полетът на костенурката

Върнах се при Зен и Изкуството да поддържаш мотоциклет. Искам да имам време и спокойствие да я чета всеки ден, така че да не забравям шътокуата от предишния.

Когато се опитвам да накарам някой ученик да си отвори очите и не успявам, мога ли да се успокоя с обяснението, че очите му са всъщност отворени, но вижда нещата по различен начин? Струва ми се, че НЕ “Проявяваш ли упоритост, започваш да се дразниш, без да знаеш защо”. ОК, може и да си прав, а другият крив, може да си наясно, че си прав, а той не е; може да си изпълнен с добри намерения, но май трябва да приемеш, че не разполагаш със сила, която може да го накара да погледне на нещата по друг начин. Може да не е невъзможно да му отвориш очите (вярвам, че не е), но е възможно ти да не знаеш как Ето това трябва да приемеш – че не си всезнаещ, а оттам и всесилен. Да, може да си най-добрият човек на света, че и с най-отворените очи, но трябва да се научиш на смирение ОК, разбирам фрустрацията ти.

Много би искал да промениш нещата, дори теоретично си наясно как, но … не можеш да го направиш на практика – не защото не искаш, ами защото не всичко зависи от теб. Има неща, за които е нужно да си мръднат пръста и други хора… има и неща, които зависят от природните закони, които кой знае защо в този момент не работят в твоя полза (или така ти се струва). Още един урок по смирение – не си самодостатъчен, поне не и докато искаш да въздействаш на средата. If there is a will, there is a way (Ако има воля, има и начин) би казал някой западен Тигър. И така … стигнахме до Пътя.

Искаш да правиш добро, а светът ти пречи. Какво да правиш тогава? “Не исках да правя зло, а и не виждах възможност да правя добро” И тогава? Ако в достъпния материален свят не виждаш възможност, означава ли това, че ти нямаш възможност? Ако се огледаш наоколо, сигурна съм, че ще намериш поне едно нещо, което да се нуждае от твоята любов, доброта, компетентност … сетих се за оня френски дядо, който създал дъбова гора като засаждал жълъди. И все пак, ако не виждаш никакви възможности за полезно действие?

Хей, защо трябва непременно да въздействаш върху средата за да направиш света по-добър? Ти нали си част oт света? Защо не въздействаш на себе си? Или искаш да кажеш, че си съвършен? Ако вярваш в това, започваш да ставаш self-righteous (”аз съм прав, а хората криви” е най-близкият превод) и да презираш хората.

Може би не е чак толкова лоша идея да си лежиш в леглото и да четеш книга и да пишеш в дневника си. По този начин, ако не правиш добро (в което се съмнявам), поне не правиш зло, излизайки навън да размахваш пръст и да раздаваш правосъдие.

следва глава # 5 от книгата (част):

 

The flatness of the prairie disappears and a deep undulation of the

earth begins. Fences are rarer, and the greenness has become paler –

all signs that we approach the High Plains.

We stop for gas at Hague and ask if there is any way to get across the

Missouri between Bismarck and Mobridge. The attendant doesn’t know of

any. It is hot now, and John and Sylvia go somewhere to get their long

underwear off. The motorcycle gets a change of oil and chain lubrication.

Chris watches everything I do but with some impatience. Not a good sign.

“My eyes hurt,” he says.

“From what?”

“From the wind.”

“We’ll look for some goggles.”

All of us go in a shop for coffee and rolls. Everything is different except one

another, so we look around rather than talk, catching fragments of

conversation among people who seem to know each other and are glancing

at us because we’re new. Afterward, down the street, I find a thermometer

for storage in the saddlebags and some plastic goggles for Chris.

The hardware man doesn’t know any short route across the Missouri either.

John and I study the map. I had hoped we might find an unofficial ferryboat

crossing or footbridge or something in the ninety-mile stretch, but evidently

there isn’t any because there’s not much to get to on the other side. It’s all

Indian reservation. We decide to head south to Mobridge and cross there.

The road south is awful. Choppy, narrow, bumpy concrete with a bad head

wind, going into the sun and big semis going the other way. These rollercoaster

hills speed them up on the down side and slow them up on the up

side and prevent our seeing very far ahead, making passing nervewracking.

The first one gave me a scare because I wasn’t ready for it. Now I hold tight

T

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and brace for them. No danger. Just a shock wave that hits you. It is hotter

and dryer.

At Herreid John disappears for a drink while Sylvia and Chris and I find

some shade in a park and try to rest. It isn’t restful. A change has taken place

and I don’t know quite what it is. The streets of this town are broad, much

broader than they need be, and there is a pallor of dust in the air. Empty lots

here and there between the buildings have weeds growing in them. The

sheet metal equipment sheds and water tower are like those of previous

towns but more spread out. Everything is more run-down and mechanicallooking,

and sort of randomly located. Gradually I see what it is. Nobody is

concerned anymore about tidily conserving space. The land isn’t valuable

anymore. We are in a Western town.

We have lunch of hamburgers and malteds at an A & W place in Mobridge,

cruise down a heavily trafficked main street and then there it is, at the

bottom of the hill, the Missouri. All that moving water is strange, banked by

grass hills that hardly get any water at all. I turn around and glance at Chris

but he doesn’t seem to be particularly interested in it.

We coast down the hill, clunk onto the bridge and across we go, watching

the river through the girders moving by rhythmically, and then we are on the

other side.

We climb a long, long hill into another kind of country.

The fences are really all gone now. No brush, no trees. The sweep of the

hills is so great John’s motorcycle looks like an ant up ahead moving through

the green slopes. Above the slopes outcroppings of rocks stand out

overhead at the tops of the bluffs.

It all has a natural tidiness. If it were abandoned land there would be a

chewed-up, scruffy look, with chunks of old foundation concrete, scraps of

painted sheet metal and wire, weeds that had gotten in where the sod was

broken up for whatever little enterprise was attempted. None of that here.

Not kept up, just never messed up in the first place. It’s just the way it

always must have been. Reservation land.

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There’s no friendly motorcycle mechanic on the other side of those rocks

and I’m wondering if we’re ready for this. If anything goes wrong now we’re

in real trouble.

I check the engine temperature with my hand. It’s reassuringly cool. I put in

the clutch and let it coast for a second in order to hear it idling. Something

sounds funny and I do it again. It takes a while to figure out that it’s not the

engine at all. There’s an echo from the bluff ahead that lingers after the

throttle is closed. Funny. I do this two or three times. Chris wonders what’s

wrong and I have him listen to the echo. No comment from him.

This old engine has a nickels-and-dimes sound to it. As if there were a lot of

loose change flying around inside. Sounds awful, but it’s just normal valve

clatter. Once you get used to that sound and learn to expect it, you

automatically hear any difference. If you don’t hear any, that’s good.

I tried to get John interested in that sound once but it was hopeless. All he

heard was noise and all he saw was the machine and me with greasy tools in

my hands, nothing else. That didn’t work.

He didn’t really see what was going on and was not interested enough to

find out. He isn’t so interested in what things mean as in what they are.

That’s quite important, that he sees things this way. It took me a long time

to see this difference and it’s important for the Chautauqua that I make this

difference clear.

I was so baffled by his refusal even to think about any mechanical subject I

kept searching for ways to clue him to the whole thing but didn’t know

where to start.

I thought I would wait until something went wrong with his machine and

then I would help him fix it and that way get him into it, but I goofed that

one myself because I didn’t understand this difference in the way he looked

at things.

His handlebars had started slipping. Not badly, he said, just a little when you

shoved hard on them. I warned him not to use his adjustable wrench on the

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tightening nuts. It was likely to damage the chrome and start small rust

spots. He agreed to use my metric sockets and box-ends.

When he brought his motorcycle over I got my wrenches out but then

noticed that no amount of tightening would stop the slippage, because the

ends of the collars were pinched shut.

“You’re going to have to shim those out,” I said.

“What’s shim?”

“It’s a thin, flat strip of metal. You just slip it around the handlebar under

the collar there and it will open up the collar to where you can tighten it

again. You use shims like that to make adjustments in all kinds of machines.”

“Oh,” he said. He was getting interested. “Good. Where do you buy them?”

“I’ve got some right here,” I said gleefully, holding up a can of beer in my

hand.

He didn’t understand for a moment. Then he said, “What, the can?”

“Sure,” I said, “best shim stock in the world.”

I thought this was pretty clever myself. Save him a trip to God knows where

to get shim stock. Save him time. Save him money.

But to my surprise he didn’t see the cleverness of this at all. In fact he got

noticeably haughty about the whole thing. Pretty soon he was dodging and

filling with all kinds of excuses and, before I realized what his real attitude

was, we had decided not to fix the handlebars after all.

As far as I know those handlebars are still loose. And I believe now that he

was actually offended at the time. I had had the nerve to propose repair of

his new eighteen-hundred dollar BMW, the pride of a half-century of

German mechanical finesse, with a piece of old beer can!

Ach, du lieber!

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Since then we have had very few conversations about motorcycle

maintenance. None, now that I think of it.

You push it any further and suddenly you are angry, without knowing why.

I should say, to explain this, that beer-can aluminum is soft and sticky, as

metals go. Perfect for the application. Aluminum doesn’t oxidize in wet

weather…or, more precisely, it always has a thin layer of oxide that prevents

any further oxidation. Also perfect.

In other words, any true German mechanic, with a half-century of

mechanical finesse behind him, would have concluded that this particular

solution to this particular technical problem was perfect.

For a while I thought what I should have done was sneak over to the

workbench, cut a shim from the beer can, remove the printing and then

come back and tell him we were in luck, it was the last one I had, specially

imported from Germany. That would have done it. A special shim from the

private stock of Baron Alfred Krupp, who had to sell it at a great sacrifice.

Then he would have gone gaga over it.

That Krupp’s-private-shim fantasy gratified me for a while, but then it wore

off and I saw it was just being vindictive. In its place grew that old feeling

I’ve talked about before, a feeling that there’s something bigger involved

than is apparent on the surface. You follow these little discrepancies long

enough and they sometimes open up into huge revelations. There was just a

feeling on my part that this was something a little bigger than I wanted to

take on without thinking about it, and I turned instead to my usual habit of

trying to extract causes and effects to see what was involved that could

possibly lead to such an impasse between John’s view of that lovely shim

and my own. This comes up all the time in mechanical work. A hang-up.

You just sit and stare and think, and search randomly for new information,

and go away and come back again, and after a while the unseen factors start

to emerge.

What emerged in vague form at first and then in sharper outline was the

explanation that I had been seeing that shim in a kind of intellectual,

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rational, cerebral way in which the scientific properties of the metal were all

that counted. John was going at it immediately and intuitively, grooving on

it. I was going at it in terms of underlying form. He was going at it in terms

of immediate appearance. I was seeing what the shim meant. He was seeing

what the shim was. That’s how I arrived at that distinction. And when you

see what the shim is,in this case, it’s depressing. Who likes to think of a

beautiful precision machine fixed with an old hunk of junk?

I guess I forgot to mention John is a musician, a drummer, who works with

groups all over town and makes a pretty fair income from it. I suppose he

just thinks about everything the way he thinks about drumming…which is to

say he doesn’t really think about it at all. He just does it. Is with it. He just

responded to fixing his motorcycle with a beer can the way he would

respond to someone dragging the beat while he was playing. It just did a big

thud with him and that was it. He didn’t want any part of it.

At first this difference seemed fairly minor, but then it grew — and grew –

and grew — until I began to see why I missed it. Some things you miss

because they’re so tiny you overlook them. But some things you don’t see

because they’re so huge. We were both looking at the same thing, seeing the

same thing, talking about the same thing, thinking about the same thing,

except he was looking, seeing, talking and thinking from a completely

different dimension.

He really does care about technology. It’s just that in this other dimension he

gets all screwed up and is rebuffed by it. It just won’t swing for him. He tries

to swing it without any rational premeditation and botches it and botches it

and botches it and after so many botches gives up and just kind of puts a

blanket curse on that whole nuts-and-bolts scene. He will not or cannot

believe there is anything in this world for which grooving is not the way to

go.

That’s the dimension he’s in. The groovy dimension. I’m being awfully

square talking about all this mechanical stuff all the time. It’s all just parts

and relationships and analyses and syntheses and figuring things out and it

isn’t really here. It’s somewhere else, which thinks it’s here, but’s a million

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miles away. This is what it’s all about. He’s on this dimensional difference

which underlay much of the cultural changes of the sixties, I think, and is

still in the process of reshaping our whole national outlook on things. The

“generation gap” has been a result of it. The names “beat” and “hip” grew

out of it. Now it’s become apparent that this dimension isn’t a fad that’s

going to go away next year or the year after. It’s here to stay because it’s a

very serious and important way of looking at things that looks incompatible

with reason and order and responsibility but actually is not. Now we are

down to the root of things.

My legs have become so stiff they are aching. I hold them out one at a time

and turn my foot as far to the left and to the right as it will go to stretch the

leg. It helps, but then the other muscles get tired from holding the legs out.

What we have here is a conflict of visions of reality. The world as you see it

right here, right now, is reality, regardless of what the scientists say it might

be. That’s the way John sees it. But the world as revealed by its scientific

discoveries is also reality, regardless of how it may appear, and people in

John’s dimension are going to have to do more than just ignore it if they

want to hang on to their vision of reality. John will discover this if his points

burn out.

That’s really why he got upset that day when he couldn’t get his engine

started. It was an intrusion on his reality. It just blew a hole right through his

whole groovy way of looking at things and he would not face up to it

because it seemed to threaten his whole life style. In a way he was

experiencing the same sort of anger scientific people have sometimes about

abstract art, or at least used to have. That didn’t fit their life style either.

What you’ve got here, really, are two realities, one of immediate artistic

appearance and one of underlying scientific explanation, and they don’t

match and they don’t fit and they don’t really have much of anything to do

with one another. That’s quite a situation. You might say there’s a little problem here.