Afterword

This book has a lot to say about Ancient Greek perspectives and their
meaning but there is one perspective it misses. That is their view of time.
They saw the future as something that came upon them from behind their
backs with the past receding away before their eyes.

When you think about it, that's a more accurate metaphor than our present
one. Who really can face the future? All you can do is project from the
past, even when the past shows that such projections are often wrong. And
who really can forget the past? What else is there to know?

Ten years after the publication of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle
Maintenance the Ancient Greek perspective is certainly appropriate. What
sort of future is coming up from behind I don't really know. But the past,
spread out ahead, dominates everything in sight.

Certainly no one could have predicted what has happened. Back then, after
121 others had turned this book down, one lone editor offered a standard
$3,000 advance. He said the book forced him to decide what he was in
publishing for, and added that although this was almost certainly the last
payment, I shouldn't be discouraged. Money wasn't the point with a book
like this.

That was true. But then came publication day, astonishing reviews,
best-seller status, magazine interviews, radio and TV interviews, movie
offers, foreign publications, endless offers to speak, and fan mail...week
after week, month after month. The letters have been full of questions:
Why? How did this happen? What is missing here? What was your motive?
There's a sort of frustrated tone. They know there's more to this book than
meets the eye. They want to hear all.

There really hasn't been any ``all'' to tell. There were no deep
manipulative ulterior motives. Writing it seemed to have higher quality
than not writing it, that was all. But as time recedes ahead and the
perspective surrounding the book grows larger, a somewhat more detailed
answer becomes possible.

There is a Swedish word, kulturbΣrer, which can be translated as
``culture-bearer'' but still doesn't mean much. It's not a concept that has
much American use, although it should have.

A culture-bearing book, like a mule, bears the culture on its back. No one
should sit down to write one deliberately. Culture-bearing books occur
almost accidentally, like a sudden change in the stock market. There are
books of high quality that are an part of the culture, but that is not the
same. They are a part of it. They aren't carrying it anywhere. They may
talk about insanity sympathetically, for example, because that's the
standard cultural attitude. But they don't carry any suggestion that
insanity might be something other than sickness or degeneracy.

Culture-bearing books challenge cultural value assumptions and often do so
at a time when the culture is changing in favor of their challenge. The
books are not necessarily of high quality. Uncle Tom's Cabin was no
literary masterpiece but it was a culture-bearing book. It came at a time
when the entire culture was about to reject slavery. People seized upon it
as a portrayal of their own new values and it became an overwhelming
success.

The success of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance seems the result
of this culture-bearing phenomenon. The involuntary shock treatment
described here is against the law today. It is a violation of human
liberty. The culture has changed.

The book also appeared at a time of cultural upheaval on the matter of
material success. Hippies were having none of it. Conservatives were
baffled. Material success was the American dream. Millions of European
peasants had longed for it all their lives and come to America to find
it...a world in which they and their descendants would at last have enough.
Now their spoiled descendants were throwing that whole dream in their
faces, saying it wasn't any good. What did they want?

The hippies had in mind something that they wanted, and were calling it
``freedom,'' but in the final analysis ``freedom'' is a purely negative
goal. It just says something is bad. Hippies weren't really offering any
alternatives other than colorful short-term ones, and some of these were
looking more and more like pure degeneracy. Degeneracy can be fun but it's
hard to keep up as a serious lifetime occupation.

This book offers another, more serious alternative to material success.
It's not so much an alternative as an expansion of the meaning of
``success'' to something larger than just getting a good job and staying
out of trouble. And also something larger than mere freedom. It gives a
positive goal to work toward that does not confine. That is the main reason
for the book's success, I think. The whole culture happened to be looking
for exactly what this book has to offer. That is the sense in which it is a
culture-bearer.

The receding Ancient Greek perspective of the past ten years has a very
dark side: Chris is dead.

He was murdered. At about 8:00 P.M. on Saturday, November 17, 1979, in San
Francisco, he left the Zen Center, where he was a student, to visit a
friend's house a block away on Haight Street.

According to witnesses, a car stopped on the street beside him and two men,
black, jumped out. One came from behind him so that Chris couldn't escape,
and grabbed his arms. The one in front of him emptied his pockets and found
nothing and became angry. He threatened Chris with a large kitchen knife.
Chris said something which the witnesses could not hear. His assailant
became angrier. Chris then said something that made him even more furious.
He jammed the knife into Chris's chest. Then the two jumped into their car
and left.

Chris leaned for a time on a parked car, trying to keep from collapsing.
After a time he staggered across the street to a lamp at the corner of
Haight and Octavia. Then, with his right lung filled with blood from a
severed pulmonary artery, he fell to the sidewalk and died.

I go on living, more from force of habit than anything else. At his funeral
we learned that he had bought a ticket that morning for England, where my
second wife and I lived aboard a sailboat. Then a letter from him arrived
which said, strangely, ``I never thought I would ever live to see my 23rd
birthday.''

His twenty-third birthday would have been in two weeks.

After his funeral we packed all his things, including a secondhand
motorcycle he had just bought, into an old pickup truck and headed back
across some of the western mountain and desert roads described in this
book. At this time of year the mountain forests and prairies were
snow-covered and alone and beautiful. By the time we reached his
grandfather's house in Minnesota we were feeling more peaceful. There in
his grandfather's attic, his things are still stored.

I tend to become taken with philosophic questions, going over them and over
them and over them again in loops that go round and round and round until
they either produce an answer or become so repetitively locked on they
become psychiatrically dangerous, and now the question became obsessive:
``Where did he go?''

Where did Chris go? He had bought an airplane ticket that morning. He had a
bank account, drawers full of clothes, and shelves full of books. He was a
real, live person, occupying time and space on this planet, and now
suddenly where was he gone to? Did he go up the stack at the crematorium?
Was he in the little box of bones they handed back? Was he strumming a harp
of gold on some overhead cloud? None of these answers made any sense.

It had to be asked: What was it I was so attached to? Is it just something
in the imagination? When you have done time in a mental hospital, that is
never a trivial question. If he wasn't just imaginary, then where did he
go? Do real things just disappear like that? If they do, then the
conservation laws of physics are in trouble. But if we stay with the laws
of physics, then the Chris that disappeared was unreal. Round and round and
round. He used to run off like that just to make me mad. Sooner or later he
would always appear, but where would he appear now? After all, really,
where did he go?

The loops eventually stopped at the realization that before it could be
asked ``Where did he go?'' it must be asked ``What is the `he' that is
gone?'' There is an old cultural habit of thinking of people as primarily
something material, as flesh and blood. As long as this idea held, there
was no solution. The oxides of Chris's flesh and blood did, of course, go
up the stack at the crematorium. But they weren't Chris.

What had to be seen was that the Chris I missed so badly was not an object
but a pattern, and that although the pattern included the flesh and blood
of Chris, that was not all there was to it. The pattern was larger than
Chris and myself, and related us in ways that neither of us understood
completely and neither of us was in complete control of.

Now Chris's body, which was a part of that larger pattern, was gone. But
the larger pattern remained. A huge hole had been torn out of the center of
it, and that was what caused all the heartache. The pattern was looking for
something to attach to and couldn't find anything. That's probably why
grieving people feel such attachment to cemetery headstones and any
material property or representation of the deceased. The pattern is trying
to hang on to its own existence by finding some new material thing to
center itself upon.

Some time later it became clearer that these thoughts were something very
close to statements found in many ``primitive'' cultures. If you take that
part of the pattern that is not the flesh and bones of Chris and call it
the ``spirit'' of Chris or the ``ghost'' of Chris, then you can say without
further translation that the spirit or ghost of Chris is looking for a new
body to enter. When we hear accounts of ``primitives'' talking this way, we
dismiss them as superstition because we interpret ghost or spirit as some
sort of material ectoplasm, when in fact they may not mean any such thing
at all.

In any event, it was not many months later that my wife conceived,
unexpectedly. After careful discussion we decided it was not something that
should continue. I'm in my fifties. I didn't want to go through any more
child-raising experiences. I'd seen enough. So we came to our conclusion
and made the necessary medical appointment.

Then something very strange happened. I'll never forget it. As we went over
the whole decision in detail one last time, there was a kind of
dissociation, as though my wife started to recede while we sat there
talking. We were looking at each other, talking normally, but it was like
those photographs of a rocket just after launching where you see two stages
start to separate from each other in space. You think you're together and
then suddenly you see that you're not together anymore.

I said, ``Wait. Stop. Something's wrong.'' What it was, was unknown, but it
was intense and I didn't want it to continue. It was a really frightening
thing, which has since become clearer. It was the larger pattern of Chris,
making itself known at last. We reversed our decision, and now realize what
a catastrophe it would have been for us if we hadn't.

So I guess you could say, in this primitive way of looking at things, that
Chris got his airplane ticket after all. This time he's little girl named
Nell and our life is back in perspective again. The hole in the pattern is
being mended. A thousand memories of Chris will always be at hand, of
course, but not a destructive clinging to some material entity that can
never be here again. We're in Sweden now, the home of my mother's
ancestors, and I'm working on a second book which is a sequel to this one.

Nell teaches aspects of parenthood never understood before. If she cries or
makes a mess or decides to be contrary (and these are relatively rare), it
doesn't bother. There is always Chris's silence to compare it to. What is
seen now so much more clearly is that although the names keep changing and
the bodies keep changing, the larger pattern that holds us all together
goes on and on. In terms of this larger pattern the lines at the end of
this book still stand. We have won it. Things are better now. You can sort
of tell these things.

ooolo99ikl;i.,pyknulmmmmmmmmmm 111

(This last line is by Nell. She reached around the corner of the machine
and banged on the keys and then watched with the same gleam Chris used to
have. If the editors preserve it, it will be her first published work.)

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     ...Robert M. Pirsig
     Gothenburg, Sweden
     1984