Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Pirsig's view of quality - Indefinable, mystical thing that happens before any sort of analysis of experience. I think it's so interesting how Robert Pirsig's quest for what is considered quality began with a simple question from one of his colleagues when he was teaching Rhetoric at Montana State University: "Are you teaching quality?"

Pirsig would have his students write essays for him, then he would read aloud the essays back to his students, and the students would decide which papers were quality work and which papers were less-than-so. And these intro to rhetoric students knew what quality was, but had a harder time finding a key definition as to what exactly makes something quality. He wanted the aesthetic to come before the theoretic. First there was the great writing, and then people developed rules from that. He says, "first you get the feeling, then you figure out why." With that being said, I have to say, listening to my classmates give presentations on Wallace Stevens' and his work, I definitely could sense the element of quality that was in the room. It's that feeling that you cannot quite place your finger one, but you know when it is good.

All of the presentations given Friday December 7th at Chautauqua for Robert Pirsig were beautifully done, but the one that particularly stood out to me was the speech given by David Buchanan, presenting Pirsig's Central Metaphor in Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The metaphor about the train is his essay struck me - if you think about a freight train, miles and miles long and each box car represents something within your mind from some previous experience, the cutting edge of the train is the pre-intellectual experience. But everything behind the freight train that is always going to come to bear on the present moment and how you experience it (not only your own personal experiment but also the collective experience from where you're from). As a motorcycle mechanic, you have to know about the shape of machine, the function, etc. to have enough experience to truly be engaged with it - to turn what could be considered a mundane task into an art.

I very much enjoyed this Pirsig even and am so thrilled he is finally accepting an honorary degree from MSU Bozeman, the town which served as a spring board for the exploration of "quality."

Final Paper

Stevens & Suffering in a Socioeconomic Setting

When a student of poetry thinks of the modernist poet Wallace Stevens, there is much to be said about his ties to the imagined space in which he sought to find truth. As a scholar, he did not particularly concern himself with 'just facts' when he was writing poetry and believed more in the importance of discovering a more transcendent truth about human nature rather than simply with human interactions. However, much of Stevens poetry and prose was published at a tumultuous time in the American (and European) landscape, socio-economically speaking, and it seemed as though some poets (including Stevens) may have been overcome by the burden of having to touch upon the interpersonal in his works. According to Mark Halliday in his book Stevens and the Interpersonal, “it was suffering that made human others inescapably noticeable to the poet. The suffering Stevens read about in newspapers persuaded him – against the current of profound self-concern and individualistic hedonism which had striped Harmonium with lavish colors – that the separate experience of selves different from his own ought to be somehow engaged by a serious poet” (13). With the poetry being released in the 1930s during the Great Depression, it made me curious as it how Stevens responded to citizens struggling with worldly matters while he is on a quest to find truth. I want to explore the political nature of Stevens' life and how that makes him different from other poets as well as highlight the unique ways in which Wallace Stevens paints a picture of human suffering amongst a background of socioeconomic turmoil.

When a student thinks of a poet of Wallace Stevens caliber, one would expect him to have a wild life, full of risk and drama, but Stevens was a man of order who had one foot bound in reality and the other forever engaged in the imaginary. It does seem odd that a man who spent his life working for an insurance company while also being of the most profound poets of abstraction. He was a man who took comfort in small manifestations of order and wanted an even keel in the rhythm of his life. But being the a vice president of an insurance company, earning a more-than-comfortable salary, he felt out of touch with the growing concerns of American citizens as they experienced hardship in trying to find work and being able to provide for their family (and more importantly, his poetry was developing its own unique, vibrant voice). After all, in Maslow's hierarchy of needs, one must meet all of his physiological needs before he can move his way up the pyramid to creativity. It would seem as though Stevens was sitting at the top of the pyramid, having already reached self-actualization, and the concerns of the bottom of the pyramid was not something he felt necessarily useful in the process of forming prose. However, in the mid-nineteen-thirties, modernist poets were being called upon to write about the concerns of the sufferings of the ordinary, working-class man. As The New Yorker, calls it, “Patrician remove was going out of style” (Michelle Dean, newyorker.com).

In 1935 (the same year Franklin D. Roosevelt instituted Social Security) Wallace Stevens released his second book of poetry Ideas of Order which featured one of Steven's most famous poems “The Idea of Order at Key West.” The poem features a woman who “sang beyond the genius of the sea” and leaves such a profound effect on the narrator that he see the world differently than before. There is a dissonance between what is happening in reality and what is merely what is has perceived in his mind – making a large statement about the power of the imagination in nature to shape one's worldview. This suspension from reality, I like to think, keeps the perception of any part of the human condition more colorful, therefore worth further exploration. The final stanza of “The Idea of Order at Key West” can act as a working thesis statement for the rest of the poetry by Stevens; as in, the idea of the order of poetry is the best way to articulate meaning in a fractured, chaotic world. The final stanza says:

Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon.

The maker's rage to order words of the sea,

Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,

And of ourselves and of our origins,

In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds (106).

The way Ramon functions in this poem as a listener of the complexities of the sea by this mysterious woman in order to create a new meaning of his own world is the same way in which all poets must function: to take what is being presented to you in nature, in society, etc. and make it work to provide a better understanding. This is especially important to what happens to be occurring in nature and in society at the time.

But the poems that are most interesting in posing as a narrative for the backdrop of the Great Depression are “Sad Strains of a Gay Waltz” and “Mozart 1935.” Two poems Halliday calls, “burdened with the sense that suffering people need a new and appropriate performance by the poet” (13). But Stevens does not use poetry in the typical way of encouraging the reader to look within themselves for joy, to pull themselves up by their boot straps, and strive to find happiness in their lives once again. The poem “Mozart, 1935” opens with:

“Poet, be seated at the piano.
Play the present, its hoo-hoo-hoo,
Its shoo-shoo-shoo, its ric-a-nic,
Its envious cachinnation.”

The poet must seat at the piano and do his job, to create music for whatever happens to be popular at the moment in order to appease the masses. However, there is an irony here when we think of the poet Mozart – he is a classical artist who is still relevant today, despite not succumbing to the fads of what happens to be popular at the time. It would be foolish to think all poetry has the power to change a nation in shambles and save people from disappoint due to economic downfall, but I believe the point here is that poetry offers us new lenses with which we can view the world. History passes and art remains; it cannot always change the world, but it is important to give our minds relief from the bleakness of everyday life - poetry is often used to placate our conflicts. Even in the title, the poem is using two elements that seem to be out of synch with one another: Mozart and the year 1935. At first glance, it seems anachronistic to compare the two, but that is not really the case. In fact, it is almost the same as saying “Stevens, 2012,” which demonstrate to us (students of his work) that despite the fact that he did not write directly to the human suffering experienced at the time, his work is still important today.

“If they throw stones upon the roof
While you practice arpeggios,
It is because they carry down the stairs
A body in rags.
Be seated at the piano.
That lucid souvenir of the past,
The divertimento;
That airy dream of the future,
The unclouded concerto . . .
The snow is falling.
Strike the piercing chord.
Be thou the voice,
Not you. Be thou, be thou
The voice of angry fear,
The voice of this besieging pain.
Be thou that wintry sound
As of the great wind howling,
By which sorrow is released,
Dismissed, absolved
In a starry placating.
We may return to Mozart.
He was young, and we, we are old.
The snow is falling
And the streets are full of cries.
Be seated, thou”

The last line is of significant importance. 'The streets are full of cries' and yet it is placidly snowing while Mozart continue to play. Poet, be seated at the piano! In Stevens and the Interepersonal, Halliday writes that the poet, “is interested not in writing about the street, but in writing about the problem of writing about the street” (13). Stevens keeps a distance between the sufferer and the artist by continually using the word “thou” instead of “you” or “we.” He is not banding with the people who are suffering, but rather offering them a larger and more central role than “mere individual self-hood: 'Be thou the voice, / Not you'” (13). And in this poem, Steven arrives at a 'starry placating' just five lines after a besieging pain because the poet, functioning as the 'thou' (not a 'you'), has stayed in general terms ('a body in rags, fear, pain, cries') whose generality makes them seem manageable. As in, this may be difficult at the moment, but years from now the suffering will not stand the test of time, but the art will.

Wallace Stevens believed that the best of what we have in the world is poetry and it only came about when we allowed our imaginations to roam free. He was probably the only vice president of an insurance company who was concerned with unveiling the world as it really is to society; in this way, the theme of the interdependence of reality and imagination serves as a metaphor for his life as a businessman and, more importantly, an artist. Stevens' life was being suspended in imagination while always having the capability of returning to the shore of reality for rejuvenation. In the words of Mark Halliday, “Stevens more than any other poet of this century has trained us to admit that all seeing is imaginative and to accept and even cherish the sense that our humanness is coterminous with our imaginative ability” (17). And even within the bounds of his comfortable, corporate, suburban existence he found his way of believing that those suffering deserved to take solace in the permanence of art as well.