[MD] The MoQ & Art

[Mary]

The MoQ & Art
Robert M. Pirsig, 2010

[Robert M. Pirsig sits on a couch with a young baby, his granddaughter, on
his lap]

"Ok, here we go."

"This is Lilly and I am Robert Pirsig, and she is my granddaughter.  I read
that films are always much more successful when they have a beautiful woman
in it, and I thought I'd include her to start with."

"She is Nell's daughter, and Nell was about this age when you may remember
that I wrote an addendum at the end of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle
Maintenance with Nell tapping on the typewriter, and I thought maybe this
time, Lilly could be in an international film and that would be her start in
life.  But now I'm laughing a little because Nell and Wendy are on the other
side of the camera waving at Lilly to get her to smile.  Did she smile?  Is
she smiling?"

[Lilly smiling as Pirsig hands her off camera]

"Ok, Lilly.  You're gonna go to your Momma.  Here you go!"

"Now, last January, I think it was, Anthony McWatt asked me to do a short
film for this meeting at Oxford, and I made an effort, but I just didn't
like it and I junked it.  But I made a lot of notes and I gave them to
Anthony and I said, here, you can do what you want with them.  What he
wanted to do with them was give them right back to me and tell me, "Make
that film!"  So, that's what I'm doing right now."

"He's also typed up my notes in a way that I can just read them and add-lib.
This is not a formal presentation.  This is just a series of little, good
ideas I've had from time to time.  I think you should really use them as
starting points of thought rather than ending points of thought, which is
what art is all about anyway."

"The use of film has both advantages and disadvantages.  I wrote this.  The
advantage is that if I say something really stupid, I can edit it out before
anybody finds out about it, and I can take a coffee break between
paragraphs, or stop and think about something before going on.  I've done
that for several months and now I guess I can go on.  The disadvantage
really is that it's difficult for me to guess how much of you already know
about the Metaphysics of Quality.  So I may be oversimplifying something or
omitting something without realizing that nobody knows what I'm talking
about.  I can't answer questions and I can't read from faces whether what
I'm saying is getting across or not the way I would in a discussion, so I'll
have to leave part of that to Dr. McWatt, and Patrick Dourly(?), and David
Buchanan.  All good men."

"To begin with, I have here, my best line concerning art is in chapter 21 of
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, where it says, quote, "Art is
high Quality endeavor.  That's all that really needs to be said.  Or, if
something more high-sounding is demanded, art is the Godhead as revealed in
the works of man."  In the MoQ, those two statements are identical, and if
you can get from one to the other you will have understood Zen and the Art
of Motorcycle Maintenance."

"I agree with Patrick Dourly that this corresponds to Gengrich's(?) notion
of "art as mastery".  He does not think of art as an object (I think that
was his first sentence) and neither does Zen and the Art of Motorcycle
Maintenance or my ideas of the Metaphysics of Quality.  Art is endeavor.
Whether it's gonna come out right or not, it's still art.  It's what you do.
It's who you are as a person that makes it art or not art."

"Now, I also added that there are fundamentally two types of art, which I
don't think Gengrich had, at least I didn't notice them, and one is static
art, which is according to the rules, and can be achieved according to
careful study and ability to do as you're told.  And then there's Dynamic
art, which is another whole different story, where there are no rules at
all, and you just do it according to your own inner - not even your own
inner self - do it to what Orientals would call the Dharma. "

"Now, Dharma is one of the most difficult words to translate into English
because it's usually translated as meaning "law", but that's only half of
Dharma.  The other half of Dharma is "duty to oneself", or "duty to a
perfect self".  If you, through enlightenment, become a perfect self, then
all you'll ever do is Dharma, but if you're living in the world of illusion,
then you better follow the law and not just do as you damn please."

"When I was a child, my Mother bought me a whole series of - this was in
1920, 30, or so - my Mother bought me a whole series of "Book House", and
one of the stories, which was one of my favorites, was about a Russian boy.
He was a prince, and he lived in a magic room that was surrounded with
mirrors.  And he kept looking at the mirrors day after day, admiring himself
this way and admiring himself that way and thinking he was the most
wonderful person in the world.  But what he didn't notice was that every day
the windows closed a little.  Every window started to close a little, and he
still didn't notice until there was almost no light in the room at all.
They almost completely closed - and then they did close.  And then all of a
sudden he vanished!  He couldn't find himself in the mirrors anymore and he
didn't know what to do.  So he sobbed and cried and rested and he sat around
for a few days and repented the fact that he'd been looking in mirrors all
this time, when he should have watched the windows and everything.  Then one
day as he sat in his tears and silence, the windows opened a crack and he
looked out and it was the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen in his life.
He was seeing something he really wanted to see for the first time.  Well,
the windows knew about that and they opened another crack.  And so they
opened wider and wider and wider and wider as the boy, the prince, never
realized they were doing so until they were wide open and when he looked
out, and he was a complete person who was ready to be the Czar of Russia.
And the story, the legend, goes that he was the greatest Czar in Russia's
history."

"The idea, as it ties into Zen is that the most deadly enemy of Zen is
egotism, and I would say that's the most deadly enemy of art.  If you do art
for your own sake, it isn't gonna be any good.  It's gonna be hammy.  It's
gonna be artsy-fartsy it's sometimes called.  It'll reflect not what you
see, but an illusion of who you think you are.  And a lot of artists get
away with that, I guess, but it's not good art from the standpoint of Zen."

"Ok, now I'm gonna get to page two."

"Oh, art as placed in the levels of evolution.  Well, if you read the
Metaphysics of Quality, you know there are four levels of evolution: the
Inorganic, the Biological, the Social, and the Intellectual.  And art is a
mixture of all of those with Dynamic Quality if it's really art - not - I
say mixture - I don't say it's completely Dynamic Quality.  Finger painting
by a two year old is Dynamic.  But it's a mixture of somebody who knows how
to satisfy the art traditions of history but at the same time has a
direction that he wants to go on his own to some extent, so he's not a
complete copy-cat and he's not a complete wild-man - he's in between.  And,
the amount of Dynamic Quality should not be overcome by Intellectual
Quality, by these static patterns.  At the same time, the static patterns or
the intellect- the Dynamic Quality should not overcome your static patterns
to a point where it's meaningless to a person who writes."

"Now there've been extreme cases, like say, Picasso, who, when he first came
out shocked everybody with these strange paintings, but if you look back at
Picasso's history, you find that he was a very talented artist by the rules.
He didn't do that because he didn't know any better, he did it because he
knew better and he wanted to go further.  So that's what I'm talking about
there."

"It's important to keep in mind that the Dynamic beauty of a piece of music
can be recognized before reading any static analysis explaining why the
music is beautiful.  A lot of people who are immersed in static patterns and
do not see Dynamic Quality clearly will say, "What's it all about?  I don't
understand it.  I don't, I don't know what he's trying to do."  What they're
doing is they're looking for static patterns when they should just be
responding to the art itself."

"People immersed in science often regard art as rather trivial because they
think it's "subjective" (that's the word they'll use for it) and it doesn't
really deal with the reality of the world.  However, the Metaphysics is that
which deals with the fundamental reality of the world, which is not
subjective.  So, if you change the metaphysics that I've done on the MoQ,
then you've changed the evaluation of art and beauty.  I would say that art
is the highest of human endeavors under the defin - not definition - but the
description of art as I've given it in ZMM and particularly in Lila."

"Now, "it's not a footnote to Plato", it says here.  Plato didn't like art
very much, and he didn't like poets, and he didn't like Sophists, and what
he wanted to do was take a world which was all art, ancient Greece, and
improve it by giving it some intellectual direction.  And he did -
enormously.  I wrote in one introduction to Coffee with Plato that we live
inside the mind of Plato.  That Plato is the man who invented reason,
almost, as we see it today.  If you look at cultures outside of America, or
if you look at cultures before Plato, you find there wasn't much reason in
them.  They settled disputes by revenge rather than by law and so on."

"For serious artists", it says here, "Quality should not be considered
subjective, Quality should be considered as reality itself."  That's very
important.  And if you can get that reality itself which is free from
subjectivity, free from ego, you have art."

"Now it says, "Art and Social Quality.  The MoQ elevates art from a socially
isolated activity to a socially central activity.  Yeah, hopefully!  But
it's in competition with science and industry and everything else, and I
think it has to fight those things.  But, you know, it's carried on the
fight pretty well.  You know, when people go to see movies they don't want
movies about technical processes so much.  They want movies that are
artistically done."

"There are a lot of people who will become artists and they're kind of
honored for that, except by the really traditional static people, the
scientist types.  I shouldn't abuse scientists.  There are plenty of artists
in science, in fact, I did a lecture in Belgium pointing out that science is
an art if it's done in a certain way, and I used the examples of Werner
Heisenberg and Neils Bohr as two artists trying to plow into something
they'd never dealt with before.  And I recommend that to you if you can find
it somewhere.  I think it's on the internet."

"Now art and Biological Quality, yeah, it's such as the skill of a painter,
a sculptor, a musician has in controlling how a brush or a musical
instrument is held.  It's obvious you're not gonna paint just by hearing
intellectual discussions of the matter, but physical practice makes
perfect."

"Now, ok, concluding thoughts."

"Experience in Bozeman.  My thoughts are not a theoretical deduction from
what someone else has said about art.  It was derived from direct experience
in the classroom where the art of writing was being taught.  If one
considers creative writing to be an art form, then ZMM is about the teaching
of the art itself rather than the teaching of the intellectualization of art
- known as literature.  I can talk for hours about experiences I had doing
this, and how classes, once they saw what I wanted. I used to tell them, "I
don't care what you do, just so it's good."  And some of them were terribly
confused by that.  "Well, how do we know what's good?"  I said, "You know
what's good!  We proved it, because we read all these papers and we all
agreed what was good.  So you just write something that's good."  And some
of them just loved that, and these were the artists, of course, and some of
them hated it, and these were the static people.  But generally the classes
were much happier when they all knew what I want."

"It says here, "The mark of an artist is that he sees Quality as a reality -
not something superficial."  For example, jazz musicians such as Charlie
Byrd or John Coltrane as opposed to the squares mentioned in ZMM."

"I'll leave you with this final thought.  George Orwell said, "To see what
is in front of one's nose requires a constant struggle."  I really like
that.  Quality is right in front of everyone's nose all the time.  Some see
it, some don't, but once one sees that Quality clearly and takes it as a
guide for his whole life, then he becomes an artist, a real artist,
regardless of what he happens to be doing at the moment."

"Now Anthony has some parentheses here saying, "loud applause and cheers!"
So you can do that if you want to."

"Ok, that's it."

[Laughter]



Mary

- The most important thing you will ever make is a realization.