Well, I've gotten around at last to adressing the topic of the
month directlly... (More or less directy anyway.)
I've just finnished pressenting a slide talk to the senior art
students at UT on Zen aesthetics. In resrching that, I've found a vertual
must-read book if you can find it. Muneyoshi Yanagi's *The Unknown Artist*
(1972). I want to present Yanagi's ideas here in abstract and
paraphrased, and relate those to the "What the hell is DQ?" question.
Yanagi begins by commenting on the pursuit of deformation, the
quest for freedom, and the avoidence of regularity in Modern art. Of
course a big insparation to Modern art was Picasso and Matisse's
"discoveries" of primative art from Africa, the Americas, and the South
Seas. It is a principal of Modern art that "Free" beuaty boils down to
irregular beuaty.
(Sounds like DQ, doesn't it?)
Among the earliest people to consciously take irregualrity,
freedom and crudness as aesthetic principals underlying their work were
the Tea Masters of Japan (16th cen CE). To Yanagi, they prefigure Modern
artists. (Like Picasso studying African masks, the cultured, sophisticated
Japanese studyed and consciously immitated the 'primative' Koreans.)
If you don't know much about Zen art: it is the "art of
imperfection." Hisamatsu in his *Zen and the Fine Arts* (1971, also a
great book) says: "Zen is a religion of non-holieness. Ordinarily in
religion God or Buddha is something sacrosanct; in Zen, however, Buddha is
non-holy as the negation of transendent holieness... [Zen] is of the
nature, as Lin-chi said, of "killing the Buddha, killing the patriarch."
("If you see the Buddha on the road, kill him." Robert M. Pirsig?
..forget him. Zen is not a procilizing movement. It doesn't try to win
converts. If that's what you think... Well, I'll shut-up before I get
myself in trouble. Everybody already knows where I stand on the
'philosophy as intellectul warfare'-issue. But, remember, in ZMM, the
Narator says, 'I'm always suspicious of far-reaching social movements.
They rarely make anything better. All the world really needs is quality
individuals leading quality lives.' [paraphrased from memory])
But to give you a better idea of what Zen art is like, Yanagi
writes: "A glance at the imperfections of Tea [bowls] will make this
clear. The shapes are irreguler, the surfaces dry or sandy, the glazes of
uneaven thickness; the pieces piled in the kiln remain unglazed where pots
rest upon one another; fire cracks are accepted. All these characteristics
are not merely put up w/, but are taken as an integral part of pot making
and are therefor of otential beuaty. The Tea Masters found depth in this
naturalness... The precise and perfect carries no overtones, admits of no
freedom; the perfect is static and regualted, cold and hard." (No wonder
Modernist in the 50s-60's didn't like motercycle technology.) Freedom,
Yasagi declairs, indeed *is* beuaty! The Japaneese craftsmen deliberatyly
deformed their bowls by not using a wheel, and left the surface rough.
BUT, Beuaty in the Tea ceremony does not ultimatly reside in the
dynamic imperfection. It should reside in what the Buddhist term *muso*,
the unchanging formlessness behind all phenomona. (Unchanging? "Behinde
all phenomina?" This sounds more like Kant that Pirsig's DQ. [Bo, I had
to throw thatin there for your benifet. ;-) ]) In *muso* there is
neither acceptence nor rejection, freedom nor restraint. "True beauty in
Tea cannot lie in either the perfect nor the imperfect, but must lie in a
realm where such distinctions have ceased to exist, where the imperfect is
identified w/ [ie. identical to] the perfect." (Yanagi)
So maybe we should say, first there is just Quality. Then Quality
can be divided-up into two aspects: it's dynamic aspect and it's
preduring, static aspect. By saying that DQ is unknowable (which if it's
pure DQ w/o any sq, yes it must be) perhaps Pirsig has misled us into
thinking that DQ = *muso* (or any other transendental, monist, skyhook
like Ding-an-sich or God or whatever). Is reality just
DQ
sq
or is it
Quality
DQ sq
Or maybe, like Kieth said, reality just = Quality, and DQ-sq, or S-O or
whatever way we divide them up is just "epistamological," for our own
convinience? (Kieth, that was you, was it not?) This is
like Poincare's "conventionalism" and seems to agree w/ Pirsig's point
that we must remember that the MoQ itself is just IntPoVs. If we don't make
this clear then there seems to be some problrm w/in the MoQ w/ respect to
time. If you look in Anthony's essay at the graph he gives of the MoQ you see
that that bottom vector is labeled "time (t)" ------> But he also says that
time is just an IntPoV. This creates a good deal of confusion, does it not?
Unless we also emphasize that the wole MoQ w/ it's 4 strata, or sandpiles, of
reality, is all, really a set of IntPoVs. It's not Reality(experience).
Reality(experience) can never be put into a book. Reading a book is an
experience. Burning a book is an experience. But the contents of the book as
such... ultimatly a book is just a good door stop. The contents of a book are
ultimatly static -- they are frozen and atemporal. You can skip around from
p.12 to p.235 and back to p.1. You can't do that in "real life." Personlly,
I think it's this logocentric, abstract nature of books that guides towards
thinking in terms of the Platonic Heavens of always-everwhere rules and
absolute Truth, and the "time of record" -- some kind of catalogue of every
event that happened from t=0 to t=now, so that if God or some-such being does
exist, then he could say w/ athority that Columbus set foot on an American
beach for the first time at 4:22 and 3.66 seconds in the afternoon of June
3rd, 1492... or whatever.
Real life we never experience that way. There *is* a difference between
a map and the terain -- between a book about reality and the reality of a
book.
____________
Due to length, I'm going to contine w/ DQ in a second post.
CU soon
Donny
homepage - http://www.moq.org
queries - mailto:moq@moq.org
unsubscribe - mailto:majordomo@moq.org with UNSUBSCRIBE MOQ_DISCUSS in
body of email
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sat Aug 17 2002 - 16:02:36 BST