Highway 13 follows another branch of our river but now it goes upstream past old sawmill towns and sleepy scenery. Sometimes when you switch from a federal to a state highway it seems like you drop back like this in time. Pretty mountains, pretty river, bumpy but pleasant tar road — old buildings, old people on a front porch — strange how old, obsolete buildings and plants and mills, the technology of fifty and a hundred years ago, always seem to look so much better than the new stuff. Weeds and grass and wildflowers grow where the concrete has cracked and broken. Neat, squared, upright lines acquire a random sag. The uniform masses of the unbroken color of fresh paint modify to a mottled, weathered softness. Nature has a non-Euclidian geometry of her own that seems to soften the deliberate objectivity of these buildings with a kind of random spontaneity that architects would do well to study.
Soon we leave the river and the old sleepy buildings and now climb to some sort of a dry, meadowy plateau. The road rolls and bumps and rocks so much I have to keep the speed down to fifty. There are some bad chuckholes in the asphalt and I watch carefully for more.
We’re really accustomed to making mileage. Stretches that would have seemed long back in the Dakotas now seem short and easy. Being on the machine seems more natural than being off it. We’re nowhere that I’m familiar with, in country that I’ve never seen before, yet I don’t feel a stranger in it.
At the top of the plateau at Grangeville, Idaho, we step from the blasting heat into an air-conditioned restaurant. Deep cool inside. While we wait for chocolate malteds I notice a high-schooler sitting at the counter exchanging looks with the girl next to him. She’s gorgeous, and I’m not the only other one who notices it. The girl behind the counter waiting on them is also watching with an anger she thinks no one else sees. Some kind of triangle. We keep passing unseen through little moments of other people’s lives.
Back in the heat again and not far from Grangeville we see that the dry plateau that looked almost like prairie when we were out on it suddenly breaks away into an enormous canyon. I see our road will go down and down through what must be a hundred hairpin turns into a desert of broken land and crags. I tap Chris’s knee and point and as we round a turn where we see it all I hear him holler, “Wow!”
At the brink I shift down to third, then close the throttle. The engine drags, backfiring a little, and down we go.
By the time our cycle has reached the bottom of wherever it is we are, we have dropped thousands of feet. I look back over my shoulder and see antlike cars way back at the top. Now we must head forward across this baking desert to wherever the road leads.
25
This morning a solution to the problem of stuckness was discussed, the classic badness caused by traditional reason. Now it’s time to move to its romantic parallel, the ugliness of the technology traditional reason has produced.
The road has twisted and rolled over desert hills into a little, narrow thread of green surrounding the town of White Bird, then proceeded on to a big fast river, the Salmon, flowing between high canyon walls. Here the heat is tremendous and the glare from the white canyon rock is blinding. We wind on and on through the bottom of the narrow canyon, nervous about fast-moving traffic and oppressed by the fiery heat.
The ugliness the Sutherlands were fleeing is not inherent in technology. It only seemed that way to them because it’s so hard to isolate what it is within technology that’s so ugly. But technology is simply the making of things and the making of things can’t by its own nature be ugly or there would be no possibility for beauty in the arts, which also include the making of things. Actually a root word of technology, techne, originally meant “art.” The ancient Greeks never separated art from manufacture in their minds, and so never developed separate words for them.
Neither is the ugliness inherent in the materials of modern technology … a statement you sometimes hear. Mass-produced plastics and synthetics aren’t in themselves bad. They’ve just acquired bad associations. A person who’s lived inside stone walls of a prison most of his life is likely to see stone as an inherently ugly material, even though it’s also the prime material of sculpture, and a person who’s lived in a prison of ugly plastic technology that started with his childhood toys and continues through a lifetime of junky consumer products is likely to see this material as inherently ugly. But the real ugliness of modern technology isn’t found in any material or shape or act or product. These are just the objects in which the low Quality appears to reside. It’s our habit of assigning Quality to subjects or objects that gives this impression.
The real ugliness is not the result of any objects of technology. Nor is it, if one follows Phædrus’ metaphysics, the result of any subjects of technology, the people who produce it or the people who use it. Quality, or its absence, doesn’t reside in either the subject or the object. The real ugliness lies in the relationship between the people who produce the technology and the things they produce, which results in a similar relationship between the people who use the technology and the things they use.
Phædrus felt that at the moment of pure Quality perception, or not even perception, at the moment of pure Quality, there is no subject and there is no object. There is only a sense of Quality that produces a later awareness of subjects and objects. At the moment of pure quality, subject and object are identical. This is the tat tvam asi truth of the Upanishads, but it’s also reflected in modern street argot. “Getting with it”, “digging it”, “grooving on it” are all slang reflections of this identity. It is this identity that is the basis of craftsmanship in all the technical arts. And it is this identity that modern, dualistically conceived technology lacks. The creator of it feels no particular sense of identity with it. The owner of it feels no particular sense of identity with it. The user of it feels no particular sense of identity with it. Hence, by Phædrus’ definition, it has no Quality.
That wall in Korea that Phædrus saw was an act of technology. It was beautiful, but not because of any masterful intellectual planning or any scientific supervision of the job, or any added expenditures to “stylize” it. It was beautiful because the people who worked on it had a way of looking at things that made them do it right unselfconsciously. They didn’t separate themselves from the work in such a way as to do it wrong. There is the center of the whole solution.
The way to solve the conflict between human values and technological needs is not to run away from technology. That’s impossible. The way to resolve the conflict is to break down the barriers of dualistic thought that prevent a real understanding of what technology is … not an exploitation of nature, but a fusion of nature and the human spirit into a new kind of creation that transcends both. When this transcendence occurs in such events as the first airplane flight across the ocean or the first footstep on the moon, a kind of public recognition of the transcendent nature of technology occurs. But this transcendence should also occur at the individual level, on a personal basis, in one’s own life, in a less dramatic way.
The walls of the canyon here are completely vertical now. In many places room for the road had to be blasted out of it. No alternate routes here. Just whichever way the river goes. It may be just my imagination, but it seems the river’s already smaller than it was an hour ago.
Such personal transcendence of conflicts with technology doesn’t have to involve motorcycles, of course. It can be at a level as simple as sharpening a kitchen knife or sewing a dress or mending a broken chair. The underlying problems are the same. In each case there’s a beautiful way of doing it and an ugly way of doing it, and in arriving at the high-quality, beautiful way of doing it, both an ability to see what “looks good” and an ability to understand the underlying methods to arrive at that “good” are needed. Both classic and romantic understandings of Quality must be combined.
The nature of our culture is such that if you were to look for instruction in how to do any of these jobs, the instruction would always give only one understanding of Quality, the classic. It would t
ell you how to hold the blade when sharpening the knife, or how to use a sewing machine, or how to mix and apply glue with the presumption that once these underlying methods were applied, “good” would naturally follow. The ability to see directly what “looks good” would be ignored.
The result is rather typical of modern technology, an overall dullness of appearance so depressing that it must be overlaid with a veneer of “style” to make it acceptable. And that, to anyone who is sensitive to romantic Quality, just makes it all the worse. Now it’s not just depressingly dull, it’s also phony. Put the two together and you get a pretty accurate basic description of modern American technology: stylized cars and stylized outboard motors and stylized typewriters and stylized clothes. Stylized refrigerators filled with stylized food in stylized kitchens in stylized houses. Plastic stylized toys for stylized children, who at Christmas and birthdays are in style with their stylish parents. You have to be awfully stylish yourself not to get sick of it once in a while. It’s the style that gets you; technological ugliness syruped over with romantic phoniness in an effort to produce beauty and profit by people who, though stylish, don’t know where to start because no one has ever told them there’s such a thing as Quality in this world and it’s real, not style. Quality isn’t something you lay on top of subjects and objects like tinsel on a Christmas tree. Real Quality must be the source of the subjects and objects, the cone from which the tree must start.
To arrive at this Quality requires a somewhat different procedure from the “Step 1, Step 2, Step 3” instructions that accompany dualistic technology, and that’s what I’ll now try to go into.
After many turns in the canyon wall we stop for a break under a scrubby little patch of small trees and rocks. The grass around the trees is burned and brown and scattered with litter from picnickers.
I collapse into some shade, and after a while squint up at the sky, which I haven’t really looked at since we entered this canyon. Up there above the canyon walls it’s cool and dark blue and far away.
Chris doesn’t even go over to see the river, something he’d normally do. Like me, he’s tired and content just to sit under the scant shade of these trees.
After a while he says there’s an old iron pump, it looks like, between us and the river. He points to it and I see what he means. He goes over and I can see him pump water onto his hand and then splash it onto his face. I go over and pump for him so he can use both hands. Then I do the same. The water feels cold on my hands and face. When done we walk to the cycle again and climb on and pull back on to the canyon road.
Now that solution. Throughout this Chautauqua so far this whole problem of technological ugliness has been looked at in a negative way. It’s been said that romantic attitudes toward Quality such as the Sutherlands have are, by themselves, hopeless. You can’t live on just groovy emotions alone. You have to work with the underlying form of the universe too, the laws of nature which, when understood, can make work easier, sickness rarer and famine almost absent. On the other hand, technology based on pure dualistic reason has also been condemned because it obtains these material advantages by turning the world into a stylized garbage dump. Now’s the time to stop condemning things and come up with some answers.
The answer is Phædrus’ contention that classic understanding should not be overlaid with romantic prettiness; classic and romantic understanding should be united at a basic level. In the past our common universe of reason has been in the process of escaping, rejecting the romantic, irrational world of prehistoric man. It’s been necessary since before the time of Socrates to reject the passions, the emotions, in order to free the rational mind for an understanding of nature’s order which was as yet unknown. Now it’s time to further an understanding of nature’s order by reassimilating those passions which were originally fled from. The passions, the emotions, the affective domain of man’s consciousness, are a part of nature’s order too. The central part.
At present we’re snowed under with an irrational expansion of blind data-gathering in the sciences because there’s no rational format for any understanding of scientific creativity. At present we are also snowed under with a lot of stylishness in the arts … thin art … because there’s very little assimilation or extension into underlying form. We have artists with no scientific knowledge and scientists with no artistic knowledge and both with no spiritual sense of gravity at all, and the result is not just bad, it is ghastly. The time for real reunification of art and technology is really long overdue.
At the DeWeeses I started to talk about peace of mind in connection with technical work but got laughed off the scene because I brought it up out of the context in which it had originally appeared to me. Now I think it is in context to return to peace of mind and see what I was talking about.
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 reason for this is that peace of mind is a prerequisite for a perception of that Quality which is beyond romantic Quality and classic Quality and which unites the two, and which must accompany the work as it proceeds. The way to see what looks good and understand the reasons it looks good, and to be at one with this goodness as the work proceeds, is to cultivate an inner quietness, a peace of mind so that goodness can shine through.
I say inner peace of mind. It has no direct relationship to external circumstances. It can occur to a monk in meditation, to a soldier in heavy combat or to a machinist taking off that last ten-thousandth of an inch. It involves unselfconsciousness, which produces a complete identification with one’s circumstances, and there are levels and levels of this identification and levels and levels of quietness quite as profound and difficult of attainment as the more familiar levels of activity. The mountains of achievement are Quality discovered in one direction only, and are relatively meaningless and often unobtainable unless taken together with the ocean trenches of self-awareness… so different from self-consciousness… which result from inner peace of mind.
This inner peace of mind occurs on three levels of understanding. Physical quietness seems the easiest to achieve, although there are levels and levels of this too, as attested by the ability of Hindu mystics to live buried alive for many days. Mental quietness, in which one has no wandering thoughts at all, seems more difficult, but can be achieved. But value quietness, in which one has no wandering desires at all but simply performs the acts of his life without desire, that seems the hardest.
I’ve sometimes thought this inner peace of mind, this quietness is similar to if not identical with the sort of calm you sometimes get when going fishing, which accounts for much of the popularity of this sport. Just to sit with the line in the water, not moving, not really thinking about anything, not really caring about anything either, seems to draw out the inner tensions and frustrations that have prevented you from solving problems you couldn’t solve before and introduced ugliness and clumsiness into your actions and thoughts.
You don’t have to go fishing, of course, to fix your motorcycle. A cup of coffee, a walk around the block, sometimes just putting off the job for five minutes of silence is enough. When you do you can almost feel yourself grow toward that inner peace of mind that reveals it all. That which turns its back on this inner calm and the Quality it reveals is bad maintenance. That which turns toward it is good. The forms of turning away and toward are infinite but the goal is always the same.
I think that when this concept of peace of mind is introduced and made central to the act of technical work, a fusion of classic and romantic quality can take place at a basic level within a practical working context. I’ve said you can actually see this fusion in skilled mechanics and machinists of a certain sort, and you can see it in the
work they do. To say that they are not artists is to misunderstand the nature of art. They have patience, care and attentiveness to what they’re doing, but more than this… there’s a kind of inner peace of mind that isn’t contrived but results from a kind of harmony with the work in which there’s no leader and no follower. The material and the craftsman’s thoughts change together in a progression of smooth, even changes until his mind is at rest at the exact instant the material is right.
We’ve all had moments of that sort when we’re doing something we really want to do. It’s just that somehow we’ve gotten into an unfortunate separation of those moments from work. The mechanic I’m talking about doesn’t make this separation. One says of him that he is “interested” in what he’s doing, that he’s “involved” in his work. What produces this involvement is, at the cutting edge of consciousness, an absence of any sense of separateness of subject and object. “Being with it”, “being a natural”, “taking hold”… there are a lot of idiomatic expressions for what I mean by this absence of subject-object duality, because what I mean is so well understood as folklore, common sense, the everyday understanding of the shop. But in scientific parlance the words for this absence of subject-object duality are scarce because scientific minds have shut themselves off from consciousness of this kind of understanding in the assumption of the formal dualistic scientific outlook.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Page 30