[MD] Overcoming the System

[Matt Kundert]

Hi John,

John said:
My first and only philosophy teacher, George Sessions, 
talked about the trouble he had with doing the dishes in 
that zen way of just doing them and not trying to get 
through doing them.  I can see the difficulty, but at the 
same time, with enough interesting stuff going on in your 
head...

Matt:
A former roommate and I used to only be able to do the 
dishes when we were drunk.  We'd get ripped, and she'd go, 
"Hey!  Let's do the dishes!"  And being drunk, what was I 
gonna' say--everything sounds like a good idea when you're 
hammered.  It got to the point where we'd have a pile of 
dishes and we'd go, "Oh, god--gotta' get down to the liquor 
store."

I don't ponder very well while doing the dishes for some 
reason, so being blitzed always worked as a kinda' zen thing.

John said:
Of course!  That's why you do the pondering while doing the 
dishes and the writing soon after so you don't forget what 
you pondered. I like to do my pondering while digging ditches.

Matt:
Absolutely.  For me, it's always been driving.  (Though, on 
reflection, perhaps dishes never worked as a philosophical 
precursor _because_ I was blitzed--writing while drunk has 
never quite worked for me.)  Up until recently, since I was 
16 I'd almost always had a job which included long bouts 
of driving (and one as a building security guard with long 
bouts of standing and looking friendly--I hated those 
people, but you had to at least look friendly).  You can mull 
over a lot of things, and any time you hit on something cool, 
you pull out some paper and write it down.

Perhaps this is simply a problem for me, because of the 
peculiar way in which I do philosophy, which involves a lot 
reading and especially writing.  It's hard to tell what others 
do with their time, so I can only look at my own experience, 
and the experience of those I'm familiar with, like Pirsig, who 
neglected his family in isolation, hunting down the 
metaphysical basis of existence.

But typically--you can't do two activities at once.  If you've 
ever gotten in trouble for thinking about something else 
while you're significant other was trying to talk to you, I 
think you might understand what I mean about the 
distinction between the activity of philosophy, and other 
activities.

I mean--people, following Pirsig, have always pounded the 
pavement in front of me about how _language_ takes us 
out of direct experience, and how this is bad and blah, blah, 
blah.  When now, finally, I'm talking about actual, 
pinpointable, practical evasions of experience--most of the 
time it is difficult to combine the activity of philosophy with 
other activities.  That's what Dewey, at least, meant when 
he said that reflection--the generalized form of 
philosophy--was indirect experience: he meant that, though 
it was its own direct experience, it was a meta-experience, 
it was  _about_ other experiences, and when you're having a 
meta-experience, you're not having the experience the 
meta-experience is about.  Or, if you are--if you're thinking 
about driving while driving--then its a shadowy version of the 
other experience, because you're doing two things at once.  
Have you ever gotten off the highway and had no memory 
the detailed things you did to get to that point because you 
were thinking of something else?

That's why I've found asking me for examples that gunk up 
the system of the MoQ so absurd--in that kind of way, I'm 
talking _about_ system, not talking within any particular 
system.  The MoQ may certainly be able to house within 
itself my meta-talk about the metaphor of system (it doesn't 
take a lot of ingenuity for that), but that's all from _within 
the MoQ_, and so not apropos or relevant to why we're using 
the metaphor of system in the first place.

Matt

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