'Tis the sad wind that sighs through the withering leaves. (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Robert M. Pirsig)

Member Name: pje

Product:	Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Robert M. Pirsig
Date:	12/02/02 (988 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Profound and moving.

Disadvantages: Heavy philosophizing.

" The place to improve the world is first in one's own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there. Other people can talk about how to expand the destiny of mankind. I just want to talk about how to fix a motorcycle. I think that what I have to say has more lasting value. "


I have a confession to make...at the risk of making myself look stooopid. The thing is, I'm still not 100% sure whether this book is a novel or not - it's listed here on dooyoo under biography, but how autobiographical is it? And it's very difficult to categorize a book about motorcycles, mental illness and philosophy. Libraries shelve it in all sorts of strange places - perhaps a passing librarian could explain...?

This book was undoubtedly the forerunner of the new-age adventure genre (for want of a better description) which has proved so lucrative for the likes of James Redfield (he of the Celestine Prophecy) in recent years. But don't let that cloud your judgement - this is the real thing: a profound piece of philosophical writing. It is not an easy read, but it is inspiring.

121 publishers rejected Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance before one of them offered Pirsig a $3,000 advance, telling him that the book had "forced him to decide what he was in publishing for."

So what the hell is it all about?

Well, on one hand it follows in the tyre-tracks of Kerouac's On The Road:

" You see things vacationing on a motorcycle in a way that is completely different from any other. In a car you're always in a compartment, and because you're used to it you don't realize that through that car window everything you see is just more TV. You're a passive observer and it is all moving by you boringly in a frame.

On a cycle the frame is gone. You're completely in contact with it all. You're in the scene, not just watching it anymore, and the sense o
f presence is overwhelming. That concrete whizzing by five inches below your foot is the real thing, the same stuff you walk on, it's right there, so blurred you can't focus on it, yet you can put your foot down and touch it anytime, and the whole thing, the whole experience, is never removed from immediate consciousness. "

But on the other hand, like Susanna Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted, it's about someone trying to discover how they came to have a nervous breakdown. A man, quite literally, trying to find himself.

And on the third hand it depicts an achingly distant relationship between father and son. But most of all it's about metaphysical philosophy, I think. (The book is subtitled: An Inquiry Into Values, by the way.)

Basically it's about a journey undertaken by a father (our narrator) and his son Chris, as they travel across America on a motorbike. For the first part of their journey they are accompanied by friends John & Sylvia Sutherland. John and Sylvia ride a BMW, without knowing anything about how it works and without having a clue how to fix the simplest mechanical problem. They can't even fix a tap, and wouldn't have a clue what points are... (What do points make...?) This is in complete a contrast to our narrator, who understands every piece of, and lovingly maintains, his motorcycle.

Yes, there are real tips on motorcycle maintenance here, but more importantly, the machine serves as a metaphor for life, and he dissects it with a subtle knife called rational analysis in order to show the difference, as he sees it, between 'classical' and 'romantic' modes of reality. Phew!

They ride from Minneapolis across the prairies of the Dakotas to Montana. And it's when they arrive there, at a place called Bozeman, and stay with an old friend, that our narrator's past life comes back to haunt him. (Before his mental breakdown he had been a teacher at a colle
ge there.) His memory of those days is almost completely lost though, and he refers to his former self (pre-breakdown) as 'Phaedrus' (the Greek word for wolf, and a character from a work by Plato.) He is trying to rediscover himself through the notes and writings made by Phaedrus at the time, as well as by retracing his steps:

" He was insane. And when you look directly at an insane man all you see is a reflection of your own knowledge that he's insane, which is not to see him at all. To see him you must see what he saw. "

Phaedrus had been a prodigy. He went to University at the age of fifteen to study biochemistry, but was expelled two years later because of failing grades. He had suffered a mental block, believing that he could construct an endless number of possible hypotheses to explain any phenomenon.

{This echoed a mental block I experienced once. I was supposed to write a program in a low-level computer language, but I never finished it - in fact I never even got round to running it through the computer. I knew that one part of it wasn't going to work y'see, and every time I fixed one bug, it opened up another glitch somewhere else. Other students stuck them into the computer, ran them, crashed them and patched them, in the ad hoc way programmers do, until they work... ...or seem to! ;-) But not me. Being a bit of a perfectionist, I wouldn't run it until I expected it to work, and of course writing the perfect program just isn't possible. I got stuck.

That reminds me...
what's the difference between an optimist and a pessimist?
Well, an optimist thinks that every problem has a solution;
whereas a pessimist thinks every solution contains another problem...

I remember having a similar problem at junior school. All I had to do was make a cube out of cardboard. No problem... Draw a 'net', cut it out, fold it up and stick the flaps inside (yes, I did remem
ber to include the flaps!) Erm, but how was I supposed to glue down the last flap? There I was, holding a box with an open lid, wondering how I could press that last flap into place when it went inside the box. I was stuck. Sadly, the box wasn't!
I still haven't figured that one out. That's the kind of mind I have, you see. When I watch Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? I wonder why the figure 11 is splayed ('1 1') on the display, and why no-one else notices it.

But I digress. I'd better get back to the book before the men in white coats turn up and cart me off to the funny farm...}

We learn how Phaedrus became obsessed with a quest to define 'quality' in philosophical terms - convinced he was on the verge of a breakthrough, when, in fact, he was on the verge of a breakdown. There's a thin line between madness and genius though - who can say which is which?

But as the narrator chases his academic Holy Grail (and I'd forgotten how much heavy philosophical theory there is in this book since I last read it) we see, with agonizing clarity, his troubled relationship with Chris, whose behaviour is starting to show symptoms of the onset of mental illness too.

I got this book to give to a friend as a Christmas present some years ago. But, obviously I had to read it first, to make sure it was suitable (it was) - and that's how I came to finish reading it at 4am one Christmas morning. Sadly it was a recent edition, because recent editions have an afterword which I found devastating. In it Robert Pirsig explains how, five years after this book was published, Chris was murdered - stabbed to death on a San Francisco sidewalk. Such a waste.

Being alive often feels like walking through a meadow, but then a moment comes when you find out that its actually a minefield. 'The unexpected hits you between the eyes' as the song goes. Things change from ordinariness to tragedy with no warni
ng, just like this digression.

The name David Gribble ought to be familiar to regular viewers of BBC2's Robot Wars. Julia Reed, one of the presenters had a soft spot for David, often putting her arms round him, and describing him as the best driver in the Wars. He drove the robot for the Pussycat team led by his father Alan.
A shy looking lad with a big cheeky grin, and one of the stars of the show.
Tragically he was in a motorcycle accident last October, a few weeks after the series was filmed, and, like the son of the Erl-King, he died in the arms of his father. He was just 17. In a questionnaire on their team's website, he chose as his best moment in life: "Getting my first motorbike."
( http://www20.brinkster.com/teamcoldfusion/david.ht ml )

It was reading that that made me want to re-read this book, and so
I'd like to dedicate this to the memory of Chris Pirsig and David Gribble.


The ENTIRE text of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (erm... apart from Chapter 26 for some reason) is available to read online at:

http://www.virtualschool.edu/mon/Quality/Pirsi gZen/index.html

[You might not like chapter fifteen (at the end of part II) though, MALU!]

There's no film, because films are too dumb to convey deep thoughts,
but Robert M. Pirsig did write a sequel called "Lila (An Inquiry Into Morals)"
which was published in 1991. In it he expounds on his ideas about the Metaphysics of Quality - but that's another story, for another day maybe.

If you hanker after a more in-depth analysis of the philosophy behind both books, there's a forum for the discussion of the Metaphysics of Quality at:

http://www.moq.org/


Here are some of the things that other reviewers said about this book:

"A hypnotist's crystal ... sparkled with diamonds"
- Richard Bach, author of Jonathan Livingstone S
eagull.

"The most significant book I have recently read ... a major reinterpretation of the pre-Socratic philosophers." - Martin Seligman, Psychology Today.

"A moving tale of the modern soul, and a fine detective story of a man in search of himself. Beautifully, lucidly written, it offers a large challenge and an equal reward..." - The Chicago Daily News.

"An unforgettable trip" - Time Magazine.


¶ Paperback: £7.99 ¶ ISBN: 0099786400 ¶ pp 416 ¶ 1991 ¶
¶ Paperback: £7.99 ¶ ISBN: 0099322617 ¶ pp 451 ¶ 1999 ¶
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