Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (18 page)

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 dhyna, 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.