Motorcycle Lessons

Talking and doing (and doing talking) in two "inquiry based" books

This is the eighth and final section of Chase’s 2023 Reading in Review, a series of posts where Chase reflects on books read in 2023. The first is here. The reviews don’t assume you have read the works, and don’t spoil their experiences. This section discusses:

• Robert Pirsig’s Zen & The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

• Matthew B. Crawford's Shop Class as Soulcraft

Two books I read at the end of this year feel like good echoes and ending notes to the Dillard and Thoreau two I read at the start. The first of these is Robert Pirsig's Zen & The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, excerpts of which were given to me to read in high school. I remember then older kids saying, reverently, that it was good that you get to read this in that class, but it didn't leave any impression on me then. We read it as part of a unit on theory of science, and in this read now in 2023, I kept waiting for the elements that would seem familiar, but they didn't. Given that reputation, I was surprised at how counter-culture the book was, not just in its 70s hippie motorcycle aesthetics, but in its anti-establishment POV.

Zen & The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is a novel, and it has a story, even if its reputation (to me? or to everyone?) is more as a philosophical treatise. Early on, after much gesturing from the protagonist about a "lost friend" of his, someone who he once knew and who haunts him, we get this very beautiful piece of writing:

One Friday I had gone to work and gotten quite a lot done before the weekend and was happy about that and later that day drove to a party where, after talking to everybody too long and too loudly and drinking way too much, went into a back room to lie down for a while.

When I awoke I saw that I’d slept the whole night, because now it was daylight, and I thought, My God, I don’t even know the name of the hosts! and wondered what kind of embarrassment this was going to lead to. The room didn’t look like the room I had lain down in, but it had been dark when I came in and I must have been blind drunk anyway.

I got up and saw that my clothes were changed. These were not the clothes I had worn the night before. I walked out the door, but to my surprise the doorway led not to rooms of a house but into a long corridor.

As I walked down the corridor I got the impression that everyone was looking at me. Three different times a stranger stopped me and asked how I felt. Thinking they were referring to my drunken condition I replied that I didn’t even have a hangover, which caused one of them to start to laugh, but then catch himself.

At a room at the end of the corridor I saw a table where there was activity of some sort going on. I sat down nearby, hoping to remain unnoticed until I got all this figured out. But a woman dressed in white came up to me and asked if I knew her name. I read the little name clip on her blouse. She didn’t see that I was doing this and seemed amazed, and walked off in a hurry.

When she came back there was a man with her, and he was looking right at me. He sat down next to me and asked me if I knew his name. I told him what it was, and was as surprised as they were that I knew it.

“It’s very early for this to be happening,” he said.

“This looks like a hospital,” I said.

They agreed.

“How did I get here?” I asked, thinking about the drunken party.

The man said nothing and the woman looked down. Very little was explained.

There is a little cozy drama at the start, the peace of going to a party after a long day at work, drinking too much, lying down and then having the awkward thought: I don’t even know the names of the hosts! It’s unnerving when the house morphs, the long corridor, the strangers talking to him, the failed joke about the hangover. The line This looks like a hospital is great, noncommittal, it LOOKS like a hospital.

This is how we learn that the friend who has been haunting our narrator is actually our narrator, a previous personality. He’s had electroshock therapy and now only partially remembers his past. This leads to great drama. He goes to visit an artist friend who he isn’t sure will notice how different he has become. He goes to his old university and floats through the halls, slowly recognizing old offices and water fountains. He talks to a former colleague while having no recollection of who she is. It’s creepy and sad.

It also raises the stakes of the drama he has with his young son, who he notes has emotional and psychological issues. The tension underlying much of the plot, then, is what kind of man his son Chris will grow up into if his father also struggled with these psychological issues.

But Pirsig’s goal isn’t to write this tension too deeply or tell the narrative story. He wants to talk about his thoughts, he does want this to be something closer to a philosophical treatise.

There are a few main strains to Pirsig’s philosophy, one of which takes up the most space and is the messiest. This is explored when our narrator’s previous personality, who he calls Phaedrus, underwent an episode while teaching rhetoric to undergrads. He strayed from the curriculum. Instead of force-feeding his students examples of great rhetoric and then grading their shitty papers, he lets the class flow into an investigation of what “quality” means. This word is important to Phaedrus and to Pirsig, but I can’t imagine it’s inspired a ton of people to proselytize this after this novel.

Phaedrus’s attempts to define quality are simultaneously meant to be compelling to the reader (“Wow, he really is seeing the world differently, I agree with him!” the novel seems to want us to say) and also are the things that led him into the psychological turmoil that required treatment. So simultaneously, he’s supposed to be tortured and messy, but also insightful enough that we should take from it. I didn’t feel that way. Phaedrus’s concerns voice deep frustration and nihilism about all of academia and traditional philosophy. It's a weird book to give a high schooler in a formal class (though I'm pretty sure we skipped all that. We focused on Phaedrus's observation that hypotheses in science are external to the system, which is a great one: you can't reach any objective truth if you generate hypotheses to test faster than you resolve them.)

The aspects of this philosophy that are interesting are all pedagogical. What feels right about Pirsig, if not his conclusions about quality, are about how we learn and how the University functions. He has a great long passage where he advocates for abolishing grades, and tells in great narrative detail how a student who drops out of college in their early 20s might rediscover education later in life with much a much better, more appropriate attitude, if there weren’t the stigma. His bit, which I quote in an earlier post, about inspiration and how quality writing happens, without imposing rules, was compelling.

What I suspect most people get out of this novel, which is in the title, is the attitude towards work and technology. This is the germ that starts the novel, when the narrator notes that he feels irked by his friends' unwillingness to repair their own motorcycles, preferring to leave that kind of work to professionals. He follows through on his strawman of their logic, that his friends are hippies who distrust technology, and so their attitude is to attempt to ignore it and spend as little of their own brain power thinking about technology. Again, I like the descriptive nature of his prose:

You go through a heavy industrial area of a large city and there it all is, the technology. In front of it are high barbed-wire fences, locked gates, signs saying NO TRESPASSING, and beyond, through sooty air, you see ugly strange shapes of metal and brick whose purpose is unknown, and whose masters you will never see. What it’s for you don t know, and why it’s there, there’s no one to tell, and so all you can feel is alienated, estranged, as though you didn’t belong there. Who owns and understands this doesn’t want you around. All this technology has somehow made you a stranger in your own land. Its very shape and appearance and mysteriousness say, “Get out”. You know there’s an explanation for all this somewhere and what it’s doing undoubtedly serves mankind in some indirect way but that isn’t what you see. What you see is the NO TRESPASSING, KEEP OUT signs and not anything serving people but little people, like ants, serving these strange, incomprehensible shapes. And you think, even if I were a part of this, even if I were not a stranger, I would be just another ant serving the shapes. So the final feeling is hostile, and I think that’s ultimately what’s involved with this otherwise unexplainable attitude of John and Sylvia. Anything to do with valves and shafts and wrenches is a part of that dehumanized world, and they would rather not think about it. They don’t want to get into it.

What Pirsig proposes, in a pretty big and inspirational way, is that even with valid feelings about technology and the way that the world’s progress in modernism has alienated so much, the path to less alienation might come through better understanding the material basis of the world, including its technology. This is not only radical, it’s also almost certainly both correct and vindicated by time.

Pirsig writes that giving your bike up to a shop to maintain alienates you even more from what you own. To understand how your own things work is a unifying, good principle. Being able to, in a very Thoreau self-reliance way, fix one's own motorcycle, can un-alienate you, return a sense of self to one's work, and also serve as a great foundation for an active critical mind.

On this, Pirsig proposes a framework of "gumption traps", or common psychological mistakes, which impede fixing a motorcycle, though which are obvious applicable in almost all areas of problem solving. They're great, and the fact that they feel totally separate from Phaedrus's strange esoteric quest for “quality” shows the problem with how much of the book is about that stuff. I won't quote all his definitions, but it's worth going to his Chapter 26 and reading about what he calls value traps, truth traps, and muscle traps. This is the value of connecting one's mental, physical, and lived work. In more revolutionary economic terms, which Pirsig avoids doing, instead of working for a market or working for a boss, you're working for yourself.

The book I paired with Pirsig's is Matthew B. Crawford's Shop Class as Soulcraft, which takes this last thread of Pirsig's and makes a cleaner book out of it. Gone are the psychological problems, the deep discussion of pedagogy, and the long investigation into pet philosophical terms. Instead, we get a neat review of the idea that we can find more meaning and deeper values out of doing things ourselves, with our own two hands. He gets into the history, the economics, and the personal experience of this idea. This cleaner account doesn't mean better, but I do suspect that Crawford's book is the one people are expecting when they read a title like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Crawford quotes heavily from Pirsig, particularly around a great scene where Pirsig writes about how hired bike shop labor won't have the same sense of pride in repairing your bike versus you would. They're clocking in, doing alienated labor. You're doing it for you. For better or for worse, Crawford also takes a more consumer, individualist perspective (emphasis mine):

It is characteristic of the spirited man that he takes an expansive view of the boundary of his own stuff he tends to act as though any material things he uses are in some sense properly his, while he is using them and when he finds himself in public spaces that seem contrived to break the connection between his will and his environment, as though he had no hands, this brings out a certain hostility in him. Consider the angry feeling that bubbles up in this person when, in a public bathroom, he finds himself waving his hands under the faucet, trying to elicit a few seconds of water from it in a futile rain dance of guessed-at mudras. This man would like to know: Why should there not be a handle? Instead he is asked to supplicate invisible powers.

Crawford is poignant and right here: we would have a better connection to the world if we were able to connect more easily to it, if it didn't feel like the stuff we interact with were only rented, built for systems bigger than us, not at human-scale. Crawford's also got a bit of a mean bite to him, a bit hyper-masculine: why so much anger? Why so much focus on men's work? (he says, in the intro, that he leaves applying all his learnings to women as an exercise to the reader--ouch!) Sometimes, it feels like the devotee of Crawford would be a great Tyler Durden convert, and that's not a compliment!

He's also, like I mentioned, leaning into individualism. Note that Pirsig's example is about labor, Crawford's is about consumption. That said, I dp like his observation that his own insight, that we wish we had a deeper connection to the stuff we make, has already been co-opted into consumer culture, is already being sold back to us (though falsely):

An ad for the Yamaha Warrior in the July 2007 issue of Motor Cyclist carries the caption Life is what you make it. Start making it your own. The picture shows a guy in his home shop, focused intently on his Warrior. There are motorcycle parts on shelves above his ancient workbench, and a full stack of grungy, obviously well-used tool boxes in standard mechanic’s red. He’s not smiling for the camera; he’s lost in his work. A smaller caption reads, The 102-cubic-inch fuel-injected Warrior. We build it. You make it your own. Smaller still, it reads, You only get one shot at life may as well make it mean something. And when you start with the four-time AMA Prostar Hot Rod Cruiser Class Champion Warrior, then add your choice of scores of Star Custom Accessories, the result is very powerful. And very personal.

So it turns out, in the small type, that what the guy is actually doing is attaching some accessory to his bike. This is a little like those model cars where the child’s role consists of putting the decals on. Motorcycle culture retains a dim remembrance of the more involving character of the old machines, and the ad seems to gesture in that direction. Back in the 1950s, when the focal practice of baking was displaced by the advent of cake mix, Betty Crocker learned quickly that it was good business to make the mix not quite complete. The baker felt better about her cake if she was required to add an egg to the mix. So if the Warrior were to be christened with a street name, an apt one might be the Betty Crocker Cruiser, forged as it is in the Easy Bake Oven of consumerism.

We know we want a deeper, productive relationships to objects (i.e., labor-offering rather than labor-saving, rather than consuming. We don't want easier work, we don't want to consume even if we do consume, we want more meaningful work). Marketing is already selling that to us, though inauthentically.

There's also something here that I think is critical, which connects to Dillard's observation of pre-modern growth concerns, and of post-modern (and post-post-modern) "problems that come from successfully solving problems." It's that we should not be fooled by the rhetoric of the narrative of progress. Part of what makes modernism so alluring is the simple narrative: "with time, we made things better." We can make skyscrapers now and cure smallpox, so the world has progressed. What Crawford gets at here is the observation that the world does not necessarily get better with time. We used to build better motorcycles before we over-industrialized, over-consumerized them. We used to have easy, less alienating plumbing fixtures. We all know that clothes made today, even expensive "high quality" clothes, are no longer made like they used to. "Things have gotten worse" is sometimes hard statement to see as true, it's why I care about "debunking" modernism in an earlier post. The converse argument, that because things have gotten worse and thus we should "go back" to how things were, is equally dangerous. Reactionary thinking, rejection of technology and dismissal of hope towards progress, is what Pirsig's frustration with his travel mates is good at making sure we don't do.

Along those lines, despite Crawford's good analysis of how society is organized to promote this alienation, how much better it is for selling things if we are consumers, Crawford has little social imagination, and a nasty reactionary tone. The end-game of his work is the "spirited man," an individual, someone who sits at a real work bench and works, alone. Where is the community? Is meaningful contribution to society and community not essential in a mission of un-alienating the world? At least Pirsig had friends!

This is why, of the four books I'm connecting together in this, I think it's worth ending with Pirsig. Not Thoreau, alone in the woods. Not Dillard, who has great social imagination from her solitude at Tinker Creek. Not Crawford, rugged spirited lonely man.

Pirsig writes his narrator as a separate character from Phaedrus, the man who lost his mind chasing quality. Our narrator is trying to take his son on a motorcycle trip, and like Phaedrus, his brain is going with thoughts and observations. Unlike Phaedrus, his impetus in exploring those thoughts isn't to solve some kind of esoteric master-of-the-world theory of everything. It's about sharing. Our non-Phaedrus narrator uses the phrase Chautauqua for what he's doing here:

What is in mind is a sort of Chautauqua—that’s the only name I can think of for it like the traveling tent-show Chautauquas that used to move across America, this America, the one that we are now in, an old-time series of popular talks intended to edify and entertain, improve the mind and bring culture and enlightenment to the ears and thoughts of the hearer. The Chautauquas were pushed aside by faster-paced radio, movies and TV, and it seems to me the change was not entirely an improvement.

In practice, the Chautauquas are a grounded series of thoughts he wants to share: we usually get a descriptive scene of him getting on his motorcycle, and then while he's driving, his thoughts develop into memories and opinions about the matters he's discussing. The talk ends when the day ends, when he shifts back into talking about stopping his bike, getting food, finding shelter. Then the next day, it happens again. He re-opens his thoughts to re-consider while back on the bike.

I found this intensely relatable. This is how thinking works, it happens in the margin while walking or eating or doing a hundred other random tasks. Pirsig's subtle radical impulse is to take his thoughts and make them shared. He goes from rumination (bad, ugly, turns into madness) to Chautauqua. Sometimes, in the diegesis, he shares his Chautauqua with his driving companions, including his son. Sometimes, they're just written down, for us, his readers.

I think this impulse to share his thoughts is the most pro-social impulse underlying Pirsig, and consequently, also Thoreau, Dillard, and in a sense Crawford. He wants to share. Pirsig's book is strange and messy, full of things that feel like he cares about so deeply even if the make his book harder to package. That's because, like Rick Rubin says over and over and over, you create to share, but you create with what you need to create in mind, not the audience. Pirsig wrote his book, not Crawford's, and that’s more radical than if he packaged it better, marketed it better. And just because it's personal, and authentic to the personal, doesn't make it narcissistic.

I don't think I would have written this and felt excited to share thoughts on 2023 reading without developing that concept more deeply. Thank you for reading this!

This is the eighth and final post of 2023 Reading in Review. More to come. Subscribe above to get email alerts for new posts.