Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (22 page)

``Sounds like art,'' the instructor says.

``Well, it is art,'' I say. ``This divorce of art from technology is completely unnatural. It's just that it's gone on so long you have to be an archeologist to find out where the two separated. Rotisserie assembly is actually a long-lost branch of sculpture, so divorced from its roots by centuries of intellectual wrong turns that just to associate the two sounds ludicrous.''

They're not sure whether I'm kidding or not.

``You mean,'' DeWeese asks, ``that when I was putting this rotisserie together I was actually sculpting it?''

``Sure.''

He goes over this in his mind, smiling more and more. ``I wish I'd known that,'' he says. Laughter follows.

Chris says he doesn't understand what I'm saying. ``That's all right, Chris,'' Jack Barsness says. ``We don't either.'' More laughter.

``I think I'll just stay with ordinary sculpture,'' the sculptor says.

``I think I'll just stick to painting,'' DeWeese says.

``I think I'll just stick to drumming,'' John says.

Chris asks, ``What are you going to stick to?''

``Mah guns, boy, mah guns,'' I tell him. ``That's the Code of the West.''

They all laugh hard at this, and my speechifying seems forgiven. When you've got a Chautauqua in your head, it's extremely hard not to inflict it on innocent people.

The conversation breaks up into groups and I spend the rest of the party talking to Jack and Wylla about developments in the English department.

After the party is over and the Sutherlands and Chris have gone to bed, DeWeese recalls my lecture, however. He says seriously, ``What you said about the rotisserie instructions was interesting.''

Gennie adds, also seriously, ``It sounded like you had been thinking about it for a long time.''

``I've been thinking about concepts that underlie it for twenty years,'' I say.

Beyond the chair in front of me, sparks fly up the chimney, drawn by the wind outside, now stronger than before.

I add, almost to myself, ``You look at where you're going and where you are and it never makes sense, but then you look back at where you've been and a pattern seems to emerge. And if you project forward from that pattern, then sometimes you can come up with something.

``All that talk about technology and art is part of a pattern that seems to have emerged from my own life. It represents a transcendence from something I think a lot of others may be trying to transcend.''

``What's that?''

``Well, it isn't just art and technology. It's a kind of a noncoalescence between reason and feeling. What's wrong with technology is that it's not connected in any real way with matters of the spirit and of the heart. And so it does blind, ugly things quite by accident and gets hated for that. People haven't paid much attention to this before because the big concern has been with food, clothing and shelter for everyone and technology has provided these.

``But now where these are assured, the ugliness is being noticed more and more and people are asking if we must always suffer spiritually and esthetically in order to satisfy material needs. Lately it's become almost a national crisis...antipollution drives, antitechnological communes and styles of life, and all that.''

Both DeWeese and Gennie have understood all this for so long there's no need for comment, so I add, ``What's emerging from the pattern of my own life is the for belief that the crisis is being caused by the inadequacy of existing forms of thought to cope with the situation. It can't be solved by rational means because the rationality itself is the source of the problem. The only ones who're solving it are solving it at a personal level by abandoning `square' rationality altogether and going by feelings alone. Like John and Sylvia here. And millions of others like them. And that seems like a wrong direction too. So I guess what I'm trying to say is that the solution to the problem isn't that you abandon rationality but that you expand the nature of rationality so that it's capable of coming up with a solution.''

``I guess I don't know what you mean,'' Gennie says.

``Well, it's quite a bootstrap operation. It's analogous to the kind of hang-up Sir Isaac Newton had when he wanted to solve problems of instantaneous rates of change. It was unreasonable in his time to think of anything changing within a zero amount of time. Yet it's almost necessary mathematically to work with other zero quantities, such as points in space and time that no one thought were unreasonable at all, although there was no real difference. So what Newton did was say, in effect, `We're going to presume there's such a thing as instantaneous change, and see if we can find ways of determining what it is in various applications.' The result of this presumption is the branch of mathematics known as the calculus, which every engineer uses today. Newton invented a new form of reason. He expanded reason to handle infinitesimal changes and I think what is needed now is a similar expansion of reason to handle technological ugliness. The trouble is that the expansion has to be made at the roots, not at the branches, and that's what makes it hard to see.

``We're living in topsy-turvy times, and I think that what causes the topsy-turvy feeling is inadequacy of old forms of thought to deal with new experiences. I've heard it said that the only real learning results from hang-ups, where instead of expanding the branches of what you already know, you have to stop and drift laterally for a while until you come across something that allows you to expand the roots of what you already know. Everyone's familiar with that. I think the same thing occurs with whole civilizations when expansion's needed at the roots.

``You look back at the last three thousand years and with hindsight you think you see neat patterns and chains of cause and effect that have made things the way they are. But if you go back to original sources, the literature of any particular era, you find that these causes were never apparent at the time they were supposed to be operating. During periods of root expansion things have always looked as confused and topsy-turvy and purposeless as they do now. The whole Renaissance is supposed to have resulted from the topsy-turvy feeling caused by Columbus' discovery of a new world. It just shook people up. The topsy-turviness of that time is recorded everywhere. There was nothing in the flat-earth views of the Old and New Testaments that predicted it. Yet people couldn't deny it. The only way they could assimilate it was to abandon the entire medieval outlook and enter into a new expansion of reason.

``Columbus has become such a schoolbook stereotype it's almost impossible to imagine him as a living human being anymore. But if you really try to hold back your present knowledge about the consequences of his trip and project yourself into his situation, then sometimes you can begin to see that our present moon exploration must be like a tea party compared to what he went through. Moon exploration doesn't involve real root expansions of thought. We've no reason to doubt that existing forms of thought are adequate to handle it. It's really just a branch extension of what Columbus did. A really new exploration, one that would look to us today the way the world looked to Columbus, would have to be in an entirely new direction.''

``Like what?''

``Like into realms beyond reason. I think present-day reason is an analogue of the flat earth of the medieval period. If you go too far beyond it you're presumed to fall off, into insanity. And people are very much afraid of that. I think this fear of insanity is comparable to the fear people once had of falling off the edge of the world. Or the fear of heretics. There's a very close analogue there.

``But what's happening is that each year our old flat earth of conventional reason becomes less and less adequate to handle the experiences we have and this is creating widespread feelings of topsy-turviness. As a result we're getting more and more people in irrational areas of thought...occultism, mysticism, drug changes and the like...because they feel the inadequacy of classical reason to handle what they know are real experiences.''

``I'm not sure what you mean by classical reason.''

``Analytic reason, dialectic reason. Reason which at the University is sometimes considered to be the whole of understanding. You've never had to understand it really. It's always been completely bankrupt with regard to abstract art. Nonrepresentative art is one of the root experiences I'm talking about. Some people still condemn it because it doesn't make `sense.' But what's really wrong is not the art but the `sense,' the classical reason, which can't grasp it. People keep looking for branch extensions of reason that will cover art's more recent occurrences, but the answers aren't in the branches, they're at the roots.''

A rush of wind comes furiously now, down from the mountaintop. ``The ancient Greeks,'' I say, ``who were the inventors of classical reason, knew better than to use it exclusively to foretell the future. They listened to the wind and predicted the future from that. That sounds insane now. But why should the inventors of reason sound insane?''

DeWeese squints. ``How could they tell the future from the wind?''

``I don't know, maybe the same way a painter can tell the future of his painting by staring at the canvas. Our whole system of knowledge stems from their results. We've yet to understand the methods that produced these results.''

I think for a while, then say, ``When I was last here, did I talk much about the Church of Reason?''

``Yes, you talked a lot about that.''

``Did I ever talk about an individual named Phædrus?''

``No.''

``Who was he?'' Gennie asks.

``He was an ancient Greek -- a rhetorician -- a `composition major' of his time. He was one of those present when reason was being invented.''

``You never talked about that, I don't think.''

``That must have come later. The rhetoricians of ancient Greece were the first teachers in the history of the Western world. Plato vilified them in all his works to grind an axe of his own and since what we know about them is almost entirely from Plato they're unique in that they've stood condemned throughout history without ever having their side of the story told. The Church of Reason that I talked about was founded on their graves. It's supported today by their graves. And when you dig deep into its foundations you come across ghosts.''

I look at my watch. It's after two. ``It's a long story,'' I say.

``You should write all this down,'' Gennie says.

I nod in agreement. ``I'm thinking about a series of lecture-essays...a sort of Chautauqua. I've been trying to work them out in my mind as we rode out here -- which is probably why I sound so primed on all this stuff. It's all so huge and difficult. Like trying to travel through these mountains on foot.

``The trouble is that essays always have to sound like God talking for eternity, and that isn't the way it ever is. 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, but you can't get that across in an essay.''

``You should do it anyway,'' Gennie says. ``Without trying to get it perfect.''

``I suppose,'' I say.

DeWeese asks, ``Does this tie in with what you were doing on `Quality'?''

``It's the direct result of it,'' I say.

I remember something and look at DeWeese. ``Didn't you advise me to drop it?''

``I said no one had ever succeeded in doing what you were trying to do.''

``Do you think it's possible?''

``I don't know. Who knows?'' His expression is really concerned. ``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.''

The wind coming down from the snowfields up above sounds for a long time throughout the house. It grows loud and high as if in hope of sweeping the whole house, all of us, away into nothing, leaving the canyon as it once was, but the house stands and the wind dies away again, defeated. Then it comes back, feinting a light blow from the far side, then suddenly a heavy gust from our side.

``I keep listening to the wind,'' I say. I add, ``I think when the Sutherlands have left, Chris and I should do some climbing up to where that wind starts. I think it's time he got a better look at that land.''

``You can start from right here,'' DeWeese says, ``and head back up the canyon. There's no road for seventy-five miles.''

``Then this is where we'll start,'' I say.

Upstairs I'm glad to see the bed's heavy quilt again. It's become quite cold now and it'll be needed. I undress quickly and get way down deep under the quilt where it is warm, very warm, and think for a long time about snowfields and winds and Christopher Columbus.

For two days John and Sylvia and Chris and I loaf and talk and ride up to an old mining town and back, and then it's time for John and Sylvia to turn back home. We ride into Bozeman from the canyon now, together for the last time.

Up ahead Sylvia's turned around for the third time, evidently to see if we're all right. She's been very quiet the last two days. A glance from her yesterday seemed apprehensive, almost frightened. She worries too much about Chris and me.

At a bar in Bozeman we have one last round of beer, and I discuss routes back with John. Then we say perfunctory things about how good it's all been and how we'll see each other soon, and this is suddenly very sad to have to talk like this...like casual acquaintances.

Out in the street again Sylvia turns to me and Chris, pauses, and then says, ``It'll be all right with you. There's nothing to worry about.''

``Of course,'' I say.

Again that same frightened glance.

John has the motorcycle started and waits for her. ``I believe you,'' I say.

She turns, gets on and with John watches oncoming traffic for an opportunity to pull out. ``I'll see you,'' I say.

She looks at us again, expressionless this time. John finds his opportunity and enters into the traffic lane. Then Sylvia waves, as if in a movie. Chris and I wave back. Their motorcycle disappears in the heavy traffic of out-of-state cars, which I watch for a long time.