On Robert Pirsig, and Our Ghosts
Feeling gratitude for Robert Pirsig, whose writing hooked my heart and whose thinking clawed directly into my soul. There is no book I have pulled off my shelf more times. No pages I’ve scratched through with more care. And no writing that has moved me inside my own head, and moved me outside, to the grand open spaces during my own journeys through the American West.
It’s not just that Pirsig’s relationship with ghosts were profound. It’s that he had a way of showing us, in the light of day, the ghosts that inhabit — no — haunt — no — that stupefy our hyper-rational civilization. Whether we acknowledge them or not.
Not days ago I had been drawing on the chapter quoted below, while talking with my 6-year-old daughter. It is only some number of weeks away that she and I will take a journey through (and above!) some of the very places Robert and Chris traveled. I have that comparison well in hand and in heart. The need for this trip, father and child, exploring the West, was seeded in me decades ago, long before I knew she would exist. Our machine will use wings rather than wheels. Our interplay of the classic and the romantic will be from Phaedrus. Our Zen will be, with honor, from Pirsig.
The excerpts don’t do the chapter justice. Nor are they nearly the most poetic from the book, or likely to be the ones quoted in all the memorials now to be penned about Pirsig. But they are fresh in my mind. I’ll leave them here as much as a memory for me to stumble on some future day, and maybe as barbs for some other reader who might, I hope, become as enchanted, as compelled as I.
“The law of gravity and gravity itself did not exist before Isaac Newton. …and what that means is that that law of gravity exists nowhere except in people’s heads! It’s a ghost!
Mind has no matter or energy but they can’t escape its predominance over everything they do. Logic exists in the mind. Numbers exist only in the mind.
I don’t get upset when scientists say that ghosts exist in the mind. It’s that only that gets me. Science is only in your mind too, it’s just that that doesn’t make it bad. Or ghosts either.
Laws of nature are human inventions, like ghosts. Law of logic, of mathematics are also human inventions, like ghosts.
…we see what we see because these ghosts show it to us, ghosts of Moses and Christ and the Buddha, and Plato, and Descartes, and Rousseau and Jefferson and Lincoln, on and on and on. Isaac Newton is a very good ghost. One of the best. Your common sense is nothing more than the voices of thousands and thousands of these ghosts from the past.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
