"Richard Rigel looked again at his watch. It was time to go. 'Let me say just one last thing,' he
said, 'and I hope you will not take it as a personal insult but rather as something to think
about: I've noticed last night and in Oswego that you are one of the most isolated individuals
I have ever seen.'"
Beneath the surface polemic of both 'Zen and the Art of Motor Cycle Maintenance' and 'Lila'
lies the shadow of the 'isolated individual'. The opening words of 'Lila' take on a new
significance, seen from this perspective. "Lila didn't know he was here." On the first page of
'Zen' the little dialogue between Pirsig and Chris, the first words spoken in the book, point to
the lack of communication and contact between them that is not resolved until the last
chapter of that book. "There's a red-winged blackbird. I whack Chris's knee and point to it.
'What!' he hollers. 'Blackbird!' He says something I don't hear. 'What?' I holler back. He
grabs the back of my helmet and hollers up, 'I've seen lots of those, Dad!'"
And as he moves into the Chautauqua sequence that forms the core of the book, he says,
"We're in such a hurry most of the time we never get much chance to talk. The result is a
kind of endless day-to-day shallowness, a monotony that leaves a person wondering years
later where all the time went..." And as he inflicts his Chautauqua on the DeWeeses, he
reflects "People should see that it's never anything other than just one person talking from
one place in time and space and circumstance. It's never been anything else, ever..." (Zen
Ch 14)
This isolation is not without significance for the major theme of Pirsig's books; quality. This
theme is introduced immediately after Pirsig's comments above. "DeWeese asks, 'Does this
tie in with what you were doing on "Quality"?' 'It's the direct result of it,' I say... 'Didn't you
advise me to drop it?'...'I don't know... A lot of people are listening better these days.
Particularly the kids. They're really listening ... and not just at you - to you ... to YOU. It
makes all the difference.'" (Zen Ch 14)
Pirsig describes Phaedrus's exploration into the meaning of the word Quality as "an
exploration which he saw as a route through the mountains of the spirit... better than any that
had existed before." But "There are as many routes as there are individual souls," and in the
creation of his map Phaedrus lost everything. It was "a total disaster".(Zen Ch 16) As
Phaedrus first ventures that "Quality cannot be defined," he also states "You know what
Quality is." And here is a tiny chink in the beautiful metaphysics that Pirsig raises. For we do
not know quality as experienced by another. The two students who voted for the quality of
the rambling, disconnected composition in Phaedrus's class are assumed to be wrong. The
majority are clearly identifying 'Quality'. Yet the famous Zuni Indian would have won no votes
for the quality of his stand, while Hitler did. Quality is not simple, as Pirsig would have us
believe, but complex, it seems.
"At the very front of the tray was DUSENBERRY. He looked at it nostalgically. At one time he
had thought DUSENBERRY was going to be at the center of the whole book." (Lila Ch 2) And
what a different book it would have been. For Dusenberry relates and participates. He
refuses to be objective. "I believe in them and they believe in me and that makes all the
difference." Dusenberry is an outsider in academia, as was Phaedrus, and this interests
Dusenberry. "Here ... was someone who seemed even more alienated than he was." They
make a strange pair. With the help of peyote, at the Native American Church, Pirsig "didn't
observe, he participated, exactly as Dusenberry had intended he should do."
But he lost it. "He thought that maybe if he did some reading in the field of anthropology he
might know better what to ask the Indians." (Lila Ch 4) Here is the great divide, in such a
simple choice. So, when Phaedrus ran into the cultural immune system around anthropology
he turned to metaphysics, and Lila is what we get. It is great stuff - for those who, like Pirsig,
are unable to relate and are fated to observe.
And so it continues as we endlessly debate the ideas in Lila - Pirsig's poisoned legacy.
Where is he, the man who ran this metaphysics together? Still suffering the hangover? We
treat him as a celebrity, often with contemptible effusiveness. We joust with ideas, his and
each others, but to what effect? Quality is a chimera. Knowing that "Good is a noun" has not
brought us together, but confirms our tragic isolation. What I seek is something that
transcends that isolation. Quality is on the edge of it, or I would not be writing this essay, but
the metaphysics of quality must be seen for what it is, a disaster.
John Beasley
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