I’m coming into this second exploration of Zamm as someone who’s spent a couple of years immersing myself in Pirsig’s work. When I first discussed this book, chapter by chapter, I had little idea what I was talking about. And a lot of this channel was my personal attempt to understand what Pirsig was saying. So on this go round, I want to say that again, practically every line in this book is meaningful to me. I want to pick a couple of passages from each chapter to discuss.
So in Chapter 1,
Here’s the first one:
...winters when the sloughs were frozen over and dead and I could walk across the ice and snow between the dead cattails and see nothing but grey skies and dead things and cold. The blackbirds were gone then. But now in July they're back and everything is at its alivest and every foot of these sloughs is humming and cricking and buzzing and chirping, a whole community of millions of living things living out their lives in a kind of benign continuum.
The word that really stands out in this paragraph is continuum.
The main aspect of a continuum concerning our perspective is that you never really see it, or you don’t think about it. But in terms of the Eastern approach that undergirds this novel and Pirsig’s work in general, I think, is an illustration of one-ness, or anoverused term perhaps, non-duality.
To show us what unites here, he first shows us death. The dead reeds and frozen ponds. But In this continuum, the unity is life. That hum is the sound of living creatures. We hear th unity, but we don’t see it; we see the discrete creatures.
I have seen these marshes a thousand times, yet each time they're new. It's wrong to call them benign. You could just as well call them cruel and senseless, they are all of those things, but the reality of them overwhelms halfway conceptions. There! A huge flock of red-winged blackbirds ascends from nests in the cattails, startled by our sound.
The sound that emerges from all these creatures illustrates that unity, gives us a perception of that continuum which itself we can’t and will never see. We can’t see life itself, but we know it
Think of the continuum of light or more broadly, the Electro-magnetic continuum. We don’t see it. We see colors or hear sounds. But even to describe all of perceived reality as an electromagnetic spectrum is not to justice to reality. That description is material reality. There is something under it or on what reality rides. What is that? We will never know, and that is the mystery. How can we understand it? Pirsig will give us ways to do so in this book, and that is the power of Pirsig’s philosophy.
Now here’s the part of the book that is predictive, that gives a premonition of the super-charged super-networked world we live in.
The Chautauquas were pushed aside by faster-paced radio, movies and TV, and it seems to me the change was not entirely an improvement. Perhaps because of these changes the stream of national consciousness moves faster now, and is broader, but it seems to run less deep. The old channels cannot contain it and in its search for new ones there seems to be growing havoc and destruction along its banks.
There is a more benign warning in this section. “not entirely and improvement”, he says. But Pirsig gives some hope that we can regroup and get a handle on the way information is conveyed so it doesn’t bowl us over in an overwhelming but superficial tsunami of data.
In this Chautauqua I would like not to cut any new channels of consciousness but simply dig deeper into old ones that have become silted in with the debris of thoughts grown stale and platitudes too often repeated. ``What's new?'' is an interesting and broadening eternal question, but one which, if pursued exclusively, results only in an endless parade of trivia and fashion, the silt of tomorrow. I would like, instead, to be concerned with the question ``What is best?,'' a question which cuts deeply rather than broadly, a question whose answers tend to move the silt downstream. There are eras of human history in which the channels of thought have been too deeply cut and no change was possible, and nothing new ever happened, and “best'' was a matter of dogma, but that is not the situation now. Now the stream of our common consciousness seems to be obliterating its own banks, losing its central direction and purpose, flooding the lowlands, disconnecting and isolating the highlands and to no particular purpose other than the wasteful fulfillment of its own internal momentum. Some channel deepening seems called for.
The slightly stern and practical warning should have been heeded. Everything he warns about has come to pass, but in much more destructive ways than he imagined. Common consciousness has completely obliterated its own banks. Attention spans have been reduced to 15 seconds, we can easily at this point all be famous for 15 minutes. We are connected by the internet, but not by the physical world. The lowlands, the common values, the institutions, even a truth we could agree on seems to have disappeared. We didn’t follow was best, we allowed the new to sweep us away, “the wasteful fulfillment of its own internal momentum”. We took “what’s new” to its conclusion – utter fragmentation.
Ironically now, that tsunami leaves us with a sort of death. The internet, digital data is too entrenched. That the internet is our way of life and the fragmentation of attention is now dogma, and changing that seems almost impossible. Yet we continue, to be addicted to “what’s new” and this blind pursuit is obliterating and locking in simultaneously. It has resulted in a fragmentation of attention that is rendering us powerless against our own destiny.
Our only way out of the mess we’re in, which threatens humanity in a variety of ways, is to cease pursuing distracting, profitable and instantly gratifying newness and to begin, once again to pursue what is best.
But what is best? Our attention is too dispersed to agree on that at this point, so we need to rediscover what is best. We must find value once again. I propose that the philosophy in this book can help us do that. Can get us back on track. So, as we go through this time, maybe we can examine clues and ways of doing just that.