Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (13 page)

To speak of certain government and establishment institutions as ``the system'' is to speak correctly, since these organizations are founded upon the same structural conceptual relationships as a motorcycle. They are sustained by structural relationships even when they have lost all other meaning and purpose. People arrive at a factory and perform a totally meaningless task from eight to five without question because the structure demands that it be that way. There's no villain, no ``mean guy'' who wants them to live meaningless lives, it's just that the structure, the system demands it and no one is willing to take on the formidable task of changing the structure just because it is meaningless.

But to tear down a factory or to revolt against a government or to avoid repair of a motorcycle because it is a system is to attack effects rather than causes; and as long as the attack is upon effects only, no change is possible. The true system, the real system, is our present construction of systematic thought itself, rationality itself, and if a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government. There's so much talk about the system. And so little understanding.

That's all the motorcycle is, a system of concepts worked out in steel. There's no part in it, no shape in it, that is not out of someone's mind -- number three tappet is right on too. One more to go. This had better be it -- .I've noticed that people who have never worked with steel have trouble seeing this...that the motorcycle is primarily a mental phenomenon. They associate metal with given shapes...pipes, rods, girders, tools, parts...all of them fixed and inviolable, and think of it as primarily physical. But a person who does machining or foundry work or forge work or welding sees ``steel'' as having no shape at all. Steel can be any shape you want if you are skilled enough, and any shape but the one you want if you are not. Shapes, like this tappet, are what you arrive at, what you give to the steel. Steel has no more shape than this old pile of dirt on the engine here. These shapes are all out of someone's mind. That's important to see. The steel? Hell, even the steel is out of someone's mind. There's no steel in nature. Anyone from the Bronze Age could have told you that. All nature has is a potential for steel. There's nothing else there. But what's ``potential''? That's also in someone's mind! -- Ghosts.

That's really what Phædrus was talking about when he said it's all in the mind. It sounds insane when you just jump up and say it without reference to anything specific like an engine. But when you tie it down to something specific and concrete, the insane sound tends to disappear and you see he could have been saying something of importance.

The fourth tappet is too loose, which is what I had hoped. I adjust it. I check the timing and see that it is still right on and the points are not pitted, so I leave them alone, screw on the valve covers, replace the plugs and start it up.

The tappet noise is gone, but that doesn't mean much yet while the oil is still cold. I let it idle while I pack the tools away, then climb on and head for a cycle shop a cyclist on the street told us about last night where they may have a chain adjuster link, and a new foot-peg rubber. Chris must have nervous feet. His foot pegs keep wearing out.

I go a couple blocks and still no tappet noise. It's beginning to sound good, I think it's gone. I won't come to any conclusions until we've gone about thirty miles though. But until then, and right now, the sun is bright, the air is cool, my head is clear, there's a whole day ahead of us, we're almost to the mountains, it's a good day to be alive. It's this thinner air that does it. You always feel like this when you start getting into higher altitudes.

The altitude! That's why the engine's running rich. Sure, that's got to be the reason. We're at twenty-five hundred feet now. I'd better switch to standard jets. They take only a few minutes to put in. And lean out the idle adjustment a little. We'll be getting up a lot higher than this.

Under some shady trees I find Bill's Cycle Shop but no Bill.

A passerby says he has ``maybe gone fishing somewhere,'' leaving his shop wide open. We really are in the West. No one would leave a shop like this open in Chicago or New York.

Inside I see that Bill is a mechanic of the ``photographic mind'' school. Everything lying around everywhere. Wrenches, screwdrivers, old parts, old motorcycles, new parts, new motorcycles, sales literature, inner tubes, all scattered so thickly and clutteredly you can't even see the workbenches under them. I couldn't work in conditions like this but that's just because I'm not a photographic-mind mechanic. Bill can probably turn around and put his hand on any tool in this mess without having to think about where it is. I've seen mechanics like that. Drive you crazy to watch them, but they get the job done just as well and sometimes faster. Move one tool three inches to the left though, and he'll have to spend days looking for it.

Bill arrives with a grin about something. Sure, he's got some jets for my machine and knows right where they are. I'll have to wait a second though. He's got to close a deal out in back on some Harley parts. I go with him out in a shed in back and see he is selling a whole Harley machine in used parts, except for the frame, which the customer already has. He is selling them all for $125. Not a bad price at all.

Coming back I comment, ``He'll know something about motorcycles before he gets those together.''

Bill laughs. ``And that's the best way to learn, too.''

He has the jets and foot-peg rubber but no chain adjuster link. I get the rubber and jets installed, take the lump out of the idle and ride back to the hotel.

Sylvia and John and Chris are just coming down the stairs with their stuff as I arrive. Their faces indicate they're in the same good mood I'm in. We head down the main street, find a restaurant and order steaks for lunch.

``This is a great town,'' John says, ``really great. Surprised there were any like this left. I was looking all over this morning. They've got stockmen's bars, high-top boots, silver-dollar belt buckles, Levis, Stetsons, the whole thing -- and it's real. It isn't just Chamber of Commerce stuff -- .In the bar down the block this morning they just started talking to me like I'd lived here all my life.''

We order a round of beers. I see by a horseshoe sign on the wall we're into Olympia beer territory now, and order that.

``They must have thought I was off a ranch or something,'' John continues. ``And this one old guy was talking away about how he wasn't going to give a thing to the goddam boys, and I really enjoyed that. The ranch was going to go to the girls, cause the goddam boys spend every cent they got down at Suzie's.'' John breaks up with laughter. ``Sorry he ever raised 'em, and so on. I thought all that stuff disappeared thirty years ago, but it's still here.''

The waitress comes with the steaks and we knife right into them. That work on the cycle has given me an appetite.

``Something else that ought to interest you,'' John says. ``They were talking in the bar about Bozeman, where we're going. They said the governor of Montana had a list of fifty radical college professors at the college in Bozeman he was going to fire. Then he got killed in a plane crash.''

``That was a long time ago,'' I answer. These steaks really are good.

``I didn't know they had a lot of radicals in this state.''

``They've got all kinds of people in this state,'' I say. ``But that was just right-wing politics.''

John helps himself to some more salt. He says, ``A Washington newspaper columnist came through and put it in his column yesterday, and that's why they were all talking about it. The president of the college confirmed it.''

``Did they print the list?''

``I don't know. Did you know any of them?''

``If they had fifty names,'' I say, ``mine must have been one.'' They both look at me with some surprise. I don't know much about it, actually. It was him, of course, and with some feeling of falseness because of this I explain that a ``radical'' in Gallatin County, Montana, is a little different from a radical somewhere else.

``This was a college,'' I tell them, ``where the wife of the president of the United States was actually banned because she was `too controversial.' ''

``Who?''

``Eleanor Roosevelt.''

``Oh my God,'' John laughs, ``that must have been wild.''

They want to hear more but it's hard to say anything. Then I remember one thing: ``In a situation like that a real radical's actually got a perfect setup. He can do almost anything and get away with it because his opposition have already made asses out of themselves. They'll make him look good no matter what he says.''

On the way out we pass a city park which I noticed last night, and which produced a memory concurrence. Just a vision of looking up into some trees. He had slept on that park bench one night on his way through to Bozeman. That's why I didn't recognize that forest yesterday. He'd come through at night, on his way to the college at Bozeman.

Now we follow the Yellowstone Valley right across Montana. It changes from Western sagebrush to Midwestern cornfields and back again, depending on whether it's under irrigation from the river. Sometimes we cross over bluffs that take us out of the irrigated area, but usually we stay close to the river. We pass by a marker saying something about Lewis and Clark. One of them came up this way on a side excursion from the Northwest Passage.

Nice sound. Fits the Chautauqua. We're really on a kind of Northwest Passage too. We pass through more fields and desert and the day wears on.

I want to pursue further now that same ghost that Phædrus pursued...rationality itself, that dull, complex, classical ghost of underlying form.

This morning I talked about hierarchies of thought...the system. Now I want to talk about methods of finding one's way through these hierarchies...logic.

Two kinds of logic are used, inductive and deductive. Inductive inferences start with observations of the machine and arrive at general conclusions. For example, if the cycle goes over a bump and the engine misfires, and then goes over another bump and the engine misfires, and then goes over another bump and the engine misfires, and then goes over a long smooth stretch of road and there is no misfiring, and then goes over a fourth bump and the engine misfires again, one can logically conclude that the misfiring is caused by the bumps. That is induction: reasoning from particular experiences to general truths.

Deductive inferences do the reverse. They start with general knowledge and predict a specific observation. For example, if, from reading the hierarchy of facts about the machine, the mechanic knows the horn of the cycle is powered exclusively by electricity from the battery, then he can logically infer that if the battery is dead the horn will not work. That is deduction.

Solution of problems too complicated for common sense to solve is achieved by long strings of mixed inductive and deductive inferences that weave back and forth between the observed machine and the mental hierarchy of the machine found in the manuals. The correct program for this interweaving is formalized as scientific method.

Actually I've never seen a cycle-maintenance problem complex enough really to require full-scale formal scientific method. Repair problems are not that hard. When I think of formal scientific method an image sometimes comes to mind of an enormous juggernaut, a huge bulldozer...slow, tedious lumbering, laborious, but invincible. It takes twice as long, five times as long, maybe a dozen times as long as informal mechanic's techniques, but you know in the end you're going to get it. There's no fault isolation problem in motorcycle maintenance that can stand up to it. When you've hit a really tough one, tried everything, racked your brain and nothing works, and you know that this time Nature has really decided to be difficult, you say, ``Okay, Nature, that's the end of the nice guy,'' and you crank up the formal scientific method.

For this you keep a lab notebook. Everything gets written down, formally, so that you know at all times where you are, where you've been, where you're going and where you want to get. In scientific work and electronics technology this is necessary because otherwise the problems get so complex you get lost in them and confused and forget what you know and what you don't know and have to give up. In cycle maintenance things are not that involved, but when confusion starts it's a good idea to hold it down by making everything formal and exact. Sometimes just the act of writing down the problems straightens out your head as to what they really are.

The logical statements entered into the notebook are broken down into six categories: (1) statement of the problem, (2) hypotheses as to the cause of the problem, (3) experiments designed to test each hypothesis, (4) predicted results of the experiments, (5) observed results of the experiments and (6) conclusions from the results of the experiments. This is not different from the formal arrangement of many college and high-school lab notebooks but the purpose here is no longer just busywork. The purpose now is precise guidance of thoughts that will fail if they are not accurate.

The real purpose of scientific method is to make sure Nature hasn't misled you into thinking you know something you don't actually know. There's not a mechanic or scientist or technician alive who hasn't suffered from that one so much that he's not instinctively on guard. That's the main reason why so much scientific and mechanical information sounds so dull and so cautious. If you get careless or go romanticizing scientific information, giving it a flourish here and there, Nature will soon make a complete fool out of you. It does it often enough anyway even when you don't give it opportunities. One must be extremely careful and rigidly logical when dealing with Nature: one logical slip and an entire scientific edifice comes tumbling down. One false deduction about the machine and you can get hung up indefinitely.