Truth Meditation

"The truth knocks on the door and you say, 'Go away, I’m looking for the truth,' and so it goes away."

Robert Pirsig


(Photo courtesy of Felix Luo and Unsplash.com.)

The Truth About Wolves and Dogs

"When a shepherd goes to kill a wolf, and takes his dog to see the sport, he should take care to avoid mistakes. The dog has certain relationships to the wolf the shepherd may have forgotten."

This line, written by Robert Pirsig in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, is incisive; equal to an revolutionary treatise, all by itself.

Reading it again, I'm reminded of several points of insight I've encountered in my past. For example, when I was a history undergrad, one of my professors described how America's white master class had forcibly converted captive Africans to Christianity in an attempt to render them docile and compliant. When, he said, the preacher fetched up against the many accounts of enslavement in Jewish scripture – accounts which rarely or never present it in a Godly light – he assured his enslaved congregation that those passages didn't mean what they seemed to mean; that they couldn't possibly understand such esoteric teachings.

"Of course, " said Dr. Francis, "this was complete nonsense. Those people knew full well what those Old Testament writers were talking about."

Later I encountered bitter capitalist denunciation of syndicalism. "Unions don't belong in The System!" they pouted. "They want to overthrow the free market!" Communism / socialism / atheism / totalitarianism / repression-depression-recession, fa-la-la-la-la.

But we lumpen learned unionism from capitalists. We implicitly understand such notions as monopoly, cornered markets, object value, possession, and the ethical justifications for acting in one's own interest, other considerations be damned. That the boss wants to kill this wolf is understandable. That he believes we've forgotten who the wolf is, is demeaning at best.

And then, of course, there's Bodhidharma. He said, "Just sit."

Literally.

That's his whole teaching.

All of it.

But in the fifteen-odd centuries since he said it, all manner of fa-la-la-la-la (or bup-po-so-en-jo-raku-ga-jo) has accrued on that small, inornate pedestal. Which was predictable; as I've quoted elsewhere, "Meditation is simple. That is why it so easily becomes complicated." You have to expect that, and accept it, and I do.

So now Zen has become a large corporate entity, complete with the usual demand for compliance, deference, and obedience, which has at length led to full-circle condemnation of Bodhidharma in some quarters. Or at least of others of his nation.

"You can't," we're assured, "possibly understand such complex, esoteric teachings."

And yet I meet more and more sheepdogs who smile and bow when we pass.

Brothers and sisters who know full well what the Old Man was talking about.


(Photo courtesy of Elxan Ehsan oğlu Qəniyev and Wikimedia Commons.)

Meditation Meditation

"You start out feeling, 'Oh Lord, I hate this' and then later on you feel 'Oh boy this is wonderful', and you're wrong both times."

Robert Pirsig


(Photo of Zen monk striking call to zazen courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)

Good Book: I See By My Outfit

By dint of random good fortune I just read I See By My Outfit: Cross-Country by Scooter—an Adventure, by Peter S. Beagle. This inexplicably obscure American masterpiece is basically Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance meets On the Road by way of Three Men in a Boat, and I heartily recommend it to anyone who appreciated those classics. (I commend it even harder to those who couldn't get through the first two. Beagle utterly lacks the pretence of Kerouac or Pirsig.)

In 1963, Peter and his childhood best friend, artist Phil Sigunick, set out from New York City for the Bay Area on motor scooters. Yeah, that's not a typo: scooters. Weird-looking Heinkel Tourists, from the days when former Nazi aircraft manufacturers were still doghoused by punitive restrictions.

If a cute little city-boy scooter doesn't strike you as the tool for the task, welcome to the adventure. (Past tense form; in the present we call it "catastrophe".)

But Phil and Pete are 24 and invincible, and the tale that ensues is simultaneously hilarious, insightful, and nostalgic. Beagle's tart, economical prose foreshadows the power that will soon make him a cultural icon. A few years later he will write The Last Unicorn (an event subtly hindsighted by his obsession with Tolkien, whose work he has to define for 1964 readers) and become a lion of literary fantasy. But that's even farther ahead than California at this point.

In fact, lots of things are ahead of him, but he's trying not to think about that. For the moment his life is a sequence of picnic grounds and diners; fleabag hotels, pawnshops, and borrowed guitars; breakdowns and rainstorms; eerily prescient cow town parochials; and more than one Cold War cop with little clue where his authority ends – or interest.

Along the way we get pithy, almost poetic descriptions of little towns along old Route 40, some of which have hardly changed in half a century. (I checked on Google Street View.) Pop-culture call-outs recreate the ecosystem of the period. Together with bookish literary references they feed the capital Internet scavenger hunt that signals a great book.

And through it all, the simple joy of being a brash young twentysomething, smart-mouthed and game, and somehow, in Beagle's case, aware of it. His breezy, funny patter is the sort of thing you can only produce – or get away with – at that age. The fact that he and Sigunick constantly remind each other to act like smart-mouthed twentysomethings – because that's their calculated schtick – is at once endearing, and a little surrealistic.

Outfit does suffer from an excess of voice in places, particularly in the repartee between the boys, which can become tedious when it pokes too long in the inside-jokey territory of childhood friends. Fortunately, Beagle's tight pacing limits these interludes to a fleeting irritation.

Some readers have also fingered the riders' casual misogyny, amounting mostly to failure to take women seriously. Beagle himself reportedly winces at those moments now, which as a fellow old man I can well imagine. But their tone is par for young stallions in 1963, and so they are a lesson in their own right. (Full disclosure: my friends and I talked similarly – out of female earshot – twenty years later.)

For the rest, my main complaint is incompleteness. The book badly needs an epilogue, maybe two – one in-period, the other retrospective. And for a book about an artist, it's frustratingly unillustrated. Why don't we have those gouaches Phil's always executing, in parking lots and beside bridges? (Both oversights may have been corrected in subsequent editions; I read the original, with the cover above.)

One thing is certain: I See By My Outfit deserves to be much more widely read. It's a beloved classic waiting fifty years and counting to happen. If you like road stories, or Americana, or social history, or just effervescent, youthful prose, this one's for you.

I nearly cried when it was over, just because there was no more to read.


Update, 7 March 2017: I've just stumbled over this 2012 Chronogram profile of Phil and his wife Judy, in which occurs the following line: "He is also a primary character in Peter S. Beagle’s classic cross-country travelogue, I See By My Outfit, for which he is creating a soon-to-be-published series of illustrations." I hope this means that my above speculation is correct, and that a recent re-issue of Outfit now includes adequate, dare we hope generous, graphic contributions by the book's co-protoganist. I mean, c'mon. Dude shares top billing in this trip, and he's a recognised artist. Isn't this the definition of a "no-brainer"?.

Forging the Chain

Haflinger horse.

Here's a fun little experiment:

1. Load any Wikipedia article, about anything.
2. Click on the first link in the main text of the article; links in (parentheses) or italics don't count.
3. Click the first link in that article, again avoiding parenthetical or italicised links. Then click on the first link in that article. And so on.

In most cases, no matter what topic you started on, you will eventually wind up at Philosophy. (If not, you probably either clicked on something that was in italics or parentheses, or somewhere you encountered a WP article whose first link took you out of Wikipedia. But this is rare.)

To test this claim, I started with the article on Haflinger horses. (I don't remember why.) Sure enough, after many clicks, I ended up at Philosophy.

I was curious to know where else the technique might lead, so I clicked on the first link there, too. That took me to Reality, then Reality to Existence, Existence to Awareness, Awareness to Consciousness, Consciousness to Quality (hello, Robert Pirsig!), Quality to Property... and then back to Philosophy; I'd finally pi'd out.

So there it is: our Big Bang. Human awareness itself originates in the perception and judging of Property. (A Quality, let us recognise, that only exists in our minds.)

Fellow Zenners, at the risk of being a Paine, I'll say it right out loud: our chains are forged.


(Photo courtesy of Jon Shave and Wikimedia Commons.)

Street Level Zen: Where It's At

"The only Zen you find at the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there."

Robert Pirsig

(Photo of Royal Enfield Thunderbird on a Himalayan mountain pass courtesy of Gopal Vijayaraghavan and Wikimedia Commons.)