Chris and I have had a good night's sleep and this morning have packed the backpacks carefully, and now have been going up the mountainside for about an hour. The forest here at the bottom of the canyon is mostly pine, with a few aspen and broad-leafed shrubs. Steep canyon walls rise way above us on both sides. Occasionally the trail opens into a patch of sunlight and grass that edges the canyon stream, but soon it reenters the deep shade of the pines. The earth of the trail is covered with a soft springy duff of pine needles. It is very quiet here.
Mountains like these and travelers in the mountains and events that happen to them here are found not only in Zen literature but in the tales of every major religion. The allegory of a physical mountain for the spiritual one that stands between each soul and its goal is an easy and natural one to make. Like those in the valley behind us, most people stand in sight of the spiritual mountains all their lives and never enter them, being content to listen to others who have been there and thus avoid the hardships. Some travel into the mountains accompanied by experienced guides who know the best and least dangerous routes by which they arrive at their destination. Still others, inexperienced and untrusting, attempt to make their own routes. Few of these are successful, but occasionally some, by sheer will and luck and grace, do make it. Once there they become more aware than any of the others that there's no single or fixed number of routes. There are as many routes as there are individual souls.
I want to talk now about Phædrus' exploration into the meaning of the term Quality, an exploration which he saw as a route through the mountains of the spirit. As best I can puzzle it out, there were two distinct phases.
In the first phase he made no attempt at a rigid, systematic definition of what he was talking about. This was a happy, fulfilling and creative phase. It lasted most of the time he taught at the school back in the valley behind us.
The second phase emerged as a result of normal intellectual criticism of his lack of definition of what he was talking about. In this phase he made systematic, rigid statements about what Quality is, and worked out an enormous hierarchic structure of thought to support them. He literally had to move heaven and earth to arrive at this systematic understanding and when he was done felt he'd achieved an explanation of existence and our consciousness of it better than any that had existed before.
If it was truly a new route over the mountain it's certainly a needed one. For more than three centuries now the old routes common in this hemisphere have been undercut and almost washed out by the natural erosion and change of the shape of the mountain wrought by scientific truth. The early climbers established paths that were on firm ground with an accessibility that appealed to all, but today the Western routes are all but closed because of dogmatic inflexibility in the face of change. To doubt the literal meaning of the words of Jesus or Moses incurs hostility from most people, but it's just a fact that if Jesus or Moses were to appear today, unidentified, with the same message he spoke many years ago, his mental stability would be challenged. This isn't because what Jesus or Moses said was untrue or because modern society is in error but simply because the route they chose to reveal to others has lost relevance and comprehensibility. ``Heaven above'' fades from meaning when space-age consciousness asks, Where is ``above''? But the fact that the old routes have tended, because of language rigidity, to lose their everyday meaning and become almost closed doesn't mean that the mountain is no longer there. It's there and will be there as long as consciousness exists.
Phædrus' second metaphysical phase was a total disaster. Before the electrodes were attached to his head he'd lost everything tangible: money, property, children; even his rights as a citizen had been taken away from him by order of the court. All he had left was his one crazy lone dream of Quality, a map of a route across the mountain, for which he had sacrificed everything. Then, after the electrodes were attached, he lost that.
I will never know all that was in his head at that time, nor will anyone else. What's left now is just fragments: debris, scattered notes, which can be pieced together but which leave huge areas unexplained.
When I first discovered this debris I felt like some agricultural peasant near the outskirts of, say, Athens, who occasionally and without much surprise plows up stones that have strange designs on them. I knew that these were part of some larger overall design that had existed in the past, but it was far beyond my comprehension. At first I deliberately avoided them, paid no attention to them because I knew these stones had caused some kind of trouble I should avoid. But I could see even then that they were a part of a huge structure of thought and I was curious about it in a secret sort of way.
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.
It is probably a long way from what he thought. When trying to recreate a whole pattern by deduction from fragments I am bound to commit errors and put down inconsistencies, for which I must ask some indulgence. In many cases the fragments are ambiguous; a number of different conclusions could be drawn. If something is wrong there's a good chance that the error isn't in what he thought but in my reconstruction of it, and a better reconstruction can later be found.
A whirr sounds and a partridge disappears through the trees.
``Did you see it?'' says Chris.
``Yes,'' I say back.
``What was it?''
``A partridge.''
``How do you know?''
``They rock back and forth like that when they fly,'' I say. I'm not sure of this but it sounds right. ``They stay close to the ground too.''
``Oh,'' says Chris and we continue hiking. The rays of the sun create a cathedral effect through the pines.
Today now I want to take up the first phase of his journey into Quality, the nonmetaphysical phase, and this will be pleasant. It's nice to start journeys pleasantly, even when you know they won't end that way. Using his class notes as reference material I want to reconstruct the way in which Quality became a working concept for him in the teaching of rhetoric. His second phase, the metaphysical one, was tenuous and speculative, but this first phase, in which he simply taught rhetoric, was by all accounts solid and pragmatic and probably deserves to be judged on its own merits, independently of the second phase.
He'd been innovating extensively. He'd been having trouble with students who had nothing to say. At first he thought it was laziness but later it became apparent that it wasn't. They just couldn't think of anything to say.
One of them, a girl with strong-lensed glasses, wanted to write a five-hundred-word essay about the United States. He was used to the sinking feeling that comes from statements like this, and suggested without disparagement that she narrow it down to just Bozeman.
When the paper came due she didn't have it and was quite upset. She had tried and tried but she just couldn't think of anything to say.
He had already discussed her with her previous instructors and they'd confirmed his impressions of her. She was very serious, disciplined and hardworking, but extremely dull. Not a spark of creativity in her anywhere. Her eyes, behind the thick-lensed glasses, were the eyes of a drudge. She wasn't bluffing him, she really couldn't think of anything to say, and was upset by her inability to do as she was told.
It just stumped him. Now he couldn't think of anything to say. A silence occurred, and then a peculiar answer: ``Narrow it down to the main street of Bozeman.'' It was a stroke of insight.
She nodded dutifully and went out. But just before her next class she came back in real distress, tears this time, distress that had obviously been there for a long time. She still couldn't think of anything to say, and couldn't understand why, if she couldn't think of anything about all of Bozeman, she should be able to think of something about just one street.
He was furious. ``You're not looking!'' he said. A memory came back of his own dismissal from the University for having too much to say. For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses. The more you look the more you see. She really wasn't looking and yet somehow didn't understand this.
He told her angrily, ``Narrow it down to the front of one building on the main street of Bozeman. The Opera House. Start with the upper left-hand brick.''
Her eyes, behind the thick-lensed glasses, opened wide. She came in the next class with a puzzled look and handed him a five-thousand-word essay on the front of the Opera House on the main street of Bozeman, Montana. ``I sat in the hamburger stand across the street,'' she said, ``and started writing about the first brick, and the second brick, and then by the third brick it all started to come and I couldn't stop. They thought I was crazy, and they kept kidding me, but here it all is. I don't understand it.''
Neither did he, but on long walks through the streets of town he thought about it and concluded she was evidently stopped with the same kind of blockage that had paralyzed him on his first day of teaching. She was blocked because she was trying to repeat, in her writing, things she had already heard, just as on the first day he had tried to repeat things he had already decided to say. She couldn't think of anything to write about Bozeman because she couldn't recall anything she had heard worth repeating. She was strangely unaware that she could look and see freshly for herself, as she wrote, without primary regard for what had been said before. The narrowing down to one brick destroyed the blockage because it was so obvious she had to do some original and direct seeing.
He experimented further. In one class he had everyone write all hour about the back of his thumb. Everyone gave him funny looks at the beginning of the hour, but everyone did it, and there wasn't a single complaint about ``nothing to say.''
In another class he changed the subject from the thumb to a coin, and got a full hour's writing from every student. In other classes it was the same. Some asked, ``Do you have to write about both sides?'' Once they got into the idea of seeing directly for themselves they also saw there was no limit to the amount they could say. It was a confidence-building assignment too, because what they wrote, even though seemingly trivial, was nevertheless their own thing, not a mimicking of someone else's. Classes where he used that coin exercise were always less balky and more interested.
As a result of his experiments he concluded that imitation was a real evil that had to be broken before real rhetoric teaching could begin. This imitation seemed to be an external compulsion. Little children didn't have it. It seemed to come later on, possibly as a result of school itself.
That sounded right, and the more he thought about it the more right it sounded. Schools teach you to imitate. If you don't imitate what the teacher wants you get a bad grade. Here, in college, it was more sophisticated, of course; you were supposed to imitate the teacher in such a way as to convince the teacher you were not imitating, but taking the essence of the instruction and going ahead with it on your own. That got you A's. Originality on the other hand could get you anything...from A to F. The whole grading system cautioned against it.
He discussed this with a professor of psychology who lived next door to him, an extremely imaginative teacher, who said, ``Right. Eliminate the whole degree-and-grading system and then you'll get real education.''
Phædrus thought about this, and when weeks later a very bright student couldn't think of a subject for a term paper, it was still on his mind, so he gave it to her as a topic. She didn't like the topic at first, but agreed to take it anyway.
Within a week she was talking about it to everyone, and within two weeks had worked up a superb paper. The class she delivered it to didn't have the advantage of two weeks to think about the subject, however, and was quite hostile to the whole idea of eliminating grades and degrees. This didn't slow her down at all. Her tone took on an old-time religious fervor. She begged the other students to listen, to understand this was really right. ``I'm not saying this for him,'' she said and glanced at Phædrus. ``It's for you.''
Her pleading tone, her religious fervor, greatly impressed him, along with the fact that her college entrance examinations had placed her in the upper one percent of the class. During the next quarter, when teaching ``persuasive writing,'' he chose this topic as a ``demonstrator,'' a piece of persuasive writing he worked up by himself, day by day, in front of and with the help of the class.
He used the demonstrator to avoid talking in terms of principles of composition, all of which he had deep doubts about. He felt that by exposing classes to his own sentences as he made them, with all the misgivings and hang-ups and erasures, he would give a more honest picture of what writing was like than by spending class time picking nits in completed student work or holding up the completed work of masters for emulation. This time he developed the argument that the whole grading system and degree should be eliminated, and to make it something that truly involved the students in what they were hearing, he withheld all grades during the quarter.
Just up above the top of the ridge the snow can be seen now. On foot it's many days away though. The rocks below it are too steep for a direct hiking climb, particularly with the heavy loads we are carrying, and Chris is way too young for any kind of ropes-and- pitons stuff. We must cross over the forested ridge we are now approaching, enter another canyon, follow it to its end and then come back at an upward angle along to the ridge. Three days hard to the snow. Four days easy. If we don't show up in nine, DeWeese will start looking for us.
We stop for a rest, sit down and brace against a tree so that we don't topple over backward from the packs. After a while I reach around over my shoulder, take the machete from the top of my pack and hand it to Chris.
``See those two aspens over there? The straight ones? At the edge?'' I point to them. ``Cut those down about a foot from the ground.''
``Why?''
``We'll need them later for hiking sticks and tent poles.''
Chris takes the machete, starts to rise but then settles back again. ``You cut them,'' he says.
So I take the machete and go over and cut the poles. They both cut neatly in one swing, except for the final strip of bark, which I sever with the back hook of the machete. Up in the rocks you need the poles for balancing and the pine up above is no good for poles, and this is about the last of the aspen here. It bothers me a little though that Chris is turning down work. Not a good sign in the mountains.
A short rest and then on we go. It'll take a while to get used to this load. There's a negative reaction to all the weight. As we go on though, it'll become more natural -- .
Phædrus' argument for the abolition of the degree-and- grading system produced a nonplussed or negative reaction in all but a few students at first, since it seemed, on first judgment, to destroy the whole University system. One student laid it wide open when she said with complete candor, ``Of course you can't eliminate the degree and grading system. After all, that's what we're here for.''
She spoke the complete truth. The idea that the majority of students attend a university for an education independent of the degree and grades is a little hypocrisy everyone is happier not to expose. Occasionally some students do arrive for an education but rote and the mechanical nature of the institution soon converts them to a less idealistic attitude.
The demonstrator was an argument that elimination of grades and degrees would destroy this hypocrisy. Rather than deal with generalities it dealt with the specific career of an imaginary student who more or less typified what was found in the classroom, a student completely conditioned to work for a grade rather than for the knowledge the grade was supposed to represent.
Such a student, the demonstrator hypothesized, would go to his first class, get his first assignment and probably do it out of habit. He might go to his second and third as well. But eventually the novelty of the course would wear off and, because his academic life was not his only life, the pressure of other obligations or desires would create circumstances where he just would not be able to get an assignment in.
Since there was no degree or grading system he would incur no penalty for this. Subsequent lectures which presumed he'd completed the assignment might be a little more difficult to understand, however, and this difficulty, in turn, might weaken his interest to a point where the next assignment, which he would find quite hard, would also be dropped. Again no penalty.
In time his weaker and weaker understanding of what the lectures were about would make it more and more difficult for him to pay attention in class. Eventually he would see he wasn't learning much; and facing the continual pressure of outside obligations, he would stop studying, feel guilty about this and stop attending class. Again, no penalty would be attached.
But what had happened? The student, with no hard feelings on anybody's part, would have flunked himself out. Good! This is what should have happened. He wasn't there for a real education in the first place and had no real business there at all. A large amount of money and effort had been saved and there would be no stigma of failure and ruin to haunt him the rest of his life. No bridges had been burned.
The student's biggest problem was a slave mentality which had been built into him by years of carrot-and- whip grading, a mule mentality which said, ``If you don't whip me, I won't work.'' He didn't get whipped. He didn't work. And the cart of civilization, which he supposedly was being trained to pull, was just going to have to creak along a little slower without him.
This is a tragedy, however, only if you presume that the cart of civilization, ``the system,'' is pulled by mules. This is a common, vocational, ``location'' point of view, but it's not the Church attitude.
The Church attitude is that civilization, or ``the system'' or ``society'' or whatever you want to call it, is best served not by mules but by free men. The purpose of abolishing grades and degrees is not to punish mules or to get rid of them but to provide an environment in which that mule can turn into a free man.
The hypothetical student, still a mule, would drift around for a while. He would get another kind of education quite as valuable as the one he'd abandoned, in what used to be called the ``school of hard knocks.'' Instead of wasting money and time as a high-status mule, he would now have to get a job as a low-status mule, maybe as a mechanic. Actually his real status would go up. He would be making a contribution for a change. Maybe that's what he would do for the rest of his life. Maybe he'd found his level. But don't count on it.
In time...six months; five years, perhaps...a change could easily begin to take place. He would become less and less satisfied with a kind of dumb, day-to-day shopwork. His creative intelligence, stifled by too much theory and too many grades in college, would now become reawakened by the boredom of the shop. Thousands of hours of frustrating mechanical problems would have made him more interested in machine design. He would like to design machinery himself. He'd think he could do a better job. He would try modifying a few engines, meet with success, look for more success, but feel blocked because he didn't have the theoretical information. He would discover that when before he felt stupid because of his lack of interest in theoretical information, he'd now find a brand of theoretical information which he'd have a lot of respect for, namely, mechanical engineering.
So he would come back to our degreeless and gradeless school, but with a difference. He'd no longer be a grade-motivated person. He'd be a knowledge-motivated person. He would need no external pushing to learn. His push would come from inside. He'd be a free man. He wouldn't need a lot of discipline to shape him up. In fact, if the instructors assigned him were slacking on the job he would be likely to shape them up by asking rude questions. He'd be there to learn something, would be paying to learn something and they'd better come up with it.
Motivation of this sort, once it catches hold, is a ferocious force, and in the gradeless, degreeless institution where our student would find himself, he wouldn't stop with rote engineering information. Physics and mathematics were going to come within his sphere of interest because he'd see he needed them. Metallurgy and electrical engineering would come up for attention. And, in the process of intellectual maturing that these abstract studies gave him, he would he likely to branch out into other theoretical areas that weren't directly related to machines but had become a part of a newer larger goal. This larger goal wouldn't be the imitation of education in Universities today, glossed over and concealed by grades and degrees that give the appearance of something happening when, in fact, almost nothing is going on. It would be the real thing.
Such was Phædrus' demonstrator, his unpopular argument, and he worked on it all quarter long, building it up and modifying it, arguing for it, defending it. All quarter long papers would go back to the students with comments but no grades, although the grades were entered in a book.
As I said before, at first almost everyone was sort of nonplussed. The majority probably figured they were stuck with some idealist who thought removal of grades would make them happier and thus work harder, when it was obvious that without grades everyone would just loaf. Many of the students with A records in previous quarters were contemptuous and angry at first, but because of their acquired self-discipline went ahead and did the work anyway. The B students and high-C students missed some of the early assignments or turned in sloppy work. Many of the low-C and D students didn't even show up for class. At this time another teacher asked him what he was going to do about this lack of response.
``Outwait them,'' he said.
His lack of harshness puzzled the students at first, then made them suspicious. Some began to ask sarcastic questions. These received soft answers and the lectures and speeches proceeded as usual, except with no grades.
Then a hoped-for phenomenon began. During the third or fourth week some of the A students began to get nervous and started to turn in superb work and hang around after class with questions that fished for some indication as to how they were doing. The B and high-C students began to notice this and work a little and bring up the quality of their papers to a more usual level. The low C, D and future F's began to show up for class just to see what was going on.
After midquarter an even more hoped-for phenomenon took place. The A-rated students lost their nervousness and became active participants in everything that went on with a friendliness that was uncommon in a grade-getting class. At this point the B and C students were in a panic, and turned in stuff that looked as though they'd spent hours of painstaking work on it. The D's and F's turned in satisfactory assignments.
In the final weeks of the quarter, a time when normally everyone knows what his grade will be and just sits back half asleep, Phædrus was getting a kind of class participation that made other teachers take notice. The B's and C's had joined the A's in friendly free-for-all discussion that made the class seem like a successful party. Only the D's and F's sat frozen in their chairs, in a complete internal panic.
The phenomenon of relaxation and friendliness was explained later by a couple of students who told him, ``A lot of us got together outside of class to try to figure out how to beat this system. Everyone decided the best way was just to figure you were going to fail and then go ahead and do what you could anyway. Then you start to relax. Otherwise you go out of your mind!''
The students added that once you got used to it it wasn't so bad, you were more interested in the subject matter, but repeated that it wasn't easy to get used to.
At the end of the quarter the students were asked to write an essay evaluating the system. None of them knew at the time of writing what his or her grade would be. Fifty-four percent opposed it. Thirty-seven percent favored it. Nine percent were neutral.
On the basis of one man, one vote, the system was very unpopular. The majority of students definitely wanted their grades as they went along. But when Phædrus broke down the returns according to the grades that were in his book...and the grades were not out of line with grades predicted by previous classes and entrance evaluations...another story was told. The A students were 2 to 1 in favor of the system. The B and C students were evenly divided. And the D's and F's were unanimously opposed!
This surprising result supported a hunch he had had for a long time: that the brighter, more serious students were the least desirous of grades, possibly because they were more interested in the subject matter of the course, whereas the dull or lazy students were the most desirous of grades, possibly because grades told them if they were getting by.
As DeWeese said, from here straight south you can go seventy-five miles through nothing but forests and snow without ever encountering a road, although there are roads to the east and the west. I've arranged it so that if things work out badly at the end of the second day we'll be near a road that can get us back fast. Chris doesn't know about this, and it would hurt his YMCA-camp sense of adventure to tell him, but after enough trips into the high country, the YMCA desire for adventure diminishes and the more substantial benefits of cutting down risks appear. This country can be dangerous. You take one bad step in a million, sprain an ankle, and then you find out how far from civilization you really are.
This is apparently a seldom-entered canyon this far up. After another hour of hiking we see that the trail is about gone.
Phædrus thought withholding grades was good, according to his notes, but he didn't give it scientific value. In a true experiment you keep constant every cause you can think of except one, and then see what the effects are of varying that one cause. In the classroom you can never do this. Student knowledge, student attitude, teacher attitude, all change from all kinds of causes which are uncontrollable and mostly unknowable. Also, the observer in this case is himself one of the causes and can never judge his effects without altering his effects. So he didn't attempt to draw any hard conclusions from all this, he just went ahead and did what he liked.
The movement from this to his enquiry into Quality took place because of a sinister aspect of grading that the withholding of grades exposed. Grades really cover up failure to teach. A bad instructor can go through an entire quarter leaving absolutely nothing memorable in the minds of his class, curve out the scores on an irrelevant test, and leave the impression that some have learned and some have not. But if the grades are removed the class is forced to wonder each day what it's really learning. The questions, What's being taught? What's the goal? How do the lectures and assignments accomplish the goal? become ominous. The removal of grades exposes a huge and frightening vacuum.
What was Phædrus trying to do, anyway? This question became more and more imperative as he went on. The answer that had seemed right when he started now made less and less sense. He had wanted his students to become creative by deciding for themselves what was good writing instead of asking him all the time. The real purpose of withholding the grades was to force them to look within themselves, the only place they would ever get a really right answer.
But now this made no sense. If they already knew what was good and bad, there was no reason for them to take the course in the first place. The fact that they were there as students presumed they did not know what was good or bad. That was his job as instructor...to tell them what was good or bad. The whole idea of individual creativity and expression in the classroom was really basically opposed to the whole idea of the University.
For many of the students, this withholding created a Kafkaesque situation in which they saw they were to be punished for failure to do something but no one would tell them what they were supposed to do. They looked within themselves and saw nothing and looked at Phædrus and saw nothing and just sat there helpless, not knowing what to do. The vacuum was deadly. One girl suffered a nervous breakdown. You cannot withhold grades and sit there and create a goalless vacuum. You have to provide some goal for a class to work toward that will fill that vacuum. This he wasn't doing.
He couldn't. He could think of no possible way he could tell them what they should work toward without falling back into the trap of authoritarian, didactic teaching. But how can you put on the blackboard the mysterious internal goal of each creative person?
The next quarter he dropped the whole idea and went back to regular grading, discouraged, confused, feeling he was right but somehow it had come out all wrong. When spontaneity and individuality and really good original stuff occurred in a classroom it was in spite of the instruction, not because of it. This seemed to make sense. He was ready to resign. Teaching dull conformity to hateful students wasn't what he wanted to do.
He'd heard that Reed College in Oregon withheld grades until graduation, and during the summer vacation he went there but was told the faculty was divided on the value of withholding grades and that no one was tremendously happy about the system. During the rest of the summer his mood became depressed and lazy. He and his wife camped a lot in those mountains. She asked why he was so silent all the time but he couldn't say why. He was just stopped. Waiting. For that missing seed crystal of thought that would suddenly solidify everything.
It's looking bad for Chris. For a while he was way ahead of me and now he sits under a tree and rests. He doesn't look at me, and that's how I know it's bad.
I sit down next to him and his expression is distant. His face is flushed and I can see he's exhausted. We sit and listen to the wind through the pines.
I know eventually he'll get up and keep going but he doesn't know this, and is afraid to face the possibility that his fear creates: that he may not be able to climb the mountain at all. I remember something Phædrus had written about these mountains and tell it to Chris now.
``Years ago,'' I tell him, ``your mother and I were at the timberline not so far from here and we camped near a lake with a marsh on one side.''
He doesn't look up but he's listening.
``At about dawn we heard falling rocks and we thought it must be an animal, except that animals don't usually clatter around. Then I heard a squishing sound in the marsh and we were really wide-awake. I got out of the sleeping bag slowly and got our revolver from my jacket and crouched by a tree.''
Now Chris's attention is distracted from his own problems.
``There was another squish,'' I say. ``I thought it could be horses with dudes packing in, but not at this hour. Another squish! And a loud galoomph! That's no horse! And a Gallomph! and a GALOOMPH! And there, in the dim grey light of dawn coming straight for me through the muck of the marsh, was the biggest bull moose I ever saw. Horns as wide as a man is tall. Next to the grizzly the most dangerous animal in the mountains. Some say the worst.''
Chris's eyes are bright again.
``GALOOMPH! I cocked the hammer on the revolver, thinking a thirty-eight Special wasn't very much for a moose. GALOOMPH! He didn't SEE me! GALOOMPH! I couldn't get out of his way. Your mother was in the sleeping bag right in his path. GALOOMPH! What a GIANT! GALOOMPH! He's ten yards away! GALOOMPH! I stand up and take aim. GALOOMPH! -- GALOOMPH! -- GALOOMPH! -- He stops, THREE YARDS AWAY, and sees me -- . The gunsights lie right between his eyes -- . We're motionless.''
I reach around into my pack and get out some cheese.
``Then what happened?'' Chris asks.
``Wait until I cut off some of this cheese.''
I remove my hunting knife and hold the cheese wrapper so that my fingers don't get on it. I slice out a quarter-inch hunk and hold it out for him.
He takes it. ``Then what happened?''
I watch until he takes his first bite. ``That bull moose looked at me for what must have been five seconds. Then he looked down at your mother. Then he looked at me again, and at the revolver which was practically lying on top of his big round nose. And then he smiled and slowly walked away.''
``Oh,'' says Chris. He looks disappointed.
``Normally when they're confronted like that they'll charge,'' I say, ``but he just thought it was a nice morning, and we were there first, so why make trouble? And that's why he smiled.''
``Can they smile?''
``No, but it looked that way.''
I put the cheese away and add, ``Later on that day we were jumping from boulder to boulder down the side of a slope. I was about to land on a great big brown boulder when all of a sudden the great big brown boulder jumped into the air and ran off into the woods. It was the same moose -- .I think that moose must have been pretty sick of us that day.''
I help Chris get to his feet. ``You were going a little too fast,'' I say. ``Now the mountainside's becoming steep and we have to go slowly. If you go too fast you get winded and when you get winded you get dizzy and that weakens your spirit and you think, I can't do it. So go slow for a while.''
``I'll stay behind you,'' he says.
``Okay.''
We walk now away from the stream we were following, up the canyon side at the shallowest angle I can find.
Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire. The reality of your own nature should determine the speed. If you become restless, speed up. If you become winded, slow down. You climb the mountain in an equilibrium between restlessness and exhaustion. Then, when you're no longer thinking ahead, each footstep isn't just a means to an end but a unique event in itself. This leaf has jagged edges. This rock looks loose. From this place the snow is less visible, even though closer. These are things you should notice anyway. To live only for some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top. Here's where things grow.
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.
There's a large fragment concerning Phædrus' first class after he gave that assignment on ``What is quality in thought and statement?'' The atmosphere was explosive. Almost everyone seemed as frustrated and angered as he had been by the question.
``How are we supposed to know what quality is?'' they said. ``You're supposed to tell us!''
Then he told them he couldn't figure it out either and really wanted to know. He had assigned it in the hope that somebody would come up with a good answer. That ignited it. A roar of indignation shook the room. Before the commotion had settled down another teacher had stuck his head in the door to see what the trouble was.
``It's all right,'' Phædrus said. ``We just accidentally stumbled over a genuine question, and the shock is hard to recover from.'' Some students looked curious at this, and the noise simmered down.
He then used the occasion for a short return to his theme of ``Corruption and Decay in the Church of Reason.'' It was a measure of this corruption, he said, that students should be outraged by someone trying to use them to seek the truth. You were supposed to fake this search for the truth, to imitate it. To actually search for it was a damned imposition.
The truth was, he said, that he genuinely did want to know what they thought, not so that he could put a grade on it, but because he really wanted to know.
They looked puzzled.
``I sat there all night long,'' one said.
``I was ready to cry, I was so mad,'' a girl next to the window said.
``You should warn us,'' a third said.
``How could I warn you,'' he said, ``when I had no idea how you'd react?''
Some of the puzzled ones looked at him with a first dawning. He wasn't playing games. He really wanted to know.
A most peculiar person.
Then someone said, ``What do you think?''
``I don't know,'' he answered.
``But what do you think?''
He paused for a long time. ``I think there is such a thing as Quality, but that as soon as you try to define it, something goes haywire. You can't do it.''
Murmurs of agreement.
He continued, ``Why this is, I don't know. I thought maybe I'd get some ideas from your paper. I just don't know.''
This time the class was silent.
In subsequent classes that day there was some of the same commotion, but a number of students in each class volunteered friendly answers that told him the first class had been discussed during lunch.
A few days later he worked up a definition of his own and put it on the blackboard to be copied for posterity. The definition was: ``Quality is a characteristic of thought and statement that is recognized by a nonthinking process. Because definitions are a product of rigid, formal thinking, quality cannot be defined.''
The fact that this ``definition'' was actually a refusal to define did not draw comment. The students had no formal training that would have told them his statement was, in a formal sense, completely irrational. If you can't define something you have no formal rational way of knowing that it exists. Neither can you really tell anyone else what it is. There is, in fact, no formal difference between inability to define and stupidity. When I say, ``Quality cannot be defined,'' I'm really saying formally, ``I'm stupid about Quality.''
Fortunately the students didn't know this. If they'd come up with these objections he wouldn't have been able to answer them at the time.
But then, below the definition on the blackboard, he wrote, ``But even though Quality cannot be defined, you know what Quality is!'' and the storm started all over again.
``Oh, no, we don't!''
``Oh, yes, you do.''
``Oh, no,we don't!''
``Oh, yes, you do!'' he said and he had some material ready to demonstrate it to them.
He had selected two examples of student composition. The first was a rambling, disconnected thing with interesting ideas that never built into anything. The second was a magnificent piece by a student who was mystified himself about why it had come out so well. Phædrus read both, then asked for a show of hands on who thought the first was best. Two hands went up. He asked how many liked the second better. Twenty-eight hands went up.
``Whatever it is,'' he said, ``that caused the overwhelming majority to raise their hands for the second one is what I mean by Quality. So you know what it is.''
There was a long reflective silence after this, and he just let it last.
This was just intellectually outrageous, and he knew it. He wasn't teaching anymore, he was indoctrinating. He had erected an imaginary entity, defined it as incapable of definition, told the students over their own protests that they knew what it was, and demonstrated this by a technique that was as confusing logically as the term itself. He was able to get away with this because logical refutation required more talent than any of the students had. In subsequent days he continually invited their refutations, but none came. He improvised further.
To reinforce the idea that they already knew what Quality was he developed a routine in which he read four student papers in class and had everyone rank them in estimated order of Quality on a slip of paper. He did the same himself. He collected the slips, tallied them on the blackboard and averaged the rankings for an overall class opinion. Then he would reveal his own rankings, and this would almost always be close to, if not identical with the class average. Where there were differences it was usually because two papers were close in quality.
At first the classes were excited by this exercise, but as time went on they became bored. What he meant by Quality was obvious. They obviously knew what it was too, and so they lost interest in listening. Their question now was ``All right, we know what Quality is. How do we get it?''
Now, at last, the standard rhetoric texts came into their own. The principles expounded in them were no longer rules to rebel against, not ultimates in themselves, but just techniques, gimmicks, for producing what really counted and stood independently of the techniques...Quality. What had started out as a heresy from traditional rhetoric turned into a beautiful introduction to it.
He singled out aspects of Quality such as unity, vividness, authority, economy, sensitivity, clarity, emphasis, flow, suspense, brilliance, precision, proportion, depth and so on; kept each of these as poorly defined as Quality itself, but demonstrated them by the same class reading techniques. He showed how the aspect of Quality called unity, the hanging-togetherness of a story, could be improved with a technique called an outline. The authority of an argument could be jacked up with a technique called footnotes, which gives authoritative reference. Outlines and footnotes are standard things taught in all freshman composition classes, but now as devices for improving Quality they had a purpose. And if a student turned in a bunch of dumb references or a sloppy outline that showed he was just fulfilling an assignment by rote, he could be told that while his paper may have fulfilled the letter of the assignment it obviously didn't fulfill the goal of Quality, and was therefore worthless.
Now, in answer to that eternal student question, How do I do this? that had frustrated him to the point of resignation, he could reply, ``It doesn't make a bit of difference how you do it! Just so it's good.'' The reluctant student might ask in class, ``But how do we know what's good?'' but almost before the question was out of his mouth he would realize the answer had already been supplied. Some other student would usually tell him, ``You just see it.'' If he said, ``No, I don't,'' he'd be told, ``Yes, you do. He proved it.'' The student was finally and completely trapped into making quality judgments for himself. And it was just exactly this and nothing else that taught him to write.
Up to now Phædrus had been compelled by the academic system to say what he wanted, even though he knew that this forced students to conform to artificial forms that destroyed their own creativity. Students who went along with his rules were then condemned for their inability to be creative or produce a piece of work that reflected their own personal standards of what is good.
Now that was over with. By reversing a basic rule that all things which are to be taught must first be defined, he had found a way out of all this. He was pointing to no principle, no rule of good writing, no theory...but he was pointing to something, nevertheless, that was very real, whose reality they couldn't deny. The vacuum that had been created by the withholding of grades was suddenly filled with the positive goal of Quality, and the whole thing fit together. Students, astonished, came by his office and said, ``I used to just hate English. Now I spend more time on it than anything else.'' Not just one or two. Many. The whole Quality concept was beautiful. It worked. It was that mysterious, individual, internal goal of each creative person, on the blackboard at last.
I turn to see how Chris is doing. His face looks tired.
I ask, ``How do you feel?''
``Okay,'' he says, but his tone is defiant.
``We can stop anywhere and camp,'' I say.
He flashes a fierce look at me, and so I say nothing more. Soon I see he's working his way around me on the slope. With what must be great effort he pulls ahead. We go on.
Phædrus got this far with his concept of Quality because he deliberately refused to look outside the immediate classroom experience. Cromwell's statement, ``No one ever travels so high as he who knows not where he is going,'' applied at this point. He didn't know where he was going. All he knew was that it worked.
In time, however, he wondered why it worked, especially when he already knew it was irrational. Why should an irrational method work when rational methods were all so rotten? He had an intuitive feeling, growing rapidly, that what he had stumbled on was no small gimmick. It went far beyond. How far, he didn't know.
This was the beginning of the crystallization that I talked about before. Others wondered at the time, ``Why should he get so excited about `quality'?'' But they saw only the word and its rhetoric context. They didn't see his past despair over abstract questions of existence itself that he had abandoned in defeat.
If anyone else had asked, What is Quality? it would have been just another question. But when he asked it, because of his past, it spread out for him like waves in all directions simultaneously, not in a hierarchic structure, but in a concentric one. At the center, generating the waves, was Quality. As these waves of thought expanded for him I'm sure he fully expected each wave to reach some shore of existing patterns of thought so that he had a kind of unified relationship with these thought structures. But the shore was never reached until the end, if it appeared at all. For him there was nothing but ever expanding waves of crystallization. I'll now try to follow these waves of crystallization, the second phase of his exploration into quality, as best I can.
Up ahead all of Chris's movements seem tired and angry. He stumbles on things, lets branches tear at him, instead of pulling them to one side.
I'm sorry to see this. Some blame can be put on the YMCA camp he attended for two weeks just before we started. From what he's told me, they made a big ego thing out of the whole outdoor experience. A proof-of-manhood thing. He began in a lowly class they were careful to point out was rather disgraceful to be in -- original sin. Then he was allowed to prove himself with a long series of accomplishments...swimming, rope tying -- he mentioned a dozen of them, but I've forgotten them.
It made the kids at camp much more enthusiastic and cooperative when they had ego goals to fulfill, I'm sure, but ultimately that kind of motivation is destructive. Any effort that has self-glorification as its final endpoint is bound to end in disaster. Now we're paying the price. When you try to climb a mountain to prove how big you are, you almost never make it. And even if you do it's a hollow victory. In order to sustain the victory you have to prove yourself again and again in some other way, and again and again and again, driven forever to fill a false image, haunted by the fear that the image is not true and someone will find out. That's never the way.
Phædrus wrote a letter from India about a pilgrimage to holy Mount Kailas, the source of the Ganges and the abode of Shiva, high in the Himalayas, in the company of a holy man and his adherents.
He never reached the mountain. After the third day he gave up, exhausted, and the pilgrimage went on without him. He said he had the physical strength but that physical strength wasn't enough. He had the intellectual motivation but that wasn't enough either. He didn't think he had been arrogant but thought that he was undertaking the pilgrimage to broaden his experience, to gain understanding for himself. He was trying to use the mountain for his own purposes and the pilgrimage too. He regarded himself as the fixed entity, not the pilgrimage or the mountain, and thus wasn't ready for it. He speculated that the other pilgrims, the ones who reached the mountain, probably sensed the holiness of the mountain so intensely that each footstep was an act of devotion, an act of submission to this holiness. The holiness of the mountain infused into their own spirits enabled them to endure far more than anything he, with his greater physical strength, could take.
To the untrained eye ego-climbing and selfless climbing may appear identical. Both kinds of climbers place one foot in front of the other. Both breathe in and out at the same rate. Both stop when tired. Both go forward when rested. But what a difference! The ego-climber is like an instrument that's out of adjustment. He puts his foot down an instant too soon or too late. He's likely to miss a beautiful passage of sunlight through the trees. He goes on when the sloppiness of his step shows he's tired. He rests at odd times. He looks up the trail trying to see what's ahead even when he knows what's ahead because he just looked a second before. He goes too fast or too slow for the conditions and when he talks his talk is forever about somewhere else, something else. He's here but he's not here. He rejects the here, is unhappy with it, wants to be farther up the trail but when he gets there will be just as unhappy because then it will be ``here.'' What he's looking for, what he wants, is all around him, but he doesn't want that because it is all around him. Every step's an effort, both physically and spiritually, because he imagines his goal to be external and distant.
That seems to be Chris's problem now.
There's an entire branch of philosophy concerned with the definition of Quality, known as esthetics. Its question, What is meant by beautiful?, goes back to antiquity. But when he was a student of philosophy Phædrus had recoiled violently from this entire branch of knowledge. He had almost deliberately failed the one course in it he had attended and had written a number of papers subjecting the instructor and materials to outrageous attack. He hated and reviled everything.
It wasn't any particular esthetician who produced this reaction in him. It was all of them. It wasn't any particular point of view that outraged him so much as the idea that Quality should be subordinated to any point of view. The intellectual process was forcing Quality into its servitude, prostituting it. I think that was the source of his anger.
He wrote in one paper, ``These estheticians think their subject is some kind of peppermint bonbon they're entitled to smack their fat lips on; something to be devoured; something to be intellectually knifed, forked and spooned up bit by bit with appropriate delicate remarks and I'm ready to throw up. What they smack their lips on is the putrescence of something they long ago killed.''
Now, as the first step of the crystallization process, he saw that when Quality is kept undefined by definition, the entire field called esthetics is wiped out -- completely disenfranchised -- kaput. By refusing to define Quality he had placed it entirely outside the analytic process. If you can't define Quality, there's no way you can subordinate it to any intellectual rule. The estheticians can have nothing more to say. Their whole field, definition of Quality, is gone.
The thought of this completely thrilled him. It was like discovering a cancer cure. No more explanations of what art is. No more wonderful critical schools of experts to determine rationally where each composer had succeeded or failed. All of them, every last one of those know-it-alls, would finally have to shut up. This was no longer just an interesting idea. This was a dream.
I don't think anyone really saw what he was up to at first. They saw an intellectual delivering a message that had all the trappings of a rational analysis of a teaching situation. They didn't see he had a purpose completely opposite to any they were used to. He wasn't furthering rational analysis. He was blocking it. He was turning the method of rationality against itself, turning it against his own kind, in defense of an irrational concept, an undefined entity called Quality.
He wrote: ``(1) Every instructor of English composition knows what quality is. (Any instructor who does not should keep this fact carefully concealed, for this would certainly constitute proof of incompetence.) (2) Any instructor who thinks quality of writing can and should be defined before teaching it can and should go ahead and define it. (3) All those who feel that quality of writing does exist but cannot be defined, but that quality should be taught anyway, can benefit by the following method of teaching pure quality in writing without defining it.''
He then went ahead and described some of the methods of comparison that had evolved in the classroom.
I think he really did hope that someone would come along, challenge him and try to define Quality for him. But no one ever did.
However, that little parenthetic statement about inability to define Quality as proof of incompetence did raise eyebrows within the department. He was, after all, the junior member, and not really expected to provide standards quite yet for his seniors' performance.
His right to say as he pleased was valued, and the senior members actually seemed to enjoy his independence of thought and support him in a churchlike way. But contrary to the belief of many opponents of academic freedom, the church attitude has never been that a teacher should be allowed to blather anything that comes into his head without any accountability at all. The church attitude is simply that the accountability must be to the God of Reason, not to the idols of political power. The fact that he was insulting people was irrelevant to the truth or falsehood of what he was saying and he couldn't ethically be struck down for this. But what they were prepared to strike him down for, ethically and with gusto, was any indication that he wasn't making sense. He could do anything he wanted as long as he justified it in terms of reason.
But how the hell do you ever justify, in terms of reason, a refusal to define something? Definitions are the foundation of reason. You can't reason without them. He could hold off the attack for a while with fancy dialectical footwork and insults about competence and incompetence, but sooner or later he had to come up with something more substantial than that. His attempt to come up with something substantial led to further crystallization beyond the traditional limits of rhetoric and into the domain of philosophy.
Chris turns and flashes a tormented look at me. It won't be long now. Even before we left there were clues this was coming. When DeWeese told a neighbor I was experienced in the mountains Chris showed a big flash of admiration. It was a large thing in his eyes. He should be done for soon, and then we can stop for the day.
Oop! There he goes. He's fallen down. He's not getting up. It was an awfully neat fall, not very accidental-looking. Now he looks at me with hurt and anger, searching for condemnation from me. I don't show him any. I sit down next to him and see he's almost defeated.
``Well,'' I say, ``we can stop here, or we can go ahead, or we can go back. Which do you want to do?''
``I don't care,'' he says, ``I don't want to -- ''
``You don't want to what?''
``I don't care!'' he says, angrily.
``Then since you don't care, we'll keep on going,'' I say, trapping him.
``I don't like this trip,'' he says. ``It isn't any fun. I thought it was going to be fun.''
Some anger catches me off guard too. ``That may be true,'' I reply, ``but it's a hell of a thing to say.''
I see a sudden flick of fear in his eyes as he gets up.
We go on.
The sky over the other wall of the canyon has become overcast, and the wind in the pines around us has become cool and ominous.
At least the coolness makes it easier hiking -- .
I was talking about the first wave of crystallization outside of rhetoric that resulted from Phædrus' refusal to define Quality. He had to answer the question, If you can't define it, what makes you think it exists?
His answer was an old one belonging to a philosophic school that called itself realism.``A thing exists,'' he said, ``if a world without it can't function normally. If we can show that a world without Quality functions abnormally, then we have shown that Quality exists, whether it's defined or not.'' He thereupon proceeded to subtract Quality from a description of the world as we know it.
The first casualty from such a subtraction, he said, would be the fine arts. If you can't distinguish between good and bad in the arts they disappear. There's no point in hanging a painting on the wall when the bare wall looks just as good. There's no point to symphonies, when scratches from the record or hum from the record player sound just as good.
Poetry would disappear, since it seldom makes sense and has no practical value. And interestingly, comedy would vanish too. No one would understand the jokes, since the difference between humor and no humor is pure Quality.
Next he made sports disappear. Football, baseball, games of every sort would vanish. The scores would no longer be a measurement of anything meaningful, but simply empty statistics, like the number of stones in a pile of gravel. Who would attend them? Who would play?
Next he subtracted Quality from the marketplace and predicted the changes that would take place. Since quality of flavor would be meaningless, supermarkets would carry only basic grains such as rice, cornmeal, soybeans and flour; possibly also some ungraded meat, milk for weaning infants and vitamin and mineral supplements to make up deficiencies. Alcoholic beverages, tea, coffee and tobacco would vanish. So would movies, dances, plays and parties. We would all use public transportation. We would all wear G.I. shoes.
A huge proportion of us would be out of work, but this would probably be temporary until we relocated in essential non-Quality work. Applied science and technology would be drastically changed, but pure science, mathematics, philosophy and particularly logic would be unchanged.
Phædrus found this last to be extremely interesting. The purely intellectual pursuits were the least affected by the subtraction of Quality. If Quality were dropped, only rationality would remain unchanged. That was odd. Why would that be?
He didn't know, but he did know that by subtracting Quality from a picture of the world as we know it, he'd revealed a magnitude of importance of this term he hadn't known was there. The world can function without it, but life would be so dull as to be hardly worth living. In fact it wouldn't be worth living. The term worth is a Quality term. Life would just be living without any values or purpose at all.
He looked back over the distance this line of thought had taken him and decided he'd certainly proved his point. Since the world obviously doesn't function normally when Quality is subtracted, Quality exists, whether it's defined or not.
After conjuring up this vision of a Qualityless world, he was soon attracted to its resemblance to a number of social situations he had already read about. Ancient Sparta came to mind, Communist Russia and her satellites. Communist China, the Brave New World of Aldous Huxley and the 1984 of George Orwell. He also remembered people from his own experience who would have endorsed this Qualityless world. The same ones who tried to make him quit smoking. They wanted rational reasons for his smoking and, when he didn't have any, acted very superior, as though he'd lost face or something. They had to have reasons and plans and solutions for everything. They were his own kind. The kind he was now attacking. And he searched for a long time for a suitable name to sum up just what characterized them, so as to get a handle on this Qualityless world.
It was intellectual primarily, but it wasn't just intelligence that was fundamental. It was a certain basic attitude about the way the world was, a presumptive vision that it ran according to laws...reason...and that man's improvement lay chiefly through the discovery of these laws of reason and application of them toward satisfaction of his own desires. It was this faith that held everything together. He squinted at this vision of a Qualityless world for a while, conjured up more details, thought about it, and then squinted some more and thought some more and then finally circled back to where he was before.
Squareness.
That's the look. That sums it. Squareness. When you subtract quality you get squareness. Absence of Quality is the essence of squareness.
Some artist friends with whom he had once traveled across the United States came to mind. They were Negroes, who had always been complaining about just this Qualitylessness he was describing. Square. That was their word for it. Way back long ago before the mass media had picked it up and given it national white usage they had called all that intellectual stuff square and had wanted nothing to do with it. And there had been a fantastic mismeshing of conversations and attitudes between him and them because he was such a prime example of the squareness they were talking about. The more he had tried to pin them down on what they were talking about the vaguer they had gotten. Now with this Quality he seemed to say the same thing and talk as vaguely as they did, even though what he talked about was as hard and clear and solid as any rationally defined entity he'd ever dealt with.
Quality. That's what they'd been talking about all the time. ``Man, will you just please, kindly dig it,'' he remembered one of them saying, ``and hold up on all those wonderful seven-dollar questions? If you got to ask what is it all the time, you'll never get time to know.'' Soul. Quality. The same?
The wave of crystallization rolled ahead. He was seeing two worlds, simultaneously. On the intellectual side, the square side, he saw now that Quality was a cleavage term. What every intellectual analyst looks for. You take your analytic knife, put the point directly on the term Quality and just tap, not hard, gently, and the whole world splits, cleaves, right in two...hip and square, classic and romantic, technological and humanistic...and the split is clean. There's no mess. No slop. No little items that could be one way or the other. Not just a skilled break but a very lucky break. Sometimes the best analysts, working with the most obvious lines of cleavage, can tap and get nothing but a pile of trash. And yet here was Quality; a tiny, almost unnoticeable fault line; a line of illogic in our concept of the universe; and you tapped it, and the whole universe came apart, so neatly it was almost unbelievable. He wished Kant were alive. Kant would have appreciated it. That master diamond cutter. He would see. Hold Quality undefined. That was the secret.
Phædrus wrote, with some beginning awareness that he was involved in a strange kind of intellectual suicide, ``Squareness may be succinctly and yet thoroughly defined as an inability to see quality before it's been intellectually defined, that is, before it gets all chopped up into words -- .We have proved that quality, though undefined, exists. Its existence can be seen empirically in the classroom, and can be demonstrated logically by showing that a world without it cannot exist as we know it. What remains to be seen, the thing to be analyzed, is not quality, but those peculiar habits of thought called `squareness' that sometimes prevent us from seeing it.''
Thus did he seek to turn the attack. The subject for analysis, the patient on the table, was no longer Quality, but analysis itself. Quality was healthy and in good shape. Analysis, however, seemed to have something wrong with it that prevented it from seeing the obvious.
I look back and see Chris is way behind. ``Come on!'' I shout.
He doesn't answer.
``Come on!'' I shout again.
Then I see him fall sideways and sit in the grass on the side of the mountain. I leave my pack and go back down to him. The slope is so steep I have to dig my feet in sideways. When I get there he's crying.
``I hurt my ankle,'' he says, and doesn't look at me.
When an ego-climber has an image of himself to protect he naturally lies to protect this image. But it's disgusting to see and I'm ashamed of myself for letting this happen. Now my own willingness to continue becomes eroded by his tears and his inner sense of defeat passes to me. I sit down, live with this for a while, then, without turning away from it, pick up his backpack and say to him, ``I'll carry the packs in relays. I'll take this one up to where mine is and then you stop and wait with it so we don't lose it. Then I'll take mine up farther and then come back for yours. That way you can get plenty of rest. It'll be slower, but we'll get there.''
But I've done this too soon. There's still disgust and resentment in my voice which he hears and is shamed by. He shows anger, but says nothing, for fear he'll have to carry the pack again, just frowns and ignores me while I relay the packs upward. I work off the resentment at having to do this by realizing that it isn't any more work for me, actually, than the other way. It's more work in terms of reaching the top of the mountain, but that's only the nominal goal. In terms of the real goal, putting in good minutes, one after the other, it comes out the same; in fact, better. We climb slowly upward and the resentment leaves.
For the next hour we move slowly upward, I carrying the packs in relays, to where I locate the beginning trickle of a stream. I send Chris down for water in one of the pans, which he gets. When he comes back he says, ``Why are we stopping here? Let's keep going.''
``This is probably the last stream we'll see for a long time, Chris, and I'm tired.''
``Why are you so tired?''
Is he trying to infuriate me? He's succeeding.
``I'm tired, Chris, because I'm carrying the packs. If you're in a hurry take your pack and go on up ahead. I'll catch up with you.''
He looks at me with another flick of fear, then sits down. ``I don't like this,'' he says, almost in tears. ``I hate this! I'm sorry I came. Why did we come here?'' He's crying again, hard.
I reply, ``You make me very sorry too. You better have something for lunch.''
``I don't want anything. My stomach hurts.''
``Suit yourself.''
He goes off a distance and picks a stem of grass and puts it in his mouth. Then he buries his face in his hands. I make lunch for myself and have a short rest.
When I wake up again he's still crying. There's nowhere for either of us to go. Nothing to do but face up to the existing situation. but I really don't know what the existing situation is.
``Chris,'' I say finally.
He doesn't answer.
``Chris,'' I repeat.
Still no answer. He finally says, belligerently, ``What?''
``I was going to say, Chris. that you don't have to prove anything to me. Do you understand that?''
A real flash of terror hits his face. He jerks his head away violently.
I say, ``You don't understand what I mean by that, do you?''
He continues to look away and doesn't answer. The wind moans through the pines.
I just don't know. I just don't know what it is. It isn't just YMCA egotism that's making him this upset. Some minor thing reflects badly on him and it's the end of the world. When he tries to do something and doesn't get it just right he blows up or goes into tears.
I settle back in the grass and rest again. Maybe it's not having answers that's defeating both of us. I don't want to go ahead because it doesn't look like any answers ahead. None behind either. Just lateral drift. That's what it is between me and him. Lateral drift, waiting for something.
Later I hear him prowl at the knapsack. I roll over and see him glaring at me. ``Where's the cheese?'' he says. The tone's still belligerent.
But I'm not going to give in to it. ``Help yourself,'' I say. ``I'm not waiting on you.''
He digs around and finds some cheese and crackers. I give him my hunting knife to spread the cheese with. ``I think what I'm going to do, Chris, is put all the heavy stuff in my pack and the light stuff in yours. That way I won't have to go back and forth with both packs.''
He agrees to this and his mood improves. It seems to have solved something for him.
My pack must be about forty or forty-five pounds now, and after we've climbed for a while an equilibrium establishes itself at about one breath for each step.
We come to a rough grade and it changes to two breaths per step. At one bank it goes to four breaths per step. Huge steps, almost vertical, hanging on to roots and branches. I feel stupid because I should have planned my way around this. The aspen staves come in handy now, and Chris takes some interest in the use of his. The packs made you top heavy and the sticks are good insurance against toppling over. You plant one foot, plant the staff, then SWING on it, up, and take three breaths, then plant the next foot, plant the staff and SWING up -- .
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 -- .
Way back long ago when we first set out on this strange voyage I talked about how John and Sylvia seemed to be running from some mysterious death force that seemed to them to be embodied in technology, and that there were many others like them. I talked for a while about how some of the people involved in technology seemed to be avoiding it too. An underlying reason for this trouble was that they saw it from a kind of ``groovy dimension'' that was concerned with the immediate surface of things whereas I was concerned with the underlying form. I called John's style romantic, mine classic. His was, in the argot of the sixties, ``hip,'' mine was ``square.'' Then we started going into this square world to see what made it tick. Data, classifications, hierarchies, cause-and-effect and analysis were discussed, and somewhere along there was some talk about a handful of sand, the world of which we're conscious, taken from the endless landscape of awareness around us. I said a process of discrimination goes to work on this handful of sand and divides it into parts. Classical, square understanding is concerned with the piles of sand and the nature of the grains and the basis for sorting and interrelating them.
Phædrus' refusal to define Quality, in terms of this analogy, was an attempt to break the grip of the classical sandsifting mode of understanding and find a point of common understanding between the classic and romantic worlds. Quality, the cleavage term between hip and square, seemed to be it. Both worlds used the term. Both knew what it was. It was just that the romantic left it alone and appreciated it for what it was and the classic tried to turn it into a set of intellectual building blocks for other purposes. Now, with the definition blocked, the classic mind was forced to view Quality as the romantic did, undistorted by thought structures.
I'm making a big thing out of all this, these classical-romantic differences, but Phædrus didn't.
He wasn't really interested in any kind of fusion of differences between these two worlds. He was after something else...his ghost. In the pursuit of this ghost he went on to wider meanings of Quality which drew him further and further to his end. I differ from him in that I've no intention of going on to that end. He just passed through this territory and opened it up. I intend to stay and cultivate it and see if I can get something to grow.
I think that the referent of a term that can split a world into hip and square, classic and romantic, technological and humanistic, is an entity that can unite a world already split along these lines into one. A real understanding of Quality doesn't just serve the System, or even beat it or even escape it. A real understanding of Quality captures the System, tames it, and puts it to work for one's own personal use, while leaving one completely free to fulfill his inner destiny.
Now that we're up high on one side of the canyon we can see back and down and across to the other side. It's as steep there as it is here...a dark mat of greenish-black pines going up to a high ridge. We can measure our progress by sighting against it at what seems like a horizontal angle.
That's all the Quality talk for today, I guess, thank goodness. I don't mind the Quality, it's just that all the classical talk about it isn't Quality. Quality is just the focal point around which a lot of intellectual furniture is getting rearranged.
We stop for a break and look down below. Chris's spirits seem to be better now, but I'm afraid it's the ego thing again.
``Look how far we've come,'' he says.
``We've got a lot farther to go.''
Later on Chris shouts to hear his echo, and throws rocks down to see where they fall. He's starting to get almost cocky, so I step up the equilibrium to where I breathe at a good swift rate, about one-and-a-half times our former speed. This sobers him somewhat and we keep on climbing.
By about three in the afternoon my legs start to get rubbery and it's time to stop. I'm not in very good shape. If you go on after that rubbery feeling you start to pull muscles and the next day is agony.
We come to a flat spot, a large knoll protruding from the side of the mountain. I tell Chris this is it for today. He seems satisfied and cheerful; maybe some progress has been made with him after all.
I'm ready for a nap, but clouds have formed in the canyon that appear ready to drop rain. They've filled in the canyon so that we can't see the bottom and can just barely see the ridge on the other side.
I break open the packs and get the tent halves out, Army ponchos, and snap them together. I take a rope and tie it between the two trees, then throw the shelter halves over it. I cut some stakes out of shrubs with the machete, and pound them in, then dig a small trench with the flat end of the machete around the tent to drain away any rainwater. We've just got everything inside when the first rain comes down.
Chris is in high spirits about the rain. We lie on our backs on the sleeping bags and watch the rain come down and hear its popping sound on the tent. The forest has a misty appearance and we both become contemplative and watch the leaves of the shrubs jolt when struck by raindrops and jolt a little ourselves when a clash of thunder comes down but feel happy that we're dry when everything around us is wet.
After a while I reach into my pack for the paperback by Thoreau, find it and have to strain a little to read it to Chris in the grey rainy light. I guess I've explained that we've done this with other books in the past, advanced books that he wouldn't normally understand. What happens is I read a sentence, he comes up with a long series of questions about it and then, when he's satisfied, I read the next sentence.
We do this with Thoreau for a while, but after half an hour I see to my surprise and disappointment that Thoreau isn't coming through. Chris is restless and so am I. The language structure is wrong for the mountain forest we're in. At least that's my feeling. The book seems tame and cloistered, something I'd never have thought of Thoreau, but there it is. He's talking to another situation, another time, just discovering the evils of technology rather than discovering the solution. He isn't talking to us. Reluctantly I put the book away again and we're both silent and meditative. It's just Chris and me and the forest and the rain. No books can guide us anymore.
Pans we've set outside the tent begin to fill up with rainwater, and later, when we have enough, we pour it all together in a pot and add some cubes of chicken bouillon and heat it over a small Sterno stove. Like any food or drink after a hard climb in the mountains, it tastes good.
Chris says, ``I like camping with you better than with the Sutherlands.''
``The circumstances are different,'' I say.
When the bouillon is gone I get out a can of pork and beans and empty it into the pot. It takes a long time to heat up, but we're in no hurry.
``It smells good,'' Chris says.
The rain has stopped and just occasional drops pat down on the tent.
``I think tomorrow'll be sunny,'' I say.
We pass the pot of pork and beans back and forth, eating from opposite sides.
``Dad, what do you think about all the time? You're always thinking all the time.''
``Ohhhhhh -- all kinds of things.''
``What about?''
``Oh, about the rain, and about troubles that can happen and about things in general.''
``What things?''
``Oh, about what it's going to be like for you when you grow up.''
He's interested. ``What's it going to be like?''
But there's a slight ego gleam in his eyes as he asks this and the answer as a result comes out masked. ``I don't know,'' I say, ``it's just what I think about.''
``Do you think we'll get to the top of this canyon by tomorrow?''
``Oh yes, we're not far from the top.''
``In the morning?''
``I think so.''
Later he is asleep, and a damp night wind comes down from the ridge causing a sighing sound from the pines. The silhouettes of the treetops move gently with the wind. They yield and then return, then with a sigh yield and return again, restless from forces that are not part of their nature. The wind causes a flutter of one side of the tent. I get up and peg it down, then walk on the damp spongy grass of the knoll for a while, then crawl back into the tent and wait for sleep.
A mat of sunlit pine needles by my face slowly tells me where I am and helps dispel a dream.
In the dream I was standing in a white-painted room looking at a glass door. On the other side was Chris and his brother and mother. Chris was waving at me from the other side of the door and his brother was smiling, but his mother had tears in her eyes. Then I saw that Chris's smile was fixed and artificial and actually there was deep fear.
I moved toward the door and his smile became better. He motioned for me to open it. I was about to open it, but then didn't. His fear came back but I turned and walked away.
It's a dream that has occurred often before. Its meaning is obvious and fits some thoughts of last night. He's trying to relate to me and is afraid he never will. Things are getting clearer up here.
Beyond the flap of the tent now the needles on the ground send vapors of mist up toward the sun. The air feels moist and cool, and while Chris still sleeps I get out of the tent carefully, stand up and stretch.
My legs and back are stiff but not painful. I do calisthenics for a few minutes to loosen them up, then sprint from the knoll into the pines. That feels better.
The pine odor is heavy and moist this morning. I squat and look down at the morning mists in the canyon below.
Later I return to the tent where a noise indicates that Chris is awake, and when I look inside I see his face stare around silently. He's a slow waker and it'll be five minutes before his mind warms up to the point where he can speak. Now he squints into the light.
``Good morning,'' I say.
No answer. A few raindrops fall down from the pines.
``Did you sleep well?''
``No.''
``That's too bad.''
``How come you're up so early?'' he asks.
``It's not early.''
``What time is it?''
``Nine o'clock,'' I say.
``I bet we didn't go to sleep until three.''
Three? If he stayed awake he's going to pay for it today.
``Well, I got to sleep,'' I say.
He looks at me strangely. ``You kept me awake.''
``Me?''
``Talking.''
``In my sleep, you mean.''
``No, about the mountain ''
Something is odd here. ``I don't know anything about a mountain, Chris.''
``Well, you talked all night about it. You said at the top of the mountain we'd see everything. You said you were going to meet me there.''
I think he's been dreaming. ``How could I meet you there when I'm already with you?''
``I don't know. You said it.'' He looks upset. ``You sounded like you were drunk or something.''
He's still half asleep. I'd better let him wake up peacefully. But I'm thirsty and remember I left the canteen behind, thinking we'd find enough water as we traveled. Dumb. There'll be no breakfast now until we're up over the ridge and far enough down to the other side where we can find a spring. ``We'd better pack up and go,'' I say, ``if we're going to get some water for breakfast.'' It's already warm out and probably will be hot this afternoon.
The tent comes down easily and I'm pleased to see that everything stayed dry. In a half-hour we're packed. Now except for beaten-down grass the area looks as if no one had been here.
We still have a lot of climbing to do, but on the trail we discover it's easier than yesterday. We're getting to the rounded upper portion of the ridge and the slope isn't as steep. It looks as though the pines have never been cut here. All direct light is shut out from the forest floor and there's no underbrush at all. Just a springy floor of needles that's open and spacious and easy hiking -- .
Time to get on with the Chautauqua and the second wave of crystallization, the metaphysical one.
This was brought about in response to Phædrus' wild meanderings about Quality when the English faculty at Bozeman, informed of their squareness, presented him with a reasonable question: ``Does this undefined `quality' of yours exist in the things we observe?'' they asked. ``Or is it subjective, existing only in the observer?'' It was a simple, normal enough question, and there was no hurry for an answer.
Hah. There was no need for hurry. It was a finisher-offer, a knockdown question, a haymaker, a Saturday-night special...the kind you don't recover from.
Because if Quality exists in the object, then you must explain just why scientific instruments are unable to detect it. You must suggest instruments that will detect it, or live with the explanation that instruments don't detect it because your whole Quality concept, to put it politely, is a large pile of nonsense.
On the other hand, if Quality is subjective, existing only in the observer, then this Quality that you make so much of is just a fancy name for whatever you like.
What Phædrus had been presented with by the faculty of the English department of Montana State College was an ancient logical construct known as a dilemma. A dilemma,which is Greek for ``two premises,'' has been likened to the front end of an angry and charging bull.
If he accepted the premise that Quality was objective, he was impaled on one horn of the dilemma. If he accepted the other premise that Quality was subjective, he was impaled on the other horn. Either Quality is objective or subjective, therefore he was impaled no matter how he answered.
He noticed that from a number of faculty members he was receiving some good-natured smiles.
Phædrus, however, because of his training in logic, was aware that every dilemma affords not two but three classic refutations, and he also knew of a few that weren't so classic, so he smiled back. He could take the left horn and refute the idea that objectivity implied scientific detectability. Or, he could take the right horn, and refute the idea that subjectivity implies ``anything you like.'' Or he could go between the horns and deny that subjectivity and objectivity are the only choices. You may be sure he tested out all three.
In addition to these three classical logical refutations there are some illogical, ``rhetorical'' ones. Phædrus, being a rhetorician, had these available too.
One may throw sand in the bull's eyes. He had already done this with his statement that lack of knowledge of what Quality is constitutes incompetence. It's an old rule of logic that the competence of a speaker has no relevance to the truth of what he says, and so talk of incompetence was pure sand. The world's biggest fool can say the sun is shining, but that doesn't make it dark out. Socrates, that ancient enemy of rhetorical argument, would have sent Phædrus flying for this one, saying, ``Yes, I accept your premise that I'm incompetent on the matter of Quality. Now please show an incompetent old man what Quality is. Otherwise, how am I to improve?'' Phædrus would have been allowed to stew around for a few minutes, and then been flattened with questions that proved he didn't know what Quality was either and was, by his own standards, incompetent.
One may attempt to sing the bull to sleep. Phædrus could have told his questioners that the answer to this dilemma was beyond his humble powers of solution, but the fact that he couldn't find an answer was no logical proof that an answer couldn't be found. Wouldn't they, with their broader experience, try to help him find this answer? But it was way too late for lullabies like that. They could simply have replied, ``No, we're way too square. And until you do come up with an answer, stick to the syllabus so that we don't have to flunk out your mixed-up students when we get them next quarter.''
A third rhetorical alternative to the dilemma, and the best one in my opinion, was to refuse to enter the arena. Phædrus could simply have said, ``The attempt to classify Quality as subjective or objective is an attempt to define it. I have already said it is undefinable ,'' and left it at that. I believe DeWeese actually counseled him to do this at the time.
Why he chose to disregard this advice and chose to respond to this dilemma logically and dialectically rather than take the easy escape of mysticism, I don't know. But I can guess. I think first of all that he felt the whole Church of Reason was irreversibly in the arena of logic, that when one put oneself outside logical disputation, one put oneself outside any academic consideration whatsoever. Philosophical mysticism, the idea that truth is indefinable and can be apprehended only by nonrational means, has been with us since the beginning of history. It's the basis of Zen practice. But it's not an academic subject. The academy, the Church of Reason, is concerned exclusively with those things that can be defined, and if one wants to be a mystic, his place is in a monastery, not a University. Universities are places where things should be spelled out.
I think a second reason for his decision to enter the arena was an egoistic one. He knew himself to be a pretty sharp logician and dialectician, took pride in this and looked upon this present dilemma as a challenge to his skill. I think now that trace of egotism may have been the beginning of all his troubles.
I see a deer move about two hundred yards ahead and above us through the pines. I try to point it out to Chris, but by the time he looks it's gone.
The first horn of Phædrus' dilemma was, If Quality exists in the object, why can't scientific instruments detect it?
This horn was the mean one. From the start he saw how deadly it was. If he was going to presume to be some super-scientist who could see in objects Quality that no scientist could detect, he was just proving himself to be a nut or a fool or both. In today's world, ideas that are incompatible with scientific knowledge don't get off the ground.
He remembered Locke's statement that no object, scientific or otherwise, is knowable except in terms of its qualities. This irrefutable truth seemed to suggest that the reason scientists cannot detect Quality in objects is because Quality is all they detect. The ``object'' is an intellectual construct deduced from the qualities. This answer, if valid, certainly smashed the first horn of the dilemma, and for a while excited him greatly.
But it turned out to be false. The Quality that he and the students had been seeing in the classroom was completely different from the qualities of color or heat or hardness observed in the laboratory. Those physical properties were all measurable with instruments. His Quality...``excellence,'' ``worth,'' ``goodness''...was not a physical property and was not measurable. He had been thrown off by an ambiguity in the term quality.He wondered why that ambiguity should exist, made a mental note to do some digging into the historic roots of the word quality, then put it aside. The horn of the dilemma was still there.
He turned his attention to the other horn of the dilemma, which showed more promise of refutation. He thought, So Quality is whatever you like? It angered him. The great artists of history...Raphael, Beethoven, Michelangelo...they were all just putting out what people liked. They had no goal other than to titillate the senses in a big way. Was that it? It was angering, and what was most angering about it was that he couldn't see any immediate way to cut it up logically. So he studied the statement carefully, in the same reflective way he always studied things before attacking them.
Then he saw it. He brought out the knife and excised the one word that created the entire angering effect of that sentence. The word was ``just.'' Why should Quality be just what you like? Why should ``what you like'' be ``just''? What did ``just'' mean in this case? When separated out like this for independent examination it became apparent that ``just'' in this case really didn't mean a damn thing. It was a purely pejorative term, whose logical contribution to the sentence was nil. Now, with that word removed, the sentence became ``Quality is what you like,'' and its meaning was entirely changed. It had become an innocuous truism.
He wondered why that statement had angered him so much in the first place. It had seemed so natural. Why had it taken so long to see that what it really said was ``What you like is bad, or at least inconsequential.'' What was behind this smug presumption that what pleased you was bad, or at least unimportant in comparison to other things? It seemed the quintessence of the squareness he was fighting. Little children were trained not to do ``just what they liked'' but -- but what? -- Of course! What others liked. And which others? Parents, teachers, supervisors, policemen, judges, officials, kings, dictators. All authorities. When you are trained to despise ``just what you like'' then, of course, you become a much more obedient servant of others...a good slave. When you learn not to do ``just what you like'' then the System loves you.
But suppose you do just what you like? Does that mean you're going to go out and shoot heroin, rob banks and rape old ladies? The person who is counseling you not to do ``just as you like'' is making some remarkable presumptions as to what is likable. He seems unaware that people may not rob banks because they have considered the consequences and decided they don't like to. He doesn't see that banks exist in the first place because they're ``just what people like,'' namely, providers of loans. Phædrus began to wonder how all this condemnation of ``what you like'' ever seemed such a natural objection in the first place.
Soon he saw there was much more to this than he had been aware of. When people said, Don't do just what you like, they didn't just mean, Obey authority. They also meant something else.
This ``something else'' opened up into a huge area of classic scientific belief which stated that ``what you like'' is unimportant because it's all composed of irrational emotions within yourself. He studied this argument for a long time,then knifed it into two smaller groups which he called scientific materialism and classic formalism. He said the two are often found associated in the same person but logically are separate.
Scientific materialism, which is commoner among lay followers of science than among scientists themselves, holds that what is composed of matter or energy and is measurable by the instruments of science is real. Anything else is unreal, or at least of no importance. ``What you like'' is unmeasurable, and therefore unreal. ``What you like'' can be a fact or it can be a hallucination. Liking does not distinguish between the two. The whole purpose of scientific method is to make valid distinctions between the false and the true in nature, to eliminate the subjective, unreal, imaginary elements from one's work so as to obtain an objective, true, picture of reality. When he said Quality was subjective, to them he was just saying Quality is imaginary and could therefore be disregarded in any serious consideration of reality.
On the other hand is classic formalism, which insists that what isn't understood intellectually isn't understood at all. Quality in this case is unimportant because it's an emotional understanding unaccompanied by the intellectual elements of reason.
Of these two main sources of that epithet ``just,'' Phædrus felt that the first, scientific materialism, was by far the easiest to cut to ribbons. This, he knew from his earlier education, was na•ve science. He went after it first, using the reductio ad absurdum. This form of argument rests on the truth that if the inevitable conclusions from a set of premises are absurd then it follows logically that at least one of the premises that produced them is absurd. Let's examine, he said, what follows from the premise that anything not composed of mass...energy is unreal or unimportant.
He used the number zero as a starter. Zero, originally a Hindu number, was introduced to the West by the Arabs during the Middle Ages and was unknown to the ancient Greeks and Romans. How was that? he wondered. Had nature so subtly hidden zero that all the Greeks and all the Romans...millions of them...couldn't find it? One would normally think that zero is right out there in the open for everyone to see. He showed the absurdity of trying to derive zero from any form of mass-energy, and then asked, rhetorically, if that meant the number zero was ``unscientific.'' If so, did that mean that digital computers, which function exclusively in terms of ones and zeros, should be limited to just ones for scientific work? No trouble finding the absurdity here.
He then went on with other scientific concepts, one by one, showing how they could not possibly exist independently of subjective considerations. He ended up with the law of gravity, in the example I gave John and Sylvia and Chris on the first night of our trip. If subjectivity is eliminated as unimportant, he said, then the entire body of science must be eliminated with it.
This refutation of scientific materialism, however, seemed to put him in the camp of philosophic idealism...Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Bradley, Bosanquet...good company all, logical to the last comma, but so difficult to justify in ``common sense'' language they seemed a burden to him in his defense of Quality rather than an aid. The argument that the world was all mind might be a sound logical position but it was certainly not a sound rhetorical one. It was way too tedious and difficult for a course in freshman composition. Too ``far-fetched.''
At this point the whole subjective horn of the dilemma looked almost as uninspiring as the objective one. And the arguments of classical formalism, when he started to examine them, made it even worse. These were the extremely forceful arguments that you shouldn't respond to your immediate emotional impulses without considering the big rational picture.
Kids are told, ``Don't spend your whole allowance for bubble gum [immediate emotional impulse] because you're going to want to spend it for something else later [big picture].'' Adults are told, ``This paper mill may smell awful even with the best controls [immediate emotions], but without it the economy of the whole town will collapse [big picture].'' In terms of our old dichotomy, what's being said is, ``Don't base your decisions on romantic surface appeal without considering classical underlying form.'' This was something he kind of agreed with.
What the classical formalists meant by the objection ``Quality is just what you like'' was that this subjective, undefined ``quality'' he was teaching was just romantic surface appeal. Classroom popularity contests could determine whether a composition had immediate appeal, all right, but was this Quality? Was Quality something that you ``just see'' or might it be something more subtle than that, so that you wouldn't see it at all immediately, but only after a long period of time?
The more he examined this argument the more formidable it appeared. This looked like the one that might do in his whole thesis.
What made it so ominous was that it seemed to answer a question that had arisen often in class and which he always had to answer somewhat casuistically. This was the question, If everyone knows what quality is, why is there such a disagreement about it?
His casuist answer had been that although pure Quality was the same for everyone, the objects that people said Quality inhered in varied from person to person. As long as he left Quality undefined there was no way to argue with this but he knew and he knew the students knew that it had the smell of falseness about it. It didn't really answer the question.
Now there was an alternative explanation: people disagreed about Quality because some just used their immediate emotions whereas others applied their overall knowledge. He knew that in any popularity contest among English teachers, this latter argument which bolstered their authority would win overwhelming endorsement.
But this argument was completely devastating. Instead of one single, uniform Quality now there appeared to be two qualities; a romantic one, just seeing, which the students had; and a classic one, overall understanding, which the teachers had. A hip one and a square one. Squareness was not the absence of Quality; it was classic Quality. Hipness was not just presence of Quality; it was mere romantic Quality. The hip-square cleavage he'd discovered was still there, but Quality didn't now seem to fall entirely on one side of the cleavage, as he'd previously supposed. Instead, Quality itself cleaved into two kinds, one on each side of the cleavage line. His simple, neat, beautiful, undefined Quality was starting to get complex.
He didn't like the way this was going. The cleavage term that was going to unify the classic and romantic ways of looking at things had itself been cleaved into two parts and could no longer unify anything. It had been caught in an analytic meat grinder. The knife of subjectivity-and-objectivity had cut Quality in two and killed it as a working concept. If he was going to save it, he couldn't let that knife get it.
And really, the Quality he was talking about wasn't classic Quality or romantic Quality. It was beyond both of them. And by God, it wasn't subjective or objective either, it was beyond both of those categories. Actually this whole dilemma of subjectivity-objectivity, of mind-matter, with relationship to Quality was unfair. That mind-matter relationship has been an intellectual hang-up for centuries. They were just putting that hang-up on top of Quality to drag Quality down. How could he say whether Quality was mind or matter when there was no logical clarity as to what was mind and what was matter in the first place?
And so: he rejected the left horn. Quality is not objective, he said. It doesn't reside in the material world.
Then: he rejected the right horn. Quality is not subjective, he said. It doesn't reside merely in the mind.
And finally: Phædrus, following a path that to his knowledge had never been taken before in the history of Western thought, went straight between the horns of the subjectivity-objectivity dilemma and said Quality is neither a part of mind, nor is it a part of matter. It is a third entity which is independent of the two.
He was heard along the corridors and up and down the stairs of Montana Hall singing softly to himself, almost under his breath, ``Holy, holy, holy -- blessed Trinity.''
And there is a faint, faint fragment of memory, possibly wrong, possibly just something I'm imagining, that says he just let the whole thought structure sit like that for weeks, without carrying it any further.
Chris shouts, ``When are we going to get to the top?''
``Probably quite a way yet,'' I reply.
``Will we see a lot?''
``I think so. Look for blue sky between the trees. As long as we can't see sky we know it's a way yet. The light will come through the trees when we round the top.''
Last night's rain has soaked this soft duff of needles sufficiently to make them good walking. Sometimes when it's really dry on a slope like this they become slippery and you have to dig your feet into them edgewise or you'll slide down.
I say to Chris, ``Isn't it great when there's no underbrush like this?''
``Why isn't there any?'' he asks.
``I think this area must never have been logged. When a forest is left alone like this for centuries, the trees shut out all the underbrush.''
``It's like a park,'' Chris says. ``You can sure see all around.'' His mood seems much better than yesterday. I think he'll be a good traveler from here on. This forest silence improves anyone.
The world now, according to Phædrus, was composed of three things: mind, matter, and Quality. The fact that he had established no relationship between them didn't bother him at first. If the relationship between mind and matter had been fought over for centuries and wasn't yet resolved, why should he, in a matter of a few weeks, come up with something conclusive about Quality? So he let it go. He put it up on a kind of mental shelf where he put all kinds of questions he had no immediate answers for. He knew the metaphysical trinity of subject, object and Quality would sooner or later have to be interrelated but he was in no hurry about it. It was just so satisfying to be beyond the danger of those horns that he relaxed and enjoyed it as long as he could.
Eventually, however, he examined it more closely. Although there's no logical objection to a metaphysical trinity, a three-headed reality, such trinities are not common or popular. The metaphysician normally seeks either a monism, such as God, which explains the nature of the world as a manifestation of one single thing, or he seeks a dualism, such as mind-matter, which explains it as two things, or he leaves it as a pluralism, which explains it as a manifestation of an indefinite number of things. But three is an awkward number. Right away you want to know, Why three? What's the relationship among them? And as the need for relaxation diminished Phædrus became curious about this relationship too.
He noted that although normally you associate Quality with objects, feelings of Quality sometimes occur without any object at all. This is what led him at first to think that maybe Quality is all subjective. But subjective pleasure wasn't what he meant by Quality either. Quality decreases subjectivity. Quality takes you out of yourself, makes you aware of the world around you. Quality is opposed to subjectivity.
I don't know how much thought passed before he arrived at this, but eventually he saw that Quality couldn't be independently related with either the subject or the object but could be found only in the relationship of the two with each other. It is the point at which subject and object meet.
That sounded warm.
Quality is not a thing. It is an event.
Warmer.
It is the event at which the subject becomes aware of the object.
And because without objects there can be no subject...because the objects create the subject's awareness of himself...Quality is the event at which awareness of both subjects and objects is made possible.
Hot.
Now he knew it was coming.
This means Quality is not just the result of a collision between subject and object. The very existence of subject and object themselves is deduced from the Quality event. The Quality event is the cause of the subjects and objects, which are then mistakenly presumed to be the cause of the Quality!
Now he had that whole damned evil dilemma by the throat. The dilemma all the time had this unseen vile presumption in it, for which there was no logical justification. that Quality was the effect of subjects and objects. It was not! He brought out his knife.
``The sun of quality,'' he wrote, ``does not revolve around the subjects and objects of our existence. It does not just passively illuminate them. It is not subordinate to them in any way. It has created them. They are subordinate to it!
And at that point, when he wrote that, he knew he had reached some kind of culmination of thought he had been unconsciously striving for over a long period of time.
``Blue sky!'' shouts Chris.
There it is, way above us, a narrow patch of blue through the trunks of the trees.
We move faster and the patches of blue become larger and larger through the trees and soon we see that the trees thin out to a bare spot at the summit. When the summit is about fifty yards away I say, ``Let's go!'' and start to dash for it, throwing into the effort all the reserves of energy I've been saving.
I give it everything I have, but Chris gains on me. Then he passes me, giggling. With the heavy load and high altitude we're not setting any records but now we're just charging up with all we have.
Chris gets there first, while I just break out of the trees. He raises his arms and shouts, ``The Winner!''
Egotist.
I'm breathing so hard when I arrive I can't speak. We just drop our packs from our shoulders and lie down against some rocks. The crust of the ground is dry from the sun, but underneath is mud from last night's rain. Below us and miles away beyond the forested slopes and the fields beyond them is the Gallatin Valley. At one corner of the valley is Bozeman. A grasshopper jumps up from the rock and soars down and away from us over the trees.
``We made it,'' Chris says. He is very happy. I am still too winded to answer. I take off my boots and socks which are soggy with sweat and set them out to dry on a rock. I stare at them meditatively as vapors from them rise up toward the sun.
Evidently I've slept. The sun is hot. My watch says a few minutes before noon. I look over the rock I'm leaning against and see Chris sound asleep on the other side. Way up above him the forest stops and barren grey rock leads into patches of snow. We can climb the back of this ridge straight up there, but it would be dangerous toward the top. I look up at the top of the mountain for a while. What was it Chris said I told him last night?...``I'll see you at the top of mountain'' -- no -- ``I'll meet you at the top of the mountain.''
How could I meet him at the top of the mountain when I'm already with him? Something's very strange about that. He said I told him something else too, the other night...that it's lonely here. That contradicts what I actually believe. I don't think it's lonely here at all.
A sound of falling rock draws my attention over to one side of the mountain. Nothing moves. Completely still.
It's all right. You hear little rockslides like this all the time.
Not so little sometimes, though. Avalanches start with little slides like that. If you're above them or beside them, they're interesting to watch. But if they're above you...no help then. You just have to watch it come.
People say strange things in their sleep, but why would I tell him I'll meet him? And why would he think I was awake? There's something really wrong there that produces a very bad quality feeling, but I don't know what it is. First you get the feeling, then you figure out why.
I hear Chris move and turn and see him look around.
``Where are we?'' he asks.
``Top of the ridge.''
``Oh,'' he says. He smiles.
I break open a lunch of Swiss cheese, pepperoni and crackers. I cut up the cheese and then the pepperoni in careful, neat slices. The silence allows you to do each thing right.
``Let's build a cabin here,'' he says.
``Ohhhhh,'' I groan, ``and climb up to it every day?''
``Sure,'' he teases. ``That wasn't hard.''
Yesterday is long ago in his memory. I pass some cheese and crackers over to him.
``What are you always thinking about?'' he asks.
``Thousands of things,'' I answer.
``What?''
``Most of them wouldn't make any sense to you.''
``Like what?''
``Like why I told you I'd meet you at the top of the mountain.''
``Oh,'' he says, and looks down.
``You said I sounded drunk,'' I tell him
``No, not drunk,'' he says, still looking down. The way he looks away from me makes me wonder all over again if he's telling the truth.
``How then?''
He doesn't answer.
``How then, Chris?''
``Just different.''
``How?''
``Well, I don't know!'' He looks up at me and there's a flicker of fear. ``Like you used to sound a long time ago,'' he says, and then looks down.
``When?''
``When we lived here.''
I keep my face composed so that he sees no change of expression in it, then carefully get up and go over and methodically turn the socks on the rock. They've dried long ago. As I return with them I see his glance is still on me. Casually I say, ``I didn't know I sounded different.''
He doesn't reply to this.
I put the socks on and slip the boots over them.
``I'm thirsty,'' Chris says.
``We shouldn't have too far to go down to find water,'' I say, standing up. I look at the snow for a while, then say, ``You ready to go?''
He nods and we get the packs on.
As we walk along the summit toward the beginning of a ravine we hear another clattering sound of falling rock, much louder than the first one I heard just a while ago. I look up to see where it is. Still nothing.
``What was that?'' Chris asks.
``Rockslide.''
We both stand still for a moment, listening. Chris asks, ``Is there somebody up there?''
``No, I think it's just melting snow that's loosening stones. When it's really hot like this in the early part of the summer you hear a lot of small rockslides. Sometimes big ones. It's part of the wearing down of the mountains.''
``I didn't know mountains wore out.''
``Not wore out, wore down. They get rounded and gentle. These mountains are still unworn.''
Everywhere around us now, except above, the sides of the mountain are covered with blackish green of the forest. In the distance the forest looks like velvet.
I say, ``You look at these mountains now, and they look so permanent and peaceful, but they're changing all the time and the changes aren't always peaceful. Underneath us, beneath us here right now, there are forces that can tear this whole mountain apart.''
``Do they ever?''
``Ever what?''
``Tear the whole mountain apart?''
``Yes,'' I say. Then I remember: ``Not far from here there are nineteen people lying dead under millions of tons of rock. Everyone was amazed there were only nineteen.''
``What happened?''
``They were just tourists from the east who had stopped for the night at a campground. During the night the underground forces broke free and when the rescuers saw what had happened the next morning, they just shook their heads. They didn't even try to excavate. All they could have done was dig down through hundreds of feet of rock for bodies that would just have to be buried all over again. So they left them there. They're still there now.''
``How did they know there were nineteen?''
``Neighbors and relatives from their hometowns reported them missing.''
Chris stares at the top of the mountain before us. ``Didn't they get any warning?''
``I don't know.''
``You'd think there'd be a warning.''
``Maybe there was.''
We walk to where the ridge we are on creases inward to the start of a ravine. I see that we can follow this ravine down and eventually find water in it. I start angling down now.
Some more rocks clatter up above. Suddenly I'm frightened.
``Chris,'' I say.
``What?''
``You know what I think?''
``No, what?''
``I think we'd be very smart if we let that mountaintop go for now and try it another summer.''
He's silent. Then he says, ``Why?''
``I have bad feelings about it.''
He doesn't say anything for a long time. Finally he says, ``Like what?''
``Oh, I just think that we could get caught up there in a storm or a slide or something and we'd be in real trouble.''
More silence. I look up and see real disappointment in his face. I think he knows I'm leaving something out. ``Why don't you think about it,'' I say, ``and then when we get to some water and have lunch we'll decide.''
We continue walking down. ``Okay?'' I say.
He finally says, ``Okay,'' in a noncommittal voice.
The descent is easy now but I see it will be steeper soon. It's still open and sunny here but soon we'll be in trees again.
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.
I don't suppose that sounds like the old days to Chris either. I spook very easily these days, and am not ashamed to admit it. He never spooked at anything. Never. That's the difference between us. That's why I'm alive and he's not. If he's up there, some psychic entity, some ghost, some Doppelgänger waiting up there for us in God knows what fashion -- well, he's going to have to wait a long time. A very long time.
These damned heights get eerie after a while. I want to go down, way down; far, far down.
To the ocean. That sounds right. Where the waves roll in slowly and there's always a roar and you can't fall anywhere. You're already there.
Now we enter the trees again, and the sight of the mountaintop is obscured by their branches and I'm glad.
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.
``Feels good to be going down, doesn't it?'' I say.
No answer.
We're going to have a little fight, I'm afraid.
You go up the mountaintop and all you're gonna get is a great big heavy stone tablet handed to you with a bunch of rules on it.
That's about what happened to him.
Thought he was a goddamned Messiah.
Not me, boy. The hours are way too long, and the pay is way too short. Let's go. Let's go -- .
Soon I'm clomping down the slope in a kind of two-step idiot gallop -- ga-dump, ga-dump, ga-dump -- until I hear Chris holler, ``SLOW DOWN!'' and see he is a couple of hundred yards back through the trees.
So I slow down, but after a while see he is deliberately lagging behind. He's disappointed, of course.
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. Believe me, when the world is seen not as a duality of mind and matter but as a trinity of quality, mind, and matter, then the art of motorcycle maintenance and other arts take on a dimension of meaning they never had. The specter of technology the Sutherlands are running from becomes not an evil but a positive fun thing. And to demonstrate that will be a long fun task.
But first, to give this other specter his walking papers, I should say the following:
Perhaps he would have gone in the direction I'm now about to go in if this second wave of crystallization, the metaphysical wave, had finally grounded out where I'll be grounding it out, that is, in the everyday world. I think metaphysics is good if it improves everyday life; otherwise forget it. But unfortunately for him it didn't ground out. It went into a third mystical wave of crystallization from which he never recovered.
He'd been speculating about the relationship of Quality to mind and matter and had identified Quality as the parent of mind and matter, that event which gives birth to mind and matter. This Copernican inversion of the relationship of Quality to the objective world could sound mysterious if not carefully explained, but he didn't mean it to be mysterious. He simply meant that at the cutting edge of time, before an object can be distinguished, there must be a kind of nonintellectual awareness, which he called awareness of Quality. You can't be aware that you've seen a tree until after you've seen the tree, and between the instant of vision and instant of awareness there must be a time lag. We sometimes think of that time lag as unimportant, But there's no justification for thinking that the time lag is unimportant...none whatsoever.
The past exists only in our memories, the future only in our plans. The present is our only reality. The tree that you are aware of intellectually, because of that small time lag, is always in the past and therefore is always unreal. Any intellectually conceived object is always in the past and therefore unreal. Reality is always the moment of vision before the intellectualization takes place. There is no other reality. This preintellectual reality is what Phædrus felt he had properly identified as Quality. Since all intellectually identifiable things must emerge from this preintellectual reality, Quality is the parent, the source of all subjects and objects.
He felt that intellectuals usually have the greatest trouble seeing this Quality, precisely because they are so swift and absolute about snapping everything into intellectual form. The ones who have the easiest time seeing this Quality are small children, uneducated people and culturally ``deprived'' people. These have the least predisposition toward intellectuality from cultural sources and have the least formal training to instill it further into them. That, he felt, is why squareness is such a uniquely intellectual disease. He felt he'd been accidentally immunized from it, or at least to some extent broken from the habit by his failure from school. After that he felt no compulsive identification with intellectuality and could examine anti-intellectual doctrines with sympathy.
Squares, he said, because of their prejudices toward intellectuality usually regard Quality, the preintellectual reality, as unimportant, a mere uneventful transition period between objective reality and subjective perception of it. Because they have preconceived ideas of its unimportance they don't seek to find out if it's in any way different from their intellectual conception of it.
It is different, he said. Once you begin to hear the sound of that Quality, see that Korean wall, that nonintellectual reality in its pure form, you want to forget all that word stuff, which you finally begin to see is always somewhere else.
Now, armed with his new time-interrelated metaphysical trinity, he had that romantic-classic Quality split, the one which had threatened to ruin him, completely stopped. They couldn't cut up Quality now. He could sit there and at his leisure cut them up. Romantic Quality always correlated with instantaneous impressions. Square Quality always involved multiple considerations that extended over a period of time. Romantic Quality was the present, the here and now of things. Classic Quality was always concerned with more than just the present. The relation of the present to the past and future was always considered. If you conceived the past and future to be all contained in the present, why, that was groovy, the present was what you lived for. And if your motorcycle is working, why worry about it? But if you consider the present to be merely an instant between the past and the future, just a passing moment, then to neglect the past and future for the present is bad Quality indeed. The motorcycle may be working now, but when was the oil level last checked? Fussbudgetry from the romantic view, but good common sense from the classic.
Now we had two different kinds of Quality but they no longer split Quality itself. They were just two different time aspects of Quality, short and long. What had previously been asked for was a metaphysical hierarchy that looked like this:
What he gave them in return was a metaphysical hierarchy that looked like this:
The Quality he was teaching was not just a part of reality, it was the whole thing.
He then proceeded in terms of the trinity to answer the question, Why does everybody see Quality differently? This was the question he had always had to answer speciously before. Now he said, ``Quality is shapeless, formless, indescribable. To see shapes and forms is to intellectualize. Quality is independent of any such shapes and forms. The names, the shapes and forms we give Quality depend only partly on the Quality. They also depend partly on the a priori images we have accumulated in our memory. We constantly seek to find, in the Quality event, analogues to our previous experiences. If we didn't we'd be unable to act. We build up our language in terms of these analogues. We build up our whole culture in terms of these analogues.''
The reason people see Quality differently, he said, is because they come to it with different sets of analogues. He gave linguistic examples, showing that to us the Hindi letters da, da, and dha all sound identical to us because we don't have analogues to them to sensitize us to their differences. Similarly, most Hindi-speaking people cannot distinguish between da and the because they are not so sensitized. It is not uncommon, he said, for Indian villagers to see ghosts. But they have a terrible time seeing the law of gravity.
This, he said, explains why a classful of freshman composition students arrives at similar ratings of Quality in the compositions. They all have relatively similar backgrounds and similar knowledge. But if a group of foreign students were brought in, or, say, medieval poems out of the range of class experience were brought in, then the students' ability to rank Quality would probably not correlate as well.
In a sense, he said, it's the student's choice of Quality that defines him. People differ about Quality, not because Quality is different, but because people are different in terms of experience. He speculated that if two people had identical a priori analogues they would see Quality identically every time. There was no way to test this, however, so it had to remain just speculation.
In answer to his colleagues at school he wrote:
``Any philosophic explanation of Quality is going to be both false and true precisely because it is a philosophic explanation. The process of philosophic explanation is an analytic process, a process of breaking something down into subjects and predicates. What I mean (and everybody else means) by the word quality cannot be broken down into subjects and predicates. This is not because Quality is so mysterious but because Quality is so simple, immediate and direct.
``The easiest intellectual analogue of pure Quality that people in our environment can understand is that `Quality is the response of an organism to its environment' (he used this example because his chief questioners seemed to see things in terms of stimulus-response behavior theory). An amoeba, placed on a plate of water with a drip of dilute sulfuric acid placed nearby, will pull away from the acid (I think). If it could speak the amoeba, without knowing anything about sulfuric acid, could say, `This environment has poor quality.' If it had a nervous system it would act in a much more complex way to overcome the poor quality of the environment. It would seek analogues, that is, images and symbols from its previous experience, to define the unpleasant nature of its new environment and thus `understand' it.
``In our highly complex organic state we advanced organisms respond to our environment with an invention of many marvelous analogues. We invent earth and heavens, trees, stones and oceans, gods, music, arts, language, philosophy, engineering, civilization and science. We call these analogues reality. And they are reality. We mesmerize our children in the name of truth into knowing that they are reality. We throw anyone who does not accept these analogues into an insane asylum. But that which causes us to invent the analogues is Quality. Quality is the continuing stimulus which our environment puts upon us to create the world in which we live. All of it. Every last bit of it.
``Now, to take that which has caused us to create the world, and include it within the world we have created, is clearly impossible. That is why Quality cannot be defined. If we do define it we are defining something less than Quality itself.''
I remember this fragment more vividly than any of the others, possibly because it is the most important of all. When he wrote it he felt momentary fright and was about to strike out the words ``All of it. Every last bit of it.'' Madness there. I think he saw it. But he couldn't see any logical reason to strike these words out and it was too late now for faintheartedness. He ignored his warning and let the words stand.
He put his pencil down and then -- felt something let go. As though something internal had been strained too hard and had given way. Then it was too late.
He began to see that he had shifted away from his original stand. He was no longer talking about a metaphysical trinity but an absolute monism. Quality was the source and substance of everything.
A whole new flood of philosophic associations came to mind. Hegel had talked like this, with his Absolute Mind. Absolute Mind was independent too, both of objectivity and subjectivity.
However, Hegel said the Absolute Mind was the source of everything, but then excluded romantic experience from the ``everything'' it was the source of. Hegel's Absolute was completely classical, completely rational and completely orderly.
Quality was not like that.
Phædrus remembered Hegel