Books: The Enormous Vrooom

• Share

ZEN AND THE ART OF MOTORCYCLE MAINTENANCE

by ROBERT M.PIRSIG 412 pages. Morrow. $7.95.

Like the pool hall and the tattoo parlor, the motorcycle usually gets a bad press. T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia) terminated his romance with himself aboard a British army bike, which he had named George VII. During the '50s and '60s, Hell's Angels on their Harley-Davidsons turned in convincing performances as Visigoths at the gates of suburbia. Easy Rider could not keep off the grass, and Evel Knievel, that star spangled Icarus of the carnival circuit, gives young minibike owners potentially lethal delusions of grandeur. But now, during the lull in the great gas panic of '74, comes a 46-year-old Minnesotan and writer of computer manuals, who makes the motorcycle not only respectable but also a focus of mental and spiritual health.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance has some casual relationship to Eugen Herrigel's small, graceful classic, Zen in the Art of Archery (1953). Pirsig's book has more moving parts, and though it is clearly autobiographical, much of it reads like a novel. It is also a roadbook in the greasing-of-America tradition and a philosophical thriller that probes with dizzying ambition the cloven values of technological society. What makes all this unique is Pirsig's way of welding his parts to a most down-to-earth story about a troubled man and his eleven-year-old son on a cross-country motorcycle trip.

Mental Breakdown. Pirsig is no orthodox Zen Buddhist; his equivalent of a meditative tea ceremony is tuning his engine. "A study of the art of motorcycle maintenance," he says, "is really a miniature study of the art of rationality itself." In an age preoccupied with sensation, Pirsig does not regard "reason" as a dirty word. His persistent message is that thinking is feeling, a view that underlies his advice about how to prepare mentally for troubleshooting an engine. Briefly, motor maintenance requires a good deal of quiet concentration so that the underlying principles of the engine are allowed to fill the gap between the object (engine) and the subject (mechanic). A Zen monk would say that under such conditions, the fixer and the fixed are no longer opposing objects but one reality. The author is more practical. Among other things, he suggests that if you cannot fix the bike yourself, at least avoid garages where the mechanics play the radio.

It is the alienating gap between subject and object that Pirsig attempts to fill. To do so he alternates philosophical discourses with descriptions of what happened on a trip that he took out West in 1968, his son Chris riding on the back of the cycle. By the time they reach Bozeman, Mont., where Pirsig once taught college English, it is apparent that his ideas have been earned at considerable cost and suffering. He reveals some frightening facts about himself. In 1961 he suffered a mental breakdown and underwent a series of shock treatments, which wiped out many of his personal memories. To give his philosophical inquiries a dramatic edge, Pirsig refers to his shadowy pretreatment self as Phaedrus, the name of one of Socrates' straight men from Plato's Dialogues.