Metaphysics of Quality (MoQ) Expert Dan Glover, Reflects On His Current Life and The 30 Years of Dynamic Quality Since the Publication of Robert Pirsig’s Book “LILA”. .

You get to my home by driving down a long dirt road full of ruts and potholes that wash deeper with each passing rainstorm. Check that: Long sandy road. There is no real dirt here, none of the rich black top soil you get up north in Illinois, not unless you haul it in. Magnolias and cypress trees grow in profusion forming a canopy over my road. Enormous oaks draped with Spanish moss suggest a step back in time, yet they are widening the highway that leads here, putting in a second two-lane to accommodate the fast-growing population.

My office looks out on the banks of a canal that leads to the St. Johns, the river that along the way gathers its sluggish waters and grows increasingly massive as it plows north pushing through the middle of Florida. I sit huddled at the keyboard, mind wandering, intending perhaps to do a bit of writing if only, if only, but instead find myself peering out the glass patio doors at the water, forever ebbing and flowing (we're close enough to the ocean here to share the tides), at the birds and gators and otters that grace me with their presence. Like me seeking these words, a blue heron sharpens her beak and perhaps dreams of fish yet uncaught.

I live alone in the middle of this swamp with my cat who is every bit as reclusive as I am. She is a true apex predator, too easily distracted by anything that twitches, and so I suppose whether I like to admit it or not, we make a good pair. Cedar bookshelves line two of these office walls, shelves I built myself from rough-sawn lumber procured locally. Beautiful wood with a scent that lingers long after the cut. On one shelf I see it -- lurking in the shadows, perched like one of those square black spiders you find here: a copy of Lila, signed by Robert M. Pirsig, a dark premium hardbound copy he sent me after I mailed him one of the first copies of Lila's Child, the book he helped me put together by so graciously providing annotations.

In the beginning, at first reading, okay, yeah, I admit it. I thought Robert Pirsig's second novel, Lila: An Inquiry into Morals, sucked rotten turtle eggs. None of the characters had any redeeming value insofar as I could tell: Phaedrus was a cold and calculating fish out of water, Richard Rigel was an asshole extraordinaire, and Lila Blewitt was not much more than a blonde bimbo of a whore. Then there was the pimp Jamie, who showed up to knock off Phaedrus and steal the Arete but only ended up getting cut for his trouble, and well, what is there to say about him? What I did not realize then was how Chris Pirsig had been murdered and how that tragedy leaked into the story of Lila, possibly leading to the character of Jamie. But that's speculation, nothing more.

What did intrigue me was the philosophy embedded in Lila, the Metaphysics of Quality, or the MOQ for short. I remembered first reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance way back when, when it was first published in 1974 -- thinking to myself: there's something at work here, something behind the scenes that isn't being fully explicated, and then some quite a few years later, Lila appeared. And there it was. That something that was missing in ZMM. So, I read Lila again, and yet again. By that time, I'd joined an internet discussion centered around Lila, a group of people I would continue to engage with over the next twenty years, and which, somewhere, somehow along the way, led me to a dialogue with the author of Lila, Robert Pirsig himself.

Now, they tell me the 30th anniversary of the publication of Lila is coming up soon. I was caught quite unawares. My gosh, thirty years. That and 1991 seems like forever ago, a literal stone age: no internet, no smartphones, no crypto, not even an Amazon.com to light the way to do my midnight shopping by. How on earth did we even survive? I don't know. I don't have a clue. But I do wish Mr. Pirsig was still here with us to celebrate. Still, I hear a new book is coming soon, On Quality: An Inquiry into Excellence, and I find I am fairly bursting at the intellectual seams to read it. Pre-ordered? Yes. Excited? Of course. And soon, soon. But here: look at what I found hiding in my saved folder:

"I'm going to do a book one of these days about the importance of being blocked," Pirsig says. "A writer who isn't blocked is going to write crap. It means he's writing off the top of his head, he's writing cliches. The way I look at it, a writer should value his blockages. That means he's starting to scale down, starting to get close. A block is a subconscious voice that says, 'Don't sell out by surrendering to the demands of the marketplace.' "

Yes, the demands of the marketplace. Normally, sure, we think of the marketplace as where we buy and sell goods, but there is far more going on than money. We buy and sell ourselves too. And it is that to which I think Mr. Pirsig is referring, the selling of oneself. There was a time when I wrote. Period. I wrote every day and late into the night. And then one day all that stopped. A few years ago, I migrated from Chicago to this shack in the middle of the swamps of Florida, and the writing has since ceased. Oh, I scribble a word now and again, and I am not really ready to call myself blocked, though perhaps that's as good a way of putting it as any. But I can say without hesitation that I have never sold out. I have never surrendered to terms I couldn't live with. Even when I was sorely tempted.

I was invited (maybe 'invited' is too strong a word but I am unsure what other terminology to use) to the MOQ conference in 2005, to celebrate Anthony McWatt's Ph.D. Excited at first, I made plans. I looked to book a flight and reserve a motel, and even plotted my itinerary, rental car, roads to travel. In the end, though, I didn't go. I tell myself how I was not then and am not now much of a mingler with people, preferring instead to spend most of my time alone. But really, I just don't want to sell out. Not then, not now.

I continue to study Lila, and I see a lot of the MOQ in everything I read, all I write, even in my day-to-day interactions with the world. Then again, perhaps I'm not unlike Avi Loeb who sees light sails in every passing comet. Filters. They can be enlightening or disastrous, and sometimes both simultaneously. Filters, yes. I have mine. You have yours.

When afforded the opportunity, one of the first questions I asked Mr. Pirsig was: Did you base the characters in Lila on real-life people like you did in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance? Are they filters? Was there a real Rigel? A real Lila?

He said: No. I was Phaedrus. I was Rigel. I was Lila. I was the Arete.

I sat confused.

Finally, after thinking on this for a few days, I wrote back and said: But Phaedrus was such a cold intellectual guy, and in a word, unlikeable. From our brief exchanges, I find you're warm and humorous -- the polar opposite of Phaedrus. You're nothing like him. You can't be Phaedrus. Mr. Pirsig said (and I paraphrase): Yes. It bothers me how people tend to think of Phaedrus as me, as if that's who I really am. But that isn't me, though I do at times tend to over-rationalize situations that might be better left simple. That's just a part of my personality, not the entirety of it.

That was one of those ah-ha moments, a lightning strike of clarity. Sure. Phaedrus as a character is Robert Pirsig, but not him in his totality. Phaedrus is the intellect, just as Richard Rigel is the social, Lila Blewitt is biological, and the Arete is inorganic. We are all made up of those four static patterns, along with undefined Dynamic Quality. That's the genius of Lila as well as its downfall, perhaps. Could be that's why Lila will never be seen by most people as being on a par with Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: our cultural filters are set up in ways that do not align well with the philosophical message contained in Robert Pirsig's second and by far more important book. Entertain us, we say, nay, demand. And Lila does not follow that prescription. So, I think, most readers don't identify with the book. Can't.

Will enough time help ameliorate this disconnect? Will another thirty years alter the fact people simply do not like the book as much as ZMM? Probably not. What, after all, does a book from the stone age have to offer to this onrushing future changing so quickly we scarce have time to acknowledge the differences before we've moved on to something new? Well, perhaps dharma. Quality. The glue that holds society together even in the face of "vast emptiness and nothing sacred." This freedom to create is irrevocably destroying old ideas, the static rituals that hold us in our place, and there's no stopping that Dynamic process. Like the St. Johns and the encroaching highway, technology is a tidal wave slowly gathering force that will wash us all away if we are unprepared, roll over us and leave us twitching and wishing for death.

We teeter on the cusp of not only a revolution but an evolutionary leap exponentially larger than anything humankind has experienced in perhaps the last seventy thousand years. In other words, in spite of the myriad advances over the past thirty years, we ain't seen anything yet. The next thirty are liable to rock us to our socks. Perhaps now more than ever we need roadmaps like the one contained in Lila: not so much a yes, go this way, no, don't go that way, but rather an okay to go both ways since they may well end up in the same place anyhow; a more expansive way of gauging our niche in the universe all the while keeping in mind cultural biases that could be guiding us wrong and yet might possibly save us too. There's no telling which. Maybe there's hope after all. Hope for something... better.

~Dan Glover, September 2021~

SPECIAL THANKS To Mr. Glover For Penning These Reflections Special To ZMMQuality.

Dan Glover is editor of “Lila's Child: An Inquiry into Quality” (2002) featuring a forward and annotations by Robert M. Pirsig, and is a prolific novelist and short story writer. To learn more about Dan Glover and his writings, please see his Amazon Author Page. Click Here.

Lila and Pirsig fans will also want to check out Dan Glover's

Henry Gurr’s Thoughts, After reading Dan Glover’s “Reflections On Lila 30th Anniversary”. An Email Sent Sep 19, 2021.

To Dan Glover & David Matos

It is EXCELLENT to have Dan Glover's completed Essay, with his thoughts on the 30th anniversary of Lila. This will make a GREAT contribution for Facebook ZMMQ Celebration of Robert Pirsig’s Book!!

In reading this essay down to “blue heron,” I’m noticing the ~stream of conscious writing & thinking these are really good descriptions! ... But also wondering” Why start the essay this way? (Just now on a second reading of first 3 paragraphs)
… AHA!! This starts off just like the first two pages of ZMM !!

And in the SAME manner, uses the context of several real factual physical circumstances, to tell us important facts about the person writing these sentences! … WOW! .. Pretty good!! Just like ZMM !!!

By the time my reading reaches “dark premium hardbound copy” … I’m thinking” Hey this IS good writing … Lots of good live first-person history re Lila Book with the factual history of questions asked and what Pirsig himself replies, with added discussions!

… And by the time I reach “joined an internet discussion, I’m CERTAIN that this IS good writing: (And as I’m doing a 3rd & final read just now), I read “importance of being blocked” … I’m realizing … Hey there is a lot of creativity going on here!

… Altogether I’m seeing that Mr. Glover is telling us of 30 years of Dynamic Quality In Action!

But simultaneously puzzling, whether I have the right to comment on this writing?!?!
… After all … Mr Glover is an important person on his own, and whatever he says is automatically good, for Facebook ZMMQ, or any place else.

AND for this reason, I’m mum about the good writing, and say => Dan Glover stands on his own reputation, and that alone says =>

It is EXCELLENT to have Dan Glover's completed Essay with his thoughts on the 30th anniversary of Lila. This will make a GREAT contribution for Facebook ZMMQ celebration of Robert Pirsig’s Book!!

Sincerely Henry Gurr

PS: Two suggestions:

**** End Of Email. ****

For Further Reading => Internet Resources & Links.

Announce New Revisions To ZMMQ Page Titled => Books That Support and or Extend Understanding Of The Ideas That Robert Pirsig Wrote Into His Book “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”. .

To LILA Book Enthusiasts, Especially Those Who Want To Do Research Re LILA.
…The Books Suggested Below Are Good Reading, Plus They Will Support and or Extend Your Understanding of the Ideas That Robert Pirsig Wrote Into His Book “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”.
…This Is A HUGE WebPage That, offers "comparable" books so you may learn more about the topics covered in ZMM, and/or related ideas.
…And, In a sense, this is a list of books that I, SiteMaster Henry Gurr, recommend. This is in addition, of course, to my solid recommendation for ZMM Book itself.

SPECIAL NOTE1:
…And Of Course, “Lila” has its own Mentioned Books/Authors. These were valuable enough for Author Robert Pirsig to mention, and thus are an implied Pirsig Book Recommendation.
… Please Know That => You Will Find A List Of These '' “LilaMentioned Books”, Fully Reported in APPENDIX At The END of This WebPage.
http://venturearete.org/ResearchProjects/ProfessorGurr/Documents.AlternativesZmm

SPECIAL NOTE2:
…Many thanks to David Matos, for telling me of Dan Glover’s “LilaIndex” This was especially valuable for helping me know of, and thus be able to search for each Author or Book.
…So an EXTRA special thanks, goes to Dan Glover!!

SPECIAL NOTE3:
…Many thanks to David Matos, for telling me of Dan Glover’s “LilaIndex”. This was especially valuable for helping me know of … and thus be able to search for… each Author or Book.
… So an EXTRA special thanks, goes to Dan Glover!!

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