[MD] The MoQ & Art

[MarshaV]

Wow Mary!  You are wonderful!!!  You've done a wonderful thing.  Many,
many thanks.  

I just returned from visiting my step-father, and haven't had time to read 
it yet.  

Three cheers and loud applause for Mary.


Marsha   






On May 31, 2010, at 2:11 PM, Mary wrote:

> 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.
> 
> 
> 
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