Interview Background

Connie Goldman is a journalist with KSJN public radio in St. Paul, Minnesota. She recently conducted an in-depth interview with Robert Pirsig, the author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values. This conversation delved deeply into Pirsig's writing process, his philosophical reflections, and his personal lifestyle.

Speakers:

• Connie Goldman (Interviewer)
• Robert Pirsig (Author)
• Narrator

Narrator: Now, Connie Goldman looks into a different set of values. There is a current book called Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance An Inquiry into Values. The author is Robert Percig. He studied chemistry, philosophy, journalism, and he spent two years in India learning Oriental philosophy. Connie Goldman of Public Radio Station KSJN in St. Paul, Minnesota interviewed Percig in his St. Paul home. In her own words, she said she learned some of the confusions and agonies of writers' real-life autosies.

Robert Pirsig: Reading is an enemy of writing. You don't realize that until you actually get into something that when you're doing your own thing, when you're concentrating on your book, if you see a movie or watch a TV show or get involved in any kind of exterior activity, it sort of takes over your own internal TV program and it ties you all up and it stops you. Of course, that's why writers become such recluses frequently, is that it's not that they don't like people, it's just that they have to have that long period of un-interrupted silence in order to collect everything they want to say together. So actually that occurred in this book where so many problems were coming up, people calling up on the telephone in the morning and I finally bought a pickup camper and took off for the North Shore. And there, up by two harbors, located the camper in a spot in April before the place had opened and I just sat there in this camper day after day, week after week, and wrote the last six chapters of the book. In my opinion, those are the six of the best chapters in the book and they were written because they had a complete consciousness. They were written out of pure boredom and that's very important I think in writing, is to be really bored because if your mind is jammed with any kind of extraneous thoughts, you can't get the full picture of what you want.

Connie Goldman: And yet I know that some of this book was written while you were working full time during the day writing computer manuals.

Robert Pirsig: That's true. Well, computer manuals are notoriously boring and they don't compete as much as TV or a motion picture or radio or anything like that with the mainstream of your life. And in that arrangement I got up before I did the computer work. I'd get up at two o'clock in the morning and go down to a little place on Lake Street in Chicago Avenue and work there.

Connie Goldman: At two in the morning?

Robert Pirsig: At two in the morning, yeah. And then sit down and sometimes write and sometimes not write because sometimes just no thoughts would come. But I got into the discipline of just getting there(shoe store) and not particularly having anything to do except write this book and then with that kind of attitude, getting something out. Once in a while I'd have a good day, once in a while I'd have a horrible day, but every time I'd have some kind of day in that way the whole first draft of the book got written. Then after that four hours was over I'd come home and have breakfast and go off to my job where they began to notice I wasn't as perky as some of the other people because I'd already put in four hours of my day. For me it was like one o'clock in the afternoon when they were starting at eight o'clock in the morning. Then at lunch I'd always have my head down on the desk and I'd take that lunch hour for a nap. Then when that was over I'd hit the four hours in the afternoon and go to bed at night at six o'clock and just conk out thin. That seemed like a horrible schedule.

Connie Goldman: For how long were you on that schedule?

Robert Pirsig: Two years. And when you look back at it people say, "Well how could you do something like that?" This was really a compulsive book, a book that if I didn't do it I'd feel worse about than if I did do it. So that two o'clock thing just became a regular habit and once I got into it, it worked out alright.

Connie Goldman: Have you ever written anything before that you felt such immediacy about, such compulsion about to use your word?

Robert Pirsig: No, always before I'd been in quotes a writer. I was trying to fulfill a role of being a writer. Here I am sitting at a desk with a typewriter or with pencil in hand and now I'm going to write something so that when I'm done I will have something people will read. It was always a separation of my real self from the act of writing. There wasn't this one-to-one relationship that occurred on this book. In this book it was just, I could almost watch my hand moving on the page and there was no volition one way or the other. It was just happening. And people have sometimes seen that in the book that it's a very direct book. It's very on. This is obviously the person himself talking and not a role player. I think that to some extent is what's giving it its success. They really feel there's some sincerity here. Back up a little I could say when I first started the book it began as just a little series of essays. I thought it wasn't going to take more than two or three weeks at the most. Then it became two or three months and before I was done it took four and a half years. But these first essays were just a little kind of a little dissertation on the relationship between technical values and human values, bringing up some information that I picked up in my work as a technical writer and applying it to the situation. This gradually expanded and expanded and expanded until these essays are kind of the nucleus of an entire novel. So we really have what we call a non-fiction work embedded in a fiction work or we'll say a dissertation embedded in a narrative. It would be a little better.

Connie Goldman: In one place in the book you say something, an expression that one has heard many times before, something about it's better to travel than to arrive. So what's the first thing you say when you're going to arrive when you're taking that journey, when your hands were automatically typing that manuscript?

Robert Pirsig: No, you never do. That phrase, "It's better to travel than arrive," is one that stayed with me since childhood. I've always had a wonderful time on trips and then just as we get to the destination I feel so let down, so sad that the trip's going to be over. I feel so stupid because all through the trip all I could think about was getting to the destination. So what I'm trying to say is to remind people of a principle which is actually quite important in Zen is that you should pay attention to where you're at right now and not where you're going to be in the future. And I think that's the root of that expression, "It's better to travel than arrive." It is better to travel than arrive. I could say also you never stop traveling really. You never do arrive. It would be a better way of putting it maybe.

Connie Goldman: What happens to you when you do have your eyes just on the goal? What happens to the - well, let's see if I can remember one of the analogies you used in the book - the appreciation of the minute-to-minute experience?

Robert Pirsig: I guess that's fairly strong in the book that eternal insistence that you watch what's right here and right now and not anything else. The past and the present are always - the past and the future are always contained within the present. It's so important to see this, and yet it's so difficult to see this truly, that the Zen people have invent meditation for that purpose. Well, I don't know if meditation is for that purpose, but frequently in meditation you do get pulled right into the present. Your thoughts about the future and your thoughts about the past tend to die down, and you're just sitting there, you see. And that gets you into the now, into the here and now. Your fixing is like Zen's sitting. Sitting is the simplest thing - probably the simplest Zen practice there is. But of course the same things you do in sitting, you do in everything else. And in this book I simply decided to talk about motorcycle maintenance as a Zen activity, although I've never objectified it. I've tried to do that because I feel that frequently people get the idea that Zen is something apart from the everyday world, and it never is. And I'm trying to bring that point home with the use of motorcycle maintenance. This is not an exotic activity, at least normally considered. This is not going and sitting on a mountain top or contemplating the petals of a flower. This is just getting in and getting your hands greasy, and yet that's still Zen. And that's sort of what's behind the title. And so while I do as a matter of fact sit regularly and have a minute of practicing Zen Buddhas, the book didn't go into that. Enough has been said about that, by people who know it better than I do. But I did want to emphasize that this everyday aspect of Zen and see that by concentrating on everyday aspects of life you can expand your understanding of the world just as well as by the more exotic techniques.

Connie Goldman: At one point in the book anyway, you introduced the idea of being stuck, of stuckness. Your word, I think.

Robert Pirsig: Yeah, that's right.

Connie Goldman: Do you want to talk about that in relationship to the journey and the self-exploration and how people usually react to being stuck and how you react to it?

Robert Pirsig: Well, I'd said in there that, and that is probably a major contribution to motorcycle maintenance of this book, that when you get stuck on fixing motorcycles, that's not a bad moment. That's actually a pretty good moment. And the times I've been stuck, I've been able to catch myself at being stuck, and instead of getting mad, I've just gone off and had a cup of coffee. I notice whenever I'm stuck like that, that if I look at the clouds, the clouds are much more beautiful. That's getting a little bit sentimental, but I find that at the very moment of stuckness, if you just stop and look around you, you find the world is very real. If you remember back in your own life periods, when your life was very vivid, it was usually during a hang-up, at least for me. So I think stuckness is very good for people, and that when it comes, you should welcome it because it won't last long. I think people in the western culture are trained to believe that if they get stuck, that may be the end of the world, but life doesn't stop. It just goes on, even when you're stuck.

Connie Goldman: That feeling of being stuck in your personal life, in your job, in any inconvenience that sets your schedule off is so overpowering to us that it sets us into fear, actual panic. Don't we get in the way of our own growth in the middle of that stuckness by not taking it and just living it?

Robert Pirsig: Stuckness is kind of what you call non-doing, and our whole society is set up for doing. We always ask a person, "What do you want to know about them?" "Well, what do you do?" Well, actually, in Zen, the correct answer is, "I don't do anything except set." You just sit around and don't do anything. "Yes, exactly." And I say, "Well, something wrong with that. What do you really do?" And the reason this question is asked again and again and again is because people are predisposed to think that unless you are doing something, something's wrong. And this is part of the value of the sitting meditation, is that you're instructed just to sit there and prevent yourself from doing anything. And you find that this is not as easy as you thought it would be. You think, "Well, gee, now I don't have to do anything. That's easy." But you discover after about ten minutes that this is very, very hard and that there are many degrees of difficulty in non-doing as there are in doing. And to become skilled at non-doing is quite as difficult as becoming skilled at doing. But then after you acquire both skills, skills at doing and skills at non-doing, you find that if you're stuck in traffic, it doesn't create frustration. You just swing into your non-doing life. That is, if your car won't go forward, you just sit in your car and you build your life that way. It's almost like photosynthesis and respiration. If a plant just gets nothing but sunlight, it's very harmful. It has to have darkness, too. And in the sunlight, it converts carbon dioxide to oxygen, but in the darkness, it takes oxygen and converts it back into carbon dioxide. And I think people are like that. You have to have some periods of doing and some periods of non-doing. And when you get both of them in a mixture back and forth, then you really lead a much fuller life than if you're always committed to doing. So many people say, "Well, I don't see the purpose of Zen. You see, the purpose of just meditation." And the reason they don't see it is because they're committed to doing. You don't do anything. But when you don't do anything, all that garbage in your head that's accumulated from all is doing during the day starts to come to the surface and float away, and your life is purified again, or at least your mental life, psychic life. And this is very valuable. And I think it's a practice which is coming in very strongly, and not just in Zen, in all the meditative disciplines.

Connie Goldman: What you've just said makes me think about the other concept that runs through the book, maybe the most primary one. The idea of quality and how your perception of quality develops？

Robert Pirsig: I had a friend I sent the book to in California, Mrs. Abigail Kenyon. She came back with the best description of the book I've heard yet, and also the shortest. It's a turtle's back. And the name of the turtle's back is quality. If you rest four elephants on top of that quality, you can put the world at it, and everything rises from there. And so, really, the term quality is the central term of the book, and that's what's meant by inquiry into values. We're trying to find out what quality is. But by the time you assume there is such a thing as quality, then you find out what you have to do to your philosophy to adopt this thing called quality. You find your whole philosophy is upended. You have to do what's called a Copernican revolution. You have to say that quality is the source of subjects and objects, rather than that subjects and objects are the source of quality. And that, I hope, is the philosophic turtle's back that will gradually gain acceptance.

Connie Goldman: You say it took four and a half years for you to write all of this, and that doesn't surprise me in the reading of it. But how many years has it taken you to arrive at what you wanted to write?

Robert Pirsig: Oh, yeah. Well, that's the... this is the outgrowth of a whole life experience. I can't think of a time when that book wasn't starting, you know, even at the age of four, when I learned to read and write in England. I remember when I left, my teacher gave me a little book called The London Primer. And for this particular teacher, to learn to read and write was the most important thing in the whole world. When I left, that was just stuck in my mind, and there it was, you see, all through these years, and finally emerged in the form of this book. Fortunately, this teacher is still alive, and we've been corresponding every year since I was four. And she's got a copy of the book now. When my English publisher wrote me, we're very pleased to be publishing your book. I said, "You don't know how pleased I am. I learned to read and write in your country." And so I'm looking forward to getting back to England eventually and seeing this teacher.

Connie Goldman: This book promises not to be reviewed and accepted as, well, just an interesting book. But some of the advanced comment on it is that it's close to a great book, that it's an important book, a very important book. How is this settling with you? Is it frightening for you? Is it rewarding for you?

Robert Pirsig: I'm just sort of trying to stay as cool as I can at this point and see how things happen. It's all a new experience for me right now. And when time reporters come into your living room, it just creates a scene that is sharply different from any kind of life you've led before. I don't know what's going to happen. I'm really playing it by ear right now and listening every moment. My big effort right now is just to keep cool and stay calm and see what happens. They are talking about bestseller in New York. This is not an expectation. This is just the thought that's on their mind. And of course, in the publishing business, they expect to pay for nine losers with that 10th winner. And when they smell a 10th winner, they just go overboard for it. I just had a letter from the vice president in charge of sales at Morro that's publishing and he says, "We're just leaving no stone unturned to get this book moving." And I talked to B. Dalton, bookseller, Alan Kahn, and he said that that's true. The company is selling very hard on this book. And they're really trying to make it a bestseller at this point. Of course, they can only go so far and that's to get it over a certain threshold. And after that, the book's got to do it on their own, its own. But I believe that they have faith that it will make it. Right now, it's just like waiting for the returns from an election. I don't know what's going to happen. Maybe a landslide, maybe not much. We'll see.

Connie Goldman: Bob, how do you plan to protect yourself? You're a private person and your most creative thinking and work is done in solitude.

Robert Pirsig: That's right. Well, this is part of the problem. I think I have an obligation to respond to people. And I'll do that until I feel that the obligation to get on with my next book is more important than that obligation. Then I have this pickup camber and I can just jump in it and take off. Nobody's going to know where I am and I have all the solitude I want. I think for a while I'll be answering all the letters I get and all the mail. Until I feel that this is really wasting my life and then get on with the second book.

Connie Goldman: Bob, we talked earlier about the younger you, the one that all your life has been writing this book.

Robert Pirsig: I notice here that some of the advance copies were sent to prominent people and Eric Hoffer has responded that he feels that you're one of the... that you're a born writer and this is one of the truly good books of our time. But he says that he thinks...it says here...can I just quote from it? It is a miracle that he came through the 1960s. The Persigs I have known at the Berkeley campus during the free speech movement and later have disappeared without a trace. It's perhaps Persig's precious patch of squareness that saved him. It shines like gold in the gravel of a river.

Connie Goldman: Did you want to comment on his comment about you?

Robert Pirsig: Well, of course the book sort of goes after squareness and he's saying that actually it's the squareness and the part of the person who's going after the squareness that saves him. I believe Hoffer got into a lot of conflict between hip and square and decided to defend the squares. He's a wonderfully honest person and I think he had a right cause on his hands. Actually, I like to think that I'm both hip and square at the same time. That these two terms aren't irreconcilable. In fact, the book is a kind of a reconciliation of those two worlds of thought. I think it's possible to be a square motorcycle mechanic at the same time a groovy rider and that this isn't a conflict for anybody. Or it's possible to be both a square and a groovy motorcycle mechanic. We'll put it that way. There's a lot of people who don't think there is such a thing as groovy motorcycle maintenance. Don't understand motorcycle maintenance really at all because it's there to be found. You see a really good one, one who's a real artist at it, that you know right away that there's such a thing as an art of motorcycle maintenance. A lot of people have doubted whether that's a worthy subject of art, but I think that's just an omniscient. Art is anything you can do well, anything you can do with quality. Anything where there are options for doing it well or poorly. There are very few things in this world that don't have options for doing it well or poorly. I think that making an art out of your technological life is the way to solve the problem of technology that the book takes up.

Connie Goldman: I think there's no question that there is less contrivance in this book than anything that I can ever remember reading. It's just blatant honest sincerity. I can almost feel the two in the morning sessions now that I learn about them.

Robert Pirsig: There's something I can tell you. When I was a student in the graduate school of the university here, I spent almost nine months studying under Alan Tate, who was a poet and teaching a graduate seminar in composition. I remember I took in one story. I'd come back from India at that time and I brought in one story entitled "Ramji and the Kurol," which was about a servant that we'd had, and a crow that he used to talk to. I thought this was a very beautiful story. I'm really impressed with it myself. I showed it to him and he read through the whole thing and he said, "Well, what do you want to write all this exotic stuff for?" He said, "Write about what you know." He said, "If you write about what you know and you do it carefully and sincerely and make sure it's really what you know, it'll be plenty exotic to everybody else." In this book, I've really tried to do that and I've tried to justify what I've done to myself by saying, "Well, it may be right, it may be wrong, but it sure is what I know." That, I suppose, is responsible for that feeling of directness that you get. It was just trying to get a one-to-one relationship between myself and what's on paper.

Connie Goldman: Did you ever have any fantasies at four in the morning while you were writing the thing about how the world would receive it?

Robert Pirsig: Well, I had them, but they wore off. After about three or four months, there's nothing keeping you going except this compulsion. Actually, the best days in writing, for some reason I woke up last night thinking about this, the best days in writing there on Lake Street were the days when I was neither enthusiastic nor depressed. Some days I'd say, "Oh, this is the world's greatest writing," and then I'd look at it, the next day and it was just awful. And sometimes I'd cut it so badly that I'd really ruined something that really wasn't as bad as I thought it was. So in the days when I was elated, I would put in stuff, but my critical faculty had weakened, so I was getting in a lot of slush that really wasn't valuable. And on days when I was depressed, my critical faculty was working way too strongly, and I'd throw away perfectly good things. So the very best day is the day when you don't really care whether it's good or whether it's bad, when you're just sitting there writing. When you trust yourself? Yeah, or when you just don't even -- are not even conscious of yourself at all. It's just when you get that total lack of self-consciousness, then it happens. Then it starts coming out on paper. But sometimes it takes months before you can get to that point, you say, and you have to throw away those months of work, because you realize then at one point all of a sudden you're hitting, it's just coming out strong. And I've heard that said by many, many writers, a way to learn to write is just to write. And what they mean is that if you keep up the discipline sooner or later, it's going to just reach a point where nothing else is motivating you, except the words themselves.

Connie Goldman: But Bob, that is exactly what the book is about. When you talk about doing an activity, planning it and feeling separate from it and evaluating it as you go along, you're really separate from what you're doing.

Robert Pirsig: That's right. Then you talk about fixing the motorcycle, and the only thing that exists is what you are doing right then, the involvement in it. So you're really talking about your writing, you're fixing your motorcycle. Your mode of most successful living is all being the same. Yeah, it all comes out to be the same thing. Actually, the sitting is the same thing. You start out feeling, "Oh, Lord, I hate this." And then later on you feel, "Oh, boy, this is wonderful." And you're wrong both times. It's just sitting. The book was just writing, and the motorcycle was just fixing. And when you get down to that nothing special thing, there's a very famous late Roshi from California, Shinri Suzuki, who used to talk about just sitting and nothing special. And to some extent, in this book, I've tried to talk about just fixing and nothing special. But of course, when you take that attitude, everything special comes in. You try for nothing special, but in the process of getting there, everything comes in, including the kitchen sink. But the goal is always just to live your life without too much fuss about it.

Narrator: And that was Robert Persig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, an inquiry into values. Connie Goldman talked with Persig.

Through this interview, we not only gain a deeper understanding of the creative process behind Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and the philosophical ideas that underpin it, but also Pirsig's unique insights on life, writing, and self-awareness. Pirsig is not just a writer, but a thinker who shows us how to find inner peace and balance in modern life through his book.

☻ 

Interview with Robert Pirsig, Author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (June 12, 1974）audio

transcription, translation, proofreading: AI+Emmaflow