How did 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance' (An enquiry into values) (ZAMM) end?

Hi em!

One thing to say straight off, there is an industry out there, devoted to Robert Pirsigs classic ZAMM, his second book 'Lila' and a huge following for something called the 'Metaphysics Of Quality' (MOQ) that derives from Pirsigs thoughts and writings.

So you em, and anyone else reading this, could simply peruse the Wikipedia page, go to the section on external links, and then happy browsing!

But thank you, this is my 4th reading and it feels like I didn't really properly read ZAMM over the first times.
I'm really enjoying reading it now, and it's a great challenge to have a go at accounting for the whole thing, as well as how it ended.

But I'm going to cheat. Here is the Wikipedia entry that's a synopsis.

"Structure[edit]

The book describes, in first person, a 17-day journey on his motorcycle from Minnesota to Northern California by the author (though he is not identified in the book) and his son Chris. They are joined for the first nine days of the trip by close friends John and Sylvia Sutherland, with whom they part ways in Montana. The trip is punctuated by numerous philosophical discussions, referred to as Chautauquas by the author, on topics including epistemology, ethical emotivism and the philosophy of science.

Many of these discussions are tied together by the story of the narrator's own past self, who is referred to in the third person as Phaedrus (after Plato's dialogue). Phaedrus, a teacher of creative and technical writing at a small college, became engrossed in the question of what defines good writing, and what in general defines good, or "Quality". His philosophical investigations eventually drove him insane, and he was subjected to electroconvulsive therapy which permanently changed his personality.

Towards the end of the book, Phaedrus's personality begins to re-emerge and the narrator is reconciled with his past."

So what is the ending about, may depend on an understanding of  the whole book, in this case, that is, my understanding! Or yours too?
If it's just me, you are going to get a biased rendering, but I'm sure you knew that!

So how to proceed?

I did what I usually do, to anal retentively, count the Parts, Sections and Pages. Here's the report to that first approach.

ZAMM has four parts containing 32 sections.
Part I has seven sections (1 to 7),
Part II  -eight sections (8 to 15)
Part III  -eleven sections (16 to 26)
and the final Part IV  -six sections (27 to 32).

I am currently zooming in on various sections to get a sense of the part it's contained in. But I think the the whole thing may need re-reading (Yay!)

For example, section 29 in the final part, has the longest (most pages) and the most meatiest bit on classical philosophy, and how it pertains to his obsessional quest for 'Quality'.

The book length is about 396 pages of standard paper back length.

At one level the book is simply about

'Father and Son on the road in a shattering odyssey of self discovery'

But also

'...The trip is punctuated by numerous philosophical discussions, referred to as Chautauquas by the author, on topics including epistemology, ethical emotivism and the philosophy of science.'

And also

'...became engrossed in the question of what defines good writing, and what in general defines good, or "Quality'

So all the things I've bolded above are the 'wtf's, that could be chewed upon, and are are floating waypoints along a chautauqua odyssey, but essentially, from the beginning to the end it is Chris and his Father on a motorbike.


What the ending IS, is about is also the book as a whole, but essentially it is (and inspite of Chris nearly going mad with despair over his father's mental state) - a good resolution that is plucked from a drifting disaster.

The other 'things' are more complex and may not have endings so much as standing questions which are also persued and mined in various platforms around the Pirsig industry.

I have on order a book that explains more the philosophy in ZAMM.

So em, looks like I've got to re-read the whole book. and the one to come. Care to join me?!

[To be continued]

Illicit Love on Twitter. Is it really Twitter's fault?

When I was 12, my Mum decided to give me the ‘facts of life’ –Yes! the ‘facts’. After the mechanical details she added an extraordinary admonishment ‘if a woman or a girl asks you to do this with her, you say No!’

Dad just drew up his newspaper, so no comment from him, so I checked out these revelations of the mechanics of sex at school, some disputed my Mum’s account in favour of the bellybutton hypothesis, but that did not hold for long, and a consensus soon settled around the conclusion- ‘Yes you put your willie into her fanny –but then what?’

When I told my friends my Mum’s ethical rider, they looked astonished ‘what is the point then if you’re not supposed to do it’. But it stuck and it wasn’t until I was 22 and away from the UK in a kibbutz in Israel, that an uncomplicated Swiss female, showed me how the mechanics actually worked and insisted that we didn’t have to be married to do this.

That was it; I was a fan of penetrative sex with a woman, regardless of marital status. I was also a fan of European women, it seemed such a direct approach hadn’t crossed the channel, imagine my surprise then, when I returned home a year later to discover that a revolution seemed to have occurred. British girls were now up for it as well.

Or was it my mind had part-cemented Mum’s declaration; her contractual demand for me to refuse sex, only actually applied in the UK? 

Once Eros was tasted abroad, Mum’s ethics were put aside. It was too damn pleasurable, it was in fact bloody fantastic; I was a committed fan of lustful relations with women.

And there were those I fell in love with, and of those, some would, some wouldn't. The beautiful girlfriend I had before I went to Israel, kicked me out of bed when I tried to fondle her breasts ‘How dare you!!’ Kissing and cuddling through the night in the same bed was fine, in fact demanded, but none of the dirty stuff. Not until at least we were engaged.

Customs and practice, women looking after their reproductive rights, preserving their virginity for the one they will eventually marry –all reasonable positions. After all, we men are only after one thing, but some are romantics, and will not push it, (so to speak), but most would dump their newly acquired girlfriends, if they didn't put out.

As I went through my twenties, love, romance and sex were the main contemplations, the main desires, the most constant obsession, how to get it, then how to keep it, without being ‘tied down’. But my first marriage happened anyway, although helpfully, neither of us wanted kids, we had both strayed, had separate social lives in our separate social work social networks. When she left, I was astonished to learn that in the ten years we’d managed to stay together she’d had six affairs to my one. Damn.

My second marriage proved better in many ways, the sex was far better, we had kids, we stayed faithful to each other, we felt our love deeply, and we were soul mates. But even the most promising ‘happy ever afters’ have to deal with the vicissitudes of a long term relationship. Twenty two years in and I discovered Twitter, and through that I had in fact, unsown oats. There was a need, (or just a want?)  -To have an extra- marital affair. But while I had an inner block to do that in reality, Twitter afforded the opportunity to do this in the virtual, at a distance of thousands of miles, as well as with local married and single women.

So on Twitter, I had become a minor ‘Don Juan’, a serial adulterer, having only emotional affairs in the first year, then subsequently sext, phone sex, involving several relationships running concurrently. My mother’s admonition was so dead and buried it had been transported to the centre of the Earth, and held there with gravitational certainty, that no matter the ‘wrongness’ of these affairs, my Twitter partners in sin, had also put aside any moral concerns, whether married or single they wanted what I wanted, romance, love and sex.

But in fact most on Twitter have been lovely friendships, an exchange of minds, of poetry, a knowing without saying that this was enough. Only rarely the romance, that was a crushness, falling into the pit of obsessional ‘love’ with all its bitter sweet, helter- skelter, red- hot, green jealousy, and exhausting hours of obsessing the relationship.

My wife found out about an important affair I was having, but then I fell into a depression, and came out to find that she too had taken my lead, but on a different media platform (yeah, Facebook). It prompted us to look at our marriage, realise that in our relentless life pattern of work and child rearing we had both changed. The unspoken contract had needed to be spoken anew. And so we have.

Perhaps my case is a lucky one, my partner and I have stayed together when many divorces and separations have been blamed on social media. Twitter followers have flown thousands of miles to meet their crushes, in some places having an affair on twitter is grounds for divorce, in ‘Second Life’ the story of the woman that divorced her husband when discovering his secret bigamous life there.

‘Are we humans or are we dancers…?’

There is the dark side of Twitter.

I once had a crush on someone from somewhere in mid USA. An ex- soldier, she was hard and finally brutal in her rejection of me, but then her background her apparent emotional chaos, her promise to evict her boyfriend should I get over there, then finally exiting abruptly from Twitter proclaiming ‘You’re not my type, I’ve discovered’

Her life? Barely scratched the surface, but through her I discovered that every year, 25,000 American women soldiers are sexually abused, with little apparent redress on their abusers. In the UK recently the case of a woman military police corporeal, who killed herself when her two attackers were never prosecuted.

The ugly dark side of Twitter, fucktards abuse DM access, harass, even attempt to blackmail on the basis of images shared in good faith. Pose as young handsomes when they are anything but, some posing as women, some women as men. Perhaps Twitter should come with a warning, the worst of men here, comingle with the best, so discern and discriminate, because it’s very difficult to get the slimeballs to cease and desist.

Are we men the problem?

War often brings out the worst in men, some ‘ordinary’ chaps will take the opportunity to rape, presumably because they can get away with it, or that the effect of combat shatters what moral control, that only works in a peace time setting. Men are dangerous. We are. We start wars, we visit hideous punishments on each other, also on women children, sick and older civilians.

Twitter can be dangerous. Here are un reconstructed monsters, like pirates, they raid, hurt and abuse, with impunity it seems.

And also it can be wonderful. In the three years, I’ve had my emotions hammered formed charmed, worked like raw steel on an anvil. In a very real sense, having serial crush affairs on Twitter, has and still is like being in an emotional gymnasium.

But friendships can turn into love, or they can happily remain in a friendship zone. One of the dyad may want to change the deal toward hotter transactions or remain unrequited. I know, of one example where two twitter accounts, met here, then married in real life.

Has social media, by increasing such opportunities, corrupted people, undermined social morals, promoted such amorous behaviours that otherwise wouldn’t be performed in real life?

Durkheim found that migrants coming from the country to Paris, changed their faith abruptly at the train station –a case of –

‘how you gonna keep them down on the farm, now that they’ve seen Paris?’

Substitute Paris for Social media, and there you have it.

“They fuck you up your Mum and Dad” (Phillip Larkin), at least mine taught and modelled me an non-abusive loving relationship, they never strayed, they got bored with each other, but when Dad got ill with cancer they renewed their closeness, Mum never recovered his passing, but found joy in mine and my sister’s children.

But I was never like them. I lusted and flirted, while refraining from physical affairs, I dreamt of them. I have burnt throughout my life, whether single or married, the desire to have as much sex as possible, but even now from her grave my mother’s admonition (say No!) has force over my libido, but in some sort of virtual sexual sublimation, Twitter has helped me side step that.

There is no guarantee of anything, but I guess if my partner and I can navigate the opportunities to explore our promiscuous sides, then all is not lost, and what is avoided is the end of our relationship from extreme boredom and frustration, avoiding a life together in a quiet desperation, something of the lot of my Folks, but I choose different. Sorry Mum, maybe you would have liked Twitter too? Forgive your son his difference..

A Little Thing Called Love

A Little Thing Called Love. Actually quite a big thing, so big we don't see it so much as suffer and enjoy the emotion, experience as commonplace and yet keenly feel it's absence.

Most music is devoted to it, most relationships are founded on it, it is the definition of the ultimate happiness, and the destroyer of it. Is that all there's need to be said?

CP Snow's 'The Four Loves' made some smooth reading suggesting a spectrum from Friendship to Love, plus a prosaic form and an impossible one. I want to explore CPS's writing, but now I partly set the table and ask;-

Is twitter love any different from that in actual life?

In my case yes. In actual life I was, and am, monogamous, have had no affairs, but in twitter I'm a poly-amorous, serial womanizing, cheating, veteran flirt and crush operator.

How can this be?

In following posts, I shall explore this for the sake of my own sanity, and long-standing curiosity and interest.

I hope there will be others of you out there who will chime to this topic, and find in my treatment of it some value and and may even be moved to share and contribute!

Ah yes! There is always...

There is within me, a need to avoid the extremes of world and local news, a world weary stance of head in the sand and lets find some nice distractions in this sandbox. Ah! Twitter! The very medium to play inconsequential communication and play flirt, joker, thinker of abstract concepts. A non qualified visitor to the Ivory Tower wannabe world of low status intellectual masturbation -with some sharp self reflection, and emotional play, with the friendships growing crushes and minor heartaches, misunderstandings -a gentle pseudo Proust world, of relationships being all there is.

I could happily have been a Proust, but without the laying in bed that is. I like moving, swimming, playing badminton, walking moors, cycling, camping -but am a family manager, with financial obligations in a time of recession. Worrying. So why engage with the wars, the press intrigue, and so forths.

The case in the States of Casey Anthony, a mother of her murdered daughter, highly implicated in that, but given a not guilty verdict, somehow crosses over to the Milly Dowler case here in the UK, the murdered teenager, whose family were virtually tortured in the trial by the murder's legal defense team. Subsequently it was revealed her phone was hacked, by a News of the World reporter and such revelations bringing a storm of public revulsion -that's spilling out onto the police, politicians, and that press baron-Murdoch.

Harmless innocents, being tortured, raped, slaughtered, and the horrific circumstances being ruthlessly and mercilessly exploited by certain media types.

A plot for a play that would be a prayer that cries out to heaven.

And so we get embroiled in the brouhaha, we have a topic of conversation, to tweet, to post, to ponder.

But like many others in the first world, I will survivie my temporary financial discomfort, my daughters's will be protected by community friends police and school. That is my prayer.

Others in this human global community will face and suffer such outrages on a daily basis, and this will never reach our ears, because they are the world's poor. Somehow that is a different planet residing on this common globe.

Do such vile crimes against innocents in the third world also not cry out to heaven?

It is almost too much to bear, I should take some action, support some charity, take a break from inconsequential communication. Or will I?

I wonder what is flowing in the Twitter Time line...

I could blame heartless corporations, their insane obsession with maximising profits at any cost. ANY cost, including the earth upon which their businseeses depend. I could riled by politicians, I could go to the gym, have a swim. Dream of fabulous sex with imaginary others whose image is a composite of real and constructed females.

Male sexuality. is that the driving force of nature that is causing our species to embroil in such tragic farcical deadly games? Is nature actually indifferent to the cries of the innocent?

And the old, old question-are we caretaken by a supernatural agency -that cares for us?

My suspicions are that we, WE, are that agency, we are in essence more than the mortal skins enclosing insane behavioural programmes in our wetware hemispheres. But I'm not going to get all religious. Done that. Now perhaps I can look at Neitszche Wittgenstein -Oh gawd, no, letting that go of that too.

So what is there left? Ah yes, -Twitter

The Tweetup, the Cocktail and a new Bar Sport

When you think about sports events in bars, one thinks of dominoes, cribbage, cards and the like. The setting is all there, the equipments, people know how to play them, can anticipate what the outcome will look like, and so on.

Imagine then an event not created or anticipated, no special equipments, but there are the people, the drinks. Also, what most pubs and bars have on tables, a menu stack. Cards set in an upright position like a small cardboard wall, this one being about 25cms high.

Then further picture the scene of three twitter folk meeting in real life. Now, something has got to happen -but why should it have happened in the way it did? Was it not serendipitous that Laura had a Raspberry Mojito cocktail, sporting a straw stick angled toward the Laura launcher?

Launcher? Yes, I see you are now beginning to suspect. In fact the said cocktail was some 90cms from the menu stack which faced the drink -but still at this moment, Alan and Rosie sitting orthogonally to the field, were chatting, unsuspectingly. Then it happened. Was it an attempt to win back attention from Alan & Rosie? Was Laura trying to bat a fly away? We may never know.

What is of record was the action of her arms windmilling in a frighteningly rapid manner. It was so quick, but I saw her left arm begin its critical move, arching down then striking up, her hand engaging the cocktail straw-stick. Thus it was launched, the hand-strike causing it to spiral, up and away from the Raspberry Mojito's glass, and begin it's flight towards the menu stack.

Rosie and Alan couldn't help but notice the flying stick as it as it traversed their line of sight, thus they became the first spectators to this emerging bar sport. They also experienced a scream, an exclamation, a shout. It was the launcher herself, cracking out a sharp staccato utterance, roughly translated as 'oh shit' -but more explosive. I swear those sound waves intercepted the twirling stick and gave it an extra lift. Thus a new sport, a new technique.

I remember thinking it's not going to clear the top of the menu stack -but it did. Clipping the top-edge of the card, traces of Raspberry Mojito spraying out, it finally toppled over. The event was complete. A new bar sport was born, and the record stands.

Did applause follow? Such a momentous occasion, the birth of a new bar sport -but no. Something more appropriate; pure side-splitting, underwear-wetting, laughter.

So, I thought, this is how 'tweetups' go. Cannot wait for the next one!

ISH

So I wrote a tweet: 'The gloss of meaning has worn to it's undercoat of skittled protection for THAT substrate-can you see that? The ISH is no longer hidden'

True -ISH -like Carlos Castaneda's works, reviled and revered, (was it was fabricated?). That word has a whiff of pejorative, but is technically correct, a building is fabricated, built, constructed, so is a narrative. A narrative then stands in some court of dubious jurisprudence, a Kafkaesque movement of occasional witnesses, advocates, judges and jury, of peers and other misfits. A veritable moving feast for diners, starving of anchored meanings.

So what's to be done.

Nothing. As @NihildeNada says. No-thing. But in that nothing what something may arise, gives us some pause and makes hazardous of so long a twit longer that I retreat to the blog. From here psycho-babbles of great pitch and moment, in this consider, have their birth pangs.

Addiction to squat diddly writing?

Addiction is another topic. My theme this time is the region of truth that we can safely settle for. The ISH therefore is a moniker whose time has fished that notion from the pond, that we call, maybe, our collective unconsciousness, coma'd and dressed, like a sleeping log.

I ramble now, and revert to stream of mind fullness unconcerned of it's responsibilities to rational discourse. My theme, however, ravaged by distractions IRL, i.e. my daughter's babblings, belie the fragility of holding even an ISH.

'That is all'

Reflections from a time in Ireland

Well guess what,!YES! the theme of the effect of twitter on me. Ho hum. I had no network connection for my phone, so I couldn't do the usual thing. Reverted to brief snatches in Internet cafes in Kilarney. "Anoder friggin twitter freak are ye? Feck. Yer'd better have dat one, it's got its own loo"

But then - this meant more contact with our family in Kerry. And I realised; the last time I've had any days without twitter, was during November 2010. I had joined twitter on the 14th November, at 21:16 hours. I was sipping a can of Holstein Pils, was wearing my pink tutu as I recall.

This twitter fast actually felt good. Also I think, feeling good from great contact we had with our family there. All the cousins got -on famously, as they always do. Bro in Law and I played guitar; Sal and her Sis sang like angels, we drank, we laughed, soo lovely.

And then visiting that gorgeous country, as you might imagine, priceless. Only the first day was it its usual brooding damp mystical, lowering clouds and all -then after, days of glorious weather. The locals kept scratching their heads in puzzlement, pointing excitedly to that strange bright thing in the sky.

Then as we travelled, and visited the land; the Dingle peninsular, lovely Inch beach, there you all were. Some in particular, commenting in my mind, that internal chatterer psyche- me, conversing with the resident installed and staying resident twitter- folk carved in synaptic traces.

So the quality of the internal chat before last November? Actually not very happy traces, old hurts and angers, chronic gripes with friends family and customers, stress of work, money, house structure and other droppings.

So the new synaptic, twitter induced traces, such a relief from the usual stream -a case for therapy -but is twitter that therapy?

A recent session I had with a therapist was suspicious of twitter -or my intensive relationship with it. She was assessing me for a CBT referral from a internal nuclear event in 2008.

I've given up the anti depressants, they knacker my libido, and keep me in some soma stable, reduce my anger, but blunt that edge too. So I'm taking a risk, my GP would disapprove, but the last young psychiatrist thought it could work as a trial. he left the service but I'm following his advice. Also the threads on twitter, the debate about the efficacy of anti depressants, Taking the chance, taking the ableness of my response skill. Love the free energy of doing that -avoiding my family and friends well intentioned smotherings.

So are we just electro -chemical events at the synaptic cleft? I got a lot of accolades from fellow students from constructing that one when doing psychology years back. Oh, I did I mention I've got a BSc 2:1 honours and a MSc in psychology? Wanna see the certificates? Oh go on! So egotistically proud of that. Ah lovely. But it mattered squat -all, when I imploded! irony perhaps.

But I digress, undress my followers, let me see your droppings. Oo no! OK, put back yer fancy fantasy avatars; back on I say -your nakedness, like mine really, so seen it; worn the marketing poster -shall we do a DVD? lets film it in Kerry!