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zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance

an inquiry into values

robert m. pirsig

Author’s Note

What follows is based on actual occurrences. Although much has been changed for rhetorical purposes, it must be regarded in its essence as fact. However, it should in no way be associated with that great body of factual information relating to orthodox Zen Buddhist practice. It’s not very factual on motorcycles, either.

Part I

1

I can see by my watch, without taking my hand from the left grip of the cycle, that it is eight-thirty in the morning. The wind, even at sixty miles an hour, is warm and humid. When it’s this hot and muggy at eight-thirty, I’m wondering what it’s going to be like in the afternoon.

In the wind are pungent odors from the marshes by the road. We are in an area of the Central Plains filled with thousands of duck hunting sloughs, heading northwest from Minneapolis toward the Dakotas. This highway is an old concrete two-laner that hasn’t had much traffic since a four-laner went in parallel to it several years ago. When we pass a marsh the air suddenly becomes cooler. Then, when we are past, it suddenly warms up again.

I’m happy to be riding back into this country. It is a kind of nowhere, famous for nothing at all and has an appeal because of just that. Tensions disappear along old roads like this. We bump along the beat-up concrete between the cattails and stretches of meadow and then more cattails and marsh grass. Here and there is a stretch of open water and if you look closely you can see wild ducks at the edge of the cattails. And turtles.—There’s a red-winged blackbird.

I whack Chris’s knee and point to it.

"What!" he hollers.

"Blackbird!"

He says something I don’t hear."What?" I holler back.

He grabs the back of my helmet and hollers up, "I’ve seen lots of those, Dad!"

"Oh!" I holler back. Then I nod. At age eleven you don’t get very impressed with red-winged blackbirds.

You have to get older for that. For me this is all mixed with memories that he doesn’t have. Cold mornings long ago when the marsh grass had turned brown and cattails were waving in the northwest wind. The pungent smell then was from muck stirred up by hip boots while we were getting in position for the sun to come up and the duck season to open. Or winters when the sloughs were frozen over and dead and I could walk across the ice and snow between the dead cattails and see nothing but grey skies and dead things and cold. The blackbirds were gone then. But now in July they’re back and everything is at its alivest and every foot of these sloughs is humming and cricking and buzzing and chirping, a whole community of millions of living things living out their lives in a kind of benign continuum.

You see things vacationing on a motorcycle in a way that is completely different from any other. In a car you’re always in a compartment, and because you’re used to it you don’t realize that through that car window everything you see is just more TV. You’re a passive observer and it is all moving by you boringly in a frame.

On a cycle the frame is gone. You’re completely in contact with it all. You’re in the scene, not just watching it anymore, and the sense of presence is overwhelming. That concrete whizzing by five inches below your foot is the real thing, the same stuff you walk on, it’s right there, so blurred you can’t focus on it, yet you can put your foot down and touch it anytime, and the whole thing, the whole experience, is never removed from immediate consciousness.

Chris and I are traveling to Montana with some friends riding up ahead, and maybe headed farther than that. Plans are deliberately indefinite, more to travel than to arrive anywhere. We are just vacationing. Secondary roads are preferred. Paved county roads are the best, state highways are next. Freeways are the worst. We want to make good time, but for us now this is measured with emphasis on "good" rather than "time" and when you make that shift in emphasis the whole approach changes. Twisting hilly roads are long in terms of seconds but are much more enjoyable on a cycle where you bank into turns and don’t get swung from side to side in any compartment. Roads with little traffic are more enjoyable, as well as safer. Roads free of drive-ins and billboards are better, roads where groves and meadows and orchards and lawns come almost to the shoulder, where kids wave to you when you ride by, where people look from their porches to see who it is, where when you stop to ask directions or information the answer tends to be longer than you want rather than short, where people ask where you’re from and how long you’ve been riding.

It was some years ago that my wife and I and our friends first began to catch on to these roads. We took them once in a while for variety or for a shortcut to another main highway, and each time the scenery was grand and we left the road with a feeling of relaxation and enjoyment. We did this time after time before realizing what should have been obvious: these roads are truly different from the main ones. The whole pace of life and personality of the people who live along them are different. They’re not going anywhere. They’re not too busy to be courteous. The hereness and nowness of things is something they know all about. It’s the others, the ones who moved to the cities years ago and their lost offspring, who have all but forgotten it. The discovery was a real find.

I’ve wondered why it took us so long to catch on. We saw it and yet we didn’t see it. Or rather we were trained not to see it. Conned, perhaps, into thinking that the real action was metropolitan and all this was just boring hinterland. It was a puzzling thing. The truth knocks on the door and you say, "Go away, I’m looking for the truth," and so it goes away. Puzzling.

But once we caught on, of course, nothing could keep us off these roads, weekends, evenings, vacations. We have become real secondary-road motorcycle buffs and found there are things you learn as you go.

We have learned how to spot the good ones on a map, for example. If the line wiggles, that’s good. That means hills. If it appears to be the main route from a town to a city, that’s bad. The best ones always connect nowhere with nowhere and have an alternate that gets you there quicker. If you are going northeast from a large town you never go straight out of town for any long distance. You go out and then start jogging north, then east, then north again, and soon you are on a secondary route that only the local people use.

The main skill is to keep from getting lost. Since the roads are used only by local people who know them by sight nobody complains if the junctions aren’t posted. And often they aren’t. When they are it’s usually a small sign hiding unobtrusively in the weeds and that’s all. County-road-sign makers seldom tell you twice. If you miss that sign in the weeds that’s your problem, not theirs. Moreover, you discover that the highway maps are often inaccurate about county roads. And from time to time you find your "county road" takes you onto a two-rutter and then a single rutter and then into a pasture and stops, or else it takes you into some farmer’s backyard.

So we navigate mostly by dead reckoning, and deduction from what clues we find. I keep a compass in one pocket for overcast days when the sun doesn’t show directions and have the map mounted in a special carrier on top of the gas tank where I can keep track of miles from the last junction and know what to look for. With those tools and a lack of pressure to "get somewhere" it works out fine and we just about have America all to ourselves.

On Labor Day and Memorial Day weekends we travel for miles on these roads without seeing another vehicle, then cross a federal highway and look at cars strung bumper to bumper to the horizon. Scowling faces inside. Kids crying in the back seat. I keep wishing there were some way to tell them something but they scowl and appear to be in a hurry, and there isn’t -- .

I have seen these marshes a thousand times, yet each time they’re new. It’s wrong to call them benign. You could just as well call them cruel and senseless, they are all of those things, but the reality of them overwhelms halfway conceptions. There! A huge flock of red-winged blackbirds ascends from nests in the cattails, startled by our sound. I swat Chris’s knee a second time—then I remember he has seen them before.

"What?" he hollers again.

"Nothing."

"Well, what?"

"Just checking to see if you’re still there," I holler, and nothing more is said.

Unless you’re fond of hollering you don’t make great conversations on a running cycle. Instead you spend your time being aware of things and meditating on them. On sights and sounds, on the mood of the weather and things remembered, on the machine and the countryside you’re in, thinking about things at great leisure and length without being hurried and without feeling you’re losing time.

What I would like to do is use the time that is coming now to talk about some things that have come to mind. We’re in such a hurry most of the time we never get much chance to talk. The result is a kind of endless day-to-day shallowness, a monotony that leaves a person wondering years later where all the time went and sorry that it’s all gone. Now that we do have some time, and know it, I would like to use the time to talk in some depth about things that seem important.

What is in mind is a sort of Chautauqua...that’s the only name I can think of for it...like the traveling tent-show Chautauquas that used to move across America, this America, the one that we are now in, an old-time series of popular talks intended to edify and entertain, improve the mind and bring culture and enlightenment to the ears and thoughts of the hearer. The Chautauquas were pushed aside by faster-paced radio, movies and TV, and it seems to me the change was not entirely an improvement. Perhaps because of these changes the stream of national consciousness moves faster now, and is broader, but it seems to run less deep. The old channels cannot contain it and in its search for new ones there seems to be growing havoc and destruction along its banks. In this Chautauqua I would like not to cut any new channels of consciousness but simply dig deeper into old ones that have become silted in with the debris of thoughts grown stale and platitudes too often repeated. "What’s new?" is an interesting and broadening eternal question, but one which, if pursued exclusively, results only in an endless parade of trivia and fashion, the silt of tomorrow. I would like, instead, to be concerned with the question "What is best?," a question which cuts deeply rather than broadly, a question whose answers tend to move the silt downstream. There are eras of human history in which the channels of thought have been too deeply cut and no change was possible, and nothing new ever happened, and "best" was a matter of dogma, but that is not the situation now. Now the stream of our common consciousness seems to be obliterating its own banks, losing its central direction and purpose, flooding the lowlands, disconnecting and isolating the highlands and to no particular purpose other than the wasteful fulfillment of its own internal momentum. Some channel deepening seems called for.

Up ahead the other riders, John Sutherland and his wife, Sylvia, have pulled into a roadside picnic area. It’s time to stretch. As I pull my machine beside them Sylvia is taking her helmet off and shaking her hair loose, while John puts his BMW up on the stand. Nothing is said. We have been on so many trips together we know from a glance how one another feels. Right now we are just quiet and looking around.

The picnic benches are abandoned at this hour of the morning. We have the whole place to ourselves. John goes across the grass to a cast-iron pump and starts pumping water to drink. Chris wanders down through some trees beyond a grassy knoll to a small stream. I am just staring around.

After a while Sylvia sits down on the wooden picnic bench and straightens out her legs, lifting one at a time slowly without looking up. Long silences mean gloom for her, and I comment on it. She looks up and then looks down again.

"It was all those people in the cars coming the other way," she says. "The first one looked so sad. And then the next one looked exactly the same way, and then the next one and the next one, they were all the same."

"They were just commuting to work."

She perceives well but there was nothing unnatural about it. "Well, you know, work," I repeat. "Monday morning. Half asleep. Who goes to work Monday morning with a grin?"

"It’s just that they looked so lost," she says. "Like they were all dead. Like a funeral procession." Then she puts both feet down and leaves them there.

I see what she is saying, but logically it doesn’t go anywhere. You work to live and that’s what they are doing. "I was watching swamps," I say.

After a while she looks up and says, "What did you see?"

"There was a whole flock of red-winged blackbirds. They rose up suddenly when we went by."

"Oh."

"I was happy to see them again. They tie things together, thoughts and such. You know?"

She thinks for a while and then, with the trees behind her a deep green, she smiles. She understands a peculiar language which has nothing to do with what you are saying. A daughter.

"Yes," she says. "They’re beautiful."

"Watch for them," I say.

"All right."

John appears and checks the gear on the cycle. He adjusts some of the ropes and then opens the saddlebag and starts rummaging through. He sets some things on the ground. "If you ever need any rope, don’t hesitate," he says. "God, I think I’ve got about five times what I need here."

"Not yet," I answer.

"Matches?" he says, still rummaging. "Sunburn lotion, combs, shoelaces—shoelaces? What do we need shoelaces for?"

"Let’s not start that," Sylvia says. They look at each other deadpan and then both look over at me.

"Shoelaces can break anytime," I say solemnly. They smile, but not at each other.

Chris soon appears and it is time to go. While he gets ready and climbs on, they pull out and Sylvia waves. We are on the highway again, and I watch them gain distance up ahead.

The Chautauqua that is in mind for this trip was inspired by these two many months ago and perhaps, although I don’t know, is related to a certain undercurrent of disharmony between them.

Disharmony I suppose is common enough in any marriage, but in their case it seems more tragic. To me, anyway.

It’s not a personality clash between them; it’s something else, for which neither is to blame, but for which neither has any solution, and for which I’m not sure I have any solution either, just ideas.

The ideas began with what seemed to be a minor difference of opinion between John and me on a matter of small importance: how much one should maintain one’s own motorcycle. It seems natural and normal to me to make use of the small tool kits and instruction booklets supplied with each machine, and keep it tuned and adjusted myself. John demurs. He prefers to let a competent mechanic take care of these things so that they are done right. Neither viewpoint is unusual, and this minor difference would never have become magnified if we didn’t spend so much time riding together and sitting in country roadhouses drinking beer and talking about whatever comes to mind. What comes to mind, usually, is whatever we’ve been thinking about in the half hour or forty-five minutes since we last talked to each other. When it’s roads or weather or people or old memories or what’s in the newspapers, the conversation just naturally builds pleasantly. But whenever the performance of the machine has been on my mind and gets into the conversation, the building stops. The conversation no longer moves forward. There is a silence and a break in the continuity. It is as though two old friends, a Catholic and Protestant, were sitting drinking beer, enjoying life, and the subject of birth control somehow came up. Big freeze-out.

And, of course, when you discover something like that it’s like discovering a tooth with a missing filling. You can never leave it alone. You have to probe it, work around it, push on it, think about it, not because it’s enjoyable but because it’s on your mind and it won’t get off your mind. And the more I probe and push on this subject of cycle maintenance the more irritated he gets, and of course that makes me want to probe and push all the more. Not deliberately to irritate him but because the irritation seems symptomatic of something deeper, something under the surface that isn’t immediately apparent.

When you’re talking birth control, what blocks it and freezes it out is that it’s not a matter of more or fewer babies being argued. That’s just on the surface. What’s underneath is a conflict of faith, of faith in empirical social planning versus faith in the authority of God as revealed by the teachings of the Catholic Church. You can prove the practicality of planned parenthood till you get tired of listening to yourself and it’s going to go nowhere because your antagonist isn’t buying the assumption that anything socially practical is good per se. Goodness for him has other sources which he values as much as or more than social practicality.

So it is with John. I could preach the practical value and worth of motorcycle maintenance till I’m hoarse and it would make not a dent in him. After two sentences on the subject his eyes go completely glassy and he changes the conversation or just looks away. He doesn’t want to hear about it.

Sylvia is completely with him on this one. In fact she is even more emphatic. "It’s just a whole other thing," she says, when in a thoughtful mood. "Like garbage," she says, when not. They want not to understand it. Not to hear about it. And the more I try to fathom what makes me enjoy mechanical work and them hate it so, the more elusive it becomes. The ultimate cause of this originally minor difference of opinion appears to run way, way deep.

Inability on their part is ruled out immediately. They are both plenty bright enough. Either one of them could learn to tune a motorcycle in an hour and a half if they put their minds and energy to it, and the saving in money and worry and delay would repay them over and over again for their effort. And they know that. Or maybe they don’t. I don’t know. I never confront them with the question. It’s better to just get along.

But I remember once, outside a bar in Savage, Minnesota, on a really scorching day when I just about let loose. We’d been in the bar for about an hour and we came out and the machines were so hot you could hardly get on them. I’m started and ready to go and there’s John pumping away on the kick starter. I smell gas like we’re next to a refinery and tell him so, thinking this is enough to let him know his engine’s flooded.

"Yeah, I smell it too," he says and keeps on pumping. And he pumps and pumps and jumps and pumps and I don’t know what more to say. Finally, he’s really winded and sweat’s running down all over his face and he can’t pump anymore, and so I suggest taking out the plugs to dry them off and air out the cylinders while we go back for another beer.

Oh my God no! He doesn’t want to get into all that stuff.

"All what stuff?"

"Oh, getting out the tools and all that stuff. There’s no reason why it shouldn’t start. It’s a brand-new machine and I’m following the instructions perfectly. See, it’s right on full choke like they say."

"Full choke!"

"That’s what the instructions say."

"That’s for when it’s cold!"

"Well, we’ve been in there for a half an hour at least," he says.

It kind of shakes me up. "This is a hot day, John," I say. "And they take longer than that to cool off even on a freezing day."

He scratches his head. "Well, why don’t they tell you that in the instructions?" He opens the choke and on the second kick it starts. "I guess that was it," he says cheerfully.

And the very next day we were out near the same area and it happened again. This time I was determined not to say a word, and when my wife urged me to go over and help him I shook my head. I told her that until he had a real felt need he was just going to resent help, so we went over and sat in the shade and waited.

I noticed he was being superpolite to Sylvia while he pumped away, meaning he was furious, and she was looking over with a kind of "Ye gods!" look. If he had asked any single question I would have been over in a second to diagnose it, but he wouldn’t. It must have been fifteen minutes before he got it started.

Later we were drinking beer again over at Lake Minnetonka and everybody was talking around the table, but he was silent and I could see he was really tied up in knots inside. After all that time. Probably to get them untied he finally said, "You know—when it doesn’t start like that it just—really turns me into a monster inside. I just get paranoic about it." This seemed to loosen him up, and he added, "They just had this one motorcycle, see? This lemon.And they didn’t know what to do with it, whether to send it back to the factory or sell it for scrap or what—and then at the last moment they saw me coming. With eighteen hundred bucks in my pocket. And they knew their problems were over."

In a kind of singsong voice I repeated the plea for tuning and he tried hard to listen. He really tries hard sometimes. But then the block came again and he was off to the bar for another round for all of us and the subject was closed.

He is not stubborn, not narrow-minded, not lazy, not stupid. There was just no easy explanation. So it was left up in the air, a kind of mystery that one gives up on because there is no sense in just going round and round and round looking for an answer that’s not there.

It occurred to me that maybe I was the odd one on the subject, but that was disposed of too. Most touring cyclists know how to keep their machines tuned. Car owners usually won’t touch the engine, but every town of any size at all has a garage with expensive lifts, special tools and diagnostic equipment that the average owner can’t afford. And a car engine is more complex and inaccessible than a cycle engine so there’s more sense to this. But for John’s cycle, a BMW R60, I’ll bet there’s not a mechanic between here and Salt Lake City. If his points or plugs burn out, he’s done for. I know he doesn’t have a set of spare points with him. He doesn’t know what points are. If it quits on him in western South Dakota or Montana I don’t know what he’s going to do. Sell it to the Indians maybe. Right now I know what he’s doing. He’s carefully avoiding giving any thought whatsoever to the subject. The BMW is famous for not giving mechanical problems on the road and that’s what he’s counting on.

I might have thought this was just a peculiar attitude of theirs about motorcycles but discovered later that it extended to other things -- .Waiting for them to get going one morning in their kitchen I noticed the sink faucet was dripping and remembered that it was dripping the last time I was there before and that in fact it had been dripping as long as I could remember. I commented on it and John said he had tried to fix it with a new faucet washer but it hadn’t worked. That was all he said. The presumption left was that that was the end of the matter. If you try to fix a faucet and your fixing doesn’t work then it’s just your lot to live with a dripping faucet.

This made me wonder to myself if it got on their nerves, this drip-drip-drip, week in, week out, year in, year out, but I could not notice any irritation or concern about it on their part, and so concluded they just aren’t bothered by things like dripping faucets. Some people aren’t.

What it was that changed this conclusion, I don’t remember—some intuition, some insight one day, perhaps it was a subtle change in Sylvia’s mood whenever the dripping was particularly loud and she was trying to talk. She has a very soft voice. And one day when she was trying to talk above the dripping and the kids came in and interrupted her she lost her temper at them. It seemed that her anger at the kids would not have been nearly as great if the faucet hadn’t also been dripping when she was trying to talk. It was the combined dripping and loud kids that blew her up. What struck me hard then was that she was not blaming the faucet, and that she was deliberately not blaming the faucet. She wasn’t ignoring that faucet at all! She was suppressing anger at that faucet and that goddamned dripping faucet was just about killing her! But she could not admit the importance of this for some reason.

Why suppress anger at a dripping faucet? I wondered.

Then that patched in with the motorcycle maintenance and one of those light bulbs went on over my head and I thought, Ahhhhhhhh!

It’s not the motorcycle maintenance, not the faucet. It’s all of technology they can’t take. And then all sorts of things started tumbling into place and I knew that was it. Sylvia’s irritation at a friend who thought computer programming was "creative." All their drawings and paintings and photographs without a technological thing in them. Of course she’s not going to get mad at that faucet, I thought. You always suppress momentary anger at something you deeply and permanently hate. Of course John signs off every time the subject of cycle repair comes up, even when it is obvious he is suffering for it. That’s technology. And sure, of course, obviously. It’s so simple when you see it. To get away from technology out into the country in the fresh air and sunshine is why they are on the motorcycle in the first place. For me to bring it back to them just at the point and place where they think they have finally escaped it just frosts both of them, tremendously. That’s why the conversation always breaks and freezes when the subject comes up.

Other things fit in too. They talk once in a while in as few pained words as possible about "it" or "it all" as in the sentence, "There is just no escape from it." And if I asked, "From what?" the answer might be "The whole thing," or "The whole organized bit," or even "The system." Sylvia once said defensively, "Well, you know how to cope with it," which puffed me up so much at the time I was embarrassed to ask what "it" was and so remained somewhat puzzled. I thought it was something more mysterious than technology. But now I see that the "it" was mainly, if not entirely, technology. But, that doesn’t sound right either. The "it" is a kind of force that gives rise to technology, something undefined, but inhuman, mechanical, lifeless, a blind monster, a death force. Something hideous they are running from but know they can never escape. I’m putting it way too heavily here but in a less emphatic and less defined way this is what it is. Somewhere there are people who understand it and run it but those are technologists, and they speak an inhuman language when describing what they do. It’s all parts and relationships of unheard-of things that never make any sense no matter how often you hear about them. And their things, their monster keeps eating up land and polluting their air and lakes, and there is no way to strike back at it, and hardly any way to escape it.

That attitude is not hard to come to. You go through a heavy industrial area of a large city and there it all is, the technology. In front of it are high barbed-wire fences, locked gates, signs saying NO TRESPASSING, and beyond, through sooty air, you see ugly strange shapes of metal and brick whose purpose is unknown, and whose masters you will never see. What it’s for you don’t know, and why it’s there, there’s no one to tell, and so all you can feel is alienated, estranged, as though you didn’t belong there. Who owns and understands this doesn’t want you around. All this technology has somehow made you a stranger in your own land. Its very shape and appearance and mysteriousness say, "Get out." You know there’s an explanation for all this somewhere and what it’s doing undoubtedly serves mankind in some indirect way but that isn’t what you see. What you see is the NO TRESPASSING, KEEP OUT signs and not anything serving people but little people, like ants, serving these strange, incomprehensible shapes. And you think, even if I were a part of this, even if I were not a stranger, I would be just another ant serving the shapes. So the final feeling is hostile, and I think that’s ultimately what’s involved with this otherwise unexplainable attitude of John and Sylvia. Anything to do with valves and shafts and wrenches is a part of that dehumanized world, and they would rather not think about it. They don’t want to get into it.

If this is so, they are not alone. There is no question that they have been following their natural feelings in this and not trying to imitate anyone. But many others are also following their natural feelings and not trying to imitate anyone and the natural feelings of very many people are similar on this matter; so that when you look at them collectively, as journalists do, you get the illusion of a mass movement, an antitechnological mass movement, an entire political antitechnological left emerging, looming up from apparently nowhere, saying, "Stop the technology. Have it somewhere else. Don’t have it here." It is still restrained by a thin web of logic that points out that without the factories there are no jobs or standard of living. But there are human forces stronger than logic. There always have been, and if they become strong enough in their hatred of technology that web can break.

Clichés and stereotypes such as "beatnik" or "hippie" have been invented for the antitechnologists, the antisystem people, and will continue to be. But one does not convert individuals into mass people with the simple coining of a mass term. John and Sylvia are not mass people and neither are most of the others going their way. It is against being a mass person that they seem to be revolting. And they feel that technology has got a lot to do with the forces that are trying to turn them into mass people and they don’t like it. So far it’s still mostly a passive resistance, flights into the rural areas when they are possible and things like that, but it doesn’t always have to be this passive.

I disagree with them about cycle maintenance, but not because I am out of sympathy with their feelings about technology. I just think that their flight from and hatred of technology is self-defeating. The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower. To think otherwise is to demean the Buddha...which is to demean oneself. That is what I want to talk about in this Chautauqua.

We’re out of the marshes now, but the air is still so humid you can look straight up directly at the yellow circle of the sun as if there were smoke or smog in the sky. But we’re in the green countryside now. The farmhouses are clean and white and fresh. And there’s no smoke or smog.

2

The road winds on and on—we stop for rests and lunch, exchange small talk, and settle down to the long ride. The beginning fatigue of afternoon balances the excitement of the first day and we move steadily, not fast, not slow.

We have picked up a southwest side wind, and the cycle cants into the gusts, seemingly by itself, to counter their effect. Lately there’s been a sense of something peculiar about this road, apprehension about something, as if we were being watched or followed. But there is not a car anywhere ahead and in the mirror are only John and Sylvia way behind.

We are not in the Dakotas yet, but the broad fields show we are getting nearer. Some of them are blue with flax blossoms moving in long waves like the surface of the ocean. The sweep of the hills is greater than before and they now dominate everything else, except the sky, which seems wider. Farmhouses in the distance are so small we can hardly see them. The land is beginning to open up.

There is no one place or sharp line where the Central Plains end and the Great Plains begin. It’s a gradual change like this that catches you unawares, as if you were sailing out from a choppy coastal harbor, noticed that the waves had taken on a deep swell, and turned back to see that you were out of sight of land. There are fewer trees here and suddenly I am aware they are no longer native. They have been brought here and planted around houses and between fields in rows to break up the wind. But where they haven’t been planted there is no underbrush, no second-growth saplings...only grass, sometimes with wildflowers and weeds, but mostly grass. This is grassland now. We are on the prairie.

I have a feeling none of us fully understands what four days on this prairie in July will be like. Memories of car trips across them are always of flatness and great emptiness as far as you can see, extreme monotony and boredom as you drive for hour after hour, getting nowhere, wondering how long this is going to last without a turn in the road, without a change in the land going on and on to the horizon.

John was worried Sylvia would not be up to the discomfort of this and planned to have her fly to Billings, Montana, but Sylvia and I both talked him out of it. I argued that physical discomfort is important only when the mood is wrong. Then you fasten on to whatever thing is uncomfortable and call that the cause. But if the mood is right, then physical discomfort doesn’t mean much. And when thinking about Sylvia’s moods and feelings, I couldn’t see her complaining.

Also, to arrive in the Rocky Mountains by plane would be to see them in one kind of context, as pretty scenery. But to arrive after days of hard travel across the prairies would be to see them in another way, as a goal, a promised land. If John and I and Chris arrived with this feeling and Sylvia arrived seeing them as "nice" and "pretty," there would be more disharmony among us than we would get from the heat and monotony of the Dakotas. Anyway, I like to talk to her and I’m thinking of myself too.

In my mind, when I look at these fields, I say to her, "See? -- See?" and I think she does. I hope later she will see and feel a thing about these prairies I have given up talking to others about; a thing that exists here because everything else does not and can be noticed because other things are absent. She seems so depressed sometimes by the monotony and boredom of her city life, I thought maybe in this endless grass and wind she would see a thing that sometimes comes when monotony and boredom are accepted. It’s here, but I have no names for it.

Now on the horizon I see something else I don’t think the others see. Far off to the southwest...you can see it only from the top of this hill...the sky has a dark edge. Storm coming. That may be what has been bothering me. Deliberately shutting it out of mind, but knowing all along that with this humidity and wind it was more than likely. It’s too bad, on the first day, but as I said before, on a cycle you’re in the scene, not just watching it, and storms are definitely part of it.

If it’s just thunderheads or broken line squalls you can try to ride around them, but this one isn’t. That long dark streak without any preceding cirrus clouds is a cold front. Cold fronts are violent and when they are from the southwest, they are the most violent. Often they contain tornadoes. When they come it’s best to just hole up and let them pass over. They don’t last long and the cool air behind them makes good riding.

Warm fronts are the worst. They can last for days. I remember Chris and I were on a trip to Canada a few years ago, got about 130 miles and were caught in a warm front of which we had plenty of warning but which we didn’t understand. The whole experience was kind of dumb and sad.

We were on a little six-and-one-half-horsepower cycle, way overloaded with luggage and way underloaded with common sense. The machine could do only about forty-five miles per hour wide open against a moderate head wind. It was no touring bike. We reached a large lake in the North Woods the first night and tented amid rainstorms that lasted all night long. I forgot to dig a trench around the tent and at about two in the morning a stream of water came in and soaked both sleeping bags. The next morning we were soggy and depressed and hadn’t had much sleep, but I thought that if we just got riding the rain would let up after a while. No such luck. By ten o’clock the sky was so dark all the cars had their headlights on. And then it really came down.

We were wearing the ponchos which had served as a tent the night before. Now they spread out like sails and slowed our speed to thirty miles an hour wide open. The water on the road became two inches deep. Lightning bolts came crashing down all around us. I remember a woman’s face looking astonished at us from the window of a passing car, wondering what in earth we were doing on a motorcycle in this weather. I’m sure I couldn’t have told her.

The cycle slowed down to twenty-five, then twenty. Then it started missing, coughing and popping and sputtering until, barely moving at five or six miles an hour, we found an old run-down filling station by some cutover timberland and pulled in.

At the time, like John, I hadn’t bothered to learn much about motorcycle maintenance. I remember holding my poncho over my head to keep the rain from the tank and rocking the cycle between my legs. Gas seemed to be sloshing around inside. I looked at the plugs, and looked at the points, and looked at the carburetor, and pumped the kick starter until I was exhausted.

We went into the filling station, which was also a combination beer joint and restaurant, and had a meal of burned-up steak. Then I went back out and tried it again. Chris kept asking questions that started to anger me because he didn’t see how serious it was. Finally I saw it was no use, gave it up, and my anger at him disappeared. I explained to him as carefully as I could that it was all over. We weren’t going anywhere by cycle on this vacation. Chris suggested things to do like check the gas, which I had done, and find a mechanic. But there weren’t any mechanics. Just cutover pine trees and brush and rain.

I sat in the grass with him at the shoulder of the road, defeated, staring into the trees and underbrush. I answered all of Chris’s questions patiently and in time they became fewer and fewer. And then Chris finally understood that our cycle trip was really over and began to cry. He was eight then, I think.

We hitchhiked back to our own city and rented a trailer and put it on our car and came up and got the cycle, and hauled it back to our own city and then started out all over again by car. But it wasn’t the same. And we didn’t really enjoy ourselves much.

Two weeks after the vacation was over, one evening after work, I removed the carburetor to see what was wrong but still couldn’t find anything. To clean off the grease before replacing it, I turned the stopcock on the tank for a little gas. Nothing came out. The tank was out of gas. I couldn’t believe it. I can still hardly believe it.

I have kicked myself mentally a hundred times for that stupidity and don’t think I’ll ever really, finally get over it. Evidently what I saw sloshing around was gas in the reserve tank which I had never turned on. I didn’t check it carefully because I assumed the rain had caused the engine failure. I didn’t understand then how foolish quick assumptions like that are. Now we are on a twenty-eight-horse machine and I take the maintenance of it very seriously.

All of a sudden John passes me, his palm down, signaling a stop. We slow down and look for a place to pull off on the gravelly shoulder. The edge of the concrete is sharp and the gravel is loose and I’m not a bit fond of this maneuver.

Chris asks, "What are we stopping for?"

"I think we missed our turn back there," John says.

I look back and see nothing. "I didn’t see any sign," I say.

John shakes his head. "Big as a barn door."

"Really?"

He and Sylvia both nod.

He leans over, studies my map and points to where the turn was and then to a freeway overpass beyond it. "We’ve already crossed this freeway," he says. I see he is right. Embarrassing. "Go back or go ahead?" I ask.

He thinks about it. "Well, I guess there’s really no reason to go back. All right. Let’s just go ahead. We’ll get there one way or another."

And now tagging along behind them I think, Why should I do a thing like that? I hardly noticed the freeway. And just now I forgot to tell them about the storm. Things are getting a little unsettling.

The storm cloud bank is larger now but it is not moving in as fast as I thought it would. That’s not so good. When they come in fast they leave fast. When they come in slow like this you can get stuck for quite a time.

I remove a glove with my teeth, reach down and feel the aluminum side cover of the engine. The temperature is fine. Too warm to leave my hand there, not so hot I get a burn. Nothing wrong there.

On an air-cooled engine like this, extreme overheating can cause a "seizure." This machine has had one—in fact, three of them. I check it from time to time the same way I would check a patient who has had a heart attack, even though it seems cured.

In a seizure, the pistons expand from too much heat, become too big for the walls of the cylinders, seize them, melt to them sometimes, and lock the engine and rear wheel and start the whole cycle into a skid. The first time this one seized, my head was pitched over the front wheel and my passenger was almost on top of me. At about thirty it freed up again and started to run but I pulled off the road and stopped to see what was wrong. All my passenger could think to say was "What did you do that for?"

I shrugged and was as puzzled as he was, and stood there with the cars whizzing by, just staring. The engine was so hot the air around it shimmered and we could feel the heat radiate. When I put a wet finger on it, it sizzled like a hot iron and we rode home, slowly, with a new sound, a slap that meant the pistons no longer fit and an overhaul was needed.

I took this machine into a shop because I thought it wasn’t important enough to justify getting into myself, having to learn all the complicated details and maybe having to order parts and special tools and all that time-dragging stuff when I could get someone else to do it in less time...sort of John’s attitude.

The shop was a different scene from the ones I remembered. The mechanics, who had once all seemed like ancient veterans, now looked like children. A radio was going full blast and they were clowning around and talking and seemed not to notice me. When one of them finally came over he barely listened to the piston slap before saying, "Oh yeah. Tappets."

Tappets? I should have known then what was coming.

Two weeks later I paid their bill for 140 dollars, rode the cycle carefully at varying low speeds to wear it in and then after one thousand miles opened it up. At about seventy-five it seized again and freed at thirty, the same as before. When I brought it back they accused me of not breaking it in properly, but after much argument agreed to look into it. They overhauled it again and this time took it out themselves for a high-speed road test.

It seized on them this time.

After the third overhaul two months later they replaced the cylinders, put in oversize main carburetor jets, retarded the timing to make it run as coolly as possible and told me, "Don’t run it fast."

It was covered with grease and did not start. I found the plugs were disconnected, connected them and started it, and now there really was a tappet noise. They hadn’t adjusted them. I pointed this out and the kid came with an open-end adjustable wrench, set wrong, and swiftly rounded both of the sheet aluminum tappet covers, ruining both of them.

"I hope we’ve got some more of those in stock," he said.

I nodded.

He brought out a hammer and cold chisel and started to pound them loose. The chisel punched through the aluminum cover and I could see he was pounding the chisel right into the engine head. On the next blow he missed the chisel completely and struck the head with the hammer, breaking off a portion of two of the cooling fins.

"Just stop," I said politely, feeling this was a bad dream.

"Just give me some new covers and I’ll take it the way it is."

I got out of there as fast as possible, noisy tappets, shot tappet covers, greasy machine, down the road, and then felt a bad vibration at speeds over twenty. At the curb I discovered two of the four engine-mounting bolts were missing and a nut was missing from the third. The whole engine was hanging on by only one bolt. The overhead-cam chain-tensioner bolt was also missing, meaning it would have been hopeless to try to adjust the tappets anyway. Nightmare.

The thought of John putting his BMW into the hands of one of those people is something I have never brought up with him. Maybe I should.

I found the cause of the seizures a few weeks later, waiting to happen again. It was a little twenty-five-cent pin in the internal oil-delivery system that had been sheared and was preventing oil from reaching the head at high speeds.

The question why comes back again and again and has become a major reason for wanting to deliver this Chautauqua. Why did they butcher it so? These were not people running away from technology, like John and Sylvia. These were the technologists themselves. They sat down to do a job and they performed it like chimpanzees. Nothing personal in it. There was no obvious reason for it. And I tried to think back into that shop, that nightmare place, to try to remember anything that could have been the cause.

The radio was a clue. You can’t really think hard about what you’re doing and listen to the radio at the same time. Maybe they didn’t see their job as having anything to do with hard thought, just wrench twiddling. If you can twiddle wrenches while listening to the radio that’s more enjoyable.

Their speed was another clue. They were really slopping things around in a hurry and not looking where they slopped them. More money that way...if you don’t stop to think that it usually takes longer or comes out worse.

But the biggest clue seemed to be their expressions. They were hard to explain. Good-natured, friendly, easygoing...and uninvolved. They were like spectators. You had the feeling they had just wandered in there themselves and somebody had handed them a wrench. There was no identification with the job. No saying, "I am a mechanic." At 5 P.M. or whenever their eight hours were in, you knew they would cut it off and not have another thought about their work. They were already trying not to have any thoughts about their work on the job. In their own way they were achieving the same thing John and Sylvia were, living with technology without really having anything to do with it. Or rather, they had something to do with it, but their own selves were outside of it, detached, removed. They were involved in it but not in such a way as to care.

Not only did these mechanics not find that sheared pin, but it was clearly a mechanic who had sheared it in the first place, by assembling the side cover plate improperly. I remembered the previous owner had said a mechanic had told him the plate was hard to get on. That was why. The shop manual had warned about this, but like the others he was probably in too much of a hurry or he didn’t care.

While at work I was thinking about this same lack of care in the digital computer manuals I was editing. Writing and editing technical manuals is what I do for a living the other eleven months of the year and I knew they were full of errors, ambiguities, omissions and information so completely screwed up you had to read them six times to make any sense out of them. But what struck me for the first time was the agreement of these manuals with the spectator attitude I had seen in the shop. These were spectator manuals. It was built into the format of them. Implicit in every line is the idea that "Here is the machine, isolated in time and in space from everything else in the universe. It has no relationship to you, you have no relationship to it, other than to turn certain switches, maintain voltage levels, check for error conditions—" and so on. That’s it. The mechanics in their attitude toward the machine were really taking no different attitude from the manual’s toward the machine, or from the attitude I had when I brought it in there. We were all spectators. And it occurred to me there is no manual that deals with the real business of motorcycle maintenance, the most important aspect of all. Caring about what you are doing is considered either unimportant or taken for granted.

On this trip I think we should notice it, explore it a little, to see if in that strange separation of what man is from what man does we may have some clues as to what the hell has gone wrong in this twentieth century. I don’t want to hurry it. That itself is a poisonous twentieth-century attitude. When you want to hurry something, that means you no longer care about it and want to get on to other things. I just want to get at it slowly, but carefully and thoroughly, with the same attitude I remember was present just before I found that sheared pin. It was that attitude that found it, nothing else.

I suddenly notice the land here has flattened into a Euclidian plane. Not a hill, not a bump anywhere. This means we have entered the Red River Valley. We will soon be into the Dakotas.

3

By the time we are out of the Red River Valley the storm clouds are everywhere and almost upon us.

John and I have discussed the situation in Breckenridge and decided to keep going until we have to stop.

That shouldn’t be long now. The sun is gone, the wind is blowing cold, and a wall of differing shades of grey looms around us.

It seems huge, overpowering. The prairie here is huge but above it the hugeness of this ominous grey mass ready to descend is frightening. We are traveling at its mercy now. When and where it will come is nothing we can control. All we can do is watch it move in closer and closer.

Where the darkest grey has come down to the ground, a town that was seen earlier, some small buildings and a water tower, has disappeared. It will be on us soon now. I don’t see any towns ahead and we are just going to have to run for it.

I pull up alongside John and throw my hand ahead in a "Speed up!" gesture. He nods and opens up. I let him get ahead a little, then pick up to his speed. The engine responds beautifully...seventy—eighty—eighty-five—we are really feeling the wind now and I drop my head to cut down the resistance—ninety. The speedometer needle swings back and forth but the tach reads a steady nine thousand—about ninety-five miles an hour—and we hold this speed—moving. Too fast to focus on the shoulder of the road now—I reach forward and flip the headlight switch just for safety. But it is needed anyway. It is getting very dark.

We whizz through the flat open land, not a car anywhere, hardly a tree, but the road is smooth and clean and the engine now has a "packed," high rpm sound that says it’s right on. It gets darker and darker.

A flash and Ka-wham! of thunder, one right on top of the other. That shook me, and Chris has got his head against my back now. A few warning drops of rain—at this speed they are like needles. A second flash...WHAM and everything brilliant—and then in the brilliance of the next flash that farmhouse—that windmill—oh, my God, he’s been here! -- throttle off—this is his road—a fence and trees—and the speed drops to seventy, then sixty, then fifty-five and I hold it there.

"Why are we slowing down?" Chris shouts.

"Too fast!"

"No, it isn’t!"

I nod yes.

The house and water tower have gone by and then a small drainage ditch appears and a crossroad leading off to the horizon. Yes—that’s right, I think. That’s exactly right.

"They’re way ahead of us!" Chris hollers. "Speed up!"

I turn my head from side to side.

"Why not?" he hollers.

"Not safe!"

"They’re gone!"

"They’ll wait."

"Speed up!"

"No." I shake my head. It’s just a feeling. On a cycle you trust them and we stay at fifty-five.

The first rain begins now but up ahead I see the lights of a town—I knew it would be there.

When we arrive John and Sylvia are there under the first tree by the road, waiting for us.

"What happened to you?"

"Slowed down."

"Well, we know that.Something wrong?"

"No. Let’s get out of this rain."

John says there is a motel at the other end of town, but I tell him there’s a better one if you turn right, at a row of cottonwoods a few blocks down.

We turn at the cottonwoods and travel a few blocks, and a small motel appears. Inside the office John looks around and says, "This is a good place. When were you here before?"

"I don’t remember," I say.

"Then how did you know about this?"

"Intuition."

He looks at Sylvia and shakes his head.

Sylvia has been watching me silently for some time. She notices my hands are unsteady as I sign in. "You look awfully pale," she says. "Did that lightning shake you up?"

"No."

"You look like you’d seen a ghost."

John and Chris look at me and I turn away from them to the door. It is still raining hard, but we make a run for it to the rooms. The gear on the cycles is protected and we wait until the storm passes over before removing it.

After the rain stops, the sky lightens a little. But from the motel courtyard, I see past the cottonwoods that a second darkness, that of night, is about to come on. We walk into town, have supper, and by the time we get back, the fatigue of the day is really on me. We rest, almost motionless, in the metal armchairs of the motel courtyard, slowly working down a pint of whiskey that John brought with some mix from the motel cooler. It goes down slowly and agreeably. A cool night wind rattles the leaves of the cottonwoods along the road.

Chris wonders what we should do next. Nothing tires this kid. The newness and strangeness of the motel surroundings excite him and he wants us to sing songs as they did at camp.

"We’re not very good at songs," John says.

"Let’s tell stories then," Chris says. He thinks for a while. "Do you know any good ghost stories? All the kids in our cabin used to tell ghost stories at night."

"You tell us some," John says.

And he does. They are kind of fun to hear. Some of them I haven’t heard since I was his age. I tell him so, and Chris wants to hear some of mine, but I can’t remember any.

After a while he says, "Do you believe in ghosts?"

"No," I say

"Why not?"

"Because they are un-sci-en-ti-fic."

The way I say this makes John smile. "They contain no matter," I continue, "and have no energy and therefore, according to the laws of science, do not exist except in people’s minds."

The whiskey, the fatigue and the wind in the trees start mixing in my mind. "Of course," I add, "the laws of science contain no matter and have no energy either and therefore do not exist except in people’s minds. It’s best to be completely scientific about the whole thing and refuse to believe in either ghosts or the laws of science. That way you’re safe. That doesn’t leave you very much to believe in, but that’s scientific too."

"I don’t know what you’re talking about," Chris says.

"I’m being kind of facetious."

Chris gets frustrated when I talk like this, but I don’t think it hurts him.

"One of the kids at YMCA camp says he believes in ghosts."

"He was just spoofing you."

"No, he wasn’t. He said that when people haven’t been buried right, their ghosts come back to haunt people. He really believes in that."

"He was just spoofing you," I repeat.

"What’s his name?" Sylvia says.

"Tom White Bear."

John and I exchange looks, suddenly recognizing the same thing.

"Ohhh, Indian!" he says.

I laugh. "I guess I’m going to have to take that back a little," I say. "I was thinking of European ghosts."

"What’s the difference?"

John roars with laughter. "He’s got you," he says.

I think a little and say, "Well, Indians sometimes have a different way of looking at things, which I’m not saying is completely wrong. Science isn’t part of the Indian tradition."

"Tom White Bear said his mother and dad told him not to believe all that stuff. But he said his grandmother whispered it was true anyway, so he believes it."

He looks at me pleadingly. He really does want to know things sometimes. Being facetious is not being a very good father. "Sure," I say, reversing myself, "I believe in ghosts too."

Now John and Sylvia look at me peculiarly. I see I’m not going to get out of this one easily and brace myself for a long explanation.

"It’s completely natural," I say, "to think of Europeans who believed in ghosts or Indians who believed in ghosts as ignorant. The scientific point of view has wiped out every other view to a point where they all seem primitive, so that if a person today talks about ghosts or spirits he is considered ignorant or maybe nutty. It’s just all but completely impossible to imagine a world where ghosts can actually exist."

John nods affirmatively and I continue.

"My own opinion is that the intellect of modern man isn’t that superior. IQs aren’t that much different. Those Indians and medieval men were just as intelligent as we are, but the context in which they thought was completely different. Within that context of thought, ghosts and spirits are quite as real as atoms, particles, photons and quants are to a modern man. In that sense I believe in ghosts. Modern man has his ghosts and spirits too, you know."

"What?"

"Oh, the laws of physics and of logic—the number system—the principle of algebraic substitution. These are ghosts. We just believe in them so thoroughly they seem real.

"They seem real to me," John says.

"I don’t get it," says Chris.

So I go on. "For example, it seems completely natural to presume that gravitation and the law of gravitation existed before Isaac Newton. It would sound nutty to think that until the seventeenth century there was no gravity."

"Of course."

"So when did this law start? Has it always existed?"

John is frowning, wondering what I am getting at.

"What I’m driving at," I say, "is the notion that before the beginning of the earth, before the sun and the stars were formed, before the primal generation of anything, the law of gravity existed."

"Sure."

"Sitting there, having no mass of its own, no energy of its own, not in anyone’s mind because there wasn’t anyone, not in space because there was no space either, not anywhere...this law of gravity still existed?"

Now John seems not so sure.

"If that law of gravity existed," I say, "I honestly don’t know what a thing has to do to be nonexistent. It seems to me that law of gravity has passed every test of nonexistence there is. You cannot think of a single attribute of nonexistence that that law of gravity didn’t have. Or a single scientific attribute of existence it did have. And yet it is still ‘common sense’ to believe that it existed."

John says, "I guess I’d have to think about it."

"Well, I predict that if you think about it long enough you will find yourself going round and round and round and round until you finally reach only one possible, rational, intelligent conclusion. The law of gravity and gravity itself did not exist before Isaac Newton. No other conclusion makes sense.

"And what that means," I say before he can interrupt, "and what that means is that that law of gravity exists nowhere except in people’s heads! It’s a ghost! We are all of us very arrogant and conceited about running down other people’s ghosts but just as ignorant and barbaric and superstitious about our own."

"Why does everybody believe in the law of gravity then?"

"Mass hypnosis. In a very orthodox form known as ‘education.""

"You mean the teacher is hypnotizing the kids into believing the law of gravity?"

"Sure."

"That’s absurd."

"You’ve heard of the importance of eye contact in the classroom? Every educationist emphasizes it. No educationist explains it."

John shakes his head and pours me another drink. He puts his hand over his mouth and in a mock aside says to Sylvia, "You know, most of the time he seems like such a normal guy."

I counter, "That’s the first normal thing I’ve said in weeks. The rest of the time I’m feigning twentieth-

century lunacy just like you are. So as not to draw attention to myself.

"But I’ll repeat it for you," I say. "We believe the disembodied words of Sir Isaac Newton were sitting in the middle of nowhere billions of years before he was born and that magically he discovered these words. They were always there, even when they applied to nothing. Gradually the world came into being and then they applied to it. In fact, those words themselves were what formed the world. That, John, is ridiculous.

"The problem, the contradiction the scientists are stuck with, is that of mind. 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."

They are just looking at me so I continue: "Laws of nature are human inventions, like ghosts. Laws of logic, of mathematics are also human inventions, like ghosts. The whole blessed thing is a human invention, including the idea that it isn’t a human invention. The world has no existence whatsoever outside the human imagination. It’s all a ghost, and in antiquity was so recognized as a ghost, the whole blessed world we live in. It’s run by 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. Ghosts and more ghosts. Ghosts trying to find their place among the living."

John looks too much in thought to speak. But Sylvia is excited. "Where do you get all these ideas?" she asks.

I am about to answer them but then do not. I have a feeling of having already pushed it to the limit, maybe beyond, and it is time to drop it.

After a while John says, "It’ll be good to see the mountains again."

"Yes, it will," I agree. "one last drink to that!"

We finish it and are off to our rooms.

I see that Chris brushes his teeth, and let him get by with a promise that he’ll shower in the morning. I pull seniority and take the bed by the window. After the lights are out he says, "Now, tell me a ghost story."

"I just did, out there."

"I mean a real ghost story."

"That was the realest ghost story you’ll ever hear."

"You know what I mean. The other kind."

I try to think of some conventional ones. "I used to know so many of them when I was a kid, Chris, but they’re all forgotten," I say. "It’s time to go to sleep. We’ve all got to get up early tomorrow."

Except for the wind through the screens of the motel window it is quiet. The thought of all that wind sweeping toward us across the open fields of the prairie is a tranquil one and I feel lulled by it.

The wind rises and then falls, then rises and sighs, and falls again—from so many miles away.

"Did you ever know a ghost?" Chris asks.

I am half asleep. "Chris," I say, "I knew a fellow once who spent all his whole life doing nothing but hunting for a ghost, and it was just a waste of time. So go to sleep."

I realize my mistake too late.

"Did he find him?"

"Yes, he found him, Chris."

I keep wishing Chris would just listen to the wind and not ask questions.

"What did he do then?"

"He thrashed him good."

"Then what?"

"Then he became a ghost himself." Somehow I had the thought this was going to put Chris to sleep, but it’s not and it’s just waking me up.

"What is his name?"

"No one you know."

"But what is it?"

"It doesn’t matter."

"Well, what is it anyway?"

"His name, Chris, since it doesn’t matter, is Phædrus. It’s not a name you know."

"Did you see him on the motorcycle in the storm?"

"What makes you say that?"

"Sylvia said she thought you saw a ghost."

"That’s just an expression."

"Dad?"

"This had better be the last question, Chris, or I’m going to become angry."

"I was just going to say you sure don’t talk like anyone else."

"Yes, Chris, I know that," I say. "It’s a problem. Now go to sleep."

"Good night, Dad."

"Good night."

A half hour later he is breathing sleepfully, and the wind is still strong as ever and I am wide-awake. There, out the window in the dark...this cold wind crossing the road into the trees, the leaves shimmering flecks of moonlight...there is no question about it, Phædrus saw all of this. What he was doing here I have no idea. Why he came this way I will probably never know. But he has been here, steered us onto this strange road, has been with us all along. There is no escape.

I wish I could say that I don’t know why he is here, but I’m afraid I must now confess that I do. The ideas, the things I was saying about science and ghosts, and even that idea this afternoon about caring and technology...they are not my own. I haven’t really had a new idea in years. They are stolen from him. And he has been watching. And that is why he is here.

With that confession, I hope he will now allow me some sleep.

Poor Chris. "Do you know any ghost stories?" he asked. I could have told him one but even the thought of that is frightening.

I really must go to sleep.

4

Every Chautauqua should have a list somewhere of valuable things to remember that can be kept in some safe place for times of future need and inspiration. Details. And now, while the others are still snoring away wasting this beautiful morning sunlight—well—to sort of fill time—

What I have here is my list of valuable things to take on your next motorcycle trip across the Dakotas.

I’ve been awake since dawn. Chris is still sound asleep in the other bed. I started to roll over for more sleep but heard a rooster crowing and then became aware we are on vacation and there is no point in sleeping. I can hear John right through the motel partition sawing wood in there—unless it’s Sylvia—no, that’s too loud. Damned chain saw, it sounds like -- .

I got so tired of forgetting things on trips like this, I made this up and store it in a file at home to check off when I am ready to go.

Most of the items are commonplace and need no comment. Some of them are peculiar to motorcycling and need some comment. Some of them are just plain peculiar and need a lot of comment. The list is divided into four parts: Clothing, Personal Stuff, Cooking and Camping Gear, and Motorcycle Stuff.

The first part, Clothing, is simple:

1.Two changes of underwear. 2.Long underwear. 3.One change of shirt and pants for each of us. I use Army-surplus fatigues. They’re cheap, tough and don’t show dirt. I had an item called "dress clothes" at first but John penciled "Tux" after this item. I was just thinking of something you might want to wear outside a filling station. 4.One sweater and jacket each. 5.Gloves. Unlined leather gloves are best because they prevent sunburn, absorb sweat and keep your hands cool. When you’re going for an hour or two little things like this aren’t important, but when you’re going all day long day after day they become plenty important. 6.Cycle boots. 7.Rain gear. 8.Helmet and sunshade. 9.Bubble. This gives me claustrophobia, so I use it only in the rain, which otherwise at high speed stings your face like needles. 10.Goggles. I don’t like windshields because they also close you in. These are some British laminated plate-glass goggles that work fine. The wind getsbehind sunglasses. Plastic goggles get scratched upand distort vision.

The next list is Personal Stuff:

Combs. Billfold. Pocketknife. Memoranda booklet. Pen. Cigarettes and matches. Flashlight. Soap and plastic soap container. Toothbrushes and toothpaste. Scissors. APCs for headaches. Insect repellent. Deodorant (after a hot day on a cycle, your best friends don’t need to tell you). Sunburn lotion. (On a cycle you don’t notice sunburn until you stop, and then it’s too late. Put it on early.) Band-Aids. Toilet paper. Washcloth (this can go into a plastic box to keep other stuff from getting damp). Towel.

Books. I don’t know of any other cyclist who takes books with him. They take a lot of space, but I have three of them here anyway, with some loose sheets of paper in them for writing. These are:

1.The shop manual for this cycle. 2.A general troubleshooting guide containing all the technical information I can never keep in my head. This is Chilton’s Motorcycle Troubleshooting Guide written by Ocee Rich and sold by Sears, Roebuck. 3.A copy of Thoreau’s Walden—which Chris has never heard and which can be read a hundred times without exhaustion. I try always to pick a book far over his head and read it as a basis for questions and answers, rather than without interruption. I read a sentence or two, wait for him to come up with his usual barrage of questions, answer them, then read another sentence or two. Classics read well this way. They must be written this way. Sometimes we have spent a whole evening reading and talking and discovered we have only covered two or three pages. It’s a form of reading done a century ago—when Chautauquas were popular. Unless you’ve tried it you can’t imagine how pleasant it is to do it this way.

I see Chris is sleeping over there completely relaxed, none of his normal tension. I guess I won’t wake him up yet.

Camping Equipment includes:

1.Two sleeping bags. 2.Two ponchos and one ground cloth. These convert into a tent and also protect the luggage from rain while you are traveling. 3.Rope. 4.U. S. Geodetic Survey maps of an area where we hope to do some hiking. 5.Machete. 6.Compass. 7.Canteen. I couldn’t find this anywhere when we left. I think the kids must have lost it somewhere. 8.Two Army-surplus mess kits with knife, fork and spoon. 9.A collapsible Sterno stove with one medium-sized can of Sterno. This is an experimental purchase. I haven’t used it yet. When it rains or when you’re above the timberline firewood is a problem. 10.Some aluminum screw-top tins. For lard, salt, butter, flour, sugar. A mountaineering supply house sold us these years ago. 11.Brillo, for cleaning. 12.Two aluminum-frame backpacks.

Motorcycle Stuff. A standard tool kit comes with the cycle and is stored under the seat. This is supplemented with the following:

A large, adjustable open-end wrench. A machinist’s hammer. A cold chisel. A taper punch. A pair of tire irons. A tire-patching kit. A bicycle pump. A can of molybdenum disulfide spray for the chain. (This has tremendous penetrating ability into the inside of each roller where it really counts, and the lubricating superiority of molybdenum disulfide is well known. Once it has dried off, however, it ought to be supplemented with good old SAE-30 engine oil.) Impact driver. A point file. Feeler gauge. Test lamp.

Spare parts include:

Plugs. Throttle, clutch and brake cables. Points, fuses, headlight and taillight bulbs, chain-coupling link with keeper, cotter pins, baling wire. Spare chain (this is just an old one that was about shot when I replaced it, enough to get to a cycle shop if the present one goes).

And that’s about it. No shoelaces.

It would probably be normal about this time to wonder what sort of U-Haul trailer all this is in. But it’s not as bulky, really, as it sounds.

I’m afraid these other characters will sleep all day if I let them. The sky outside is sparkling and clear, it’s a shame to waste it like this.

I go over finally and give Chris a shake. His eyes pop open, then he sits bolt upright uncomprehending.

"Shower time," I say.

I go outside. The air is invigorating. In fact...Christ!...it is cold out. I pound on the Sutherlands’ door.

"Yahp," comes John’s sleepy voice through the door. "Umhmmmm. Yahp."

It feels like autumn. The cycles are wet with dew. No rain today. But cold! It must be in the forties.

While waiting I check the engine oil level and tires, and bolts, and chain tension. A little slack there, and I get out the tool kit and tighten it up. I’m really getting anxious to get going.

I see that Chris dresses warmly and we are packed and on the road, and it is definitely cold. Within minutes all the heat of the warm clothing is drained out by the wind and I am shivering with big shivers. Bracing.

It ought to warm up as soon as the sun gets higher in the sky. About half an hour of this and we’ll be in Ellendale for breakfast. We should cover a lot of miles today on these straight roads.

If it weren’t so damn cold this would be just gorgeous riding. Low-angled dawn sun striking what looks almost like frost covering those fields, but I guess it’s just dew, sparkling and kind of misty. Dawn shadows everywhere make it look less flat than yesterday. All to ourselves. Nobody’s even up yet, it looks like. My watch says six-thirty. The old glove above it looks like it’s got frost on it, but I guess it’s just residues from the soaking last night. Good old beat-up gloves. They are so stiff now from the cold I can hardly straighten my hand out.

I talked yesterday about caring, I care about these moldy old riding gloves. I smile at them flying through the breeze beside me because they have been there for so many years and are so old and so tired and so rotten there is something kind of humorous about them. They have become filled with oil and sweat and dirt and spattered bugs and now when I set them down flat on a table, even when they are not cold, they won’t stay flat. They’ve got a memory of their own. They cost only three dollars and have been restitched so many times it is getting impossible to repair them, yet I take a lot of time and pains to do it anyway because I can’t imagine any new pair taking their place. That is impractical, but practicality isn’t the whole thing with gloves or with anything else.

The machine itself receives some of the same feelings. With over 27,000 on it it’s getting to be something of a high-miler, an old-timer, although there are plenty of older ones running. But over the miles, and I think most cyclists will agree with this, you pick up certain feelings about an individual machine that are unique for that one individual machine and no other. A friend who owns a cycle of the same make, model and even same year brought it over for repair, and when I test rode it afterward it was hard to believe it had come from the same factory years ago. You could see that long ago it had settled into its own kind of feel and ride and sound, completely different from mine. No worse, but different.

I suppose you could call that a personality. Each machine has its own, unique personality which probably could be defined as the intuitive sum total of everything you know and feel about it. This personality constantly changes, usually for the worse, but sometimes surprisingly for the better, and it is this personality that is the real object of motorcycle maintenance. The new ones start out as good-looking strangers and, depending on how they are treated, degenerate rapidly into bad-acting grouches or even cripples, or else turn into healthy, good-natured, long-lasting friends. This one, despite the murderous treatment it got at the hands of those alleged mechanics, seems to have recovered and has been requiring fewer and fewer repairs as time goes on.

There it is! Ellendale!

A water tower, groves of trees and buildings among them in the morning sunlight. I’ve just given in to the shivering which has been almost continuous the whole trip. The watch says seven-fifteen.

A few minutes later we park by some old brick buildings. I turn to John and Sylvia who have pulled up behind us. "That was cold!" I say.

They just stare at me fish-eyed.

"Bracing, what?" I say. No answer.

I wait until they are completely off, then see that John is trying to untie all their luggage. He is having trouble with the knot. He gives up and we all move toward the restaurant.

I try again. I’m walking backward in front of them toward the restaurant, feeling a little manic from the ride, wringing my hands and laughing. "Sylvia! Speak to me!" Not a smile.

I guess they really were cold.

They order breakfast without looking up.

Breakfast ends, and I say finally, "What next?"

John says slowly and deliberately, "We’re not leaving here until it warms up." He has a sheriff-at-sundown tone in his voice, which I suppose makes it final.

So John and Sylvia and Chris sit and stay warm in the lobby of the hotel adjoining the restaurant, while I go out for a walk.

I guess they’re kind of mad at me for getting them up so early to ride through that kind of stuff. When you’re stuck together like this, I figure small differences in temperament are bound to show up. I remember, now that I think of it, I’ve never been cycling with them before one or two o’clock in the afternoon, although for me dawn and early morning is always the greatest time for riding.

The town is clean and fresh and unlike the one we woke up in this morning. Some people are on the street and are opening stores and saying, "Good morning" and talking and commenting about how cold it is. Two thermometers on the shady side of the street read 42 and 46 degrees. One in the sun reads 65 degrees.

After a few blocks the main street goes onto two hard, muddy tracks into a field, past a quonset hut full of farm machinery and repair tools, and then ends in a field. A man standing in the field is looking at me suspiciously, wondering what I am doing, probably, as I look into the quonset hut. I return down the street, find a chilly bench and stare at the motorcycle. Nothing to do.

It was cold all right, but not that cold. How do John and Sylvia ever get through Minnesota winters? I wonder. There’s kind of a glaring inconsistency here, that’s almost too obvious to dwell on. If they can’t stand physical discomfort and they can’t stand technology, they’ve got a little compromising to do. They depend on technology and condemn it at the same time. I’m sure they know that and that just contributes to their dislike of the whole situation. They’re not presenting a logical thesis, they’re just reporting how it is. But three farmers are coming into town now, rounding the corner in that brand-new pickup truck. I’ll bet with them it’s just the other way around. They’re going to show off that truck and their tractor and that new washing machine and they’ll have the tools to fix them if they go wrong, and know how to use the tools. They value technology. And they’re the ones who need it the least. If all technology stopped, tomorrow, these people would know how to make out. It would be rough, but they’d survive. John and Sylvia and Chris and I would be dead in a week. This condemnation of technology is ingratitude, that’s what it is.

Blind alley, though. If somone’s ungrateful and you tell him he’s ungrateful, okay, you’ve called him a name. You haven’t solved anything.

A half hour later the thermometer by the hotel door reads 53 degrees. Inside the empty main dining room of the hotel I find them, looking restless. They seem, by their expressions, to be in a better mood though, and John says optimistically, "I’m going to put on everything I own, and then we’ll make it all right."

He goes out to the cycles, and when he comes back says, "I sure hate to unpack all that stuff, but I don’t want another ride like that last one." He says it is freezing in the men’s room, and since there is no one else in the dining room, he crosses behind a table back from where we are sitting, and I am sitting at the table, talking to Sylvia, and then I look over and there is John, all decked out in a full-length set of pale-blue long underwear. He is smirking from ear to ear at how silly he looks. I stare at his glasses lying on the table for a moment and then say to Sylvia:

"You know, just a moment ago we were sitting here talking to Clark Kent—see, there’s his glasses—and now all of a sudden—Lois, do you suppose? -- "

John howls. "CHICKENMAN!"

He glides over the varnished lobby floor like a skater, does a handspring, then glides back. He raises one arm over his head and then crouches as if starting for the sky. "I’m ready, here I go!" He shakes his head sadly. "Jeez, I hate to bust through that nice ceiling, but my X-ray vision tells me somebody’s in trouble." Chris is giggling.

"We’ll all be in trouble if you don’t get some clothes on," Sylvia says.

John laughs. "An exposer, hey? ‘The Ellendale revealer!’ " He struts around some more, then begins to put his clothes on over the underwear. He says, "Oh no, oh no, they wouldn’t do that. Chickenman and the police have an understanding. They know who’s on the side of law and order and justice and decency and fair play for everyone."

When we hit the highway again it is still chilly, but not like it was. We pass through a number of towns and gradually, almost imperceptibly, the sun warms us up, and my feelings warm up with it. The tired feeling wears off completely and the wind and sun feel good now, making it real. It’s happening, just from the warming of the sun, the road and green prairie farmland and buffeting wind coming together. And soon it is nothing but beautiful warmth and wind and speed and sun down the empty road. The last chills of the morning are thawed by the warm air. Wind and more sun and more smooth road.

So green this summer and so fresh.

There are white and gold daisies among the grass in front of an old wire fence, a meadow with some cows and far in the distance a low rising of the land with something golden on it. Hard to know what it is. No need to know.

Where there is a slight rise in the road the drone of the motor becomes heavier. We top the rise, see a new spread of land before us, the road descends and the drone of the engine falls away again. Prairie. Tranquil and detached.

Later, when we stop, Sylvia has tears in her eyes from the wind, and she stretches out her arms and says, "It’s so beautiful. It’s so empty."

I show Chris how to spread his jacket on the ground and use an extra shirt for a pillow. He is not at all sleepy but I tell him to lie down anyway, he’ll need the rest. I open up my own jacket to soak up more heat. John gets his camera out.

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."

"When are we going to get going?" Chris says.

"What’s your hurry?" I ask.

"I just want to get going."

"There’s nothing up ahead that’s any better than it is right here."

He looks down silently with a frown. "Are we going to go camping tonight?" he asks. The Sutherlands look at me apprehensively.

"Are we?" he repeats.

"We’ll see later," I say.

"Why later?"

"Because I don’t know now."

"Why don’t you know now?"

"Well, I just don’t know now why I just don’t know."

John shrugs that it’s okay.

"This isn’t the best camping country," I say. "There’s no cover and no water." But suddenly I add, "All right, tonight we’ll camp out." We had talked about it before.

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.

5

The flatness of the prairie disappears and a deep undulation of the earth begins. Fences are rarer, and the greenness has become paler—all signs that we approach the High Plains.

We stop for gas at Hague and ask if there is any way to get across the Missouri between Bismarck and Mobridge. The attendant doesn’t know of any. It is hot now, and John and Sylvia go somewhere to get their long underwear off. The motorcycle gets a change of oil and chain lubrication. Chris watches everything I do but with some impatience. Not a good sign.

"My eyes hurt," he says.

"From what?"

"From the wind."

"We’ll look for some goggles."

All of us go in a shop for coffee and rolls. Everything is different except one another, so we look around rather than talk, catching fragments of conversation among people who seem to know each other and are glancing at us because we’re new. Afterward, down the street, I find a thermometer for storage in the saddlebags and some plastic goggles for Chris.

The hardware man doesn’t know any short route across the Missouri either. John and I study the map. I had hoped we might find an unofficial ferryboat crossing or footbridge or something in the ninety-mile stretch, but evidently there isn’t any because there’s not much to get to on the other side. It’s all Indian reservation. We decide to head south to Mobridge and cross there.

The road south is awful. Choppy, narrow, bumpy concrete with a bad head wind, going into the sun and big semis going the other way. These roller-coaster hills speed them up on the down side and slow them up on the up side and prevent our seeing very far ahead, making passing nervewracking. The first one gave me a scare because I wasn’t ready for it. Now I hold tight and brace for them. No danger. Just a shock wave that hits you. It is hotter and dryer.

At Herreid John disappears for a drink while Sylvia and Chris and I find some shade in a park and try to rest. It isn’t restful. A change has taken place and I don’t know quite what it is. The streets of this town are broad, much broader than they need be, and there is a pallor of dust in the air. Empty lots here and there between the buildings have weeds growing in them. The sheet metal equipment sheds and water tower are like those of previous towns but more spread out. Everything is more run-down and mechanical-looking, and sort of randomly located. Gradually I see what it is. Nobody is concerned anymore about tidily conserving space. The land isn’t valuable anymore. We are in a Western town.

We have lunch of hamburgers and malteds at an A & W place in Mobridge, cruise down a heavily trafficked main street and then there it is, at the bottom of the hill, the Missouri. All that moving water is strange, banked by grass hills that hardly get any water at all. I turn around and glance at Chris but he doesn’t seem to be particularly interested in it.

We coast down the hill, clunk onto the bridge and across we go, watching the river through the girders moving by rhythmically, and then we are on the other side.

We climb a long, long hill into another kind of country.

The fences are really all gone now. No brush, no trees. The sweep of the hills is so great John’s motorcycle looks like an ant up ahead moving through the green slopes. Above the slopes outcroppings of rocks stand out overhead at the tops of the bluffs.

It all has a natural tidiness. If it were abandoned land there would be a chewed-up, scruffy look, with chunks of old foundation concrete, scraps of painted sheet metal and wire, weeds that had gotten in where the sod was broken up for whatever little enterprise was attempted. None of that here. Not kept up, just never messed up in the first place. It’s just the way it always must have been. Reservation land.

There’s no friendly motorcycle mechanic on the other side of those rocks and I’m wondering if we’re ready for this. If anything goes wrong now we’re in real trouble.

I check the engine temperature with my hand. It’s reassuringly cool. I put in the clutch and let it coast for a second in order to hear it idling. Something sounds funny and I do it again. It takes a while to figure out that it’s not the engine at all. There’s an echo from the bluff ahead that lingers after the throttle is closed. Funny. I do this two or three times. Chris wonders what’s wrong and I have him listen to the echo. No comment from him.

This old engine has a nickels-and-dimes sound to it. As if there were a lot of loose change flying around inside. Sounds awful, but it’s just normal valve clatter. Once you get used to that sound and learn to expect it, you automatically hear any difference. If you don’t hear any, that’s good.

I tried to get John interested in that sound once but it was hopeless. All he heard was noise and all he saw was the machine and me with greasy tools in my hands, nothing else. That didn’t work.

He didn’t really see what was going on and was not interested enough to find out. He isn’t so interested in what things mean as in what they are. That’s quite important, that he sees things this way. It took me a long time to see this difference and it’s important for the Chautauqua that I make this difference clear.

I was so baffled by his refusal even to think about any mechanical subject I kept searching for ways to clue him to the whole thing but didn’t know where to start.

I thought I would wait until something went wrong with his machine and then I would help him fix it and that way get him into it, but I goofed that one myself because I didn’t understand this difference in the way he looked at things.

His handlebars had started slipping. Not badly, he said, just a little when you shoved hard on them. I warned him not to use his adjustable wrench on the tightening nuts. It was likely to damage the chrome and start small rust spots. He agreed to use my metric sockets and box-ends.

When he brought his motorcycle over I got my wrenches out but then noticed that no amount of tightening would stop the slippage, because the ends of the collars were pinched shut.

"You’re going to have to shim those out," I said.

"What’s shim?"

"It’s a thin, flat strip of metal. You just slip it around the handlebar under the collar there and it will open up the collar to where you can tighten it again. You use shims like that to make adjustments in all kinds of machines."

"Oh," he said. He was getting interested. "Good. Where do you buy them?"

"I’ve got some right here," I said gleefully, holding up a can of beer in my hand.

He didn’t understand for a moment. Then he said, "What, the can?"

"Sure," I said, "best shim stock in the world."

I thought this was pretty clever myself. Save him a trip to God knows where to get shim stock. Save him time. Save him money.

But to my surprise he didn’t see the cleverness of this at all. In fact he got noticeably haughty about the whole thing. Pretty soon he was dodging and filling with all kinds of excuses and, before I realized what his real attitude was, we had decided not to fix the handlebars after all.

As far as I know those handlebars are still loose. And I believe now that he was actually offended at the time. I had had the nerve to propose repair of his new eighteen-hundred dollar BMW, the pride of a half-century of German mechanical finesse, with a piece of old beer can!

Ach, du lieber!

Since then we have had very few conversations about motorcycle maintenance. None, now that I think of it.

You push it any further and suddenly you are angry, without knowing why.

I should say, to explain this, that beer-can aluminum is soft and sticky, as metals go. Perfect for the application. Aluminum doesn’t oxidize in wet weather...or, more precisely, it always has a thin layer of oxide that prevents any further oxidation. Also perfect.

In other words, any true German mechanic, with a half-century of mechanical finesse behind him, would have concluded that this particular solution to this particular technical problem was perfect.

For a while I thought what I should have done was sneak over to the workbench, cut a shim from the beer can, remove the printing and then come back and tell him we were in luck, it was the last one I had, specially imported from Germany. That would have done it. A special shim from the private stock of Baron Alfred Krupp, who had to sell it at a great sacrifice. Then he would have gone gaga over it.

That Krupp’s-private-shim fantasy gratified me for a while, but then it wore off and I saw it was just being vindictive. In its place grew that old feeling I’ve talked about before, a feeling that there’s something bigger involved than is apparent on the surface. You follow these little discrepancies long enough and they sometimes open up into huge revelations. There was just a feeling on my part that this was something a little bigger than I wanted to take on without thinking about it, and I turned instead to my usual habit of trying to extract causes and effects to see what was involved that could possibly lead to such an impasse between John’s view of that lovely shim and my own. This comes up all the time in mechanical work. A hang-up. You just sit and stare and think, and search randomly for new information, and go away and come back again, and after a while the unseen factors start to emerge.

What emerged in vague form at first and then in sharper outline was the explanation that I had been seeing that shim in a kind of intellectual, rational, cerebral way in which the scientific properties of the metal were all that counted. John was going at it immediately and intuitively, grooving on it. I was going at it in terms of underlying form. He was going at it in terms of immediate appearance. I was seeing what the shim meant. He was seeing what the shim was. That’s how I arrived at that distinction. And when you see what the shim is,in this case, it’s depressing. Who likes to think of a beautiful precision machine fixed with an old hunk of junk?

I guess I forgot to mention John is a musician, a drummer, who works with groups all over town and makes a pretty fair income from it. I suppose he just thinks about everything the way he thinks about drumming...which is to say he doesn’t really think about it at all. He just does it. Is with it. He just responded to fixing his motorcycle with a beer can the way he would respond to someone dragging the beat while he was playing. It just did a big thud with him and that was it. He didn’t want any part of it.

At first this difference seemed fairly minor, but then it grew—and grew—and grew—until I began to see why I missed it. Some things you miss because they’re so tiny you overlook them. But some things you don’t see because they’re so huge. We were both looking at the same thing, seeing the same thing, talking about the same thing, thinking about the same thing, except he was looking, seeing, talking and thinking from a completely different dimension.

He really does care about technology. It’s just that in this other dimension he gets all screwed up and is rebuffed by it. It just won’t swing for him. He tries to swing it without any rational premeditation and botches it and botches it and botches it and after so many botches gives up and just kind of puts a blanket curse on that whole nuts-and-bolts scene. He will not or cannot believe there is anything in this world for which grooving is not the way to go.

That’s the dimension he’s in. The groovy dimension. I’m being awfully square talking about all this mechanical stuff all the time. It’s all just parts and relationships and analyses and syntheses and figuring things out and it isn’t really here. It’s somewhere else, which thinks it’s here, but’s a million miles away. This is what it’s all about. He’s on this dimensional difference which underlay much of the cultural changes of the sixties, I think, and is still in the process of reshaping our whole national outlook on things. The "generation gap" has been a result of it. The names "beat" and "hip" grew out of it. Now it’s become apparent that this dimension isn’t a fad that’s going to go away next year or the year after. It’s here to stay because it’s a very serious and important way of looking at things that looks incompatible with reason and order and responsibility but actually is not. Now we are down to the root of things.

My legs have become so stiff they are aching. I hold them out one at a time and turn my foot as far to the left and to the right as it will go to stretch the leg. It helps, but then the other muscles get tired from holding the legs out.

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 life style. In a way he was experiencing the same sort of anger scientific people have sometimes about abstract art, or at least used to have. That didn’t fit their life style 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.

At one stretch in the long desolate road we see an isolated grocery store. Inside, in back, we find a place to sit on some packing cases and drink canned beer.

The fatigue and backache are getting to me now. I push the packing case over to a post and lean on that.

Chris’s expression shows he is really settling into something bad. This has been a long hard day. I told Sylvia way back in Minnesota that we could expect a slump in spirits like this on the second or third day and now it’s here. Minnesota...when was that?

A woman, badly drunk, is buying beer for some man she’s got outside in a car. She can’t make up her mind what brand to buy and the wife of the owner waiting on her is getting mad. She still can’t decide, but then sees us, and weaves over and asks if we own the motorcycles. We nod yes. Then she wants a ride on one. I move back and let John handle this.

He puts her off graciously, but she comes back again and again, offering him a dollar for a ride. I make some jokes about it, but they’re not funny and just add to the depression. We get out and back into the brown hills and heat again.

By the time we reach Lemmon we are really aching tired. At a bar we hear about a campground to the south. John wants to camp in a park in the middle of Lemmon, a comment that sounds strange and angers Chris greatly.

I’m more tired now than I can remember having been in a long time. The others too. But we drag ourselves through a supermarket, pick up whatever groceries come to mind and with some difficulty pack them onto the cycles. The sun is so far down we’re running out of light. It’ll be dark in an hour. We can’t seem to get moving. I wonder, are we dawdling, or what?

"C’mon, Chris, let’s go," I say.

"Don’t holler at me. I’m ready."

We drive down a county road from Lemmon, exhausted, for what seems a long, long time, but can’t be too long because the sun is still above the horizon. The campsite is deserted. Good. But there is less than a half-hour of sun and no energy left. This is the hardest now.

I try to get unpacked as fast as possible but am so stupid with exhaustion I just set everything by the camp road without seeing what a bad spot it is. Then I see it is too windy. This is a High Plains wind. It is semidesert here, everything burned up and dry except for a lake, a large reservoir of some sort below us. The wind blows from the horizon across the lake and hits us with sharp gusts. It is already chilly. There are some scrubby pines back from the road about twenty yards and I ask Chris to move the stuff over there.

He doesn’t do it. He wanders off down to the reservoir. I carry the gear over by myself.

I see between trips that Sylvia is making a real effort at setting things up for cooking, but she’s as tired as I am.

The sun goes down.

John has gathered wood but it’s too big and the wind is so gusty it’s hard to start. It needs to be splintered into kindling. I go back over to the scrub pines, hunt around through the twilight for the machete, but it’s already so dark in the pines I can’t find it. I need the flashlight. I look for it, but it’s too dark to find that either.

I go back and start up the cycle and ride it back over to shine the headlight on the stuff so that I can find the flashlight. I look through all the stuff item by item to find the flashlight. It takes a long time to realize I don’t need the flashlight, I need the machete, which is in plain sight. By the time I get it back John has got the fire going. I use the machete to hack up some of the larger pieces of wood.

Chris reappears. He’s got the flashlight!

"When are we going to eat?" he complains.

"We’re getting it fixed as fast as possible," I tell him. "Leave the flashlight here."

He disappears again, taking the flashlight with him.

The wind blows the fire so hard it doesn’t reach up to cook the steaks. We try to fix up a shelter from the wind using large stones from the road, but it’s too dark to see what we’re doing. We bring both cycles over and catch the scene in a crossbeam of headlights. Peculiar light. Bits of ash blowing up from the fire suddenly glow bright white in it, then disappear in the wind.

BANG! There’s a loud explosion behind us. Then I hear Chris giggling.

Sylvia is upset.

"I found some firecrackers," Chris says.

I catch my anger in time and say to him, coldly, "It’s time to eat now."

"I need some matches," he says.

"Sit down and eat."

"Give me some matches first."

"Sit down and eat."

He sits down and I try to eat the steak with my Army mess knife, but it is too tough, and so I get out a hunting knife and use it instead. The light from the motorcycle headlight is full upon me so that the knife, when it goes down into the mess gear, is in full shadow and I can’t see where it’s going.

Chris says he can’t cut his either and I pass my knife to him. While reaching for it he dumps everything onto the tarp.

No one says a word.

I’m not angry that he spilled it, I’m angry that now the tarp’s going to be greasy the rest of the trip.

"Is there any more?" he asks.

"Eat that," I say. "It just fell on the tarp."

"It’s too dirty," he says.

"Well, that’s all there is."

A wave of depression hits. I just want to go to sleep now. But he’s angry and I expect we’re going to have one of his little scenes. I wait for it and pretty soon it starts.

"I don’t like the taste of this," he says.

"Yes, that’s rough, Chris."

"I don’t like any of this. I don’t like this camping at all."

"It was your idea," Sylvia says. "You’re the one who wanted to go camping."

She shouldn’t say that, but there’s no way she can know. You take his bait and he’ll feed you another one, and then another, and another until you finally hit him, which is what he really wants.

"I don’t care," he says.

"Well, you ought to," she says.

"Well, I don’t."

An explosion point is very near. Sylvia and John look at me but I remain deadpan. I’m sorry about this but there’s nothing I can do right now. Any argument will just worsen things.

"I’m not hungry," Chris says.

No one answers.

"My stomach hurts," he says.

The explosion is avoided when Chris turns and walks away in the darkness.

We finish eating. I help Sylvia clean up, and then we sit around for a while. We turn the cycle lights off to conserve the batteries and because the light from them is ugly anyway. The wind has died down some and there is a little light from the fire. After a while my eyes become accustomed to it. The food and anger have taken off some of the sleepiness. Chris doesn’t return.

"Do you suppose he’s just punishing?" Sylvia asks.

"I suppose," I say, "although it doesn’t sound quite right." I think about it and add, "That’s a child-psychology term...a context I dislike. Let’s just say he’s being a complete bastard."

John laughs a little.

"Anyway," I say, "it was a good supper. I’m sorry he had to act up like this."

"Oh, that’s all right," John says. "I’m just sorry he won’t get anything to eat."

"It won’t hurt him."

"You don’t suppose he’ll get lost out there."

"No, he’ll holler if he is."

Now that he has gone and we have nothing to do I become more aware of the space all around us. There is not a sound anywhere. Lone prairie.

Sylvia says, "Do you suppose he really has stomach pains?"

"Yes," I say, somewhat dogmatically. I’m sorry to see the subject continued but they deserve a better explanation than they’re getting. They probably sense that there’s more to it than they’ve heard. "I’m sure he does," I finally say. "He’s been examined a half-dozen times for it. Once it was so bad we thought it was appendicitis -- .I remember we were on a vacation up north. I’d just finished getting out an engineering proposal for a five-million-dollar contract that just about did me in. That’s a whole other world. No time and no patience and six hundred pages of information to get out the door in one week and I was about ready to kill three different people and we thought we’d better head for the woods for a while.

"I can hardly remember what part of the woods we were in. Head just spinning with engineering data, and anyway Chris was just screaming. We couldn’t touch him, until I finally saw I was going to have to pick him up fast and get him to the hospital, and where that was I’ll never remember, but they found nothing."

"Nothing?"

"No. But it happened again on other occasions too."

"Don’t they have any idea?" Sylvia asks.

"This spring they diagnosed it as the beginning symptoms of mental illness."

"What?" John says.

It’s too dark to see Sylvia or John now or even the outlines of the hills. I listen for sounds in the distance, but hear none. I don’t know what to answer and so say nothing.

When I look hard I can make out stars overhead but the fire in front of us makes it hard to see them. The night all around is thick and obscure. My cigarette is down to my fingers and I put it out.

"I didn’t know that," Sylvia’s voice says. All traces of anger are gone. "We wondered why you brought him instead of your wife," she says. "I’m glad you told us."

John shoves some of the unburned ends of the wood into the fire.

Sylvia says, "What do you suppose the cause is?"

John’s voice rasps, as if to cut it off, but I answer, "I don’t know. Causes and effects don’t seem to fit. Causes and effects are a result of thought. I would think mental illness comes before thought." This doesn’t make sense to them, I’m sure. It doesn’t make much sense to me and I’m too tired to try to think it out and give it up.

"What do the psychiatrists think?" John asks.

"Nothing. I stopped it."

"Stopped it?"

"Yes."

"Is that good?"

"I don’t know. There’s no rational reason I can think of for saying it’s not good. Just a mental block of my own. I think about it and all the good reasons for it and make plans for an appointment and even look for the phone number and then the block hits, and it’s just like a door slammed shut."

"That doesn’t sound right."

"No one else thinks so either. I suppose I can’t hold out forever."

"But why?" Sylvia asks.

"I don’t know why—it’s just that—I don’t know—they’re not kin."—Surprising word, I think to myself never used it before. Not of kin—sounds like hillbilly talk—not of a kind—same root—kindness, too—they can’t have real kindness toward him, they’re not his kin -- . That’s exactly the feeling.

Old word, so ancient it’s almost drowned out. What a change through the centuries. Now anybody can be "kind." And everybody’s supposed to be. Except that long ago it was something you were born into and couldn’t help. Now it’s just a faked-up attitude half the time, like teachers the first day of class. But what do they really know about kindness who are not kin.

It goes over and over again through my thoughts—mein Kind...my child. There it is in another language. Mein Kinder -- "Wer reitet so spät durch Nacht und Wind? Es ist der Vater mit seinem Kind."

Strange feeling from that.

"What are you thinking about?" Sylvia asks.

"An old poem, by Goethe. It must be two hundred years old. I had to learn it a long time ago. I don’t know why I should remember it now, except—" The strange feeling comes back.

"How does it go?" Sylvia asks.

I try to recall. "A man is riding along a beach at night, through the wind. It’s a father, with his son, whom he holds fast in his arm. He asks his son why he looks so pale, and the son replies, ‘Father, don’t you see the ghost?’ The father tried to reassure the boy it’s only a bank of fog along the beach that he sees and only the rustling of the leaves in the wind that he hears but the son keeps saying it is the ghost and the father rides harder and harder through the night."

"How does it end?"

"In failure—death of the child. The ghost wins."

The wind blows light up from the coals and I see Sylvia look at me startled.

"But that’s another land and another time," I say. "Here life is the end and ghosts have no meaning. I believe that. I believe in all this too," I say, looking out at the darkened prairie, "although I’m not sure of what it all means yet—I’m not sure of much of anything these days. Maybe that’s why I talk so much."

The coals die lower and lower. We smoke our last cigarettes. Chris is off somewhere in the darkness but I’m not going to shag after him. John is carefully silent and Sylvia is silent and suddenly we are all separate, all alone in our private universes, and there is no communication among us. We douse the fire and go back to the sleeping bags in the pines.

I discover that this one tiny refuge of scrub pines where I have put the sleeping bags is also the refuge from the wind of millions of mosquitos up from the reservoir. The mosquito repellent doesn’t stop them at all. I crawl deep into the sleeping bag and make one little hole for breathing. I am almost asleep when Chris finally shows up.

"There’s a great big sandpile over there," he says, crunching around on the pine needles.

"Yes," I say. "Get to sleep."

"You should see it. Will you come and see it tomorrow?"

"We won’t have time."

"Can I play over there tomorrow morning?"

"Yes."

He makes interminable noises getting undressed and into the sleeping bag. He is in it. Then he rolls around. Then he is silent, and then rolls some more. Then he says, "Dad?"

"What?"

"What was it like when you were a kid?"

"Go to sleep, Chris!" There are limits to what you can listen to.

Later I hear a sharp inhaling of phlegm that tells me he has been crying, and though I’m exhausted, I don’t sleep. A few words of consolation might have helped there. He was trying to be friendly. But the words weren’t forthcoming for some reason. Consoling words are more for strangers, for hospitals, not kin. Little emotional Band-Aids like that aren’t what he needs or what’s sought -- .I don’t know what he needs, or what’s sought.

A gibbous moon comes up from the horizon beyond the pines, and by its slow, patient arc across the sky I measure hour after hour of semisleep. Too much fatigue. The moon and strange dreams and sounds of mosquitos and odd fragments of memory become jumbled and mixed in an unreal lost landscape in which the moon is shining and yet there is a bank of fog and I am riding a horse and Chris is with me and the horse jumps over a small stream that runs through the sand toward the ocean somewhere beyond. And then that is broken -- .And then it reappears.

And in the fog there appears an intimation of a figure. It disappears when I look at it directly, but then reappears in the corner of my vision when I turn my glance. I am about to say something, to call to it, to recognize it, but then do not, knowing that to recognize it by any gesture or action is to give it a reality which it must not have. But it is a figure I recognize even though I do not let on. It is Phædrus.

Evil spirit. Insane. From a world without life or death.

The figure fades and I hold panic down—tight—not rushing it—just letting it sink in—not believing it, not disbelieving it—but the hair crawls slowly on the back of my skull—he is calling Chris, is that it? -- Yes? --

6

My watch says nine o’clock. And it’s already too hot to sleep. Outside the sleeping bag, the sun is already high into the sky. The air around is clear and dry.

I get up puffy-eyed and arthritic from the ground.

My mouth is already dry and cracked and my face and hands are covered with mosquito bites. Some sunburn from yesterday morning is hurting.

Beyond the pines are burned grass and clumps of earth and sand so bright they are hard to look at. The heat, silence, and barren hills and blank sky give a feeling of great, intense space.

Not a bit of moisture in the sky. Today’s going to be a scorcher.

I walk out of the pines onto a stretch of barren sand between some grass and watch for a long time, meditatively -- .

I’ve decided today’s Chautauqua will begin to explore Phædrus’ world. It was intended earlier simply to restate some of his ideas that relate to technology and human values and make no reference to him personally, but the pattern of thought and memory that occurred last night has indicated this is not the way to go. To omit him now would be to run from something that should not be run from.

In the first grey of the morning what Chris said about his Indian friend’s grandmother came back to me, clearing something up. She said ghosts appear when someone has not been buried right. That’s true. He never was buried right, and that’s exactly the source of the trouble.

Later I turn and see John is up and looking at me uncomprehendingly. He is still not really awake, and now walks aimlessly in circles to clear his head. Soon Sylvia is up too and her left eye is all puffed up. I ask her what happened. She says it is from mosquito bites. I begin to collect gear to repack the cycle. John does the same.

When this is done we get a fire started while Sylvia opens up packages of bacon and eggs and bread for breakfast.

When the food is ready, I go over and wake Chris. He doesn’t want to get up. I tell him again. He says no. I grab the bottom of the sleeping bag, give it a mighty tablecloth jerk, and he is out of it, blinking in the pine needles. It takes him a while to figure out what has happened, while I roll up the sleeping bag.

He comes to breakfast looking insulted, eats one bite, says he isn’t hungry, his stomach hurts. I point to the lake down below us, so strange in the middle of the semidesert, but he doesn’t show any interest. He repeats his complaint. I just let it go by and John and Sylvia disregard it too. I’m glad they were told what the situation is with him. It might have created real friction otherwise.

We finish breakfast silently, and I’m oddly tranquil. The decision about Phædrus may have something to do with it. But we are also perhaps a hundred feet above the reservoir, looking across it into a kind of Western spaciousness. Barren hills, no one anywhere, not a sound; and there is something about places like this that raises your spirits a little and makes you think that things will probably get better.

While loading the remaining gear on the luggage rack I see with surprise that the rear tire is worn way down. All that speed and heavy load and heat on the road yesterday must have caused it. The chain is also sagging and I get out the tools to adjust it and then groan.

"What’s the matter," John says.

"Thread’s stripped in the chain adjustment."

I remove the adjusting bolt and examine the threads. "It’s my own fault for trying to adjust it once without loosening the axle nut. The bolt is good." I show it to him. "It looks like the internal threading in the frame that’s stripped."

John stares at the wheel for a long time. "Think you can make it into town?"

"Oh, yeah, sure. You can run it forever. It just makes the chain difficult to adjust."

He watches carefully as I take up the rear axle nut until it’s barely snug, tap it sideways with a hammer until the chain slack is right, then tighten up the axle nut with all my might to keep the axle from slipping forward later on, and replace the cotter pin. Unlike the axle nuts on a car, this one doesn’t affect bearing tightness.

"How did you know how to do that?" he asks.

"You just have to figure it out."

"I wouldn’t know where to start," he says.

I think to myself, That’s the problem, all right, where to start. To reach him you have to back up and back up, and the further back you go, the further back you see you have to go, until what looked like a small problem of communication turns into a major philosophic enquiry. That, I suppose, is why the Chautauqua.

I repack the tool kit and close the side cover plates and think to myself, He’s worth reaching though.

On the road again the dry air cools off the slight sweat from that chain job and I’m feeling good for a while. As soon as the sweat dries off though, it’s hot. Must be in the eighties already.

There’s no traffic on this road, and we’re moving right along. It’s a traveling day.

Now I want to begin to fulfill a certain obligation by stating that there was one person, no longer here, who had something to say, and who said it, but whom no one believed or really understood. Forgotten. For reasons that will become apparent I’d prefer that he remain forgotten, but there’s no choice other than to reopen his case.

I don’t know his whole story. No one ever will, except Phædrus himself, and he can no longer speak. But from his writings and from what others have said and from fragments of my own recall it should be possible to piece together some kind of approximation of what he was talking about. Since the basic ideas for this Chautauqua were taken from him there will be no real deviation, only an enlargement that may make the Chautauqua more understandable than if it were presented in a purely abstract way. The purpose of the enlargement is not to argue for him, certainly not to praise him. The purpose is to bury him...forever.

Back in Minnesota when we were traveling through some marshland I did some talking about the "shapes" of technology, the "death force" that the Sutherlands seem to be running from. I want to move now in the opposite direction from the Sutherlands, toward that force and into its center. In doing so we will be entering Phædrus’ world, the only world he ever knew, in which all understanding is in terms of underlying form.

The world of underlying form is an unusual object of discussion because it is actually a mode of discussion itself. You discuss things in terms of their immediate appearance or you discuss them in terms of their underlying form, and when you try to discuss these modes of discussion you get involved in what could be called a platform problem. You have no platform from which to discuss them other than the modes themselves.

Previously I was discussing his world of underlying form, or at least the aspect of it called technology, from an external view. Now I think it’s right to talk about that world of underlying form from its own point of view. I want to talk about the underlying form of the world of underlying form itself.

To do this, first of all, a dichotomy is necessary, but before I can use it honestly I have to back up and say what it is and means, and that is a long story in itself. Part of this back-up problem. But right now I just want to use a dichotomy and explain it later. I want to divide human understanding into two kinds...classical understanding and romantic understanding. In terms of ultimate truth a dichotomy of this sort has little meaning but it is quite legitimate when one is operating within the classic mode used to discover or create a world of underlying form. The terms classic and romantic, as Phædrus used them, mean the following:

A classical understanding sees the world primarily as underlying form itself. A romantic understanding sees it primarily in terms of immediate appearance. If you were to show an engine or a mechanical drawing or electronic schematic to a romantic it is unlikely he would see much of interest in it. It has no appeal because the reality he sees is its surface. Dull, complex lists of names, lines and numbers. Nothing interesting. But if you were to show the same blueprint or schematic or give the same description to a classical person he might look at it and then become fascinated by it because he sees that within the lines and shapes and symbols is a tremendous richness of underlying form.

The romantic mode is primarily inspirational, imaginative, creative, intuitive. Feelings rather than facts predominate. "Art" when it is opposed to "Science" is often romantic. It does not proceed by reason or by laws. It proceeds by feeling, intuition and esthetic conscience. In the northern European cultures the romantic mode is usually associated with femininity, but this is certainly not a necessary association.

The classic mode, by contrast, proceeds by reason and by laws...which are themselves underlying forms of thought and behavior. In the European cultures it is primarily a masculine mode and the fields of science, law and medicine are unattractive to women largely for this reason. Although motorcycle riding is romantic, motorcycle maintenance is purely classic. The dirt, the grease, the mastery of underlying form required all give it such a negative romantic appeal that women never go near it.

Although surface ugliness is often found in the classic mode of understanding it is not inherent in it. There is a classic esthetic which romantics often miss because of its subtlety. The classic style is straightforward, unadorned, unemotional, economical and carefully proportioned. Its purpose is not to inspire emotionally, but to bring order out of chaos and make the unknown known. It is not an esthet- ically free and natural style. It is esthetically restrained. Everything is under control. Its value is measured in terms of the skill with which this control is maintained.

To a romantic this classic mode often appears dull, awkward and ugly, like mechanical maintenance itself. Everything is in terms of pieces and parts and components and relationships. Nothing is figured out until it’s run through the computer a dozen times. Everything’s got to be measured and proved. Oppressive. Heavy. Endlessly grey. The death force.

Within the classic mode, however, the romantic has some appearances of his own. Frivolous, irrational, erratic, untrustworthy, interested primarily in pleasure-seeking. Shallow. Of no substance. Often a parasite who cannot or will not carry his own weight. A real drag on society. By now these battle lines should sound a little familiar.

This is the source of the trouble. Persons tend to think and feel exclusively in one mode or the other and in doing so tend to misunderstand and underestimate what the other mode is all about. But no one is willing to give up the truth as he sees it, and as far as I know, no one now living has any real reconciliation of these truths or modes. There is no point at which these visions of reality are unified.

And so in recent times we have seen a huge split develop between a classic culture and a romantic counterculture...two worlds growingly alienated and hateful toward each other with everyone wondering if it will always be this way, a house divided against itself. No one wants it really...despite what his antagonists in the other dimension might think.

It is within this context that what Phædrus thought and said is significant. But no one was listening at that time and they only thought him eccentric at first, then undesirable, then slightly mad, and then genuinely insane. There seems little doubt that he was insane, but much of his writing at the time indicates that what was driving him insane was this hostile opinion of him. Unusual behavior tends to produce estrangement in others which tends to further the unusual behavior and thus the estrangement in self-stoking cycles until some sort of climax is reached. In Phædrus’ case there was a court-ordered police arrest and permanent removal from society.

I see we are at the left turn onto US 12 and John has pulled up for gas. I pull up beside him.

The thermometer by the door of the station reads 92 degrees. "Going to be another rough one today," I say.

When the tanks are filled we head across the street into a restaurant for coffee. Chris, of course, is hungry.

I tell him I’ve been waiting for that. I tell him he eats with the rest of us or not all. Not angrily. Just matter-of-factly. He’s reproachful but sees how it’s going to be.

I catch a fleeting look of relief from Sylvia. Evidently she thought this was going to be a continuous problem.

When we have finished the coffee and are outside again the heat is so ferocious we move off on the cycles as fast as possible. Again there is that momentary coolness, but it disappears. The sun makes the burned grass and sand so bright I have to squint to cut down glare. This US 12 is old, bad highway. The broken concrete is tar-patched and bumpy. Road signs indicate detours ahead. On either side of the road are occasional worn sheds and shacks and roadside stands that have accumulated through the years. The traffic is heavy now. I’m just as happy to be thinking about the rational, analytical, classical world of Phædrus.

His kind of rationality has been used since antiquity to remove oneself from the tedium and depression of one’s immediate surroundings. What makes it hard to see is that where once it was used to get away from it all, the escape has been so successful that now it is the "it all" that the romantics are trying to escape. What makes his world so hard to see clearly is not its strangeness but its usualness. Familiarity can blind you too.

His way of looking at things produces a kind of description that can be called an "analytic" description. That is another name of the classic platform from which one discusses things in terms of their underlying form. He was a totally classic person. And to give a fuller description of what this is I want now to turn his analytic approach back upon itself...to analyze analysis itself. I want to do this first of all by giving an extensive example of it and then by dissecting what it is. The motorcycle is a perfect subject for it since the motorcycle itself was invented by classic minds. So listen:

A motorcycle may be divided for purposes of classical rational analysis by means of its component assemblies and by means of its functions.

If divided by means of its component assemblies, its most basic division is into a power assembly and a running assembly.

The power assembly may be divided into the engine and the power-delivery system. The engine will be taken up first.

The engine consists of a housing containing a power train, a fuel-air system, an ignition system, a feedback system and a lubrication system.

The power train consists of cylinders, pistons, connecting rods, a crankshaft and a flywheel.

The fuel-air system components, which are part of the engine, consist of a gas tank and filter, an air cleaner, a carburetor, valves and exhaust pipes.

The ignition system consists of an alternator, a rectifier, a battery, a high-voltage coil and spark plugs.

The feedback system consists of a cam chain, a camshaft, tappets and a distributor.

The lubrication system consists of an oil pump and channels throughout the housing for distribution of the oil.

The power-delivery system accompanying the engine consists of a clutch, a transmission and a chain.

The supporting assembly accompanying the power assembly consists of a frame, including foot pegs, seat and fenders; a steering assembly; front and rear shock absorbers; wheels; control levers and cables; lights and horn; and speed and mileage indicators.

That’s a motorcycle divided according to its components. To know what the components are for, a division according to functions is necessary:

A motorcycle may be divided into normal running functions and special, operator-controlled functions.

Normal running functions may be divided into functions during the intake cycle, functions during the compression cycle, functions during the power cycle and functions during the exhaust cycle.

And so on. I could go on about which functions occur in their proper sequence during each of the four cycles, then go on to the operator-controlled functions and that would be a very summary description of the underlying form of a motorcycle. It would be extremely short and rudimentary, as descriptions of this sort go. Almost any one of the components mentioned can be expanded on indefinitely. I’ve read an entire engineering volume on contact points alone, which are just a small but vital part of the distributor. There are other types of engines than the single-cylinder Otto engine described here: two-cycle engines, multiple-cylinder engines, diesel engines, Wankel engines...but this example is enough.

This description would cover the "what" of the motorcycle in terms of components, and the "how" of the engine in terms of functions. It would badly need a "where" analysis in the form of an illustration, and also a "why" analysis in the form of engineering principles that led to this particular conformation of parts. But the purpose here isn’t exhaustively to analyze the motorcycle. It’s to provide a starting point, an example of a mode of understanding of things which will itself become an object of analysis.

There’s certainly nothing strange about this description at first hearing. It sounds like something from a beginning textbook on the subject, or perhaps a first lesson in a vocational course. What is unusual about it is seen when it ceases to be a mode of discourse and becomes an object of discourse. Then certain things can be pointed to.

The first thing to be observed about this description is so obvious you have to hold it down or it will drown out every other observation. This is: It is just duller than ditchwater. Yah-da, yah-da, yah-da, yah-da, yah, carburetor, gear ratio, compression, yah-da-yah, piston, plugs, intake, yah-da-yah, on and on and on. That is the romantic face of the classic mode. Dull, awkward and ugly. Few romantics get beyond that point.

But if you can hold down that most obvious observation, some other things can be noticed that do not at first appear.

The first is that the motorcycle, so described, is almost impossible to understand unless you already know how one works. The immediate surface impressions that are essential for primary understanding are gone. Only the underlying form is left.

The second is that the observer is missing. The description doesn’t say that to see the piston you must remove the cylinder head. "You" aren’t anywhere in the picture. Even the "operator" is a kind of personalityless robot whose performance of a function on the machine is completely mechanical. There are no real subjects in this description. Only objects exist that are independent of any observer.

The third is that the words "good" and "bad" and all their synonyms are completely absent. No value judgments have been expressed anywhere, only facts.

The fourth is that there is a knife moving here. A very deadly one; an intellectual scalpel so swift and so sharp you sometimes don’t see it moving. You get the illusion that all those parts are just there and are being named as they exist. But they can be named quite differently and organized quite differently depending on how the knife moves.

For example, the feedback mechanism which includes the camshaft and cam chain and tappets and distributor exists only because of an unusual cut of this analytic knife. If you were to go to a motorcycle-parts department and ask them for a feedback assembly they wouldn’t know what the hell you were talking about. They don’t split it up that way. No two manufacturers ever split it up quite the same way and every mechanic is familiar with the problem of the part you can’t buy because you can’t find it because the manufacturer considers it a part of something else.

It is important to see this knife for what it is and not to be fooled into thinking that motorcycles or anything else are the way they are just because the knife happened to cut it up that way. It is important to concentrate on the knife itself. Later I will want to show how an ability to use this knife creatively and effectively can result in solutions to the classic and romantic split.

Phædrus was a master with this knife, and used it with dexterity and a sense of power. With a single stroke of analytic thought he split the whole world into parts of his own choosing, split the parts and split the fragments of the parts, finer and finer and finer until he had reduced it to what he wanted it to be. Even the special use of the terms "classic" and "romantic" are examples of his knifemanship.

But if this were all there were to him, analytic skill, I would be more than willing to shut up about him. What makes it important not to shut up about him was that he used this skill in such a bizarre and yet meaningful way. No one ever saw this, I don’t think he even saw it himself, and it may be an illusion of my own, but the knife he used was less that of an assassin than that of a poor surgeon. Perhaps there is no difference. But he saw a sick and ailing thing happening and he started cutting deep, deeper and deeper to get at the root of it. He was after something. That is important. He was after something and he used the knife because that was the only tool he had. But he took on so much and went so far in the end his real victim was himself.

7

Heat is everywhere now. I can’t ignore it anymore. The air is like a furnace blast so hot that my eyes under the goggles feel cool compared to the rest of my face. My hands are cool but the gloves have big black spots from perspiration on the back surrounded by white streaks of dried salt.

On the road ahead a crow tugs on some carrion and flies up slowly as we approach. It looks like a lizard on the road, dry and stuck to the tar.

On the horizon appears an image of buildings, shimmering slightly. I look down at the map and it must be Bowman. I think about ice water and air conditioning.

On the street and sidewalks of Bowman we see almost no one, even though plenty of parked cars show they’re here. All inside. We swing the machines into an angled parking place with a tight turn that points them outward, for when we’re ready to go. A lone, elderly person wearing a broad-brimmed hat watches us put the cycles on their stands and remove helmets and goggles.

"Hot enough for you?" he asks. His expression is blank.

John shakes his head and says, "Gawd!"

The expression, shaded by the hat, becomes almost a smile.

"What is the temperature?" John asks.

"Hundred and two," he says, "last I saw. Should go to hundred and four."

He asks us how far we have come and we tell him and he nods with a kind of approval. "That’s a long way," he says. Then he asks about the machines.

The beer and air conditioning are calling, but we don’t break away. We just stand there in the hundred-and-two sun talking to this person. He is a stockman, retired, says this is pretty much ranch country around here and he used to own a cycle years ago. It pleases me that he should want to talk about his Henderson in this hundred-and-two sun. We talk about it for a while, with growing impatience from John and Sylvia and Chris, and when we finally say good-bye he says he is glad to have met us and his expression is still blank but we sense that he really meant it. He walks away with a kind of slow dignity in the hundred-and-two sun.

In the restaurant I try to comment on this but no one is interested. John and Sylvia look really out of it. They just sit and soak up the air-conditioned air without a move. The waitress comes for the order and that snaps them out of it a little, but they are not ready and so she goes away again.

"I don’t think I want to leave here," Sylvia says.

An image of the elderly man outside in the wide- brimmed hat comes back to me. "Think what it was like around here before air conditioning," I say.

"I am," she says.

"With the roads this hot and that bad back tire of mine, we shouldn’t go more than sixty," I say.

No comment from them.

Chris, in contrast to them, seems to be back to his normal self, alert and watching everything. When the food comes he wolfs it down and then, before we are half-finished, asks for more. He gets it and we wait for him to finish.

Miles later and the heat is just ferocious. Sunglasses and goggles are not enough for this glare. You need a welder’s mask.

The High Plains break up into washed-out and gullied hills. It is all bright whitish tan. Not a blade of grass anywhere. Just scattered weed stalks and rocks and sand. The black of the highway is a relief to look at so I stare down at it and study how the blur whizzes by underfoot. Beside it I see the left exhaust pipe has picked up a bluer color than it has ever had before. I spit on my glove tips, touch it and can see the sizzle. Not good.

It’s important now to just live with this and not fight it mentally—mind control -- .

I should talk now about Phædrus’ knife. It’ll help understand some of the things we talked about.

The application of this knife, the division of the world into parts and the building of this structure, is something everybody does. All the time we are aware of millions of things around us...these changing shapes, these burning hills, the sound of the engine, the feel of the throttle, each rock and weed and fence post and piece of debris beside the road...aware of these things but not really conscious of them unless there is something unusual or unless they reflect something we are predisposed to see. We could not possibly be conscious of these things and remember all of them because our mind would be so full of useless details we would be unable to think. From all this awareness we must select, and what we select and call consciousness is never the same as the awareness because the process of selection mutates it. We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world.

Once we have the handful of sand, the world of which we are conscious, a process of discrimination goes to work on it. This is the knife. We divide the sand into parts. This and that. Here and there. Black and white. Now and then. The discrimination is the division of the conscious universe into parts.

The handful of sand looks uniform at first, but the longer we look at it the more diverse we find it to be. Each grain of sand is different. No two are alike. Some are similar in one way, some are similar in another way, and we can form the sand into separate piles on the basis of this similarity and dissimilarity. Shades of color in different piles...sizes in different piles...grain shapes in different piles...subtypes of grain shapes in different piles...grades of opacity in different piles...and so on, and on, and on. You’d think the process of subdivision and classification would come to an end somewhere, but it doesn’t. It just goes on and on.

Classical understanding is concerned with the piles and the basis for sorting and interrelating them. Romantic understanding is directed toward the handful of sand before the sorting begins. Both are valid ways of looking at the world although irreconcilable with each other.

What has become an urgent necessity is a way of looking at the world that does violence to neither of these two kinds of understanding and unites them into one. Such an understanding will not reject sand-sorting or contemplation of unsorted sand for its own sake. Such an understanding will instead seek to direct attention to the endless landscape from which the sand is taken. That is what Phædrus, the poor surgeon, was trying to do.

To understand what he was trying to do it’s necessary to see that part of the landscape, inseparable from it, which must be understood, is a figure in the middle of it, sorting sand into piles. To see the landscape without seeing this figure is not to see the landscape at all. To reject that part of the Buddha that attends to the analysis of motorcycles is to miss the Buddha entirely.

There is a perennial classical question that asks which part of the motorcycle, which grain of sand in which pile, is the Buddha. Obviously to ask that question is to look in the wrong direction, for the Buddha is everywhere. But just as obviously to ask that question is to look in the right direction, for the Buddha is everywhere. About the Buddha that exists independently of any analytic thought much has been said...some would say too much, and would question any attempt to add to it. But about the Buddha that exists within analytic thought, and gives that analytic thought its direction, virtually nothing has been said, and there are historic reasons for this. But history keeps happening, and it seems no harm and maybe some positive good to add to our historical heritage with some talk in this area of discourse.

When analytic thought, the knife, is applied to experience, something is always killed in the process. That is fairly well understood, at least in the arts. Mark Twain’s experience comes to mind, in which, after he had mastered the analytic knowledge needed to pilot the Mississippi River, he discovered the river had lost its beauty. Something is always killed. But what is less noticed in the arts...something is always created too. And instead of just dwelling on what is killed it’s important also to see what’s created and to see the process as a kind of death-birth continuity that is neither good nor bad, but just is.

We pass through a town called Marmarth but John doesn’t stop even for a rest and so we go on. More furnace heat, into some badlands, and we cross the border into Montana. A sign by the road announces it.

Sylvia waves her arms up and down and I beep the horn in response, but when I look at the sign my feelings are not jubilant at all. For me its information causes a sudden inward tension that can’t exist for them. They’ve no way of knowing we’re now in the country where he lived.

All this talk so far about classic and romantic understanding must seem a strangely oblique way of describing him, but to get at Phædrus, this oblique route is the only one to take. To describe his physical appearance or the statistics of his life would be to dwell on misleading superficialities. And to come at him directly would be to invite disaster.

He was insane. And when you look directly at an insane man all you see is a reflection of your own knowledge that he’s insane, which is not to see him at all. To see him you must see what he saw and when you are trying to see the vision of an insane man, an oblique route is the only way to come at it. Otherwise your own opinions block the way. There is only one access to him that I can see as passable and we still have a way to go.

I’ve been going into all this business of analyses and definitions and hierarchies not for their own sake but to lay the groundwork for an understanding of the direction in which Phædrus went.

I told Chris the other night that Phædrus spent his entire life pursuing a ghost. That was true. The ghost he pursued was the ghost that underlies all of technology, all of modern science, all of Western thought. It was the ghost of rationality itself. I told Chris that he found the ghost and that when he found it he thrashed it good. I think in a figurative sense that is true. The things I hope to bring to light as we go along are some of the things he uncovered. Now the times are such that others may at last find them of value. No one then would see the ghost that Phædrus pursued, but I think now that more and more people see it, or get glimpses of it in bad moments, a ghost which calls itself rationality but whose appearance is that of incoherence and meaninglessness, which causes the most normal of everyday acts to seem slightly mad because of their irrelevance to anything else. This is the ghost of normal everyday assumptions which declares that the ultimate purpose of life, which is to keep alive, is impossible, but that this is the ultimate purpose of life anyway, so that great minds struggle to cure diseases so that people may live longer, but only madmen ask why. One lives longer in order that he may live longer. There is no other purpose. That is what the ghost says.

At Baker, where we stop, the thermometers are reading 108 degrees in the shade. When I take my gloves off, the metal of the gas tank is so hot I can’t touch it. The engine is making ominous knick-knicking sounds from overheating. Very bad. The rear tire has worn badly too, and I feel with my hand that it’s almost as hot as the gas tank.

"We’re going to have to slow down," I say.

"What?"

"I don’t think we should go over fifty," I say.

John looks at Sylvia and she looks at him. Something has already been said between them about my slowness. They both look as if they’ve about had it.

"We just want to get there fast," John says, and they both walk toward a restaurant.

The chain has been running hot and dry too. In the righthand saddlebag I rummage for a can of spray lubricant, find it, then start the engine and spray the moving chain. The chain is still so hot the solvent evaporates almost instantly. Then I squirt a little oil on, let it run for a minute and shut the engine off. Chris waits patiently, then follows me into the restaurant.

"I thought you said the big slump was going to come on the second day," Sylvia says as we approach the booth they are in.

"Second or third," I reply.

"Or fourth or fifth?"

"Maybe."

She and John look at each other again with the same expression they showed before. It seems to say, "Three’s a crowd." They may want to go ahead fast and wait for me in some town up ahead. I’d suggest it myself except that if they go much faster they won’t be waiting for me in some town. It’ll be by the side of the road.

"I don’t know how the people here stand this," Sylvia says.

"Well, it’s hard country," I say with a little irritation. "They know it’s hard before they come here and are ready for it."

I add, "If one person complains he just makes it that much harder for the others. They’ve got stamina. They know how to keep on going."

John and Sylvia don’t say much, and John finishes his Coke early and is off to a bar for a snort. I go out and check the cycle luggage again and find that the new pack has been compressing a little and so take up the slack in the ropes and retie them.

Chris points to a thermometer in direct sunlight and we see it has gone all the way above the scale at 120 degrees.

Before we are out of town I am sweating again. The cool drying-off period doesn’t last even half a minute.

The heat just slams into us. Even with dark sunglasses I have to squint my eyes into slits. There’s nothing but burning sand and pale sky so bright it’s hard to look anywhere. It’s just become white-hot everywhere. A real inferno.

John up ahead is speeding faster and faster. I give up on him and slow it down to fifty-five. Unless you’re just looking for trouble in this heat you don’t run tires at eighty-five. A blowout on this stretch would really be it.

I suppose they took what I said as a kind of rebuke but I didn’t have that in mind. I’m no more comfortable than they are in this heat but there’s no point in dwelling on it. All day while I’ve been thinking and talking about Phædrus they must have been thinking about how bad all this is. That’s what’s really wearing them down. The thought.

Some things can be said about Phædrus as an individual:

He was a knower of logic, the classical system-of-the-system which describes the rules and procedures of systematic thought by which analytic knowledge may be structured and interrelated. He was so swift at this his Stanford-Binet IQ, which is essentially a record of skill at analytic manipulation, was recorded at 170, a figure that occurs in only one person in fifty thousand.

He was systematic, but to say he thought and acted like a machine would be to misunderstand the nature of his thought. It was not like pistons and wheels and gears all moving at once, massive and coordinated. The image of a laser beam comes to mind instead; a single pencil of light of such terrific energy in such extreme concentration it can be shot at the moon and its reflection seen back on earth. Phædrus did not try to use his brilliance for general illumination. He sought one specific distant target and aimed for it and hit it. And that was all. General illumination of that target he hit now seems to be left for me.

In proportion to his intelligence he was extremely isolated. There’s no record of his having had close friends. He traveled alone. Always. Even in the presence of others he was completely alone. People sometimes felt this and felt rejected by it, and so did not like him, but their dislike was not important to him.

His wife and family seem to have suffered the most. His wife says those who tried to go beyond the barriers of his reserve found themselves facing a blank. My impression is that they were starved for some kind of affection which he never gave.

No one really knew him. That is evidently the way he wanted it, and that’s the way it was. Perhaps his aloneness was the result of his intelligence. Perhaps it was the cause. But the two were always together. An uncanny solitary intelligence.

This still doesn’t do it though, because this and the image of a laser beam convey the idea that he was completely cold and unemotional, and that is not so. In his pursuit of what I have called the ghost of rationality he was a fanatic hunter.

One fragment becomes especially vivid now of a scene in the mountains where the sun was behind the mountain half an hour and an early twilight had changed the trees and even the rocks to almost blackened shades of blue and grey and brown. Phædrus had been there three days without food. His food had run out but he was thinking deeply and seeing things and was reluctant to leave. He was not far away from where he knew there was a road and was in no hurry.

In the dusk coming down the trail he saw a movement and then what seemed to be a dog approaching on the trail, a very large sheep dog, or an animal more like a husky, and he wondered what would bring a dog to this obscure place at this time of evening. He disliked dogs, but this animal moved in a way that forestalled these feelings. It seemed to be watching him, judging him. Phædrus stared into the animal’s eyes for a long time, and for a moment felt some kind of recognition. Then the dog disappeared.

He realized much later it was a timber wolf, and the memory of this incident stayed with him a long time. I think it stayed with him because he had seen a kind of image of himself.

A photograph can show a physical image in which time is static, and a mirror can show a physical image in which time is dynamic, but I think what he saw on the mountain was another kind of image altogether which was not physical and did not exist in time at all. It was an image nevertheless and that is why he felt recognition. It comes to me vividly now because I saw it again last night as the visage of Phædrus himself.

Like that timber wolf on the mountain he had a kind of animal courage. He went his own way with unconcern for consequences that sometimes stunned people, and stuns me now to hear about it. He did not often swerve to right or to left. I’ve discovered that. But this courage didn’t arise from any idealistic idea of self-sacrifice, only from the intensity of his pursuit, and there was nothing noble about it.

I think his pursuit of the ghost of rationality occurred because he wanted to wreak revenge on it, because he felt he himself was so shaped by it. He wanted to free himself from his own image. He wanted to destroy it because the ghost was what he was and he wanted to be free from the bondage of his own identity. In a strange way, this freedom was achieved.

This account of him must sound unworldly, but the most unworldly part of it all is yet to come. This is my own relationship to him. This has been forestalled and obscured until now, but nevertheless must be known.

I first discovered him by inference from a strange series of events many years ago. One Friday I had gone to work and gotten quite a lot done before the weekend and was happy about that and later that day drove to a party where, after talking to everybody too long and too loudly and drinking way too much, went into a back room to lie down for a while.

When I awoke I saw that I’d slept the whole night, because now it was daylight, and I thought, "My God, I don’t even know the name of the hosts!" and wondered what kind of embarrassment this was going to lead to. The room didn’t look like the room I had lain down in, but it had been dark when I came in and I must have been blind drunk anyway.

I got up and saw that my clothes were changed. These were not the clothes I had worn the night before. I walked out the door, but to my surprise the doorway led not to rooms of a house but into a long corridor.

As I walked down the corridor I got the impression that everyone was looking at me. Three different times a stranger stopped me and asked how I felt. Thinking they were referring to my drunken condition I replied that I didn’t even have a hangover, which caused one of them to start to laugh, but then catch himself.

At a room at the end of the corridor I saw a table where there was activity of some sort going on. I sat down nearby, hoping to remain unnoticed until I got all this figured out. But a woman dressed in white came up to me and asked if I knew her name. I read the little name clip on her blouse. She didn’t see that I was doing this and seemed amazed, and walked off in a hurry.

When she came back there was a man with her, and he was looking right at me. He sat down next to me and asked me if I knew his name. I told him what it was, and was as surprised as they were that I knew it.

"It’s very early for this to be happening," he said.

"This looks like a hospital," I said.

They agreed.

"How did I get here?" I asked, thinking about the drunken party.

The man said nothing and the woman looked down. Very little was explained.

It took me more than a week to deduce from the evidence around me that everything before my waking up was a dream and everything afterward was reality. There was no basis for distinguishing the two other than the growing pile of new events that seemed to argue against the drunk experience. Little things appeared, like the locked door, the outside of which I could never remember seeing. And a slip of paper from the probate court telling me that some person was committed as insane. Did they mean me?

It was explained to me finally that "You have a new personality now." But this statement was no explanation at all. It puzzled me more than ever since I had no awareness at all of any "old" personality. If they had said, "You are a new personality," it would have been much clearer. That would have fitted. They had made the mistake of thinking of a personality as some sort of possession, like a suit of clothes, which a person wears. But apart from a personality what is there? Some bones and flesh. A collection of legal statistics, perhaps, but surely no person. The bones and flesh and legal statistics are the garments worn by the personality, not the other way around.

But who was the old personality whom they had known and presumed I was a continuation of?

This was my first inkling of the existence of Phædrus, many years ago. In the days and weeks and years that have followed, I’ve learned much more.

He was dead. Destroyed by order of the court, enforced by the transmission of high-voltage alternating current through the lobes of his brain. Approximately 800 mills of amperage at durations of 0.5 to 1.5 seconds had been applied on twenty-eight consecutive occasions, in a process known technologically as "Annihilation ECS." A whole personality had been liquidated without a trace in a technologically faultless act that has defined our relationship ever since. I have never met him. Never will.

And yet strange wisps of his memory suddenly match and fit this road and desert bluffs and white-hot sand all around us and there is a bizarre concurrence and then I know he has seen all of this. He was here, otherwise I would not know it. He had to be. And in seeing these sudden coalescences of vision and in recall of some strange fragment of thought whose origin I have no idea of, I’m like a clairvoyant, a spirit medium receiving messages from another world. That is how it is. I see things with my own eyes, and I see things with his eyes too. He once owned them.

These EYES! That is the terror of it. These gloved hands I now look at, steering the motorcycle down the road, were once his! And if you can understand the feeling that comes from that, then you can understand real fear...the fear that comes from knowing there is nowhere you can possibly run.

We enter a low-rimmed canyon. Before long, a roadside stop I’ve been waiting for appears. A few benches, a little building and some tiny green trees with hoses running to their bases. John, so help me God, is at the exit on the other side, ready to pull out onto the highway.

I ignore this and pull up by the building. Chris jumps off and we pull the machine back up on the stand. The heat rises from the engine as if it were on fire, throwing off waves that distort everything around it. Out of the corner of my eye I see the other cycle come back. When they arrive they are both glaring at me.

Sylvia says, "We’re just—angry!"

I shrug my shoulders and walk to the drinking fountain.

John says, "Where’s all that stamina you were telling us about?"

I look at him for a second and see he really is angry. "I was afraid you took that too seriously," I say, and then turn away. I drink the water and it’s alkaline, like soapy water. I drink it anyway.

John goes into the building to soak his shirt with water. I check the oil level. The oil filler cap is so hot it burns my fingers right through the gloves. The engine hasn’t lost much oil. The back tire tread is down a little more but still serviceable. The chain is tight enough but a little dry so I oil it again to be safe. The critical bolts are all tight enough.

John comes over dripping with water and says, "You go ahead this time, we’ll stay behind."

"I won’t go fast," I say.

"That’s all right," he says. "We’ll get there."

So I go ahead and we take it slowly. The road through the canyon doesn’t straighten out into more of what we’ve been through, as I expected it would, but starts to wind upward. Surprise.

Now the road meanders a little, now it cuts back away from the direction in which we should be going, then returns. Soon it rises a little and then rises some more. We are moving in angular directions into narrow devil’s gaps, then upward again higher and a little higher each time.

Some shrubs appear. Then small trees. The road goes higher still into grass, and then fenced meadows.

Overhead a small cloud appears. Rain perhaps? Perhaps. Meadows must have rain. And these now have flowers in them. Strange how all this has changed. Nothing to show it on the map. And the consciousness of memory has disappeared too. Phædrus must not have come this way. But there was no other road. Strange. It keeps rising upward.

The sun angles toward the cloud, which now has grown downward to touch the horizon above us, in which there are trees, pines, and a cold wind comes down with pine smells from the trees. The flowers in the meadow blow in the wind and the cycle leans a little and we are suddenly cool.

I look at Chris and he is smiling. I am smiling too.

Then the rain comes hard on the road with a gust of earth-smell from the dust that has waited for too long and the dust beside the road is pocked with the first raindrops.

This is all so new. And we are so in need of it, a new rain. My clothes become wet, and goggles are spattered, and chills start and feel delicious. The cloud passes from beneath the sun and the forest of pines and small meadows gleams again, sparkling where the sunlight catches small drops from the rain.

We reach the top of the climb dry again but cool now and stop, overlooking a huge valley and river below.

"I think we have arrived," John says.

Sylvia and Chris have walked into the meadow among the flowers under pines through which I can see the far side of the valley, away and below.

I am a pioneer now, looking onto a promised land.

Part II

8

It’s about ten o’clock in the morning and I’m sitting alongside the machine on a cool, shady curbstone back of a hotel we have found in Miles City, Montana. Sylvia is with Chris at a Laundromat doing the laundry for all of us. John is off looking for a duckbill to put on his helmet. He thought he saw one at a cycle shop when we came into town yesterday. And I’m about to sharpen up the engine a little.

Feeling good now. We got in here in the afternoon and made up for a lot of sleep. It was a good thing we stopped. We were so stupid with exhaustion we didn’t know how tired we were. When John tried to register rooms he couldn’t even remember my name. The desk girl asked us if we owned those "groovy, dreamy motorcycles" outside the window and we both laughed so hard she wondered what she had said wrong. It was just numbskull laughter from too much fatigue. We’ve been more than glad to leave them parked and walk for a change.

And baths. In a beautiful old enameled cast-iron bathtub that crouched on lion’s paws in the middle of a marble floor, just waiting for us. The water was so soft it felt as if I would never get the soap off. Afterward we walked up and down the main streets and felt like a family -- .

On this machine I’ve done the tuning so many times it’s become a ritual. I don’t have to think much about how to do it anymore. Just mainly look for anything unusual. The engine has picked up a noise that sounds like a loose tappet but could be something worse, so I’m going to tune it now and see if it goes away. Tappet adjustment has to be done with the engine cold, which means wherever you park it for the night is where you work on it the next morning, which is why I’m on a shady curbstone back of a hotel in Miles City, Montana. Right now the air is cool in the shade and will be for an hour or so until the sun gets around the tree branches, which is good for working on cycles. It’s important not to tune these machines in the direct sun or late in the day when your brain gets muddy because even if you’ve been through it a hundred times you should be alert and looking for things.

Not everyone understands what a completely rational process this is, this maintenance of a motorcycle. They think it’s some kind of a "knack" or some kind of "affinity for machines" in operation. They are right, but the knack is almost purely a process of reason, and most of the troubles are caused by what old time radio men called a "short between the earphones," failures to use the head properly. A motorcycle functions entirely in accordance with the laws of reason, and a study of the art of motorcycle maintenance is really a miniature study of the art of rationality itself. I said yesterday that the ghost of rationality was what Phædrus pursued and what led to his insanity, but to get into that it’s vital to stay with down-to-earth examples of rationality, so as not to get lost in generalities no one else can understand. Talk about rationality can get very confusing unless the things with which rationality deals are also included.

We are at the classic-romantic barrier now, where on one side we see a cycle as it appears immediately...and this is an important way of seeing it...and where on the other side we can begin to see it as a mechanic does in terms of underlying form...and this is an important way of seeing things too. These tools for example...this wrench...has a certain romantic beauty to it, but its purpose is always purely classical. It’s designed to change the underlying form of the machine.

The porcelain inside this first plug is very dark. That is classically as well as romantically ugly because it means the cylinder is getting too much gas and not enough air. The carbon molecules in the gasoline aren’t finding enough oxygen to combine with and they’re just sitting here loading up the plug. Coming into town yesterday the idle was loping a little, which is a symptom of the same thing.

Just to see if it’s just the one cylinder that’s rich I check the other one. They’re both the same. I get out a pocket knife, grab a stick lying in the gutter and whittle down the end to clean out the plugs, wondering what could be the cause of the richness. That wouldn’t have anything to do with rods or valves. And carbs rarely go out of adjustment. The main jets are oversized, which causes richness at high speeds but the plugs were a lot cleaner than this before with the same jets. Mystery. You’re always surrounded by them. But if you tried to solve them all, you’d never get the machine fixed. There’s no immediate answer so I just leave it as a hanging question.

The first tappet is right on, no adjustment required, so I move on to the next. Still plenty of time before the sun gets past those trees—I always feel like I’m in church when I do this -- .The gage is some kind of religious icon and I’m performing a holy rite with it. It is a member of a set called "precision measuring instruments" which in a classic sense has a profound meaning.

In a motorcycle this precision isn’t maintained for any romantic or perfectionist reasons. It’s simply that the enormous forces of heat and explosive pressure inside this engine can only be controlled through the kind of precision these instruments give. When each explosion takes place it drives a connecting rod onto the crankshaft with a surface pressure of many tons per square inch. If the fit of the rod to the crankshaft is precise the explosion force will be transferred smoothly and the metal will be able to stand it. But if the fit is loose by a distance of only a few thousandths of an inch the force will be delivered suddenly, like a hammer blow, and the rod, bearing and crankshaft surface will soon be pounded flat, creating a noise which at first sounds a lot like loose tappets. That’s the reason I’m checking it now. If it is a loose rod and I try to make it to the mountains without an overhaul, it will soon get louder and louder until the rod tears itself free, slams into the spinning crankshaft and destroys the engine. Sometimes broken rods will pile right down through the crankcase and dump all the oil onto the road. All you can do then is start walking.

But all this can be prevented by a few thousandths of an inch fit which precision measuring instruments give, and this is their classical beauty...not what you see, but what they mean...what they are capable of in terms of control of underlying form.

The second tappet’s fine. I swing over to the street side of the machine and start on the other cylinder.

Precision instruments are designed to achieve an idea, dimensional precision, whose perfection is impossible. There is no perfectly shaped part of the motorcycle and never will be, but when you come as close as these instruments take you, remarkable things happen, and you go flying across the countryside under a power that would be called magic if it were not so completely rational in every way. It’s the understanding of this rational intellectual idea that’s fundamental. John looks at the motorcycle and he sees steel in various shapes and has negative feelings about these steel shapes and turns off the whole thing. I look at the shapes of the steel now and I see ideas. He thinks I’m working on parts.I ‘m working on concepts.

I was talking about these concepts yesterday when I said that a motorcycle can be divided according to its components and according to its functions. When I said that suddenly I created a set of boxes with the following arrangement:

And when I said the components may be subdivided into a power assembly and a running assembly, suddenly appear some more little boxes:

And you see that every time I made a further division, up came more boxes based on these divisions until I had a huge pyramid of boxes. Finally you see that while I was splitting the cycle up into finer and finer pieces, I was also building a structure.

This structure of concepts is formally called a hierarchy and since ancient times has been a basic structure for all Western knowledge. Kingdoms, empires, churches, armies have all been structured into hierarchies. Modern businesses are so structured. Tables of contents of reference material are so structured, mechanical assemblies, computer software, all scientific and technical knowledge is so structured...so much so that in some fields such as biology, the hierarchy of kingdom-

phylum-class-order-family-genus-species is almost an icon.

The box "motorcycle" contains the boxes "components" and "functions." The box "components" contains the boxes "power assembly" and "running assembly," and so on. There are many other kinds of structures produced by other operators such as "causes" which produce long chain structures of the form, "A causes B which causes C which causes D," and so on. A functional description of the motorcycle uses this structure. The operator’s "exists," "equals," and "implies" produce still other structures. These structures are normally interrelated in patterns and paths so complex and so enormous no one person can understand more than a small part of them in his lifetime. The overall name of these interrelated structures, the genus of which the hierarchy of containment and structure of causation are just species, is system. The motorcycle is a system. A real system.

To speak of certain government and establishment institutions as "the system" is to speak correctly, since these organizations are founded upon the same structural conceptual relationships as a motorcycle. They are sustained by structural relationships even when they have lost all other meaning and purpose. People arrive at a factory and perform a totally meaningless task from eight to five without question because the structure demands that it be that way. There’s no villain, no "mean guy" who wants them to live meaningless lives, it’s just that the structure, the system demands it and no one is willing to take on the formidable task of changing the structure just because it is meaningless.

But to tear down a factory or to revolt against a government or to avoid repair of a motorcycle because it is a system is to attack effects rather than causes; and as long as the attack is upon effects only, no change is possible. The true system, the real system, is our present construction of systematic thought itself, rationality itself, and if a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government. There’s so much talk about the system. And so little understanding.

That’s all the motorcycle is, a system of concepts worked out in steel. There’s no part in it, no shape in it, that is not out of someone’s mind—number three tappet is right on too. One more to go. This had better be it -- .I’ve noticed that people who have never worked with steel have trouble seeing this...that the motorcycle is primarily a mental phenomenon. They associate metal with given shapes...pipes, rods, girders, tools, parts...all of them fixed and inviolable, and think of it as primarily physical. But a person who does machining or foundry work or forge work or welding sees "steel" as having no shape at all. Steel can be any shape you want if you are skilled enough, and any shape but the one you want if you are not. Shapes, like this tappet, are what you arrive at, what you give to the steel. Steel has no more shape than this old pile of dirt on the engine here. These shapes are all out of someone’s mind. That’s important to see. The steel? Hell, even the steel is out of someone’s mind. There’s no steel in nature. Anyone from the Bronze Age could have told you that. All nature has is a potential for steel. There’s nothing else there. But what’s "potential"? That’s also in someone’s mind! -- Ghosts.

That’s really what Phædrus was talking about when he said it’s all in the mind. It sounds insane when you just jump up and say it without reference to anything specific like an engine. But when you tie it down to something specific and concrete, the insane sound tends to disappear and you see he could have been saying something of importance.

The fourth tappet is too loose, which is what I had hoped. I adjust it. I check the timing and see that it is still right on and the points are not pitted, so I leave them alone, screw on the valve covers, replace the plugs and start it up.

The tappet noise is gone, but that doesn’t mean much yet while the oil is still cold. I let it idle while I pack the tools away, then climb on and head for a cycle shop a cyclist on the street told us about last night where they may have a chain adjuster link, and a new foot-peg rubber. Chris must have nervous feet. His foot pegs keep wearing out.

I go a couple blocks and still no tappet noise. It’s beginning to sound good, I think it’s gone. I won’t come to any conclusions until we’ve gone about thirty miles though. But until then, and right now, the sun is bright, the air is cool, my head is clear, there’s a whole day ahead of us, we’re almost to the mountains, it’s a good day to be alive. It’s this thinner air that does it. You always feel like this when you start getting into higher altitudes.

The altitude! That’s why the engine’s running rich. Sure, that’s got to be the reason. We’re at twenty-five hundred feet now. I’d better switch to standard jets. They take only a few minutes to put in. And lean out the idle adjustment a little. We’ll be getting up a lot higher than this.

Under some shady trees I find Bill’s Cycle Shop but no Bill.

A passerby says he has "maybe gone fishing somewhere," leaving his shop wide open. We really are in the West. No one would leave a shop like this open in Chicago or New York.

Inside I see that Bill is a mechanic of the "photographic mind" school. Everything lying around everywhere. Wrenches, screwdrivers, old parts, old motorcycles, new parts, new motorcycles, sales literature, inner tubes, all scattered so thickly and clutteredly you can’t even see the workbenches under them. I couldn’t work in conditions like this but that’s just because I’m not a photographic-mind mechanic. Bill can probably turn around and put his hand on any tool in this mess without having to think about where it is. I’ve seen mechanics like that. Drive you crazy to watch them, but they get the job done just as well and sometimes faster. Move one tool three inches to the left though, and he’ll have to spend days looking for it.

Bill arrives with a grin about something. Sure, he’s got some jets for my machine and knows right where they are. I’ll have to wait a second though. He’s got to close a deal out in back on some Harley parts. I go with him out in a shed in back and see he is selling a whole Harley machine in used parts, except for the frame, which the customer already has. He is selling them all for $125. Not a bad price at all.

Coming back I comment, "He’ll know something about motorcycles before he gets those together."

Bill laughs. "And that’s the best way to learn, too."

He has the jets and foot-peg rubber but no chain adjuster link. I get the rubber and jets installed, take the lump out of the idle and ride back to the hotel.

Sylvia and John and Chris are just coming down the stairs with their stuff as I arrive. Their faces indicate they’re in the same good mood I’m in. We head down the main street, find a restaurant and order steaks for lunch.

"This is a great town," John says, "really great. Surprised there were any like this left. I was looking all over this morning. They’ve got stockmen’s bars, high-top boots, silver-dollar belt buckles, Levis, Stetsons, the whole thing—and it’s real. It isn’t just Chamber of Commerce stuff -- .In the bar down the block this morning they just started talking to me like I’d lived here all my life."

We order a round of beers. I see by a horseshoe sign on the wall we’re into Olympia beer territory now, and order that.

"They must have thought I was off a ranch or something," John continues. "And this one old guy was talking away about how he wasn’t going to give a thing to the goddam boys, and I really enjoyed that. The ranch was going to go to the girls, cause the goddam boys spend every cent they got down at Suzie’s." John breaks up with laughter. "Sorry he ever raised ‘em, and so on. I thought all that stuff disappeared thirty years ago, but it’s still here."

The waitress comes with the steaks and we knife right into them. That work on the cycle has given me an appetite.

"Something else that ought to interest you," John says. "They were talking in the bar about Bozeman, where we’re going. They said the governor of Montana had a list of fifty radical college professors at the college in Bozeman he was going to fire. Then he got killed in a plane crash."

"That was a long time ago," I answer. These steaks really are good.

"I didn’t know they had a lot of radicals in this state."

"They’ve got all kinds of people in this state," I say. "But that was just right-wing politics."

John helps himself to some more salt. He says, "A Washington newspaper columnist came through and put it in his column yesterday, and that’s why they were all talking about it. The president of the college confirmed it."

"Did they print the list?"

"I don’t know. Did you know any of them?"

"If they had fifty names," I say, "mine must have been one." They both look at me with some surprise. I don’t know much about it, actually. It was him, of course, and with some feeling of falseness because of this I explain that a "radical" in Gallatin County, Montana, is a little different from a radical somewhere else.

"This was a college," I tell them, "where the wife of the president of the United States was actually banned because she was ‘too controversial.’ "

"Who?"

"Eleanor Roosevelt."

"Oh my God," John laughs, "that must have been wild."

They want to hear more but it’s hard to say anything. Then I remember one thing: "In a situation like that a real radical’s actually got a perfect setup. He can do almost anything and get away with it because his opposition have already made asses out of themselves. They’ll make him look good no matter what he says."

On the way out we pass a city park which I noticed last night, and which produced a memory concurrence. Just a vision of looking up into some trees. He had slept on that park bench one night on his way through to Bozeman. That’s why I didn’t recognize that forest yesterday. He’d come through at night, on his way to the college at Bozeman.

9

Now we follow the Yellowstone Valley right across Montana. It changes from Western sagebrush to Midwestern cornfields and back again, depending on whether it’s under irrigation from the river. Sometimes we cross over bluffs that take us out of the irrigated area, but usually we stay close to the river. We pass by a marker saying something about Lewis and Clark. One of them came up this way on a side excursion from the Northwest Passage.

Nice sound. Fits the Chautauqua. We’re really on a kind of Northwest Passage too. We pass through more fields and desert and the day wears on.

I want to pursue further now that same ghost that Phædrus pursued...rationality itself, that dull, complex, classical ghost of underlying form.

This morning I talked about hierarchies of thought...the system. Now I want to talk about methods of finding one’s way through these hierarchies...logic.

Two kinds of logic are used, inductive and deductive. Inductive inferences start with observations of the machine and arrive at general conclusions. For example, if the cycle goes over a bump and the engine misfires, and then goes over another bump and the engine misfires, and then goes over another bump and the engine misfires, and then goes over a long smooth stretch of road and there is no misfiring, and then goes over a fourth bump and the engine misfires again, one can logically conclude that the misfiring is caused by the bumps. That is induction: reasoning from particular experiences to general truths.

Deductive inferences do the reverse. They start with general knowledge and predict a specific observation. For example, if, from reading the hierarchy of facts about the machine, the mechanic knows the horn of the cycle is powered exclusively by electricity from the battery, then he can logically infer that if the battery is dead the horn will not work. That is deduction.

Solution of problems too complicated for common sense to solve is achieved by long strings of mixed inductive and deductive inferences that weave back and forth between the observed machine and the mental hierarchy of the machine found in the manuals. The correct program for this interweaving is formalized as scientific method.

Actually I’ve never seen a cycle-maintenance problem complex enough really to require full-scale formal scientific method. Repair problems are not that hard. When I think of formal scientific method an image sometimes comes to mind of an enormous juggernaut, a huge bulldozer...slow, tedious lumbering, laborious, but invincible. It takes twice as long, five times as long, maybe a dozen times as long as informal mechanic’s techniques, but you know in the end you’re going to get it. There’s no fault isolation problem in motorcycle maintenance that can stand up to it. When you’ve hit a really tough one, tried everything, racked your brain and nothing works, and you know that this time Nature has really decided to be difficult, you say, "Okay, Nature, that’s the end of the nice guy," and you crank up the formal scientific method.

For this you keep a lab notebook. Everything gets written down, formally, so that you know at all times where you are, where you’ve been, where you’re going and where you want to get. In scientific work and electronics technology this is necessary because otherwise the problems get so complex you get lost in them and confused and forget what you know and what you don’t know and have to give up. In cycle maintenance things are not that involved, but when confusion starts it’s a good idea to hold it down by making everything formal and exact. Sometimes just the act of writing down the problems straightens out your head as to what they really are.

The logical statements entered into the notebook are broken down into six categories: (1) statement of the problem, (2) hypotheses as to the cause of the problem, (3) experiments designed to test each hypothesis, (4) predicted results of the experiments, (5) observed results of the experiments and (6) conclusions from the results of the experiments. This is not different from the formal arrangement of many college and high-school lab notebooks but the purpose here is no longer just busywork. The purpose now is precise guidance of thoughts that will fail if they are not accurate.

The real purpose of scientific method is to make sure Nature hasn’t misled you into thinking you know something you don’t actually know. There’s not a mechanic or scientist or technician alive who hasn’t suffered from that one so much that he’s not instinctively on guard. That’s the main reason why so much scientific and mechanical information sounds so dull and so cautious. If you get careless or go romanticizing scientific information, giving it a flourish here and there, Nature will soon make a complete fool out of you. It does it often enough anyway even when you don’t give it opportunities. One must be extremely careful and rigidly logical when dealing with Nature: one logical slip and an entire scientific edifice comes tumbling down. One false deduction about the machine and you can get hung up indefinitely.

In Part One of formal scientific method, which is the statement of the problem, the main skill is in stating absolutely no more than you are positive you know. It is much better to enter a statement "Solve Problem: Why doesn’t cycle work?" which sounds dumb but is correct, than it is to enter a statement "Solve Problem: What is wrong with the electrical system?" when you don’t absolutely know the trouble is in the electrical system. What you should state is "Solve Problem: What is wrong with cycle?" and then state as the first entry of Part Two: "Hypothesis Number One: The trouble is in the electrical system." You think of as many hypotheses as you can, then you design experiments to test them to see which are true and which are false.

This careful approach to the beginning questions keeps you from taking a major wrong turn which might cause you weeks of extra work or can even hang you up completely. Scientific questions often have a surface appearance of dumbness for this reason. They are asked in order to prevent dumb mistakes later on.

Part Three, that part of formal scientific method called experimentation, is sometimes thought of by romantics as all of science itself because that’s the only part with much visual surface. They see lots of test tubes and bizarre equipment and people running around making discoveries. They do not see the experiment as part of a larger intellectual process and so they often confuse experiments with demonstrations, which look the same. A man conducting a gee-whiz science show with fifty thousand dollars’ worth of Frankenstein equipment is not doing anything scientific if he knows beforehand what the results of his efforts are going to be. A motorcycle mechanic, on the other hand, who honks the horn to see if the battery works is informally conducting a true scientific experiment. He is testing a hypothesis by putting the question to nature. The TV scientist who mutters sadly, "The experiment is a failure; we have failed to achieve what we had hoped for," is suffering mainly from a bad scriptwriter. An experiment is never a failure solely because it fails to achieve predicted results. An experiment is a failure only when it also fails adequately to test the hypothesis in question, when the data it produces don’t prove anything one way or another.

Skill at this point consists of using experiments that test only the hypothesis in question, nothing less, nothing more. If the horn honks, and the mechanic concludes that the whole electrical system is working, he is in deep trouble. He has reached an illogical conclusion. The honking horn only tells him that the battery and horn are working. To design an experiment properly he has to think very rigidly in terms of what directly causes what. This you know from the hierarchy. The horn doesn’t make the cycle go. Neither does the battery, except in a very indirect way. The point at which the electrical system directly causes the engine to fire is at the spark plugs, and if you don’t test here, at the output of the electrical system, you will never really know whether the failure is electrical or not.

To test properly the mechanic removes the plug and lays it against the engine so that the base around the plug is electrically grounded, kicks the starter lever and watches the spark plug gap for a blue spark. If there isn’t any he can conclude one of two things: (a) there is an electrical failure or (b) his experiment is sloppy. If he is experienced he will try it a few more times, checking connections, trying every way he can think of to get that plug to fire. Then, if he can’t get it to fire, he finally concludes that a is correct, there’s an electrical failure, and the experiment is over. He has proved that his hypothesis is correct.

In the final category, conclusions, skill comes in stating no more than the experiment has proved. It hasn’t proved that when he fixes the electrical system the motorcycle will start. There may be other things wrong. But he does know that the motorcycle isn’t going to run until the electrical system is working and he sets up the next formal question: "Solve problem: what is wrong with the electrical system?"

He then sets up hypotheses for these and tests them. By asking the right questions and choosing the right tests and drawing the right conclusions the mechanic works his way down the echelons of the motorcycle hierarchy until he has found the exact specific cause or causes of the engine failure, and then he changes them so that they no longer cause the failure.

An untrained observer will see only physical labor and often get the idea that physical labor is mainly what the mechanic does. Actually the physical labor is the smallest and easiest part of what the mechanic does. By far the greatest part of his work is careful observation and precise thinking. That is why mechanics sometimes seem so taciturn and withdrawn when performing tests. They don’t like it when you talk to them because they are concentrating on mental images, hierarchies, and not really looking at you or the physical motorcycle at all. They are using the experiment as part of a program to expand their hierarchy of knowledge of the faulty motorcycle and compare it to the correct hierarchy in their mind. They are looking at underlying form.

A car with a trailer coming our way is passing and having trouble getting back into his lane. I flash my headlight to make sure he sees us. He sees us but he can’t get back in. The shoulder is narrow and bumpy. It’ll spill us if we take it. I’m braking, honking, flashing. Christ Almighty, he panics and heads for our shoulder! I hold steady to the edge of the road. Here he COMES! At the last moment he goes back and misses us by inches.

A cardboard carton flaps and rolls on the road ahead of us, and we watch it for a long time before we come to it. Fallen off somebody’s truck evidently.

Now the shakes come. If we’d been in a car that would’ve been a head-on. Or a roll in the ditch.

We pull off into a little town that could be in the middle of Iowa. The corn is growing high all around and the smell of fertilizer is heavy in the air. We retreat from the parked cycles into an enormous, high-ceilinged old place. To go with the beer this time I order every kind of snack they’ve got, and we have a late lunch on peanuts, popcorn, pretzels, potato chips, dried anchovies, dried smoked fish of some other kind with a lot of fine little bones in it, Slim Jims, Long Johns, pepperoni, Fritos, Beer Nuts, ham-sausage spread, fried pork rind and some sesame crackers with an extra taste I’m unable to identify.

Sylvia says, "I’m still feeling weak." She somehow thought that cardboard box was our motorcycle rolling over and over again on the highway.

10

Outside in the valley again the sky is still limited by the bluffs on either side of the river, but they are closer together and closer to us than they were this morning. The valley is narrowing as we move toward the river’s source.

We’re also at a kind of beginning point in the things I’m discussing at which one can at last start to talk about Phædrus’ break from the mainstream of rational thought in pursuit of the ghost of rationality itself.

There was a passage he had read and repeated to himself so many times it survives intact. It begins:

In the temple of science are many mansions—and various indeed are they that dwell therein and the motives that have led them there.

Many take to science out of a joyful sense of superior intellectual power; science is their own special sport to which they look for vivid experience and the satisfaction of ambition; many others are to be found in the temple who have offered the products of their brains on this altar for purely utilitarian purposes. Were an angel of the Lord to come and drive all the people belonging to these two categories out of the temple, it would be noticeably emptier but there would still be some men of both present and past times left inside -- . If the types we have just expelled were the only types there were, the temple would never have existed any more than one can have a wood consisting of nothing but creepers—those who have found favor with the angel—are somewhat odd, uncommunicative, solitary fellows, really less like each other than the hosts of the rejected.

What has brought them to the temple—no single answer will cover—escape from everyday life, with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one’s own shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from his noisy cramped surroundings into the silence of the high mountains where the eye ranges freely through the still pure air and fondly traces out the restful contours apparently built for eternity.

The passage is from a 1918 speech by a young German scientist named Albert Einstein.

Phædrus had finished his first year of University science at the age of fifteen. His field was already biochemistry, and he intended to specialize at the interface between the organic and inorganic worlds now known as molecular biology. He didn’t think of this as a career for his own personal advancement. He was very young and it was a kind of noble idealistic goal.

The state of mind which enables a man to do work of this kind is akin to that of the religious worshipper or lover. The daily effort comes from no deliberate intention or program, but straight from the heart.

If Phædrus had entered science for ambitious or utilitarian purposes it might never have occurred to him to ask questions about the nature of a scientific hypothesis as an entity in itself. But he did ask them, and was unsatisfied with the answers.

The formation of hypotheses is the most mysterious of all the categories of scientific method. Where they come from, no one knows. A person is sitting somewhere, minding his own business, and suddenly...flash!...he understands something he didn’t understand before. Until it’s tested the hypothesis isn’t truth. For the tests aren’t its source. Its source is somewhere else.

Einstein had said:

Man tries to make for himself in the fashion that suits him best a simplified and intelligible picture of the world. He then tries to some extent to substitute this cosmos of his for the world of experience, and thus to overcome it -- .He makes this cosmos and its construction the pivot of his emotional life in order to find in this way the peace and serenity which he cannot find in the narrow whirlpool of personal experience -- .The supreme task—is to arrive at those universal elementary laws from which the cosmos can be built up by pure deduction. There is no logical path to these laws; only intuition, resting on sympathetic understanding of experience, can reach them -- .

Intuition? Sympathy? Strange words for the origin of scientific knowledge.

A lesser scientist than Einstein might have said, "But scientific knowledge comes from nature. Nature provides the hypotheses." But Einstein understood that nature does not. Nature provides only experimental data.

A lesser mind might then have said, "Well then, man provides the hypotheses." But Einstein denied this too. "Nobody," he said, "who has really gone into the matter will deny that in practice the world of phenomena uniquely determines the theoretical system, in spite of the fact that there is no theoretical bridge between phenomena and their theoretical principles."

Phædrus’ break occurred when, as a result of laboratory experience, he became interested in hypotheses as entities in themselves. He had noticed again and again in his lab work that what might seem

to be the hardest part of scientific work, thinking up the hypotheses, was invariably the easiest. The act of formally writing everything down precisely and clearly seemed to suggest them. As he was testing hypothesis number one by experimental method a flood of other hypotheses would come to mind, and as he was testing these, some more came to mind, and as he was testing these, still more came to mind until it became painfully evident that as he continued testing hypotheses and eliminating them or confirming them their number did not decrease. It actually increased as he went along.

At first he found it amusing. He coined a law intended to have the humor of a Parkinson’s law that "The number of rational hypotheses that can explain any given phenomenon is infinite." It pleased him never to run out of hypotheses. Even when his experimental work seemed dead-end in every conceivable way, he knew that if he just sat down and muddled about it long enough, sure enough, another hypothesis would come along. And it always did. It was only months after he had coined the law that he began to have some doubts about the humor or benefits of it.

If true, that law is not a minor flaw in scientific reasoning. The law is completely nihilistic. It is a catastrophic logical disproof of the general validity of all scientific method!

If the purpose of scientific method is to select from among a multitude of hypotheses, and if the number of hypotheses grows faster than experimental method can handle, then it is clear that all hypotheses can never be tested. If all hypotheses cannot be tested, then the results of any experiment are inconclusive and the entire scientific method falls short of its goal of establishing proven knowledge.

About this Einstein had said, "Evolution has shown that at any given moment out of all conceivable constructions a single one has always proved itself absolutely superior to the rest," and let it go at that. But to Phædrus that was an incredibly weak answer. The phrase "at any given moment" really shook him. Did Einstein really mean to state that truth was a function of time? To state that would annihilate the most basic presumption of all science!

But there it was, the whole history of science, a clear story of continuously new and changing explanations of old facts. The time spans of permanence seemed completely random he could see no order in them. Some scientific truths seemed to last for centuries, others for less than a year. Scientific truth was not dogma, good for eternity, but a temporal quantitative entity that could be studied like anything else.

He studied scientific truths, then became upset even more by the apparent cause of their temporal condition. It looked as though the time spans of scientific truths are an inverse function of the intensity of scientific effort. Thus the scientific truths of the twentieth century seem to have a much shorter life-span than those of the last century because scientific activity is now much greater. If, in the next century, scientific activity increases tenfold, then the life expectancy of any scientific truth can be expected to drop to perhaps one-tenth as long as now. What shortens the life-span of the existing truth is the volume of hypotheses offered to replace it; the more the hypotheses, the shorter the time span of the truth. And what seems to be causing the number of hypotheses to grow in recent decades seems to be nothing other than scientific method itself. The more you look, the more you see. Instead of selecting one truth from a multitude you are increasing the multitude. What this means logically is that as you try to move toward unchanging truth through the application of scientific method, you actually do not move toward it at all. You move away from it! It is your application of scientific method that is causing it to change!

What Phædrus observed on a personal level was a phenomenon, profoundly characteristic of the history of science, which has been swept under the carpet for years. The predicted results of scientific enquiry and the actual results of scientific enquiry are diametrically opposed here, and no one seems to pay too much attention to the fact. The purpose of scientific method is to select a single truth from among many hypothetical truths. That, more than anything else, is what science is all about. But historically science has done exactly the opposite. Through multiplication upon multiplication of facts, information, theories and hypotheses, it is science itself that is leading mankind from single absolute truths to multiple, indeterminate, relative ones. The major producer of the social chaos, the indeterminacy of thought and values that rational knowledge is supposed to eliminate, is none other than science itself. And what Phædrus saw in the isolation of his own laboratory work years ago is now seen everywhere in the technological world today. Scientifically produced antiscience...chaos.

It’s possible now to look back a little and see why it’s important to talk about this person in relation to everything that’s been said before concerning the division between classic and romantic realities and the irreconcilability of the two. Unlike the multitude of romantics who are disturbed about the chaotic changes science and technology force upon the human spirit, Phædrus, with his scientifically trained classic mind, was able to do more than just wring his hands with dismay, or run away, or condemn the whole situation broadside without offering any solutions.

As I’ve said, he did in the end offer a number of solutions, but the problem was so deep and so formidable and complex that no one really understood the gravity of what he was resolving, and so failed to understand or misunderstood what he said.

The cause of our current social crises, he would have said, is a genetic defect within the nature of reason itself. And until this genetic defect is cleared, the crises will continue. Our current modes of rationality are not moving society forward into a better world. They are taking it further and further from that better world. Since the Renaissance these modes have worked. As long as the need for food, clothing and shelter is dominant they will continue to work. But now that for huge masses of people these needs no longer overwhelm everything else, the whole structure of reason, handed down to us from ancient times, is no longer adequate. It begins to be seen for what it really is...emotionally hollow, esthetically meaningless and spiritually empty. That, today, is where it is at, and will continue to be at for a long time to come.

I’ve a vision of an angry continuing social crisis that no one really understands the depth of, let alone has solutions to. I see people like John and Sylvia living lost and alienated from the whole rational structure of civilized life, looking for solutions outside that structure, but finding none that are really satisfactory for long. And then I’ve a vision of Phædrus and his lone isolated abstractions in the laboratory...actually concerned with the same crisis but starting from another point, moving in the opposite direction...and what I’m trying to do here is put it all together. It’s so big...that’s why I seem to wander sometimes.

No one that Phædrus talked to seemed really concerned about this phenomenon that so baffled him. They seemed to say, "We know scientific method is valid, so why ask about it?"

Phædrus didn’t understand this attitude, didn’t know what to do about it, and because he wasn’t a student of science for personal or utilitarian reasons, it just stopped him completely. It was as if he were contemplating that serene mountain landscape Einstein had described, and suddenly between the mountains had appeared a fissure, a gap of pure nothing. And slowly, and agonizingly, to explain this gap, he had to admit that the mountains, which had seemed built for eternity, might possibly be something else—perhaps just figments of his own imagination. It stopped him.

And so Phædrus, who at the age of fifteen had finished his freshman year of science, was at the age of seventeen expelled from the University for failing grades. Immaturity and inattention to studies were given as official causes.

There was nothing anyone could have done about it; either to prevent it or correct it. The University couldn’t have kept him on without abandoning standards completely.

In a stunned state Phædrus began a long series of lateral drifts that led him into a far orbit of the mind, but he eventually returned along a route we are now following, to the doors of the University itself. Tomorrow I’ll try to start on that route.

At Laurel, in sight of the mountains at last, we stop for the night. The evening breeze is cool now. It comes down off the snow. Although the sun must have disappeared behind the mountains an hour ago, there’s still good light in the sky from behind the range.

Sylvia and John and Chris and I walk up the long main street in the gathering dusk and feel the presence of the mountains even though we talk about other things. I feel happy to be here, and still a little sad to be here too. Sometimes it’s a little better to travel than to arrive.

11

I wake up wondering if we’re near mountains because of memory or because of something in the air. We’re in a beautiful old wooden room of a hotel. The sun is shining on the dark wood through the window shade, but even with the shade drawn I can sense that we’re near mountains. There’s mountain air in this room. It’s cool and moist and almost fragrant. One deep breath makes me ready for the next one and then the next one and with each deep breath I feel a little readier until I jump out of bed and pull up the shade and let all that sunlight in...brilliant, cool, bright, sharp and clear.

An urge grows to go over and push Chris up and down to bounce him awake to see all this, but out of kindness, or respect maybe, he is allowed to sleep a while longer, and so with razor and soap I go to a common washroom at the other end of a long corridor of the same dark wood, floorboards creaking all the way. In the washroom the hot water is steaming and perking in the pipes, too hot at first for shaving, but fine after I mix it with cold water.

Through the window beyond the mirror I see there is a porch out in back, and when done go out and stand on it. It’s at a level with the tops of the trees surrounding the hotel which seem to respond to this morning air the same way I do. The branches and leaves move with each light breeze as if it were expected, were what had been waited for all this time.

Chris is soon up and Sylvia comes out of her room saying she and John have already eaten breakfast and he is out walking somewhere, but she will go with Chris and me and walk down with us to breakfast

We are in love with everything this morning and talk about good things all the way down a sunlit morning street to a restaurant. The eggs and hot cakes and coffee are from heaven. Sylvia and Chris talk intimately about his school and friends and personal things, while I listen and gaze through the large restaurant window at the storefront across the road. So different now from that lonely night in South Dakota. Beyond those buildings are mountains and snowfields.

Sylvia says John has talked to someone in town about another route to Bozeman, south through Yellowstone Park.

"South?" I say. "You mean Red Lodge?"

"I guess so."

A memory comes to me of snowfields in June. "That road goes way up above the timberline."

"Is that bad?" Sylvia asks.

"It’ll be cold." In the middle of the snowfields in my mind appear the cycles and us riding on them. "But just tremendous."

We meet John again and it’s settled. Soon, beyond a railroad underpass, we are on a twisting blacktop through fields toward the mountains up ahead. This

is a road Phædrus used all the time, and flashes of his memory coincide everywhere. The high, dark Absaroka Range looms directly ahead.

We are following a creek to its source. It contains water that was probably snow less than an hour ago. The stream and the road pass through green and stony fields each a little higher than before. Everything is so intense in this sunlight. Dark shadows, bright light. Dark blue sky. The sun is bright and hot when we’re in it, but when we pass under trees along the road, it’s suddenly cold.

We play tag with a little blue Porsche along the way, passing it with a beep and being passed by it with a beep and doing this several times through fields of dark aspen and bright greens of grass and mountain shrubs. All this is remembered.

He would use this route to get into the high country, then backpack in from the road for three or four or five days, then come back out for more food and head back in again, needing these mountains in an almost physio- logical way. The train of his abstractions became so long and so involved he had to have the surroundings of silence and space here to hold it straight. It was as though hours of constructions would have been shattered by the least distraction of other thought or other duty. It wasn’t like other people’s thinking, even then, before his insanity. It was at a level at which everything shifts and changes, at which institutional values and verities are gone and there is nothing but one’s own spirit to keep one going. His early failure had released him from any felt obligation to think along institutional lines and his thoughts were already independent to a degree few people are familiar with. He felt that institutions such as schools, churches, governments and political organizations of every sort all tended to direct thought for ends other than truth, for the perpetuation of their own functions, and for the control of individuals in the service of these functions. He came to see his early failure as a lucky break, an accidental escape from a trap that had been set for him, and he was very trap-wary about institutional truths for the remainder of his time. He didn’t see these things and think this way at first, however, only later on. I’m getting way out of sequence here. This all came much later.

At first the truths Phædrus began to pursue were lateral truths; no longer the frontal truths of science, those toward which the discipline pointed, but the kind of truth you see laterally, out of the corner of your eye. In a laboratory situation, when your whole procedure goes haywire, when everything goes wrong or is indeterminate or is so screwed up by unexpected results you can’t make head or tail out of anything, you start looking laterally. That’s a word he later used to describe a growth of knowledge that doesn’t move forward like an arrow in flight, but expands sideways, like an arrow enlarging in flight, or like the archer, discovering that although he has hit the bull’s eye and won the prize, his head is on a pillow and the sun is coming in the window. Lateral knowledge is knowledge that’s from a wholly unexpected direction, from a direction that’s not even understood as a direction until the knowledge forces itself upon one. Lateral truths point to the falseness of axioms and postulates underlying one’s existing system of getting at truth.

To all appearances he was just drifting. In actuality he was just drifting. Drifting is what one does when looking at lateral truth. He couldn’t follow any known method of procedure to uncover its cause because it was these methods and procedures that were all screwed up in the first place. So he drifted. That was all he could do.

The drift took him into the Army, which sent him to Korea. From his memory there’s a fragment, a picture of a wall, seen from a prow of a ship, shining radiantly, like a gate of heaven, across a misty harbor. He must have valued the fragment greatly and thought about it many times because although it doesn’t fit anything else it is intense, so intense I’ve returned to it myself many times. It seems to symbolize something very important, a turning point.

His letters from Korea are radically different from his earlier writing, indicating this same turning point. They just explode with emotion. He writes page after page about tiny details of things he sees: marketplaces, shops with sliding glass doors, slate roofs, roads, thatched huts, everything. Sometimes full of wild enthusiasm, sometimes depressed, sometimes angry, sometimes even humorous, he is like someone or some creature that has found an exit from a cage he did not even know was around him, and is wildly roaming over the countryside visually devouring everything in sight.

Later he made friends with Korean laborers who spoke some English but wanted to learn more so that they could qualify as translators. He spent time with them after working hours and in return they took him on long weekend hikes through the hills to see their homes and friends and translate for him the way of life and thought of another culture.

He is sitting by a footpath on a beautiful windswept hillside overlooking the Yellow Sea. The rice in the terrace below the footpath is full-grown and brown. His friends look down at the sea with him seeing islands far out from shore. They eat a picnic lunch and talk to one another and to him and the subject is ideographs and their relation to the world. He comments on how amazing it is that everything in the universe can be described by the twenty-six written characters with which they have been working. His friends nod and smile and eat the food they’ve taken from tins and say no pleasantly. He is confused by the nod yes and the answer no and so repeats the statement. Again comes the nod meaning yes and the answer no. That is the end of the fragment, but like the wall it’s one he thinks about many times.

The final strong fragment from that part of the world is of a compartment of a troopship. He is on his way home. The compartment is empty and unused. He is alone on a bunk made of canvas laced to a steel frame, like a trampoline. There are five of these to a tier, tier after tier of them, completely filling the empty troop compartment.

This is the foremost compartment of the ship and

the canvas in the adjoining frames rises and falls, accompanied by elevator feelings in his stomach. He contemplates these things and a deep booming on the steel plates all around him and realizes that except for these signs there is no indication whatsoever that this entire compartment is rising massively high up into the air and then plunging down, over and over again. He wonders if it is that which is making it difficult to concentrate on the book before him, but realizes that no, the book is just hard. It’s a text on Oriental philosophy and it’s the most difficult book he’s ever read. He’s glad to be alone and bored in this empty troop compartment, otherwise he’d never get through it.

The book states that there’s a theoretic component of man’s existence which is primarily Western (and this corresponded to Phædrus’ laboratory past) and an esthetic component of man’s existence which is seen more strongly in the Orient (and this corresponded to Phædrus’ Korean past) and that these never seem to meet. These terms "theoretic" and "esthetic" correspond to what Phædrus later called classic and romantic modes of reality and probably shaped these terms in his mind more than he ever knew. The difference is that the classic reality is primarily theoretic but has its own esthetics too. The romantic reality is primarily esthetic, but has its theory too. The theoretic and esthetic split is between components of a single world. The classic and romantic split is between two separate worlds. The philosophy book, which is called The Meeting of East and West, by F. S. C. Northrop, suggests that greater cognizance be made of the "undifferentiated aesthetic continuum" from which the theoretic arises.

Phædrus didn’t understand this, but after arriving in Seattle, and his discharge from the Army, he sat in his hotel room for two whole weeks, eating enormous Washington apples, and thinking, and eating more apples, and thinking some more, and then as a result of all these fragments, and thinking, returned to the University to study philosophy. His lateral drift was ended. He was actively in pursuit of something now.

A sudden cross-gust of cold air comes heavy with the smell of pines, and soon another and another, and as we approach Red Lodge I’m shivering.

At Red Lodge the road’s almost joined to the base of the mountain. The dark ominous mass beyond dominates even the roofs of the buildings on either side of the main street. We park the cycles and unpack them to remove warm clothing. We walk past ski shops into a restaurant where we see on the walls huge photographs of the route we will take up. And up and up, over one of the highest paved roads in the world. I feel some anxiety about this, which I realize is irrational and try to get rid of by talking about the road to the others. There’s no way to fall off. No danger to the motorcycle. Just a memory of places where you could throw a stone and it would drop thousands of feet before coming to rest and somehow associating that stone with the cycle and rider.

When coffee is finished we put on the heavy clothing, repack and have soon traveled to the first of many switchback turns across the face of the mountain.

The asphalt of the road is much wider and safer than it occurred in memory. On a cycle you have all sorts of extra room. John and Sylvia take the hairpin turns up ahead and then come back above us, facing us, and have smiles. Soon we take the turn and see their backs again. Then another turn for them and we meet them again, laughing. It’s so hard when contemplated in advance, and so easy when you do it.

I talked about Phædrus’ lateral drift, which ended with entry into the discipline of philosophy. He saw philosophy as the highest echelon of the entire hierarchy of knowledge. Among philosophers this is so widely believed it’s almost a platitude, but for him it’s a revelation. He discovered that the science he’d once thought of as the whole world of knowledge is only a branch of philosophy, which is far broader and far more general. The questions he had asked about infinite hypotheses hadn’t been of interest to science because they weren’t scientific questions. Science cannot study scientific method without getting into a bootstrap problem that destroys the validity of its answers. The questions he’d asked were at a higher level than science goes. And so Phædrus found in philosophy a natural continuation of the question that brought him to science in the first place, What does it all mean? What’s the purpose of all this?

At a turnout on the road we stop, take some record photographs to show we have been here and then walk to a little path that takes us out to the edge of a cliff. A motorcycle on the road almost straight down beneath us could hardly be seen from up here. We bundle up more tightly against the cold and continue upward.

The broad-leafed trees are all gone. Only small pines are left. Many of these have twisted and stunted shapes.

Soon stunted pines disappear entirely and we’re in alpine meadows. There’s not a tree anywhere, only grass everywhere filled with little pink and blue and white dots of intense color. Wildflowers, everywhere! These and grasses and mosses and lichens are all that can live here, now. We’ve reached the high country, above the timberline.

I look over my shoulder for one last view of the gorge. Like looking down at the bottom of the ocean. People spend their entire lives at those lower altitudes without any awareness that this high country exists.

The road turns inward, away from the gorge and into snowfields.

The engine backfires fiercely from lack of oxygen and threatens to stop but never does. Soon we are between banks of old snow, the way snow looks in early spring after a thaw. Little streams of water run everywhere into mossy mud, and then below this into week-old grass and then small wildflowers, the tiny pink and blue and yellow and white ones which seem to pop out, sun-brilliant, from black shadows. Everywhere it’s like this! Little pins of colored light shoot forth to me from a background of somber dark green and black. Dark sky now and cold. Except where the sun hits. On the sun side my arm and leg and jacket are hot, but the dark side, in deep shadows now, is very cold.

The snowfields become heavy and show steep banks where snowplows have been. The banks become four feet high, then six feet, then twelve feet high. We move through twin walls, almost a tunnel of snow. Then the tunnel opens onto dark sky again and when we emerge we see we’re at the summit.

Beyond is another country. Mountain lakes and pines and snowfields are below. Above and beyond them as far as we can see are farther mountain ranges covered with snow. The high country.

We stop and park at a turnoff where a number of tourists take pictures and look around at the view and at one other. At the back of his cycle John removes his camera from the saddlebag. From my own machine I remove the tool kit and spread it out on the seat, then take the screwdriver, start the engine and with the screwdriver adjust the carburetors until the idling sound changes from a really bad loping to just slightly bad. I’m surprised at how all the way up it backfired and sputtered and kicked and gave every indication it was going to quit but never did. I didn’t adjust them, out of curiosity to see what eleven thousand feet of altitude would do. Now I’m leaving them rich and sounding just bad because we’ll be going down some now toward Yellowstone Park and if they aren’t slightly rich now they’ll get too lean later on, which is dangerous because it overheats the engine.

The backfiring is still fairly heavy on the way down from the summit with the engine dragging in second gear, but then the noise diminishes as we reach lower altitudes. The forests return. We move among rocks and lakes and trees now, taking beautiful turns and curves of the road.

I want to talk about another kind of high country now in the world of thought, which in some ways, for me at least, seems to parallel or produce feelings similar to this, and call it the high country of the mind.

If all of human knowledge, everything that’s known, is believed to be an enormous hierarchic structure, then the high country of the mind is found at the uppermost reaches of this structure in the most general, the most abstract considerations of all.

Few people travel here. There’s no real profit to be made from wandering through it, yet like this high country of the material world all around us, it has its own austere beauty that to some people makes the hardships of traveling through it seem worthwhile.

In the high country of the mind one has to become adjusted to the thinner air of uncertainty, and to the enormous magnitude of questions asked, and to the answers proposed to these questions. The sweep goes on and on and on so obviously much further than the mind can grasp one hesitates even to go near for fear of getting lost in them and never finding one’s way out.

What is the truth and how do you know it when you have it? -- How do we really know anything? Is there an "I," a "soul," which knows, or is this soul merely cells coordinating senses? -- Is reality basically changing, or is it fixed and permanent? -- When it’s said that something means something, what’s meant by that?

Many trails through these high ranges have been made and forgotten since the beginning of time, and although the answers brought back from these trails have claimed permanence and universality for themselves, civilizations have varied in the trails they have chosen and we have many different answers to the same question, all of which can be thought of as true within their own context. Even within a single civilization old trails are constantly closed and new ones opened up.

It’s sometimes argued that there’s no real progress; that a civilization that kills multitudes in mass warfare, that pollutes the land and oceans with ever larger quantities of debris, that destroys the dignity of individuals by subjecting them to a forced mechanized existence can hardly be called an advance over the simpler hunting and gathering and agricultural existence of prehistoric times. But this argument, though romantically appealing, doesn’t hold up. The primitive tribes permitted far less individual freedom than does modern society. Ancient wars were committed with far less moral justification than modern ones. A technology that produces debris can find, and is finding, ways of disposing of it without ecological upset. And the schoolbook pictures of primitive man sometimes omit some of the detractions of his primitive life...the pain, the disease, famine, the hard labor needed just to stay alive. From that agony of bare existence to modern life can be soberly described only as upward progress, and the sole agent for this progress is quite clearly reason itself.

One can see how both the informal and formal processes of hypothesis, experiment, conclusion, century after century, repeated with new material, have built up the hierarchies of thought which have eliminated most of the enemies of primitive man. To some extent the romantic condemnation of rationality stems from the very effectiveness of rationality in uplifting men from primitive conditions. It’s such a powerful, all-dominating agent of civilized man it’s all but shut out everything else and now dominates man himself. That’s the source of the complaint.

Phædrus wandered through this high country, aimlessly at first, following every path, every trail where someone had been before, seeing occasionally with small hindsights that he was apparently making some progress, but seeing nothing ahead of him that told him which way to go.

Through the mountainous questions of reality and knowledge had passed great figures of civilization, some of whom, like Socrates and Aristotle and Newton and Einstein, were known to almost everyone, but most of whom were far more obscure. Names he had never heard of before. And he became fascinated with their thought and their whole way of thinking. He followed their trails carefully until they seemed to grow cold, then dropped them. His work was just barely passing by academic standards at this time, but this wasn’t because he wasn’t working or thinking. He was thinking too hard, and the harder you think in this high country of the mind the slower you go. Phædrus read in a scientific way rather than a literary way, testing each sentence as he went along, noting doubts and questions to be resolved later, and I’m fortunate in having a whole trunkful of volumes of these notations.

What is most astonishing about them is that almost everything he said years later is contained in them. It’s frustrating to see how completely unaware he is at the time of the significance of what he is saying. It’s like seeing someone handling, one by one, all the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle whose solution you know, and you want to tell him, "Look, this fits here, and this fits here," but you can’t tell him. And so he wanders blindly along one trail after another gathering one piece after another and wondering what to do with them, and you grit your teeth when he goes off on a false trail and are relieved when he comes back again, even though he is discouraged himself. "Don’t worry," you want to tell him. "Keep going!"

But he’s such an abominable scholar it must be through the kindness of his instructors that he passes at all. He prejudges every philosopher he studies. He always intrudes and imposes his own views upon the material he is studying. He is never fair. He’s always partial. He wants each philosopher to go a certain way and becomes infuriated when he does not.

A fragment of memory is preserved of him sitting in a room at three and four in the morning with Immanuel Kant’s famous Critique of Pure Reason, studying it as a chess player studies the openings of the tournament masters, trying to test the line of development against his own judgment and skill, looking for contradictions and incongruities.

Phædrus is a bizarre person when contrasted to the twentieth-century Midwestern Americans who surround him, but when he is seen studying Kant he is less strange. For this eighteenth-century German philosopher he feels a respect that rises not out of agreement but out of appreciation for Kant’s formidable logical fortification of his position. Kant is always superbly methodical, persistent, regular and meticulous as he scales that great snowy mountain of thought concerning what is in the mind and what is outside the mind. It is, for modern climbers, one of the highest peaks of all, and I want now to magnify this picture of Kant and show a little about how he thought and how Phædrus thought about him in order to give a clearer picture of what the high country of the mind is like and also to prepare the way for an understanding of Phædrus’ thoughts.

Phædrus’ resolution of the entire problem of classic and romantic understanding occurred at first in this high country of the mind, and unless one understands the relation of this country to the rest of existence, the meaning and the importance of lower levels of what he said here will be underestimated or misunderstood.

To follow Kant one must also understand something about the Scottish philosopher David Hume. Hume had previously submitted that if one follows the strictest rules of logical induction and deduction from experience to determine the true nature of the world, one must arrive at certain conclusions. His reasoning followed lines that would result from answers to this question: Suppose a child is born devoid of all senses; he has no sight, no hearing, no touch, no smell, no taste...nothing. There’s no way whatsoever for him to receive any sensations from the outside world. And suppose this child is fed intravenously and otherwise attended to and kept alive for eighteen years in this state of existence. The question is then asked: Does this eighteen-year-old person have a thought in his head? If so, where does it come from? How does he get it?

Hume would have answered that the eighteen-year-old had no thoughts whatsoever, and in giving this answer would have defined himself as an empiricist, one who believes all knowledge is derived exclusively from the senses. The scientific method of experimentation is carefully controlled empiricism. Common sense today is empiricism, since an overwhelming majority would agree with Hume, even though in other cultures and other times a majority might have differed.

The first problem of empiricism, if empiricism is believed, concerns the nature of "substance." If all our knowledge comes from sensory data, what exactly is this substance which is supposed to give off the sensory data itself? If you try to imagine what this substance is, apart from what is sensed, you’ll find yourself thinking about nothing whatsoever.

Since all knowledge comes from sensory impressions and since there’s no sensory impression of substance itself, it follows logically that there is no knowledge of substance. It’s just something we imagine. It’s entirely within our own minds. The idea that there’s something out there giving off the properties we perceive is just another of those common-sense notions similar to the common-sense notion children have that the earth is flat and parallel lines never meet.

Secondly, if one starts with the premise that all our knowledge comes to us through our senses, one must ask, From what sense data is our knowledge of causation received? In other words, what is the scientific empirical basis of causation itself?

Hume’s answer is "None." There’s no evidence for causation in our sensations. Like substance, it’s just something we imagine when one thing repeatedly follows another. It has no real existence in the world we observe. If one accepts the premise that all knowledge comes to us through our senses, Hume says, then one must logically conclude that both "Nature" and "Nature’s laws" are creations of our own imagination.

This idea that the entire world is within one’s own mind could be dismissed as absurd if Hume had just thrown it out for speculation. But he was making it an airtight case.

To throw out Hume’s conclusions was necessary, but unfortunately he had arrived at them in such a way that it was seemingly impossible to throw them out without abandoning empirical reason itself and retiring into some medieval predecessor of empirical reason. This Kant would not do. Thus it was Hume, Kant said, who "aroused me from my dogmatic slumbers" and caused him to write what is now regarded as one of the greatest philosophical treatises ever written, the Critique of Pure Reason, often the subject of an entire University course.

Kant is trying to save scientific empiricism from the consequences of its own self-devouring logic. He starts out at first along the path that Hume has set before him. "That all our knowledge begins with experience there can be no doubt," he says, but he soon departs from the path by denying that all components of knowledge come from the senses at the moment the sense data are received. "But though all knowledge begins with experience it doesn’t follow that it arises out of experience."

This seems, at first, as though he is picking nits, but he isn’t. As a result of this difference, Kant skirts right around the abyss of solipsism that Hume’s path leads to and proceeds on an entirely new and different path of his own.

Kant says there are aspects of reality which are not supplied immediately by the senses. These he calls a priori. An example of a priori knowledge is "time." You don’t see time. Neither do you hear it, smell it, taste it or touch it. It isn’t present in the sense data as they are received. Time is what Kant calls an "intuition," which the mind must supply as it receives the sense data.

The same is true of space. Unless we apply the concepts of space and time to the impressions we receive, the world is unintelligible, just a kaleidoscopic jumble of colors and patterns and noises and smells and pain and tastes without meaning. We sense objects in a certain way because of our application of a priori intuitions such as space and time, but we do not create these objects out of our imagination, as pure philosophical idealists would maintain. The forms of space and time are applied to data as they are received from the object producing them. The a priori concepts have their origins in human nature so that they’re neither caused by the sensed object nor bring it into being, but provide a kind of screening function for what sense data we will accept. When our eyes blink, for example, our sense data tell us that the world has disappeared. But this is screened out and never gets to our consciousness because we have in our minds an a priori concept that the world has continuity. What we think of as reality is a continuous synthesis of elements from a fixed hierarchy of a priori concepts and the ever changing data of the senses. Now stop and apply some of the concepts Kant has put forth to this strange machine, this creation that’s been bearing us along through time and space. See our relation to it now, as Kant reveals it to us.

Hume has been saying, in effect, that everything I know about this motorcycle comes to me through my senses. It has to be. There’s no other way. If I say it’s made of metal and other substances, he asks, What’s metal? If I answer that metal’s hard and shiny and cold to the touch and deforms without breaking under blows from a harder material, Hume says those are all sights and sounds and touch. There’s no substance. Tell me what metal is apart from these sensations. Then, of course, I’m stuck.

But if there’s no substance, what can we say about the sense data we receive? If I hold my head to the left and look down at the handle grips and front wheel and map carrier and gas tank I get one pattern of sense data. If I move my head to the right I get another slightly different pattern of sense data. The two views are different. The angles of the planes and curves of the metal are different. The sunlight strikes them differently. If there’s no logical basis for substance then there’s no logical basis for concluding that what’s produced these two views is the same motorcycle.

Now we’ve a real intellectual impasse. Our reason, which is supposed to make things more intelligible, seems to be making them less intelligible, and when reason thus defeats its own purpose something has to be changed in the structure of our reason itself.

Kant comes to our rescue. He says that the fact that there’s no way of immediately sensing a "motorcycle," as distinguished from the colors and shapes a motorcycle produces, is no proof at all that there’s no motorcycle there. We have in our minds an a priori motorcycle which has continuity in time and space and is capable of changing appearance as one moves one’s head and is therefore not contradicted by the sense data one is receiving.

Hume’s motorcycle, the one that makes no sense at all, will occur if our previous hypothetical bed patient, the one who has no senses at all, is suddenly, for one second only, exposed to the sense data of a motorcycle, then deprived of his senses again. Now, I think, in his mind he would have a Hume motorcycle, which provides him with no evidence whatsoever for such concepts as causation.

But, as Kant says, we are not that person. We have in our minds a very real a priori motorcycle whose existence we have no reason to doubt, whose reality can be confirmed anytime.

This a priori motorcycle has been built up in our minds over many years from enormous amounts of sense data and it is constantly changing as new sense data come in. Some of the changes in this specific a priori motorcycle I’m riding are very quick and transitory, such as its relationship to the road. This I’m monitoring and correcting all the time as we take these curves and bends in the road. As soon as the information’s of no more value I forget it because there’s more coming in that must be monitored. Other changes in this a priori are slower: Disappearance of gasoline from the tank. Disappearance of rubber from the tires. Loosening of bolts and nuts. Change of gap between brake shoes and drums. Other aspects of the motorcycle change so slowly they seem permanent...the paint job, the wheel bearings, the control cables...yet these are constantly changing too. Finally, if one thinks in terms of really large amounts of time even the frame is changing slightly from the road shocks and thermal changes and forces of internal fatigue common to all metals.

It’s quite a machine, this a priori motorcycle. If you stop to think about it long enough you’ll see that it’s the main thing. The sense data confirm it but the sense data aren’t it. The motorcycle that I believe in an a priori way to be outside of myself is like the money I believe I have in the bank. If I were to go down to the bank and ask to see my money they would look at me a little peculiarly. They don’t have "my money" in any little drawer that they can pull open to show me. "My money" is nothing but some east-west and north-south magnetic domains in some iron oxide resting on a roll of tape in a computer storage bin. But I’m satisfied with this because I’ve faith that if I need the things that money enables, the bank will provide the means, through their checking system, of getting it. Similarly, even though my sense data have never brought up anything that could be called "substance" I’m satisfied that there’s a capability within the sense data of achieving the things that substance is supposed to do, and that the sense data will continue to match the a priori motorcycle of my mind. I say for the sake of convenience that I’ve money in the bank and say for the sake of convenience that substances compose the cycle I’m riding on. The bulk of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is concerned with how this a priori knowledge is acquired and how it is employed.

Kant called his thesis that our a priori thoughts are independent of sense data and screen what we see a "Copernican revolution." By this he referred to Copernicus’ statement that the earth moves around the sun. Nothing changed as a result of this revolution, and yet everything changed. Or, to put it in Kantian terms, the objective world producing our sense data did not change, but our a priori concept of it was turned inside out. The effect was overwhelming. It was the acceptance of the Copernican revolution that distinguishes modern man from his medieval predecessors.

What Copernicus did was take the existing a priori concept of the world, the notion that it was flat and fixed in space, and pose an alternative a priori concept of the world, that it’s spherical and moves around the sun; and showed that both of the a priori concepts fitted the existing sensory data.

Kant felt he had done the same thing in metaphysics. If you presume that the a priori concepts in our heads are independent of what we see and actually screen what we see, this means that you are taking the old Aristotelian concept of scientific man as a passive observer, a "blank tablet," and truly turning this concept inside out. Kant and his millions of followers have maintained that as a result of this inversion you get a much more satisfying understanding of how we know things.

I’ve gone into this example in some detail, partly to show some of the high country in close perspective, but more to prepare for what Phædrus did later. He too performed a Copernican inversion and as a result of this inversion produced a resolution of the separate worlds of classical and romantic understanding. And it seems to me that as a result it is possible to again get a much more satisfying understanding of what the world is all about.

Kant’s metaphysics thrilled Phædrus at first, but later it dragged and he didn’t know exactly why. He thought about it and decided that maybe it was the Oriental experience. He had had the feeling of escape from a prison of intellect, and now this was just more of the prison again. He read Kant’s esthetics with disappointment and then anger. The ideas expressed about the "beautiful" were themselves ugly to him, and the ugliness was so deep and pervasive he hadn’t a clue as to where to begin to attack it or try to get around it. It seemed woven right into the whole fabric of Kant’s world so deeply there was no escape from it. It wasn’t just eighteenth-century ugliness or "technical" ugliness. All of the philosophers he was reading showed it. The whole university he was attending smelled of the same ugliness. It was everywhere, in the classroom, in the textbooks. It was in himself and he didn’t know how or why. It was reason itself that was ugly and there seemed no way to get free.

12

At Cooke City John and Sylvia look and sound happier than I have seen them in years, and we whack into our hot beef sandwiches with great whacks. I’m happy to hear and see all their high-country exuberance but don’t comment much, just keep eating.

Outside the picture window across the road are huge pines. Many cars pass beneath them on their way to the park. We’re a long way down from the timberline now. Warmer here but covered over with an occasional low cloud ready to drop rain.

I suppose if I were a novelist rather than a Chautauqua orator I’d try to "develop the characters" of John and Sylvia and Chris with action-packed scenes that would also reveal "inner meanings" of Zen and maybe Art and maybe even Motorcycle Maintenance. That would be quite a novel, but for some reason I don’t feel quite up to it. They’re friends, not characters, and as Sylvia herself once said, "I don’t like being an object!" So a lot of things we know about one another I’m simply not going into. Nothing bad, but not really relevant to the Chautauqua. That’s the way it should be with friends.

At the same time I think you can understand from the Chautauqua why I must always seem so reserved and remote to them. Once in a while they ask questions that seem to call for a statement of what the hell I’m always thinking about, but if I were to babble what’s really on my mind about, say, the a priori presumption of the continuity of a motorcycle from second to second and do this without benefit of the entire edifice of the Chautauqua, they’d just be startled and wonder what’s wrong. I really am interested in this continuity and the way we talk and think about it and so tend to get removed from the usual lunchtime situation and this gives an appearance of remoteness. It’s a problem.

It’s a problem of our time. The range of human knowledge today is so great that we’re all specialists and the distance between specializations has become so great that anyone who seeks to wander freely among them almost has to forego closeness with the people around him. The lunchtime here-and-now stuff is a specialty too.

Chris seems to understand my remoteness better than they do, perhaps because he’s more used to it and his relationship to me is such that he has to be more concerned. In his face I sometimes see a look of worry, or at least anxiety, and wonder why, and then discover that I’m angry. If I hadn’t seen his expression, I might not have known it. Other times he’s running and jumping all over the place and I wonder why and discover that it’s because I’m in a good mood. Now I see he’s a little nervous and answering a question that John had evidently directed at me. It’s about the people we’ll be staying with tomorrow, the DeWeeses.

I’m not sure what the question was but add, "He’s a painter. He teaches fine arts at the college there, an abstract impressionist."

They ask how I came to know him and I have to answer that I don’t remember which is a little evasive. I don’t remember anything about him except fragments. He and his wife were evidently friends of Phædrus’ friends, and he came to know them that way.

They wonder what an engineering writer like myself would have in common with an abstract painter and I have to say again that I don’t know. I mentally file through the fragments for an answer but none comes.

Their personalities were certainly different. Whereas photographs of Phædrus’ face during this period show alienation and aggression...a member of his department had half jokingly called it a "subversive" look...some photographs of DeWeese from the same period show a face that is quite passive, almost serene, except for a mild questioning expression.

In my memory is a movie about a World War I spy who studied the behavior of a captured German officer (who looked exactly like him) by means of a one-way mirror. He studied him for months until he could imitate every gesture and nuance of speech. Then he pretended to be the escaped officer in order to infiltrate the German Army command. I remember the tension and excitement as he faced his first test with the officer’s old friends to learn if they would see through his imposture. Now I’ve some of the same feeling about DeWeese, who’ll naturally presume I’m the person he once knew.

Outside a light mist has made the motorcycles wet. I take out the plastic bubble from the saddlebag and attach it to the helmet. We’ll be entering Yellowstone Park soon.

The road ahead is foggy. It seems like a cloud has drifted into the valley, which isn’t really a valley at all but more of a mountain pass.

I don’t know how well DeWeese knew him, and what memories he’ll expect me to share. I’ve gone through this before with others and have usually been able to gloss over awkward moments. The reward each time has been an expansion of knowledge about Phædrus that has greatly aided further impersonation, and which over the years has supplied the bulk of the information I’ve been presenting here.

From what fragments of memory I have, Phædrus had a high regard for DeWeese because he didn’t understand him. For Phædrus, failure to understand something created tremendous interest and DeWeese’s attitudes were fascinating. They seemed all haywire. Phædrus would say something he thought was pretty funny and DeWeese would look at him in a puzzled way or else take him seriously. Other times Phædrus would say something that was very serious and of deep concern, and DeWeese would break up laughing, as though he had cracked the cleverest joke he had ever heard.

For example, there is the fragment of memory about a dining-room table whose edge veneer had come loose and which Phædrus had reglued. He held the veneer in place while the glue set by wrapping a whole ball of string around the table, round and round and round.

DeWeese saw the string and wondered what that was all about.

"That’s my latest sculpture," Phædrus had said. "Don’t you think it kind of builds?"

Instead of laughing, DeWeese looked at him with amazement, studied it for a long time and finally said, "Where did you learn all this?" For a second Phædrus thought he was continuing the joke, but he was serious.

Another time Phædrus was upset about some failing students. Walking home with DeWeese under some trees he had commented on it and DeWeese had wondered why he took it so personally.

"I’ve wondered too," Phædrus had said, and in a puzzled voice had added, "I think maybe it’s because every teacher tends to grade up students who resemble him the most. If your own writing shows neat penmanship you regard that more important in a student than if it doesn’t. If you use big words you’re going to like students who write with big words."

"Sure. What’s wrong with that?" DeWeese had said.

"Well, there’s something whacky here," Phædrus had said, "because the students I like the most, the ones I really feel a sense of identity with, are all failing!"

DeWeese had completely broken up with laughter at this and left Phædrus feeling miffed. He had seen it as a kind of scientific phenomenon that might offer clues leading to new understanding, and DeWeese had just laughed.

At first he thought DeWeese was just laughing at his unintended insult to himself. But that didn’t fit because DeWeese wasn’t a derogatory kind of person at all. Later he saw it was a kind of supertruth laugh. The best students always are flunking. Every good teacher knows that. It was a kind of laughter that destroys tensions produced by impossible situations and Phædrus could have used some of it because at this time he was taking things way too seriously.

These enigmatic responses of DeWeese gave Phædrus the idea that DeWeese had access to a huge terrain of hidden understanding. DeWeese always seemed to be concealing something. He was hiding something from him, and Phædrus couldn’t figure out what it was.

Then comes a strong fragment, the day when he discovered DeWeese seemed to have the same puzzled feeling about him.

A light switch in DeWeese’s studio didn’t work and he asked Phædrus if he knew what was wrong with it. He had a slightly embarrassed, slightly puzzled smile on his face, like the smile of an art patron talking to a painter. The patron is embarrassed to reveal how little he knows but is smiling with the expectation of learning more. Unlike the Sutherlands, who hate technology, DeWeese was so far removed from it he didn’t feel it any particular menace. DeWeese was actually a technology buff, a patron of the technologies. He didn’t understand them, but he knew what he liked, and he always enjoyed learning more.

He had the illusion the trouble was in the wire near the bulb because immediately upon toggling the switch the light went out. If the trouble had been in the switch, he felt, there would have been a lapse of time before the trouble showed up in the bulb. Phædrus did not argue with this, but went across the street to the hardware store, bought a switch and in a few minutes had it installed. It worked immediately, of course, leaving DeWeese puzzled and frustrated. "How did you know the trouble was in the switch?" he asked.

"Because it worked intermittently when I jiggled the switch."

"Well...couldn’t it jiggle the wire?"

"No." Phædrus’ cocksure attitude angered DeWeese and he started to argue. "How do you know all that?" he said.

"It’s obvious."

"Well then, why didn’t I see it?"

"You have to have some familiarity."

"Then it’s not obvious, is it?"

DeWeese always argued from this strange perspective that made it impossible to answer him. This was the perspective that gave Phædrus the idea DeWeese was concealing something from him. It wasn’t until the very end of his stay in Bozeman that he thought he saw, in his own analytic and methodical way, what that perspective was.

At the park entrance we stop and pay a man in a Smokey Bear hat. He hands us a one-day pass in return. Ahead I see an elderly tourist take a movie of us, then smile. From under his shorts protrude white legs into street stockings and shoes. His wife, who watches approvingly, has identical legs. I wave to them as we go by and they wave back. It’s a moment that will be preserved on film for years.

Phædrus despised this park without knowing exactly why...because he hadn’t discovered it himself, perhaps, but probably not. Something else. The guided-tour attitude of the rangers angered him. The Bronx Zoo attitudes of the tourists disgusted him even more. Such a difference from the high country all around. It seemed an enormous museum with exhibits carefully manicured to give the illusion of reality, but nicely chained off so that children would not injure them. People entered the park and became polite and cozy and fakey to each other because the atmosphere of the park made them that way. In the entire time he had lived within a hundred miles of it he had visited it only once or twice.

But this is getting out of sequence. There’s a span of about ten years missing. He didn’t jump from Immanuel Kant to Bozeman, Montana. During this span of ten years he lived in India for a long time studying Oriental philosophy at Benares Hindu University.

As far as I know he didn’t learn any occult secrets there. Nothing much happened at all except exposures. He listened to philosophers, visited religious persons, absorbed and thought and then absorbed and thought some more, and that was about all. All his letters show is an enormous confusion of contradictions and incongruities and divergences and exceptions to any rule he formulated about the things he observed. He’d entered India an empirical scientist, and he left India an empirical scientist, not much wiser than he had been when he’d come. However, he’d been exposed to a lot and had acquired a kind of latent image that appeared in conjunction with many other latent images later on.

Some of these latencies should be summarized because they become important later on. He became aware that the doctrinal differences among Hinduism and Buddhism and Taoism are not anywhere near as important as doctrinal differences among Christianity and Islam and Judaism. Holy wars are not fought over them because verbalized statements about reality are never presumed to be reality itself.

In all of the Oriental religions great value is placed on the Sanskrit doctrine of Tat tvam asi, "Thou art that," which asserts that everything you think you are and everything you think you perceive are undivided. To realize fully this lack of division is to become enlightened.

Logic presumes a separation of subject from object; therefore logic is not final wisdom. The illusion of separation of subject from object is best removed by the elimination of physical activity, mental activity and emotional activity. There are many disciplines for this. One of the most important is the Sanskrit dhy
na, mispronounced in Chinese as "Chan" and again mispronounced in Japanese as "Zen." Phædrus never got involved in meditation because it made no sense to him. In his entire time in India "sense" was always logical consistency and he couldn’t find any honest way to abandon this belief. That, I think, was creditable on his part.

But one day in the classroom the professor of philosophy was blithely expounding on the illusory nature of the world for what seemed the fiftieth time and Phædrus raised his hand and asked coldly if it was believed that the atomic bombs that had dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were illusory. The professor smiled and said yes. That was the end of the exchange.

Within the traditions of Indian philosophy that answer may have been correct, but for Phædrus and for anyone else who reads newspapers regularly and is concerned with such things as mass destruction of human beings that answer was hopelessly inadequate. He left the classroom, left India and gave up.

He returned to his Midwest, picked up a practical degree in journalism, married, lived in Nevada and Mexico, did odd jobs, worked as a journalist, a science writer and an industrial-advertising writer. He fathered two children, bought a farm and a riding horse and two cars and was starting to put on middle-aged weight. His pursuit of what has been called the ghost of reason had been given up. That’s extremely important to understand. He had given up.

Because he’d given up, the surface of life was comfortable for him. He worked reasonably hard, was easy to get along with and, except for an occasional glimpse of inner emptiness shown in some short stories he wrote at the time, his days passed quite usually.

What started him up here into these mountains isn’t certain. His wife seems not to know, but I’d guess it was perhaps some of those inner feelings of failure and the hope that somehow this might take him back on the track again. He had become much more mature, as if the abandonment of his inner goals had caused him somehow to age more quickly.

We exit from the park at Gardiner, where not much rain seems to fall, because the mountainsides show only grass and sage in the twilight. We decide to stay here for the night.

The town is on high banks on either side of a bridge over a river which rushes over smooth and clean boulders. Across the bridge they’ve already turned the lights on at the motel where we check in, but even in the artificial light coming from the windows I can see each cabin has been carefully surrounded by planted flowers, and so I step carefully to avoid them.

I notice things about the cabin too, which I point out to Chris. The windows are all double-hung and sash-weighted. The doors click shut without looseness. All the moldings are perfectly mitered. There’s nothing arty about all this, it’s just well done and, something tells me, is all done by one person.

When we return to the motel from the restaurant an elderly couple are sitting in a small garden outside the office enjoying the evening breeze. The man confirms that he’s made all these cabins himself, and is so pleased it’s been noticed that his wife, who sees this, invites us all to sit down.

We talk with no need to hurry. This is the oldest entrance to the park. It was used before there were any automobiles. They talk about changes that have taken place over the years, adding a dimension to what we see around us, and it builds to a kind of beautiful thing...this town, this couple and the years that have gone by here. Sylvia puts her hand on John’s arm. I am conscious of the sounds of the river rushing past boulders below and a fragrance in the night wind. The woman, who knows all fragrances, says it is honeysuckle, and we are quiet for a while and I become pleasantly drowsy. Chris is almost asleep when we decide to turn in.

13

John and Sylvia eat their breakfast hot cakes and drink their coffee, still caught up in the mood of last night, but I’m finding it hard to get food down.

Today we should arrive at the school, the place where an enormous coalescence of things occurred, and I’m already feeling tense.

I remember reading once about an archeological excavation in the Near East, learning about the archeologist’s feelings when he opened the forgotten tombs for the first time in thousands of years. Now I feel like some archeologist myself.

The sagebrush down the canyon now toward Livingston is like sagebrush you see all the way from here into Mexico.

This morning sunlight is the same as yesterday’s except warmer and softer now that we’re at a lower altitude again.

There is nothing unusual. It’s just this archeological feeling that the calmness of the surroundings conceals things. A haunted place.

I really don’t want to go there. I’d just as soon turn around and go back.

Just tension, I guess.

It fits one of the fragments of this memory, in which many mornings the tension was so intense he would throw up everything before he got to his first classroom. He loathed appearing before classrooms of students and talking. It was a complete violation of his whole lone, isolated way of life, and what he experienced was intense stage fright, except that it never showed on him as stage fright, but rather as a terrific intensity about everything he did. Students had told his wife it was just like electricity in the air. The moment he entered the classroom all eyes turned on him and followed him as he walked to the front of the room. All conversation died to a hush and remained at a hush even though it was several minutes, often, before the class started. Throughout the hour the eyes never strayed from him.

He became much talked about, a controversial figure. The majority of students avoided his sections like the Black Death. They had heard too many stories.

The school was what could euphemistically be called a "teaching college." At a teaching college you teach and you teach and you teach with no time for research, no time for contemplation, no time for participation in outside affairs. Just teach and teach and teach until your mind grows dull and your creativity vanishes and you become an automaton saying the same dull things over and over to endless waves of innocent students who cannot understand why you are so dull, lose respect and fan this disrespect out into the community. The reason you teach and you teach and you teach is that this is a very clever way of running a college on the cheap while giving a false appearance of genuine education.

Yet despite this he called the school by a name that didn’t make much sense, in fact sounded a little ludicrous in view of its actual nature. But the name had great meaning to him, and he stuck to it and he felt, before he left, that he had rammed it into a few minds sufficiently hard to make it stick. He called it a "Church of Reason," and much of the puzzlement people had about him could have ended if they’d understood what he meant by this.

The state of Montana at this time was undergoing an outbreak of ultra-right-wing politics like that which occurred in Dallas, Texas, just prior to President Kennedy’s assassination. A nationally known professor from the University of Montana at Missoula was prohibited from speaking on campus on the grounds that it would "stir up trouble." Professors were told that all public statements must be cleared through the college public-relations office before they could be made.

Academic standards were demolished. The legislature had previously prohibited the school from refusing entry to any student over twenty-one whether he had a high-school diploma or not. Now the legislature had passed a law fining the college eight thousand dollars for every student who failed, virtually an order to pass every student.

The newly elected governor was trying to fire the college president for both personal and political reasons. The college president was not only a personal enemy, he was a Democrat, and the governor was no ordinary Republican. His campaign manager doubled as state coordinator for the John Birch Society. This was the same governor who supplied the list of fifty subversives we heard about a few days ago.

Now, as part of this vendetta, funds to the college were being cut. The college president had passed on an unusually large part of the cut to the English department, of which Phædrus was a member, and whose members had been quite vocal on issues of academic freedom.

Phædrus had given up, was exchanging letters with the Northwest Regional Accrediting Association to see if they could help prevent these violations of accreditation requirements. In addition to this private correspondence he had publicly called for an investigation of the entire school situation.

At this point some students in one of his classes had asked Phædrus, bitterly, if his efforts to stop accred- itation meant he was trying to prevent them from getting an education.

Phædrus said no.

Then one student, apparently a partisan of the governor, said angrily that the legislature would prevent the school from losing its accreditation.

Phædrus asked how.

The student said they would post police to prevent it.

Phædrus pondered this for a while, then realized the enormity of the student’s misconception of what accreditation was all about.

That night, for the next day’s lecture, he wrote out his defense of what he was doing. This was the Church of Reason lecture, which, in contrast to his usual sketchy lecture notes, was very long and very carefully elaborated.

It began with reference to a newspaper article about a country church building with an electric beer sign hanging right over the front entrance. The building had been sold and was being used as a bar. One can guess that some classroom laughter started at this point. The college was well known for drunken partying and the image vaguely fit. The article said a number of people had complained to the church officials about it. It had been a Catholic church, and the priest who had been delegated to respond to the criticism had sounded quite irritated about the whole thing. To him it had revealed an incredible ignorance of what a church really was. Did they think that bricks and boards and glass constituted a church? Or the shape of the roof? Here, posing as piety was an example of the very materialism the church opposed. The building in question was not holy ground. It had been desanctified. That was the end of it. The beer sign resided over a bar, not a church, and those who couldn’t tell the difference were simply revealing something about themselves.

Phædrus said the same confusion existed about the University and that was why loss of accreditation was hard to understand. The real University is not a material object. It is not a group of buildings that can be defended by police. He explained that when a college lost its accreditation, nobody came and shut down the school. There were no legal penalties, no fines, no jail sentences. Classes did not stop. Everything went on just as before. Students got the same education they would if the school didn’t lose its accreditation. All that would happen, Phædrus said, would simply be an official recognition of a condition that already existed. It would be similar to excommunication. What would happen is that the real University, which no legislature can dictate to and which can never be identified by any location of bricks or boards or glass, would simply declare that this place was no longer "holy ground." The real University would vanish from it, and all that would be left was the bricks and the books and the material manifestation.

It must have been a strange concept to all of the students, and I can imagine him waiting for a long time for it to sink in, and perhaps then waiting for the question, What do you think the real University is?

His notes, in response to this question, state the following:

The real University, he said, has no specific location. It owns no property, pays no salaries and receives no material dues. The real University is a state of mind. It is that great heritage of rational thought that has been brought down to us through the centuries and which does not exist at any specific location. It’s a state of mind which is regenerated throughout the centuries by a body of people who traditionally carry the title of professor, but even that title is not part of the real University. The real University is nothing less than the continuing body of reason itself.

In addition to this state of mind, "reason," there’s a legal entity which is unfortunately called by the same name but which is quite another thing. This is a nonprofit corporation, a branch of the state with a specific address. It owns property, is capable of paying salaries, of receiving money and of responding to legislative pressures in the process.

But this second university, the legal corporation, cannot teach, does not generate new knowledge or evaluate ideas. It is not the real University at all. It is just a church building, the setting, the location at which conditions have been made favorable for the real church to exist.

Confusion continually occurs in people who fail to see this difference, he said, and think that control of the church buildings implies control of the church. They see professors as employees of the second university who should abandon reason when told to and take orders with no backtalk, the same way employees do in other corporations.

They see the second university, but fail to see the first.

I remember reading this for the first time and remarking about the analytic craftsmanship displayed. He avoided splitting the University into fields or departments and dealing with the results of that analysis. He also avoided the traditional split into students, faculty and administration.

When you split it either of those ways you get a lot of dull stuff that doesn’t really tell you much you can’t get out of the official school bulletin. But Phædrus split it between "the church" and "the location," and once this cleavage is made the same rather dull and imponderable institution seen in the bulletin suddenly is seen with a degree of clarity that wasn’t previously available. On the basis of this cleavage he provided explanations for a number of puzzling but normal aspects of University life.

After these explanations he returned to the analogy of the religious church. The citizens who build such a church and pay for it probably have in mind that they’re doing this for the community. A good sermon can put the parishioners in a right frame of mind for the coming week. Sunday school will help the children grow up right. The minister who delivers the sermon and directs the Sunday school understands these goals and normally goes along with them, but he also knows that his primary goals are not to serve the community. His primary goal is always to serve God. Normally there’s no conflict but occasionally one creeps in when trustees oppose the minister’s sermons and threaten reduction of funds. That happens.

A true minister, in such situations, must act as though he’d never heard the threats. His primary goal isn’t to serve the members of the community, but always God.

The primary goal of the Church of Reason, Phædrus said, is always Socrates’ old goal of truth, in its ever-changing forms, as it’s revealed by the process of rationality. Everything else is subordinate to that. Normally this goal is in no conflict with the location goal of improving the citizenry, but on occasion some conflict arises, as in the case of Socrates himself. It arises when trustees and legislators who’ve contributed large amounts of time and money to the location take points of view in opposition to the professors’ lectures or public statements. They can then lean on the administration by threatening to cut off funds if the professors don’t say what they want to hear. That happens too.

True churchmen in such situations must act as though they had never heard these threats. Their primary goal never is to serve the community ahead of everything else. Their primary goal is to serve, through reason, the goal of truth.

That was what he meant by the Church of Reason. There was no question but that it was a concept that was deeply felt by him. He was regarded as something of a troublemaker but was never censured for it in any proportion to the amount of trouble he made. What saved him from the wrath of everyone around him was partly an unwillingness to give any support to the enemies of the college, but also partly a begrudging understanding that all of his troublemaking was ultimately motivated by a mandate they were never free from themselves: the mandate to speak the rational truth.

The lecture notes explain almost all of why he acted the way he did, but leave one thing unexplained...his fanatic intensity. One can believe in the truth and in the process of reason to discover it and in resistance to state legislatures, but why burn one’s self out, day after day, over it?

The psychological explanations that have been made to me seem inadequate. Stage fright can’t sustain that kind of effort month after month. Neither does another explanation sound right, that he was trying to redeem himself for his earlier failure. There is no evidence anywhere that he ever thought of his expulsion from the university as a failure, just an enigma. The explanation I’ve come to arises from the discrepancy between his lack of faith in scientific reason in the laboratory and his fanatic faith expressed in the Church of Reason lecture. I was thinking about the discrepancy one day and it suddenly came to me that it wasn’t a discrepancy at all. His lack of faith in reason was why he was so fanatically dedicated to it.

You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence in. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it’s going to rise tomorrow. When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kinds of dogmas or goals, it’s always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt.

The militancy of the Jesuits he somewhat resembled is a case in point. Historically their zeal stems not from the strength of the Catholic Church but from its weakness in the face of the Reformation. It was Phædrus’ lack of faith in reason that made him such a fanatic teacher. That makes more sense. And it makes a lot of sense out of the things that followed.

That’s probably why he felt such a deep kinship with so many failing students in the back rows of his classrooms. The contemptuous looks on their faces reflected the same feelings he had toward the whole rational, intellectual process. The only difference was that they were contemptuous because they didn’t understand it. He was contemptuous because he did. Because they didn’t understand it they had no solution but to fail and for the rest of their lives remember the experience with bitterness. He on the other hand felt fanatically obliged to do something about it. That was why his Church of Reason lecture was so carefully prepared. He was telling them you have to have faith in reason because there isn’t anything else. But it was a faith he didn’t have himself.

It must always be remembered that this was the nineteen-fifties, not the nineteen-seventies. There were rumblings from the beatniks and early hippies at this time about "the system" and the square intellectualism that supported it, but hardly anyone guessed how deeply the whole edifice would be brought into doubt. So here was Phædrus, fanatically defending an institution, the Church of Reason, that no one, no one certainly in Bozeman, Montana, had any cause to doubt. A pre-Reformation Loyola. A militant reassuring everyone the sun would rise tomorrow, when no one was worried. They just wondered about him.

But now, with the most tumultuous decade of the century between him and ourselves, a decade in which reason has been assailed and assaulted beyond the wildest beliefs of the fifties, I think that in this Chautauqua based on his discoveries we can understand a little better what he was talking about—a solution for it all—if only that were true—so much of it’s lost there’s no way of knowing.

Maybe that’s why I feel like an archeologist. And have such a tension about it. I have only these fragments of memory, and pieces of things people tell me, and I keep wondering as we get closer if some tombs are better left shut.

Chris, sitting behind me, suddenly comes to mind, and I wonder how much he knows, how much he remembers.

We reach an intersection where the road from the park joins the main east-west highway, stop and turn on to it.

From here we go over a low pass and into Bozeman itself. The road goes up now, heading west, and suddenly I’m looking forward to what’s ahead.

14

We ride down out of the pass onto a small green plain. To the immediate south we can see pine-forested mountains that still have last winter’s snow on the peaks. In all other directions appear lower mountains, more in the distance, but just as clear and sharp. This picture-postcard scenery vaguely fits memory but not definitely. This interstate freeway we are on must not have existed then.

The statement "To travel is better than to arrive" comes back to mind again and stays. We have been traveling and now we will arrive. For me a period of depression comes on when I reach a temporary goal like this and have to reorient myself toward another one. In a day or two John and Sylvia must go back and Chris and I must decide what we want to do next. Everything has to be reorganized.

The main street of the town seems vaguely familiar but there’s a feeling of being a tourist now and I see the shop signs are for me, the tourist, and not for people who live here. This isn’t really a small town. People are moving too fast and too independently of one another. It’s one of these population fifteen-to-thirty-thousand towns that isn’t exactly a town, not exactly a city...not exactly anything really.

We eat lunch in a glass-and-chrome restaurant that brings no recall at all. It looks as though it’s been built since he lived here and shows the same lack of self-identity seen on the main street.

I go to a phone book and look for Robert DeWeese’s number but don’t find it. I dial the operator but she’s never heard of the party and can’t tell me the number. I don’t believe it! Were they just in his imagination? Her statement produces a panicky feeling that lasts for a moment, but then I remember their answer to my letter telling them we were coming and calm down. Imaginary people don’t use the mails.

John suggests I try to call the art department or some friends. I smoke for a while and drink coffee, and when I’m relaxed again I do this and learn how to get there. It’s not the technology that’s scary. It’s what it does to the relations between people, like callers and operators, that’s scary.

From the town to the mountains across the valley floor must be less than ten miles, and we cross that distance now on dirt roads through rich green high alfalfa ready for cutting, so thick it looks difficult to walk through. The fields sweep outward and slightly upward to the base of the mountains where a much darker green of the pines rises suddenly up. That will be where the DeWeeses live. Where the light green and the dark green meet. The wind is full of the lightgreen new-

mown-hay smells and livestock smells. At one point we pass through a cold bank of air where the smell changes to pine, but then are back in the warmth again. Sunlight and meadows and the close-looming mountain.

Just as we get to the pines, the gravel in the road becomes very deep. We slow down to first gear and ten miles an hour and I keep both feet off the pegs to kick the cycle upright again if it should mush into the gravel and start to go down. We round a corner and suddenly enter the pines and a very steep V canyon in the mountain, and there right beside the road is a large grey house with an enormous abstract iron sculpture attached to one side and beneath it sitting in a chair tipped back against the house surrounded by company is the living image of DeWeese himself with a can of beer in his hand, which waves to us. Right out of the old photographs.

I’m so busy keeping the machine up I can’t take my hands off the grips and I wave a leg back instead. The living image of DeWeese himself grins as we pull up.

"You found it," he says. Relaxed smile. Happy eyes.

"It’s been a long time," I say. I feel happy too, though strange at suddenly seeing the image move and talk.

We dismount and take off our riding gear and I see that the open porch deck he and his guests are on is unfinished and unweathered. DeWeese looks down from where it is only a few feet above the road on our side, but the V of the canyon slants so steeply that on the far side the ground descends fifteen feet below the deck. The stream itself appears another fifty feet down and away from the house, among trees and deep grass where a horse, partially hidden by the trees, grazes without looking up. Now we have to look high to see the sky. Surrounding us is the dark-green forest we watched as we approached.

"This is just beautiful!" Sylvia says.

The living image of DeWeese smiles down at her. "Thank you," he says, "I’m glad you like it." His tone is all here and now, completely relaxed. I realize that although this is the authentic image of DeWeese himself, it’s also a brand-new person who’s been renewing himself continually and I’m going to have to get to know him all over again.

We step up onto the deck. Between the floorboards it has spaces, like a grate. I can see the ground through them. With a "Well, I’m not quite sure how to do this" tone and smile, DeWeese makes introductions all around, but they’re in one ear and out the other. I can never remember names. His guests are an art instructor from the school who has horn-rimmed glasses, and his wife, who smiles self-consciously. They must be new.

We talk for a while, DeWeese mainly explaining to them who I am, and then, from where the deck disappears around the corner of the house, suddenly comes Gennie DeWeese with a tray of beer cans. She is a painter too and, I’m suddenly aware, a quick comprehender and already there’s a shared smile over the artistic economy of grabbing a can of beer instead of her hand, while she says, "Some neighbors just came over with a mess of trout for dinner. I’m so pleased." I try to think of something appropriate to say, but just nod.

We sit down, I in the sunlight, where it’s difficult to distinguish details of the other side of the deck in the shade.

DeWeese looks at me, seems about to comment on my appearance, which is undoubtedly much different from what he remembers, but something deflects this and he turns to John instead and asks about the trip.

John explains that it’s been just great, something he and Sylvia have needed for years.

Sylvia seconds this. "Just to be out in the open in all this space," she says.

"Lots of space in Montana," DeWeese says, a little wistfully. He and John and the art instructor become involved in get-acquainted talk about differences between Montana and Minnesota.

The horse grazes peacefully below us, and just beyond it the water sparkles in the creek. The talk has shifted to DeWeese’s land here in the canyon, how long DeWeese has lived here and what art instruction at the college is like. John has a real gift for casual conversation like this that I’ve never had, so I just listen.

After a while the heat from the sun is so great I take off my sweater and open my shirt. Also to stop squinting I bring out some sunglasses and put them on. That’s better, but it blanks out the shade so completely I can hardly see faces at all and leaves me feeling sort of visually detached from everything but the sun and the sunlit slopes of the canyon. I think to myself about unpacking but decide not to mention it. They know we’re staying but just intuitively allow first things to happen first. First we relax, then we unpack. What’s the hurry? The beer and sun begin to toast my head like a marshmallow. Very nice.

I don’t know how much later I hear some comments about "the movie star here" come from John and I realize he is talking about me and my sunglasses. I look over the tops of them into the shade and make out that DeWeese and John and the art instructor are smiling at me. They must want me in the conversation, something about problems on the trip.

"They want to know what happens if something goes bad mechanically," John says.

I relate the whole story of the time Chris and I were in the rainstorm and the engine quit, which is a good story, but somewhat pointless, I realize as I’m telling it, as an answer to his question. The final line about being out of gas brings the expected groan.

"And I even told him to look," Chris says. Both DeWeese and Gennie comment on Chris’s size. He becomes self-conscious and glows a little. They ask about his mother and his brother and we both answer these questions as best we can.

The heat of the sun finally becomes too much for me and I shift my chair into the shade. The marshmallow feeling leaves in the sudden chill and after a few minutes I have to button up. Gennie notices and says, "As soon as the sun goes over the ridge up there it gets really cold."

The distance between the sun and the ridge is narrow. I’d judge that although it’s only the middle of the afternoon, less than half an hour of direct sun remains. John asks about the mountains in the winter and he and DeWeese and the art instructor talk about this and about snowshoeing in the mountains. I could just sit here forever.

Sylvia and Gennie and the art instructor’s wife talk about the house and soon Gennie invites them inside.

My thoughts drift to the statement about Chris growing so fast and suddenly the feeling of the tomb comes on. I’ve heard only indirectly of the time Chris lived here, and yet to them it seems that he’s hardly been gone. We live in entirely different time structures.

The conversation shifts onto what is current in art and music and theater and I’m surprised at how well John keeps up his end of the conversation. I’m not basically interested in what’s new in these areas and he probably knows it and for that reason never talks about it to me. Just the reverse of the motorcycle maintenance situation. I wonder if I look as glassy-eyed now as he does when I talk about rods and pistons.

But what he and DeWeese really have in common is Chris and me, and a funny stickiness is developing here, ever since the movie-star comment. John’s good-natured sarcasm toward his old drinking and cycling companion is chilling DeWeese slightly, causing resultant respectful tones toward me from DeWeese. These seem to increase John’s sarcasm in a self-stoking way and they both sense this and so they kind of veer away from me onto some subject of agreement and then come back again but this stickiness develops and they veer away again onto another agreeable subject.

"Anyway," John says, "this character here told us we were in for a letdown when we came here, and we still haven’t gotten over this ‘letdown.""

I laugh. I hadn’t wanted to build him up to it. DeWeese smiles too. But then John turns to me and says, "Geez, you must have been really crazy, I mean really nuts to leave this place. I don’t care what the college is like."

I see DeWeese look at him, shocked. Then angry. DeWeese looks at me and I wave it off. Some kind of impasse has developed but I don’t know how to get around it. "It’s a beautiful place," I say weakly.

DeWeese says defensively, "If you were here for a while you’d see another side to it." The instructor nods in agreement.

The impasse now produces its silence. It’s an impossible one to reconcile. What John said wasn’t unkind. He’s kinder than anyone. What he knows and I know but DeWeese doesn’t know is that the person they’re both referring to isn’t much these days. Just another middle-class, middle-aged person getting along. Worried mainly about Chris, but beyond that nothing special.

But what DeWeese and I know and the Sutherlands don’t know is that there was someone, a person who lived here once, who was creatively on fire with a set

of ideas no one had ever heard of before, but then something unexplained and wrong happened and DeWeese doesn’t know how or why and neither do I. The reason for the impasse, the bad feeling, is that DeWeese thinks that person is here now. And there’s no way I can tell him otherwise.

For a brief moment, way up at the top of the ridge, the sun diffuses through the trees and a halation of the light comes down to us. The halo expands, capturing every-

thing in a sudden flash, and suddenly it catches me too.

"He saw too much," I say, still thinking about the impasse, but DeWeese looks puzzled and John doesn’t register at all, and I realize the non sequitur too late. In the distance a single bird cries plaintively.

Now suddenly the sun is gone behind the mountain and the whole canyon is in dull shadow.

To myself I think how uncalled for that was. You don’t make statements like that. You leave the hospital with the understanding that you don’t.

Gennie appears with Sylvia and suggests we unpack. We agree and she shows us to our rooms. I see that my bed has a heavy quilt on it against the cold of the night. Beautiful room.

In three trips to the cycle and back I have everything transferred. Then I go to Chris’s room to see what needs to be unpacked but he’s cheerful and being grown-up and doesn’t need help.

I look at him. "How do you like it here?"

He says, "Fine, but it isn’t anything like the way you told about it last night."

"When?"

"Just before we went to sleep. In the cabin."

I don’t know what he’s referring to.

He adds, "You said it was lonely here."

"Why would I say that?"

"I don’t know." My question frustrates him, so I leave it. He must have been dreaming.

When we come down to the living room I can smell the aroma from the frying trout in the kitchen. At one end of the room DeWeese is bent over the fireplace holding a match to some newspaper under the kindling. We watch him for a while.

"We use this fireplace all summer long," he says.

I reply, "I’m surprised it’s this cold."

Chris says he’s cold too. I send him back up for his sweater and mine as well.

"It’s the evening wind," DeWeese says. "It sweeps down the canyon from up high where it’s really cold."

The fire flares suddenly and then dies and then flares again from an uneven draft. It must be windy, I think, and look through the huge windows that line one wall of the living room. Across the canyon in the dusk I see the sharp movement of the trees.

"But that’s right," DeWeese says. "You know how cold it is up there. You used to spend all your time up there."

"It brings back memories," I say.

A single fragment comes to mind now of night winds all around a campfire, smaller than this one before us now, sheltered in the rock against the high wind because there are no trees. Next to the fire are cooking gear and backpacks to help give wind shelter, and a canteen filled with water gathered from the melting snow. The water had to be collected early because above the timberline the snow stops melting when the sun goes down.

DeWeese says, "You’ve changed a lot." He is looking at me searchingly. His expression seems to ask whether this is a forbidden topic or not, and he gathers from looking at me that it is. He adds, "I guess we all have."

I reply, "I’m not the same person at all," and this seems to put him a little more at ease. Were he aware of the literal truth of that, he’d be a lot less at ease. "A lot has happened," I say, "and some things have come up that have made it important to try to untangle them a little, in my own mind at least, and that’s partly why I’m here."

He looks at me, expecting something more, but the art instructor and his wife appear by the fireside and we drop it.

"The wind sounds like there’ll be a storm tonight," the instructor says.

"I don’t think so," DeWeese says.

Chris returns with the sweaters and asks if there are any ghosts up in the canyon.

DeWeese looks at him with amusement. "No, but there are wolves," he says.

Chris thinks about this and asks, "What do they do?"

DeWeese says, "They make trouble for the ranchers." He frowns. "They kill the young calves and lambs."

"Do they chase people?"

"l’ve never heard of it," DeWeese says and then, seeing that this disappoints Chris, adds, "but they could."

At dinner the brook trout is accompanied by glasses of Bay county Chablis. We sit separately in chairs and sofas around the living room. One entire side of this room has the windows which would overlook the canyon, except that now it’s dark outside and the glass reflects the light from the fireplace. The glow of the fire is matched by an inner glow from the wine and fish and we don’t say much except murmurs of appreciation.

Sylvia murmurs to John to notice the large pots and vases around the room.

"I was noticing those," John says. "Fantastic."

"Those were made by Peter Voulkas," Sylvia says.

"Is that right?"

"He was a student of Mr. DeWeese."

"Oh, for Christ’s sake! I almost kicked one of those over."

DeWeese laughs.

Later John mumbles something a few times, looks up and announces, "This does it—this just does the whole thing for us -- .Now we can go back for another eight years on Twenty-six-forty-nine Colfax Avenue."

Sylvia says mournfully, "Let’s not talk about that."

John looks at me for a moment. "I suppose anybody with friends who can provide an evening like this can’t be all bad." He nods gravely. "I’m going to have to take back all those things I thought about you."

"All of them?" I ask.

"Some, anyway."

DeWeese and the instructor smile and some of the impasse goes away.

After dinner Jack and Wylla Barsness arrive. More living images. Jack is recorded in the tomb fragments as a good person who writes and teaches English at the college. Their arrival is followed by that of a sculptor from northern Montana who herds sheep for his income. I gather from the way DeWeese introduces him that I’m not supposed to have met him before.

DeWeese says he is trying to persuade the sculptor to join the faculty and I say, "I’ll try to talk him out of it," and sit down next to him, but conversation is very sticky because the sculptor is extremely serious and suspicious, evidently because I’m not an artist. He acts like I’m a detective trying to get something on him, and it isn’t until he discovers I do a lot of welding that I become okay. Motorcycle maintenance opens strange doors. He says he welds for some of the same reasons I do. After you pick up skill, welding gives a tremendous feeling of power and control over the metal. You can do anything. He brings out some photographs of things he has welded and these show beautiful birds and animals with flowing metal surface textures that are not like anything else.

Later I move over and talk with Jack and Wylla. Jack is leaving to head an English department down in Boise, Idaho. His attitudes toward the department here seem guarded, but negative. They would be negative, of course, or he wouldn’t be leaving. I seem to remember now he was a fiction writer mainly, who taught English, rather than a systematic scholar who taught English. There was a continuing split in the department along these lines which in part gave rise to, or at least accelerated the growth of, Phædrus’ wild set of ideas which no one else had ever heard of, and Jack was supportive of Phædrus because, although he wasn’t sure he knew what Phædrus was talking about, he saw it was something a fiction writer could work with better than linguistic analysis. It’s an old split. Like the one between art and art history. One does it and the other talks about how it’s done and the talk about how it’s done never seems to match how one does it.

DeWeese brings over some instructions for assembly of an outdoor barbecue rotisserie which he wants me to evaluate as a professional technical writer. He’s spent a whole afternoon trying to get the thing together and he wants to see these instructions totally damned.

But as I read them they look like ordinary instructions to me and I’m at a loss to find anything wrong with them. I don’t want to say this, of course, so I hunt hard for something to pick on. You can’t really tell whether a set of instructions is all right until you check it against the device or procedure it describes, but I see a page separation that prevents reading without flipping back and forth between the text and illustration...always a poor practice. I jump on this very hard and DeWeese encourages every jump. Chris takes the instructions to see what I mean.

But while I’m jumping on this and describing some of the agonies of misinterpretation that bad cross- referencing can produce, I’ve a feeling that this isn’t why DeWeese found them so hard to understand. It’s just the lack of smoothness and continuity which threw him off. He’s unable to comprehend things when they appear in the ugly, chopped-up, grotesque sentence style common to engineering and technical writing. Science works with chunks and bits and pieces of things with the continuity presumed, and DeWeese works only with the continuities of things with the chunks and bits and pieces presumed. What he really wants me to damn is the lack of artistic continuity, something an engineer couldn’t care less about. It hangs up, really, on the classic-romantic split, like everything else about technology.

But Chris, meanwhile, takes the instructions and folds them around in a way I hadn’t thought of so that the illustration sits there right next to the text. I double-take this, then triple-take it and feel like a movie cartoon character who has just walked beyond the edge of a cliff but hasn’t fallen yet because he hasn’t realized his predicament. I nod, and there’s silence, and then I realize my predicament, then a long laughter as I pound Chris on the top of the head all the way down to the bottom of the canyon. When the laughter subsides, I say, "Well, anyway—" but the laughter starts all over again.

"What I wanted to say," I finally get in, "is that I’ve a set of instructions at home which open up great realms for the improvement of technical writing. They begin, ‘Assembly of Japanese bicycle require great peace of mind.’ "

This produces more laughter, but Sylvia and Gennie and the sculptor give sharp looks of recognition.

"That’s a good instruction," the sculptor says. Gennie nods too.

"That’s kind of why I saved it," I say. "At first I laughed because of memories of bicycles I’d put together and, of course, the unintended slur on Japanese manufacture. But there’s a lot of wisdom in that statement."

John looks at me apprehensively. I look at him with equal apprehension. We both laugh. He says, "The professor will now expound."

"Peace of mind isn’t at all superficial, really," I expound. "It’s the whole thing. That which produces it is good maintenance; that which disturbs it is poor maintenance. What we call workability of the machine is just an objectification of this peace of mind. The ultimate test’s always your own serenity. If you don’t have this when you start and maintain it while you’re working you’re likely to build your personal problems right into the machine itself."

They just look at me, thinking about this.

"It’s an unconventional concept," I say, "but conventional reason bears it out. The material object of observation, the bicycle or rotisserie, can’t be right or wrong. Molecules are molecules. They don’t have any ethical codes to follow except those people give them. The test of the machine is the satisfaction it gives you. There isn’t any other test. If the machine produces tranquillity it’s right. If it disturbs you it’s wrong until either the machine or your mind is changed. The test of the machine’s always your own mind. There isn’t any other test."

DeWeese asks, "What if the machine is wrong and I feel peaceful about it?"

Laughter.

I reply, "That’s self-contradictory. If you really don’t care you aren’t going to know it’s wrong. The thought’ll never occur to you. The act of pronouncing it wrong’s a form of caring."

I add, "What’s more common is that you feel unpeaceful even if it’s right, and I think that’s the actual case here. In this case, if you’re worried, it isn’t right. That means it isn’t checked out thoroughly enough. In any industrial situation a machine that isn’t checked out is a ‘down’ machine and can’t be used even though it may work perfectly. Your worry about the rotisserie is the same thing. You haven’t completed the ultimate requirement of achieving peace of mind, because you feel these instructions were too complicated and you may not have understood them correctly."

DeWeese asks, "Well, how would you change them so I would get this peace of mind?"

"That would require a lot more study than I’ve just given them now. The whole thing goes very deep. These rotisserie instructions begin and end exclusively with the machine. But the kind of approach I’m thinking about doesn’t cut it off so narrowly. What’s really angering about instructions of this sort is that they imply there’s only one way to put this rotisserie together...their way. And that presumption wipes out all the creativity. Actually there are hundreds of ways to put the rotisserie together and when they make you follow just one way without showing you the overall problem the instructions become hard to follow in such a way as not to make mistakes. You lose feeling for the work. And not only that, it’s very unlikely that they’ve told you the best way."

"But they’re from the factory," John says.

"I’m from the factory too," I say "and I know how instructions like this are put together. You go out on the assembly line with a tape recorder and the foreman sends you to talk to the guy he needs least, the biggest goof-off he’s got, and whatever he tells you...that’s the instructions. The next guy might have told you something completely different and probably better, but he’s too busy." They all look surprised. "I might have known," DeWeese says.

"It’s the format," I say. "No writer can buck it. Technology presumes there’s just one right way to do things and there never is. And when you presume there’s just one right way to do things, of course the instructions begin and end exclusively with the rotisserie. But if you have to choose among an infinite number of ways to put it together then the relation of the machine to you, and the relation of the machine and you to the rest of the world, has to be considered, because the selection from many choices, the art of the work is just as dependent upon your own mind and spirit as it is upon the material of the machine. That’s why you need the peace of mind."

"Actually this idea isn’t so strange," I continue. "Sometime look at a novice workman or a bad workman and compare his expression with that of a craftsman whose work you know is excellent and you’ll see the difference. The craftsman isn’t ever following a single line of instruction. He’s making decisions as he goes along. For that reason he’ll be absorbed and attentive to what he’s doing even though he doesn’t deliberately contrive this. His motions and the machine are in a kind of harmony. He isn’t following any set of written instructions because the nature of the material at hand determines his thoughts and motions, which simultaneously change the nature of the material at hand. The material and his thoughts are changing together in a progression of changes until his mind’s at rest at the same time the material’s right."

"Sounds like art," the instructor says.

"Well, it is art," I say. "This divorce of art from technology is completely unnatural. It’s just that it’s gone on so long you have to be an archeologist to find out where the two separated. Rotisserie assembly is actually a long-lost branch of sculpture, so divorced from its roots by centuries of intellectual wrong turns that just to associate the two sounds ludicrous."

They’re not sure whether I’m kidding or not.

"You mean," DeWeese asks, "that when I was putting this rotisserie together I was actually sculpting it?"

"Sure."

He goes over this in his mind, smiling more and more. "I wish I’d known that," he says. Laughter follows.

Chris says he doesn’t understand what I’m saying. "That’s all right, Chris," Jack Barsness says. "We don’t either." More laughter.

"I think I’ll just stay with ordinary sculpture," the sculptor says.

"I think I’ll just stick to painting," DeWeese says.

"I think I’ll just stick to drumming," John says.

Chris asks, "What are you going to stick to?"

"Mah guns, boy, mah guns," I tell him. "That’s the Code of the West."

They all laugh hard at this, and my speechifying seems forgiven. When you’ve got a Chautauqua in your head, it’s extremely hard not to inflict it on innocent people.

The conversation breaks up into groups and I spend the rest of the party talking to Jack and Wylla about developments in the English department.

After the party is over and the Sutherlands and Chris have gone to bed, DeWeese recalls my lecture, however. He says seriously, "What you said about the rotisserie instructions was interesting."

Gennie adds, also seriously, "It sounded like you had been thinking about it for a long time."

"I’ve been thinking about concepts that underlie it for twenty years," I say.

Beyond the chair in front of me, sparks fly up the chimney, drawn by the wind outside, now stronger than before.

I add, almost to myself, "You look at where you’re going and where you are and it never makes sense, but then you look back at where you’ve been and a pattern seems to emerge. And if you project forward from that pattern, then sometimes you can come up with something.

"All that talk about technology and art is part of a pattern that seems to have emerged from my own life. It represents a transcendence from something I think a lot of others may be trying to transcend."

"What’s that?"

"Well, it isn’t just art and technology. It’s a kind of a noncoalescence between reason and feeling. What’s wrong with technology is that it’s not connected in any real way with matters of the spirit and of the heart. And so it does blind, ugly things quite by accident and gets hated for that. People haven’t paid much attention to this before because the big concern has been with food, clothing and shelter for everyone and technology has provided these.

"But now where these are assured, the ugliness is being noticed more and more and people are asking if we must always suffer spiritually and esthetically in order to satisfy material needs. Lately it’s become almost a national crisis...antipollution drives, antitechnological communes and styles of life, and all that."

Both DeWeese and Gennie have understood all this for so long there’s no need for comment, so I add, "What’s emerging from the pattern of my own life is the for belief that the crisis is being caused by the inadequacy of existing forms of thought to cope with the situation. It can’t be solved by rational means because the rationality itself is the source of the problem. The only ones who’re solving it are solving it at a personal level by abandoning ‘square’ rationality altogether and going by feelings alone. Like John and Sylvia here. And millions of others like them. And that seems like a wrong direction too. So I guess what I’m trying to say is that the solution to the problem isn’t that you abandon rationality but that you expand the nature of rationality so that it’s capable of coming up with a solution."

"I guess I don’t know what you mean," Gennie says.

"Well, it’s quite a bootstrap operation. It’s analogous to the kind of hang-up Sir Isaac Newton had when he wanted to solve problems of instantaneous rates of change. It was unreasonable in his time to think of anything changing within a zero amount of time. Yet it’s almost necessary mathematically to work with other zero quantities, such as points in space and time that no one thought were unreasonable at all, although there was no real difference. So what Newton did was say, in effect, ‘We’re going to presume there’s such a thing as instantaneous change, and see if we can find ways of determining what it is in various applications.’ The result of this presumption is the branch of mathematics known as the calculus, which every engineer uses today. Newton invented a new form of reason. He expanded reason to handle infinitesimal changes and I think what is needed now is a similar expansion of reason to handle technological ugliness. The trouble is that the expansion has to be made at the roots, not at the branches, and that’s what makes it hard to see.

"We’re living in topsy-turvy times, and I think that what causes the topsy-turvy feeling is inadequacy of old forms of thought to deal with new experiences. I’ve heard it said that the only real learning results from hang-ups, where instead of expanding the branches of what you already know, you have to stop and drift laterally for a while until you come across something that allows you to expand the roots of what you already know. Everyone’s familiar with that. I think the same thing occurs with whole civilizations when expansion’s needed at the roots.

"You look back at the last three thousand years and with hindsight you think you see neat patterns and chains of cause and effect that have made things the way they are. But if you go back to original sources, the literature of any particular era, you find that these causes were never apparent at the time they were supposed to be operating. During periods of root expansion things have always looked as confused and topsy-turvy and purposeless as they do now. The whole Renaissance is supposed to have resulted from the topsy-turvy feeling caused by Columbus’ discovery of a new world. It just shook people up. The topsy-turviness of that time is recorded everywhere. There was nothing in the flat-earth views of the Old and New Testaments that predicted it. Yet people couldn’t deny it. The only way they could assimilate it was to abandon the entire medieval outlook and enter into a new expansion of reason.

"Columbus has become such a schoolbook stereotype it’s almost impossible to imagine him as a living human being anymore. But if you really try to hold back your present knowledge about the consequences of his trip and project yourself into his situation, then sometimes you can begin to see that our present moon exploration must be like a tea party compared to what he went through. Moon exploration doesn’t involve real root expansions of thought. We’ve no reason to doubt that existing forms of thought are adequate to handle it. It’s really just a branch extension of what Columbus did. A really new exploration, one that would look to us today the way the world looked to Columbus, would have to be in an entirely new direction."

"Like what?"

"Like into realms beyond reason. I think present-day reason is an analogue of the flat earth of the medieval period. If you go too far beyond it you’re presumed to fall off, into insanity. And people are very much afraid of that. I think this fear of insanity is comparable to the fear people once had of falling off the edge of the world. Or the fear of heretics. There’s a very close analogue there.

"But what’s happening is that each year our old flat earth of conventional reason becomes less and less adequate to handle the experiences we have and this is creating widespread feelings of topsy-turviness. As a result we’re getting more and more people in irrational areas of thought...occultism, mysticism, drug changes and the like...because they feel the inadequacy of classical reason to handle what they know are real experiences."

"I’m not sure what you mean by classical reason."

"Analytic reason, dialectic reason. Reason which at the University is sometimes considered to be the whole of understanding. You’ve never had to understand it really. It’s always been completely bankrupt with regard to abstract art. Nonrepresentative art is one of the root experiences I’m talking about. Some people still condemn it because it doesn’t make ‘sense.’ But what’s really wrong is not the art but the ‘sense,’ the classical reason, which can’t grasp it. People keep looking for branch extensions of reason that will cover art’s more recent occurrences, but the answers aren’t in the branches, they’re at the roots."

A rush of wind comes furiously now, down from the mountaintop. "The ancient Greeks," I say, "who were the inventors of classical reason, knew better than to use it exclusively to foretell the future. They listened to the wind and predicted the future from that. That sounds insane now. But why should the inventors of reason sound insane?"

DeWeese squints. "How could they tell the future from the wind?"

"I don’t know, maybe the same way a painter can tell the future of his painting by staring at the canvas. Our whole system of knowledge stems from their results. We’ve yet to understand the methods that produced these results."

I think for a while, then say, "When I was last here, did I talk much about the Church of Reason?"

"Yes, you talked a lot about that."

"Did I ever talk about an individual named Phædrus?"

"No."

"Who was he?" Gennie asks.

"He was an ancient Greek—a rhetorician—a ‘composition major’ of his time. He was one of those present when reason was being invented."

"You never talked about that, I don’t think."

"That must have come later. The rhetoricians of ancient Greece were the first teachers in the history of the Western world. Plato vilified them in all his works to grind an axe of his own and since what we know about them is almost entirely from Plato they’re unique in that they’ve stood condemned throughout history without ever having their side of the story told. The Church of Reason that I talked about was founded on their graves. It’s supported today by their graves. And when you dig deep into its foundations you come across ghosts."

I look at my watch. It’s after two. "It’s a long story," I say.

"You should write all this down," Gennie says.

I nod in agreement. "I’m thinking about a series of lecture-essays...a sort of Chautauqua. I’ve been trying to work them out in my mind as we rode out here—which is probably why I sound so primed on all this stuff. It’s all so huge and difficult. Like trying to travel through these mountains on foot.

"The trouble is that essays always have to sound like God talking for eternity, and that isn’t the way it ever is. People should see that it’s never anything other than just one person talking from one place in time and space and circumstance. It’s never been anything else, ever, but you can’t get that across in an essay."

"You should do it anyway," Gennie says. "Without trying to get it perfect."

"I suppose," I say.

DeWeese asks, "Does this tie in with what you were doing on ‘Quality’?"

"It’s the direct result of it," I say.

I remember something and look at DeWeese. "Didn’t you advise me to drop it?"

"I said no one had ever succeeded in doing what you were trying to do."

"Do you think it’s possible?"

"I don’t know. Who knows?" His expression is really concerned. "A lot of people are listening better these days. Particularly the kids. They’re really listening—and not just at you...to you—to you. It makes all the difference."

The wind coming down from the snowfields up above sounds for a long time throughout the house. It grows loud and high as if in hope of sweeping the whole house, all of us, away into nothing, leaving the canyon as it once was, but the house stands and the wind dies away again, defeated. Then it comes back, feinting a light blow from the far side, then suddenly a heavy gust from our side.

"I keep listening to the wind," I say. I add, "I think when the Sutherlands have left, Chris and I should do some climbing up to where that wind starts. I think it’s time he got a better look at that land."

"You can start from right here," DeWeese says, "and head back up the canyon. There’s no road for seventy-five miles."

"Then this is where we’ll start," I say.

Upstairs I’m glad to see the bed’s heavy quilt again. It’s become quite cold now and it’ll be needed. I undress quickly and get way down deep under the quilt where it is warm, very warm, and think for a long time about snowfields and winds and Christopher Columbus.

15

For two days John and Sylvia and Chris and I loaf and talk and ride up to an old mining town and back, and then it’s time for John and Sylvia to turn back home. We ride into Bozeman from the canyon now, together for the last time.

Up ahead Sylvia’s turned around for the third time, evidently to see if we’re all right. She’s been very quiet the last two days. A glance from her yesterday seemed apprehensive, almost frightened. She worries too much about Chris and me.

At a bar in Bozeman we have one last round of beer, and I discuss routes back with John. Then we say perfunctory things about how good it’s all been and how we’ll see each other soon, and this is suddenly very sad to have to talk like this...like casual acquaintances.

Out in the street again Sylvia turns to me and Chris, pauses, and then says, "It’ll be all right with you. There’s nothing to worry about."

"Of course," I say.

Again that same frightened glance.

John has the motorcycle started and waits for her. "I believe you," I say.

She turns, gets on and with John watches oncoming traffic for an opportunity to pull out. "I’ll see you," I say.

She looks at us again, expressionless this time. John finds his opportunity and enters into the traffic lane. Then Sylvia waves, as if in a movie. Chris and I wave back. Their motorcycle disappears in the heavy traffic of out-of-state cars, which I watch for a long time.

I look at Chris and he looks at me. He says nothing.

We spend the morning sitting at first on a park bench marked SENIOR CITIZENS ONLY, then get food and at a filling station change the tire and replace the chain adjuster link. The link has to be remachined to fit and so we wait and walk for a while, back away from the main street. We come to a church and sit down on the lawn in front of it. Chris lies back on the grass and covers his eyes with his jacket.

"You tired?" I ask him.

"No."

Between here and the edge of the mountains to the north, heat waves shimmer the air. A transparent-winged bug sets down from the heat on a stalk of grass by Chris’s foot. I watch it flex its wings, feeling lazier every minute. I lie back to go to sleep, but don’t. Instead a restless feeling hits. I get up.

"Let’s walk for a while," I say.

"Where?"

"Toward the school."

"All right."

We walk under shady trees on very neat sidewalks past neat houses. The avenues provide many small surprises of recognition. Heavy recall. He’s walked through these streets many times. Lectures. He prepared his lectures in the peripatetic manner, using these streets as his academy.

The subject he’d been brought here to teach was rhetoric, writing, the second of the three R’s. He was to teach some advanced courses in technical writing and some sections of freshman English.

"Do you remember this street?" I ask Chris.

He looks around and says, "We used to ride in the car to look for you." He points across the street. "I remember that house with the funny roof -- .Whoever saw you first would get a nickel. And then we’d stop and let you in the back of the car and you wouldn’t even talk to us."

"I was thinking hard then."

"That’s what Mom said."

He was thinking hard. The crushing teaching load was bad enough, but what for him was far worse was that he understood in his precise analytic way that the subject he was teaching was undoubtedly the most unprecise, unanalytic, amorphous area in the entire Church of Reason. That’s why he was thinking so hard. To a methodical, laboratory-trained mind, rhetoric is just completely hopeless. It’s like a huge Sargasso Sea of stagnated logic.

What you’re supposed to do in most freshman-rhetoric courses is to read a little essay or short story, discuss how the writer has done certain little things to achieve certain little effects, and then have the students write an imitative little essay or short story to see if they can do the same little things. He tried this over and over again but it never jelled. The students seldom achieved anything, as a result of this calculated mimicry, that was remotely close to the models he’d given them. More often their writing got worse. It seemed as though every rule he honestly tried to discover with them and learn with them was so full of exceptions and contradictions and qualifications and confusions that he wished he’d never come across the rule in the first place.

A student would always ask how the rule would apply in a certain special circumstance. Phædrus would then have the choice of trying to fake through a made-up explanation of how it worked, or follow the selfless route and say what he really thought. And what he really thought was that the rule was pasted on to the writing after the writing was all done. It was post hoc, after the fact, instead of prior to the fact. And he became convinced that all the writers the students were supposed to mimic wrote without rules, putting down whatever sounded right, then going back to see if it still sounded right and changing it if it didn’t. There were some who apparently wrote with calculating premeditation because that’s the way their product looked. But that seemed to him to be a very poor way to look. It had a certain syrup, as Gertrude Stein once said, but it didn’t pour. But how’re you to teach something that isn’t premeditated? It was a seemingly impossible requirement. He just took the text and commented on it in an unpremeditated way and hoped the students would get something from that. It wasn’t satisfactory.

There it is up ahead. Tension hits, the same stomach feeling, as we walk toward it.

"Do you remember that building?"

"That’s where you used to teach—why are we going here?"

"I don’t know. I just wanted to see it."

Not many people seem to be around. There wouldn’t be, of course. Summer session is on now. Huge and strange gables over old dark-brown brick. A beautiful building, really. The only one that really seems to belong here. Old stone stairway up to the doors. Stairs cupped by wear from millions of footsteps.

"Why are we going inside?"

"Shh. Just don’t say anything now."

I open the great heavy outside door and enter. Inside are more stairs, worn and wooden. They creak underfoot and smell of a hundred years of sweeping and waxing. Halfway up I stop and listen. There’s no sound at all.

Chris whispers, "Why are we here?"

I just shake my head. I hear a car go by outside.

Chris whispers, "I don’t like it here. It’s scary in here."

"Go outside then," I say.

"You come too."

"Later."

"No, now." He looks at me and sees I’m staying. His look is so frightened I’m about to change my mind, but then suddenly his expression breaks and he turns and runs down the stairs and out the door before I can follow him.

The big heavy door closes down below, and I’m all alone here now. I listen for some sound -- .Of whom? -- Of him? -- I listen for a long time -- .

The floorboards have an eerie creek as I move down the corridor and they are accompanied by an eerie thought that it is him. In this place he is the reality and I am the ghost. On one of the classroom doorknobs I see his hand rest for a moment, then slowly turn the knob, then push the door open.

The room inside is waiting, exactly as remembered, as if he were here now. He is here now. He’s aware of everything I see. Everything jumps forth and vibrates with recall.

The long dark-green chalkboards on either side are flaked and in need of repair, just as they were. The chalk, never any chalk except little stubs in the trough, is still here. Beyond the blackboard are the windows and through them are the mountains he watched, meditatively, on days when the students were writing. He would sit by the radiator with a stub of chalk in one hand and stare out the window at the mountains, interrupted, occasionally, by a student who asked, "Do we have to do -- ?" And he would turn and answer whatever thing it was and there was a oneness he had never known before. This was a place where he was received...as himself. Not as what he could be or should be but as himself. A place all receptive...listening. He gave everything to it. This wasn’t one room, this was a thousand rooms, changing each day with the storms and snows and patterns of clouds on the mountains, with each class, and even with each student. No two hours were ever alike, and it was always a mystery to him what the next one would bring -- .

My sense of time has been lost when I hear a creaking of steps in the hall. It becomes louder, then stops at the entrance to this classroom. The knob turns. The door opens. A woman looks in.

She has an aggressive face, as if she intended to catch someone here. She appears to be in her late twenties, is not very pretty. "I thought I saw someone," she says. "I thought—" She looks puzzled.

She comes inside the room and walks toward me. She looks at me more closely. Now the aggressive look vanishes, slowly changing to wonder. She looks astonished.

"Oh, my God," she says. "Is it you?"

I don’t recognize her at all. Nothing.

She calls my name and I nod, Yes, it’s me.

"You’ve come back."

I shake my head. "Just for these few minutes."

She continues to look until it becomes embarrassing. Now she becomes aware of this herself, and asks, "May I sit down for a moment?" The timid way she asks this indicates she may have been a student of his.

She sits down on one of the front-row chairs. Her hand, which bears no wedding ring, is trembling. I really am a ghost.

Now she becomes embarrassed herself. "How long are you staying? -- No, I asked you that—"

I fill in, "I’m staying with Bob DeWeese for a few days and then heading West. I had some time to spend in town and thought I’d see how the college looked."

"Oh," she says, "I’m glad you did -- . It’s changed—we’ve all changed—so much since you left -- ."

There’s another embarrassing pause.

"We heard you were in the hospital -- ."

"Yes," I say.

There is more embarrassed silence. That she doesn’t pursue it means she probably knows why. She hesitates some more, searches for something to say. This is getting hard to bear.

"Where are you teaching?" she finally asks.

"I’m not teaching anymore," I say. "I’ve stopped."

She looks incredulous. "You’ve stopped?" She frowns and looks at me again, as if to verify that she is really talking to the right person. "You can’t do that."

"Yes, you can."

She shakes her head in disbelief. "Not you!"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"That’s all over for me now. I’m doing other things."

I keep wondering who she is, and her expression looks equally baffled. "But that’s just—" The sentence drops off. She tries again. "You’re just being completely—" but this sentence fails too.

The next word is "crazy." But she has caught herself both times. She realizes something, bites her lip and looks mortified I’d say something if I could, but there’s no place to start. I’m about to tell her I don’t know her but she stands up and says, "I must go now." I think she sees I don’t know her. She goes to the door, says good-bye quickly and perfunctorily, and as it closes her footsteps go quickly, almost at a run, down the hall.

The outer door of the building closes and the classroom is as silent as before, except for a kind of psychic eddy current she has left behind. The room is completely modified by it. Now it contains only the backwash of her presence, and what it was I came here to see has vanished.

Good, I think, standing up again, I’m glad to have visited this room but I don’t think I’ll ever want to see it again. I’d rather fix motorcycles, and one’s waiting.

On the way out I open one more door, compulsively. There on the wall I see something which sends a spine-tingling feeling along my neck.

It’s a painting. I’ve had no recollection of it but now I know he bought it and put it there. And suddenly I know it’s not a painting, it’s a print of a painting he ordered from New York and which DeWeese had frowned at because it was a print and prints are of art and not art themselves, a distinction he didn’t recognize at the time. But the print, Feininger’s "Church of the Minorites," had an appeal to him that was irrelevant to the art in that its subject, a kind of Gothic cathedral, created from semiabstract lines and planes and colors and shades, seemed to reflect his mind’s vision of the Church of Reason and that was why he’d put it here. All this comes back now. This was his office. A find. This is the room I am looking for!

I step inside and an avalanche of memory, loosened by the jolt of the print, begins to come down. The light on the print comes from a miserable cramped window in the adjacent wall through which he looked out onto and across the valley onto the Madison Range and watched the storms come in and while watching this valley before me now through this window here, now—started the whole thing, the whole madness, right here! This is the exact spot!

And that door leads to Sarah’s office. Sarah! Now it comes down! She came trotting by with her watering pot between those two doors, going from the corridor to her office, and she said, "I hope you are teaching Quality to your students." This in a la-de-da, singsong voice of a lady in her final year before retirement about to water her plants. That was the moment it all started. That was the seed crystal.

Seed crystal. A powerful fragment of memory comes back now. The laboratory. Organic chemistry. He was working with an extremely supersaturated solution when something similar had happened.

A supersaturated solution is one in which the saturation point, at which no more material will dissolve, has been exceeded. This can occur because the saturation point becomes higher as the temperature of the solution is increased. When you dissolve the material at a high temperature and then cool the solution, the material sometimes doesn’t crystallize out because the molecules don’t know how. They require something to get them started, a seed crystal, or a grain of dust or even a sudden scratch or tap on the surrounding glass.

He walked to the water tap to cool the solution but never got there. Before his eyes, as he walked, he saw a star of crystalline material in the solution appear and then grow suddenly and radiantly until it filled the entire vessel. He saw it grow. Where before was only clear liquid there was now a mass so solid he could turn the vessel upside down and nothing would come out.

The one sentence "I hope you are teaching Quality to your students" was said to him, and within a matter of a few months, growing so fast you could almost see it grow, came an enormous, intricate, highly structured mass of thought, formed as if by magic.

I don’t know what he replied to her when she said this. Probably nothing. She would be back and forth behind his chair many times each day to get to and from her office. Sometimes she stopped with a word or two of apology about the interruption, sometimes with a fragment of news, and he was accustomed to this as a part of office life. I know that she came by a second time and asked, "Are you really teaching Quality this quarter?" and he nodded and looked back from his chair for a second and said, "Definitely!" and she trotted on. He was working on lecture notes at the time and was in a state of complete depression about them.

What was depressing was that the text was one of the most rational texts available on the subject of rhetoric and it still didn’t seem right. Moreover he had access to the authors, who were members of the department. He had asked and listened and talked and agreed with their answers in a rational way but somehow still wasn’t satisfied with them.

The text started with the premise that if rhetoric is to be taught at all at a University level it should be taught as a branch of reason, not as a mystic art. Therefore it emphasized a mastery of the rational foundations of communication in order to understand rhetoric. Elementary logic was introduced, elementary stimulus-response theory was brought in, and from these a progression was made to an understanding of how to develop an essay.

For the first year of teaching Phædrus had been fairly content with this framework. He felt there was something wrong with it, but that the wrongness was not in this application of reason to rhetoric. The wrongness was in the old ghost of his dreams...rationality itself. He recognized it as the same wrongness that had been troubling him for years, and for which he had no solutions. He just felt that no writer ever learned to write by this squarish, by-the-numbers, objective, methodical approach. Yet that was all rationality offered and there was nothing to do about it without being irrational And if there was one thing he had a clear mandate to do in this Church of Reason it was to be rational, so he had to let it go at that.

A few days later when Sarah trotted by again she stopped and said, "I’m so happy you’re teaching Quality this quarter. Hardly anybody is these days."

"Well, I am," he said. "I’m definitely making a point of it."

"Good!" she said, and trotted on.

He returned to his notes but it wasn’t long before thought about them was interrupted by a recall of her strange remark. What the hell was she talking about? Quality? Of course he was teaching Quality. Who wasn’t? He continued with the notes.

Another thing that depressed him was prescriptive rhetoric, which supposedly had been done away with but was still around. This was the old slap-on-the-fingers- if-your-modifiers-were-caught-dangling stuff. Correct spelling, correct punctuation, correct grammar. Hundreds of rules for itsy-bitsy people. No one could remember all that stuff and concentrate on what he was trying to write about. It was all table manners, not derived from any sense of kindness or decency or humanity, but originally from an egotistic desire to look like gentlemen and ladies. Gentlemen and ladies had good table manners and spoke and wrote grammatically. It was what identified one with the upper classes. In Montana, however, it didn’t have this effect at all. It identified one, instead, as a stuck-up Eastern ass. There was a minimum prescriptive-rhetoric requirement in the department, but like the other teachers he scrupulously avoided any defense of prescriptive rhetoric other than as a "requirement of the college."

Soon the thought interrupted again. Quality? There was something irritating, even angering about that question. He thought about it, and then thought some more, and then looked out the window, and then thought about it some more. Quality?

Four hours later he still sat there with his feet on the window ledge and stared out into what had become a dark sky. The phone rang, and it was his wife calling to find out what had happened. He told her he would be home soon, but then forgot about this and everything else. It wasn’t until three o’clock in the morning that he wearily confessed to himself that he didn’t have a clue as to what Quality was, picked up his briefcase and headed home.

Most people would have forgotten about Quality at this point, or just left it hanging suspended because they were getting nowhere and had other things to do. But he was so despondent about his own inability to teach what he believed, he really didn’t give a damn about whatever else it was he was supposed to do, and when he woke up the next morning there was Quality staring him in the face. Three hours of sleep and he was so tired he knew he wouldn’t be up to giving a lecture that day, and besides, his notes had never been completed, so he wrote on the blackboard: "Write a 350-word essay answering the question, What is quality in thought and statement?" Then he sat by the radiator while they wrote and thought about quality himself.

At the end of the hour no one seemed to have finished, so he allowed the students to take their papers home. This class didn’t meet again for two days, and that gave him some time to think about the question some more too. During that interim he saw some of the students walking between classes, nodded to them and got looks of anger and fear in return. He guessed they were having the same trouble he was.

Quality—you know what it is, yet you don’t know what it is. But that’s self-contradictory. But some things are better than others, that is, they have more quality. But when you try to say what the quality is, apart from the things that have it, it all goes poof! There’s nothing to talk about. But if you can’t say what Quality is, how do you know what it is, or how do you know that it even exists? If no one knows what it is, then for all practical purposes it doesn’t exist at all. But for all practical purposes it really does exist. What else are the grades based on? Why else would people pay fortunes for some things and throw others in the trash pile? Obviously some things are better than others—but what’s the "betterness"? -- So round and round you go, spinning mental wheels and nowhere finding anyplace to get traction. What the hell is Quality? What is it?

Part III

16

Chris and I have had a good night’s sleep and this morning have packed the backpacks carefully, and now have been going up the mountainside for about an hour. The forest here at the bottom of the canyon is mostly pine, with a few aspen and broad-leafed shrubs. Steep canyon walls rise way above us on both sides. Occasionally the trail opens into a patch of sunlight and grass that edges the canyon stream, but soon it reenters the deep shade of the pines. The earth of the trail is covered with a soft springy duff of pine needles. It is very quiet here.

Mountains like these and travelers in the mountains and events that happen to them here are found not only in Zen literature but in the tales of every major religion. The allegory of a physical mountain for the spiritual one that stands between each soul and its goal is an easy and natural one to make. Like those in the valley behind us, most people stand in sight of the spiritual mountains all their lives and never enter them, being content to listen to others who have been there and thus avoid the hardships. Some travel into the mountains accompanied by experienced guides who know the best and least dangerous routes by which they arrive at their destination. Still others, inexperienced and untrusting, attempt to make their own routes. Few of these are successful, but occasionally some, by sheer will and luck and grace, do make it. Once there they become more aware than any of the others that there’s no single or fixed number of routes. There are as many routes as there are individual souls.

I want to talk now about Phædrus’ exploration into the meaning of the term Quality, an exploration which he saw as a route through the mountains of the spirit. As best I can puzzle it out, there were two distinct phases.

In the first phase he made no attempt at a rigid, systematic definition of what he was talking about. This was a happy, fulfilling and creative phase. It lasted most of the time he taught at the school back in the valley behind us.

The second phase emerged as a result of normal intellectual criticism of his lack of definition of what he was talking about. In this phase he made systematic, rigid statements about what Quality is, and worked out an enormous hierarchic structure of thought to support them. He literally had to move heaven and earth to arrive at this systematic understanding and when he was done felt he’d achieved an explanation of existence and our consciousness of it better than any that had existed before.

If it was truly a new route over the mountain it’s certainly a needed one. For more than three centuries now the old routes common in this hemisphere have been undercut and almost washed out by the natural erosion and change of the shape of the mountain wrought by scientific truth. The early climbers established paths that were on firm ground with an accessibility that appealed to all, but today the Western routes are all but closed because of dogmatic inflexibility in the face of change. To doubt the literal meaning of the words of Jesus or Moses incurs hostility from most people, but it’s just a fact that if Jesus or Moses were to appear today, unidentified, with the same message he spoke many years ago, his mental stability would be challenged. This isn’t because what Jesus or Moses said was untrue or because modern society is in error but simply because the route they chose to reveal to others has lost relevance and comprehensibility. "Heaven above" fades from meaning when space-age consciousness asks, Where is "above"? But the fact that the old routes have tended, because of language rigidity, to lose their everyday meaning and become almost closed doesn’t mean that the mountain is no longer there. It’s there and will be there as long as consciousness exists.

Phædrus’ second metaphysical phase was a total disaster. Before the electrodes were attached to his head he’d lost everything tangible: money, property, children; even his rights as a citizen had been taken away from him by order of the court. All he had left was his one crazy lone dream of Quality, a map of a route across the mountain, for which he had sacrificed everything. Then, after the electrodes were attached, he lost that.

I will never know all that was in his head at that time, nor will anyone else. What’s left now is just fragments: debris, scattered notes, which can be pieced together but which leave huge areas unexplained.

When I first discovered this debris I felt like some agricultural peasant near the outskirts of, say, Athens, who occasionally and without much surprise plows up stones that have strange designs on them. I knew that these were part of some larger overall design that had existed in the past, but it was far beyond my comprehension. At first I deliberately avoided them, paid no attention to them because I knew these stones had caused some kind of trouble I should avoid. But I could see even then that they were a part of a huge structure of thought and I was curious about it in a secret sort of way.

Later, when I developed more confidence in my immunity to his affliction, I became interested in this debris in a more positive way and began to jot down the fragments amorphically, that is, without regard to form, in the order in which they occurred to me. Many of these amorphic statements have been supplied by friends. There are thousands of them now, and although only a small portion of them can fit into this Chautauqua, this Chautauqua is clearly based on them.

It is probably a long way from what he thought. When trying to recreate a whole pattern by deduction from fragments I am bound to commit errors and put down inconsistencies, for which I must ask some indulgence. In many cases the fragments are ambiguous; a number of different conclusions could be drawn. If something is wrong there’s a good chance that the error isn’t in what he thought but in my reconstruction of it, and a better reconstruction can later be found.

A whirr sounds and a partridge disappears through the trees.

"Did you see it?" says Chris.

"Yes," I say back.

"What was it?"

"A partridge."

"How do you know?"

"They rock back and forth like that when they fly," I say. I’m not sure of this but it sounds right. "They stay close to the ground too."

"Oh," says Chris and we continue hiking. The rays of the sun create a cathedral effect through the pines.

Today now I want to take up the first phase of his journey into Quality, the nonmetaphysical phase, and this will be pleasant. It’s nice to start journeys pleasantly, even when you know they won’t end that way. Using his class notes as reference material I want to reconstruct the way in which Quality became a working concept for him in the teaching of rhetoric. His second phase, the metaphysical one, was tenuous and speculative, but this first phase, in which he simply taught rhetoric, was by all accounts solid and pragmatic and probably deserves to be judged on its own merits, independently of the second phase.

He’d been innovating extensively. He’d been having trouble with students who had nothing to say. At first he thought it was laziness but later it became apparent that it wasn’t. They just couldn’t think of anything to say.

One of them, a girl with strong-lensed glasses, wanted to write a five-hundred-word essay about the United States. He was used to the sinking feeling that comes from statements like this, and suggested without disparagement that she narrow it down to just Bozeman.

When the paper came due she didn’t have it and was quite upset. She had tried and tried but she just couldn’t think of anything to say.

He had already discussed her with her previous instructors and they’d confirmed his impressions of her. She was very serious, disciplined and hardworking, but extremely dull. Not a spark of creativity in her anywhere. Her eyes, behind the thick-lensed glasses, were the eyes of a drudge. She wasn’t bluffing him, she really couldn’t think of anything to say, and was upset by her inability to do as she was told.

It just stumped him. Now he couldn’t think of anything to say. A silence occurred, and then a peculiar answer: "Narrow it down to the main street of Bozeman." It was a stroke of insight.

She nodded dutifully and went out. But just before her next class she came back in real distress, tears this time, distress that had obviously been there for a long time. She still couldn’t think of anything to say, and couldn’t understand why, if she couldn’t think of anything about all of Bozeman, she should be able to think of something about just one street.

He was furious. "You’re not looking!" he said. A memory came back of his own dismissal from the University for having too much to say. For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses. The more you look the more you see. She really wasn’t looking and yet somehow didn’t understand this.

He told her angrily, "Narrow it down to the front of one building on the main street of Bozeman. The Opera House. Start with the upper left-hand brick."

Her eyes, behind the thick-lensed glasses, opened wide. She came in the next class with a puzzled look and handed him a five-thousand-word essay on the front of the Opera House on the main street of Bozeman, Montana. "I sat in the hamburger stand across the street," she said, "and started writing about the first brick, and the second brick, and then by the third brick it all started to come and I couldn’t stop. They thought I was crazy, and they kept kidding me, but here it all is. I don’t understand it."

Neither did he, but on long walks through the streets of town he thought about it and concluded she was evidently stopped with the same kind of blockage that had paralyzed him on his first day of teaching. She was blocked because she was trying to repeat, in her writing, things she had already heard, just as on the first day he had tried to repeat things he had already decided to say. She couldn’t think of anything to write about Bozeman because she couldn’t recall anything she had heard worth repeating. She was strangely unaware that she could look and see freshly for herself, as she wrote, without primary regard for what had been said before. The narrowing down to one brick destroyed the blockage because it was so obvious she had to do some original and direct seeing.

He experimented further. In one class he had everyone write all hour about the back of his thumb. Everyone gave him funny looks at the beginning of the hour, but everyone did it, and there wasn’t a single complaint about "nothing to say."

In another class he changed the subject from the thumb to a coin, and got a full hour’s writing from every student. In other classes it was the same. Some asked, "Do you have to write about both sides?" Once they got into the idea of seeing directly for themselves they also saw there was no limit to the amount they could say. It was a confidence-building assignment too, because what they wrote, even though seemingly trivial, was nevertheless their own thing, not a mimicking of someone else’s. Classes where he used that coin exercise were always less balky and more interested.

As a result of his experiments he concluded that imitation was a real evil that had to be broken before real rhetoric teaching could begin. This imitation seemed to be an external compulsion. Little children didn’t have it. It seemed to come later on, possibly as a result of school itself.

That sounded right, and the more he thought about it the more right it sounded. Schools teach you to imitate. If you don’t imitate what the teacher wants you get a bad grade. Here, in college, it was more sophisticated, of course; you were supposed to imitate the teacher in such a way as to convince the teacher you were not imitating, but taking the essence of the instruction and going ahead with it on your own. That got you A’s. Originality on the other hand could get you anything...from A to F. The whole grading system cautioned against it.

He discussed this with a professor of psychology who lived next door to him, an extremely imaginative teacher, who said, "Right. Eliminate the whole degree-and-grading system and then you’ll get real education."

Phædrus thought about this, and when weeks later a very bright student couldn’t think of a subject for a term paper, it was still on his mind, so he gave it to her as a topic. She didn’t like the topic at first, but agreed to take it anyway.

Within a week she was talking about it to everyone, and within two weeks had worked up a superb paper. The class she delivered it to didn’t have the advantage of two weeks to think about the subject, however, and was quite hostile to the whole idea of eliminating grades and degrees. This didn’t slow her down at all. Her tone took on an old-time religious fervor. She begged the other students to listen, to understand this was really right. "I’m not saying this for him," she said and glanced at Phædrus. "It’s for you."

Her pleading tone, her religious fervor, greatly impressed him, along with the fact that her college entrance examinations had placed her in the upper one percent of the class. During the next quarter, when teaching "persuasive writing," he chose this topic as a "demonstrator," a piece of persuasive writing he worked up by himself, day by day, in front of and with the help of the class.

He used the demonstrator to avoid talking in terms of principles of composition, all of which he had deep doubts about. He felt that by exposing classes to his own sentences as he made them, with all the misgivings and hang-ups and erasures, he would give a more honest picture of what writing was like than by spending class time picking nits in completed student work or holding up the completed work of masters for emulation. This time he developed the argument that the whole grading system and degree should be eliminated, and to make it something that truly involved the students in what they were hearing, he withheld all grades during the quarter.

Just up above the top of the ridge the snow can be seen now. On foot it’s many days away though. The rocks below it are too steep for a direct hiking climb, particularly with the heavy loads we are carrying, and Chris is way too young for any kind of ropes-and- pitons stuff. We must cross over the forested ridge we are now approaching, enter another canyon, follow it to its end and then come back at an upward angle along to the ridge. Three days hard to the snow. Four days easy. If we don’t show up in nine, DeWeese will start looking for us.

We stop for a rest, sit down and brace against a tree so that we don’t topple over backward from the packs. After a while I reach around over my shoulder, take the machete from the top of my pack and hand it to Chris.

"See those two aspens over there? The straight ones? At the edge?" I point to them. "Cut those down about a foot from the ground."

"Why?"

"We’ll need them later for hiking sticks and tent poles."

Chris takes the machete, starts to rise but then settles back again. "You cut them," he says.

So I take the machete and go over and cut the poles. They both cut neatly in one swing, except for the final strip of bark, which I sever with the back hook of the machete. Up in the rocks you need the poles for balancing and the pine up above is no good for poles, and this is about the last of the aspen here. It bothers me a little though that Chris is turning down work. Not a good sign in the mountains.

A short rest and then on we go. It’ll take a while to get used to this load. There’s a negative reaction to all the weight. As we go on though, it’ll become more natural -- .

Phædrus’ argument for the abolition of the degree-and- grading system produced a nonplussed or negative reaction in all but a few students at first, since it seemed, on first judgment, to destroy the whole University system. One student laid it wide open when she said with complete candor, "Of course you can’t eliminate the degree and grading system. After all, that’s what we’re here for."

She spoke the complete truth. The idea that the majority of students attend a university for an education independent of the degree and grades is a little hypocrisy everyone is happier not to expose. Occasionally some students do arrive for an education but rote and the mechanical nature of the institution soon converts them to a less idealistic attitude.

The demonstrator was an argument that elimination of grades and degrees would destroy this hypocrisy. Rather than deal with generalities it dealt with the specific career of an imaginary student who more or less typified what was found in the classroom, a student completely conditioned to work for a grade rather than for the knowledge the grade was supposed to represent.

Such a student, the demonstrator hypothesized, would go to his first class, get his first assignment and probably do it out of habit. He might go to his second and third as well. But eventually the novelty of the course would wear off and, because his academic life was not his only life, the pressure of other obligations or desires would create circumstances where he just would not be able to get an assignment in.

Since there was no degree or grading system he would incur no penalty for this. Subsequent lectures which presumed he’d completed the assignment might be a little more difficult to understand, however, and this difficulty, in turn, might weaken his interest to a point where the next assignment, which he would find quite hard, would also be dropped. Again no penalty.

In time his weaker and weaker understanding of what the lectures were about would make it more and more difficult for him to pay attention in class. Eventually he would see he wasn’t learning much; and facing the continual pressure of outside obligations, he would stop studying, feel guilty about this and stop attending class. Again, no penalty would be attached.

But what had happened? The student, with no hard feelings on anybody’s part, would have flunked himself out. Good! This is what should have happened. He wasn’t there for a real education in the first place and had no real business there at all. A large amount of money and effort had been saved and there would be no stigma of failure and ruin to haunt him the rest of his life. No bridges had been burned.

The student’s biggest problem was a slave mentality which had been built into him by years of carrot-and- whip grading, a mule mentality which said, "If you don’t whip me, I won’t work." He didn’t get whipped. He didn’t work. And the cart of civilization, which he supposedly was being trained to pull, was just going to have to creak along a little slower without him.

This is a tragedy, however, only if you presume that the cart of civilization, "the system," is pulled by mules. This is a common, vocational, "location" point of view, but it’s not the Church attitude.

The Church attitude is that civilization, or "the system" or "society" or whatever you want to call it, is best served not by mules but by free men. The purpose of abolishing grades and degrees is not to punish mules or to get rid of them but to provide an environment in which that mule can turn into a free man.

The hypothetical student, still a mule, would drift around for a while. He would get another kind of education quite as valuable as the one he’d abandoned, in what used to be called the "school of hard knocks." Instead of wasting money and time as a high-status mule, he would now have to get a job as a low-status mule, maybe as a mechanic. Actually his real status would go up. He would be making a contribution for a change. Maybe that’s what he would do for the rest of his life. Maybe he’d found his level. But don’t count on it.

In time...six months; five years, perhaps...a change could easily begin to take place. He would become less and less satisfied with a kind of dumb, day-to-day shopwork. His creative intelligence, stifled by too much theory and too many grades in college, would now become reawakened by the boredom of the shop. Thousands of hours of frustrating mechanical problems would have made him more interested in machine design. He would like to design machinery himself. He’d think he could do a better job. He would try modifying a few engines, meet with success, look for more success, but feel blocked because he didn’t have the theoretical information. He would discover that when before he felt stupid because of his lack of interest in theoretical information, he’d now find a brand of theoretical information which he’d have a lot of respect for, namely, mechanical engineering.

So he would come back to our degreeless and gradeless school, but with a difference. He’d no longer be a grade-motivated person. He’d be a knowledge-motivated person. He would need no external pushing to learn. His push would come from inside. He’d be a free man. He wouldn’t need a lot of discipline to shape him up. In fact, if the instructors assigned him were slacking on the job he would be likely to shape them up by asking rude questions. He’d be there to learn something, would be paying to learn something and they’d better come up with it.

Motivation of this sort, once it catches hold, is a ferocious force, and in the gradeless, degreeless institution where our student would find himself, he wouldn’t stop with rote engineering information. Physics and mathematics were going to come within his sphere of interest because he’d see he needed them. Metallurgy and electrical engineering would come up for attention. And, in the process of intellectual maturing that these abstract studies gave him, he would he likely to branch out into other theoretical areas that weren’t directly related to machines but had become a part of a newer larger goal. This larger goal wouldn’t be the imitation of education in Universities today, glossed over and concealed by grades and degrees that give the appearance of something happening when, in fact, almost nothing is going on. It would be the real thing.

Such was Phædrus’ demonstrator, his unpopular argument, and he worked on it all quarter long, building it up and modifying it, arguing for it, defending it. All quarter long papers would go back to the students with comments but no grades, although the grades were entered in a book.

As I said before, at first almost everyone was sort of nonplussed. The majority probably figured they were stuck with some idealist who thought removal of grades would make them happier and thus work harder, when it was obvious that without grades everyone would just loaf. Many of the students with A records in previous quarters were contemptuous and angry at first, but because of their acquired self-discipline went ahead and did the work anyway. The B students and high-C students missed some of the early assignments or turned in sloppy work. Many of the low-C and D students didn’t even show up for class. At this time another teacher asked him what he was going to do about this lack of response.

"Outwait them," he said.

His lack of harshness puzzled the students at first, then made them suspicious. Some began to ask sarcastic questions. These received soft answers and the lectures and speeches proceeded as usual, except with no grades.

Then a hoped-for phenomenon began. During the third or fourth week some of the A students began to get nervous and started to turn in superb work and hang around after class with questions that fished for some indication as to how they were doing. The B and high-C students began to notice this and work a little and bring up the quality of their papers to a more usual level. The low C, D and future F’s began to show up for class just to see what was going on.

After midquarter an even more hoped-for phenomenon took place. The A-rated students lost their nervousness and became active participants in everything that went on with a friendliness that was uncommon in a grade-getting class. At this point the B and C students were in a panic, and turned in stuff that looked as though they’d spent hours of painstaking work on it. The D’s and F’s turned in satisfactory assignments.

In the final weeks of the quarter, a time when normally everyone knows what his grade will be and just sits back half asleep, Phædrus was getting a kind of class participation that made other teachers take notice. The B’s and C’s had joined the A’s in friendly free-for-all discussion that made the class seem like a successful party. Only the D’s and F’s sat frozen in their chairs, in a complete internal panic.

The phenomenon of relaxation and friendliness was explained later by a couple of students who told him, "A lot of us got together outside of class to try to figure out how to beat this system. Everyone decided the best way was just to figure you were going to fail and then go ahead and do what you could anyway. Then you start to relax. Otherwise you go out of your mind!"

The students added that once you got used to it it wasn’t so bad, you were more interested in the subject matter, but repeated that it wasn’t easy to get used to.

At the end of the quarter the students were asked to write an essay evaluating the system. None of them knew at the time of writing what his or her grade would be. Fifty-four percent opposed it. Thirty-seven percent favored it. Nine percent were neutral.

On the basis of one man, one vote, the system was very unpopular. The majority of students definitely wanted their grades as they went along. But when Phædrus broke down the returns according to the grades that were in his book...and the grades were not out of line with grades predicted by previous classes and entrance evaluations...another story was told. The A students were 2 to 1 in favor of the system. The B and C students were evenly divided. And the D’s and F’s were unanimously opposed!

This surprising result supported a hunch he had had for a long time: that the brighter, more serious students were the least desirous of grades, possibly because they were more interested in the subject matter of the course, whereas the dull or lazy students were the most desirous of grades, possibly because grades told them if they were getting by.

As DeWeese said, from here straight south you can go seventy-five miles through nothing but forests and snow without ever encountering a road, although there are roads to the east and the west. I’ve arranged it so that if things work out badly at the end of the second day we’ll be near a road that can get us back fast. Chris doesn’t know about this, and it would hurt his YMCA-camp sense of adventure to tell him, but after enough trips into the high country, the YMCA desire for adventure diminishes and the more substantial benefits of cutting down risks appear. This country can be dangerous. You take one bad step in a million, sprain an ankle, and then you find out how far from civilization you really are.

This is apparently a seldom-entered canyon this far up. After another hour of hiking we see that the trail is about gone.

Phædrus thought withholding grades was good, according to his notes, but he didn’t give it scientific value. In a true experiment you keep constant every cause you can think of except one, and then see what the effects are of varying that one cause. In the classroom you can never do this. Student knowledge, student attitude, teacher attitude, all change from all kinds of causes which are uncontrollable and mostly unknowable. Also, the observer in this case is himself one of the causes and can never judge his effects without altering his effects. So he didn’t attempt to draw any hard conclusions from all this, he just went ahead and did what he liked.

The movement from this to his enquiry into Quality took place because of a sinister aspect of grading that the withholding of grades exposed. Grades really cover up failure to teach. A bad instructor can go through an entire quarter leaving absolutely nothing memorable in the minds of his class, curve out the scores on an irrelevant test, and leave the impression that some have learned and some have not. But if the grades are removed the class is forced to wonder each day what it’s really learning. The questions, What’s being taught? What’s the goal? How do the lectures and assignments accomplish the goal? become ominous. The removal of grades exposes a huge and frightening vacuum.

What was Phædrus trying to do, anyway? This question became more and more imperative as he went on. The answer that had seemed right when he started now made less and less sense. He had wanted his students to become creative by deciding for themselves what was good writing instead of asking him all the time. The real purpose of withholding the grades was to force them to look within themselves, the only place they would ever get a really right answer.

But now this made no sense. If they already knew what was good and bad, there was no reason for them to take the course in the first place. The fact that they were there as students presumed they did not know what was good or bad. That was his job as instructor...to tell them what was good or bad. The whole idea of individual creativity and expression in the classroom was really basically opposed to the whole idea of the University.

For many of the students, this withholding created a Kafkaesque situation in which they saw they were to be punished for failure to do something but no one would tell them what they were supposed to do. They looked within themselves and saw nothing and looked at Phædrus and saw nothing and just sat there helpless, not knowing what to do. The vacuum was deadly. One girl suffered a nervous breakdown. You cannot withhold grades and sit there and create a goalless vacuum. You have to provide some goal for a class to work toward that will fill that vacuum. This he wasn’t doing.

He couldn’t. He could think of no possible way he could tell them what they should work toward without falling back into the trap of authoritarian, didactic teaching. But how can you put on the blackboard the mysterious internal goal of each creative person?

The next quarter he dropped the whole idea and went back to regular grading, discouraged, confused, feeling he was right but somehow it had come out all wrong. When spontaneity and individuality and really good original stuff occurred in a classroom it was in spite of the instruction, not because of it. This seemed to make sense. He was ready to resign. Teaching dull conformity to hateful students wasn’t what he wanted to do.

He’d heard that Reed College in Oregon withheld grades until graduation, and during the summer vacation he went there but was told the faculty was divided on the value of withholding grades and that no one was tremendously happy about the system. During the rest of the summer his mood became depressed and lazy. He and his wife camped a lot in those mountains. She asked why he was so silent all the time but he couldn’t say why. He was just stopped. Waiting. For that missing seed crystal of thought that would suddenly solidify everything.

17

It’s looking bad for Chris. For a while he was way ahead of me and now he sits under a tree and rests. He doesn’t look at me, and that’s how I know it’s bad.

I sit down next to him and his expression is distant. His face is flushed and I can see he’s exhausted. We sit and listen to the wind through the pines.

I know eventually he’ll get up and keep going but he doesn’t know this, and is afraid to face the possibility that his fear creates: that he may not be able to climb the mountain at all. I remember something Phædrus had written about these mountains and tell it to Chris now.

"Years ago," I tell him, "your mother and I were at the timberline not so far from here and we camped near a lake with a marsh on one side."

He doesn’t look up but he’s listening.

"At about dawn we heard falling rocks and we thought it must be an animal, except that animals don’t usually clatter around. Then I heard a squishing sound in the marsh and we were really wide-awake. I got out of the sleeping bag slowly and got our revolver from my jacket and crouched by a tree."

Now Chris’s attention is distracted from his own problems.

"There was another squish," I say. "I thought it could be horses with dudes packing in, but not at this hour. Another squish! And a loud galoomph! That’s no horse! And a Gallomph! and a GALOOMPH! And there, in the dim grey light of dawn coming straight for me through the muck of the marsh, was the biggest bull moose I ever saw. Horns as wide as a man is tall. Next to the grizzly the most dangerous animal in the mountains. Some say the worst."

Chris’s eyes are bright again.

"GALOOMPH! I cocked the hammer on the revolver, thinking a thirty-eight Special wasn’t very much for a moose. GALOOMPH! He didn’t SEE me! GALOOMPH! I couldn’t get out of his way. Your mother was in the sleeping bag right in his path. GALOOMPH! What a GIANT! GALOOMPH! He’s ten yards away! GALOOMPH! I stand up and take aim. GALOOMPH! -- GALOOMPH! -- GALOOMPH! -- He stops, THREE YARDS AWAY, and sees me -- . The gunsights lie right between his eyes -- . We’re motionless."

I reach around into my pack and get out some cheese.

"Then what happened?" Chris asks.

"Wait until I cut off some of this cheese."

I remove my hunting knife and hold the cheese wrapper so that my fingers don’t get on it. I slice out a quarter-inch hunk and hold it out for him.

He takes it. "Then what happened?"

I watch until he takes his first bite. "That bull moose looked at me for what must have been five seconds. Then he looked down at your mother. Then he looked at me again, and at the revolver which was practically lying on top of his big round nose. And then he smiled and slowly walked away."

"Oh," says Chris. He looks disappointed.

"Normally when they’re confronted like that they’ll charge," I say, "but he just thought it was a nice morning, and we were there first, so why make trouble? And that’s why he smiled."

"Can they smile?"

"No, but it looked that way."

I put the cheese away and add, "Later on that day we were jumping from boulder to boulder down the side of a slope. I was about to land on a great big brown boulder when all of a sudden the great big brown boulder jumped into the air and ran off into the woods. It was the same moose -- .I think that moose must have been pretty sick of us that day."

I help Chris get to his feet. "You were going a little too fast," I say. "Now the mountainside’s becoming steep and we have to go slowly. If you go too fast you get winded and when you get winded you get dizzy and that weakens your spirit and you think, I can’t do it. So go slow for a while."

"I’ll stay behind you," he says.

"Okay."

We walk now away from the stream we were following, up the canyon side at the shallowest angle I can find.

Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire. The reality of your own nature should determine the speed. If you become restless, speed up. If you become winded, slow down. You climb the mountain in an equilibrium between restlessness and exhaustion. Then, when you’re no longer thinking ahead, each footstep isn’t just a means to an end but a unique event in itself. This leaf has jagged edges. This rock looks loose. From this place the snow is less visible, even though closer. These are things you should notice anyway. To live only for some future goal is shallow. It’s the sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top. Here’s where things grow.

But of course, without the top you can’t have any sides. It’s the top that defines the sides. So on we go—we have a long way—no hurry—just one step after the next—with a little Chautauqua for entertainment -- .Mental reflection is so much more interesting than TV it’s a shame more people don’t switch over to it. They probably think what they hear is unimportant but it never is.

There’s a large fragment concerning Phædrus’ first class after he gave that assignment on "What is quality in thought and statement?" The atmosphere was explosive. Almost everyone seemed as frustrated and angered as he had been by the question.

"How are we supposed to know what quality is?" they said. "You’re supposed to tell us!"

Then he told them he couldn’t figure it out either and really wanted to know. He had assigned it in the hope that somebody would come up with a good answer. That ignited it. A roar of indignation shook the room. Before the commotion had settled down another teacher had stuck his head in the door to see what the trouble was.

"It’s all right," Phædrus said. "We just accidentally stumbled over a genuine question, and the shock is hard to recover from." Some students looked curious at this, and the noise simmered down.

He then used the occasion for a short return to his theme of "Corruption and Decay in the Church of Reason." It was a measure of this corruption, he said, that students should be outraged by someone trying to use them to seek the truth. You were supposed to fake this search for the truth, to imitate it. To actually search for it was a damned imposition.

The truth was, he said, that he genuinely did want to know what they thought, not so that he could put a grade on it, but because he really wanted to know.

They looked puzzled.

"I sat there all night long," one said.

"I was ready to cry, I was so mad," a girl next to the window said.

"You should warn us," a third said.

"How could I warn you," he said, "when I had no idea how you’d react?"

Some of the puzzled ones looked at him with a first dawning. He wasn’t playing games. He really wanted to know.

A most peculiar person.

Then someone said, "What do you think?"

"I don’t know," he answered.

"But what do you think?"

He paused for a long time. "I think there is such a thing as Quality, but that as soon as you try to define it, something goes haywire. You can’t do it."

Murmurs of agreement.

He continued, "Why this is, I don’t know. I thought maybe I’d get some ideas from your paper. I just don’t know."

This time the class was silent.

In subsequent classes that day there was some of the same commotion, but a number of students in each class volunteered friendly answers that told him the first class had been discussed during lunch.

A few days later he worked up a definition of his own and put it on the blackboard to be copied for posterity. The definition was: "Quality is a characteristic of thought and statement that is recognized by a nonthinking process. Because definitions are a product of rigid, formal thinking, quality cannot be defined."

The fact that this "definition" was actually a refusal to define did not draw comment. The students had no formal training that would have told them his statement was, in a formal sense, completely irrational. If you can’t define something you have no formal rational way of knowing that it exists. Neither can you really tell anyone else what it is. There is, in fact, no formal difference between inability to define and stupidity. When I say, "Quality cannot be defined," I’m really saying formally, "I’m stupid about Quality."

Fortunately the students didn’t know this. If they’d come up with these objections he wouldn’t have been able to answer them at the time.

But then, below the definition on the blackboard, he wrote, "But even though Quality cannot be defined, you know what Quality is!" and the storm started all over again.

"Oh, no, we don’t!"

"Oh, yes, you do."

"Oh, no,we don’t!"

"Oh, yes, you do!" he said and he had some material ready to demonstrate it to them.

He had selected two examples of student composition. The first was a rambling, disconnected thing with interesting ideas that never built into anything. The second was a magnificent piece by a student who was mystified himself about why it had come out so well. Phædrus read both, then asked for a show of hands on who thought the first was best. Two hands went up. He asked how many liked the second better. Twenty-eight hands went up.

"Whatever it is," he said, "that caused the overwhelming majority to raise their hands for the second one is what I mean by Quality. So you know what it is."

There was a long reflective silence after this, and he just let it last.

This was just intellectually outrageous, and he knew it. He wasn’t teaching anymore, he was indoctrinating. He had erected an imaginary entity, defined it as incapable of definition, told the students over their own protests that they knew what it was, and demonstrated this by a technique that was as confusing logically as the term itself. He was able to get away with this because logical refutation required more talent than any of the students had. In subsequent days he continually invited their refutations, but none came. He improvised further.

To reinforce the idea that they already knew what Quality was he developed a routine in which he read four student papers in class and had everyone rank them in estimated order of Quality on a slip of paper. He did the same himself. He collected the slips, tallied them on the blackboard and averaged the rankings for an overall class opinion. Then he would reveal his own rankings, and this would almost always be close to, if not identical with the class average. Where there were differences it was usually because two papers were close in quality.

At first the classes were excited by this exercise, but as time went on they became bored. What he meant by Quality was obvious. They obviously knew what it was too, and so they lost interest in listening. Their question now was "All right, we know what Quality is. How do we get it?"

Now, at last, the standard rhetoric texts came into their own. The principles expounded in them were no longer rules to rebel against, not ultimates in themselves, but just techniques, gimmicks, for producing what really counted and stood independently of the techniques...Quality. What had started out as a heresy from traditional rhetoric turned into a beautiful introduction to it.

He singled out aspects of Quality such as unity, vividness, authority, economy, sensitivity, clarity, emphasis, flow, suspense, brilliance, precision, proportion, depth and so on; kept each of these as poorly defined as Quality itself, but demonstrated them by the same class reading techniques. He showed how the aspect of Quality called unity, the hanging-togetherness of a story, could be improved with a technique called an outline. The authority of an argument could be jacked up with a technique called footnotes, which gives authoritative reference. Outlines and footnotes are standard things taught in all freshman composition classes, but now as devices for improving Quality they had a purpose. And if a student turned in a bunch of dumb references or a sloppy outline that showed he was just fulfilling an assignment by rote, he could be told that while his paper may have fulfilled the letter of the assignment it obviously didn’t fulfill the goal of Quality, and was therefore worthless.

Now, in answer to that eternal student question, How do I do this? that had frustrated him to the point of resignation, he could reply, "It doesn’t make a bit of difference how you do it! Just so it’s good." The reluctant student might ask in class, "But how do we know what’s good?" but almost before the question was out of his mouth he would realize the answer had already been supplied. Some other student would usually tell him, "You just see it." If he said, "No, I don’t," he’d be told, "Yes, you do. He proved it." The student was finally and completely trapped into making quality judgments for himself. And it was just exactly this and nothing else that taught him to write.

Up to now Phædrus had been compelled by the academic system to say what he wanted, even though he knew that this forced students to conform to artificial forms that destroyed their own creativity. Students who went along with his rules were then condemned for their inability to be creative or produce a piece of work that reflected their own personal standards of what is good.

Now that was over with. By reversing a basic rule that all things which are to be taught must first be defined, he had found a way out of all this. He was pointing to no principle, no rule of good writing, no theory...but he was pointing to something, nevertheless, that was very real, whose reality they couldn’t deny. The vacuum that had been created by the withholding of grades was suddenly filled with the positive goal of Quality, and the whole thing fit together. Students, astonished, came by his office and said, "I used to just hate English. Now I spend more time on it than anything else." Not just one or two. Many. The whole Quality concept was beautiful. It worked. It was that mysterious, individual, internal goal of each creative person, on the blackboard at last.

I turn to see how Chris is doing. His face looks tired.

I ask, "How do you feel?"

"Okay," he says, but his tone is defiant.

"We can stop anywhere and camp," I say.

He flashes a fierce look at me, and so I say nothing more. Soon I see he’s working his way around me on the slope. With what must be great effort he pulls ahead. We go on.

Phædrus got this far with his concept of Quality because he deliberately refused to look outside the immediate classroom experience. Cromwell’s statement, "No one ever travels so high as he who knows not where he is going," applied at this point. He didn’t know where he was going. All he knew was that it worked.

In time, however, he wondered why it worked, especially when he already knew it was irrational. Why should an irrational method work when rational methods were all so rotten? He had an intuitive feeling, growing rapidly, that what he had stumbled on was no small gimmick. It went far beyond. How far, he didn’t know.

This was the beginning of the crystallization that I talked about before. Others wondered at the time, "Why should he get so excited about ‘quality’?" But they saw only the word and its rhetoric context. They didn’t see his past despair over abstract questions of existence itself that he had abandoned in defeat.

If anyone else had asked, What is Quality? it would have been just another question. But when he asked it, because of his past, it spread out for him like waves in all directions simultaneously, not in a hierarchic structure, but in a concentric one. At the center, generating the waves, was Quality. As these waves of thought expanded for him I’m sure he fully expected each wave to reach some shore of existing patterns of thought so that he had a kind of unified relationship with these thought structures. But the shore was never reached until the end, if it appeared at all. For him there was nothing but ever expanding waves of crystallization. I’ll now try to follow these waves of crystallization, the second phase of his exploration into quality, as best I can.

Up ahead all of Chris’s movements seem tired and angry. He stumbles on things, lets branches tear at him, instead of pulling them to one side.

I’m sorry to see this. Some blame can be put on the YMCA camp he attended for two weeks just before we started. From what he’s told me, they made a big ego thing out of the whole outdoor experience. A proof-of-manhood thing. He began in a lowly class they were careful to point out was rather disgraceful to be in—original sin. Then he was allowed to prove himself with a long series of accomplishments...swimming, rope tying—he mentioned a dozen of them, but I’ve forgotten them.

It made the kids at camp much more enthusiastic and cooperative when they had ego goals to fulfill, I’m sure, but ultimately that kind of motivation is destructive. Any effort that has self-glorification as its final endpoint is bound to end in disaster. Now we’re paying the price. When you try to climb a mountain to prove how big you are, you almost never make it. And even if you do it’s a hollow victory. In order to sustain the victory you have to prove yourself again and again in some other way, and again and again and again, driven forever to fill a false image, haunted by the fear that the image is not true and someone will find out. That’s never the way.

Phædrus wrote a letter from India about a pilgrimage to holy Mount Kailas, the source of the Ganges and the abode of Shiva, high in the Himalayas, in the company of a holy man and his adherents.

He never reached the mountain. After the third day he gave up, exhausted, and the pilgrimage went on without him. He said he had the physical strength but that physical strength wasn’t enough. He had the intellectual motivation but that wasn’t enough either. He didn’t think he had been arrogant but thought that he was undertaking the pilgrimage to broaden his experience, to gain understanding for himself. He was trying to use the mountain for his own purposes and the pilgrimage too. He regarded himself as the fixed entity, not the pilgrimage or the mountain, and thus wasn’t ready for it. He speculated that the other pilgrims, the ones who reached the mountain, probably sensed the holiness of the mountain so intensely that each footstep was an act of devotion, an act of submission to this holiness. The holiness of the mountain infused into their own spirits enabled them to endure far more than anything he, with his greater physical strength, could take.

To the untrained eye ego-climbing and selfless climbing may appear identical. Both kinds of climbers place one foot in front of the other. Both breathe in and out at the same rate. Both stop when tired. Both go forward when rested. But what a difference! The ego-climber is like an instrument that’s out of adjustment. He puts his foot down an instant too soon or too late. He’s likely to miss a beautiful passage of sunlight through the trees. He goes on when the sloppiness of his step shows he’s tired. He rests at odd times. He looks up the trail trying to see what’s ahead even when he knows what’s ahead because he just looked a second before. He goes too fast or too slow for the conditions and when he talks his talk is forever about somewhere else, something else. He’s here but he’s not here. He rejects the here, is unhappy with it, wants to be farther up the trail but when he gets there will be just as unhappy because then it will be "here." What he’s looking for, what he wants, is all around him, but he doesn’t want that because it is all around him. Every step’s an effort, both physically and spiritually, because he imagines his goal to be external and distant.

That seems to be Chris’s problem now.

18

There’s an entire branch of philosophy concerned with the definition of Quality, known as esthetics. Its question, What is meant by beautiful?, goes back to antiquity. But when he was a student of philosophy Phædrus had recoiled violently from this entire branch of knowledge. He had almost deliberately failed the one course in it he had attended and had written a number of papers subjecting the instructor and materials to outrageous attack. He hated and reviled everything.

It wasn’t any particular esthetician who produced this reaction in him. It was all of them. It wasn’t any particular point of view that outraged him so much as the idea that Quality should be subordinated to any point of view. The intellectual process was forcing Quality into its servitude, prostituting it. I think that was the source of his anger.

He wrote in one paper, "These estheticians think their subject is some kind of peppermint bonbon they’re entitled to smack their fat lips on; something to be devoured; something to be intellectually knifed, forked and spooned up bit by bit with appropriate delicate remarks and I’m ready to throw up. What they smack their lips on is the putrescence of something they long ago killed."

Now, as the first step of the crystallization process, he saw that when Quality is kept undefined by definition, the entire field called esthetics is wiped out—completely disenfranchised—kaput. By refusing to define Quality he had placed it entirely outside the analytic process. If you can’t define Quality, there’s no way you can subordinate it to any intellectual rule. The estheticians can have nothing more to say. Their whole field, definition of Quality, is gone.

The thought of this completely thrilled him. It was like discovering a cancer cure. No more explanations of what art is. No more wonderful critical schools of experts to determine rationally where each composer had succeeded or failed. All of them, every last one of those know-it-alls, would finally have to shut up. This was no longer just an interesting idea. This was a dream.

I don’t think anyone really saw what he was up to at first. They saw an intellectual delivering a message that had all the trappings of a rational analysis of a teaching situation. They didn’t see he had a purpose completely opposite to any they were used to. He wasn’t furthering rational analysis. He was blocking it. He was turning the method of rationality against itself, turning it against his own kind, in defense of an irrational concept, an undefined entity called Quality.

He wrote: "(1) Every instructor of English composition knows what quality is. (Any instructor who does not should keep this fact carefully concealed, for this would certainly constitute proof of incompetence.) (2) Any instructor who thinks quality of writing can and should be defined before teaching it can and should go ahead and define it. (3) All those who feel that quality of writing does exist but cannot be defined, but that quality should be taught anyway, can benefit by the following method of teaching pure quality in writing without defining it."

He then went ahead and described some of the methods of comparison that had evolved in the classroom.

I think he really did hope that someone would come along, challenge him and try to define Quality for him. But no one ever did.

However, that little parenthetic statement about inability to define Quality as proof of incompetence did raise eyebrows within the department. He was, after all, the junior member, and not really expected to provide standards quite yet for his seniors’ performance.

His right to say as he pleased was valued, and the senior members actually seemed to enjoy his independence of thought and support him in a churchlike way. But contrary to the belief of many opponents of academic freedom, the church attitude has never been that a teacher should be allowed to blather anything that comes into his head without any accountability at all. The church attitude is simply that the accountability must be to the God of Reason, not to the idols of political power. The fact that he was insulting people was irrelevant to the truth or falsehood of what he was saying and he couldn’t ethically be struck down for this. But what they were prepared to strike him down for, ethically and with gusto, was any indication that he wasn’t making sense. He could do anything he wanted as long as he justified it in terms of reason.

But how the hell do you ever justify, in terms of reason, a refusal to define something? Definitions are the foundation of reason. You can’t reason without them. He could hold off the attack for a while with fancy dialectical footwork and insults about competence and incompetence, but sooner or later he had to come up with something more substantial than that. His attempt to come up with something substantial led to further crystallization beyond the traditional limits of rhetoric and into the domain of philosophy.

Chris turns and flashes a tormented look at me. It won’t be long now. Even before we left there were clues this was coming. When DeWeese told a neighbor I was experienced in the mountains Chris showed a big flash of admiration. It was a large thing in his eyes. He should be done for soon, and then we can stop for the day.

Oop! There he goes. He’s fallen down. He’s not getting up. It was an awfully neat fall, not very accidental-looking. Now he looks at me with hurt and anger, searching for condemnation from me. I don’t show him any. I sit down next to him and see he’s almost defeated.

"Well," I say, "we can stop here, or we can go ahead, or we can go back. Which do you want to do?"

"I don’t care," he says, "I don’t want to—"

"You don’t want to what?"

"I don’t care!" he says, angrily.

"Then since you don’t care, we’ll keep on going," I say, trapping him.

"I don’t like this trip," he says. "It isn’t any fun. I thought it was going to be fun."

Some anger catches me off guard too. "That may be true," I reply, "but it’s a hell of a thing to say."

I see a sudden flick of fear in his eyes as he gets up.

We go on.

The sky over the other wall of the canyon has become overcast, and the wind in the pines around us has become cool and ominous.

At least the coolness makes it easier hiking -- .

I was talking about the first wave of crystallization outside of rhetoric that resulted from Phædrus’ refusal to define Quality. He had to answer the question, If you can’t define it, what makes you think it exists?

His answer was an old one belonging to a philosophic school that called itself realism."A thing exists," he said, "if a world without it can’t function normally. If we can show that a world without Quality functions abnormally, then we have shown that Quality exists, whether it’s defined or not." He thereupon 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. If you can’t distinguish between good and bad in the arts they disappear. There’s no point in hanging a painting on the wall when the bare wall looks just as good. There’s no point to symphonies, when scratches from the record or hum from the record player sound just as good.

Poetry would disappear, since it seldom makes sense and has no practical value. And interestingly, comedy would vanish too. No one would understand the jokes, since the difference between humor and no humor is pure Quality.

Next he made sports disappear. Football, baseball, games of every sort would vanish. The scores would no longer be a measurement of anything meaningful, but simply empty statistics, like the number of stones in a pile of gravel. Who would attend them? Who would play?

Next he subtracted Quality from the marketplace and predicted the changes that would take place. Since quality of flavor would be meaningless, supermarkets would carry only basic grains such as rice, cornmeal, soybeans and flour; possibly also some ungraded meat, milk for weaning infants and vitamin and mineral supplements to make up deficiencies. Alcoholic beverages, tea, coffee and tobacco would vanish. So would movies, dances, plays and parties. We would all use public transportation. We would all wear G.I. shoes.

A huge proportion of us would be out of work, but this would probably be temporary until we relocated in essential non-Quality work. Applied science and technology would be drastically changed, but pure science, mathematics, philosophy and particularly logic would be unchanged.

Phædrus found this last to be extremely interesting. The purely intellectual pursuits were the least affected by the subtraction of Quality. If Quality were dropped, only rationality would remain unchanged. That was odd. Why would that be?

He didn’t know, but he did know that by subtracting Quality from a picture of the world as we know it, he’d revealed a magnitude of importance of this term he hadn’t known was there. 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. The term worth is a Quality term. Life would just be living without any values or purpose at all.

He looked back over the distance this line of thought had taken him and decided he’d certainly proved his point. Since the world obviously doesn’t function normally when Quality is subtracted, Quality exists, whether it’s defined or not.

After conjuring up this vision of a Qualityless world, he was soon attracted to its resemblance to a number of social situations he had already read about. Ancient Sparta came to mind, Communist Russia and her satellites. Communist China, the Brave New World of Aldous Huxley and the 1984 of George Orwell. He also remembered people from his own experience who would have endorsed this Qualityless world. The same ones who tried to make him quit smoking. They wanted rational reasons for his smoking and, when he didn’t have any, acted very superior, as though he’d lost face or something. They had to have reasons and plans and solutions for everything. They were his own kind. The kind he was now attacking. And he searched for a long time for a suitable name to sum up just what characterized them, so as to get a handle on this Qualityless world.

It was intellectual primarily, but it wasn’t just intelligence that was fundamental. It was a certain basic attitude about the way the world was, a presumptive vision that it ran according to laws...reason...and that man’s improvement lay chiefly through the discovery of these laws of reason and application of them toward satisfaction of his own desires. It was this faith that held everything together. He squinted at this vision of a Qualityless world for a while, conjured up more details, thought about it, and then squinted some more and thought some more and then finally circled back to where he was before.

Squareness.

That’s the look. That sums it. Squareness. When you subtract quality you get squareness. Absence of Quality is the essence of squareness.

Some artist friends with whom he had once traveled across the United States came to mind. They were Negroes, who had always been complaining about just this Qualitylessness he was describing. Square. That was their word for it. Way back long ago before the mass media had picked it up and given it national white usage they had called all that intellectual stuff square and had wanted nothing to do with it. And there had been a fantastic mismeshing of conversations and attitudes between him and them because he was such a prime example of the squareness they were talking about. The more he had tried to pin them down on what they were talking about the vaguer they had gotten. Now with this Quality he seemed to say the same thing and talk as vaguely as they did, even though what he talked about was as hard and clear and solid as any rationally defined entity he’d ever dealt with.

Quality. That’s what they’d been talking about all the time. "Man, will you just please, kindly dig it," he remembered one of them saying, "and hold up on all those wonderful seven-dollar questions? If you got to ask what is it all the time, you’ll never get time to know." Soul. Quality. The same?

The wave of crystallization rolled ahead. He was seeing two worlds, simultaneously. On the intellectual side, the square side, he saw now that Quality was a cleavage term. What every intellectual analyst looks for. You take your analytic knife, put the point directly on the term Quality and just tap, not hard, gently, and the whole world splits, cleaves, right in two...hip and square, classic and romantic, technological and humanistic...and the split is clean. There’