From: johnny moral (johnnymoral@hotmail.com)
Date: Thu Jul 01 2004 - 15:34:50 BST
Hi Rick, welcome back.
It's ironic that you post an anti-miscegenation rant with your first post!
I thought we were through with these cut and paste jobs!
Johnny
>From: "Valence" <valence10@hotmail.com>
>Reply-To: moq_discuss@moq.org
>To: <moq_discuss@moq.org>
>Subject: MD Pirsig the Critic
>Date: Wed, 30 Jun 2004 22:45:30 -0400
>
>Hi all,
>My recent withdrawal from the MD notwithstanding, I just had to share this
>one with the friends I know I still have here :-)
>
>Anyway, following up on a lead I found at Ian Glendinning's wonderful
>Psybertron website (http://www.psybertron.org/pirsigpages.html), I shuffled
>down to the basement of the New York Public Library and eventually was able
>to locate this "long lost" Pirsig article. It's a book review he wrote for
>the The New York Times Sunday Book Review which was published on June 8,
>1975. I had to retype the whole thing from a blurry print-out of a
>microfilm archive. Words that (I think) were in italics are herein
>rendered
>with asterisks.
>
>It's my gift to you.
>
>Enjoy...
>
>and take care
>rick
>--------------------------------------------------
>A husband without a wife
>
>ONE MAN, HURT
>
>A Shattering Account of the End of a Happy Marriage. By Albert Martin. 278
>pp. New York: Macmillan. $8.95
>
>By Robert Pirsig (Robert Pirsig, author of "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle
>Maintenance," is now a Guggenheim Fellow writing a second book.)
>
>"One Man, Hurt" describes in detail the agonizing chronology of a divorce,
>shows the life that preceded and surrounds it, and calls for opposition
>to the social trends the author feels produced it. As a document of marital
>bliss and as an attack on feminism it backfires completely. The author's
>atrocious suburban banality drowns out everything else.
> We never get done reading how much the author loves his wife, his
>children,
>washing dishes, doing diapers, his house (a suburban one in Connecticut),
>his neighborhood, his job, his church, his priest, his mother and father,
>his mother-in-law, his father-in-law, the Little League, kid's hockey, TV,
>their cats and dogs. For him suburban life is some sort of continuous
>ceremony, a ritual he must have learned to imitate watching old Andy Hardy
>shows on the late-late movie on TV. Then, when his wife tells him she
>wants
>a divorce to "discover herself," he cries *what* is she *talking* about?
>What more can he possibly *give* her? Throughout the book, he never finds
>out.
>
>However, if one can transcend this banal level, one can find in this book
>some unexpected literary merit. The author tells us how miserable he is,
>yet because he doesn't know how to render it properly we never see it for
>ourselves. But he really is miserable. As one reads on, one begins to see
>beneath the surface of his plastic suburban style and acquire tolerance and
>even sympathy for his predicament. His one saving grace begins to shine
>through: he is not an arrogant man. He sincerely tries to learn what is
>wrong, tries to change himself. He really *is* hurt, and he hasn't
>deliberately hurt anyone else to provoke it. What are the real causes?
>What could he have done? he asks. What can he do now? It would be an act
>of arrogance not to try to answer.
>
>The first key is his pathetic clinging to the material symbols of
>middle-class life. This, one discovers, is a poor boy, ambitious and
>undoubtedly hard-working, from a Polish Roman Catholic childhood in New
>England. Everything he loves, down to his cats and dogs, are symbols of
>his
>upward rise from the background of his immigrant parents. Now, like Jay
>Gatsby and Sammy Glick before him, he sees it all turning to ashes. The
>central shining symbol of his own aspirations, the ballet dancer on the New
>York stage whom he persuaded to marry him, wants out. She sees her whole
>life is just a cheap symbol, like everything else in his world and she
>wants
>something more real.
>
>She asks him to look inward, but he doesn't know what she is talking about.
>For them there is no inward self, only roles. He is a totally
>other-directed man, a result of a background he cannot change and cannot
>even understand. At the superficial level of his own understanding there
>is
>no difference between his New England Catholicism and his wife's Texas
>Methodism, but at a level he is unaware of there are very deep differences,
>and these, I think, are the root of it all.
>
>I once taught a college course where I asked the class, "Is the an absolute
>external morality?" And I was astonished to discover that, without
>exception, every Catholic student said yes, and every Protestant student
>said no. There is a profound division here.
>
>For the traditional Catholic layman, morality is external. The author
>remembers vividly the terror he felt in parochial school when he saw what
>happened to Cecelia after she defied Sister Anastasia. He still feels it.
>For him the other-directed authoritarian system of his moral education has
>become the pattern of his life, and we see in page after page his professed
>love of, and obedience to, authority. He is a system player. That is how
>he had to learn it. You love the system and the system loves you. Now the
>system is failing and he is without a clue and in terror as to why this
>should happen.
>
>Protestants, including his own wife, tend to take more heed of their own
>consciences when coming to moral decisions. This is more true among
>Methodists than many other sects, more true of all, I think, among
>Protestants residing in the state of Texas. In fact, if there's one thing
>the traditional Texas Protestant knows how to do better than anything else,
>it's how to make up his *own* ornery mind about what is right and what is
>wrong, and *keeps* it made up, come hell or high water, or anything else
>you
>might want to run in front of him. Texas girls see this in their fathers
>and grow up unconsciously expecting to find it in every man. This,
>tragically, in the one thing the author cannot supply. He must run to
>authorities for every moral decision and every major idea in his head. And
>by Texas Protestant standards this makes him a moral weakling and a
>failure,
>and this, I think, is why his wife cannot love him. And there is nothing
>he
>can do about it.
>
>Nevertheless, I think this book will provide a happy ending for its author.
>It is, among other things, a 278-page marital advertisement which should
>produce dozens, if not hundreds, of matrimonial offers. I hope, for his
>own
>sake, that his final choice is someone who really appreciates him for the
>good man he is. Preferably, it should be an Eastern, Polish, Roman
>Catholic
>woman, heavy-boned and big-breasted, domineering and authoritarian, from a
>childhood of poverty like the one he got away from by marrying the little
>ballet dancer from Texas. She should love him earthily, and also her
>children and her church discipline and the suburban life, because she finds
>in these things the meaning of life itself. He deserves it.
>
>As for his divorced wife, I don't know what will happen. She has a hard
>life coming.
>
>But there's a feeling, rising up from deep inner sources, that in the end,
>when it is all over for all of us, it will be she who goes to heaven long
>before he does.
>
>
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