[MD] Taking words Seriously

[Matt Kundert]

Hi Steve,

Steve said:
If experience is reality in the MOQ, then I don't see how we would 
ever need to worry about being in touch with reality. Likewise, if DQ 
is the leading edge of experience, then how is perceiving DQ 
something that "you" can be better or worse at? If this "you" is a set 
of static pattern left in the wake of DQ, then it is always in intimate 
contact with DQ.

Matt:
Dave has been emphasizing for years whenever I would take this line 
that Pirsig still makes a direct/indirect distinction, and this then would 
appear to fill the role in providing a way of saying that DQ is 
something you can be better or worse at.

I've always had difficulty seeing how the direct/indirect distinction 
doesn't reproduce the problems of the experience/reality distinction.  
Be that as it may, if we distinguish between the collapse of the latter 
from the erection of the former, perhaps the way of visualizing how 
it works is to see people as being able to face two different 
directions.  The "you" of static patterns is always situated at the 
front of the train (because, technically, "you" _are_ the train, and 
how would a train not have a front?), but it can face the back, or 
face forward.  One can then elaborate the analogy in terms similar 
to what Dave was saying: if you're facing backward, you're more 
likely to run into things; this is why we look where we're going.

The trouble, yet, is that I still see no clear way of telling the 
difference, in your own first-personal experience, between facing 
your static patterns and facing forward toward your direct experience 
of life.  How do you tell the difference between facing the direct 
experience of life and being lucky and never running into problems?  
Because what I do fear, and this will seem ironic to Dave, is the 
trivializing of Dynamic Quality by making it sound easy.  For example, 
if being able to tell the difference between direct and indirect is as 
easy as telling the difference between linguistic and the nonlinguistic, 
then I think something has gone wrong in understanding the 
difference between the direct and indirect.  It's more or less easy to 
tell the difference between what Pirsig describes as "Dynamic 
Quality" and what he describes as "static patterns."  That's not what 
I'm concerned about, however.  I'm concerned about the kinds of 
questions that arise when one tries to put Pirsig's Metaphysics of 
Quality to use in one's own life.  And when one tries to do this, that 
is what proves the importance of things in Pirsig's philosophy like the 
indeterminacy of DQ/degeneracy thesis.

Matt