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?