While there are many passages from Lila I like, I find myself going back to
chapter 8 for its sheer audacity. Up until this point Phaedrus has had his
confrontation with Rigel and his fling with Lila but no serious effort has
been expended on metaphysical matters. That's about to change. Chapter 8
starts out with:
"The idea that the world is composed of nothing but value sounds impossible at
first".
Of course, it helps if you've read ZMM before, but even if you have, this
opening line is still an affront to your sensibilities. (I've read this
section a number of times, and I'm still affronted, but at least I smile now).
Reading on you find he's so sure of himself that he's rather blase about the
whole notion, comforting the reader like a father would his child. Don't
worry. You'll get used to the idea, and you'll be better for it, he says. This
serene attitude is actually intimidating, because most people who propose
absurd things try to cover up their insecurity by acting cock-sure and giving
you this big salesman routine. Not this guy. Just put on these new-fangled
glasses and I promise you'll see better, he says. At this point you may have a
flickering impulse to return the book to the library. But when you pause to
realize that the man spent most of his adult life (at great personal cost)
wrestling these issues, and that he writes about it with the kind of clear and
direct prose you have been craving for in the philosophical literature, you
decide to keep flipping the pages. Such is the essential Pirsig allure.
"Phaedrus remembered reading about an experiment with special glasses that
made users see everything upside down and backward."
In 9th grade I actually saw a fascinating film in science class about the
inverted vision experiment Pirsig describes. It was in black and white, and
the scientists wore these clumsy contraptions that covered their heads and
caused them to see everything upside down. They were filmed walking
tentatively on city sidewalks, groping the sides of buildings for support.
While they wore the things continuously for several days, their brains
miraculously flipped the image so everything appeared right-side up again!
When they took the contraptions off, everything was upside-down again, and
after a few days their brains re-adjusted once more! Phew! Good thing!
In Chapter 9 Phaedrus decides the basic division of reality into Dynamic and
Static Quality and says this about Dynamic Quality:
"Dynamic Quality is the pre-intellectual cutting edge of reality, the source
of all things, completely simple and always new".
I'm a computer programmer by trade. About 10 years ago at my job I worked with
a fellow named ZK (not his real name) who used to annoy me to no end. He's the
kind of guy who was always complaining about something he didn't like about
the product we were building. He would complain the user interface was not
designed for how the user worked. He would say the software was not following
the principles of structured analysis he was studying. He was verbally
combative and he and I had some serious arguments and I had doubts whether I
could work with him any longer. Now this might be interesting if you like to
hear about office politics, but this kind of person is not all *that*
atypical.
What made ZK interesting was that lots of things bugged him, like the Unix
editor and the software control system we would use every day. Most people
might come into a new job situation and be annoyed initially by some new
process or some quirky behaviour about a tool, but after awhile you learn to
deal with it, you get used to it, and it ceases to bother you. It wasn't like
this for ZK. Things that bothered him the first day still bothered him a year
later. The other thing about ZK was that he would make a lot of careless
mistakes in his own work, and in personal contacts he sometimes seemed
confused or preoccupied. One day he told me that in his younger days he held
an impressive job where he designed and oversaw the entire software that
controlled a complicated factory. He went on to say he wouldn't be able to do
that anymore and something about him had changed. He seemed bitter about it.
I hadn't thought about ZK for years, but something about re-reading chapter 8
for this essay made me think of him again. Perhaps it was the dynamic quality
of the Zuni brujo in Chapter 9 that triggered it. ZK's inability to let go of
a problem, because it broke open like a fresh sore every day, suggested to me
he was experiencing more DQ than the recommended daily allowance. He was all
too often "sitting on hot stoves". ZK wasn't making the static latches of his
experiences like most people do. Then it occured to me he might have a
medium-term memory problem, since memory seems so pivotal for retaining static
patterns. His seeming confusion might be due to being overloaded with DQ or
his strained attempts to remember facts, and certainly the carelessness in his
own work could be attributed to these as well.
Then I thought about people who have agoraphobia. A person with an extreme
case of it will suffer panic attacks unless they stay in the comfortable
surroundings of their own home. Are panic attacks symptomatic of an overload
of DQ triggered by new environments, and is home a safe haven because mostly
static patterns reside there? I wonder if ZK ever had a panic attack.
In chapter 8 Phaedrus argues against subjects containing values:
"For year's we've read about how values are supposed to emanate from some
location in the 'lower' centers of the brain.... No one has ever been able to
add to a person's values by inserting one at this location, or observed any
changes at this location as a result of a change of values."
That's fine, yet there must be something in the brain that makes people
receptive to the value experienced. And there must be something in the brain
that regulates the receptiveness to the value experienced, and possibly when
the thing that does the regulating lets in too much dynamic value, the result
is agoraphobia or worse, autism.
Glenn
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