Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

  Phædrus the wolf. It fits. Walking back to his apartment with light steps he sees it fits more and more. He wouldn’t be happy if they were overjoyed with the thesis. Hostility is really his element. It really is. Phædrus the wolf, yes, down from the mountains to prey upon the poor innocent citizens of this intellectual community. It fits all right.

  The Church of Reason, like all institutions of the System, is based not on individual strength but upon individual weakness. What’s really demanded in the Church of Reason is not ability, but inability. Then you are considered teachable. A truly able person is always a threat. Phædrus sees that he has thrown away a chance to integrate himself into the organization by submitting to whatever Aristotelian thing he is supposed to submit to. But that kind of opportunity seems hardly worth the bowing and scraping and intellectual prostration necessary to maintain it. It is a low-quality form of life.

  For him Quality is better seen up at the timberline than here obscured by smoky windows and oceans of words, and he sees that what he is talking about can never really be accepted here because to see it one has to be free from social authority and this is an institution of social authority. Quality for sheep is what the shepherd says. And if you take a sheep and put it up at the timberline at night when the wind is roaring, that sheep will be panicked half to death and will call and call until the shepherd comes, or comes the wolf.

  He makes one last attempt somehow to be nice at the next session of the class but the Chairman isn’t having any. Phædrus asks him to explain a point, saying he hasn’t been able to understand it. He has, but thinks it would be nice to defer a little.

  The answer is “Maybe you got tired!” delivered as scathingly as possible; but it doesn’t scathe. The Chairman is simply condemning in Phædrus that which he most fears in himself. As the class goes on Phædrus sits staring out the window feeling sorry for this old shepherd and his classroom sheep and dogs and sorry for himself that he will never be one of them. Then, when the bell rings, he leaves forever.

  The classes at Navy Pier by contrast are going like wildfire, the students now listening intently to this strange, bearded figure from the mountains who is telling them there was such a thing as Quality in this universe and they know what it is. They don’t know what to make of it, are unsure, some of them afraid of him. They can see he is somehow dangerous, but all are fascinated and want to hear more.

  But Phædrus is no shepherd either and the strain of behaving like one is killing him. A strange thing that has always occurred in classes occurs again, when the unruly and wild students in the back rows have always empathized with him and been his favorites, while the more sheepish and obedient students in the front rows have always been terrorized by him and are because of this objects of his contempt, even though in the end the sheep have passed and his unruly friends in the back rows have not. And Phædrus sees, though he does not want to admit it to himself even now, he sees intuitively nevertheless that his days as a shepherd are coming to an end too. And he wonders more and more what is going to happen next.

  He has always feared the silence in the classroom, the sort that has destroyed the Chairman. It is not his nature to talk and talk and talk for hours on end and it exhausts him to do this, and now, having nothing left to turn upon, he turns upon this fear.

  He comes to the classroom, the bell rings, and Phædrus sits there and does not talk. For the entire hour he is silent. Some of the students challenge him a little to wake him up, but then are silent. Others are going straight out of their minds with internal panic. At the end of the hour the whole class literally breaks and runs for the door. Then he goes to his next class and the same thing happens. And the next class, and the next. Then Phædrus goes home. And he wonders more and more what is going to happen next.

  Thanksgiving comes.

  His four hours of sleep have dwindled down to two and then to nothing. It is all over. He will not be going back to the study of Aristotelian rhetoric. Neither will he return to the teaching of that subject. It is over. He begins to walk the streets, his mind spinning.

  The city closes in on him now, and in his strange perspective it becomes the antithesis of what he believes. The citadel not of Quality, the citadel of form and substance. Substance in the form of steel sheets and girders, substance in the form of concrete piers and roads, in the form of brick, of asphalt, of auto parts, old radios, and rails, dead carcasses of animals that once grazed the prairies. Form and substance without Quality. That is the soul of this place. Blind, huge, sinister and inhuman: seen by the light of fire flaring upward in the night from the blast furnaces in the south, through heavy coal smoke deeper and denser into the neon of BEER and PIZZA and LAUNDROMAT signs and unknown and meaningless signs along meaningless straight streets going off into other straight streets forever.

  If it was all bricks and concrete, pure forms of substance, clearly and openly, he might survive. It is the little, pathetic attempts at Quality that kill. The plaster false fireplace in the apartment, shaped and waiting to contain a flame that can never exist. Or the hedge in front of the apartment building with a few square feet of grass behind it. A few square feet of grass, after Montana. If they just left out the hedge and grass it would be all right. Now it serves only to draw attention to what has been lost.

  Along the streets that lead away from the apartment he can never see anything through the concrete and brick and neon but he knows that buried within it are grotesque, twisted souls forever trying the manners that will convince themselves they possess Quality, learning strange poses of style and glamour vended by dream magazines and other mass media, and paid for by the vendors of substance. He thinks of them at night alone with their advertised glamorous shoes and stockings and underclothes off, staring through the sooty windows at the grotesque shells revealed beyond them, when the poses weaken and the truth creeps in, the only truth that exists here, crying to heaven, God, there is nothing here but dead neon and cement and brick.

  His time consciousness begins to go. Sometimes his thoughts race on and on at a speed seeming to approach that of light. But when he tries to make decisions relating to his surroundings, it seems to take whole minutes for a single thought to emerge. A single thought begins to grow in his mind, extracted from something he read in the dialogue Phædrus.

  “And what is written well and what is written badly… need we ask Lysias or any other poet or orator who ever wrote or will write either a political or other work, in meter or out of meter, poet or prose writer, to teach us this?”

  What is good, Phædrus, and what is not good… need we ask anyone to tell us these things?

  It is what he was saying months before in the classroom in Montana, a message Plato and every dialectician since him had missed, since they all sought to define the Good in its intellectual relation to things. But what he sees now is how far he has come from that. He is doing the same bad things himself. His original goal was to keep Quality undefined, but in the process of battling against the dialecticians he has made statements, and each statement has been a brick in a wall of definition he himself has been building around Quality. Any attempt to develop an organized reason around an undefined quality defeats its own purpose. The organization of the reason itself defeats the quality. Everything he has been doing has been a fool’s mission to begin with.

  On the third day he turns a corner at an intersection of unknown streets and his vision blanks out. When it returns he is lying on the sidewalk, people moving around him as if he were not there. He gets up wearily and mercilessly drives his thoughts to remember the way back to the apartment. They are slowing down. Slowing down. This is about the time he and Chris try to find the sellers of bunk beds for the children to sleep in. After that he does not leave the apartment.

  He stares at the wall in a cross-legged position upon a quilted blanket on the floor of a bedless bedroom. All bridges have been burned. There is no way back. And now there is no way forward either.

  For three days and three nig
hts, Phædrus stares at the wall of the bedroom, his thoughts moving neither forward nor backward, staying only at the instant. His wife asks if he is sick, and he does not answer. His wife becomes angry, but Phædrus listens without responding. He is aware of what she says but is no longer able to feel any urgency about it. Not only are his thoughts slowing down, but his desires too. And they slow and slow, as if gaining an imponderable mass. So heavy, so tired, but no sleep comes. He feels like a giant, a million miles tall. He feels himself extending into the universe with no limit.

  He begins to discard things, encumbrances that he has carried with him all his life. He tells his wife to leave with the children, to consider themselves separated. Fear of loathsomeness and shame disappear when his urine flows not deliberately but naturally on the floor of the room. Fear of pain, the pain of the martyrs is overcome when cigarettes burn not deliberately but naturally down into his fingers until they are extinguished by blisters formed by their own heat. His wife sees his injured hands and the urine on the floor and calls for help.

  But before help comes, slowly, imperceptibly at first, the entire consciousness of Phædrus begins to come apart — to dissolve and fade away. Then gradually he no longer wonders what will happen next. He knows what will happen next, and tears flow for his family and for himself and for this world. A fragment comes and lingers from an old Christian hymn, “You’ve got to cross that lonesome valley.” It carries him forward. “You’ve got to cross it by yourself.” It seems a Western hymn that belongs out in Montana.

  “No one else can cross it for you”, it says. It seems to suggest something beyond. “You’ve got to cross it by yourself.”

  He crosses a lonesome valley, out of the mythos, and emerges as if from a dream, seeing that his whole consciousness, the mythos, has been a dream and no one’s dream but his own, a dream he must now sustain of his own efforts. Then even “he” disappears and only the dream of himself remains with himself in it.

  And the Quality, the arete he has fought so hard for, has sacrificed for, has never betrayed, but in all that time has never once understood, now makes itself clear to him and his soul is at rest.

  The cars are thinned out to almost none, and the road is so black it seems as though the headlight can barely fight its way through the rain to reach it. Murderous. Anything can happen… a sudden rut, an oil slick, a dead animal. — But if you go too slow they’ll kill you from behind. I don’t know why we still go on in this. We should have stopped long ago. I don’t know what I’m doing anymore. I was looking for some sign of a motel, I guess, but not thinking about it and missing them. If we keep on like this they’ll all close.

  We take the next exit from the freeway, hoping it will lead somewhere, and soon are on bumpy blacktop with ruts and loose gravel. I go slowly. Streetlamps overhead throw swinging arcs of sodium light through the sheets of rain. We pass from light into shadow into light into shadow again without a single sign of welcome anywhere. A sign announces “STOP” to our left, but does not tell which way to turn. One way looks as dark as the other. We could go endlessly through these streets and not find anything, and now not even find the freeway again.

  “Where are we?” Chris shouts.

  “I don’t know.” My mind has become tired and slow. I can’t seem to think of the right answer — or what to do next.

  Now I see ahead a white glow and bright sign of a filling station far down the street.

  It’s open. We pull up and go inside. The attendant, who looks Chris’s age, watches us strangely. He doesn’t know of any motel. I go to the telephone directory, find some and tell him the street addresses, and he tries to give directions but they’re poor. I call the motel he says is closest, make a reservation and confirm the directions.

  In the rain and the dark streets, even with directions, we almost miss it. They have turned the light out, and when I register nothing is said.

  The room is a remnant of the bleakness of the thirties, sordid, homemade by a person who didn’t know carpentry, but it’s dry and has a heater and beds and that’s all we want. I turn on the heater and we sit before it and soon the chills and shivers and damp start to leave our bones.

  Chris doesn’t look up, just stares into the grille of the wall heater. Then, after a while, he says, “When are we going back home?”

  Failure.

  “When we get to San Francisco”, I say. “Why?”

  “I’m so tired of just sitting and — ” His voice has trailed off.

  “And what?”

  “And — I don’t know. Just sitting — like we’re not really going anyplace.”

  “Where should we go?”

  “I don’t know. How should I know?”

  “I don’t know either”, I say.

  “Well, why don’t you!” he says. He begins to cry.

  He doesn’t answer. Then he puts his head in his hands and rocks back and forth. The way he does it gives me an eerie feeling. After a while he stops and says, “When I was little it was different.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know. We always did things. That I wanted to do. Now I don’t want to do anything.”

  He continues to rock back and forth in that eerie way, with his face in his hands, and I don’t know what to do. It’s a strange, unworldly rocking motion, a fetal self-enclosure that seems to shut me out, to shut everything out. A return to somewhere that I don’t know about — the bottom of the ocean.

  Now I know where I have seen it before, on the floor of the hospital.

  I don’t know of anything to do.

  After a while we get in our beds and I try to sleep.

  Then I ask Chris, “Was it better before we left Chicago?”

  “Yes.”

  “How? What do you remember?”

  “That was fun.”

  “Fun?”

  “Yes”, he says, and is quiet. Then he says, “Remember the time we went to look for beds?”

  “That was fun?”

  “Sure”, he says, and is quiet for a long time. Then he says, “Don’t you remember? You made me find all the directions home. — You used to play games with us. You used to tell us all kinds of stories and we’d go on rides to do things and now you don’t do anything.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “No, you don’t! You just sit and stare and you don’t do anything!” I hear him crying again.

  Outside the rain comes in gusts against the window, and I feel a kind of heavy pressure bear down on me. He’s crying for him. It’s him he misses. That’s what the dream is about. In the dream. —

  For what seems like a long time I continue to listen to the cricking sound of the wall heater and the wind and the rain against the roof and window. Then the rain dies away and there is nothing left but a few drops of water from the trees moving in an occasional gust of wind.

  31

  In the morning I am stopped by the appearence of a green slug on the ground. It’s about six inches long, three-quarters inch wide and soft and almost rubbery and covered with slime like some internal organ of an animal.

  All around me it’s damp and wet and foggy and cold, but clear enough to see that the motel we have stopped in is on a slope with apple trees down below and grass and small weeds under them covered with dew or just rain that hasn’t run off. I see another slug and then another… my God, the place is crawling with them.

  When Chris comes out I show one to him. It moves slowly like a snail across a leaf. He has no comment.

  We leave and breakfast in a town off the road called Weott, where I see he’s still in a distant mood. It’s a kind of looking-away mood and a not-talking mood, and I leave him alone.

  Farther on at Leggett we see a tourist duck pond and we buy Cracker Jacks and throw them to the ducks and he does this in the most unhappy way I have ever seen. Then we pass into some of the twisting coastal range road and suddenly enter heavy fog. Then the temperature drops and I know we’re back at the ocean again.

  When the fog lift
s we can see the ocean from a high cliff, far out and so blue and so distant. As we ride I become colder, deep cold.

  We stop and I get out the jacket and put it on. I see Chris go very close to the edge of the cliff. It’s at least one hundred feet to the rocks below. Way too close!

  “CHRIS!” I holler. He doesn’t answer.

  I go up, swiftly grab his shirt and pull him back. “Don’t do that”, I say.

  He looks at me with a strange squint.

  I get out extra clothes for him and hand them to him. He takes them but he dawdles and doesn’t put them on.

  There’s no sense hurrying him. In this mood if he wants to wait, he can.

  He waits and waits. Ten minutes, then fifteen minutes pass.

  We’re going to have a waiting contest.

  After thirty minutes of cold winds off the ocean he asks, “Which way are we going?”

  “South, now, along the coast.”

  “Let’s go back.”

  “Where?”

  “To where it’s warmer.”

  That would add another hundred miles. “We have to go south now”, I say.

  “Why?”

  “Because it would add too many miles going back.”

  “Let’s go back.”

  “No. Get your warm clothes on.”

  He doesn’t and just sits there on the ground.

  After another fifteen minutes he says, “Let’s go back.”

  “Chris, you’re not running the cycle. I’m running it. We’re going south.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s too far and because I’ve said so.”

  “Well, why don’t we just go back?”

  Anger reaches me. “You don’t really want to know, do you?”

  “I want to go back. Just tell me why we can’t go back.”

  I’m hanging on to my temper now. “What you really want isn’t to go back. What you really want is just to get me angry, Chris. If you keep it up you’ll succeed!”