Re-re-reading 'Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance'

I first read it the summer between school and university and was amazed at the world it contained, certain fragments embedded themselves in my memory like tiny explosions, oft remembered. I remembered a beautiful section about the architecture of use – stone steps slowly sinking and curling under the weight of thousands of passers-by, developing lips and protrusions beyond their conceived design. I read my father’s copy – notes scribbled and sections highlighted. I remember trying to make sense of the highlights – why this paragraph? why this line? Some echoed our own interactions.

“You’re going to have to shim those out,” I said “What’s shim?” “It’s a thin, flat strip of metal. You just slip it around the handlebar under the collar there and it will open up the collar to where you can tighten it again.” “Oh”, he said. He was getting interested. “Good. Where do you buy them?” “I’ve got some right here,” I said, gleefully holding up a can of beer in my hand.
He didn’t understand for a moment. Then he said, “What, the can?” “Sure,” I said, “best shim stock in the world.” I thought this was pretty clever myself. Save him a trip to God knows where to get shim stock. Save him time. Save him money. But to my surprise he didn’t see the cleverness of this at all. In fact he got noticeably haughty about the whole thing. Pretty soon he was dodging and filling with all kinds of excuses and, before I realized what his real attitude was, we had decided not to fix the handlebars after all. As far as I know those handlebars are still loose. And I believe now that he was actually offended at the time. I had had the nerve to propose repair of his new eighteen-hundred dollar BMW, the pride of a half-century of German mechanical finesse, with a piece of old beer can! Ach, du lieber!

I read it again four years later, after university and before I went to Japan. It was like rediscovering an old friend. It embodied so much of what I had been thinking about in my design work; the nature of ‘quality’, the nature of ‘technology’ and its social effects; the purpose of objects beyond the aesthetic, the purpose of the aesthetic and how the two often sit uncomfortably together.

I talked yesterday about caring, I care about these moldy old riding gloves. I smile at them flying through the breeze beside me because they have been there for so many years and are so old and so tired and so rotten there is something kind of humorous about them. They have become filled with oil and sweat and dirt and spattered bugs and now when I set them down flat on a table, even when they are not cold, they won’t stay flat. They’ve got a memory of their own. They cost only three dollars and have been re-stitched so many times it is getting impossible to repair them, yet I take a lot of time and pains to do it anyway because I can’t imagine any new pair taking their place. That is impractical, but practicality isn’t the whole thing with gloves or anything else.

After three years with an awful lot of ‘aesthetic-minded’ design students it blew open the source of my own frustrations.

... Schools teach you to imitate. If you don’t imitate what the teacher wants you get a bad grade. Here, in college, it was more sophisticated of course; you were supposed to imitate the teacher in such a way as to convince the teacher you were not imitating, but taking the essence of instruction and going ahead with it on your own. That got you As. Originality on the other hand could get you anything from A to F. The whole grading system cautioned against it [...] The idea that the majority of students attend a university for an education independent of the degree and grades is a little hypocrisy everyone is happier not to expose. Occasionally some students do arrive for an education but rote and the mechanical nature of the institution soon converts them to a less idealistic attitude.

I was surprised at how much of the book surprised me, how little of the central ideas had remained accessible in my memory. How had I forgot this?

Caring about what you are doing is considered either unimportant or taken for granted. On this trip I think we should explore it a little [...] I don’t want to hurry it. That itself is a poisonous twentieth century attitude. When you want to hurry something that means you no longer care about it and want to get on to other things.

...

‘Assembly of Japanese bicycle require great peace of mind.’ This produces more laughter, but Sylvia and Gennie and the sculptor give sharp looks of recognition. “That’s a good instruction,” the sculptor says. Gennie nods too. “That’s kind of why I saved it,” I say. “At first I laughed because of memories of bicycles I’d put together and, of course, the unintended slur on Japanese manufacture. But there’s a lot of wisdom in that statement.”

Or maybe was it seven years later – on the cycle ride across North America – that would make more sense now, I remember sharing it with Wei-Ho and talking about it around that time. Criss-crossing a similar route albeit in somewhat different style.

There’s a span of about ten years missing. He didn’t jump from Immanuel Kant to Bozeman, Montana. During this span of ten years he lived in India for a long time studying [...] As far as I know he didn’t learn any occult secrets there. Nothing much happened at all except exposures. He listened to philosophers, visited religious persons, absorbed and thought and then absorbed and thought some more, and that was about all.

Fast forward eight years (or five) and another shift, leaving life in London behind – it seemed an appropriate time to revisit. This time I was entering the digital age, reading an electronic copy on my kindle. No annotations or notes save those I added in myself. And this time with an afterword – written ten years after publication, back in 1984 – that was not in my father’s copy.

My memory is confronted not only with recognition but with page after page of ‘new’ material that I have almost no recollection of. Half remembered passages are half remembered wrongly or at least incompletely, patterns of emphasis and meaning ebb and flow.

A beautiful building, really. The only one that really seems to belong here. Old stone stairway up to the doors. Stairs cupped by wear from millions of footsteps.

... the technology of fifty and a hundred years ago, always seems to look so much better than the new stuff. Weeds and grass and wildflowers grow were the concrete has cracked and broken. Neat, squared, upright lines acquire random sag. The uniform masses of the unbroken color of fresh paint modify to a mottled, weathered softness. Nature has a non-Euclidean 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.

Even sections that I remember as standing out bold and clear are mere sentences lost in longer unremembered stretches. The book still holds me, informs and moves me but I struggle to make it gel with what I remember of it; at a loss for what my former self took from it. It brings to mind the notion of the river never being the same from one moment to the next. I remember reading ‘The Great Gatsby’ twice within eighteen months; the first time being extremely non-plussed; getting the feeling that it must be one of those books that represented a huge leap forward at the time it was written but lost on me, unable to put it into its own context and having no frame of reference. I was encouraged to read it again not in small part by the excited descriptions within ‘Reading Lolita in Tehran’ and suddenly found it wide-open and streaming with life. I simply could not understand how I had so failed – not merely to understand it, but even to enjoy it those months before.

“The trouble is that essays always have to sound like God talking for eternity, and that isn’t the way it ever is. People should see that it’s never anything other than just one person talking from one place in time and space and circumstance. It’s never been anything else ever, but you can’t get that across in an essay.”

It’s been a few months since I felt I could sit still long enough to concentrate on anything – especially to be lost in yourself the way a good book encourages. There’s a sense of a breeze in the mind – a freshness that has been missing. It resonated with an article a friend recommended recently; Lumberjack Wisdom

I like the word ‘gumption’ because it’s so homely and so forlorn and so out of style it looks as if it needs a friend and isn’t likely to reject anyone who comes along. It’s an old Scottish word, once used by pioneers, but which, like ‘kin’, seems to have all but dropped out of use. I like it because it describes exactly what happens to someone who connects with Quality. He gets filled with gumption. The Greeks called it enthousiasmos, the root of ‘enthusiasm’ which means literally “filled with theos” or God, or Quality. [...] You see it often in people who return from long, quiet fishing trips. Often they’re a little defensive about having to put so much time to “no account” because there’s no intellectual justification for what they’ve been doing. But the returned fisherman usually has a peculiar abundance of gumption, usually for the very same things he was sick to death of a few weeks before. He hasn’t been wasting time. It’s only our limited cultural viewpoint that makes it seem so.

It was good to be still with this book again. I have no doubt that I will be still with it some more.

To discover a metaphysical relationship of Quality and the Buddha at some mountaintop of personal experience is very spectacular. And very unimportant. If that were all this Chautauqua was about I should be dismissed. What’s important is the relevance of such a discovery to all the valleys of this world, and all the dull, dreary jobs and monotonous years that await all of us in them.

...

Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire. The reality of your own nature should determine the speed. If you become restless, speed up. If you become winded, slow down. You climb the mountain in an equilibrium between restlessness and exhaustion. Then, when you’re no longer thinking ahead, each footstep isn’t just a means to an end but a unique event in itself. This leaf has jagged edges. This rock looks loose. From this place the snow is less visible, even though closer. These are things you should notice anyway. To live only for some future goal is shallow. It’s the sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top. Here’s where things grow.

Things that happen when you trumpet on the beach

Friday morning, the last day of my first course. Late start – just admin today. Take the trumpet out for a morning blast. Two distant lines of men either side of me, attached to a rope arcing out into the sea, slowly working their way closer; their boat left to drift ashore on the incoming tide. I keep edging away from the nearer line until they’re both equidistant. Some of the men give me smiles as they work. It’s slow work. No-one’s exerting themselves, they’re all just edging and letting the current do the work. 

I stroll home to get breakfast and come back with my bowl to watch as both lines shift closer together and further along the beach. When they get within fifty metres of each other the birds start appearing. Lots of birds; pelicans and frigate birds for the most part. They’re pulling in an audience of locals too, people waiting for the catch. Old ladies and mothers and wives of the men. Friends and neighbours pull up on bicycles and sit on driftwood watching. The sun is the hottest it’s felt this early in the day. Most of the men wear long sleeves in the surf, some hoods and headwraps. 

The men pull up the rope and the netting, coiling it in zigzags along the shore as they tighten the noose. More birds. As they get to within fifteen metres the pelicans start swooping into the water along the edges of the nets where the fish are ensnared or trying to break free. A couple of the men run out into the deeper surf to scare them off. But now there’s dozens and dozens attacking the water in groups and gorging. The nets keep coiling. The spectators get involved; the older women pulling free the baby silver flashes on the wet sand; the men hauling; the birds thrashing; the surf white with activity. 

The field of play shrinks until the birds are forced out and the men pull in their catch with smiles and laughter. The pelicans skulking close by for any slips or escapees. 

The frigates overhead give it up and allow themselves to be carried away on rising thermals. As I walk home along the beach I’m passed by bicycles laden with carrier bags of fish.

Time to go to work.

***

Things that happen 2:

After sunset I wander out into the low-tide surf to toot my horn. After ten minutes the landscape behind me is dark but the sea still reflects the last of the sky, an opalescent pewter. I am aware there is a figure immediately behind my right shoulder. I turn half-way through my rendition of 'Summertime'. The man is in darkness but offers his hand. He goes on to explain that he is Colombian and on a round-the-Americas trip, and that it's his girlfriend's birthday tomorrow - can I help him out. 

Entonces... wouldn't you?