I’m working on a synthesis of
disembodied parts. This is the question: Why live longer? And if the ghost of
reason responds, “One lives longer in order that he may live longer” (85), and
you believe him, “[t]he ghost wins” (67). The ghost is running knives through our
lives and wants us to know the name for everything, but we’re not supposed to
know a whole can be infinitely halved, that taxonomy is a singularity at the
center of a black hole.
Taxonomy began in the garden, where “the
illusion that all those parts are just there and being named as they exist” (79),
where the illusion took root and sprouted a stalk that “just goes on and on” (82),
stretching like a skinny fist into the heavens, where the origin of names
existed always in the creatures and never in Adam. This happened in the garden.
This happened in the garden, where
Eve never learned that “[w]hen…the knife… is applied…something is always killed”
(83), that a snake flensed can make some pretty elegant boots, that snake
tastes better than forbidden fruit. Poor Eve never imagined slow-roasting Satan
before he’d become flame retardant. This happened in the garden.
Let
me fashion you a story, he said. “The world has no existence whatsoever outside
the human imagination” (Pirsig 42). Imagine you are searching for the knife,
and “it takes a long time to realize [you] don’t need the flashlight, you need
the machete, which is in plain sight” (63). Maybe “[you] get out a hunting
knife” (63) and try to find that timber wolf to cut out of him that part of you
you recognized staring “into the animal’s eyes” (88). Don’t forget that “it is
important to concentrate on the knife itself” (79), that you can catch yourself
mirrored in the metal of the blade if the light is right and you look long enough.
And when you catch yourself, see that you didn’t fall, because your paws are
grounded, and you’re a digit short of a handgrip, and there never was a knife at all, save for the one he holds, the one before you, the one who thinks this moment is
“not physical and d[oes] not exist in time at all” (88). Take heart when he,
applying the knife, sunders himself from you. Blade in your underbelly, unzips
your coat, and you are born anew. Dismembered, remember “[w]hen…the knife… is
applied” (84), something will die, but “[s]omething[’s] created too” (84).
Coooool. :) I see what you did there.
ReplyDeleteThe whole knife thing makes complete sense to me because that's literally how we understand the world: we understand what a dog is because it is not a cat. We understand what a cat is because it is not a tree, and so on. The divisions are built right into our language, even with the connotations of feminine and masculine words, like Doug's great example of binaries with hysterical < Latin hystericus, < Greek ὑστερικός belonging to the womb, suffering in the womb, hysterical...
I like how your post here emphasizes that something is lost but something is also found. We lose the broader picture when we make things more specific, but we also find those binaries and differences between things which can help us pinpoint causes. It also reminds me of the law of equivalent exchange; that we cannot gain anything without giving something in return. Then we go again to the idea of progress; and if it's really progress at all, hence if it's worth it to give something up for something else; see Lyotard on the Postmodern Condition.
The metaphorical (?) knife in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is something I feel I've overlooked until now. Your post reminds me of the path a Rhet/Comp class I took last semester ultimately followed. By the end of the course, we were using rhetoric (or at least reading about how other people have tried to use rhetoric) to unmask 'hidden' paradigms of human thought. Some reasoning processes are unquestioned and intuitive, but should they be? That question could apply to cutting concepts into neat little categories.
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