[MD] mystical awareness and intellectual explantions

[skutvik at online.no]

Ron and All

On 6 March you wrote:

> Mr. Skutvik,
> I was touring your web page and reading your work, I appreciate your
> painting style by the way 
>  the impressionistic realism evokes mood and atmosphere with your
> masterful brush strokes, I'd like to know more about your thoughts
> regarding the cow, you mention something about Animals being imortal
> because they are not able to percieve death. If I may ask, could you
> Expand on this? Thank you -x

How to go about this without merely repeating that part of my 
essay? As told I was a little philosopher from my earliest age, but 
to proceed to my late twenties - early sixties of the century - it 
reached some climax with a kind of epiphany (one never knows 
what the real article is). Recently I tried to tell Case about it, but 
its next to impossible to convey such an experience, anyway, it 
was a sudden insight that our reality is language, not suspended 
in - or based on -, or just -  but LANGUAGE. It was no conclusion 
of any previous argument or thoughts, but struck out of the blue 
with total conviction. 

Why/how cows entered this was my childhood fasciation with 
these inscrutable animals. Perhaps all animals are inscrutable but 
cats and dogs f.ex. signals some responses. If you gaze at a dog 
it looks away as if embarrassed, but in a cow's eye no recognition 
of anything is found. Well, after the insight it was passed on to 
these animals I had felt so sorry for in my childhood because of 
their ignorance of their own fate and indifference whether in the 
meadow or their way to the slaughterhouse. Because they were 
outside language they were outside death too, immortal so to say. 

I later expanded this to ourselves: We might die but we cant be 
dead, because "to be" indicates existence ...and some more of 
such. In fact I still regard it as valid. Language indicates some an 
impression of a non-existent existence. Perhaps from where the 
catholic "limbo" stems. We speak of a recent deceased person as 
if being dead, not quite at the far side, but by and by their new 
status is becoming more normal, for instance, we don't look on 
historic figures as "dead", their post-life status is their proper 
state.                 

OK, my obsession  with this made me speak endlessly about it, 
but after many blank stares and friendly advice not to dwell on 
things like that, I didn't speak so much but thought about it no 
less. And now another complication occurred. Some other 
problems of mine - this I pass over - lead to a an anxiety attack, 
and my fears found a focus in my speculations: They were the 
reason for my illness! And now I really was in limbo, trying to 
avoid my thoughts from wandering into the field that immediately 
evoked my fears. This was 1968 and many years of this followed, 
but then in 1977 I found Pirsigs "Zen ..." and things changed, 
finally a fate similar to my own. 

Even if Pirsigs Quality insight and my own Language don't 
immediately match I recognized it immediately, and I became a 
Pirsig fan to say the least. Subject/object metaphysics NOT being 
realitys ground  was what evoked insights like mine about 
absolutes beyond. SOM confronts you with two incompatible 
alternatives - all is mind or mind a by-product - none acceptable, 
thus my Language was a variety of Quality and I happily 
accepted Pirsig's version and eagerly awaited his next book.  

>From ZMM I had sensed how he would finish off SOM by the 
lethal grip he had fastened on it (identifying it as the "intellectual" 
- or Classic - part of the proto moq) but when LILA arrived none 
of this happened. The Romantic/Classic becoming 
Dynamic/Static was just perfect , and so were the static levels, 
but "intellect" (the level) were no longer the S/O, rather SOM had 
become a faulty idea of an idea-intellect. And what's more, 
Quality was not part of  the MOQ, the metaphysics was just 
another intellectual pattern . Not that I saw these things at first 
glance, but after a year of the "Lila Squad" I launched the SOLQI 
idea, that since has been my mission incomplete. 

Why Pirsig let his world-shaking idea down in favor of the bland 
version embraced by som many as an affirmation of their pre-
conceived New Age leaning, I will never know. For a long time I 
thought he had found it too radical and - you know sailing around, 
hammering away on his new book not knowing if a single person 
would understand the first thing - wanted to tune it down, but (my 
reasoning went on ...) when he saw that someone had grasped 
the idea he would open up. But this was vanity, in "Lila's Child" it 
was clear that he did not endorse the SOL - didn't even 
understand it -  rather, in later letters - to Paul Turner f.ex. - he 
tuned SOM down to some irrelevant episode that hardly matters.

Well, here I go again. This was more than you asked for Ron. 
Regarding cows they ARE immortal in a MOQ light too, Biology 
as such is immortal, death entered with the social level. The 
paleontologists say that the one sure sign of an awareness of 
death is burial rituals, which reveals the social wish/will of 
continuity beyond. 

Enough 

Bo