[One more book review that attracted little-to-no interest from my MMM editors.]
by Robert Pirsig, 1974
All Rights Reserved © 2012
Thomas W. Day
In 2014,
Zen (or ZAMM) will celebrate its 40th year in publication. It is one of
the best read books in history. Google returns 2 million hits for a search on
the book's title. There are dozens of guidebooks for readers: study guides for
high school and college students, anniversary editions with introductions and
explanations, primers for the less-than-literate, me-too copies, and lots of philosophical analysis.
For a book so often despised by academics, ZAMM has inspired an incredible
amount of examination and deconstruction.
I have owned a copy of this book since the first year it was published (1974). I
have reviewed more than 100 books, several hundred music CDs, and written
hundreds of thousands words since I first stumbled upon
Zen and, before
now, I have
never found the confidence or arrogance to write about one of the books that
shaped my life. Recently, I found a digital copy of
Zen and the Art of
Motorcycle Maintenance and was amazed to realize that a popular book
published in my lifetime has gone into the public domain. I am probably on
my 20th copy of the paperback version of this book, having loaned and lost each
of the previous copies I've owned. At the minimum, I've read ZAMM twenty times. For
almost forty years, every time I have backpacked into the wilderness
or travelled by motorcycle for more than a couple days I have brought a copy of ZAMM for those quiet
moments that are the reason I venture into unfamiliar and isolated places. Of the few good
things I know,
Robert Pirsig and
Colin Fletcher (
The
Complete Walker and many
other wonderful foot traveling stories) and
John Muir (
Keep
Your Volkswagen Alive; A Manual of Step-By-Step Procedures for the Compleat
Idiot)
are responsible for at least 50% of my life's accumulated knowledge.
When someone I respect a lot told me he'd tried and failed to read
ZAMM
to the end, multiple times, I restarted the self-evaluation experience that
always accompanies my exposure to Robert Pirsig's insights; just to see what
might make this book difficult to read. When I discovered that all but one
novel,
Catch 22, from the collection one of the greatest authors of the
20th Century,
Joseph Heller, had been purged from my local library system, I
felt compelled to write about
ZAMM to slow Pirsig's disappearance into
the flotsam and jetsam of our trivialized and drug-and-attention-disordered Facebook and Twitter'd world.
When my father discovered my teenage interest in mechanical and electrical
concepts, he told me, "Anything you can do for yourself, someone else can do better."
When I was a young man, in his "Chautauqua" Pirsig told me, "A motorcycle functions entirely in accordance with
the laws of reason, and a study of the art of motorcycle maintenance is really a
miniature study of the art of rationality itself." Pirsig's description of
the mechanics who botched his bike repair illustrated a world I wanted to avoid,
"At 5 P.M. or whenever their eight hours were in, you knew they would cut it off
and not have another thought about their work. They were already trying not to
have any thoughts about their work on the job. . . They were involved in it
(technology and their work) but not in such a way as to care." I knew that the
only person who would care about the things I wanted fixed or built was me. Pirsig
convinced me that I could learn to do the work.
I grew up in a very religious
family and community where "rationality" was avoided whenever possible. I was
the family black sheep, green monkey, or whatever label you use to identify and whack the
prominent nail. I desperately sought rationality and ZAMM is packed with it from
the first to the last page. The confluence of technology, logic, and reason, and
the possibility of a career nestled between those concepts was revolutionary. It
still is.
Surrounding the practical aspects of ZAMM, Pirsig pursues the concept of
"quality." All of us are involved in this search, but many of us are distracted
by the sparkly lights advertising uses to convince us that quality is something
we can purchase. ZAMM flies against the whole "lifestyle" theory of product
marketing. One reason the counter-culture so readily accepted ZAMM is that
Pirsig validates the philosophy of questioning authority. From a
traditionalist's perspective, Persig's dissection of romantic and rhetoric
philosophies was a cold-blooded evaluation of the gaping holes in emotionalism
and formal argument. More than a few academics, who live and thrive on
emotionalism and rhetoric, fought back from the ramparts of their gloomy
institutions while five million of us took refuge in the streets armed with a
new way to look for Quality in our lives.
From a hopeful writer's perspective, ZAMM is inspirational. Rejected by a
record 121 publishers and selling 5 million copies worldwide, ZAMM is a beacon
of hope for authors of all stripes, even though few of us can hope to approach
Pirsig's brilliant combination of formal and contemporary style and content.
From a life-long student's perspective, Pirsig taught me that in a world full of
irrational people, insane cultural garbage, and what seems like universal
foolishness, there can be small outposts of rationality and calm. You just have
to find them; or make them for yourself. Maybe this is just another version of
Dylan Thomas' "Rage, rage against the dying of the light," but ZAMM makes the
effort seems more like an attempt to build something than just a rant about
death. Pirsig told me, "Trials never end, of course. Unhappiness and misfortune
are bound to occur as long as people live, but there is a feeling now, that was
not here before, and is not just on the surface of things, but penetrates all
the way through: We’ve won it. It’s going to get better now. You can sort of
tell these things." I needed to read the book through to that point, multiple
times in my life. I did it again, this spring, and I believe it is going to get
better now. As it always does.
One of the guys from the V-Strom list sent this out as a reminder of the "good old days." I was the guy with the soccer armor and padded coveralls, usually riding a slightly obsolete Rickman or Suzuki motocrosser. I never thought I was "dynamite," but I definitely had more fun than that pack of sparkly caballeros in Xmas colors. .bmp)
A few years back, I had a great time camping and riding across as much of North Dakota as I found interesting. Three weeks and about 2,500 miles and I could have spent another week on the eastern edge without getting bored. I'm fooling around with another summer tour for 2013 and it would be hard not to put North Dakota on the route sheet on the way to Alaska. Two things jam up those plans: 1) for the next couple of years, North Dakota is going to play the oil boom game and the cost of staying anywhere between Bismark and the western edge of the state is out-of-sight and 2) after my experience in Texas (Dallas-Fort Worth tap water smells like a weird combination of sulfur and carpet cleaning chemicals), I'd like to avoid any more consumption of fracking contaminated water than absolutely necessary.
Canada, on the other hand, is a problem. A lot of my favorite places are in the gun sights of the oil companies. My favorite part of the trip, the Top of the World boarder crossing puts me right in the path of this ecological mess. I guess all that long-term water contamination explains why east coast water is so nasty, too. 
The Carin' Sharin' Chronicles
On my usual commute to downtown St. Paul, I was stuck waiting for
a break in Rice Street traffic at my neighborhood intersection. To the north, I
had about a block-and-a-half of space before south-bound traffic boxed me in. To
the south, one large, black van was signaling a turn at my intersection. Behind
it, at least another two blocks of clear space. Not trusting the van to do what
the turn signals indicated, I waited until the van was beginning its turn before I eased out into the road. Hidden from my
view was an asphalt-colored sedan, tailgating the van.
The van's blacked out windows and size had completely obscured my view of the
tailgater and, now, I was solidly in the car's path. The driver hit the brakes
and I nailed the throttle and we missed each other by a few feet. The event was
close enough that I can still raise a little bile several weeks after the
near-crash. 
About half of the time, when I need to install a new tire, I bum an hour from Paul Streeter and do the deed in his nicely heated basement shop. We drink a couple of beers, I use his bead buster and tire mounting frame, and the tire gets changed with minimum knuckle busting. I made a bead buster of my own, last year, after one of those trips to Paul's and it works, but it's ugly and less than super-stable (at right). As you can probably see, it was made from wood scraps and pieces of metal I found lying around my shop. Every other time I use it, I end up slightly re-fabbing it because it wasn't that strong. It works, but it wasn't pretty, reliable, or fun to use. 
