Commentary on Chapter 7 of Lila - An Inquiry into Morals - by Robert M. Pirsig
Primarily what’s happening in this chapter are two things:
One, he’s setting up how his philosophy is veering into understanding the social arena within the context mentioned earlier – Indian versus European, and how this has so affected the ways of believing and understanding in this country. This will be used as a launching point for a new understanding of evolution based on Quality
The second is that we are going to start getting a sense of who Lila is and how she comes across as a person in the room, let’s say. In this case, a very small room.
So, let’s start with an interesting reaction Phaedrus has to Rigel:
He felt depressed. That Rigel had really gotten to him. Someday, maybe, he would develop a thick enough skin to not get bothered by someone like that, but the day hadn’t arrived yet. Somehow, he’d gotten the idea that a sailboat provided isolation and peace and tranquility, in which thoughts could proceed freely and calmly without outside interference. It never happened
What depressed most was the stupid way he had let himself be set up for Rigel’s attack. He had probably been invited to breakfast just to receive that little sermon. Now he’d brood for days and go over everything that was said and recycle every word over and over again and think of perfect answers that he should have said at the time.
Now, the reason I find this reaction interesting is that you would not expect Phaedrus, who we know is this utter genius, to be so affected by Rigel’s moralizing. You’d think after he had written this book about Quality, he’s above this kind of thing. But he isn’t and that’s interesting. He’s reacting the same way any of us would – ruminating and stewing on how he had been overpowered by someone with a much worse argument that he was capable of, and how he wasn’t able to access his intellect to rebut when he needed to.
Flummoxed by the whole unpleasant breakfast, he tries to psychoanalyze Rigel to try to figure out why he’s such a moralist.
So, let’s try to analyze Phaedrus for a minute. He’s said on numerous occasions, he’s socially awkward. Remember him on the streetcar in SF, too shy and awkward to make any kind of move toward who he thought was Lila, and she knew it. So, she made fun of him. Here’s the same guy, this time in a dominance battle with an inferior adversary and behaving like, let’s say, a beta. So, he’s struggling with his lack of social skills, right?
Well, there’s another explanation on top of it. Say he is socially awkward, and social situations trigger his anxiety so he can’t think. Now when you’re anxious, that happens. Anxiety is in the lower brain and the pfc cuts off when you’re anxious. That’s why therapists might direct their patients to say look at their watch or do a math problem in their heads when they are in these situations – because it gets your thinking back online. So maybe it’s partially that
But remember also what he says, that it’s too complicated to try to explain what he means (fill this in)
This is the other part of the problem. You can read all of ZMM and still not get what Pirsig is talking about. Rigel has read it, and doesn’t get it. All he sees is “, Zen, just fixing, Quality is what you like etc., there is no fixed morality, there’s only quality” and it seems like a call to revolution to him: burn your bras and your draft card. So Pirsig is in the middle, because he walks us through his process, in the middle of expanding his theory to include morals. So, he doesn’t have an easy answer for Rigel. That’s the problem.
The feeling left was one of enormous confusion and weariness, a kind of back-to-the-drawing-board, back-to-square-one feeling you get where you’re thinking you’re making great progress and then suddenly some question like this comes along and sets you back to where you started. He didn’t even want to think about it.
However, sometimes you need to be shot down in order to get up again. There is probably a good reason to go back to the drawing board that it takes a blow like this to see what you’re missing. While this may be a blow to Phaedrus’, the social pariah’s ego, it’s a bonus for his theory. Look how in this chapter, as he analyzes Rigel, he gets steps closer to where he wants to be in terms of the impact of the Victorians. So this conflict is fruitious for expanding the social piece of his theory.
So as you look at his analysis of Rigel, you see his theory develop:
First, he thinks Rigel is cutting him down to make his Victorian moral system been better – it’s an ego thing and a meanness thing.
But that attitude doesn’t explain it, then he makes the relationship between Rigel and Victorian morals.
Or is it the sex trap?
All the while, his growing insight is mirrored by the topography – same as in Zamm, he sees the Victorian, European influence the further East and closer to Manhattan he goes.
Since he’d entered the Erie Canal system he’d noticed how things seemed older and more tired. Now that feeling was even more dominant.
Hundreds of years ago these old waterways were the only way to travel in this continent. For a while he had wondered why his boat always seemed to stop in the oldest part of each city it came to, and then he realized that small boats stopping right there is what got the city started in the first place.
AS always, Phaedrus sees the origin of the pattern. So this is another topographical analogy of getting to the root of things, as he is trying to do with what exactly prompted the sermon from Rigel.
Every time he came this way he could feel the people getting more formal and impersonal and… crafty. Exploitative. European. And petty too, and ungenerous.
Since he’s from the Midwest, he explains that way of understanding, which we know is a combination of Indian and European:
In a state like Minnesota or Wisconsin you can be poor and still feel some sense of dignity if you work hard and live fairly cleanly and you keep your eye on the future.
And I love that line, because that is exactly the antidote to the victim mentality that is being promoted right about now. When we strip dignity from the poor, we strip away the one thing it would take for them to have agency. Why work or look toward the future when you’ve been set up psychologically and beaurcratically to fail? Another hidden gem of Wisdom from Pirsig. Because he does contrast these poor to the urban poor who believe they are nobody.
So I want to mention a great book, if you don’t know about it, it’s called Albion’s seed, which demonstrates how much a culture can be influenced by immigration. In the case of the US, the different parts of the East coast and south are still very much influenced by the early English immigrants. Pirsig describes another variation of that influence:
New England was settled by a completely different pattern of immigration. That was it. In the early days New England was all one big WASP family staying put, but this valley was everybody on the move. Dutch, English, French, German, Irish — and their relations were often hostile.
Which for Phaedrus may explain the Eastern attitude of standoffishness. So maybe Rigel’s problem is he’s an Easterner. But of course, that’s not it either. Maybe it’s the fact he’s a celebrity, and since we’re supposed to be equal – Indian, and exceptional, European, at the same time, it could be he’s both admired for being exceptional and disparaged for being superior. So what looks like an ego thing with Rigel may be our internal conflict as Americans.
The old Indians knew how to handle it. They just got rid of anything anybody wanted. They didn’t own property, they dressed in rags, some of them. They kept it down, laid low, and let the aristocrats and egalitarians and sycophants and assassins all look on them as worthless. That way they got a lot accomplished without all the celebrity grief.
That’s what monks in the East do as well, and the most famous mystical religious leader of all time. So you could even say this is all tied up in the mystical/materialist dichotomy that we think about a lot even today, and also infuses our morality of if you are pious, you do not value material items. You can’t worship God and mammon at the same time. There’s a lot of wisdom in that.
What he will do is grill Lila about Rigel, to see if maybe she can give him some insight. He’s really obsessed with this. And maybe again we can see this obsession as a way to try to figure it out, but it’s interesting that he hammers Lila about it to the point she gets pisses off. She has no interest in this kind of thing.
So now onto the second part of the chapter. Lila.
She’s very in the moment. She wants to eat, and she wants to eat now. And overall, the impression you get from her is someone with really little ability to reflect. She knows what she wants now and that’s good enough for her. Listen to this, it sounds like a child;
Well, we’re under way now, he said. We have to use this current while it’s with us or we lose a whole day. Tonight we’ll have a big meal.
Tonight?!
Yeah, he said.
He heard her mutter, Peanut butter and junk food… Don’t you have anything at all?… Oh, wait a minute, she said. Here’s a half a bar of chocolate.
Then he heard her say Ugh!
What’s the matter? he asked.
There’s something wrong with it. It tastes stale… How about some coffee? Do you have any coffee? Her voice sounded pleading.
He paints a picture of someone who, without any real aim outside the immediate, she capitalized on her looks. Rigel as much as said so. And now they are fading, so what’s left is a kind of rough individual, who may have lost her looks, but still retains some sexual appeal,
She moved to sit across from him. The four letters of L-O-V-E shifted around in provocative directions.
and who has lived this transient lifestyle, she hasn’t been able, or doesn’t have the ability to concentrate on anything long enough to really get anywhere. Just living off of men in what seems a very low-level way. But learns what she needs to make it in that world, including
Do you know how to steer one of these boats? he asked.
Of course, she said.
Part of her attitude:
It must be nice to have a boat like this all your own, she said. Nobody ever tells you what to do. You just move on.
You certainly get the idea that Lila does not want anyone to tell her what to do. And this adds to that in the moment, pleasure seeking personality and where it gets you. Pursuing moment to moment satisfaction, and ending up in lower and lower end scenarios. Like the one she’s in now, with this aging author, who even if she knew who he was, probably wouldn’t be impressed. Not like her banker whose life she supposedly ruined. But she keeps going, doing the best she can. What else can she do?
And this is pretty much confirmed when she asks about her career
Lots of different jobs.
What did you do?
Secretary, she said.
Oh, he said.
That sort of exhausted that. He didn’t want to hear about her typing.
Well, my guess is she never typed a word in her life. Secretary is certainly what she might have done, but she didn’t. Either way is pretty much nowhere for a woman, but one of them is more fun and much less stable. And it does kind of make you think of a time, of which Lila is a vestige, that women really didn’t have many choices. A good thing to remember the difference in a time when women have all the choices in the world. At least in the West, and that maybe we should be grateful. Lila is a very typical fallen women, which, if you are not married, is the only other thing you can be besides an office clerk in Victorian times.
What a change from last night. No illumination today. Just this kind of dull face staring ahead not looking at anything in particular.
Booze. Very problematic, but very seductive. It transforms the dull to the illuminated instantly. Yet, we know during that moment of illumination, it actually revealed something much deeper, not unlike the peyote ceremony, that through someone like Lila can be channeled something infinite and transcendent.
But now he’s contending with flesh and blood Lila, not Leela of the previous evening.
He watched her for a while.
It certainly wasn’t an evil face, though. Not low quality. You could see it as pretty if you wanted to.
The eyes were out of place somehow. Her whole face and body and style of talking and action were all tough and ready for anything, but those eyes when she looked right at you were something else, like some frightened child looking up from the bottom of a well. They didn’t fit at all.
And I’m including this, because there is an incongruence in Lila. Something we don’t know yet, but again something that transcends her rough self through those childlike eyes
As he grills her about Rigel, and discovers that she does not find him to be particularly moral, maybe he comes across an answer.
that’s the way he gets sometimes. He’s moody. Also he likes to tell other people what to do.
But you said he was not especially moral. Why would he pick on morals?
I don’t know. He gets it from his mother. He gets everything from his mother. That’s the way he talks sometimes. But he doesn’t really mean it. He’s just moody.
So maybe that explains Rigel’s attitude. Moodiness. But of course that’s not it either. As he muses on the Victorian mansions, with their oppressive overwrought posture and lifelessness, he begins to get the insight into Rigel that he needs to understand.
Victorian spirit: a whole attitude toward life. Quality, they called it. European quality. Full of status and protocol.
It had the same feeling as Rigel’s sermon this morning. The social pattern that created that sermon on morality and the one that created these mansions were the same. It wasn’t just Eastern; it was Victorian.
The Victorians always took themselves seriously, and the thing they took most seriously of all was their code of morality, or virtue, as they liked to call it.
So they are puritanical? Not really, because the Puritans came about their morality from the deepest and richest experience of God. So much so, they were willing to put up with Plymouth. It isn’t the Victorian social pattern of virtue, whether we agree with it or not, the puritans had the dynamic experience of Quality in their actual connection with God. That got them through one of the most horrendous immigration stories imaginable. The Victorians? No comparison
He got an image of them standing back of Rigel’s shoulder at breakfast this morning endorsing every word Rigel said. They would have, too. That superiority Rigel asserted this morning was exactly the pose they would have affected.
.
Smug posing was the essence of their style. That’s what these mansions were, poses — turrets and gingerbread and ornamental cast iron.
The period ended when, after having defined for all time what Truth and Virtue and Quality are, the Victorians and their Edwardian successors sent an entire generation of children into the trenches of the First World War on behalf of these ideals. And murdered them. For nothing. That war was the natural consequence of Victorian moral egotism.
Basically, the war was the advent of being trapped in a moral ideology which the Victorians substituted for a holistic view of reality. When a whole culture is in a gumption trap, very bad things can happen. And just like our own traps, it may take some kind of war to open up a crack to let the light in.
Now we get to the gist of all this rumination and interrogation. Rigel is a representative of Victorian morality. But how does it all line up? How is it then that Rigel and Lila, who they are, the relationship they have to each other figure into this theory. They are at moral odds with each other, each representing a different side. Rigel, the Victorian, hating Lila for being a fallen woman who has no eye on posing as anything else than what she is, and who is not motivated by anything else than her own needs. She just her id self…an anathema to Victorian superego morality. Two very different moral systems.
Quality is morality. Make no mistake about it. They’re identical. And if Quality is the primary reality of the world then that means morality is also the primary reality of the world. The world is primarily a moral order.
This is why he can’t explain anything to Rigel. Rigel is stuck in the Victorian moral immune system. Phaedrus would not have been able to convey Quality to Rigel because there is no opening. The only way to open someone’s mind who’s in a value trap such as this is perhaps to lay the whole theory out from scratch. To go back to the beginning. Something Phaedrus seems to have to do again and again. But again, Rigel read the book and interpreted through his own lens.
So how about Lila? Could she understand? What kind of Quality does she possess? Is it the kind of Quality that will allow for a deep understanding as seen through those blue eyes last nigh? It doesn’t look that way at all this morning.