Last summer I got interested once again in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and its author Robert Maynard Pirsig. I dug up my dusty old copy of “ZAMM” and gave it a good second read. I then did a Google on Pirsig as to find out what ever became of him. I found out about his second book, “Lila”, which I hadn’t noticed when it came out back in the early 90s. Lila wasn’t quite the hit that ZAMM was. Anyway, I got hold of Lila and read that one too. In between all that, I read various commentary about Pirsig and various reactions to his ideas.
Robert Pirsig sure struck a nerve back in the early 80s with a whole lot of people. Just about everyone who took the literary motorcycle journey with Pirsig in ZAMM said “wow, that was deep; quality, Zen, ancient Greeks, Montana, madness, computers and socket wrenches. It must all mean something and probably relates to my life somehow”.
For those few people who bought Lila and read the follow-up to ZAMM, the reaction was a bit of a head-scratcher. Yes, the ancient Greeks were still there, along with socket wrenches, quality, Native Americans, computers, even a bit of Zen and Montana. Unfortunately, there was a good bit more madness this time. Instead of taking another motorcycle journey out west with his son (who unfortunately died a few years after ZAMM was published), Pirsig took us on a sailboat ride down the Hudson River along with a drunken old hooker (Lila, of course), heading for an appointment in Manhattan with Robert Redford (Pirsig, not the hooker). The plot line and all of Pirsig’s ruminations on the philosophy of quality are sewed up in the end by a plastic doll sitting on a concrete piling off the Jersey coast, who gives a speech to Pirsig’s alter ego “Phraedus”. It’s a bit more difficult for the average slob to relate to such a scattered tale than to a journey through the little towns of Idaho and South Dakota.
Looking back on my reacquaintance with Mr. Pirsig’s works, I’m still scratching my head a bit. Just what was the guy trying to say? Like many other people, I thought I knew what he was saying after reading ZAMM, but everything that followed it just seemed to increase the static. ZAMM reminded me of one of those old “connect the dots” pictures where a complex but discernable pattern eventually emerges. Lila (and just about everthing else regarding Robert Pirsig’s life) tried to present a fully developed portrait, but it turned out to be fuzzy and blurred beyond recognition.
In the end, I left Robert Pirsig with a heightened appreciation for the importance of ancient Greek philosophy. I was also edified by his praise of technology, both abstract (computer programs) and concrete (motorcycle engines and boat sails). And he drops some useful observations about the tension between change and stability (too much stability brings boredom, too much change brings chaos). But as to his social philosophies and his increasingly complex specifications regarding his “quality” concept, I decided to take a pass. The more he tried to concretize it, the more he disregarded some of the most important aspects of being human.
Robert Pirsig is brilliant, but he’s had a hard life. In many ways he is a victim, as his books seem to say. And victims are not necessarily the best people to paint an accurate portrait of the world or present a useful diagram for our lives in it. They use too many bright and dark tones and leave out some of the more subtle shades.
Ultimately, Robert Pirsig leaves us with an interesting and profound picture of the world — actually, the world as viewed by Robert Pirsig. And that picture is certainly very useful to anyone interested in drawing a blueprint for the future of humankind. But in and of themselves, Mr. Pirsig’s works are not such a blueprint, as Mr. Pirsig seemed to have intended. In the end, I’d have to classify Robert Pirsig along with Robert Ringer and other writers from the 70s who caught the public’s imagination for a moment but couldn’t hold on to it. (Actually, Ringer has a new book out that shows that people sometimes do get wiser with age. Ringer was famous for his hard-edged advice handbooks based on Ayn Rand’s “objectivist” ideals, i.e. look out for yourself and *!*! everyone else, cause that’s what they’ll do to you. I read a few bits from his recent “Getting What You Want”, though, and it seems as though Ringer has mellowed a bit, as if perhaps other people and long-term concerns do matter after all. A little, anyhow.)