dances with her and takes
her back to his boat. The portrayal of this other ceremony (which
precedes the teepee ceremony in the novel) is much more vivid, with
vivid descriptions of the music, lights, people etc. I suspect that not
all the details are autobiographical, but Pirsig shows us his
familiarity with this type of ceremony.
While the teepee "ceremony" sound harmless, humanity also invented other
ceremonies like burning witches and sacrificing children. Thus each
ceremony must be judged on its own merits. Pirsig's "morning after"
description gives a clear indication of his dissatifaction with the bar
ceremony!. (As an aside, if we go on with the slow reading we'll come to
where Phaedrus trashes the ceremony that Lila so loved - that
sing-a-long aboard the "Jungle Queen").
What makes these sessions "ceremonies"? We are told that the Native
American way is to just do things unceremoniously. Is this whole teepee
thing a ceremony, or just something they do?
The distinction between ceremony and other tasks may be a predominantly
Western fiction.
Roger asked for my comment on Mysticism; I note that whenever we smell a
mystical component in a task, we call it a ceremony (tho' there are also
non-mystical ceremonies). I don't want to pursue this angle because I
don't think the mysticism vs. non-mysticism or ceremony vs. non-ceremony
are issues any more.
On the subject of the paper slips, Pirsig already gave us glimpses of
this system of organization in ZAMM, e.g. when he helps Chris to write a
letter home. He tells Chris first to make a list of items of content
(i.e. make the individual cards), then arrange the items into a letter
(the hierarchy).
This seems to be the method he was teaching his students in Bozeman and
it is the method of empiricism. The method is to first collect the data
without too much regard to any hierarchy, because the best hierarchy
will become apparent later from the data itself.
Later, one uses the hierarchy to re-present the data in edited/filtered
form. That's how Pirsig worked to give us ZAMM and Lila. That's pretty
much how sound and picture-processing engineers work too.
(I now see the relationship to Walter's bottom-up vs. top-down
approaches - the cycle presented above includes both).
Have a nice weekend everyone,
Jonathan
---------
But Sir Darius Xerxes Cama wasn't listening. He was standing at the
great window of the library, staring out at the Arabian Sea. "The only
people who see the whole picture," he murmured, "are the ones who step
out of the frame."
-Salman Rushdie (The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 1999).
MOQ.org - http://www.moq.org
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