Evening all. I'm still ironing out my schedule, so this post is a little later than I'd have liked it to be (I'm typing it up just before 8pm local time), but welcome to the first actual review post of The Silvercrow! It's been a somewhat busy couple of weeks and I haven't had much time to push further in Zen, but I can promise I have enough chapters finished to have a backlog of reviews anyway.
Enough chatter, though - let's get to the review.
And what is good, Phaedrus,
And what is not good—
Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?
We are introduced to our main character - unnamed, though according to Pirsig the story "must be regarded in its essence as fact" - this is a (fictionalized) account of a motorcycle trip Pirsig took with his son Chris in 1968, from Minnesota to Northern California. For this reason, and for simplicity, I'll refer to our main character as "Pirsig," and should I need to refer to Pirsig as the author, I will say so explicitly.
In this chapter, as I said, we are introduced to our four main characters: Pirsig, his son Chris, and their two traveling companions John and Sylvia Sutherland. They travel through a swampy area, and here we are immediately introduced to a recurring idea that I have noticed in my reading. Pirsig points out a blackbird to Chris, only for Chris to be bored by it ("I've seen lots of those, Dad!"), and later swats Chris's hand again, at first to point out a flock of blackbirds but passed off as making sure he's still there. Pirsig, as will become very common throughout the book, makes it very clear what he notices here - the interest in this kind of small thing, the little beauties in the world, is something you "have to get older for," because as you age those things become mixed with memories that you don't have at age eleven.
The main thesis of this chapter, though, is introduced in form before contents; a Chautauqua given by Pirsig in homage to the Chautauqua movement proper that peaked through the late 1800s and early 1900s. Chautauqua was a traveling entertainment and education show, and a slower-paced form of entertainment than the movies, radio, and TV that are now relevant; these faster forms are, in Pirsig's words, "not entirely an improvement." I am given to agreeing - certainly, in the case of this book, and in the case of Zen as a whole, I don't feel the participants are benefited by rushing or by any form of rapidity.
The inspiration for the Chautauqua is described as a sort of disharmony in the Sutherlands that Pirsig perceives - and dissects, thoroughly, in a manner that on a first read I interpreted as presumptuous and even disdainful. The thought that the narrator could simply pick apart their relationship so well from outside is absurd. But through reading more of the book, it becomes clear that the narrator has amazing powers of observation, a la Pink Floyd (the character) in "Nobody Home," and so this does not seem so impossible from later in the book as it did at first glance.
His conclusion is that the two have this disharmony because they both have a fundamental hatred for "it all" - what Pirsig calls the "death force" of technology. They both refuse to even think about doing motorcycle maintenance themselves, with John described as seeming to have a mental block on it, and Pirsig comes to the conclusion that the hatred is not passing but permanent. If the hatred were passing, they would lash out directly - but when their anger works around the issue, with Sylvia yelling at her children for talking too much after hours of a leaking faucet dripping in her ear, it is clear that they will not lash out at something so immovable that their anger has grown around it.
The Chautauqua about the death force takes a pause there - but there is one passage I would like to specifically mention, where Pirsig explains the impossibility of reconciliation between a Catholic and a Protestant on the subject of birth control. He explains that one could argue until out of breath about the effectiveness of birth control or planned parenthood, and not get anywhere because they do not make the same fundamental assumption - that a thing's effectiveness implies its goodness. One makes that assumption, and the other makes the assumption that goodness comes from elsewhere, and these two things are never discussed and thus never reconciliable.
It's a valuable lesson to take for all activists on all matters - one that is often parroted but just as often ignored. Look at where the other guy's coming from. So often in this Internet era I see other people writing hasty rebuttals that can be easily dismissed, or resorting to simple insults rather than decent arguments. I often catch myself doing the same. I don't mean to preach, but it is another example of the prioritization of quick gratification that Pirsig wanted to avoid through his Chautauqua on this motorcycle trip, rather than an attempt to gain a more fundamental understanding of the people and the world around oneself.
This is the genius of the book, in its form, its function, and its two nested narratives in the motorcycle trip and the Chautauqua. All four fit together seamlessly to show partly that we ought simply to move slower and consider our thoughts and actions against and within the world around us. Where his son Chris is shown over the book to be more impulsive, looking forward to the destination and often seeking momentary gratification, Pirsig spends so much of the motorcycle trip lost in thought.
I say "partly" because the main focus of the book, at least as far as I have read, is less the aforementioned consideration of the world, or the "Zen" part of the title; rather, much of it is about the "Motorcycle Maintenance," and the so-called death force Pirsig mentions. The view of this force that we are given in this chapter is one of acceptance and harmony from Pirsig. To pretend that one can flee or shun technology in our ever-advancing world is "self-defeating," according to him; and he says that the Buddha according to Zen Buddhist beliefs is found in everything, and must therefore be found just as contently in a motorcycle's transmission as in a flower's petals. Pretending otherwise "is to demean the Buddha—which is to demean oneself."
This view will be challenged as the book progresses, but that is all for this chapter. More on Thursday.
Perhaps it's exemplary of this book's content that I could easily have doubled the length of this post without too much difficulty. I'm finding myself very deeply interested in it, both in a narrative sense and in a philosophical one, and that may indicate that my posts about the book will be longer ones. If that's the case, I may consciously try to cut them short - but for this first post, I felt it worthwhile keeping it untrimmed and natural.
If you have any comments or criticisms on this post, please feel free to let me know. Remember, you can always find me on Tumblr at verix-silvercrow.
I'll see you this Thursday. And as always, have an excellent day, night or otherwise, and keep on abiding.
Verix
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