Reading Pirsig’s
Zen has thus far been an interesting
ride—so to speak. I cannot say I love
everything I’m reading or agree with the choices being made during the cross-country
journey, but like the use of the motorcycle metaphor. It took me a little while to figure out just
how the ideas being portrayed are applicable to our English seminar class, but
I am gradually drawing more and more parallels as I turn the pages. I see the constant maintenance and upkeep of
the motorcycle while our central figures trudge across the map as a commentary
of our education—which is by no means limited to the confines of the four-ish
official years we are serving at MSU. We
are constantly changing, updating, fixing, and adding to our educations in an
effort to fit our personal, academic, and even professional environments as
they change over and over. Much like the
road trip of this book, the climate is constantly changing and we must
adapt. This was one of the main points
I’ve taken from Zen so far.
I like the assertion that the figure
of time is blurred by our thoughts, and, finding that Zen is comes with an ease
of mind where time seems to stand still.
The motorcycle journey is no typical road trip. Because these sorts of travelers are of the
great outdoors, the text reads, they tend to start, “thinking about things at
great leisure and length without being hurried and without feeling [they’re]
losing time” (15). The meditative
qualities of Zen are worth reflection, because really how often do we sit and
concentrate on our thoughts without the distraction of friends, family, school,
work, television, etc.? Maybe right before
bed when all is silent, but even then I feel like we are fighting our thoughts
back so we can fall asleep. I doubt I
will ever ride a motorcycle for hundreds of miles to find this peace, but it
seems like it would be pretty effective.
I feel like the narrator often takes
his thoughts a little too far, as though he’s drunk on his Zen. In reading the text, I found myself starting
to agree with what is being explained, but it seems to stray a little too far
or become too abstract at a number of turns for me to say I’m fully on
board. For example, the narrator tells
us that laws of nature are human inventions.
How he explains this makes sense, but then he goes on to say, “the world
has no existence whatsoever outside the human imagination” (42). I have a hard time with this statement and
others like it. This is to say there is
no world without human beings, and the world as we know it only exists in our
imagination. I understand that enough,
but I cannot shake the idea the physical world came before people did. I know the world he speaks of is more
cerebral, but I have trouble separating the two. I think much more straightforward. There is a world without us, but we are not
there to interpret it. The whole tree
falls in a forest idea seems to come into play.
It makes a sound. The world goes
on without us. Clearly I’m having
trouble with some of Zen’s ideas.
I had to read over the Phaedrus and
laser beam stuff a few times to understand its insertion into the text. I’m still not sure I totally get it, but I
came up with my own understanding for conversation’s sake. The text reads, “Phaedrus did not try to use
his brilliance for general illumination.
He sought one specific distant target and aimed for it and hit it. And that was all” (87). I roughly compared Phaedrus’ general
illumination to our educations as students, and the focus of the laser beam to
our areas of academic concentration—writing for the majority of us. Even that is not quite as focused as I believe
Phaedrus’ target to be. I think that
focus will come after graduation when we find jobs or make other goals to
further implement our training in different areas. One might become a professor, another a short
fiction writer, another a columnist, and another a service operator with a
great vocabulary. This is something that
truly only time will tell.
Because graduation is coming up, we
as students are starting to consider what’s next. We all have our dream jobs in mind
(hopefully), but it’s highly likely we’ll have to start from the ground up and
work toward our endgames. Here’s a short
article on what some writers are doing in the real world, whether it is there
dream position or not.
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