Napkin theory 101
June 13, 2008 – 10:41 am” Gumption is the psychic gasoline that keeps the whole thing going.” - Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
This essay(s) began for me with a re-reading of a really good book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values by Robert Pirsig. This book was part of a series of books assigned by Professor Michael Robinson while completing my graduate thesis at Auburn University. Why should a course just end when the calender says it does? Furthermore why should it be at the University? Could it not be on a motorcycle like Pirsig’s experiences were, which drove the writing of the book in the first place? Sure, said my professor. What do you think about that idea? Its fabulous, I just wish someone would do it. At this point in graduate school you learn to not elaborate nor press for details, vague approvals are priceless. Hence there was no formal plan for this trip, in fact it amounts to only a loose bundle of folded napkins stuffed into the breast pocket of my jacket and is evolving as we, Marta-my motorcycle, and I, motor across the Rocky Mountains. A real ehad me-hamitbodedim thing you might say. The napkins began accumulating in a coffee shop one morning when leaving the mountain town of Telluride, Colorado, where I live.
In a small ranching town nearby I have a friend who owns a great little and bookstore, Cimarron Books and Coffehouse. Here I stopped for a coffee break and looked out highway 550 that runs north and south. I had chosen to head south that morning to Arizona by New Mexico, directly through the San Juan Mountains, a beautiful and challenging drive in some of the most rugged terrain in the lower 48 states. As I contemplated this over a cup of coffee that morning I started trying to make sense out of some of the thoughts that Pirsig’s book had left me originally with on the first reading years ago and how I had failed at applying those lessons to my own life. What a lesson that is- I read or experience something, have great revelations about how it should change my life and then do exactly the opposite.
Pirsig writes about this “Church of Reason” and in it he deconstructs the education system most of us experience. He feels that no one really goes to a college for the attainment of knowledge per se anymore. It is a pursuit of a future place in society - measured by grades, which we are conditioned to work for rather than the knowledge the grades are suppossed to represent. Unfortunately many of us stick with this pattern as we enter in the real world. Jobs are chosen because of money, location – affordability, housing - upside resale potential. Regretably, we have more contacts than friendships.
Academic courses like this are finite instead they should be put aside when the semester ends and picked up again (irregardless of the grade assigned) and further expanded, the readings studied again, the trails of thought retraced and pushed further. A motorcycle ride across a continent filled with hiking in the mountains is perhaps a far superior venue to the classroom. How can anyone not concur with this? That’s my argument by the way - to take a course I have already taken, get more credit for it and pick up the thought trails where they left off. Read the same books, but rethink every thought of my own along with that of my collegues and get the hell out of the church of reason while riding a motorcycle. Miracles happen, they agreed.
In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values ,Pirsig focuses considerable attention on the word Quality and through his alter ego - narrator Phadreus, explores its meaning deeply. The better word though that comes to mind for me after reading this book and thinking about it for a while is fullfillment. This is what he was (in a way) or should have wrote about. What Pirsig is getting at is values in this book. But these are the pieces and the wholeness of where this is headed as advocated through a kind of “passionate caring”. This type of passion and values become the ground of being in his argument. But more than “quality”, I think fullfillment defines experience - captions “being”. Let me put it this way, if anything, quality can be but a measure of fullfillment.
These are Robinson’s books – I’ve added the ones on Kabbalah and Hardcore Zen
The definition of fullfillment in the Oxford dictionary is “a feeling of satisfaction at having achieved your desire.” It comes from the old english word “fulfillen” which is rooted in an earlier version “fullfyllen”. The root of this is the prefix full and in old english there is a myriad of nouns and verbs all sharing additional insight. Meanings that are beyond the surface meaning of “full” a pint for example alone. To perfect…to advance, to complete, to pursue, all are the “fullest” examples of “quality”. There is nothing beyond it and it has the air of completion in whatever event is being measured or evaluated. Its use ends all observation and signals a new event linguistically-physically. Fulfillment is also a word that is no easy task of time assigned to it. It can look forward and backward or include the present simultaneously. Hastily I started writing down things on napkins that caused me to experience fulfillment in life. This grew into a stack quickly although they were not things that I did or happened to me often I painfully noticed. I paused and then wrote down the ideas and plans I currently had in life - career, business opportunities, investments, and the dreaded Plan A, B, and C that were my psychological hedge against events not unfolding in the planned direction of my choice.
At the end of this exercise there were two distinct piles of bar napkins. One which had a definite theme to it and had guided me unfailingly, so I thought, the past ten years, and the other, which brought fulfillment. In the relationship between the two sets of napkins was the reason I was what Pirsig describes as the “ego-hiker”.
To the untrained eye, ego-climbing and selfless climbing may appear identical… but what a difference! The ego-climber is like an instrument that’s out of adjustment…every step’s an effort, both physically and spiritually, because he imagines his goal to be external and distant.
Upon realizing this I quickly threw the napkins from the rational - “external and distant” non-fulfillment pile into the trash. Shortly afterward I added my maps which had the carefully highlighted route to Scottsdale on them. The napkins that were about how I experienced fulfillment were now folded carefully and pressed into my breast pocket. This would be how I would continue professor Robinson’s course – afield, alive. I started my motorbike and at the intersection removed the first napkin - which had “Arctic circle” scrawled on it and turned Marta north instead of south. No one would complain if this course was a long one.
