And because without objects there can be no subject… because the objects create the subject’s awareness of himself… Quality is the event at which awareness of both subjects and objects is made possible.
Hot.
Now he knew it was coming.
This means Quality is not just the result of a collision between subject and object. The very existence of subject and object themselves is deduced from the Quality event. The Quality event is the cause of the subjects and objects, which are then mistakenly presumed to be the cause of the Quality!
Now he had that whole damned evil dilemma by the throat. The dilemma all the time had this unseen vile presumption in it, for which there was no logical justification that Quality was the effect of subjects and objects. It was not! He brought out his knife.
“The sun of quality”, he wrote, “does not revolve around the subjects and objects of our existence. It does not just passively illuminate them. It is not subordinate to them in any way. It has created them. They are subordinate to it!”
And at that point, when he wrote that, he knew he had reached some kind of culmination of thought he had been unconsciously striving for over a long period of time.
“Blue sky!” shouts Chris.
There it is, way above us, a narrow patch of blue through the trunks of the trees.
We move faster and the patches of blue become larger and larger through the trees and soon we see that the trees thin out to a bare spot at the summit. When the summit is about fifty yards away I say, “Let’s go!” and start to dash for it, throwing into the effort all the reserves of energy I’ve been saving.
I give it everything I have, but Chris gains on me. Then he passes me, giggling. With the heavy load and high altitude we’re not setting any records but now we’re just charging up with all we have.
Chris gets there first, while I just break out of the trees. He raises his arms and shouts, “The Winner!”
Egotist.
I’m breathing so hard when I arrive I can’t speak. We just drop our packs from our shoulders and lie down against some rocks. The crust of the ground is dry from the sun, but underneath is mud from last night’s rain. Below us and miles away beyond the forested slopes and the fields beyond them is the Gallatin Valley. At one corner of the valley is Bozeman. A grasshopper jumps up from the rock and soars down and away from us over the trees.
“We made it”, Chris says. He is very happy. I am still too winded to answer. I take off my boots and socks which are soggy with sweat and set them out to dry on a rock. I stare at them meditatively as vapors from them rise up toward the sun.
20
Evidently I’ve slept. The sun is hot. My watch says a few minutes before noon. I look over the rock I’m leaning against and see Chris sound asleep on the other side. Way up above him the forest stops and barren grey rock leads into patches of snow. We can climb the back of this ridge straight up there, but it would be dangerous toward the top. I look up at the top of the mountain for a while. What was it Chris said I told him last night?… “I’ll see you at the top of mountain” — no — “I’ll meet you at the top of the mountain.”
How could I meet him at the top of the mountain when I’m already with him? Something’s very strange about that. He said I told him something else too, the other night… that it’s lonely here. That contradicts what I actually believe. I don’t think it’s lonely here at all.
A sound of falling rock draws my attention over to one side of the mountain. Nothing moves. Completely still.
It’s all right. You hear little rockslides like this all the time.
Not so little sometimes, though. Avalanches start with little slides like that. If you’re above them or beside them, they’re interesting to watch. But if they’re above you… no help then. You just have to watch it come.
People say strange things in their sleep, but why would I tell him I’ll meet him? And why would he think I was awake? There’s something really wrong there that produces a very bad quality feeling, but I don’t know what it is. First you get the feeling, then you figure out why.
I hear Chris move and turn and see him look around.
“Where are we?” he asks.
“Top of the ridge.”
“Oh”, he says. He smiles.
I break open a lunch of Swiss cheese, pepperoni and crackers. I cut up the cheese and then the pepperoni in careful, neat slices. The silence allows you to do each thing right.
“Let’s build a cabin here”, he says.
“Ohhhhh”, I groan, “and climb up to it every day?”
“Sure”, he teases. “That wasn’t hard.”
Yesterday is long ago in his memory. I pass some cheese and crackers over to him.
“What are you always thinking about?” he asks.
“Thousands of things”, I answer.
“What?”
“Most of them wouldn’t make any sense to you.”
“Like what?”
“Like why I told you I’d meet you at the top of the mountain.”
“Oh”, he says, and looks down.
“You said I sounded drunk”, I tell him
“No, not drunk”, he says, still looking down. The way he looks away from me makes me wonder all over again if he’s telling the truth.
“How then?”
He doesn’t answer.
“How then, Chris?”
“Just different.”
“How?”
“Well, I don’t know!” He looks up at me and there’s a flicker of fear. “Like you used to sound a long time ago”, he says, and then looks down.
“When?”
“When we lived here.”
I keep my face composed so that he sees no change of expression in it, then carefully get up and go over and methodically turn the socks on the rock. They’ve dried long ago. As I return with them I see his glance is still on me. Casually I say, “I didn’t know I sounded different.”
He doesn’t reply to this.
I put the socks on and slip the boots over them.
“I’m thirsty”, Chris says.
“We shouldn’t have too far to go down to find water”, I say, standing up. I look at the snow for a while, then say, “You ready to go?”
He nods and we get the packs on.
As we walk along the summit toward the beginning of a ravine we hear another clattering sound of falling rock, much louder than the first one I heard just a while ago. I look up to see where it is. Still nothing.
“What was that?” Chris asks.
“Rockslide.”
We both stand still for a moment, listening. Chris asks, “Is there somebody up there?”
“No, I think it’s just melting snow that’s loosening stones. When it’s really hot like this in the early part of the summer you hear a lot of small rockslides. Sometimes big ones. It’s part of the wearing down of the mountains.”
“I didn’t know mountains wore out.”
“Not wore out, wore down. They get rounded and gentle. These mountains are still unworn.”
Everywhere around us now, except above, the sides of the mountain are covered with blackish green of the forest. In the distance the forest looks like velvet.
I say, “You look at these mountains now, and they look so permanent and peaceful, but they’re changing all the time and the changes aren’t always peaceful. Underneath us, beneath us here right now, there are forces that can tear this whole mountain apart.”
“Do they ever?”
“Ever what?”
“Tear the whole mountain apart?”
“Yes”, I say. Then I remember: “Not far from here there are nineteen people lying dead under millions of tons of rock. Everyone was amazed there were only nineteen.”
“What happened?”
“They were just tourists from the east who had stopped for the night at a campground. During the night the underground forces broke free and when the rescuers saw what had happened the next morning, they just sh
ook their heads. They didn’t even try to excavate. All they could have done was dig down through hundreds of feet of rock for bodies that would just have to be buried all over again. So they left them there. They’re still there now.”
“How did they know there were nineteen?”
“Neighbors and relatives from their hometowns reported them missing.”
Chris stares at the top of the mountain before us. “Didn’t they get any warning?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’d think there’d be a warning.”
“Maybe there was.”
We walk to where the ridge we are on creases inward to the start of a ravine. I see that we can follow this ravine down and eventually find water in it. I start angling down now.
Some more rocks clatter up above. Suddenly I’m frightened.
“Chris”, I say.
“What?”
“You know what I think?”
“No, what?”
“I think we’d be very smart if we let that mountaintop go for now and try it another summer.”
He’s silent. Then he says, “Why?”
“I have bad feelings about it.”
He doesn’t say anything for a long time. Finally he says, “Like what?”
“Oh, I just think that we could get caught up there in a storm or a slide or something and we’d be in real trouble.”
More silence. I look up and see real disappointment in his face. I think he knows I’m leaving something out. “Why don’t you think about it”, I say, “and then when we get to some water and have lunch we’ll decide.”
We continue walking down. “Okay?” I say.
He finally says, “Okay”, in a noncommittal voice.
The descent is easy now but I see it will be steeper soon. It’s still open and sunny here but soon we’ll be in trees again.
I don’t know what to make of all this weird talk at night except that it’s not good. For either of us. It sounds like all the strain of this cycling and camping and Chautauqua and all these old places has a bad effect on me that appears at night. I want to clear out of here as fast as possible.
I don’t suppose that sounds like the old days to Chris either. I spook very easily these days, and am not ashamed to admit it. He never spooked at anything. Never. That’s the difference between us. That’s why I’m alive and he’s not. If he’s up there, some psychic entity, some ghost, some Doppelganger waiting up there for us in God knows what fashion — well, he’s going to have to wait a long time. A very long time.
These damned heights get eerie after a while. I want to go down, way down; far, far down.
To the ocean. That sounds right. Where the waves roll in slowly and there’s always a roar and you can’t fall anywhere. You’re already there.
Now we enter the trees again, and the sight of the mountaintop is obscured by their branches and I’m glad.
I think we’ve gone as far along Phædrus’ path as we want to go in this Chautauqua too. I want to leave his path now. I’ve given him all due credit for what he thought and said and wrote, and now I want to develop on my own some of the ideas he neglected to pursue. The title of this Chautauqua is “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”, not “Zen and the Art of Mountain Climbing”, and there are no motorcycles on the tops of mountains, and in my opinion very little Zen. Zen is the “spirit of the valley”, not the mountaintop. The only Zen you find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there. Let’s get out of here.
“Feels good to be going down, doesn’t it?” I say.
No answer.
We’re going to have a little fight, I’m afraid.
You go up the mountaintop and all you’re gonna get is a great big heavy stone tablet handed to you with a bunch of rules on it.
That’s about what happened to him.
Thought he was a goddamned Messiah.
Not me, boy. The hours are way too long, and the pay is way too short. Let’s go. Let’s go.
Soon I’m clomping down the slope in a kind of two-step idiot gallop — ga-dump, ga-dump, ga-dump — until I hear Chris holler, “SLOW DOWN!” and see he is a couple of hundred yards back through the trees.
So I slow down, but after a while see he is deliberately lagging behind. He’s disappointed, of course.
I suppose what I ought to do in the Chautauqua is just point out in summary form the direction Phædrus went, without evaluation, and then get on with my own thing. Believe me, when the world is seen not as a duality of mind and matter but as a trinity of quality, mind, and matter, then the art of motorcycle maintenance and other arts take on a dimension of meaning they never had. The specter of technology the Sutherlands are running from becomes not an evil but a positive fun thing. And to demonstrate that will be a long fun task.
But first, to give this other specter his walking papers, I should say the following:
Perhaps he would have gone in the direction I’m now about to go in if this second wave of crystallization, the metaphysical wave, had finally grounded out where I’ll be grounding it out, that is, in the everyday world. I think metaphysics is good if it improves everyday life; otherwise forget it. But unfortunately for him it didn’t ground out. It went into a third mystical wave of crystallization from which he never recovered.
He’d been speculating about the relationship of Quality to mind and matter and had identified Quality as the parent of mind and matter, that event which gives birth to mind and matter. This Copernican inversion of the relationship of Quality to the objective world could sound mysterious if not carefully explained, but he didn’t mean it to be mysterious. He simply meant that at the cutting edge of time, before an object can be distinguished, there must be a kind of nonintellectual awareness, which he called awareness of Quality. You can’t be aware that you’ve seen a tree until after you’ve seen the tree, and between the instant of vision and instant of awareness there must be a time lag. We sometimes think of that time lag as unimportant, but there’s no justification for thinking that the time lag is unimportant… none whatsoever.
The past exists only in our memories, the future only in our plans. The present is our only reality. The tree that you are aware of intellectually, because of that small time lag, is always in the past and therefore is always unreal. Any intellectually conceived object is always in the past and therefore unreal. Reality is always the moment of vision before the intellectualization takes place. There is no other reality. This preintellectual reality is what Phædrus felt he had properly identified as Quality. Since all intellectually identifiable things must emerge from this preintellectual reality, Quality is the parent, the source of all subjects and objects.
He felt that intellectuals usually have the greatest trouble seeing this Quality, precisely because they are so swift and absolute about snapping everything into intellectual form. The ones who have the easiest time seeing this Quality are small children, uneducated people and culturally “deprived” people. These have the least predisposition toward intellectuality from cultural sources and have the least formal training to instill it further into them. That, he felt, is why squareness is such a uniquely intellectual disease. He felt he’d been accidentally immunized from it, or at least to some extent broken from the habit by his failure from school. After that he felt no compulsive identification with intellectuality and could examine anti-intellectual doctrines with sympathy.
Squares, he said, because of their prejudices toward intellectuality usually regard Quality, the preintellectual reality, as unimportant, a mere uneventful transition period between objective reality and subjective perception of it. Because they have preconceived ideas of its unimportance they don’t seek to find out if it’s in any way different from their intellectual conception of it.
It is different, he said. Once you begin to hear the sound of that Quality, see that Korean wall, that nonintellectual reality in its pure form, you want to forget all that word stuff, which you finally begin to see is always somewhere else
.
Now, armed with his new time-interrelated metaphysical trinity, he had that romantic-classic Quality split, the one which had threatened to ruin him, completely stopped. They couldn’t cut up Quality now. He could sit there and at his leisure cut them up. Romantic Quality always correlated with instantaneous impressions. Square Quality always involved multiple considerations that extended over a period of time. Romantic Quality was the present, the here and now of things. Classic Quality was always concerned with more than just the present. The relation of the present to the past and future was always considered. If you conceived the past and future to be all contained in the present, why, that was groovy, the present was what you lived for. And if your motorcycle is working, why worry about it? But if you consider the present to be merely an instant between the past and the future, just a passing moment, then to neglect the past and future for the present is bad Quality indeed. The motorcycle may be working now, but when was the oil level last checked? Fussbudgetry from the romantic view, but good common sense from the classic.
Now we had two different kinds of Quality but they no longer split Quality itself. They were just two different time aspects of Quality, short and long. What had previously been asked for was a metaphysical hierarchy that looked like this:
reality
subjective
(perception)
objective (physical)
classic
(intellectual)
romantic
(emotional)
the Quality he had to teach
the Quality he was teaching
What he gave them in return was a metaphysical hierarchy that looked like this:
the Quality (reality)
romantic Quality
(preintellectual reality)
classic Quality
(intellectual reality)
subjective reality
(consciousness)
objective reality
(substance)
The Quality he was teaching was not just a part of reality, it was the whole thing.