[MD] Taking Words Seriously

[david buchanan]

Matt, Dan and all would-be writers:


"Mountains like these and travelers in the mountains and events that happen to them here are found not only in Zen literature but in the tales of every major religion. The allegory of a physical mountain for the spiritual one that stands between each soul and its goal is an easy and natural one to make. Like those in the valley behind us, most people stand in sight of the spiritual mountains all their lives and never enter them, being content to listen to others who have been there and thus avoid the hardships. Some travel into the mountains accompanied by experienced guides who know the best and least dangerous routes by which they arrive at their destination. Still others, inexperienced and untrusting, attempt to make their own routes. Few of these are successful, but occasionally some, by sheer will and luck and grace, do make it. Once there they become more aware than any of the others that there's no single or fixed number of routes. There are as many routes as there are individual souls." (ZAMM 187-8)


"As a result of his experiments he concluded that imitation was a real evil that had to be broken before real rhetoric teaching could begin. ...Schools teach you to imitate. If you don't imitate what the teacher wants you get a bad grade. Here, in college, it was more sophisticated, of course; you were supposed to imitate the teacher in such a way as to convince the teacher you were not imitating, but taking the essence of the instruction and going ahead with it on your own. That got you A's. Originality on the other hand could get you anything - from A to F. the whole grading system cautioned against it." (ZAMM 192-3)


"Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire. The reality of your own nature should determine the speed. If you become restless, speed up. If you become winded, slow down. You climb the mountain in an equilibrium between restlessness and exhaustion. Then, when you're no longer thinking ahead, each footstep isn't just a means to an end but a unique event in itself. This leaf has jagged edges. This rock looks loose. From this place the snow is less visible, even though closer. These are things you should notice anyway. To live only for some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top. Here's where things grow." (ZAMM 204)


dmb says:

Imitation is a real evil but originality is risky business. Blazing your own trail up the mountain can get you killed and writing something original can earn you an F. Doing what the teacher wants and following the well-worn routes is less dangerous. See, this isn't just a lesson for creative writers. Pirsig's rhetoric lessons are analogous to the spiritual mountain-climbing lessons and both are really lessons in living. There are as many routes as there are climbers and the speed of each climber should be determined by the reality of his own nature, he says. 

I suppose that you can see what he's getting at here, eh gents? 

"Right," said the extremely imaginative psychology professor who lived next door, "Eliminate the whole degree-and grading system and then you'll get real education." (ZAMM 193) These parallel lessons sort of come together to serve his overall theme, namely "Corruption and Decay in the Church of Reason". (ZAMM 205) He makes a case that the purpose of "real education" is to produce free men, not mules or slaves. The cart of civilization or "the system" should be moving forward by efforts of knowledge-motivated people, as opposed to grade-motivated mules who are only led forward by the dangling of carrots. Phaedrus worked up a story about a hypothetical student who flunks himself out of the gradeless and degreeless college. After some time working as a mechanic, this story goes, he returns...

"...but with a difference. He'd no longer be a grade-motivated person. He'd be a knowledge-motivated person. He would need no external pushing to learn. His push would come from inside. He'd be a free man. He wouldn't need a lot of discipline to shape him up. ..Motivation of this sort, once it catches hold is a ferocious force, and in the gradeless, degreeless institution where our student would find himself, he wouldn't stop with rote engineering information. ..And, in the process of intellectual maturing that these abstract studies gave him, he would be likely to branch out into other theoretical areas that weren't directly related to machines but had become a part of a newer larger goal. This larger goal wouldn't be the imitation of education in Universities today, glossed over and concealed by grades and degrees that give the appearance of something happening, when, in fact, almost nothing is going on. It would be the real thing." (ZAMM 197)


The dull student with thick-lensed glasses, he says, was strangely unaware that she could look at things with her own eyes. She didn't know that she could venture off the beaten path but forcing her to start with that upper left hand brick left her with no options. There were no paths by which she could approach that brick. There were no essays about that brick for her to imitate and that brick conformed to nobody's idea of a standard essay topic. What made it work was the way it precluded the possibility of taking a path already cut by somebody else. She had no choice but to find her own way, to speak with her own voice, to see with her own eyes. However you like to imagine it, fresh eyes or new roads, the idea is the same. Quality is the goal of every creative person but the route to that goal should be determined by your own nature, not imposed by external rules or standards. The latter can be helpful so long as you realize such rules are abstractions based on somebody else's journey and so some of them may not apply in your case. Imitating somebody else's success might very well be a betrayal of your own nature or otherwise work against you.