Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

I’ve just finished rereading “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values” by Robert Pirsig circa 1974. I think I first read this book about 30 years ago, and I certainly understood it and got more out of it this time around. If you get it yourself, be sure to get the Perennial Classics Edition with extra insights and a new introduction by the author.

Three threads intertwine in the book: the story of a man and his son trying to connect with each other as they travel cross-country on a motorcycle, an examination of the indefinable concept of quality and the balance necessary between intuition and technology, and a man’s inner struggle to retain his sanity as he reconciles two essential parts of his being into one, for his son’s sake.

The narrator talks about a friend traveling with him who has no interest or patience for learning how to maintain the motorcycle he rides - foresaking technology to focus only art and intuition – and how this is a mistake. To have Quality (Oneness) in one’s life both art and knowledge are needed. He makes the point that this is true for any work or activity and uses motorcycle maintenance as the analogy. Although Quality cannot be defined, you know it when you see it. Quality in an activity is recognizable by the peace of mind a person feels during the activity. Without peace of mind there is no Quality.

These ideas seem very relevant in this election year. From p. 270:

To put it in more concrete terms: If you want to build a factory, or fix a motorcycle, or set a nation right without getting stuck, then classical, structured, dualistic subject-object knowledge, although necessary, isn’t enough. You have to have some feeling for the quality of the work. You have to have a sense of what’s good. That is what carries you forward. This sense isn’t just something you are born with, although you are born with it. It’s also something you can develop. It’s not just “intuition,” not just unexplainable “skill” or “talent.” It’s the direct result of contact with basic reality, Quality, which dualistic reason has in the past tended to conceal.

It all sounds so far out and esoteric when it’s put like that. It comes as a shock to discover that it is one of the most homespun, down-to-earth views of reality you can have. Harry Truman, of all people, comes to mind, when he said concerning his administration’s programs, “We’ll just try them…and if they don’t work…why then we’ll just try something else.” That may not be an exact quote, but that’s close…The reality of the American government isn’t static, he said, it’s dynamic. If we don’t like it we’ll get something better.

(Yes. In January, we will get something better. Don’t forget to vote in November.)

I recognize in these ideas the reason why I am unhappy at work when there is too much focus on numbers, metrics and people as interchangeable “components” and not enough focus on the essence of good work and good results which is represented by Quality.

Meanwhile, I think of my brother, who also read this book thirty years ago and related especially strongly to it. Paul was a mechanical genius – he could fix almost anything. He just knew how machines worked. He was highly interested in Philosophy and could hold his own in philosophical exchanges with my husband, which is no small feat. And Paul struggled to reconcile dueling parts of his personality at war with each other in a way that only a person who is bipolar can really understand.

Pirsig talks about the issue of “stuckness” – how seemingly insurmountable roadblocks and problems are actually opportunities to step back and open mindedly re-examine the facts and their relative importance. This also reminds me of my brother as well as myself and our experiences in the high tech world. P. 292:

Stuckness shouldn’t be avoided. It’s the psychic predecessor to all real understanding. An egoless acceptance of stuckness is a key to an understanding of all Quality, in mechanical work as in other endeavors. It’s the understanding of Quality as revealed by stuckness which so often makes self-taught mechanics so superior to institute-trained men, who have learned how to handle everything except a new situation.

In other words, you must set aside ego enough to admit you’re stuck (even if you’re supposed to be a pro) before you can start down the path toward a solution. At the time he wrote this book Pirsig, onetime professor of Rhetoric and Philosophy, was writing technical documentation for IBM computers. So, high tech folk, the question of Quality as peace of mind comes into play. P. 301:

Peace of mind isn’t at all superficial to technical work. It’s the whole thing. That which produces it is good work and that which destroys it is bad work. The specs, the measuring instruments, the quality control, the final check-out, these are all means toward the end of satisfying the peace of mind of those responsible for the work. What really counts in the end is their peace of mind, nothing else…The way to see what looks good and understand the reasons it looks good, and to be one with this goodness as the work proceeds, is to cultivate an inner quietness, a peace of mind so that goodness can shine through.

He says that this inner peace of mind, “involves unselfconciousness, which produces a complete identification with one’s circumstances…levels and levels of quietness quite as profound and difficult of attainment as the more familiar levels of activity.”

In other words - the profound quietness that can be found in the Now. I want to believe that somewhere, somehow, Paul has also finally found this peace of mind.