PART ONE
Chp 1
Lila is in the midst of some fearful dream. Phaedrus remembers seeing
Lila for the first time on a streetcar with her girlfriend,
giggling at him. The space was what sailing was all about. In the bar,
the party begins. Lila arrives. Let's get together. Me and you.
And do the thing. We like to do. Where have you been all this time? he
wanted to say. Enough ale and everything gets reduced to
pure biology.
Chp 2
Phaedrus wakes up and Lila and her suitcase are on the boat. Phaedrus'
slips and the Metaphysics of Quality. Unassimilated,
program, crit, tough, junk. Hang up everything until Lila gone.
Chp 3
Dusenberry and his Indians. Dusenberry refused to accept objectivity as
an anthropological criterion. the trouble with the objective
approach is that you don't learn much that way... the only way to find
out about Indians is to care for them and win their love and
respect them... then they'll do almost anyting for you... Peyote:
hallucinogen or de-hallucinogen. Stop wandering, these are your real
people. They just did things. There was no going about it or waste
mostion, plain spoken. The American personality is a mixture of
European and Indian values. The Sundance Kid: silence, a modest of
manner and a dangerous willingness to sudden enormous
violence. European and Indian cultural differences. Freedom, the idea
that holds America together. Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry
Finn. As Phaedrus' studies got deeper and deeper he saw that is was to
this conflict between European and Indian values, between
freedom and order, that his study should be directed.
Chp 4
Dusenberry and his hostility towards objective anthropology. First you
say things our way and then we'll listen to you. Boas
superimposed scientific method onto anthropology but man isn't suited to
this kind of objective study. William James Sidis, the
ridiculed genius.
Chp 5
Value. Negativism towards value results from attitudes of objectivity.
Values are not allowed. But there is nothing vague about a
value judgement, elections, stock exchanges, the Internal Revenue
Service. The solution was to find a new structure from which to
rebuild anthropology and thus escape from the while logical walled-in
jargonized way of looking at things. A new metaphysics. It
has opponents from science and from mysticism, thought is not a path to
reality. But still to the intellect the process of defining
Quality has a compulsive quality of its own. Values are the essence of
logical positivist experience but you can't assign them to
subjects or objects.
Chp 6
Richard Rigel angry at Phaedrus decides to talk to him. Tells him to get
Lila off his boat. Tells him Lila ruined his friend Jim's life.
Rigel attacks quality. Do you personally think Miss Lila M. Blewitt is a
Woman of Quality? he asks. Phaedrus says yes. Zen and the
Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was the devil's work, says Rigel.
Chp 7
Rigel and his cost-free morals. East coast Europeaness vs West coast
generosity. Celebrity. Lila gets up and gets dressed, P asks her
about Rigel. Victorians as nouveaux riches; involuted. After the war the
lost generation, Victorian morality left us in a moral vacuum,
and to answer the question we have to go all the way back to the
beginning.
Chp 8
The Metaphysics of Quality claims that all legitimate human knowledge
arises from the senses or by thinking about what the senses
provide including values of art, morality and mysticism. It says that
there is no empirical evidence for the assumption that the world
is composed of subjects and objects and that anything that can't be
classified as a subject or an object isn't real. The Metaphysics of
Quality says that there are many sets of intellectual reality and that
some have more quality than others. Value is not a subspecies of
substance. Substance is a subspecies of value. Platypus, free will vs
determinism, the discontinuity of matter at the sub-atomic level,
the purposelessness of the universe, causation, substance. Should
reality be something that only a handful of the world's most
advanced physicists understand. If this is so then how is it fair to
imprison a person in a mental hospital for life for "failing to
understand reality"? The Metaphysics of Quality substitutes value for
causation and substance.
Chp 9
By using the term Quality he had already violated the mystic reality and
he was in trouble. When an American Indian goes into
isolation and fasts inorder to achieve a vision, the vision he seeks is
not romantic nor classic. The morality of the Zuni brujo
following some vague sense of 'betterness'. Static and dynamic is the
basic division of reality. The hot stove, dynamic action
without thought. The song on the car radio that is so fantastically good
that it stops you in your tracks. Dynamic fades into static. A
hurricane in Key Largo promises Dynamic relief from static patterns.
Little children are quicker to perceive dynamic quality than old
people. American indians are exceptionally skilled at holding onto the
ever-changing center of things, Manito equals manifestations of
skill, fortune, blessing, luck, any wondrous occurrence, any phenomenon
that transcended the run of everyday experience.
Chp 10
Lila and Phaedrus talk about going to Florida. The Jungle Queen. The
smokestack. The dead dog. The end of the world.
Chp 11
Phaedrus sees that Lila isn't listening. She has a set of fixed static
patterns of value and if you argued with her she'd get mad at you.
Does Lila have quality he asks again. It wasn't that the question was
unanswerable. It was answerable but the answer went on and
on and you never got done. She's a kind of jungle of evolutionary
patterns of value evolving toward dynamic quality. Evolution and
the purpose of it, the drive towards perfection. Has the question been
taken up of whether life is heading away from mechanistic
patterns. Spur of the moment decisions of dynamic quality. Dynamic
quality is not chaos but it is not structured. Patterns of life
change in ways that evade, override and circumvent these laws. Static
latching prevents evolutionary degeneration.
Chp 12
The encyclopedia of four topics - Inorganic, Biological, Social,
Intellectual. They are not continuous, they are discrete. Clears up the
mind matter platypus two levels of value were missing - biological and
social. Free will vs determinism. Everything is an ethical
activity, betterness - is an elementary unit of ethics upon which all
right and wrong can be based.
Chp 13
Latching science and ethics. There are many moral systems, the laws of
nature, the law of the jungle., the law, intellectual morality
and dynamic morality. The morality of medicine, the morality of
vegetarianism, the morality of capital punishment. Only a living
being can react to dynamic quality. And Lila, biological she's fine,
socially she's pretty far down the scale, intellectually she's
nowhere, but dynamically she's special.
Chp 14
They stop, have showers and go shopping. Lila argues with the checkout
lady. Lila cooks. They talk. What holds a person together
is his patterns of likes and dislikes. The ultimate truth about the
world isn't history or sociology but biography. You are a culture of
one, an evolved static pattern of quality capable of dynamic change.
Lila likes food and men, and she dislikes mean people, she
doesn't want to get old. She was married but her husband was killed. Her
baby also died because she didn't cover her properly. She
has known Rigel since the second grade. I was popular then everybody
wanted to go out with me. Rigel's mother. I'm not anybody
says Lila, you don't know where the center of me is. I fyou think I'm an
angel then that's what I am, if you think I'm a whore then
that's what I am.
Chp 15
Phaedrus as Sad Sack, he knows a lot but he just doesn't know what's
going on. The chemistry professor. Lila, the jellyfish,
seduces him. These cellular patterns have been lovers for millions of
years and they aren't about to be put off by these recent little
intellectual patterns. What he was trying to hang onto is this
confluence where the mental and biological patterns are both awake and
aware at the same time. Sexual selection is dynamic. Biology has a sense
of disgust about intelligence.
PART TWO
Chp 16
Lila and Pirsig go to the bar and drink with Jamie. Pirsig leaves in
annoyance. Lila and Jamie plot to kill Phaedrus. Sometimes I think
I'm bad Lila and then someone like you comes along and shows me how.
Fatso says he heard about a man out on Long Island who
buys boats, no questions.
Chp 17
New York, this city, the most dynamic place on earth. Dreams as dynamic
reality. The Giant is going to devour you - social value
devours biological. If you want to live in New York you should be
willing to be lucky. The free market is Dynamic. The whole thing
is to obtain static and Dynamic Quality simultaneously. How do you tell
the saviors from the degenerates. It's the freedom to be so
awful that gives you the freedom to be so good. The Victorians built New
York. The Victorians as rich hicks. Up to the hotel room,
the giant could be very good to you . . . if he wanted to.
Chp 18
Lila wanders New York. She shouldn't have argued with Phaedrus she says.
She looks at the street signs. She goes to the restaurant
and has some drinks, feels better then realizes that Jamie's friend has
stolen her purse. The waiter lets her go anyway. Everybody
has gone, her pills are gone too.
Chp 19
Phaedrus meets Robert Redford in the hotel room. Phaedrus goons out.
They talk about Lake Minnetonka and the charm and
gracefulness, old money. Phaedrus gives Redford the film rights to Zen
and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. No matter how it's
done you won't like it, says Redford.
Chp 20
Phaedrus feels disconnected. If he sells the film rights he will win
socially, but intellectually? The static culture patterns had been
trying for all these years to kill him with failure. Now they were going
to get him with success. If you get too famous you'll go
straight to hell. Each person you come to is a different mirror. But
what controls all these mirrors is the culture. Sex and celebrity.
Sex is the dynamic quality that primitive biological patterns once used
to organize themselves. Celebrity is the dynamic quality that
primitive social patterns once used to organize themselves. In the
Odyssey Home equates quality and celebrity. High school. Fame
and fortune shape the social level.
Chp 21
Celebrity and moths flying round the artificial sun. Rigid Victorian
values Grace and morals were something you could aspire to. But
since then a huge cultural mutation has taken place The Metaphysics of
substance says that society and intellect are ephemeral
possessions of reality and a distinction between society and intellect
is unimportant. The Victorians were the last people to believe
that patterns of intellect are subordinate to patterns of society. To be
a gentleman was as close as you could get to being god.
Chp 22
President Woodrow Wilson, the only university professor ever to be
elected president of the United States marked the turning point
from social domination to intellectual domination. The snobbish,
fashionable Victorian social world was gone. In the twenties chaos
seemed to be in control, people rushed from one fad to another, abstract
art, discordant music, Freudian psychoanalysis, the test
becomes Does it meet the approval of our intellect. And the forces that
have been against it, Hitler's all-consuming glorification of
social authority and hatred of intellectualism. Suddenly before the old
Victorian's eyes a new social caste of intllectual Brahmins was
being created over their head. The theory class. The Metaphysics of
Quality supports this but it says there is a defect because it
leaves the world purposeless and valueless. Morals are judged by whether
they are rational or irrational. But problems began to
emerge. Indian values are all right in an Indian society but they don't
work well in a city where punctuality and attention to detail
matter. The intellectualism left a kind of loneliness, rebels without a
cause. Phaedrus' cause was the quality of his life. People were
not any happier. The loneliness became a far worse prison than the
virtue of the Victorians was.
Chp 23
Lila wanders New York. She shouldn't have got angry she tells herself.
She was so sick and tired of this world where everybody is
supposed to hate everybody else. Her dog, Lucky. Finds her baby in the
river.
PART THREE
Chp 24
Does Lila have quality. Rigel is mad because he thinks Pirsig said sex
is amoral. But the Metaphysics of Quality says that it is only
social values and morals that science is unconcerned with. Our
scientific description of nature is always culturally defined. It is
immoral for intellect to be dominated by society but it is also immoral
for intellect to assassinate society. Intellect must distinguish
between those issues that are society vs biology and those which are
intellect vs society. The hippie revolution was against both
society and intellectuality, it was against understanding itself. Drugs
that destroyed one's ability to reason were a sacrament. Zen
was interpreted as anything goes. Both static and intellectual were
undermined and nothing better has taken their place. New York is
the most dynamic place on earth and that's what makes it so unstable.
After the fall of the Roman Empire civilisation was forgotten
and a Dark Age settled in. The Metaphysics of Quality could replace this
paralyzing intellectual system. These subject-object patterns
were never designed for governing society. In the sixties what passed
for morality was a kind of vague amorphous soup of
sentiments known as human rights. Society exists primarily to free
people from biological chains. It has done that job so well that
intellectuals forget it and turn upon society with a shameful
ingratitude. We are living in an intellectual and technological paradise
and
a moral and social nightmare because the intellectual level of evolution
has ignored the social level's role in keeping the biological level
under control. The twentieth-century intellectual faith in man's basic
goodness is disastrously naive. The ideal of a harmonious
society in which everyone without coercion cooperates happily with
everyone else for the mutual good of all is a devastating fiction.
Chp 25
Phaedrus goes back to the boat, Lila is waiting on the deck with the
doll. What to do with her. What makes a person insane is that
they have absurd ideas and they are a nuisance to somebody else. When he
was insane he didn't think he had fallen into some
cataleptic trance, he thought he had fallen out of one.
Chp 26
Philosophologists are all that are left. Willam James, a real
philosopher. The philosophy of insanity. Psychiatrists as
representatives
of the culture. If there is only one person in the world, is there any
way he could be insane. Anthropologists see that insanity is
culturally defined. Sanity varies from culture to culture. The Cleveland
harbour effect, ignore observations and follow the chart. The
Dharmakaya Light, a Dynamic intrusion upon a static situation.
Chp 27
Jamie shows up on the boat. Then Rigel appears. Lila attacks Jamie with
a pocket knife, she says he killed her baby. Rigel tells
Phaedrus to leave and meet him downstream.
Chp 28
Free, Phaedrus sails on, Lila is downstairs in the cabin.
Chp 29
Lila in a trance-like state. Amok. What makes people sane? Trance and
hypnosis are platypi but the culture fosters them. The insane
person runs a private film that he likes better than the one everyone
else is running. You can't think of everything. Contrarians.
Degenerative and dynamic. Lila is in an evolutionary battle against the
static patterns of her own life. And Lila's battle is everybody's
battle. William James, truth is a species of good. Radical empiricism,
subjects and objects are secondary. The test of the true is the
good.
Chp 30
Lila starts talking again, how to cure her? Lila's religion of one.
Religious mysticism vs insanity. As long as psychiatry is encased
within subject and objects it will never seek a mystic solution to
insanity. The solution is to dissolve all static patterns. Mystic
retreats in insane asylums, dhyana. Dhyana was what the boat was all
about. Vacation. The most moral activity of all is the creation
of space for life to move onward. Wouldst thou be perfect do not yelp
about God. Arete as virtue. Rt, arithmetic, aristocrat,
rhetoric, worth, rite, ritual, wright, right. First, created, beautiful
repetitive order of moral and esthetic correctness. Rt as ritual,
static quality. Rta, the cosmic order of things. The sun god, Surya
began his chariot ride across the heavens from the about of rta.
Varuna, the guardian of rta. Rta, course, cosmic order, right. The
physical order of the universe is also the moral order. The context
in which the fundamental conflict between static and dynamic had been
worked out. The descent of dynamic into static. But
dynamic quality reemerges as dharma. Dharma is Quality itself, the
principle of rightness which give structure and purpose to the
evolution of all life and to the evolving understanding of the universe
which life has created. Dharma combines freedom and ritual, it
includes static and dynamic quality without contradiction. Don't shatter
the static to discover the dynamic, get them perfect. In the
center of the most monotonous boredom of static ritualistic patterns the
dynamic freedom is found. Lila need more ritual, the kind of
ritual that embodies dynamic quality.
Chp 31
Meets Rigel again. Rigel asks again if Lila has quality. Lila has been
chasing him across the country he says. Lila wants to go back
with him. Lila says Phaedrus is trying to kill her. Phaedrus tells Lila
she's making a mistake going back.
Chp 32
>From the static point of view the whole escape into dynamic quality
seems like a death experience. Kill all intellectual patterns, kill
them completely, and then follow dynamic quality, and morality will be
served. karma is the suffering that results from clinging to
the static patterns of the world. If you take that karmic garbage and
absorb it yourself instead of passing it on to others, that's the
highest moral conduct of all. Phaedrus gets the slips out again but a
metaphysics is an attempt to capture the dynamic within a static
pattern, you never get it right. The doll has turned into a religious
idol, he decides to bury it. The doll represents Lila's innermost
values. It's a happy ending says the doll. Lila will become a repentant
sinner and keep Rigel's ego blown tightly. You only did one
moral thing on this trip when you were caught by surprise and couldn't
think of your usual intellectual answer. Back to the Indians.
Americans don't have to go to the Orient to learn about mysticism. The
Dakota Indian considers goodness to be a noun rather than
an adjective.
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 - 16:02:39 BST