Snatch XIV

In charge. What an idea. More control than I've ever realized. Well, the illusion of control. Whatever hand is on the plug no doubt can pull it without warning, on a whim or by some preordained schedule, no way for me to know. No way to know if there even is a hand or a plug. And would I want a warning? That's something to chew on, and for all I know I have plenty of time for the chewing. All the same there are plenty more things on which to chew, so many that merely prioritizing them could take forever.

If not, though, if the plug comes out before I finish this thought, is this the thought I wish to be my last? Well, it must be, or I'd be thinking another one. So there goes the illusion of control and the pressing weight of its responsibility. A luxury, this sense of free-fall, for the moment anyway, riding a whimsy that steers away from the darker concerns. Plug? What plug? Pain? Sanity-robbing pain? Yes, yes, of course. I've mentioned it, it's uncomfortably near, in memory but congealing to theory the longer absent. My faith's in the whimsy now. She's in charge. Why deny her?

LILA: AN INQUIRY INTO MORALS -- Robert M. Pirsig

The first thing I learned from Robert Pirsig was that I'm a romantic. A mildly unsettling discovery as I started reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values shortly after the paperback edition came out in the mid-'70s. I had assumed romantics were dreamy sappy sorts who loved show tunes and craved syrup on their stories. Couldn't be me, the cynical Army vet, digger of Mailer, Jones, the Dead and the Stones. It wasn't until later, postPirsig, that I read somewhere cynics are disenchanted romantics, and it resonated.

But I wasn't there yet when I started Zen. My “cynicism” was more unconscious affectation than true, akin to whistling in the dark with a secret faith in the happy ending. I was a romantic in disguise from myself.

Pirsig's skill at leading me to this reluctant discovery was masterful. It started with the title. For me, Zen Buddhism was a one-hand-clapping fad, the kind of esoteria that enabled hipsters to sneer at the Mr. Joneses for not knowing what was happening. I identified with Mr. Jones. But paired with something so two-handed as mechanics, and with the ingenious embellishment of the pragmatic with “art,” the book felt more than accessible. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance intrigued me. It didn't hurt that mainstream critics raved about Zen, lauding it as, in one review, “profoundly important, disturbing, deeply moving, full of insights, a wonderful book."

Such endorsements on top of a sly title sold me the book. Pirsig's voice did the rest.