Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (12 page)

But who was the old personality whom they had known and presumed I was a continuation of?

This was my first inkling of the existence of Phædrus, many years ago. In the days and weeks and years that have followed, I've learned much more.

He was dead. Destroyed by order of the court, enforced by the transmission of high-voltage alternating current through the lobes of his brain. Approximately 800 mills of amperage at durations of 0.5 to 1.5 seconds had been applied on twenty-eight consecutive occasions, in a process known technologically as ``Annihilation ECS.'' A whole personality had been liquidated without a trace in a technologically faultless act that has defined our relationship ever since. I have never met him. Never will.

And yet strange wisps of his memory suddenly match and fit this road and desert bluffs and white-hot sand all around us and there is a bizarre concurrence and then I know he has seen all of this. He was here, otherwise I would not know it. He had to be. And in seeing these sudden coalescences of vision and in recall of some strange fragment of thought whose origin I have no idea of, I'm like a clairvoyant, a spirit medium receiving messages from another world. That is how it is. I see things with my own eyes, and I see things with his eyes too. He once owned them.

These EYES! That is the terror of it. These gloved hands I now look at, steering the motorcycle down the road, were once his! And if you can understand the feeling that comes from that, then you can understand real fear...the fear that comes from knowing there is nowhere you can possibly run.

We enter a low-rimmed canyon. Before long, a roadside stop I've been waiting for appears. A few benches, a little building and some tiny green trees with hoses running to their bases. John, so help me God, is at the exit on the other side, ready to pull out onto the highway.

I ignore this and pull up by the building. Chris jumps off and we pull the machine back up on the stand. The heat rises from the engine as if it were on fire, throwing off waves that distort everything around it. Out of the corner of my eye I see the other cycle come back. When they arrive they are both glaring at me.

Sylvia says, ``We're just -- angry!''

I shrug my shoulders and walk to the drinking fountain.

John says, ``Where's all that stamina you were telling us about?''

I look at him for a second and see he really is angry. ``I was afraid you took that too seriously,'' I say, and then turn away. I drink the water and it's alkaline, like soapy water. I drink it anyway.

John goes into the building to soak his shirt with water. I check the oil level. The oil filler cap is so hot it burns my fingers right through the gloves. The engine hasn't lost much oil. The back tire tread is down a little more but still serviceable. The chain is tight enough but a little dry so I oil it again to be safe. The critical bolts are all tight enough.

John comes over dripping with water and says, ``You go ahead this time, we'll stay behind.''

``I won't go fast,'' I say.

``That's all right,'' he says. ``We'll get there.''

So I go ahead and we take it slowly. The road through the canyon doesn't straighten out into more of what we've been through, as I expected it would, but starts to wind upward. Surprise.

Now the road meanders a little, now it cuts back away from the direction in which we should be going, then returns. Soon it rises a little and then rises some more. We are moving in angular directions into narrow devil's gaps, then upward again higher and a little higher each time.

Some shrubs appear. Then small trees. The road goes higher still into grass, and then fenced meadows.

Overhead a small cloud appears. Rain perhaps? Perhaps. Meadows must have rain. And these now have flowers in them. Strange how all this has changed. Nothing to show it on the map. And the consciousness of memory has disappeared too. Phædrus must not have come this way. But there was no other road. Strange. It keeps rising upward.

The sun angles toward the cloud, which now has grown downward to touch the horizon above us, in which there are trees, pines, and a cold wind comes down with pine smells from the trees. The flowers in the meadow blow in the wind and the cycle leans a little and we are suddenly cool.

I look at Chris and he is smiling. I am smiling too.

Then the rain comes hard on the road with a gust of earth-smell from the dust that has waited for too long and the dust beside the road is pocked with the first raindrops.

This is all so new. And we are so in need of it, a new rain. My clothes become wet, and goggles are spattered, and chills start and feel delicious. The cloud passes from beneath the sun and the forest of pines and small meadows gleams again, sparkling where the sunlight catches small drops from the rain.

We reach the top of the climb dry again but cool now and stop, overlooking a huge valley and river below.

``I think we have arrived,'' John says.

Sylvia and Chris have walked into the meadow among the flowers under pines through which I can see the far side of the valley, away and below.

I am a pioneer now, looking onto a promised land.

It's about ten o'clock in the morning and I'm sitting alongside the machine on a cool, shady curbstone back of a hotel we have found in Miles City, Montana. Sylvia is with Chris at a Laundromat doing the laundry for all of us. John is off looking for a duckbill to put on his helmet. He thought he saw one at a cycle shop when we came into town yesterday. And I'm about to sharpen up the engine a little.

Feeling good now. We got in here in the afternoon and made up for a lot of sleep. It was a good thing we stopped. We were so stupid with exhaustion we didn't know how tired we were. When John tried to register rooms he couldn't even remember my name. The desk girl asked us if we owned those ``groovy, dreamy motorcycles'' outside the window and we both laughed so hard she wondered what she had said wrong. It was just numbskull laughter from too much fatigue. We've been more than glad to leave them parked and walk for a change.

And baths. In a beautiful old enameled cast-iron bathtub that crouched on lion's paws in the middle of a marble floor, just waiting for us. The water was so soft it felt as if I would never get the soap off. Afterward we walked up and down the main streets and felt like a family -- .

On this machine I've done the tuning so many times it's become a ritual. I don't have to think much about how to do it anymore. Just mainly look for anything unusual. The engine has picked up a noise that sounds like a loose tappet but could be something worse, so I'm going to tune it now and see if it goes away. Tappet adjustment has to be done with the engine cold, which means wherever you park it for the night is where you work on it the next morning, which is why I'm on a shady curbstone back of a hotel in Miles City, Montana. Right now the air is cool in the shade and will be for an hour or so until the sun gets around the tree branches, which is good for working on cycles. It's important not to tune these machines in the direct sun or late in the day when your brain gets muddy because even if you've been through it a hundred times you should be alert and looking for things.

Not everyone understands what a completely rational process this is, this maintenance of a motorcycle. They think it's some kind of a ``knack'' or some kind of ``affinity for machines'' in operation. They are right, but the knack is almost purely a process of reason, and most of the troubles are caused by what old time radio men called a ``short between the earphones,'' failures to use the head properly. A motorcycle functions entirely in accordance with the laws of reason, and a study of the art of motorcycle maintenance is really a miniature study of the art of rationality itself. I said yesterday that the ghost of rationality was what Phædrus pursued and what led to his insanity, but to get into that it's vital to stay with down-to-earth examples of rationality, so as not to get lost in generalities no one else can understand. Talk about rationality can get very confusing unless the things with which rationality deals are also included.

We are at the classic-romantic barrier now, where on one side we see a cycle as it appears immediately...and this is an important way of seeing it...and where on the other side we can begin to see it as a mechanic does in terms of underlying form...and this is an important way of seeing things too. These tools for example...this wrench...has a certain romantic beauty to it, but its purpose is always purely classical. It's designed to change the underlying form of the machine.

The porcelain inside this first plug is very dark. That is classically as well as romantically ugly because it means the cylinder is getting too much gas and not enough air. The carbon molecules in the gasoline aren't finding enough oxygen to combine with and they're just sitting here loading up the plug. Coming into town yesterday the idle was loping a little, which is a symptom of the same thing.

Just to see if it's just the one cylinder that's rich I check the other one. They're both the same. I get out a pocket knife, grab a stick lying in the gutter and whittle down the end to clean out the plugs, wondering what could be the cause of the richness. That wouldn't have anything to do with rods or valves. And carbs rarely go out of adjustment. The main jets are oversized, which causes richness at high speeds but the plugs were a lot cleaner than this before with the same jets. Mystery. You're always surrounded by them. But if you tried to solve them all, you'd never get the machine fixed. There's no immediate answer so I just leave it as a hanging question.

The first tappet is right on, no adjustment required, so I move on to the next. Still plenty of time before the sun gets past those trees -- I always feel like I'm in church when I do this -- .The gage is some kind of religious icon and I'm performing a holy rite with it. It is a member of a set called ``precision measuring instruments'' which in a classic sense has a profound meaning.

In a motorcycle this precision isn't maintained for any romantic or perfectionist reasons. It's simply that the enormous forces of heat and explosive pressure inside this engine can only be controlled through the kind of precision these instruments give. When each explosion takes place it drives a connecting rod onto the crankshaft with a surface pressure of many tons per square inch. If the fit of the rod to the crankshaft is precise the explosion force will be transferred smoothly and the metal will be able to stand it. But if the fit is loose by a distance of only a few thousandths of an inch the force will be delivered suddenly, like a hammer blow, and the rod, bearing and crankshaft surface will soon be pounded flat, creating a noise which at first sounds a lot like loose tappets. That's the reason I'm checking it now. If it is a loose rod and I try to make it to the mountains without an overhaul, it will soon get louder and louder until the rod tears itself free, slams into the spinning crankshaft and destroys the engine. Sometimes broken rods will pile right down through the crankcase and dump all the oil onto the road. All you can do then is start walking.

But all this can be prevented by a few thousandths of an inch fit which precision measuring instruments give, and this is their classical beauty...not what you see, but what they mean...what they are capable of in terms of control of underlying form.

The second tappet's fine. I swing over to the street side of the machine and start on the other cylinder.

Precision instruments are designed to achieve an idea, dimensional precision, whose perfection is impossible. There is no perfectly shaped part of the motorcycle and never will be, but when you come as close as these instruments take you, remarkable things happen, and you go flying across the countryside under a power that would be called magic if it were not so completely rational in every way. It's the understanding of this rational intellectual idea that's fundamental. John looks at the motorcycle and he sees steel in various shapes and has negative feelings about these steel shapes and turns off the whole thing. I look at the shapes of the steel now and I see ideas. He thinks I'm working on parts.I 'm working on concepts.

I was talking about these concepts yesterday when I said that a motorcycle can be divided according to its components and according to its functions. When I said that suddenly I created a set of boxes with the following arrangement:

And when I said the components may be subdivided into a power assembly and a running assembly, suddenly appear some more little boxes:

And you see that every time I made a further division, up came more boxes based on these divisions until I had a huge pyramid of boxes. Finally you see that while I was splitting the cycle up into finer and finer pieces, I was also building a structure.

This structure of concepts is formally called a hierarchy and since ancient times has been a basic structure for all Western knowledge. Kingdoms, empires, churches, armies have all been structured into hierarchies. Modern businesses are so structured. Tables of contents of reference material are so structured, mechanical assemblies, computer software, all scientific and technical knowledge is so structured...so much so that in some fields such as biology, the hierarchy of kingdom-

phylum-class-order-family-genus-species is almost an icon.

The box ``motorcycle'' contains the boxes ``components'' and ``functions.'' The box ``components'' contains the boxes ``power assembly'' and ``running assembly,'' and so on. There are many other kinds of structures produced by other operators such as ``causes'' which produce long chain structures of the form, ``A causes B which causes C which causes D,'' and so on. A functional description of the motorcycle uses this structure. The operator's ``exists,'' ``equals,'' and ``implies'' produce still other structures. These structures are normally interrelated in patterns and paths so complex and so enormous no one person can understand more than a small part of them in his lifetime. The overall name of these interrelated structures, the genus of which the hierarchy of containment and structure of causation are just species, is system. The motorcycle is a system. A real system.