notes from my pad...

So while I haven't yet started to translate the scribbling from vacation, the first page of the pad I brought up (yeah I should have used the moleskin, i brought it up, but somehow started writing first on the big pad and by that time a couple pages had been written so i went with consistency) anyway where was I?

The first pad of the page is a bunch of passages I pulled out of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance from reading it over the winter/holiday vacation. I got to the point of writing stuff down for the first page in the pad then started just marking in the margins of my old cheap paperback copy of the book. That was the start of the third time reading it. In a way the first chapter really is one of the best in the books. So much philosophy is just spread out there. Good stuff.

The first passage:

You see things vacationing on a motorcycle in a way that is completely different from any other. In a car you're always in a compartment, and because you're used to it you don't realize that through that car window everything you see is just more TV. You're a passive observer and it is all moving by you boringly in a frame.

On a cycle the frame is gone. You're completely in contact with it all. You're in the scene, not just watching it anymore, and the sense of presence is overwhelming. That concrete whizzing by five inches below your foot is the real thing, the same stuff you walk on, it's right there, so blurred you can't focus on it, yet you can put your foot down and touch it anytime, and the whole thing, the whole experience, is never removed from immediate consciousness.

Now take the motorcycle and replace that with bicycle... and slow it down...

The next passage started me thinking, and I'm not sure if it is a direct quote or not (no " marks at the start of this, although it might be one).
"Dripping faucet... ie the whole mindset where even the most intelligent defer the simplest mechanical tasks to "Professionals." Or ignore them all together."

that is something that i find amazing. Cars are simple. Bikes are simple. Dripping faucets are simple. But save for the bike example people make pretty damn good livings fixing cars and leaky faucets. Simple things that don't really require too much intelligence to fix... I guess rightfully so cars can be complex, and more intimidating than a leaky faucet (and they require more specialized tools than a pipe wrench), so maybe that falls short as well.

Pirsig goes on about technologist. And the difference between then and now is not much different. Maybe just on the scale of technology (the difference).

The final quote sort of sets up the whole book in a way. Not quite the thesis statement but pretty close.

I disagree with them about cycle maintenance, but not because I am out of sympathy with their feelings about technology. I just think that their flight from and hatred of technology is self-defeating. The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower. To think otherwise is to demean the Buddha...which is to demean oneself. That is what I want to talk about in this Chautauqua.

It isn't so much that I've adopted a sort of Zen approach to Microscope or Bike or Car maintenance, more of a realization of 'hey that's a good way of describing how I approach it.' Yeah it is a hard book to read. Dry at times. Great at others. Half of the time I pick it up to read again I never make it to the end of it. Reading Takeshi Kovacs novels are much more fun, and sometimes almost as philosophically provoking...


that's the extent of one page of scribbling while reading...

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