Travelling Companions

When I left Montreal in the 1970’s, I brought a book with me that some of my Montreal friends were reading. I never got to compare notes with them about “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” by Robert Pirsig, because, leaving the city where I had lived all my life, I found myself a week later sleeping in a cemetery on a hill above the harbor in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia. Because there were no lights up there, I would go down the hill to the wharfs where scallop trawlers were moored and read my book under a light-pole on the dock.

I now realize this was a perfect guide for the journey I was on, and I’d like to share something about the story it tells: of how the very beginnings of our civilization–like much of the society in which we presently live–has deceived us about what is most important.

Here is a brief synopsis. A man who was a professor of philosophy at a University in the American East is taking a motorcycle trip to California with his son. The son doesn’t get a speaking part until the last line of the book, when he uses the second person pronoun to answer the many questions his father hasn’t been able to answer for himself over 100’s of pages.

It’s been 50 years since I read this book, but I still remember that second person pronoun, “You”, jumping off the page like the moment of insight we all hope will rescue us from our wandering in the desert. The narrator calls himself Phaedrus after the young man in a Socratic Dialogue intended to reveal our innate ability to discover the truth. Whether or not Socrates was genuine in claiming this innate capacity, back in 1975 I knew that I had lost contact with my own truth.

The father is tracing the path that convinced him that Western philosophy rests on falsehood, as he drives across the country with his son behind him on the back of the motorcycle. We discover that the son, who is supposedly having the experience of a lifetime, cannot see this countryside until they are leaving it behind. In the course of reviewing the Western philosophy he has taught for years, he goes through Aristotle and Plato, finding something inadequate, even false, in each of them. Then he reaches Socrates and examines the Socratic dialogue named after the young man, “Phaedrus”, whom Socrates is trying to persuade can find truth inside him. But the current day Phaedrus concludes that Socrates is leading this Greek youth to a belief using an argument that assumes it. This causes him to conclude that the purpose of so called “Socratic Dialogue” (a foundation of logical inquiry in our Western culture) is to plant convenient conclusions inside naive minds; not to foster the spontaneous discovery of universal truth within our own hearts.

As this modern-day Phaedrus is undermining our faith in the Western philosophic tradition, whenever they pull off the road for the night, he spends the evening “mindfully” caring for his motorcycle: cleaning every surface, checking every valve, topping off every receptacle with water or oil, all in the spirit of the Zen tradition that had crossed the ocean and refreshed many dissatisfied minds living on the North American continent.

But something is not right with how Phaedrus’ is relating to his world and with his son. His practice of Zen feels driven and categorical, echoing his wholesale condemnation of the ancient philosophers whose work has created much of our Western traditions.

What is new for me as I look back at this earlier time in my life and I wonder why I read Pirsig’s book so avidly every night by the light of a bulb on a tall pole above the boat where I sat, rocking gently in the ocean swell in the harbor of a fishing village, and on whose docks I experienced another panic attack echoing the one that had sent me running blind out of my life in Montreal, was that I can now see something more clearly than I could then. That second panic attack occurred when I was turned down by the skipper of a scallop trawler that had just returned from its 14-day run, leaving me feeling enveloped by a future empty of any place for me to stand.

Like Phaedrus (the philosopher running from his East Coast university), I too was in despair about the way I had learned to look at my world and my place in it. Like Phaedrus, I was caught up in self-defeating cycles in which every thought, hope, dream, and the gestures I had learned to build a believable life were dead on arrival, because I couldn’t relax in the middle of wherever I was and see how truly wonderful it was to be in a small village, unencumbered by my past, and let myself listen to what I was discovering. Instead, I allowed my anxieties to stick to me like the black tar of the tobacco leaves I was picking a month later on Prince Edward Island, which I found scrubbed off easily in the sandy dirt in which the tobacco plants were growing.

That panic attack on the Lunenberg dock gave me the moment I needed to move through some of my despair. Instead of falling into the pit that had opened up after I had given up my job and apartment and suddenly realized that I had no idea of what could come next to replace them, I told myself this time that I would not allow myself to fall into a learned pattern of hopelessness. That wasn’t the last attack I had, but there would only be one more with that intensity.

When I had another panic attack a year later in Calgary, my means of deliverance feels in retrospect more aware, as if I had worked through something in that intervening year. When the job postings on the cork boards of The Farm Labor Pool became virtually empty, my fear that summer work on farms and ranches had come to an end–now that the wheat was in the silos and the hay bales were in the barns of Alberta for that year (so that, I told myself, I would have to crawl back to Montreal and get another programming job), dissipated in a sudden realization.

I was exactly where I had yearned to be when I had fled my life in Montreal. I was peering into the edge of the future–free to face whatever showed up next. With that thought, I stood up from my chair in my Calgary YMCA room, went downstairs to where people were watching the Olympics being held that summer in my old hometown, Montreal, and within minutes had my first of three jobs that came my way in the next few days–when a man walked in and said he’d pay $10 to anyone who could load cartons of empty beer bottles into a truck for him. I was standing in front of him within seconds. Later that night, I got a job loading semi-trucks with the rides from the Calgary Stampede which was just ending. The next morning, on my way to the Labor pool to check out their bulletin board again, a man pulled up next to me and asked if I knew where that building was. When I told him I was headed there myself, he said “Hop in. I need help putting up balcony railings on new condos. Should last a few days. Let’s have breakfast first, my treat.” Later that week I got a job at a local ranch that lasted months—not just to bring in a seasonal harvest, but to drive cattle up into the mountains on horseback, chase bulls out of a field, also on horseback, and whitewash farm buildings where I met a goat who would lean her head on my shoulder while I painted, taking an occasional sip from the open paint can.