The Manuals Never Tell All You Need to Know
FLAMM, DUDLEY
The Manuals Never Tell All You Need to Know Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values By Robert M. Pirsig Morrow. 412 pp. $7.95. Reviewed by Dudley Flamm Short story...
...You're describing that feeling of being out of touch, of things slipping past, of being dead before we know it—and with a lot of regrets for having blown the scene...
...You knew readers would not mistake your book for a shop manual, so why do you try to expunge even a tiny part of the machine's reality...
...Yes, you do speak to these matters, but evasively, behind the veil, while the clarion of abstraction is hardly ever muted...
...I want to know about Phaedrus in the ordinary terms that have caused the rest of us to seek wholeness through the therapies of birdhouse building, gardening, photography, raising children, and sorting out our own nuts and bolts just like Biker...
...You're making it easy on yourself and easy on your readers, especially those who will enjoy babbling about the Big Ideas in your book...
...How am I to read your book, I ask myself...
...Or perhaps it's that title of yours, fusing things that, although they are real and true for you, are trendy status symbols right now...
...Thus, the occasion of the trip and its human encounters seem diminished by being used as a setup for the formal philosophy...
...Maybe it is the quirkiness of our era, with its sensitivity-training at menopause (male and female), jogging for middle-aged sexuality, and dieting to become yogurt itself because yogurt has a chic history and is ecologically redemptive...
...Why the shift from human pain to a dialogue in six philosophic modes...
...I think you agree with this when it comes to caring for that bike, but lose track of it whenever Phaedrus appears on the scene...
...they are effects of living, once removed from direct perceptions...
...Your book is a different matter...
...While they ride, the narrator delivers to the reader a Chautauqua, "an old-lime series of popular talks intended to edify and entertain, improve the mind and bring culture and enlightenment to the ears and mind of the hearer...
...brother...
...Reviewed by Dudley Flamm Short story writer and motorcycle racer An autobiography of the mind and body, it is on one level the story of a summer month's motorcycle trip taken by the narrator and his eleven-year-old son, from their home in Minnesota to California...
...Is he not seeking a respite from the distortions worked by our failures, reaching for a morality that allows compassion or, simpler yet, kindness for others to get some breathing room...
...Gear down your superbike...
...Or is it the story of a life, in which all statements, those about everyday bodily activity and those about the activities of the mind, are to be taken as ways of defining the narrator's (the Biker's) being...
...You have written a book that in many ways I find honest and true (virtues, for me, slightly more important than artful or intelligent...
...But happy as I am that you are whole enough to set down the true parts of your book, I am troubled by some of your strategies of artifice—the Tho-reauvian touches at the start, the quietly insistent priggishness and the parade (or is it parody...
...But I will forget, as quickly as I can, those abstractions presuming to edify and purporting to share great truths that are like the fine clothes of the naked emperor...
...And the narrator must confront Phaedrus as he and his son visit places where they once lived...
...And I find a more serious problem...
...When Biker organizes the tools of his workbench or torques his head bolts twice, is he not attempting to find that place where expertise and order can reign, that simple task at which we might not fall completely on our faces or asses...
...Literary people and popular philosophers may declare that you are meaningfully talking about the triumph of humane rationality, religion, science, and other schoolroom verities...
...I mean really...
...Is it because you are not content with the human story...
...You reach us (me, I won't be coy) where it hurts...
...Biker genuinely knows that discussing concepts is easy, but how to feel about them is hard, and how to live with them harder still...
...But we know Walden for what it is—bloodless...
...With him, however, it was all projection—the bill of particulars on what his cabin cost, the cycle of the seasons, the frozen pond water carrying its clarity to remote corners of the world...
...and when...
...You explore this time and again in those real encounters between people and people, but why can't you hold the focus in just those human terms...
...My own life is so far from tranquil that I cannot bring myself to apply the literary analyst's eye-loupe to your creation and show how it all coheres into some metaphysical, multifaceted crystal...
...And why did he have children...
...I find you very factual about them —your maintenance program is beautifully precise...
...of textbook techniques...
...And he confronts, too, his deteriorating relationship with his son, who has himself been diagnosed as suffering the beginning symptoms of mental illness...
...Yet I, for one, feel reticent about imputing such pre-sumptuousness to you, even though I find synoptic philosophy, truth-table logic and binary analysis heavily interlarded with those realities that supposedly are meant to assure a workaday existence for the airy vision—the concreteness of the bike and the down-home flavor of the Chautauqua...
...From the dust jacket of the book Dear Robert Pirsig, I write this letter with difficulty, knowing I will not be able to disguise my confusion or my feelings, and fearing that because of this, the things I am clear about may be misunderstood too...
...Why won't you tell those of us who are more directly confused by the commonplace events of living—like the mounting bitterness and warps of mind, the social pressures for successes that we didn't have the morale for (even if the talent)—than by Plato or Kant or Hume or Zen...
...Biker relishes quoting theories, and not just to exorcise Phaedrus...
...When he rightly remarks, as he repairs his cycle, that he is not working with machine parts but with ideas, he is acknowledging the bike as his means for relating both to ordinary reality and to the Phaedrus world of abstract ideas and systematic philosophy...
...The woman, not the ideas...
...Will not a public so heavily in debt already to its own groovy forms of Norman Vincent Pealism discover too much meaning in those particles of salvation you offer in the three thous clearance between piston and barrel...
...Thoreau told us right off (as you do) that his was a controlled experiment to permit certain opportunities for comment...
...The ghost is called Phaedrus...
...The Chautauqua covers many topics, from motorcycle maintenance itself through a search for how to live, an inquiry into "what is best," to the creation of a philosophical system that reconciles science, religion and humanism...
...It may well be that you are just too clever for me (no irony intended...
...There is no anguish in it at all...
...Sincerely, Dudley Flamm...
...Is it, as the subtitle suggests, a formal inquiry, where I can debate your assumptions, question your conclusions and critically examine your readings of the great works of East and West...
...There is also a whispered presumption of larger-than-life insight...
...I will remember your book indelibly for the way you checked your metric bolts and ran the threads clean with the die...
...It occurs to me that you may be trying to explain or account for Phaedrus' life exclusively in terms of these abstract ideas—that you are treating them as facts, events...
...I suspect this to be the case...
...The extent and quality of the Chautau-quas argue strongly for an existence of their own, independent of what they reveal about Biker's mind...
...I will remember it because it gave a glimpse of something that saddens me yet I know for truth—how a decent, moral and intelligent man can find more in his machine than in his own flesh and blood to solace himself...
...Maybe it will, and maybe you can profit from this...
...Maybe it's not your fault at all, and the real reason I feel cut off from so much of your book is because of that dust-jacket puffery...
...There is real anguish in it...
...Abstract ideas and intel-lectualized systems by themselves are not the causes of how we live...
...The ghost is his former self, a brilliant, questing, questioning man who under the burden of his pursuit of ideals went mad, was institutionalized, underwent shock therapy, and died—and has now returned...
...The limit is 55 throughout the land these days, and we're all in crisis together...
...I recoil...
...Still, even as I admit this view, I find myself puzzling over your playful (?) disclaimer in the Author's Note that the book isn't "very factual on motorcycles...
...I'm really saying that there are two people at work not only in your book but on your book, and that cerebral Phaedrus, who caused you so much anguish, is still up to his old tricks...
...What mundane realities kept him from making it before shock therapy and 500 cc's came into his life...
...Why did Phaedrus marry...
...And on another and connecting level, the book is the story of the narrator's visit to the "forgotten tomb of his past" and his confrontation there with a ghost...
...Oh, you know what's wrong with him, yet you like him too well all the same...
...I hope so, since I think you need success and your book is not undeserving: It does strike chords...
...Thoreau faked it also, to be sure...
...it does raise issues...
...Really...
...I tend toward the latter and see you trying to make the idea-centered world of Phaedrus meaningful to the concrete world of the Biker...
Vol. 57 • May 1974 • No. 11
