I'm currently reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig. I may have read it in my twenties but I honestly don't remember, so it feels like the first time. The book holds a Guinness Book of World Records for being a best-seller (5 million copies sold) while having been initially rejected by 121 publishers. (Gives me hope for my own writing)
I can see why. It's a tough book to put in a category--it was shelved in the Non-fiction section at the library, though it reads like a novel, even though it's not. It's more like a fictionalized autobiography of a father and his 11 year old son who take a motorcycle trip from their home in Minnesota to San Francisco with a couple of friends. It's not really about Zen, and it's not really about motorcycle maintenance (specifically) either, but Pirsig's attempts to carve out a nice in the world of philosophy with his ponderings on the issue of Quality using the father-son trip as a platform on which to build his ideas.
Interestingly, Pirsig wrote the novel in 1968, I believe, after his wife divorced him and he was committed to undergo shock therapy (ECT) to treat his schizophrenia. He went to college at 15, and had a 170 IQ, so he was a really smart guy. Which is kind of remarkable, because while the book is coherent, knowing his background you kind of wonder "should I really put much stock in these philosophical pinings? Is this the manifesto of a madman?"
When I was in my twenties I owned a 1979 Yamaha XS750 motorcycle. I took it to class, used it to get around, though the longest trip I took was from Philly to Wildwood Crest, NJ, where it stalled out in a rainstorm. It was always breaking down on me and my neighbor in the apartment behind me would graciously pick me up when needed with his pickup truck. I didn't know anything about working on engines or motorcycles, had no way of transporting it, and was at the mercy of mechanics to diagnose problems. After I got a flat and the plates were stolen (and then it was subsequently towed outside my apartment due to not being tagged), I surrendered the title and was glad to be done with the whole thing.
I've bicycled across the U.S. and it was a good way to see the country because you are going slow, yet aren't confined by the barrier of a car which separates you from the country side. When it's hot, you're hot. When it rains, you get wet. Still, I wouldn't have wanted to drive cross-country; I drive enough as it is these days.
On a motorcycle, you're traveling the same speed as a car, but aren't framed in by one. You're still exposed to the elements, and limited in what you can carry. There are more mechanical parts to break down than on a bicycle. So I guess seeing the country the way Pirsig and his son did is a 'split-the-middle' between bicycle touring and car-touring.
The book is a little on the dry side, and I think that's because Pirsig definitely falls into what he calls the "Classical" camps, which he contrasts with the "Romantic" camp. Think of it as left-brain vs right brain, where the author falls squarely into the left-brained (logical, analytical, mathematical, engineer-type) classification. He struggles to understand his riding partners, John and Sylvia, and their aversion to all things mechanical and (as we will see below, 'technological') because they are what he would consider "Romantics." In the context of the below passage, he is referencing the couple having a dripping faucet at home but not being inclined to fix it, nor are they inclined to work on their own motorcycles and know how they work. For the author, it's hard for him to relate to this non-technical, non-mechanical way of thinking.
I realized I am much more like John and Sylvia in the book, and I get kind of annoyed at Pirsig's overly-technical, engineer-type brain pontificating, even when talking about Philosophy.
When it comes to technology, I would consider myself a techno-pessimist. Which is why the following passage spoke to me for some reason, even though it was 1974 by the time it the book was published. Still, I think those feelings among many people like myself with our relationship to technology square with the passage below, even though they were written over half a century ago.
I know I will suffer for my antipathy towards technology. I know I will be left behind if I don't get on board. Which fills me with fear and anxiety, because not only do I not understand it or incompetent with regards to it, but I feel shut out from it. For the first time in my life, I feel as if I may become a serf rather than a vassal--one at the whim and control of a force more powerful than I am, that doesn't care for me or my petty resistance or ideals or objections. The data centers will go in despite protest, the AI will subsume us, and I will soon be an old man shouting at the clouds. All this fills me with dread, and it's not 'technology,' per se, but the absolute helplessness I feel in its looming shadow.
Anyway, have a read and let me know what you think.
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"It's not the motorcycle maintenance, not the faucet. It's all of technology they can't take. And then all sorts of things started tumbling into place and I knew that was it. Sylvia's irritation at a friend who thought that computer programming was 'creative.' All their drawings and paintings and photographs without a technological thing in them. Of course she's not going to get mad at that faucet, I thought. You always suppress momentary anger at something you deeply and permanently hate. Of course John signs off every time the subject of cycle repair comes up, even when it is obvious he is suffering for it. That's technology. And sure, of course, obviously. It's so simple when you see it. To get away from technology out into the country in the fresh air and sunshine is why they are on the motorcycle in the first place. For me to bring it back to them just at the point and place where they think they have finally escaped it just frosts both of them, tremendously. That's why the conversation always breaks and freezes when the subject comes up.
Other things fit in too. They talk once in a while in as few pained words as possible about 'it' or 'it all' as in the sentence, 'There is just no escape from it.' And if I asked, 'From what?' the answer might be 'The whole thing,' or 'The whole organized bit,' or even 'The system.' Sylvia once said defensively, 'Well, you know how to cope with it,' which puffed me up so much at the time I was embarrassed to ask what 'it' was and so remained somewhat puzzled. I thought it was something more mysterious than technology. But now I see that the 'it' was mainly, if not entirely, technology. But that doesn't sound right either. The 'it' is a kind of force that gives rise to technology, something undefined, but inhuman, mechanical, lifeless, a blind monster, a death force. Something hideous they are running from but know they can never escape. I'm putting it way too heavily here but in a less emphatic and less defined way this is what it is. Somewhere there are people who understand it and run it but those are technologists, and they speak an inhuman language when describing what they do. It's all parts and relationships of unheard-of things that never make any sense no matter how often you hear about them. And their things, their monster keeps eating up land and polluting their air and lakes, and there is no way to strike back at it, and hardly any way to escape it.
That attitude is not hard to come to. You go through a heavy industrial area of a larger city and there is all is, the technology. In front of it are high barbed-wire fences, locked gates, signs saying NO TRESPASSING, and beyond, through sooty air, you see ugly strange shapes of metal and brick whose purpose is unknown, and whose masters you will never see. What it's for you don't know, and why it's there, there's no one to tell, and so all you can feel is alienated, estranged, as though you didn't belong there. Who owns and understands this doesn't want you around. All this technology has somehow made you a stranger in your own land. It's very shape and appearance and mysteriousness say, 'Get out.' You know there's an explanation for all this somewhere and what it's doing undoubtedly serves mankind in some indirect way but that isn't what you see. What you see is the NO TRESPASSING, KEEP OUT signs and not anything serving people but little people, like ants, serving these strange, incomprehensible shapes. And you think, even if I were a part of this, even if I were not a stranger, I would be just another ant serving the shapes. So the final feeling is hostile, and I think that's ultimately what's involved with this otherwise unexplainable attitude of John and Sylvia. Anything to do with valves and shafts and wrenches is a part of that dehumanized world, and they would rather not think about it. They don't want to get into it.
If this is so, they are not alone. There is no question that they have been following their natural feelings in this and not trying to imitate anyone. But many others are also following their natural feelings in this and not trying to imitate anyone and the natural feelings of very many people are similar on this matter; so that when you look at them collectively, as journalists do, you get the illusion of a mass movement, an antitechnological mass movement, and entire political antitechnological left emerging, looming up from apparently nowhere, saying 'Stop the technology. Have it somewhere else. Don't have it here.' It is still restrained by a thin web of logic that points out that without the factories there are no jobs or standard of living. But there are human forces stronger than logic. There always have been, and if they become strong enough in their hatred of technology that web can break.
Cliches and stereotypes such as 'beatnik' or 'hippie' have been invented for the antitechnologists, the anti system people, and will continue to be. But one does not convert individuals into mass people with the simple coining of a mass term. John and Sylvia are not mass people and neither are most of the others going their way. It is against being a mass person that they seem to be revolting. And they feel that technology has got a lot to do with the forces that are trying to turn them into mass people and they don't like it. So far it's still mostly a passive resistance, flights into the rural areas when they are possible and things like that, but it doesn't always have to be this passive.
I disagree with them about cycle maintenance, but not because I am out of sympathy with their feelings about technology. I just think that their flight from and hatred of technology is self-defeating. The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does as the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower. To think otherwise is to demean the Buddha--which is to demean oneself. That is what I want to talk about in this Chautauqua."
Robert Pirsig. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. William Morrow & Company, New York, 1974 (23-26).
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