Transcript
Brett McKay:
Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness Podcast. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of the book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig. It’s a peculiar book, especially for a bestseller. Not a lot of it is actually about Zen or motorcycle maintenance, combines a travel log, a father-son story, and philosophical musings, and the structure of its narration makes it hard to follow. Thus, it’s the kind of book people often buy, start, and then put down without ever finishing. That’s initially what happened to Mark Richardson, an author and automotive journalist who was born in the UK, but has lived most of his life in Canada. When the book finally clicked for Mark, he was so inspired by it that he actually undertook Pirsig’s motorcycle pilgrimage himself. Mark shares that story in Zen and Now, which intersperses stories from his own road trip with an exploration of Pirsig’s life and famous book.
If you wanted to read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, but haven’t been able to get into it, today Mark will offer an introduction to what it’s all about. We discussed Pirsig’s ideas on the metaphysics of quality and our relationship to technology and how he tried to combine the ethos of Eastern and Western thought into a unified philosophy of living. We also get into why Mark wanted to recreate Pirsig’s road trip, the joys of traveling by motorcycle, what Mark learned along the way. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at awim.is/zen.
Mark Richardson, welcome to the show.
Mark Richardson:
Hey, good to be here, Brett.
Brett McKay:
So it is the 50th anniversary of the classic bestselling book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It’s one of those books I’m sure everyone has heard of, maybe they even own a copy or know someone owns a copy. But back in the early 2000s, you recreated the famous motorcycle trip that the author of that book, Robert Pirsig, took with his son Chris back in 1968. Let’s start off talking about Zen in the art of motorcycle maintenance and Pirsig. Who was Robert Pirsig?
Mark Richardson:
The easy answer is he was a nut bar and a lunatic. He was actually certified insane earlier in his life as a complete crackpot, but he was also a teacher. He was a writer, a lovely writer as it turns out. He was a philosopher. He was a genius. He had an IQ of more than 170, and he had really been through the ringer in his life. He’d spent time in a sanitarium. He had gone through electroshock therapy. He tried to kill his wife or put a gun to her head at one point, was not good, but he sort of came through it all and ended up going on this motorcycle trip in the second half of his life or second third of his life and wrote a book about it. And that’s the book that I got to read.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. This book, Zen of the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, it’s about a trip. It’s about a relationship between him and his son. It’s also about his mental illness.
Mark Richardson:
Yeah, very much so.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. And then it’s also about philosophy. And he was a genius. He graduated, he went to college when he was 15, right?
Mark Richardson:
Yes. And it was too young for him actually. He flunked out. He only lasted a year or so because he was sort of in too soon. He was too immature for that.
Brett McKay:
And then he also, he went to India, I believe, to study Eastern philosophy as well.
Mark Richardson:
Yeah, he went to India to study philosophy. He says he didn’t really study it. He just sort of loafed around India for a year or so. He went to Korea, he was in the army and he was posted there. And that gave him an interest in Eastern thought, I guess, the spirituality of that. That’s where he first experienced it. Then he tried to bring it all back to the Midwest. He was from Minneapolis and tried to bring it back there and give it some kind of use and couldn’t really find a use for it. I mean, there he is trying to make a living. He’s trying to be spiritual. He’s trying to think about Zen and all of this stuff, but he also has to make a living. He’s trying to be a journalist and he’s not really succeeding at any of it.
Brett McKay:
And then he also did some teaching and he attended the University of Chicago and he had some serious conflict there. At the time, the University of Chicago is very famous for their great books program with Mortimer Adler. And Pirsig wasn’t a big fan of it and he bumped heads with the higher ups there.
Mark Richardson:
Yeah, big time. It’s one of the, I’ll call it crescendo in the book where he describes that. He describes having an intellectual argument with the chairman of the philosophy department. And he says that he came out the winner, but of course we’ve only really got Pirsig’s side for that. He was attending classes, I think in the University of Illinois. No, sorry, he was teaching classes at the University of Illinois. He was teaching rhetoric and he was trying to improve himself by going to the University of Chicago. And this is kind of where it all got to be all a bit much for him and he ended up having a breakdown because of it.
Brett McKay:
Do we know what kind of breakdown he had?
Mark Richardson:
It was schizophrenia. He was diagnosed as a schizophrenic.
Brett McKay:
And then he had electroshock therapy, but it was against his will. His wife and his dad signed off on it and he got taken away and…
Mark Richardson:
And it took them a long time to do that. They did not want to do it. Actually, his wife kind of wanted to do it because she was the one who was in the bad relationship, but his father had to be the one who actually signed off and his father refused to do it right up until the time that Robert Pirsig put the gun to his wife’s head. And then his dad said, “Okay, enough is enough.”
Brett McKay:
And what happened to his mental health after that treatment?
Mark Richardson:
Well, it does seem to have improved. I mean, he had a bunch of treatments over the course of about a year. He was then released from the asylum and he came home and he tried to live a sort of a quiet life and it was a very boring life. And as he says, he was sort of falling into middle-aged decrepitude, right? He sort of bought a place, he had a horse, that sort of thing. He was getting fat and he was still trying to find some sort of use for his life, some sort of value for his life. One thing led to another and well, actually he found motorcycles because he had had a pilot’s license and that got taken away from him when he went into the asylum. So when he came out of the asylum, he sort of liked to do something like flying, do something with his wife, his young children, and got into motorcycles.
And that gave him the opportunity to travel around and do things and see things.
Brett McKay:
So what was the purpose of this trip that he went on with his son? They go from Minnesota to San Francisco. Was there a bigger purpose or did Pirsig just want to get out and have a trip?
Mark Richardson:
It was a little bit of everything. His wife pushed him, his wife Nancy, she pushed him at the time to sort of spend time with the kids. The kids were a little troubled in their own ways. They were feeling separated from their father who was this kind of tortured genius guy. So she pressed him to go off and spend alone time with them. So this particular trip was with young Chris, who was 11 years old at the time, which people these days say is way too young to have a child on a motorcycle. I don’t agree with that, but I took my own kid around at 11 years old because he could reach the footbags and all was good. But he’d been on sort of shorter trips before and away trips, trips where they had stayed out overnight, but this was to be the big trip.
He basically had the summer off and he was spending time with his kid and he had another son, a younger son called Ted who went to stay with his aunt during this time and his mother was traveling. Nancy was traveling. So they just sort of went off and did their own thing and this was supposed to be kind of a bonding experience for young Chris and Bob Pirsig.
Brett McKay:
And so this route they took, it went basically through the Northern United States. It went from Minnesota through the Dakotas, through Montana, Idaho, Oregon.
Mark Richardson:
Well, you see, nobody takes this route, right? If you’re going to do that, you’re going to go through Sturgis, you’re going to see Mount Rushmore, you’re going to do all this stuff. The nice thing that struck me about this particular route is that it really is the road less traveled. It’s got some wonderful scenery along the way. You get to go through the Baretooth Pass, which is astonishing between Montana and Wyoming. You get to ride down the Lola Road in Idaho. It’s got hundreds of turns for the next hundred miles. It’s a wonderful motorcycling road and all of this stuff. And they just sort of found their way across. The first half of the trip to Bozeman, Montana, he traveled with a couple of his friends, the Sutherlands, and then he stayed with some other friends, some friends that he had made when he was teaching in Montana State College in Bozeman.
They stayed there for, I think it was about five days. The Sutherlands turned home and Pirsig and his son carried on out west.
Brett McKay:
So when most people think of taking a cross country road trip on a motorcycle, they’re thinking like a cruiser, a Harley or maybe one those BMWs. Pirsig didn’t take that. What kind of motorcycle did he use?
Mark Richardson:
Well, those bikes just didn’t exist back then. This was in 1968 and Pirsig just took his own bike, which happened to be in the garage. It was a couple of years old. It was a 1966 Honda Superhawk. It was a CB77 Superhawk, 250 CC, I think it was, and made like 24 horsepower. You’d never think to do something like that these days on a bike like that. But hey, it carried him. It carried him and his son and all their luggage and he maintained it well along the way, so it got them all the way to the other end.
Brett McKay:
So Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance isn’t just a travel memoir. It is a philosophy book. In fact, it’s been called the greatest selling philosophy book in American history. What philosophical themes does Pirsig explore in this book?
Mark Richardson:
Well, he explores all of them really. He came up with his own philosophical ideal, which he called the metaphysics of quality. And it’s kind of like, well, it’s putting both together. It’s putting East and West together. I mean, you look at the title of the book, Zen, which is Eastern Spirituality, and you got the art, which is the artistic merits to everything, and then motorcycle maintenance, which is the science of everything. And if you go into philosophy a little bit, and to be honest with you, I was not a philosopher when I read this book. I just wanted to read about motorcycles, but it did get me thinking about it. And I had done Philosophy 101 at university and that was kind of it. But it showed me that the Greeks, the Greek philosophers were very practical, your Plato, your Aristotle, they tended to have reason and emotion and they prioritized reason.
And your Eastern philosophers were very spiritual. So this is kind of Pirsig’s way of putting the two of them together, saying, “Well, you can’t have one without the other. You can’t have the yin without the yang.” And so he came up with what he called his metaphysics, his basic principles, if you will, of quality, what makes something good and what makes it the best that it could be.
Brett McKay:
So what does Pirsig mean by quality?
Mark Richardson:
People have done PhDs on this stuff.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. There’s actually, there’s a guidebook – I think it was written by a bunch of Jesuits.
Mark Richardson:
Well, one of them was a Jesuit. And yeah, it goes into the whole Eastern ideal, the whole Western ideal. I read it. I don’t know that I absorbed all of it. I’m not that smart. The story goes that Pirsig went to teach English and he would’ve been, I can’t think, I suppose he would’ve been in his 30s. He went to teach English at Montana State College, which was kind of like a second tier college at the time in Bozeman, Montana. And one of the profs said, “I hope you’re teaching quality in your course.” And this is a guy who’s kind of on the edge a little bit mentally, right? He has not yet had his breakdown. He’s still trying to figure out why am I here? And whereas, well, I don’t know about you, but if somebody said, “I hope you’re teaching quality in your motorcycle course,” I’d say, “Yeah, it’s great quality. It’s the best there is,” or whatever. But Pirsig took that as a question of, “Well, what is quality? How am I to teach quality? How do I know when I’ve found quality?” And so he went on from there and tried to figure out what quality was. And I don’t know that he ever actually truly succeeded. I think that quality for Pirsig is, well, as my kid says to me, he says, “I’m the guy who told him that if a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well. And so the idea is to just try to find the best you can out of any particular situation.” Maybe that’s what quality is for Pirsig.
Brett McKay:
It’s kind of simplistic, isn’t it?
Mark Richardson:
It is. Yeah.
Brett McKay:
It’s just like what makes something good? What makes something excellent? And Pirsig says it’s hard. He poses questions to his students and they’d be like, “Well, we just know.” It’s like, “Okay, well tell me what makes this thing good.” And then he’d do this exercise where he’d read essays that the students wrote and he’d have the students rank them. And he’s like, “Well, how did you determine which one was the best one?” And none of them could ever answer him.
Mark Richardson:
And then he started refusing to grade his students because he said, “What is a grade? A grade is just a thing that’s just the scientific reason behind something when there’s more to it than that. Just because I say that this is an A doesn’t mean it actually is an A. What does it take to make it an A?” Now these days, of course, in universities and the like, it’s very clear what deserves an A, what deserves a B, whatever. But Pirsig would say, “Well, there’s a lot more to it than that. It cannot be so simplistic.” And it’s the art of balancing your emotion with your reason, if you will. I mean, Pirsig broke it all down into what he called classical and romantic. And actually later he called it dynamic and static. There’s a second book that he wrote, Lila, which gets a lot more into his philosophy.
Have you read that book?
Brett McKay:
I have not read that one, but I want to now that I’ve finished Zen in the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
Mark Richardson:
Well, if you’re looking for motorcycles, there’s no motorcycles in there. There are boats. He bought a boat and he talks about sailing his boat down the canal to New York. And he uses this opportunity just as he used the motorcycle trip to explain his metaphysics of quality, he used the boat trip in Lila to round it all out, if you will, and sort of get to what he was trying to say. But it wasn’t a terribly popular book because it was very philosophical. And to be honest with you, I think it was missing Chris. I think a lot of people loved Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance because of the father-son relationship, and there was none of that in Lila.
Brett McKay:
Going back to quality, one thing that Pirsig did to figure this out, he went to the ancient Greeks, and I think he hit on this idea that the ancient Greeks had of arete – excellence. He said, “That’s what I’m talking about when it comes to quality. And it’s just something is good.” But then he started, this is when he got into trouble at the University of Chicago because he made the argument that Plato and Aristotle, they missed the mark when they were talking about Arete. And he said they tried to capture arete in this definition. And he says, “Once you do that, you basically eliminate the idea of quality or excellence.” And he said, “Instead, we had to look to the pre-Socratic philosophers, where they talked about life is just change and in flux. And even the sophist, this is where he got in big trouble. He said the sophist who are the object of scorn and Plato’s dialogues, he says, “No, actually they got it right. They were right and Plato was wrong.”
Mark Richardson:
Yeah. The sophists were very practical, realistic types, right? They came before Aristotle and Plato and the like, and there were lots of arguments in philosophy class all about that. I’m afraid much of that is beyond me. That’s like philosophy 201 or whatever.
Brett McKay:
And then another thing that he brought in that Eastern aspect, he said, quality is like the idea of the Dao or Dharma. You can’t really define it, but it’s good and excellent. You know it when you see it. We somehow were able to respond to it. Did this search for quality or trying to figure out what quality is, is that what kind of exacerbated his mental illness?
Mark Richardson:
Yeah. He couldn’t stop questioning it. He never did find what. I mean, in that stage of his life, he just couldn’t come up with an answer. It drove him literally mad. He was trying to quantify something that couldn’t be quantified, right? And he never did do it, certainly not at that point. I’m not sure, as I said earlier, I’m not sure he ever did, but he at least gave us ways that we can find to look for it ourselves because everybody’s quality is different. My quality is different from your quality, I would say, and not a good bad thing or a bad thing or whatever. It’s just that we’re different people, so we have different virtues and qualities.
Brett McKay:
He also, in this book, develops his ideas about man’s relationship to technology. What did Pirsig think about technology?
Mark Richardson:
Well, that’s a very big part of the whole book, which is the whole technological thing to us. Persek was actually a very technically proficient guy. He had a job where he would write instruction manuals. He was writing instruction manuals for ballistics for nuclear weapons. I mean, he knew what he was doing with this sort of thing. He was into computers before anybody was into computers. And yet he also decried technology because he said, look, we’ve just become too reliant upon our technology, always assuming that the technology will see us through, and yet technology has many, many faults and we cannot rely on that if we’re to be the best that we can be. We have to go beyond the technology to find our own.
Brett McKay:
Well, an argument he makes too is that part of the problem with modern people’s relationship with technology is that they’re alienated from it. Technology is this thing that they interact with, but they don’t actually know what’s going on with it. And that’s why we get frustrated with it or we kind of see technology as this evil in our lives. And he uses the Sutherlands in his book to capture that idea that he thinks a lot of people have with technology. It’s like they like it, but they don’t really like it.
Mark Richardson:
Yeah. John and Sylvia Sutherland were his friends and the friends of the family. Their kids were friends with their boys, that sort of thing. And John was the kind of guy who would buy a new motorcycle every year and he wanted to have the latest and greatest stuff, but he could never really quite understand how it all was, and he really didn’t care because it worked fine for him. And so if his BMW broke down, well, he’d take it to the shop and somebody at the shop would fix it and that was that. Whereas Pirsig would say, “Well, the person fixing it at the shop is not necessarily doing the best job that they can. You’re much better off if you know how to work on your own BMW and fix it yourself. You’ll have a better machine for it.” One of the things that drove Pirsig a little bit crazy was that John Sutherland had a dripping tap back at his house and he had just never fixed it.
He just hadn’t got around to it. And it wasn’t necessarily that he didn’t know how to, it was just he couldn’t be bothered. He would call in a plumber at some point if it was to get to the point that drove him crazy, but he never did. And yet Pirsig couldn’t sit there in his house and listen to a tap drip without it affecting him in some way.
Brett McKay:
I think Pirsig understood that technology can be your friend if you engage with it. It can be a tool, but you have to not just be a tool to technology. You have to actually know what’s going on behind with all the gears and things, and then you can have this appreciation for it. As I was reading this, it reminded me a lot of the writing and work that Matthew Crawford has done. Have you read any of his stuff?
Mark Richardson:
Yes. Yeah, I have.
Brett McKay:
Shopclass as SoulCraft. He has the same sort of idea that we’re alienated from our tools and alienated from our technology. And we might be maybe not happier, but more engaged with life and not feel technology as this oppressive thing if we actually took the time to engage with it. And Persik says it takes patience. It takes zen. It takes sort of a steadfastness in order for you to do that. You can’t just expect the technology to work the way you want it. You have to work with it.
Mark Richardson:
One of the things that he does say in the middle of the book somewhere is that you got to watch out with technology because, well, his friends, I think they had a rotisserie and they had to put it together. And his point was that when you put together a rotisserie, don’t just read the instructions and go from there and bolt it together. You should actually take a look at everything, take a moment to analyze it, figure out why everything works the way it does, and then build the rotisserie the way that you think it should be built best, because that’s probably better than the original design. The original design was just done by somebody who was paid to do it and do it probably in a hurry. Whereas if you take the time to think something through, you can probably do a better job of it.
And I actually met somebody who wrote instruction manuals for rotisseries about a couple of months ago, and I put that story to them and they were very insulted by it. So it was an interesting conversation.
Brett McKay:
And as I was reading that, his ideas about technology and our relationship with it and that we should be more engaged with it instead of passive consumers of technology, I wonder what he would think about artificial intelligence and social media platforms. I think if Pirsig was around today, he would be one of those indie hackers, right? He would have a computer, but he’d have his own server at his house where he created his own operator. He would probably use Linux and just be able to control everything. He wouldn’t go into these platforms like Facebook or Twitter. I think he’d want to be able to control what he did with his computer life.
Mark Richardson:
He would. And yet, I mean, I wrote some letters and I wrote them on my computer and he sent me back typewritten letters. He used a typewriter to reply to my letters. And sometimes he would just type within my letters between the paragraphs with his responses, which got shorter and more cursed as time went on because he didn’t really like to be bothered by anybody. He wanted to be reclusive. But this is the beauty of the motorcycle, right? We come back to the motorcycle that it’s something that you can sit on and you can go for a ride and that’s fine. But if you actually know how to maintain it and make it into the best motorcycle it can be, then you can take more pleasure from your motorcycle ride.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. And he also saw that motorcycle maintenance is a way to practice quality or try to achieve quality. He was very fastidious about how you change a tire. You got to soap it and you got to do things the right way. And maintaining your own motorcycle allows you to practice quality.
Mark Richardson:
Yeah. He didn’t always do it right, but he did try. And I think that he’s the kind of person that you probably call a fuddy duddy these days. You take forever over something, whereas you just want to get it out of the way so you can move on to the next thing. You have an appointment in 10 minutes or whatever, and yet Pirsig would still be there sort of soaping down the tire, getting it just right, just smoothly. And yet more often than not, he’d mess it up. Sometimes he’d make the most egregious errors, the most basic errors because he was so busy trying to think of the big picture and the why are we here stuff, he would miss out on all little tiny stuff, which he freely admits to in his book. Like the time that he went off on a motorcycle ride with his son Chris, I think it was the year before this one.
It was a shorter ride or something and they ran out of gas and he didn’t realize that they’d run out of gas because he could shake the tank and hear the gas slopping around in there. And so in the pouring rain, he was trying to figure out why his bike had stopped and he couldn’t figure it out. And because he could hear the gas in the tank slapping about, he knew he had gas. He hadn’t figured out the most basic thing, which is to just switch it onto the reserve tank because you got a little bit of gas left in the bottom there. That’s actually one of those things where technology’s taken over for us a little bit now because I don’t think you get a motorcycle now with a reserve tank you have to manually switch over. Maybe that’s an old thing. My bike has that, but I think most do not.
Brett McKay:
He also writes in the book about this idea of gumption and gumption traps. He talks a lot about this and actually I really enjoyed this section. What did Pirsig mean by gumption and what are gumption traps?
Mark Richardson:
Pirsig said that he liked the word gumption because it’s kind of an old-fashioned word and he’s an old-fashioned guy, but gumption is drive. It’s not just your drive, the thing that pushes you. It’s not just your impetus. There’s optimism in there. There’s faith in there. You know it’s going to get done. You just want to do something. But then for every person who has gumption, they also have the probability of gumption traps, which are setbacks. There’s actually there’s two types of traps. There’s setbacks and there’s hangups. And so you get started on something, you’re all keen to do it, but then you get set back or hung up by something. I’ll give you an example. Yesterday I had to write a review of a motorcycle that I’d written recently and I kind of liked this bike. I thought it was a good bike and I went into writing the story and sitting down to write the story.
I’ve got the lead, I’ve got the whole thing. I’ve got lots of gumption going. I’m all set. I’ve got the drive for it. But then I realized that I didn’t know all the pricing of it, and that’s an important part of the story. Is it actually worth the money? So I sort of ground a bit to a halt because I didn’t know how much it cost to have this extra and that extra, which I’d appreciated on the bike. I couldn’t find it online. I had to write into people. I had to wait for a reply. And that kind of took away my gumption, right? That was a setback. And then the hangup comes because you’re waiting for it and then you just sort of get bored by it. You get laziness is another hangup. I wasn’t lazy in this. I don’t like to think, but I was a little bored by the whole thing thinking, you know what?
I mean, this bike has all the same stuff that a lot of other bikes does. It just does it very well. I’ve written this story before and so I sort of lost interest. I lost some of my gumption for this. And so normally what a lot of people would do then is they just sort of stop. But Pirsig said that what you got to do then is take a break, clear your head, but don’t give up on the gumption. You got to stick with it because it was there in the first place for a reason, so stick with it. So you can do a few things to clear your head of this stuff. Somebody once suggested just taking a nap is a good thing or doing a jigsaw puzzle or just doing something totally different that gets your mind off it. The thing that I like to do is go for a ride on my bike.
I’ll just take off for half an hour. And when I came back, hey, the company had replied with the pricing. I knew where I needed to go to the story and I banged it all out in a half an hour.
Brett McKay:
So yeah, setbacks, you could probably categorize as external factors, right? You’re missing a piece or you run out of gas or it could be something physical. It’d be something tangible, like your computer goes flat because the battery goes out, something like that. A hangup is less tangible than that. A hangup is in your own head where you just don’t know where to go to next. He talks about some of the hangups. You mentioned boredom is one. Anxiety is one. Egotism, you’re thinking you know what you’re doing, but you really don’t. Impatience, that was another one he talked about a lot is you got to be patient. And if you become impatient, then you’re going to fall into a gumption trap.
Mark Richardson:
And impatience is a big thing today and even more so today than it ever was back in 1968 or 74 when the book was published, that sort of thing. We have so many distractions now that help to make us impatient. And we also assume that, hey, we’ll find out right away. I mean, think about it. When Pirsig was doing his thing, if he needed to find out pricing, then he could maybe have phoned somebody and hoped to get an answer by the next morning. Whereas I bang out an email and I assume that I’ll get it within five minutes. And if I don’t, I’m impatient and it gives me a hangup.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. As I was reading that section about gumption traps and setbacks, it made me think of my own attempts when I’ve tried to DIY stuff, whether I’m fixing something around my house. One that I often fall into is where you find out you’re missing a part. And so you go to the Home Depot and then you buy the part you think you need and then you come back and it’s like, no, this is the wrong part. It’s either go back, that’s a gumption trap where that’s where I’m like, I want to give up on this thing because it’s just so annoying. He actually has a solution to that. Just bring the piece, bring the part with you that you’re trying to replace so you can know exactly what you need.
Mark Richardson:
That’s actually something I picked up on it and I take the piece now to Home Depot or wherever, right? And it makes life a lot easier that way.
Brett McKay:
Okay. And the book itself, the way it’s written, when you first started reading it, it can be kind of confusing. It’s a memoir. It’s also a travel log. It’s this philosophical discourse. And then it’s also talking about his mental illness. And there’s two narrators in this thing, basically. There’s the narrator who is Pirsig after the electroshock treatment, and he’s kind of just this flat, he’s kind of a jerk. And he’s the guy riding the motorcycle. And then there’s Phaedras who comes in every now and then. And this is Pirsig before the electroshock treatment. And Phaedras had his problems obviously with the mental illness, but he was more of a decent guy.
Mark Richardson:
I think this is one of the reasons why people get hung up on the book. You start reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance with plenty of gumption. Somebody’s given it to you and it’s got a great reputation and it sounds good. And then you have the setback that you can’t remember where you put the book, but then you finally find it and you read it and then you are hung up on it because you don’t quite know what he’s saying. You’re not following this. You though it was a motorcycle book. That’s how I came into it. I thought it was a motorcycle book. I was a teenager at the time, which is why I wanted to read it. And after 50 pages, it stops being a motorcycle book completely and it becomes a philosophical treatise and I wasn’t expecting that. But it’s also a little complicated to understand because yeah, he writes through two separate narrators and he also uses, you don’t really realize it at the time, but he uses the technique of the unreliable narrator.
You’re not quite sure which one of the two to follow. Also, I mean, in the original book, it was all written in the same font and even Pirsig himself, certainly the publisher recognized that this was making it a difficult book for people to follow. So by the time he got around to, I think it was the 10th anniversary book, they started writing and certainly at the end when one of the narrators was talking, it would be in one font and the other was in the other font just to make it a little easier to follow through. What I found was when I first read it, I was completely confused. Hang on, who’s talking here? What’s happening? I don’t understand this. And so I put it down for something easier to read. And then the next time I sort of pressed through a little bit more and got a hundred pages in and I was still horribly confused.
And this is one reason why I wrote my own book because when I did finally read Zen of the Art and it all made sense, I found it such a rewarding read that I figured that just with a little bit of a primer, a little bit of expectation of knowing what you’re going into, then people will find it much simpler to read and much more straightforward. And hopefully they have done.
Brett McKay:
So when the book came out, so the trip was in 1968. The book came out in 74. It was a smash success and it’s kind of weird that it was because it was rejected by all these different publishers and there was just this one guy who went to the slush pile at the publishing company. This might be something. What do you think was going on? Why do you think this weird book about motorcycles and metaphysics resonated with Americans at the time?
Mark Richardson:
And it really did resonate with Americans. It was an unexpected success. I mean, Pirsig always expected it to be successful and was very pleased at its success, but it came out of nowhere. And this was in 1974. And the best explanation I could think of is that America at the time was going through all kinds of troubles and a lot of people had found Eastern spirituality and didn’t quite know what to do with that Eastern spirituality. And Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance gave them a sort of a metaphysics, gave them the basic principles that bonded the practical reasoning of the Greeks to the, if you will, the airy fairy spirituality of the East and gave them a grounding to show them, look, this is what you want, this is the way that you feel, so this is the way to make it happen.
Brett McKay:
So you picked up the book when you were 15 because you were into motorcycles, read a few pages like, “Ah, don’t like this.” And then a while later you finished it. And before the conversation between you and I, I was talking about, I had the same thing. I actually bought this book back in 2013, started reading it and I was like, “I don’t know about this.” And I stopped reading it. Finally got around to reading the whole thing in preparation for our conversation. After you read this book, why did you feel like you had to go on this pilgrimage where you recreated Pirsigs? Was something going on in your life where you felt like you needed to do this?
Mark Richardson:
Yeah, very much. I was 41 years old and I can date that exactly because I went on vacation with my family. I have two sons who are quite young. They would’ve been three and four years old, that sort of age at the time. And they were a handful for my wife and I, and I had a busy job and I went on vacation and I was going to stay at a cottage by a lake. I just literally looked at my bookshelf to figure out why I got to take some books and I thought I might as well try and take Zen in the Art because it’s got to be a good book. I’ve just been missing something. I don’t know. Everybody seems to like this book. Let me give it a try. So I lay in a hammock while my kids played on the beach around me at this lake and read the book.
And this time when I’d get hung up on all this Aristotle and Plato and Socrates and stuff that I really wasn’t familiar with, I’d just sort of skip ahead and say, yeah, yeah, yeah anyway and get back to the motorcycle bits or the travel loggy bits. And I finished it actually on my 41st birthday lying in a hammock beside that lake. And I thought, oh, that’s who Phaedras was. That’s why this makes sense now. So I literally didn’t pause, didn’t miss a beat. I turned back to page one, read it again, read all the philosophy and it all suddenly made sense now because I had a context in which to put this book. And then when I finished that, I thought, well, that has a lot to say. And what’s more, it’s a pretty good road trip. And it’s the sort of road trip that most people wouldn’t do because as I said at the beginning, it’s kind of like the road less traveled.
And I’d kind of like to do that. And I’d like to get away for a bit. I need some me time, some mark time. I hate to say it, but I just want to just have some time on my own to get my head in the right place very much as Pirsig did. Why don’t I recreate this ride? Why don’t I follow this? It did him some good. So maybe it’ll do me some good too. And other than anything else, it’ll be a damn good motorcycle ride. And also, if I can persuade my wife that I might be able to write a book out of this, then she’ll give me the time off because it took like a month. It’s a two week trip out there and a couple of weeks back. And so she did, she went along with that. And I determined that if I was to do this trip, then I would do it the following summer at around about the same time that Pirsig did.
And I would end on my birthday in San Francisco the day I turned 42, which is what happened. And then I sat down to write the book and that took another four years.
Brett McKay:
How did you figure out the route that Pirsig took? Because in the book he gives mentions of some towns you went through, but you actually somehow were able to figure out he took this road and you stopped at this particular gas station. How did you figure that stuff out?
Mark Richardson:
Well, we mentioned at the beginning, the guidebook, there is actually a list at the beginning of that book that shows the names of the towns that he mentions. Sometimes Pirsig is very detailed and he’s always detailed in his description. He’s not always detailed about where he is. So you don’t quite know which town this one is, but you know some of the towns around because he mentions them. Anyway, I got a rough route from that book so I could sort of trace it across on probably a paper map at the time. And then there were other people, as I discovered as I started chipping away at this before I would take the ride, there were Pirsig pilgrims. There were people who had done this before me, lots of people who’d done this before me. They hadn’t necessarily done the whole ride, but they’d done bits of the ride and they’d stayed in touch through various means, whatever.
And there was one guy in particular, a professor called Henry Gurr, and he had done the drive himself in his car a year or so earlier. And he hadn’t figured out everything, but he’d figured out most of it. So then I had 95% of it, 90% of it, and I sort of winged it from there to figure out. I read the book as I went along and I could see, oh, well he must have gone this way or that way. Some of the roads didn’t exist anymore, but a lot of them, almost all of them did. And everything was, because it’s the Midwest, hadn’t really changed very much and was very much like it was in the original book.
Brett McKay:
What kind of motorcycle did you take on your trip?
Mark Richardson:
Yeah, I took the worst possible motorcycle. I was actually, because my job, I get to ride motorcycles and drive cars and things. And when I mentioned this to various manufacturers, they all wanted to give me a machine to ride. And I said, “You know what? I have to do this on my own bike because my own bike is simple and easy for me to maintain.” It’s not very comfortable, but it’s a Suzuki DR-600, which was actually before even the 650, which is the more common bike now. And it’s a big dual purpose thumper with a Kickstarter and a carburetor. And frankly, everything started breaking on the bike as soon as I set off. And I was never quite sure if I was going to get to the other end or not, but it did give me the opportunity to practice a lot of motorcycle maintenance, which was a very valuable thing for me for the whole book.
Brett McKay:
One of the things that I found arresting in the Zen in the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and as well as in your book is the description of what it’s like to drive through these state highways and country roads in the high plains and in the mountains on a motorcycle. How did Pirsig describe that and what was your experience like and how is it different from driving a car?
Mark Richardson:
Well, can I just quote from the book?
Brett McKay:
Yeah.
Mark Richardson:
Great. Motorcyclists use this all the time, this quote to try to explain the appeal of riding a motorcycle. They may or may not know where it came from, but it gets used all the time. So this is on the second page of his book. And he says, “You see things vacationing on a motorcycle in a way that is completely different from any other. In a car, you’re always in a compartment. And because you’re used to it, you don’t realize that through that car window, everything you see is just more TV. You’re a passive observer and it’s all moving by you boringly in a frame.” And then he says, “On a cycle, a motorcycle, the frame is gone. You’re completely in contact with it all. You’re in the scene. You’re not just watching it anymore. And the sense of presence is overwhelming. That concrete whizzing by five inches below your foot is the real thing. The same stuff you walk on, it’s right there. It’s so blurred you can’t focus on it, yet you can put your foot down and touch it anytime. And the whole thing, the whole experience is never removed from immediate consciousness.” And I don’t think I’ve ever seen any better description of the appeal of riding a motorcycle than that.
Brett McKay:
Along your trip, you meet a whole bunch of different people and you talk about your experiences with them. You actually met some of the characters that were in the original Zen in the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. One of them was Jenny DeWees. She’s passed away, I imagine.
Mark Richardson:
She was pretty old. Yeah,
Brett McKay:
She has. So she was alive and you got to stay at her place. So she knew Pirsig. What insights into Pirsig did you get from her?
Mark Richardson:
Well, I was lucky when I did my trip and the timing of my trip that obviously a lot of people are getting older at this point, but I was able to actually meet people who had been a part of it. I met with John Sutherland who had been a part of it. He’s since passed away. And I met with Jenny DeWeese. Her husband, Robert, had passed away many years earlier, but they had hosted Robert Pirsig when he stayed with them in Bozeman at their sort of ranch house just south of Bozeman. This is where he reached with Sutherlands and then the Sutherlands stayed a day or two and then they headed back and he carried on from there. And I sat down with Jenny and her whole family and she was able to let me know that Robert Pirsig was the real thing. She had known him in Bozeman before he had left to go out to Chicago.
And what he had to say was genuine from his heart, that he honestly believed and was searching for the answers when they had this conversation at their ranch house.
Brett McKay:
And as you mentioned earlier, when they were at the Deweese’s, they were there for about five days. During this time, him and Chris, Pirsig and his son Chris, they went on this backpacking trip into the mountains and it’s a pivotal scene in the book. What did this scene teach us about the relationship between Pirsig and his son?
Mark Richardson:
Well, it told us that it wasn’t very good. Don’t forget that on a motorcycle, it’s a quite different thing for a passenger. The passenger’s sitting on the back, the passenger can’t even see the face of the person who’s riding the bike. And in this case, the passenger, Chris, can’t see the face, so he doesn’t know if the person is Phaedrus or his dad. That’s a different matter. Finally, they get to stop at the Deweese’s. The Sutherlands leave and they’ve got a couple more days before they’re going to carry on out west. So they go for a hike up into the mountains. They’re spending time together actually beside each other rather than one behind the other. And this sort of gives them an opportunity to get to know each other a little better. But frankly, Bob Pirsig was a lousy father. I don’t think he was a very good father at all.
He wasn’t sympathetic toward his son in a way that I would be or that most people would credit these days. And it showed us, they go for this hike to the top of the mountain. They never quite reached the top of the mountain. That’s actually very important that they try and get there, but they argue, or at least he argues with his son. His son is being a rambunctious kid and he just can’t really take it. And he starts to question whether his son should even continue with him on the rest of the journey. And it sort of starts to go downhill from there. When they’re with the Sutherlands for the first half of the trip, and the trip is basically two weeks within the middle of the two weeks is five days with the Deweeses. The first half of the trip, the Sutherlands are there to counteract, to bounce things off.
They’re there to keep everything ticking along. But the second half of the trip when they head off into Idaho and out to the West Coast, that’s when it’s just the father and the son together, and that’s when everything starts to break down. And yeah, the hike in the mountains is the beginning of that.
Brett McKay:
So yeah, there’s this tension between Pirsig and his son. Yeah. So for the rest of the trip, it was just sort of on and off. The son would get mad and Pirsig really didn’t understand why he was mad. And towards the end, you see Pirsig, you can’t tell if it’s like. This is when the two narrators start to blend a lot.
So they start getting near to San Francisco and on this foggy morning in this random field high above the Pacific, father and son, so it’s Chris and Pirsig have it out. And the narrator, the new Pirsig recedes, like the post electroshock therapy Pirsig recedes and Phaedrus, the original Pirsig comes back metaphorically.
Mark Richardson:
The father and the son are finally reunited. And I tend to think of it as the father, son and Holy Ghost with the whole spirituality of it all. But the book ends with them riding south towards San Francisco and saying things are going to get better from now on. They don’t actually make it all the way to San Francisco. Of course, I did. And San Francisco is pivotal for the whole story of Pirsig because it was in San Francisco 11 years later that Chris Pirsig was murdered.
Brett McKay:
It was really incredibly tragic. So the reason why Chris was in San Francisco, he’s studying at some Zen monastery. And in the book, I don’t know if I’m reading this wrong, but it sounds like Pirsig saw in Chris some of the same mental illness that he had. This could be a problem. And in fact, that’s what happened. Chris had a lot of problems in life, and so they sent him to the Zen Monastery to maybe help him out, but that’s where he ended up getting killed. It was just this random murder.
Mark Richardson:
Apparently, it seems to be. I tried to get to the bottom of whether it really was a random murder or whether he owed money or something like that, and I never succeeded, and it really wasn’t worth it, and I didn’t really want to know the answer anyway. But it does seem to be just a random stabbing outside the Zen monastery in the Haite district of San Francisco, and Chris died right there on the sidewalk.
Brett McKay:
What’d that do to Pirsig?
Mark Richardson:
It’s difficult to say. He has one account. His wife has another account. It shattered the man. There’s no doubt of that. He didn’t know what to do about the whole thing. He missed Chris terribly. He felt guilty about everything. I mean, Chris was out there because he was basically avoiding jail time. Chris had got into big time trouble with drugs, as had his brother Ted, and they had managed to negotiate that Chris would go off to the Zen monastery instead of serving any kind of remand time in correctional center. Chris was coming through. You could see a future here now for Chris. You could see that it was all actually going to happen. Chris was 22 years old and he just bought a motorcycle and all of this stuff. It was finally coming together and then it was taken away. And this broke Robert Pirsig as it would break me, and I’m sure it would break you and I hope it would break practically everybody.
But he came through it. He became even more reclusive for this. He had been reclusive before. Now he was super reclusive and he found his way through it and he was with his second wife at this point, a woman named Wendy, who he had met after the book was published. They had a daughter and he believed that his daughter was kind of like the reincarnation, or not the reincarnation, but his daughter was the successor as it were to Chris. It made him, I believe, into a better father for it because he knew where to better focus his energies this time around.
Brett McKay:
Did you experience any epiphanies about life when you finished your Zen trip?
Mark Richardson:
Well, I said earlier that I had all these issues of being overwhelmed by my family, of being a young dad with just wanting some time for myself. I realized how much I did value my family, my own family, and that I did want to come back home and I did want to be with them and to spend my life with them. I mean, you can just say, “Well, the grass is always greener on the other side.” It’s a little bit more than that. But I realized from having that time, it’s kind of like having the hangup, right? The hangup with life. We just need a break from things. I said earlier that I would go off for a ride on my motorcycle just to shake my head out. This was kind of a month long shaking out of my head in order to realize where I best belonged, which was at home.
Brett McKay:
Why do you think the book still continues to sell well? Do you think it’s the philosophy? Is it the motorcycles? Is it the story about father and son? What do you think it is?
Mark Richardson:
Well, I think it has a reputation now. It’s still got motorcycles in there. It’s got a father-son story, and I think that the philosophy itself hasn’t changed it at all. In fact, it’s probably even more relevant now than it was back then. The philosophy is about balancing technology with spirituality, and we need more and more of that as we spend more time on our phones and we spend more time with things that are even more complicated. I mean, I can’t fix my other motorcycle now. I don’t know how to do that. It’s a very complicated bike, but I can still fix my old bike, and this makes me a happier and better person for it, I think. I think that the lesson of Zen of the Art of motorcycle maintenance has never gone away, that you need to find that balance between the two, and especially now as there’s so many more draws on our attention and so much easier to get distracted.
Brett McKay:
Well, Mark, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the books we’ve discussed and your work?
Mark Richardson:
If you want to know more about Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, probably the best place to go is there’s a website, RobertPirsig.org. That’s the Robert Pirsig Association. In fact, they’re even going to have a gathering because as you mentioned right at the beginning, this is the 50th anniversary this year of the publication of the book. There’s a gathering in Minneapolis at the beginning of July. I’m going to be there. They’re trying to organize a ride that’ll go all the way from Minneapolis to San Francisco. You can just go along for a day like I’ll do, just the first day, or you can do a few days or go all the way if you want to, whatever. You can go to robertpercig.org and find out more about that sort of thing there. If you want to know more about me and my book, I have my own website.
I’m up in Canada, so it’s a CA thing and it’s markrichardson.ca.
Brett McKay:
Well, Mark, thanks so much time. It’s been a pleasure.
Mark Richardson:
Hey, Brett, the pleasure is mine. Thank you.
Brett McKay:
My guest today was Mark Richardson. He’s the author of the book, Zen & Now. It’s available on amazon.com. You can find more information about his work at his website, markrichardson.ca. Until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to the podcast, but to put what you’ve heard into action.
