Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (21 page)

Now suddenly the sun is gone behind the mountain and the whole canyon is in dull shadow.

To myself I think how uncalled for that was. You don't make statements like that. You leave the hospital with the understanding that you don't.

Gennie appears with Sylvia and suggests we unpack. We agree and she shows us to our rooms. I see that my bed has a heavy quilt on it against the cold of the night. Beautiful room.

In three trips to the cycle and back I have everything transferred. Then I go to Chris's room to see what needs to be unpacked but he's cheerful and being grown-up and doesn't need help.

I look at him. ``How do you like it here?''

He says, ``Fine, but it isn't anything like the way you told about it last night.''

``When?''

``Just before we went to sleep. In the cabin.''

I don't know what he's referring to.

He adds, ``You said it was lonely here.''

``Why would I say that?''

``I don't know.'' My question frustrates him, so I leave it. He must have been dreaming.

When we come down to the living room I can smell the aroma from the frying trout in the kitchen. At one end of the room DeWeese is bent over the fireplace holding a match to some newspaper under the kindling. We watch him for a while.

``We use this fireplace all summer long,'' he says.

I reply, ``I'm surprised it's this cold.''

Chris says he's cold too. I send him back up for his sweater and mine as well.

``It's the evening wind,'' DeWeese says. ``It sweeps down the canyon from up high where it's really cold.''

The fire flares suddenly and then dies and then flares again from an uneven draft. It must be windy, I think, and look through the huge windows that line one wall of the living room. Across the canyon in the dusk I see the sharp movement of the trees.

``But that's right,'' DeWeese says. ``You know how cold it is up there. You used to spend all your time up there.''

``It brings back memories,'' I say.

A single fragment comes to mind now of night winds all around a campfire, smaller than this one before us now, sheltered in the rock against the high wind because there are no trees. Next to the fire are cooking gear and backpacks to help give wind shelter, and a canteen filled with water gathered from the melting snow. The water had to be collected early because above the timberline the snow stops melting when the sun goes down.

DeWeese says, ``You've changed a lot.'' He is looking at me searchingly. His expression seems to ask whether this is a forbidden topic or not, and he gathers from looking at me that it is. He adds, ``I guess we all have.''

I reply, ``I'm not the same person at all,'' and this seems to put him a little more at ease. Were he aware of the literal truth of that, he'd be a lot less at ease. ``A lot has happened,'' I say, ``and some things have come up that have made it important to try to untangle them a little, in my own mind at least, and that's partly why I'm here.''

He looks at me, expecting something more, but the art instructor and his wife appear by the fireside and we drop it.

``The wind sounds like there'll be a storm tonight,'' the instructor says.

``I don't think so,'' DeWeese says.

Chris returns with the sweaters and asks if there are any ghosts up in the canyon.

DeWeese looks at him with amusement. ``No, but there are wolves,'' he says.

Chris thinks about this and asks, ``What do they do?''

DeWeese says, ``They make trouble for the ranchers.'' He frowns. ``They kill the young calves and lambs.''

``Do they chase people?''

``l've never heard of it,'' DeWeese says and then, seeing that this disappoints Chris, adds, ``but they could.''

At dinner the brook trout is accompanied by glasses of Bay county Chablis. We sit separately in chairs and sofas around the living room. One entire side of this room has the windows which would overlook the canyon, except that now it's dark outside and the glass reflects the light from the fireplace. The glow of the fire is matched by an inner glow from the wine and fish and we don't say much except murmurs of appreciation.

Sylvia murmurs to John to notice the large pots and vases around the room.

``I was noticing those,'' John says. ``Fantastic.''

``Those were made by Peter Voulkas,'' Sylvia says.

``Is that right?''

``He was a student of Mr. DeWeese.''

``Oh, for Christ's sake! I almost kicked one of those over.''

DeWeese laughs.

Later John mumbles something a few times, looks up and announces, ``This does it -- this just does the whole thing for us -- .Now we can go back for another eight years on Twenty-six-forty-nine Colfax Avenue.''

Sylvia says mournfully, ``Let's not talk about that.''

John looks at me for a moment. ``I suppose anybody with friends who can provide an evening like this can't be all bad.'' He nods gravely. ``I'm going to have to take back all those things I thought about you.''

``All of them?'' I ask.

``Some, anyway.''

DeWeese and the instructor smile and some of the impasse goes away.

After dinner Jack and Wylla Barsness arrive. More living images. Jack is recorded in the tomb fragments as a good person who writes and teaches English at the college. Their arrival is followed by that of a sculptor from northern Montana who herds sheep for his income. I gather from the way DeWeese introduces him that I'm not supposed to have met him before.

DeWeese says he is trying to persuade the sculptor to join the faculty and I say, ``I'll try to talk him out of it,'' and sit down next to him, but conversation is very sticky because the sculptor is extremely serious and suspicious, evidently because I'm not an artist. He acts like I'm a detective trying to get something on him, and it isn't until he discovers I do a lot of welding that I become okay. Motorcycle maintenance opens strange doors. He says he welds for some of the same reasons I do. After you pick up skill, welding gives a tremendous feeling of power and control over the metal. You can do anything. He brings out some photographs of things he has welded and these show beautiful birds and animals with flowing metal surface textures that are not like anything else.

Later I move over and talk with Jack and Wylla. Jack is leaving to head an English department down in Boise, Idaho. His attitudes toward the department here seem guarded, but negative. They would be negative, of course, or he wouldn't be leaving. I seem to remember now he was a fiction writer mainly, who taught English, rather than a systematic scholar who taught English. There was a continuing split in the department along these lines which in part gave rise to, or at least accelerated the growth of, Phædrus' wild set of ideas which no one else had ever heard of, and Jack was supportive of Phædrus because, although he wasn't sure he knew what Phædrus was talking about, he saw it was something a fiction writer could work with better than linguistic analysis. It's an old split. Like the one between art and art history. One does it and the other talks about how it's done and the talk about how it's done never seems to match how one does it.

DeWeese brings over some instructions for assembly of an outdoor barbecue rotisserie which he wants me to evaluate as a professional technical writer. He's spent a whole afternoon trying to get the thing together and he wants to see these instructions totally damned.

But as I read them they look like ordinary instructions to me and I'm at a loss to find anything wrong with them. I don't want to say this, of course, so I hunt hard for something to pick on. You can't really tell whether a set of instructions is all right until you check it against the device or procedure it describes, but I see a page separation that prevents reading without flipping back and forth between the text and illustration...always a poor practice. I jump on this very hard and DeWeese encourages every jump. Chris takes the instructions to see what I mean.

But while I'm jumping on this and describing some of the agonies of misinterpretation that bad cross- referencing can produce, I've a feeling that this isn't why DeWeese found them so hard to understand. It's just the lack of smoothness and continuity which threw him off. He's unable to comprehend things when they appear in the ugly, chopped-up, grotesque sentence style common to engineering and technical writing. Science works with chunks and bits and pieces of things with the continuity presumed, and DeWeese works only with the continuities of things with the chunks and bits and pieces presumed. What he really wants me to damn is the lack of artistic continuity, something an engineer couldn't care less about. It hangs up, really, on the classic-romantic split, like everything else about technology.

But Chris, meanwhile, takes the instructions and folds them around in a way I hadn't thought of so that the illustration sits there right next to the text. I double-take this, then triple-take it and feel like a movie cartoon character who has just walked beyond the edge of a cliff but hasn't fallen yet because he hasn't realized his predicament. I nod, and there's silence, and then I realize my predicament, then a long laughter as I pound Chris on the top of the head all the way down to the bottom of the canyon. When the laughter subsides, I say, ``Well, anyway -- '' but the laughter starts all over again.

``What I wanted to say,'' I finally get in, ``is that I've a set of instructions at home which open up great realms for the improvement of technical writing. They begin, `Assembly of Japanese bicycle require great peace of mind.' ''

This produces more laughter, but Sylvia and Gennie and the sculptor give sharp looks of recognition.

``That's a good instruction,'' the sculptor says. Gennie nods too.

``That's kind of why I saved it,'' I say. ``At first I laughed because of memories of bicycles I'd put together and, of course, the unintended slur on Japanese manufacture. But there's a lot of wisdom in that statement.''

John looks at me apprehensively. I look at him with equal apprehension. We both laugh. He says, ``The professor will now expound.''

``Peace of mind isn't at all superficial, really,'' I expound. ``It's the whole thing. That which produces it is good maintenance; that which disturbs it is poor maintenance. What we call workability of the machine is just an objectification of this peace of mind. The ultimate test's always your own serenity. If you don't have this when you start and maintain it while you're working you're likely to build your personal problems right into the machine itself.''

They just look at me, thinking about this.

``It's an unconventional concept,'' I say, ``but conventional reason bears it out. The material object of observation, the bicycle or rotisserie, can't be right or wrong. Molecules are molecules. They don't have any ethical codes to follow except those people give them. The test of the machine is the satisfaction it gives you. There isn't any other test. If the machine produces tranquillity it's right. If it disturbs you it's wrong until either the machine or your mind is changed. The test of the machine's always your own mind. There isn't any other test.''

DeWeese asks, ``What if the machine is wrong and I feel peaceful about it?''

Laughter.

I reply, ``That's self-contradictory. If you really don't care you aren't going to know it's wrong. The thought'll never occur to you. The act of pronouncing it wrong's a form of caring.''

I add, ``What's more common is that you feel unpeaceful even if it's right, and I think that's the actual case here. In this case, if you're worried, it isn't right. That means it isn't checked out thoroughly enough. In any industrial situation a machine that isn't checked out is a `down' machine and can't be used even though it may work perfectly. Your worry about the rotisserie is the same thing. You haven't completed the ultimate requirement of achieving peace of mind, because you feel these instructions were too complicated and you may not have understood them correctly.''

DeWeese asks, ``Well, how would you change them so I would get this peace of mind?''

``That would require a lot more study than I've just given them now. The whole thing goes very deep. These rotisserie instructions begin and end exclusively with the machine. But the kind of approach I'm thinking about doesn't cut it off so narrowly. What's really angering about instructions of this sort is that they imply there's only one way to put this rotisserie together...their way. And that presumption wipes out all the creativity. Actually there are hundreds of ways to put the rotisserie together and when they make you follow just one way without showing you the overall problem the instructions become hard to follow in such a way as not to make mistakes. You lose feeling for the work. And not only that, it's very unlikely that they've told you the best way.''

``But they're from the factory,'' John says.

``I'm from the factory too,'' I say ``and I know how instructions like this are put together. You go out on the assembly line with a tape recorder and the foreman sends you to talk to the guy he needs least, the biggest goof-off he's got, and whatever he tells you...that's the instructions. The next guy might have told you something completely different and probably better, but he's too busy.'' They all look surprised. ``I might have known,'' DeWeese says.

``It's the format,'' I say. ``No writer can buck it. Technology presumes there's just one right way to do things and there never is. And when you presume there's just one right way to do things, of course the instructions begin and end exclusively with the rotisserie. But if you have to choose among an infinite number of ways to put it together then the relation of the machine to you, and the relation of the machine and you to the rest of the world, has to be considered, because the selection from many choices, the art of the work is just as dependent upon your own mind and spirit as it is upon the material of the machine. That's why you need the peace of mind.''

``Actually this idea isn't so strange,'' I continue. ``Sometime look at a novice workman or a bad workman and compare his expression with that of a craftsman whose work you know is excellent and you'll see the difference. The craftsman isn't ever following a single line of instruction. He's making decisions as he goes along. For that reason he'll be absorbed and attentive to what he's doing even though he doesn't deliberately contrive this. His motions and the machine are in a kind of harmony. He isn't following any set of written instructions because the nature of the material at hand determines his thoughts and motions, which simultaneously change the nature of the material at hand. The material and his thoughts are changing together in a progression of changes until his mind's at rest at the same time the material's right.''