Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (11 page)

When analytic thought, the knife, is applied to experience, something is always killed in the process. That is fairly well understood, at least in the arts. Mark Twain's experience comes to mind, in which, after he had mastered the analytic knowledge needed to pilot the Mississippi River, he discovered the river had lost its beauty. Something is always killed. But what is less noticed in the arts...something is always created too. And instead of just dwelling on what is killed it's important also to see what's created and to see the process as a kind of death-birth continuity that is neither good nor bad, but just is.

We pass through a town called Marmarth but John doesn't stop even for a rest and so we go on. More furnace heat, into some badlands, and we cross the border into Montana. A sign by the road announces it.

Sylvia waves her arms up and down and I beep the horn in response, but when I look at the sign my feelings are not jubilant at all. For me its information causes a sudden inward tension that can't exist for them. They've no way of knowing we're now in the country where he lived.

All this talk so far about classic and romantic understanding must seem a strangely oblique way of describing him, but to get at Phædrus, this oblique route is the only one to take. To describe his physical appearance or the statistics of his life would be to dwell on misleading superficialities. And to come at him directly would be to invite disaster.

He was insane. And when you look directly at an insane man all you see is a reflection of your own knowledge that he's insane, which is not to see him at all. To see him you must see what he saw and when you are trying to see the vision of an insane man, an oblique route is the only way to come at it. Otherwise your own opinions block the way. There is only one access to him that I can see as passable and we still have a way to go.

I've been going into all this business of analyses and definitions and hierarchies not for their own sake but to lay the groundwork for an understanding of the direction in which Phædrus went.

I told Chris the other night that Phædrus spent his entire life pursuing a ghost. That was true. The ghost he pursued was the ghost that underlies all of technology, all of modern science, all of Western thought. It was the ghost of rationality itself. I told Chris that he found the ghost and that when he found it he thrashed it good. I think in a figurative sense that is true. The things I hope to bring to light as we go along are some of the things he uncovered. Now the times are such that others may at last find them of value. No one then would see the ghost that Phædrus pursued, but I think now that more and more people see it, or get glimpses of it in bad moments, a ghost which calls itself rationality but whose appearance is that of incoherence and meaninglessness, which causes the most normal of everyday acts to seem slightly mad because of their irrelevance to anything else. This is the ghost of normal everyday assumptions which declares that the ultimate purpose of life, which is to keep alive, is impossible, but that this is the ultimate purpose of life anyway, so that great minds struggle to cure diseases so that people may live longer, but only madmen ask why. One lives longer in order that he may live longer. There is no other purpose. That is what the ghost says.

At Baker, where we stop, the thermometers are reading 108 degrees in the shade. When I take my gloves off, the metal of the gas tank is so hot I can't touch it. The engine is making ominous knick-knicking sounds from overheating. Very bad. The rear tire has worn badly too, and I feel with my hand that it's almost as hot as the gas tank.

``We're going to have to slow down,'' I say.

``What?''

``I don't think we should go over fifty,'' I say.

John looks at Sylvia and she looks at him. Something has already been said between them about my slowness. They both look as if they've about had it.

``We just want to get there fast,'' John says, and they both walk toward a restaurant.

The chain has been running hot and dry too. In the righthand saddlebag I rummage for a can of spray lubricant, find it, then start the engine and spray the moving chain. The chain is still so hot the solvent evaporates almost instantly. Then I squirt a little oil on, let it run for a minute and shut the engine off. Chris waits patiently, then follows me into the restaurant.

``I thought you said the big slump was going to come on the second day,'' Sylvia says as we approach the booth they are in.

``Second or third,'' I reply.

``Or fourth or fifth?''

``Maybe.''

She and John look at each other again with the same expression they showed before. It seems to say, ``Three's a crowd.'' They may want to go ahead fast and wait for me in some town up ahead. I'd suggest it myself except that if they go much faster they won't be waiting for me in some town. It'll be by the side of the road.

``I don't know how the people here stand this,'' Sylvia says.

``Well, it's hard country,'' I say with a little irritation. ``They know it's hard before they come here and are ready for it.''

I add, ``If one person complains he just makes it that much harder for the others. They've got stamina. They know how to keep on going.''

John and Sylvia don't say much, and John finishes his Coke early and is off to a bar for a snort. I go out and check the cycle luggage again and find that the new pack has been compressing a little and so take up the slack in the ropes and retie them.

Chris points to a thermometer in direct sunlight and we see it has gone all the way above the scale at 120 degrees.

Before we are out of town I am sweating again. The cool drying-off period doesn't last even half a minute.

The heat just slams into us. Even with dark sunglasses I have to squint my eyes into slits. There's nothing but burning sand and pale sky so bright it's hard to look anywhere. It's just become white-hot everywhere. A real inferno.

John up ahead is speeding faster and faster. I give up on him and slow it down to fifty-five. Unless you're just looking for trouble in this heat you don't run tires at eighty-five. A blowout on this stretch would really be it.

I suppose they took what I said as a kind of rebuke but I didn't have that in mind. I'm no more comfortable than they are in this heat but there's no point in dwelling on it. All day while I've been thinking and talking about Phædrus they must have been thinking about how bad all this is. That's what's really wearing them down. The thought.

Some things can be said about Phædrus as an individual:

He was a knower of logic, the classical system-of-the-system which describes the rules and procedures of systematic thought by which analytic knowledge may be structured and interrelated. He was so swift at this his Stanford-Binet IQ, which is essentially a record of skill at analytic manipulation, was recorded at 170, a figure that occurs in only one person in fifty thousand.

He was systematic, but to say he thought and acted like a machine would be to misunderstand the nature of his thought. It was not like pistons and wheels and gears all moving at once, massive and coordinated. The image of a laser beam comes to mind instead; a single pencil of light of such terrific energy in such extreme concentration it can be shot at the moon and its reflection seen back on earth. Phædrus did not try to use his brilliance for general illumination. He sought one specific distant target and aimed for it and hit it. And that was all. General illumination of that target he hit now seems to be left for me.

In proportion to his intelligence he was extremely isolated. There's no record of his having had close friends. He traveled alone. Always. Even in the presence of others he was completely alone. People sometimes felt this and felt rejected by it, and so did not like him, but their dislike was not important to him.

His wife and family seem to have suffered the most. His wife says those who tried to go beyond the barriers of his reserve found themselves facing a blank. My impression is that they were starved for some kind of affection which he never gave.

No one really knew him. That is evidently the way he wanted it, and that's the way it was. Perhaps his aloneness was the result of his intelligence. Perhaps it was the cause. But the two were always together. An uncanny solitary intelligence.

This still doesn't do it though, because this and the image of a laser beam convey the idea that he was completely cold and unemotional, and that is not so. In his pursuit of what I have called the ghost of rationality he was a fanatic hunter.

One fragment becomes especially vivid now of a scene in the mountains where the sun was behind the mountain half an hour and an early twilight had changed the trees and even the rocks to almost blackened shades of blue and grey and brown. Phædrus had been there three days without food. His food had run out but he was thinking deeply and seeing things and was reluctant to leave. He was not far away from where he knew there was a road and was in no hurry.

In the dusk coming down the trail he saw a movement and then what seemed to be a dog approaching on the trail, a very large sheep dog, or an animal more like a husky, and he wondered what would bring a dog to this obscure place at this time of evening. He disliked dogs, but this animal moved in a way that forestalled these feelings. It seemed to be watching him, judging him. Phædrus stared into the animal's eyes for a long time, and for a moment felt some kind of recognition. Then the dog disappeared.

He realized much later it was a timber wolf, and the memory of this incident stayed with him a long time. I think it stayed with him because he had seen a kind of image of himself.

A photograph can show a physical image in which time is static, and a mirror can show a physical image in which time is dynamic, but I think what he saw on the mountain was another kind of image altogether which was not physical and did not exist in time at all. It was an image nevertheless and that is why he felt recognition. It comes to me vividly now because I saw it again last night as the visage of Phædrus himself.

Like that timber wolf on the mountain he had a kind of animal courage. He went his own way with unconcern for consequences that sometimes stunned people, and stuns me now to hear about it. He did not often swerve to right or to left. I've discovered that. But this courage didn't arise from any idealistic idea of self-sacrifice, only from the intensity of his pursuit, and there was nothing noble about it.

I think his pursuit of the ghost of rationality occurred because he wanted to wreak revenge on it, because he felt he himself was so shaped by it. He wanted to free himself from his own image. He wanted to destroy it because the ghost was what he was and he wanted to be free from the bondage of his own identity. In a strange way, this freedom was achieved.

This account of him must sound unworldly, but the most unworldly part of it all is yet to come. This is my own relationship to him. This has been forestalled and obscured until now, but nevertheless must be known.

I first discovered him by inference from a strange series of events many years ago. One Friday I had gone to work and gotten quite a lot done before the weekend and was happy about that and later that day drove to a party where, after talking to everybody too long and too loudly and drinking way too much, went into a back room to lie down for a while.

When I awoke I saw that I'd slept the whole night, because now it was daylight, and I thought, ``My God, I don't even know the name of the hosts!'' and wondered what kind of embarrassment this was going to lead to. The room didn't look like the room I had lain down in, but it had been dark when I came in and I must have been blind drunk anyway.

I got up and saw that my clothes were changed. These were not the clothes I had worn the night before. I walked out the door, but to my surprise the doorway led not to rooms of a house but into a long corridor.

As I walked down the corridor I got the impression that everyone was looking at me. Three different times a stranger stopped me and asked how I felt. Thinking they were referring to my drunken condition I replied that I didn't even have a hangover, which caused one of them to start to laugh, but then catch himself.

At a room at the end of the corridor I saw a table where there was activity of some sort going on. I sat down nearby, hoping to remain unnoticed until I got all this figured out. But a woman dressed in white came up to me and asked if I knew her name. I read the little name clip on her blouse. She didn't see that I was doing this and seemed amazed, and walked off in a hurry.

When she came back there was a man with her, and he was looking right at me. He sat down next to me and asked me if I knew his name. I told him what it was, and was as surprised as they were that I knew it.

``It's very early for this to be happening,'' he said.

``This looks like a hospital,'' I said.

They agreed.

``How did I get here?'' I asked, thinking about the drunken party.

The man said nothing and the woman looked down. Very little was explained.

It took me more than a week to deduce from the evidence around me that everything before my waking up was a dream and everything afterward was reality. There was no basis for distinguishing the two other than the growing pile of new events that seemed to argue against the drunk experience. Little things appeared, like the locked door, the outside of which I could never remember seeing. And a slip of paper from the probate court telling me that some person was committed as insane. Did they mean me?

It was explained to me finally that ``You have a new personality now.'' But this statement was no explanation at all. It puzzled me more than ever since I had no awareness at all of any ``old'' personality. If they had said, ``You are a new personality,'' it would have been much clearer. That would have fitted. They had made the mistake of thinking of a personality as some sort of possession, like a suit of clothes, which a person wears. But apart from a personality what is there? Some bones and flesh. A collection of legal statistics, perhaps, but surely no person. The bones and flesh and legal statistics are the garments worn by the personality, not the other way around.