Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (32 page)

``Not wore out, wore down. They get rounded and gentle. These mountains are still unworn.''

Everywhere around us now, except above, the sides of the mountain are covered with blackish green of the forest. In the distance the forest looks like velvet.

I say, ``You look at these mountains now, and they look so permanent and peaceful, but they're changing all the time and the changes aren't always peaceful. Underneath us, beneath us here right now, there are forces that can tear this whole mountain apart.''

``Do they ever?''

``Ever what?''

``Tear the whole mountain apart?''

``Yes,'' I say. Then I remember: ``Not far from here there are nineteen people lying dead under millions of tons of rock. Everyone was amazed there were only nineteen.''

``What happened?''

``They were just tourists from the east who had stopped for the night at a campground. During the night the underground forces broke free and when the rescuers saw what had happened the next morning, they just shook their heads. They didn't even try to excavate. All they could have done was dig down through hundreds of feet of rock for bodies that would just have to be buried all over again. So they left them there. They're still there now.''

``How did they know there were nineteen?''

``Neighbors and relatives from their hometowns reported them missing.''

Chris stares at the top of the mountain before us. ``Didn't they get any warning?''

``I don't know.''

``You'd think there'd be a warning.''

``Maybe there was.''

We walk to where the ridge we are on creases inward to the start of a ravine. I see that we can follow this ravine down and eventually find water in it. I start angling down now.

Some more rocks clatter up above. Suddenly I'm frightened.

``Chris,'' I say.

``What?''

``You know what I think?''

``No, what?''

``I think we'd be very smart if we let that mountaintop go for now and try it another summer.''

He's silent. Then he says, ``Why?''

``I have bad feelings about it.''

He doesn't say anything for a long time. Finally he says, ``Like what?''

``Oh, I just think that we could get caught up there in a storm or a slide or something and we'd be in real trouble.''

More silence. I look up and see real disappointment in his face. I think he knows I'm leaving something out. ``Why don't you think about it,'' I say, ``and then when we get to some water and have lunch we'll decide.''

We continue walking down. ``Okay?'' I say.

He finally says, ``Okay,'' in a noncommittal voice.

The descent is easy now but I see it will be steeper soon. It's still open and sunny here but soon we'll be in trees again.

I don't know what to make of all this weird talk at night except that it's not good. For either of us. It sounds like all the strain of this cycling and camping and Chautauqua and all these old places has a bad effect on me that appears at night. I want to clear out of here as fast as possible.

I don't suppose that sounds like the old days to Chris either. I spook very easily these days, and am not ashamed to admit it. He never spooked at anything. Never. That's the difference between us. That's why I'm alive and he's not. If he's up there, some psychic entity, some ghost, some Doppelgänger waiting up there for us in God knows what fashion -- well, he's going to have to wait a long time. A very long time.

These damned heights get eerie after a while. I want to go down, way down; far, far down.

To the ocean. That sounds right. Where the waves roll in slowly and there's always a roar and you can't fall anywhere. You're already there.

Now we enter the trees again, and the sight of the mountaintop is obscured by their branches and I'm glad.

I think we've gone as far along Phædrus' path as we want to go in this Chautauqua too. I want to leave his path now. I've given him all due credit for what he thought and said and wrote, and now I want to develop on my own some of the ideas he neglected to pursue. The title of this Chautauqua is ``Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,'' not ``Zen and the Art of Mountain Climbing,'' and there are no motorcycles on the tops of mountains, and in my opinion very little Zen. Zen is the ``spirit of the valley,'' not the mountaintop. The only Zen you find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there. Let's get out of here.

``Feels good to be going down, doesn't it?'' I say.

No answer.

We're going to have a little fight, I'm afraid.

You go up the mountaintop and all you're gonna get is a great big heavy stone tablet handed to you with a bunch of rules on it.

That's about what happened to him.

Thought he was a goddamned Messiah.

Not me, boy. The hours are way too long, and the pay is way too short. Let's go. Let's go -- .

Soon I'm clomping down the slope in a kind of two-step idiot gallop -- ga-dump, ga-dump, ga-dump -- until I hear Chris holler, ``SLOW DOWN!'' and see he is a couple of hundred yards back through the trees.

So I slow down, but after a while see he is deliberately lagging behind. He's disappointed, of course.

I suppose what I ought to do in the Chautauqua is just point out in summary form the direction Phædrus went, without evaluation, and then get on with my own thing. Believe me, when the world is seen not as a duality of mind and matter but as a trinity of quality, mind, and matter, then the art of motorcycle maintenance and other arts take on a dimension of meaning they never had. The specter of technology the Sutherlands are running from becomes not an evil but a positive fun thing. And to demonstrate that will be a long fun task.

But first, to give this other specter his walking papers, I should say the following:

Perhaps he would have gone in the direction I'm now about to go in if this second wave of crystallization, the metaphysical wave, had finally grounded out where I'll be grounding it out, that is, in the everyday world. I think metaphysics is good if it improves everyday life; otherwise forget it. But unfortunately for him it didn't ground out. It went into a third mystical wave of crystallization from which he never recovered.

He'd been speculating about the relationship of Quality to mind and matter and had identified Quality as the parent of mind and matter, that event which gives birth to mind and matter. This Copernican inversion of the relationship of Quality to the objective world could sound mysterious if not carefully explained, but he didn't mean it to be mysterious. He simply meant that at the cutting edge of time, before an object can be distinguished, there must be a kind of nonintellectual awareness, which he called awareness of Quality. You can't be aware that you've seen a tree until after you've seen the tree, and between the instant of vision and instant of awareness there must be a time lag. We sometimes think of that time lag as unimportant, But there's no justification for thinking that the time lag is unimportant...none whatsoever.

The past exists only in our memories, the future only in our plans. The present is our only reality. The tree that you are aware of intellectually, because of that small time lag, is always in the past and therefore is always unreal. Any intellectually conceived object is always in the past and therefore unreal. Reality is always the moment of vision before the intellectualization takes place. There is no other reality. This preintellectual reality is what Phædrus felt he had properly identified as Quality. Since all intellectually identifiable things must emerge from this preintellectual reality, Quality is the parent, the source of all subjects and objects.

He felt that intellectuals usually have the greatest trouble seeing this Quality, precisely because they are so swift and absolute about snapping everything into intellectual form. The ones who have the easiest time seeing this Quality are small children, uneducated people and culturally ``deprived'' people. These have the least predisposition toward intellectuality from cultural sources and have the least formal training to instill it further into them. That, he felt, is why squareness is such a uniquely intellectual disease. He felt he'd been accidentally immunized from it, or at least to some extent broken from the habit by his failure from school. After that he felt no compulsive identification with intellectuality and could examine anti-intellectual doctrines with sympathy.

Squares, he said, because of their prejudices toward intellectuality usually regard Quality, the preintellectual reality, as unimportant, a mere uneventful transition period between objective reality and subjective perception of it. Because they have preconceived ideas of its unimportance they don't seek to find out if it's in any way different from their intellectual conception of it.

It is different, he said. Once you begin to hear the sound of that Quality, see that Korean wall, that nonintellectual reality in its pure form, you want to forget all that word stuff, which you finally begin to see is always somewhere else.

Now, armed with his new time-interrelated metaphysical trinity, he had that romantic-classic Quality split, the one which had threatened to ruin him, completely stopped. They couldn't cut up Quality now. He could sit there and at his leisure cut them up. Romantic Quality always correlated with instantaneous impressions. Square Quality always involved multiple considerations that extended over a period of time. Romantic Quality was the present, the here and now of things. Classic Quality was always concerned with more than just the present. The relation of the present to the past and future was always considered. If you conceived the past and future to be all contained in the present, why, that was groovy, the present was what you lived for. And if your motorcycle is working, why worry about it? But if you consider the present to be merely an instant between the past and the future, just a passing moment, then to neglect the past and future for the present is bad Quality indeed. The motorcycle may be working now, but when was the oil level last checked? Fussbudgetry from the romantic view, but good common sense from the classic.

Now we had two different kinds of Quality but they no longer split Quality itself. They were just two different time aspects of Quality, short and long. What had previously been asked for was a metaphysical hierarchy that looked like this:

What he gave them in return was a metaphysical hierarchy that looked like this:

The Quality he was teaching was not just a part of reality, it was the whole thing.

He then proceeded in terms of the trinity to answer the question, Why does everybody see Quality differently? This was the question he had always had to answer speciously before. Now he said, ``Quality is shapeless, formless, indescribable. To see shapes and forms is to intellectualize. Quality is independent of any such shapes and forms. The names, the shapes and forms we give Quality depend only partly on the Quality. They also depend partly on the a priori images we have accumulated in our memory. We constantly seek to find, in the Quality event, analogues to our previous experiences. If we didn't we'd be unable to act. We build up our language in terms of these analogues. We build up our whole culture in terms of these analogues.''

The reason people see Quality differently, he said, is because they come to it with different sets of analogues. He gave linguistic examples, showing that to us the Hindi letters da, da, and dha all sound identical to us because we don't have analogues to them to sensitize us to their differences. Similarly, most Hindi-speaking people cannot distinguish between da and the because they are not so sensitized. It is not uncommon, he said, for Indian villagers to see ghosts. But they have a terrible time seeing the law of gravity.

This, he said, explains why a classful of freshman composition students arrives at similar ratings of Quality in the compositions. They all have relatively similar backgrounds and similar knowledge. But if a group of foreign students were brought in, or, say, medieval poems out of the range of class experience were brought in, then the students' ability to rank Quality would probably not correlate as well.

In a sense, he said, it's the student's choice of Quality that defines him. People differ about Quality, not because Quality is different, but because people are different in terms of experience. He speculated that if two people had identical a priori analogues they would see Quality identically every time. There was no way to test this, however, so it had to remain just speculation.

In answer to his colleagues at school he wrote:

``Any philosophic explanation of Quality is going to be both false and true precisely because it is a philosophic explanation. The process of philosophic explanation is an analytic process, a process of breaking something down into subjects and predicates. What I mean (and everybody else means) by the word quality cannot be broken down into subjects and predicates. This is not because Quality is so mysterious but because Quality is so simple, immediate and direct.

``The easiest intellectual analogue of pure Quality that people in our environment can understand is that `Quality is the response of an organism to its environment' (he used this example because his chief questioners seemed to see things in terms of stimulus-response behavior theory). An amoeba, placed on a plate of water with a drip of dilute sulfuric acid placed nearby, will pull away from the acid (I think). If it could speak the amoeba, without knowing anything about sulfuric acid, could say, `This environment has poor quality.' If it had a nervous system it would act in a much more complex way to overcome the poor quality of the environment. It would seek analogues, that is, images and symbols from its previous experience, to define the unpleasant nature of its new environment and thus `understand' it.

``In our highly complex organic state we advanced organisms respond to our environment with an invention of many marvelous analogues. We invent earth and heavens, trees, stones and oceans, gods, music, arts, language, philosophy, engineering, civilization and science. We call these analogues reality. And they are reality. We mesmerize our children in the name of truth into knowing that they are reality. We throw anyone who does not accept these analogues into an insane asylum. But that which causes us to invent the analogues is Quality. Quality is the continuing stimulus which our environment puts upon us to create the world in which we live. All of it. Every last bit of it.