◊ LETTER FROM THE AUTHOR: Last September, I came across an old paperback copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig, and started combing through it again after 20 years. While following Pirsig once more across the badlands and into the Rockies on his motorcycle journey to the West Coast, I realized that Pirsig was the quintessential "eternal student", a man who seemed interested in learning more about everything. Of course, Zen and the Art didn't become a best seller simply by telling of the unquenchable intellectual curiosity of a middle-aged guy from Minnesota. Pirsig put his motorcycle trip and his life story into a higher philosophical context with his mystical search for the meaning of "quality".

It stuck me that Pirsig is truly an American original; nothing like him has come down the literary pike since the publication of Zen and the Art back in the late 70s. He managed to tie together science, the history of civilization, computers, academia, critical thought, philosophy, eastern spirituality, and Americana all within one nice little story, via a series of "chautauquas" or mini-lectures. He put it into a human context by including his neighbors and his son on the journey, and by visiting some of the places and people of his past along the way. Pirsig at first sounds like the prototype for the 21st century human, the technologist and philosopher with a heart.

After my re-read of Zen and the Art, I wanted to find out just what became of Pirsig since the phenomenon that he stirred up in the late 70s. How fares the 21st Century man since the 21st Century began? Through a bit of search engine research, I quickly found out that Pirsig published one more book in the early 90s, Lila. But other than that, Pirsig has led a mostly reclusive life. He has made very few public appearances, has only given two or three interviews, and hasn't published any articles in any papers or magazines. You would have thought that after Zen and the Art, Robert Pirsig would have become a major voice in the realm of social commentary, a guiding presence as America adapts to an increasingly high-tech, real-time, wired-in world.

But it turns out that Robert Pirsig wanted to do something else. Instead of involving himself in the day-to-day issues challenging our society as we adapt to the ever-changing rules of an internationalized economy and a new political order (or disorder), Pirsig decided to build an intellectual mansion around his fuzzy notions of "quality". On the surface, Lila is the fictionalized story of an overly intellectual author (resembling Pirsig, surprise, surprise) who takes a sailboat down the Hudson River and gives a ride to a troubled woman (named Lila) with an unsavory past. However, the book is really a Trojan Horse for Pirsig's "Metaphysics of Quality". Instead of writing an abstract treatise for the academic philosophy crowd, Pirsig thought that he could use his "Zen and the Art" formula to sell the world on the importance of his new way of thinking. However, Lila just couldn't live up to Zen and the Art. You still see references to Robert Pirsig today, but not for his Metaphysics of Quality. His motorcycle journey through Montana and Idaho with his son is still remembered, but the intricate intellectual calculations of Lila, which attempt to sort reality out in new and unapparent ways, are gathering much dust.

Nevertheless, I bought Lila and read it, and then typed out a long letter to Mr. Pirsig. You may not call my letter an instance of fanmail. I offered some observations on what I saw as evidence of human weaknesses in his writing (e.g., ignoring any mention of his parents or his spouses, and very little on his children), and in the problems I see in extending his concept of "quality" into the metaphysical realm, as the "ultimate monism" or final converging point for all things. But at bottom, I thanked him for being an eternal student, for asking questions that no one else seemed to have thought of, and for stimulating my own sleeping neurons.

About six months had passed without any reply from Mr. Pirsig, and I had put him out of mind. I've written other authors before, as have some of my friends, and I know that perhaps one out of three will grace you with a response. So, you can imagine my surprise the other day when I pulled a letter from the mailbox with the return address of Robert M. Pirsig, Portsmouth, NH. My goodness, one of the literary gods has decided to take note of this eternal urchin! That really made my day.

OK, but then I opened the letter and read it. Not exactly very warm and engaging. Mr. Pirsig wasn't particularly interested in 90% of what I said. His letter was short and to the point (concluding with "I've got to get on to the rest of this pile of mail"). He focused solely on my comments about his "quality" concept. To wit: "The comments in [your letter] are interesting and intelligent but seem pretty far from my own understanding of the Metaphysics of Quality." Well, looks like I'm not getting an A on this paper. "In my understanding the term Quality is a concept and a metaphysical monism, but the referent of the term Quality is not defined as a concept or a monism or anything else". Hmm, so I was half right. There is a monism involved here, but it only applies to the definition of the definition of quality, not to the definition of Pirsig's quality itself -- which obviously has no definition. So, if there's no definition for Mr. Pirsig's brand of quality, then no one can understand what he means, and no one can criticize him. So whatever you say, you will always remain "pretty far from [his] own understanding". Kind of like "heads I win, tails you lose". Yea, I remember that from his books -- whenever someone questioned the relevance or usefulness of his quality concepts, he would twist the rules around, or conclude that the person just didn't understand him. People, how stupid...

In my letter, I also compared what Pirsig was getting at with his quality concepts to the quantum fire that existed in the first micro-instant of the Universe at the Big Bang, when all matter and energy were one, the forces of gravity and electrodynamics were all unified, and physics were ultimately simple, if incredibly high-energy. In other words, I was saying that his idea of quality, if it could be explained properly, might be the philosophical equivalent of the grand unification theories of physics, i.e. what Stephen Hawking described as "know[ing] the mind of God". I guess that Mr. Pirsig disagreed with that notion. "The big bang is merely an inorganic pattern of static quality events, not Quality itself". Oh. OK, if you say so. So, if we ever figure the Big Bang out, we shall know the mind of God, but not the mind of Robert Pirsig.

But hey, excuse my cynicism. It's just a shame that Robert Maynard Pirsig became such a prisoner of his own paradigms. The guy was at least nice enough to send a letter and sign it. Maybe the signature is valuable (but I'm not selling!). And for added historical value, there appears to be a short, thin piece of hair on the letter, something like cat fur. Wow, maybe Mr. Pirsig's cat jumped on the desk when he was preparing my letter. Now, that's what I would call an organic quality event. Maybe even "Quality itself" ... if you like cats, anyway.
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posted by Jim at 6:10 PM    0 Comments    Leave a Comment