Phaedrus and Theimania

[Steve Smith]

FriAM-

As long as I am being arbitrarily prolific (manic?) I feel compelled to reference the *other* book I'm more than halfway through.  It is likely to be familiar to many here.  "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" - Robert Pirsig. 

I read this when I was young and it was fresh and hyperpopularized and I swear I hardly recognize a word of it as I re-read it now.  I was so unprepared for it...  reading it probably coincides with my recent anecdote about diving into "Philosophy and Physics", but also a time of life when my primary (nearly singular) mode of transportation was a motorcycle not dissimilar (mine an early 70s Honda, his a few years older) to the one Persig rides on his long journey (in real life, as well as ultimately in his story).  

I mentioned this to Guerin (that I was reading it) and he dove into the philosophical ideas related to Phaedrus (the Greek Philosopher as well as the "former" personality of Persig pre-ECT who he was channeling/finding/experiencing on his motorcycle trip).  I was too early in the book to appreciate his references, and it had been too long (and I was too innocent during) from my first reading to remember.   Now, most of the way through the book, it is all flooding back to me, not unlike the way Pirsig's Phaedrus comes back to him.

And to add an extra level of indirection, I am not, in fact reading "Zen", but rather listening to it as Mary reads it aloud.   She also (with no attachment to either motorcycles nor analytical thought) read it as a young woman and could hardly remember any of it either.  

In searching for more context on Phaedrus the Greek and Phaedrus the Pirsig alter-ego, I found what might be Pirsig's last (and rare) interview in 2006.  In many ways it feels as if he is part of these interwoven thread of FriAM conversation (or is it just me?).  Esp. Re: metaphysics and the nature of science/knowledge.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/nov/19/fiction

Pirsig's pearls

· The Buddha resides 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.

· Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a 30,000 page menu and no food.

· Traditional scientific method has always been, at the very best, 20-20 hindsight. It's good for seeing where you've been. It's good for testing the truth of what you think you know, but it can't tell you where you ought to go.

· Why, for example, should a group of simple, stable compounds of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen struggle for billions of years to organise themselves into a professor of chemistry? What's the motive?

· The only Zen you find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there.

- Steve

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