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."