Poetry & Prose

The Source Of The Complaint

"Iwant to talk about another kind of high country now in the world of thought, which in some ways, for me at least, seems to parallel or produce feelings similar to this, and call it the high country of the mind.

If all of human knowledge, everything thats known, is believed to be an enormous hierarchic structure, then the high country of the mind is found at the uppermost reaches of this structure in the most general, the most abstract considerations of all.

Few people travel here. There's no real profit to be made from wandering through it, yet like this high country of the material world all around us, it has its own austere beauty that to some people makes the hardships of traveling through it seem worthwhile.

In the high country of the mind one has to become adjusted to the thinner air of uncertainty, and to the enormous magnitude of questions asked, and to the answers proposed to these questions. The sweep goes on and on and on so obviously much further than the mind can grasp one hesitates even to go near for fear of getting lost in them and never finding one's way out.

What is the truth and how do you know it when you have it? -- How do we really know anything? Is there an "I," a "soul," which knows, or is this soul merely cells coordinating senses? -- Is reality basically changing, or is it fixed and permanent? -- When it's said that something means something, what's meant by that?

Many trails through these high ranges have been made and forgotten since the beginning of time, and although the answers brought back from these trails have claimed permanence and universality for themselves, civilizations have varied in the trails they have chosen and we have many different answers to the same question, all of which can be thought of as true within their own context. Even within a single civilization old trails are constantly closed and new ones opened up.

It's sometimes argued that there's no real progress; that a civilization that kills multitudes in mass warfare, that pollutes the land and oceans with ever larger quantities of debris, that destroys the dignity of individuals by subjecting them to a forced mechanized existence can hardly be called an advance over the simpler hunting and gathering and agricultural existence of prehistoric times. But this argument, though romantically appealing, doesn't hold up. The primitive tribes permitted far less individual freedom than does modern society. Ancient wars were committed with far less moral justification than modern ones. A technology that produces debris can find, and is finding, ways of disposing of it without ecological upset. And the schoolbook pictures of primitive man sometimes omit some of the detractions of his primitive life...the pain, the disease, famine, the hard labor needed just to stay alive. From that agony of bare existence to modern life can be soberly described only as upward progress, and the sole agent for this progress is quite clearly reason itself.

One can see how both the informal and formal processes of hypothesis, experiment, conclusion, century after century, repeated with new material, have built up the hierarchies of thought which have eliminated most of the enemies of primitive man. To some extent the romantic condemnation of rationality stems from the very effectiveness of rationality in uplifting men from primitive conditions. It's such a powerful, all-dominating agent of civilized man it's all but shut out everything else and now dominates man himself. That's the source of the complaint."

  Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance  
  Robert M. Pirsig

Can you imagine my surprise?
To be honest - I struggled thru many passages of this book - with its lofty philosophical views. I went under some of those Greek hurdles instead of over them. But, as I began to breath a little easier - coming down from the Rockies toward Idaho - imagine my surprise to encounter "real" people. As Pirsig states in an "author's notes": "What follows is based on actual occurrences. . . . "
I met one of those 'actual occurrences' while attending Boise State - I met the daughter Pirsig mentioned (when mentioning her professor parent). She actually directed me in her Passion Play. I wish. That is to say - I played the good samaritan in the Passion Play she directed.

categories:     Poetry & Prose     -top-