"Quality is the parent, the source of all subjects and objects." - Robert Pirsig |
Mr Wim de Haas: Two Essays.INTRODUCTION By Henry Gurr, ZMMQ SiteMaste.
In Mr Wim de Haas’ Two Essays, you will see how he, with excellent insight, discusses the topic of “Landscape & Nature” and how he responded to his surrounding Landscape as he traveled the Route of the Book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
1) As you read Mr Wim de Haas two Essays, you should fully keep in mind that => These whole topics of “Landscape & Nature”, are VERY important! Not only in its Original Development as a Human Ideas and Concepts.
2) But ALSO you shuld keep in mind how these two essays closely relate to the larger Cultural & Arts Movement called Romanticism OR the Romantic Era.
3) Wikipedia does a very good job at explaining, to a HUGE artistic extent, the Romantic Era, which has direct application to Mr de Haas’ Essay. AND…. As you read this Wikipedia article, please pay special attention to the 24 instances of the word “Nature”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanticism ‘
4) If you study this topic enough, eventually you should get the idea that writers / poets in The Romantic Era, INVENTED BOTH “Nature” & “Landscape”, as we now know these concepts.
5) In Other Words: Before the Romantic Era, hunans, strange to say, did NOT experience either Nature or Landscape as we now know these ideas / concepts!
6) Come to think ot it =>This human development of the special awareness of “Landscape” & ”Nature are both good examples of Owen Barfield’s “Evolution of Consciousness” , wherein we can “see” the individual steps of development of what humans are NOW aware of.
7) While reading these essays, you will see a series of blue numbers in [square brackets] which indicate citations for the quotes mentioned in these essays. To jump-to the citation, click on the blue number, which wil take you down to the footnotes. To return to where you were, click the back arrow, usually in the upper left area on your browser.
CAUTION: Romantic Era, is to be distinguished from Robert Pirsig’s ZMM Book Romantic Versus Classical discussion. Of course Pirsig’s meaning & use of Romantic has similar to that in Romantic Era: But whereas the Romantics, rejected Classical, Pirsig’s whole book is an integration of The Romantic AND The Classical, into a unified system he called “The Metaphysics of Quality”.. . For A Continued Discussion, Please Also See “For Further Reading”, At The End Of This Page. -o00O00o- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in the NetherlandsQuality as Leitmotiv in Dutch Spatial Planning by Wim de Haas, February 2020 As a reader of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (ZMM) I am always looking for published uses of ZMM in Dutch texts and culture. Particularly the role ZMM played in Dutch National Spatial Planning, which I find remarkable. As is probably known, the Netherlands have a long tradition of spatial planning. In a small crowded country like the Netherlands, government intervention in spatial developments is widely accepted. This is usually explained by the huge area below sea level and the resulting centuries long struggle against the water. In order to maintain a complex system of dikes, consensus driven governance and a central authority are a need to survive. The Dutch water boards for instance, have a form of democracy, that is centuries older than our national system of free elections. Every five years, The Dutch Government makes a strategic policy document on the development of land use. This document describes the national policies on the expansion of cities and large industrial sites, roads and other infrastructure, major nature reserve, coastal defense etc. The purposes of this document is to create coherence in Governments interventions and to contribute to spatial quality. It is probably no coincidence that spatial quality was chosen as overall goal. Quality was an important concept in the ideas of many a young Government employee. ZMM played an important role in this. How did this happen? In the 1970s, when I was a student at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, ZMM appeared in every student’s dormitory room. ZMM stood on every student’s bookshelf, next to Lord of the Rings by Tolkien and Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. Throughout the Netherlands, ZMM had many readers and eventually even some early Dutch Pirsig pilgrims. For example: In 1977, two Nijmegen University students made a journey through America along the route of ZMM. They published a book with photographic impressions titled Quality, Not Quantity (Ralp Hakkert & Wiljo Doeleman, Groningen NL, 1977). A group of young government officials with new ideas, emerges from this generation of students. With time, these young officials became more and more important. They advocated the idea of quality in many areas of policy, especially in spatial policies. This goal of spatial quality appealed to many. Not only in Government, but in all kinds of social organizations. A lot of government publications quoted ZMM or – a few years later – the second book of Robert Pirsig LILA. The concept of Quality gave word to the feeling of many young policy makers, that public policy should not be just in bureaucracy or just in managerial technique, but should be something which must add something to all aspects of Dutch society. The ideas of these young policy makers were quite influential, despite the fact that their ideas are difficult to articulate in words. In that time many studies on the operationalization of ‘Spatial Quality’ were conducted. If you Google ‘Spatial Quality’, and you will find many Dutch publications. I guess this term is not very familiar in English speaking countries. A lot of these publications quote ZMM. I did some of these studies myself and quoted ZMM a lot. But in many of these studies the idea of quality was applied in a way that Robert Pirsig would have called ‘classic’. They split up the concept of quality in several aspects between which, I fear, the core is lost. The worst example was an official publication in which in a matrix 3 times 4 quality aspects of quality were distinguished! It is often heard that ZMM has played an important role in describing the ‘zeitgeist’ of the seventies. Robert Pirsig probably did not know, and didn’t even imagine, that ZMM even was a major influence in parts of Dutch policy culture. It shows once again, ZMM’s deep & widespread positive influence, proving that a true Classic of Literature transcends itself on all fronts. -o00O00o- An Essay Journey In The Meaning of LandscapeAn Inquiry Into Quality' By Wim de Haas, February 2020 The first time I learned about Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (ZMM) was in 1975 in a book review in the Dutch weekly ‘Vrij Nederland’[1]. I bought the book in the Corgi Books (edition of 1976) and read it for the first time at the campsite of Oslo (Norway), high above the city, sitting in lotus position before my tent. I so completely lost myself reading it, that the campsite operator gently asked if he was disturbing me under meditating. That was the beginning of a forty yearlong fascination. In that time I traveled the ZMM route twice: in 2009 and in 2014. Not on a motorcycle, but by car. I tried to sleep in the same motels and on the same camping spots as the narrator of ZMM, here I will call him Robert, his son Chris and his friends, John and Sylvia. Before these trips I have looked hours on the websites of Ian Glendinning (www.psybertron.org) and Gary Wegner (zamm.zqx.net/zmm is no longer viable). Also, I have read the book Zen and Now by Mark Richardson who traveled the ZMM route by motorcycle. Further, I found an unknown Dutch photo book: Quality, not Quantity; Photographic Impressions of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Ralph Hakkert and Wiljo Doeleman published in 1977. As far as I know this is the first Pirsig Pilgrimage that has ever been published. And I even read a Swedish book by Sven Lindqvist Fadern Sonen Och Den Heliga Motorcykeln[2] with the help of Google translate. But I learned the most from the website of Henry Gurr. He invited me to write this essay http://venturearete.org/ResearchProjects/ProfessorGurr/ Why Did I Follow The ZMM Route So Precisely?
Concern about the Dutch landscape was the reason I have studied Landscape Planning in Wageningen University NL (Netherlands) in the seventies. All my professional life as government official, as planner and as researcher was in one way or another related to landscape. Landscape was always there (www.planningka.com; https://bit.ly/2RpeoUk). During my studies my thoughts were quite simple: Nature and Landscapes are threatened by technology in an unequal fight. ZMM gave a different answer: Quality transcends the opposition between nature and technology. That’s the kind of answer I would like to investigate on this Essay Journey. I want to explore what the quality of landscapes is. What does landscape tell us? Or, in terms of ZMM, how can we dare to live and move around in our physical environment, without the precondition of Quality? This trip (my Essay Journey), is my method of researching these questions. It is a kind of study trip, not a fact-finding mission, but a ‘meaning-finding’ one. What is landscape?
….However, since the word landscape did not yet exist, Petrarch described his experiences with words like “admiring earthly things” OR “ had seen enough of the mountain” OR “until we reached the bottom again” OR “turn back that day, to glance at the summit of the mountain”. The English word landscape is of Dutch origin. The Dutch word is land-schap (land + to shape or sculpt), which means a portion of land, either governed by one ruler or seen from one point of view. The modern form of the word, with its connotations of scenery, appeared in the late sixteenth century when the term landschap was introduced by Dutch painters who used it to refer to paintings of inland natural or rural scenery. The English word landscape, first recorded in 1598, was borrowed from a Dutch painters' term. -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landscape
Before I left home, I got to hear “How boring the landscape of the Dakotas is. Here is nothing but emptiness.” Robert writes: “So we move down the empty road. I don’t want to own these prairies, or photograph them, or change them, or even stop or even keep going. We are just moving down the empty road. ” … Empty? … Apparently I see more than others … which is obvious if you are trained in landscape. Knowledge drives out dullness, just as Robert Pirsig said. During my studies I was fascinated to learned for the first time that physical landscapes consists of layers, like the layers in a cake. There are three layers: an abiotic layer, a biotic layer and an anthropogenic layer. The abiotic layer of stones, rocks, sand and water forms the basis. Blunt forces of nature prevail here. They fold the land and break it down again. In and on the abiotic layer the plant and animal world emerge. They form the second layer: the biotic. Man uses both layers as the basis to settle, to multiply and to give names to things. His activities condense in the third layer: the anthropogenic. It is here ,,, in North Dakota, on US Highway 12 in the barren hills of in this empty empty, land … that ZMM introduces the character of Phædrus, Robert’s old ego, whose brain was emptied by ferocious electroshock therapy. Phædrus was a restless creative thinker who did not want to commit to established frames. Phædrus made a distinction between two fundamentally different ways of thinking: classic and romantic. The classical thinking is rational and analytical, while the romantic thinking is based on feeling and intuition. Maintaining motorcycles is classic, driving motorcycles romantic. Classic thinking wants to be value-neutral and expresses itself in (natural) laws; romantic thinking, by contrast, starts from the immediate experience and expresses itself in images. This distinction between classic and romantic thinking is also relevant to landscape. Dividing a landscape in layers is typical classic, where-in Landscape layers reveal all kinds of characteristic of the land, but the landscape as a whole stays out of sight. By contrast, Romantic thinking about landscape differentiates no layers, but tries to grab the meaning of a landscape in one image: barren hills, a lonesome valley, endless landscape, lost landscape, serene landscape. This highway US 12 is a good example. I am driving on it for a few days now. In classic thinking a highway is a hardened piece of surface that makes driving easier and faster. This is the result of the classic thinking of the people who have designed, financed, and built the Interstates of the United States. But romantically seen, a highway is also the expression of an idea, which goes beyond the classic: For Robert Pirsig, it is a symbolic entrance to The Iconic West of America. In the romantic view of the landscape all boredom disappears, it accepts emptiness as it is. The romantic view embraces or even presupposes emptiness. Or as Robert expressed it, reflecting on the attitude of his travel companion Sylvia: “I thought maybe in this endless grass and wind she [Sylvia] would see a thing that sometimes comes when monotony and boredom are accepted. It’s here, but I have no names for it. ” There Are Many Kinds Of Landscapes, Each Characterized By Their Own Story:
Into The Snowfields of the Mountains of Montana: Quality Judgements
Phædrus was repulsed by the ideas of Kant’s attempt to describe beauty and ugly in rational terms. Phædrus found out that this bad feeling was caused -- not by the use of rationality -- but by rationality itself. Actually, I think Phædrus didn’t do justice to Kant’s ideas. I see Kant as an important ally of Phædrus, especially Phædrus’ analysis of the Kant’s Critique on Judgment. According to Kant, judgment mediates between ideas and experiences. A judgement is a happening of Quality, and thus not a logical operation and not rational in itself. From that point of view a judgment on beauty is completely different from a description of beauty, in rational terms. Statements about quality are also Kantian judgments, and not operations from Reason. This can also be seen in Phædrus thought experiment about life without Quality. I quote: Phædrus ‘proceeded to subtract Quality from a description of the world as we know it. The first casualty from such a subtraction, he said, would be the fine arts. ‘… ‘comedy would vanish too. No one would understand the jokes, since the difference between humor and no humor is pure Quality.’ … ‘The world can function without it, but life would be so dull as to be hardly worth living. In fact it wouldn’t be worth living.’ [4] All these quotes are about the ability of people to judge, even in the way Kant defines judgement. In the act of judgement Quality emerges. Quality is the Idea of judgment, that Kant could have said. Wow: Landscape Quality
Quality in the landscape manifests itself also as destination. It looks as if the landscape signals: “This is the right place, this place is asking for cultivation, for development, for building.” Or more symbolic: “In the West the good life is waiting for you. There you can find gold, there you can build a new life.” Like ZMM, exemplary travel through the US, always go from East to West, never the other way around. Prineville Junction Oregon: Landscape Myths
In the 4 lane highway’s ferocious traffic south of Prinevills Junction, Robert describes a landscape myth: That of the two American landscapes. “It’s the primary America we’re in. It hit the night before last in Prineville Junction and it’s been with us ever since. There’s this primary America of freeways and jet flights and TV and movie spectaculars. And people caught up in this primary America seem to go through huge portions of their lives without much consciousness of what’s immediately around them. The media have convinced them that what’s right around them is unimportant. And that’s why they’re lonely. You see it in their faces. First the little flicker of searching, and then when they look at you, you’re just a kind of an object. You don’t count. You’re not what they’re looking for. You’re not on TV.” .. “But in the secondary America we’ve been through, of back roads, and Chinaman’s ditches, and Appaloosa horses, and sweeping mountain ranges, and meditative thoughts, and kids with pinecones and bumblebees and open sky above us mile after mile after mile, all through that, what was real, what was around us dominated. And so there wasn’t much feeling of loneliness.” [7] The landscape behind him, the rural America of the Dakotas, Montana, Idaho, Eastern Oregon, was that of the secondary America where people still have real contact with each other. This dichotomy is not the result of modern technology, but according to ZMM it is caused by organizing everything in subject – object dichotomy schemes. To change this, Robert trusted strongly on the strength of individual decisions. “My personal feeling is that this is how any further improvement of the world will be done: by individuals making Quality decisions and that’s all.[8] ” Change happens only when people take quality-based decisions. “We do need a return to individual integrity, self-reliance and old-fashioned gumption.[9] ” Someone who knows how to maintain a motorcycle with great attention, will never be without friends.
What is lost is not a core principle, a rule, a force of a thing, but the attitude to deal with it. That’s what Robert Pirsig meant with Quality - I guess. Quality is about the way we construct our reality …. and indeed …. Our Myth! At the next stage of his trip Robert explains this to his son. Mendocino Coast: Right Attitudes
Robert and Chris went on. Chris stood on the footrests and looked over Roberts shoulder, both without a helmet. He enjoyed. He also wanted a motor and asked Robert if motorcycling was difficult. Not if you have the right attitudes. It’s having the right attitudes that’s hard. [11] Robert replied. These sentences strike me for the first time. I must have read them before, but I have never paid attention to them. Until now I thought these were just about motorcycling. Without this trip I had never realized, that these phrases are the core ZMM. It's all about having the right attitudes. Especially when we are forced to push a stone up the mountain every day. A right attitude is the result of practice with dedication and full attention. For instance the practice of motorcycle maintenance. Attention is a form of commitment, of waiting for Quality & judgment. The attentive waits for a breakthrough. Or as Iris Murdoch following Simone Weil said: Wait for the choice imposes itself. [12] At that precise given moment, you discover what Quality is. San Francisco: The End
Here, at this crossing, my report of this trip ends. It was a search in the landscape of ZMM that began with the difference between classic and romantic thinking and culminated in the idea of Quality as the right attitude. As Robert calls it: “… a feeling, that was not here before, and is not just on the surface of things, but penetrates all the way through. ”[13]
A) Planning as a Conversation: Planning Knowledge Attention
This site is for everyone who - like me - is interested in fundamental questions about managing the urban and rural landscape.
B) A Brief Autobiography Of Mr Wim de Haas
I have made this site about questions that have occupied me for a long time. I am fascinated by the relationship between knowledge and (government) action, language as a carrier of knowledge, and power and the role of metaphors. I had this interest in the meaning of politics, ethics and mysticism before I started studying land development and planning in Wageningen [University]. After my studies I have always had to deal with the relationship between knowledge and action from different perspectives in my work (research, implementation, knowledge policy, advice)...
C) Mr Wim de Haas Own 54 Photos, Illustrate His Travel Along Route of ZMM Book. A Photo Album: In the Footsteps of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
In English, so no translation is needed here =>]
D) My (Henry Gurr’s) own photos of my ZMM trip in 2002. To get the most benefit out of this, read each of the texts beneath the pictures, which represent albums. To see more, click on the picture to go to its album. If you double-click on a picture, it will make it its largest version. Click here to to to this gallery
-o00O00o- Links to Additional Reading Related to the AboveYou can learn a bit about Romantic Era awareness by reading the 2 inch paragraph at THE HARP AND THE CAMERA IN LITERATURE.. here
https://www.usca.edu/mathematical-sciences/faculty-sites/henry-gurr/aeolian-harp/file !Weather & Landscape Serve To Telegraph Ones Inner Thinking, A Literary Research Paper, by University of Iowa, Professor Robert Nelson. '''
In the Conclusion to his essay Place, Vision, and Identity in Native American Literatures, Professor Robert M. Nelson discusses the impact of the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.. 'I was especially intrigued by Pirsig's use of climate and geography as controlling metaphors for the intellectual topography … and landscape serve to telegraph or accompany changes in the drift and direction of the nameless narrator's own thinking. … In Pirsig's text, the structure and motion of narrative consciousness seemed (and still seems) to me to depend as much on the physical landscape through which it moves as on the currents of the intellectually mainstream ideas it retraces. That is, for all the overt abstractness-- sometimes even abstruseness--of the novel's metaphysical subject matter, its basic structure, seem fundamentally realistic, [Realistic] at least in the sense that the structure and motion of its [ZMM's] plot remain consistently responsible to the topography of the physical landscape through which the protagonist moves.
Similar to Prof Nelson’s above Concluding Paragraphs Are The Thoughts of Mr Wim DeHaas, who is Especially Good On Topic of Landscape & Nature! ...As You Read, Mr Wim DeHaas, You Will See That He, Prof Nelson, and Robert Pirsig, Are In Parallel Realities! Each in their own words, are “Seeing”, Indeed “Seeing Into” What is there, but there is no name for it Prof Nelson writes: [In ZMM, the surrounding landscape] once again becomes a topic of discourse when Sylvia's husband, John, pauses to take photographs of the prairie somewhere between Ellendale and Hague [Excerpt from ZMM] After a while he says, "This is the hardest stuff in the world to photograph. You need a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree lens, or something. You see it, and then you look down in the ground glass and it's just nothing. As soon as you put a border on it, it's gone."
I say, "That's what you don't see in a car, I suppose."
Sylvia says, "Once when I was about ten we stopped like this by the road and I used half a roll of film taking pictures. And when the pictures came back I cried. There wasn't anything there."
Of course, there is always something "there," in a photograph or in a verbal image of the landscape, but what the images are supposed to be of is, in the final analysis, missing from the photograph, or the description. To "see" it requires a moment of vision, a moment of conceptual surrender to the immediate presence of the world, a moment of identification between what takes shape in the mind's eye and what is there to be seen. And as Sylvia puts it, as she stretches out her arms in a gesture of both embrace and surrender, in that moment "`It's so beautiful. It's so empty'"
“As several Navajo songs about hozhojii (a term often translated as "Blessingway") tell us, to move in the way of the land is to walk in beauty. Perhaps this is what Pirsig is saying, at the formal heart of his Chautauqua and in his Euroamerican way, when he has his protagonist (re-)discover that "Quality is not a thing. It is an event" and that "Reality is always the moment of vision before the intellectualization takes place. There is no other reality" (222). Pirsig's narrator's "Quality" or "Reality," Welch's Loney's "possibilities of spirit," Silko's Tayo's recovery, and Momaday's Abel's return are all, in some sense, names for that "thing"--which is, when seen clearest, not so much a thing as an event, taking place--that inheres in the land, waiting to be recognized, waiting to become the informing element of healing human vision and, in works such as these, to become the indispensable controlling principle of articulation and choice.”
[END excerpt from ZMM] To Read ALL Of Professor Robert M Nelson’s Article => The Function of Landscape in Native American Fiction click on link below, and after the page comes up, Mouse Center Wheel Press Down, to select portion you want. https://web.archive.org/web/20011031223412/http://www.richmond.edu/~rnelson/PandV/front.html Technically ZMM is not about either Landscape or Nature: But as Professor Robert M Nelson and Mr Wim DeHaas discuss, ''' these “essences” are never far from the readers awareness: This happens because => Built into ZMM, at the beginning and ending of every chapter, is a Travel Narrative, which is effectively a Tragellogue, This has two components, the first 1) is obvious and the second 2) is more subtle ... 1) In order to ~lighten-up the difficult jop of reading ZMM => Author Robert Pirsig has placed at the beginning and end of EBERY Chapter => A Travelogue which is an entertaining, self contained real world story, facutal & complete with continuity of persons involved, travel times, town names, etc: Naturally real world landscape words are used => Up (430), Down (270), Tree (166), Road (144), Mountain (119), Town (47), Desert (42), Sand (23), Forest (19), Mountain-Metaphorical (`16), Mountain Pass (4), Sage (2), Terrane (1), Etc
2) But the Travelogue has a SECOND, vastly more important function: It is to poetically set the stage for the readers (and athor’s), mood, feeling, sense, aura, glow, and content, for their reading (and writing) of each Chapter’s Chautaqua Lecture! This is closely related to what Professor Nelson meant by “Weather & Landscape Telegraph Ones Inner Thinking,” (HINT: Now might be a good time to scroll back up to B) and re-read Professor’s Nelsons explanation.)->The Travelogue’s SECOND function, I call Metaphorial Bridge Connection. AFTER the following link comes up, scroll down to => The Town Of Three Forks, read this section carefully, and then go the link given. Learn more about Metaphorial Bridge Connection in the Photo Caption here => http://venturearete.org/ResearchProjects/ProfessorGurr/Documents/ZMMFactual,
To be sure you understand this second function, please notice the underlined, in the following, which is the Photo Caption of above link => ”In distance is the town of Three Forks, MT. In ZMM Chapter 22, the Narrator takes up his Chautauqua about " .... an alarmingly deep crisis in the foundations of the exact sciences ... ". As he tells us, Mathematicians had found three contradictory major mathematical geometries, of which only one of the three has fruitful/practical application to our world. This conclusion was was arrived at only, after long twisty narrow strenuous effort.
... As this Chautauqua ends ...... sure enough ...... exactly on cue
3) Of course this raises many questions Re Metaphorial Bridge Connection.=> ...How does the narrator find these poetic connections (Telegraph), between Chautauqua and Local Scenery? .... Clearly, it is a property of Robert Pirsig’s wide experience and a very active mind. Some may come from memory or spontaneous inspiration while he travels. I’m convinced that 1) Once Pirsig saw the idea of Bridge Connections was seen as effective, 2) Pirsig decided to do this on every chapter, 3) At which point he acctively looken for how to set up the Metaphorial Bridge Connection.
4) Once this way of writing ZMM was working, the Actual Travel Sequence it self, BECAME the ordering of Chautauqual Topics. And I believe this discovery is what made Pirsigs SECOND writing of ZMM so unique & successful!
...Of Course many of the connections (especially catchy/poetic town name) come from the narrator’s repeated consultation with maps, while he traveled and while he wrote ZMM. In many cases, topographic maps (topos) were consulted. (See p 21, 36.) Perhaps he wrote these into his 1968 travel notes or marked them on his map that he had open on his cycle gas tank. Several places in ZMM, he says he consults his map on the cycle gas tank as he is in motion. Some place he says the map is open to the current segment of read and strapped onto the gas tank of his cycle. This well in-grained habit, would naturally get applied, during Pirsig’s actual writing. Footnotes: citations of the quotes from the above essays 1) Vrij Nederland, 8 March 1975, by Leopold de Buch, alias Rudy Kousbroek
OrigPgCmpsdHSGfeb1620revRPGfeb1610
|
Recent Changes (All) | Edit Sidebar | Wiki Help | Page History | Edit Page | Powered by PmWiki |