Journeys in Space: An Excellent Motorcycle Adventure!

 “I can see from my watch, without taking my hand from the left grip of the cycle, that it is eight-thirty in the morning.  The wind, even at sixty miles an hour, is warm and humid.  When it’s this hot and muggy at eight-thirty, I’m wondering what it’s going to be like in the afternoon.

In the wind are pungent odors from the marshes by the road.  We are in an area of the Central Plains filled with thousands of duck hunting sloughs, heading northwest from Minneapolis toward the Dakotas.  The highway is an old concrete two-laner that hasn’t had much traffic since a four-laner went in parallel to it several years ago.  When we pass a marsh the air suddenly becomes cooler.  Then when we are past, it suddenly warms up again.”

Robert Pirsig

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

William Morrow and Company © 1974

An EXCELLENT Motorcycle Adventure! 

This year is the fortieth anniversary of the publication of Pirsig’s “iconic” novel, originally published in April 1974.  I stumbled upon it my freshman year of college in upstate New York, probably didn’t appreciate it much that year… then was forced through it again my senior year as assigned reading in a modern literature course[1].  I got more out of it the second time, but like most 21 year olds, I didn’t think there was much for me to learn at the University… although I did still believe in books and the books assigned that term were generally excellent[2]… I skimmed as much as read Pirsig.

For some unknown reason I revisited the work the following year… I can’t quite remember the genesis of the revisiting…  I had just purchased my first brand new motorcycle[3]… or perhaps I had been exchanging letters with a friend[4]… or perhaps it just caught my eye on the bookshelf one day.  In any event, to prove the old aphorism true, the third time was indeed the charm.  The book unfolded before my eyes I could see clearly not just Pirsig’s theory of metaphysics but a much deeper message about the interconnections between, well… everything.  For the younger reader, I recognize that this sounds hopelessly new-age, and hippie-ish, and terribly not 21^st century. But so be it.

For the last forty years, I have revisited Pirsig many, many times.  Maybe not every year, but twenty or thirty times… cover to cover.  Each time I see things differently[5].  For maybe the first five re-readings I was mainly concerned with the aspects of Pirsig’s metaphysics of classical understanding.  Later, I became more concerned with the aspects of his metaphysics of romantic understanding, then briefly with his metaphysics of Quality… which for him the point of the book.  For me though, I ended up using his own analytical methods against him… once you learn how to use Phaedrus’s analytical knife, to cut the world up in to objects of your own choosing… with your understanding based on the defined interrelationships between them, of necessity also of your own choosing… you begin to understand that our lives are a collaboration between ourselves and the universe.  Book learning becomes not an act of mastering facts and truths but of developing a fluid, changing, understanding based on who you are and what you are becoming, as much as the written text itself.

I had occasion to revisit Pirsig over this last winter, during an illness, and this time I was struck not so much by the metaphysics, or the drama of the journey of self-discovery, as I was of merely the voice of the narrator.  Although the narrator is the main character of Pirsig’s novel, he has no name[6]… although we are led to believe that the narrator is Pirsig himself[7].  The voice is slow, sonorous, soothing… incessant and immense.

Events have conspired over the last year or so to cause me to spend more time in contemplation that I usually do.  At this point of my life… with fewer years ahead than behind… I find it a convenient time to document some things.  I have been writing all my life, it seems, nearly fifty years but very little has been for publication[8].  This blog will be something of a vanity project, I suppose, but following the example of all the previous generations that went on the road… and thought about things and wrote about the things that they thought about and the things that they saw and people that they met… well, somehow it seems finally time for me to do this.

So we are departing, Ruth and I, on An Excellent Motorcycle Adventure.  We won’t be following Pirsig per se (either his physical journey or his metaphysical journey).  And we won’t be exactly following the footsteps of Lewis and Clark… nor the passages of Mark Twain on the Mississippi River… nor the frenzied driving of Dean Moriarty and Sal Paradise… although all of these will be much on my mind.  We will be what we are, a couple of middle aged folks on vacation.  We will see mountains and prairies and deserts and a couple of oceans.  And think about a few things as best we can.

And so, I thought I just might write it all down.

An Excellent Motorcycle Adventure! We depart Monday June 23rd at 5:00 AM…

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[1] Many thanks to Professor Turrisi for this class.  The course title, Modern Literature, was essentially an exercise in irony since every assigned text work that we read that term contained the famous Protagoras quote:  “Man is the measure of all things:  of things which are, that they are, and of things which are not, that they are not.”  Protagoras died in 420 BCE, so in some sense there is no way that this can be modern, yet for those of us of a certain age… just coming out of the 1960’s and living in the 1970’s… it can be a refreshingly empowering quote when we realize that that “Man” refers to us each as individuals.  Pirsig reinforces this in his beginning note by quoting Plato:  “And what is good Phaedrus, and what is not good, need we ask anyone to tell us these things?”  The whole ethos was very much of an pro-individual anti-establishment bent, which seems atavistic and archaic in these more modern, more conservative (and need I say more politically polarized) times.

[2] E.M. Forrester The Machine Stops, Edward Albee The Sandbox and Pirsig, amongst others.

[3] A 1979 Suzuki GS550E: four cylinders, double overhead cams, about 450 lbs dry weight.  It was a decent enough bike for $2000 back then.  I should have spent the extra money for the GS850, which was the same engine bored out to the higher displacement and mounted on the GS1000 frame… but I was somewhat more cash constrained in those days.

[4] Audrey in Vermont, do you remember?

[5] Edmund Burke wisely tells us, that no one “can read the same book twice”, an echo of the Greek sophist Heraclitus, “No man ever steps in the same river twice.”

[6] Think of the protagonist of Richard Brautigan’s  In Watermelon Sugar as another nameless narrator… are all nameless narrators the same person?

[7] Certainly, the narrator and Pirsig have many autobiographical details in common.

[8] Not counting The Tattler at Nashua High School, and some sports stories for the Nashua Telegraph.   A few technical articles and short fiction all published in fairly obscure conference proceedings and journals