1. 09 October 2006

    Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

    Robert Pirsig

    823 days ago

    I don’t know what happened, but somehow I missed out on the fact that this is more or less a true story. I didn’t find the author’s note until I searched around on the internet for more about the author, who it seemed to me, knew my hometown of Minneapolis well (his hometown, in fact). As he mentions in an authors note right at the beginning, it’s based on actual occurences (There are photos documenting the trip).

    I got this book from the school library, which has a good set of older books. It’s a first edition from what I can tell, beautifully bound in an unadorned black hardcover. The only printing is on the spine, where it gives the author and title in boxy white capitals. I really want to figure out how to steal the book, swap the tags on it with a newer edition. I’ll see how much sway I allow my bad side.

    We’re in such a hurry of the time we never get much chance to talk. The result is a kind of endless day-to-day shallowness, a monotony that leaves a person wondering years later where all the time went and sorry that it’s gone. 15

    Reminds me of Thoreau, how people’s interactions are so contrived in our days. Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other. We meet at meals three times a day, and give each other a new taste of that old musty cheese that we are.

    Problems with most technical writing (here describing a motorcycle manual):

    1. the motorcycle, so described, is almost impossible to understand unless you know how one works.
    2. The second is that the observer is missing. The description doesn’t say that to see the piston you must remove the cylinder head. “You” aren’t anywhere in the picture.
    3. The third is that the words “good” and “bad” and all their synonyms are completely absent. No value judgments have been expressed anywhere, only facts. 79

    A lot of the stuff I get from this book fits right in with the more and more popular argument for the ruby programming language – beauty is immensely important to whatever you do, be it painting or programming. It’s a value that has been ignored since god knows when, but doing something in ruby just feels better than doing the exact same thing in java, making it so much more meaningful.

    ...remarkable things happen, and you go flying across the countryside under a power that would be called magic if it were not so completely rational in every way. 100

    Our current modes of rationality are not moving society forward into a better world. They are taking it further and further from that better world. Since the renaissance these modes have worked. As long as the need for food, clothing, and shelter is dominant they will continue to work. But now that for huge masses of people these needs no longer overwhelm everything else, the whole structure of reason, handed down to us from ancient times, is no longer adequate. It begins to be seen for what it really is – emotionally hollow, esthetically meaningless and spiritually empty. 117

    To all appearances he was just drifting. In actuality he was just drifting. Drifting is what one does when looking at lateral truth. He couldn’t follow any known method of procedure to uncover its cause because it was these methods and procedures that were all screwed up in the first place. So he drifted, that was all he could do. 122

    Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, to read.

    You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence in. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it’s going to rise tomorrow. When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kinds of dogmas or goals, it’s always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt. 152

    John and Sylvia lived, or at least are said to live, on the same street as me. Colfax Avenue. 162

    “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 tight into the machine itself.” 165

    Programming with ruby.

    “The test of the machine is the satisfaction it gives you. There isn’t any other test. If the machine produces tranquility 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.” 165

    “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 ant 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 thougtts are changing together in a progression of changes until his mind’s at rest at the same time the material’s right.”


    “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.” 167

    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. 168

    Feininger, Church of the minorities. Apparently this hangs at the Walker art center, I haven’t been there in awhile and should probably go see some art.

    As a result of his experiments he concluded that imitation was a real evil that had to be broken before real rhetoric teaching could begin. This imitation seemed to be an external compulsion. Little children didn’t have it. It seemed to come later on, possibly as a result of school itself. 192

    Imitation being that kids in school form an idea of that which their teacher wants for them to do and conceives of any of their work through that idea. Brainwashed.

    This surprising result supported a hunch he had had for a long time: that the brighter, more serious students were the least desirous of grades, possibly because they were more interested in the subject matter of the course, whereas the dull or lazy students were the most desirous of grades, possible because grades told them if they were getting by. 199

    I’m pretty close to being done with school. It’s fun and all, but aside from the soccer team and the people, there’s not that much here for me. Rationalizations for staying are that hey, I’m having fun; it wouldn’t be much cheaper to have my own place (dropping out and moving in with my parents isn’t really a card I would want to or be able to play); only 1-2 years and I have the diploma; I do like playing on the soccer team, and the small college town atmosphere. Against: Goddamned expensive, burying myself in debt (although I could be trying harder to earn money to pay off loans), I like classes for the most part, but don’t really care about them, I’m more just doing them because the thing to do is do them. I do like school, but I feel bad for being here in that I really don’t care whether or not I end up in possession of a degree.

    “Quality is a characteristic of thought and statement that is recognized by a non-thinking process. Because definitions are a product of rigid, formal thinking, quality cannot be defined.” 206

    His Quality brings me back to Chris Alexanders Wholeness. I believe the most recent impetus, the one that finally got me to the library to check out Zen was a footnote somewhere in The Nature of Order, Book 1.

    “Now, to take that which has caused us to create the world, and include it within the world we have created, is clearly impossible. That is why Quality cannot be defined. If we do define it we are defining something less than Quality itself.” 251

    I like this bootstrapping problem. Will we ever understand the system of the world that created us? Will robots ever be able to understand the system of the world that created them? Because if they can, we ought to be able to. But what if we just can’t? Are we just thrashing around like fish out of water?

    Geometry is not true, it is advantageous 264 – One of my favorite ideas is that all of everything there is can be allegorized as just some wobbly and patched up scaffolding, barely able to hold up to the weight of all the responsibility we’ve given it. The scaffolding is built up around whatever there actually is, God, science, whatever you believe to be the driving force of the universe. But it’s terribly crude, because we humans are fickle and narrow minded simpletons who haven’t but deluded ourselves into the idea of having some sort of understanding about the world at large. We’ve built our knowledge of the world so heavily upon itself that it won’t take much to bring it tumbling back down.

    Peace of mind isn’t at all superficial to technical work. It’s the whole thing. That which produces it is a good work and that which destroys it is bad work. [...] The reason for this is that peace of mind is a prerequisite for a perception of that Quality which is beyond romantic Quality and classic Quality and which unites the two, and which must accompany the work as it proceeds. The way to see what looks good and understand the reasons it looks food, and to be at one with this goodness as the work proceeds, is to cultivate an inner quietness, a piece of mind so that goodness can shine through. 295

    Peace of mind – the whole thing.

    enthousiamsmos: Greek, literally “filled with god.” Wholeness, quality. Root word to our english enthusiasm. 303

    The real cycle you’re working on is a cycle called yourself. The machine that appears to be “out there” and the person that appears to be “in here” are not two separate things. They grow toward Quality or fall away from Quality together. 325

    The mythos-over-logos argument states that our rationality is shaped by these legends, that our knowledge today is in relation to these legends as a tree is in relation to the little shrub it once was. One can gain great insights into the complex overall structure of the tree by studying the much simpler shape of the shrub. There’s no difference in kind or even difference in identity, only a difference in size. 349

    This works well with my meanderings on everything we know just being a shitty scaffold build up, without much foundation, around what we think to be the nature of things. The further we go, the more corrupted our worldview becomes. The further away it gets from God, science, or whatever you believe to be the driving force of the universe.

    Religion isn’t invented by man. Men are invented by religion. Men invent responses to Quality, and among these responses is an understanding of what they themselves are. You know something and then the Quality stimulus hits and then you try to define the Quality stimulus, but to define it all you’ve got to work with is what you know. So your definition is made up of what you know. It’s an analogue to what you already know. It has to be. It can’t be anything else. And the mythos grows this way. By analogies to what is known before. The mythos is a building of analogues upon analogues. These fill the boxcars of the train of consciousness. The mythos is the whole train of collective consciousness of all communicating mankind. Every last bit of it. The Quality is the track that directs the train. What is outside the train, to either dies – that is the terra incognita of the insane. 351

    Phaedrus vs. Aristotle, Chris Alexander vs. Aristotle. 360

    Phaedrus remembered a line from Thoreau: “You never gain something but that you lose something.” And now he began to see for the first time the unbelievable magnitude of what man, when he gained power to understand and rule the world in terms of dialectic truths, had lost. He had built empires of scientific capability to manipulate the phenomena of nature into enormous manifestations of his own dreams of power and wealth – but for this he had exchanged an empire of understanding of equal magnitude: An understanding of what it is to be a part of the world, and not an enemy of it. 377

    I didn’t highlight anything in the last ~30 pages of the book, but that’s where it really gets good. The ideas of Phaedrus are out there, and now the story between the narrarator and Chris and life comes together, in a good way.

  2. 09 January 2006

    1096 days ago

    A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider god-fearing and pious. On the other hand, they do less easily move against him, believing that he has the gods on his side.

    Aristotle

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