neurological dryer lint

i just read about the coolest thing ever. it's from a book you may have heard of called zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance, by Robert M. Pirsig. it's interesting and funny so far... a lot like blue like jazz, incidentally. funny because blj's author, Miller, wrote a book before it called prayer and the art of volkswagen maintenance, which is a similar type of book as zen - a guy's road trip and the things he discovers while on it, observations that lead to conclusions about life. i really, really like it.

anyway. zen was written in 1974. but some of his observations parallel a lot of the things my community of friends has been learning and discussing for the last few years. leave it to christians to be a few years behind. :) anyway, people have begun to label some people as 'modernist' or 'postmodernist' depending on their view of the 'christian' system of beliefs, and moreso, how to exist in a relationship with God. some of my friends fall in one camp, some in the other, and i've always felt like i exist in both. maybe that makes me wishy-washy, but i don't think it does. i feel like i tend to be used to help bridge a gap between the two. but i think your average church-going american would look at me and place me in the postmodern camp, because i don't think traditions are very useful and... well, instead of defining things and making my viewpoints divisive, suffice it to say that people tell me i'm like that. okay.

anyway. i read this and i think Pirsig hits the nail on the head, describes the conflicting views very accurately - and he's just talking about hippies vs. scientists, not anything really relating to followers of Jesus. but it still fits, which is reassuring to me. he's talking about his friend John and how he sees things for what they 'are' - what they look like on the outside - their effect on the world. he describes himself as someone who see things for what they 'mean' - how they work, their function. i'm explaining this poorly. let's say this - the author sees a motorcycle, and understands its inner workings, why it works like it does, the mechanical aspects, and he loves those things, feels natural about them. his friend John sees the motorcycle as a gateway to experiences, simply an accessory to adventure - but more important is what he doesn't see - he avoids the mechanical, functional side entirely, as if the concept is alien. he doesn't acknowledge that the mechanical side is important - and in the same way Pirsig avoids the floaty, abstract ideas of what the bike means to him.

this is how Pirsig describes it:

What we have here is a conflict of visions of reality. The world as you see it right here, right now, is reality, regardless of what the scientists say it might be. That's the way John sees it. But the world as revealed by its scientific discoveries is also reality, regardless of how it may appear, and people in John's dimension are going to have to do more than just ignore it if they want to hang on to their vision of reality. John will discover this if his points burn out.

That's really why he got upset that day when he couldn't get his engine started. It was an intrusion on his reality. It just blew a hole right through his whole groovy way of looking at things and he would not face up to it because it seemed to threaten his whole lifestyle. In a way he was experiencing the same anger scientific people have sometimes about abstract art, or at least used to have. That didn't fit into their lifestyle, either.

What you've got here, really, are two realities, one of immediate artistic appearance and one of underlying scientific explanation, and they don't match and they don't fit and they don't really have much of anything to do with one another. That's quite a situation. You might say there's a little problem here.

i was the scientific guy. my tendencies still lie in that direction. but by living with other guys who are the polar opposite (artie, namely) i've been dragged kicking and screaming in the other direction, and i'm quite happy with where it brought me. that narrow-minded, foolish kid i was three or so years ago thought he was so right about everything that he could have been his own God. i'm grateful to all of my friends - especially artie, though - for being who they are, and helping me to understand the other side, so that the other side could integrate its way into me.

man, i like this book a lot. i may interject more interesting things from it from time to time. if that's okay. :)

listening to: nine inch nails - we're in this together