[MD] Where's the Target I'm Shooting at?

[Platt Holden]

Hi SA, Marsha:

>      So, where's the target I'm (or we) are shooting
> at? when it comes to quality.  Is it the awe in beauty
> that defines our performance of what this quality is? 

Excellent question. And the answer to your second question is, "Yes." 

Marsha has it right also. "It is the awe (awareness) that in each 
moment there IS beauty (points to or is the result of DQ).

What Pirsig had to say about it is right, too. From SODV:

 " 'In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance' art was defined as 
high quality endeavor. I have never found a need to add anything to 
that definition. But one of the reasons I have spent so much time in 
this paper describing the personal relationship of Werner Heisenberg 
and Niels Bohr in the development of quantum theory is that although 
the world views science as a sort of plodding, logical methodical 
advancement of knowledge, what I saw here were two artists in the 
throes of creative discovery. They were at the cutting edge of 
knowledge plunging into the unknown trying to bring something out of 
that unknown into a static form that would be of value to everyone. As 
Bohr might have loved to observe, science and art are just two 
different complementary ways of looking at the same thing. In the 
largest sense it is really unnecessary to create a meeting of the arts 
and sciences because in actual practice, at the most immediate level 
they have never really been separated. They have always been different 
aspects of the same human purpose. "

Pirsig's words became more meaningful to me when at the end of a 6th 
grader's paper I was judging as part of a Halloween contest, the author 
had written, "Beautifully done by Sarah Briggs."  

My own reminder of the target I'm shooting at is, "Push on until you 
capture the beauty of the thing." 

But regardless of how you define the target wherein beauty plays a 
part, everyone is right in their own way. Like Dynamic Quality, beauty 
escapes definition. As one art critic wrote, "The only valid thing in 
art is the one thing that cannot be explained." 

So IMO your question can only be answered by your individual, unique 
human spirit, ie. that within you that originated in the stars and to 
which someday you will return.

For I have concluded that where beauty is is where love lost is now.   

Regards,
Platt