Chautauqua
Part I
chapter 1
What is in mind is a sort of Chautauqua...that's the only name I can
thinkof for it...like the traveling tent-show Chautauquas that used to
moveacross America, this America, the one that we are now in, an
old-timeseries of popular talks intended to edify and entertain, improve
the mindand bring culture and enlightenment to the ears and thoughts
of the hearer.The Chautauquas were pushed aside by faster-paced
radio, movies and TV, andit seems to me the change was not entirely
an improvement. Perhaps becauseof these changes the stream of
national consciousness moves faster now, andis broader, but it seems to
run less deep. The old channels cannot containit and in its search for
new ones there seems to be growing havoc anddestruction along its
banks. In this Chautauqua I would like not to cut anynew channels of
consciousness but simply dig deeper into old ones that havebecome
silted in with the debris of thoughts grown stale and platitudes toooften
repeated. ``What's new?'' is an interesting and broadening
eternalquestion, but one which, if pursued exclusively, results only in
an endlessparade of trivia and fashion, the silt of tomorrow. I would
like, instead,to be concerned with the question ``What is best?,'' a
question which cutsdeeply rather than broadly, a question whose
answers tend to move the siltdownstream. There are eras of human
history in which the channels ofthought have been too deeply cut and
no change was possible, and nothingnew ever happened, and ``best''
was a matter of dogma, but that is not thesituation now. Now the
stream of our common consciousness seems to beobliterating its own
banks, losing its central direction and purpose,flooding the lowlands,
disconnecting and isolating the highlands and to noparticular purpose
other than the wasteful fulfillment of its own internal momentum. Some
channel deepening seems called for. (7-8)
The Chautauqua that is in mind for this trip was inspired by these two
[John and Sylvia] many months ago and perhaps, although I don't
know, is related to a certain undercurrent of disharmony between them. (9)
The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits
of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at
the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower. To think otherwise is
to demean the Buddha...which is to demean oneself. That is what I
want to talk about in this Chautauqua. (16)
chapter 2
The question why comes back again and again and has become a major
reason for wanting to deliver this Chautauqua. Why did they [the
mechanics] butcher it so? These were not people running away from
technology, like John and Sylvia. These were the technologists
themselves. (23)
chapter 4
Every Chautauqua should have a list somewhere of valuable things to
remember that can be kept in some safe place for times of future need
and inspiration. (34)
Sometimes we have spent a whole evening reading and talking and
discovered we have only covered two or three pages. It's a form of
reading done a century ago -- when Chautauquas were popular. Unless
you've tried it you can't imagine how pleasant it is to do it this way.
(36)
chapter 5
He [John] 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. (45)
chapter 6
I've decided today's Chautauqua will begin to explore Phædrus' world.
(57)
I think to myself, That's the problem, all right, where to start. To
reach him you have to back up and back up, and the further back you
go, the further back you see you have to go, until what looked like a
small problem of communication turns into a major philosophic
inquiry. That, I suppose, is why the Chautauqua. (59)
Since the basic ideas for this Chautauqua were taken from him there
will be no real deviation, only an enlargement that may make the
Chautauqua more understandable than if it were presented in a purely
abstract way. The purpose of the enlargement is not to argue for him,
certainly not to praise him. The purpose is to bury him...forever. (60)


Part II

chapter 9
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. (92)

chapter 12
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. ((120)

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. (121)

chapter 13
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. (135)

chapter 14
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. (148-9)

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.'' (153)


Part III

chapter 16
Later, when I developed more confidence in my immunity to his
affliction, I became interested in this debris in a more positive way and
began to jot down the fragments amorphically, that is, without regard
to form, in the order in which they occurred to me. Many of these
amorphic statements have been supplied by friends. There are
thousands of them now, and although only a small portion of them can
fit into this Chautauqua, this Chautauqua is clearly based on them.
(169)

chapter 17
But of course, without the top you can't have any sides. It's the top
that defines the sides. So on we go -- we have a long way -- no hurry
-- just one step after the next -- with a little Chautauqua for
entertainment . . . . Mental reflection is so much more interesting than
TV it's a shame more people don't switch over to it. They probably
think what they hear is unimportant but it never is. (183)

chapter 18
I don't know if I've got any more Chautauqua left in me today. My
head gets fuzzy about this time in the afternoon -- maybe I can
establish just one overview and let it go for today -- . (199)

chapter 19
Time to get on with the Chautauqua and the second wave of
crystallization, the metaphysical one. (205)

chapter 20
I don't know what to make of all this weird talk at night except that it's
not good. For either of us. It sounds like all the strain of this cycling
and camping and Chautauqua and all these old places has a bad effect
on me that appears at night. I want to clear out of here as fast as
possible. (220)

I think we've gone as far along Phædrus' path as we want to go in this
Chautauqua too. I want to leave his path now. I've given him all due
credit for what he thought and said and wrote, and now I want to
develop on my own some of the ideas he neglected to pursue. The title
of this Chautauqua is ``Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,''
not ``Zen and the Art of Mountain Climbing,'' and there are no
motorcycles on the tops of mountains, and in my opinion very little
Zen. Zen is the ``spirit of the valley,'' not the mountaintop. The only
Zen you find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there.
Let's get out of here. (220)

I suppose what I ought to do in the Chautauqua is just point out in
summary form the direction Phædrus went, without evaluation, and
then get on with my own thing. (221)

chapter 21
What I want to do now in the Chautauqua is get away from intellectual
abstractions of an extremely general nature and into some solid,
practical, day-to-day information, and I'm not quite sure how to go
about this. (229)

To discover a metaphysical relationship of Quality and the Buddha at
some mountaintop of personal experience is very spectacular. And very
unimportant. If that were all this Chautauqua was about I should be
dismissed. What's important is the relevance of such a discovery to all
the valleys of this world, and all the dull, dreary jobs and monotonous
years that await all of us in them. (229)

The dictum that Science and its offspring, technology, are ``value
free,'' that is, ``quality free,'' has got to go. It's that ``value freedom''
that underlines the death-force effect to which attention was brought
early in the Chautauqua. Tomorrow I intend to start on that. (231)

chapter 22
I want to talk today about a person whom Phædrus never heard of, but
whose writings I've studied quite extensively in preparation for this
Chautauqua. Unlike Phædrus, this man was an international celebrity at
thirty-five, a living legend at fifty-eight, whom Bertrand Russell has
described as ``by general agreement, the most eminent scientific man of
his generation.'' He was an astronomer, a physicist, a mathematician
and philosopher all in one. His name was Jules Henri Poincaré. (232)

Everything is so different now without the Sutherlands...so lonely. If
you'll excuse me I'll just talk Chautauqua now, until the loneliness
goes away. (236)

chapter 24
Long Chautauqua today. One that I've been looking forward to during
the whole trip. 
 Second gear and then third. Not too fast on these curves.
Beautiful sunlight on these forests. 
 There has been a haze, a backup problem in this Chautauqua so
far; I talked about caring the first day and then realized I couldn't say
anything meaningful about caring until its inverse side, Quality, is
understood. (247)


Part IV

chapter 29
There are political reactionaries who've been saying something close to
this for years. I'm not one of them, but to the extent they're talking
about real individual worth and not just an excuse for giving more
money to the rich, they're right. We do need a return to individual
integrity, self-reliance and old-fashioned gumption. We really do. I
hope that in this Chautauqua some directions have been pointed to.
(323)

chapter 31
I can imitate the father he's supposed to have, but subconsciously, at
the Quality level, he sees through it and knows his real father isn't
here. In all this Chautauqua talk there's been more than a touch of
hypocrisy. Advice is given again and again to eliminate subject-object
duality, when the biggest duality of all, the duality between me and
him, remains unfaced. A mind divided against itself. (363)