(lst_pst1) Lila by Robert Pirsig

(written long time ago - 19 Jun 2005 1 am as per text)

Lila is a sequel to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Pirsig develops a complete and integrated philosophy-metaphysics in it - the Metaphysics of Quality. A book like this takes time to settle down. In my experience it is in the second and sometimes the third reading that I can say, I have learned and abstracted from such books. I am writing this after my first read itself. I think soon, I will tend to disagree with much if not most of this.

I am writing this just after seeing a movie 'All the President's Men' at 1 o'clock in the night of the 19th of June 2k5. The movie deals with the Watergate scandal. And something which has again caught on the public imagination as the 'Deep Throat' has revealed himself. The film stars Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman as the two young Washington Post reporters who unearthed the scam of the Republican committee for the Re-election of President Richard Nixon tapping the phones and spying on the Democrats.

Robert Redford is someone who appears in the book.

Redford, for the uninitiated is a Hollywood superstar who has made three generations of American women go weak in their knees. He is an Oscar winning director, a traditional supporter of the Democrats and a staunch environmentalist. (He had even threatened to emigrate from America if George W. Bush won his re-electing bid.- don't know what happened to that).

One of Redford's biggest hits was 'Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)'. Redford's plain speaking cowboy would obtain cult status. Pirsig 'uses' Redford to explain two things - the plain-speaking American male characteristic and 'celebrity-hood' in the modern society.

He says and with not little anthropological evidence that the American white frontier man's plain speaking characteristic is derived from the American Indian. The way that an American male views a European - 'all flair and no substance', is the same way that the American male is viewed by an American Indian. And the way that the American male is viewed by a European 'uncivilized' is the same that the American male views the Indian.

That celebrity business is another whole phenomenon that's related to Indian-European conflict of values. Pirsig says its a peculiarly American phenomenon to catapult people suddenly into celebrity, lavish praise and wealth upon them, and then, at the moment they at last become convinced of their worth, try to destroy them. At their feet and then at their throat. He thought the reason was that in America you're supposed to be socially superior like a European and socially equal like an Indian at the same time. It doesn't matter that these goals are contradictory.