Pirsig's second book, Lila, if you hadn't gathered, is about a boat trip, though it seems more a matter of drifting around than a purposeful excursion (though he stops off to do some business in New York, or rather not do some business, as he decides to not allow Hollywood to make a ZAMM movie because it will be inevitably dumbed down beyond recognition). Well, here he is talking about his boat, and a different trip he took to cross the Atlantic ("right where the Titanic was sunk," he notes). As a bonus, the introduction is by John Sutherland, the musician who travels with Pirsig during the early part of ZAMM.
Not much of philosophical interest here, though I like that Sutherland says that Pirsig should do some travel writing, and if he wants to throw some philosophy in there, he could do that... as if, from Sutherland's point of view, the philosophical part was just a bit of self-indulgence crammed into this travelogue. I can certainly picture a movie version (Pirsig describes talking with Robert Redford about adapting it; I could picture it as a new Clint Eastwood-directed thing) of ZAMM sort of like A Beautiful Mind, where the philosophy is brought in only so much as is necessary to define the protagonist's character, and the focus is on the landscapes and the emotional relationships between father and son and the other characters. Personally, I think such a movie would be a boon: it would certainly renew attention on the original book and get the ideas discussed further. ...Or maybe it would just be a bust.
-Mark Linsenmayer
That was awesome…thanks.
This clip will be of interest to any Pirsig fans just because you get to hear him talk, to see what he’s like. I happen to know that the video was recorded in Liverpool in July of 2005, when Dr. McWatt received his Ph.D. and hosted a kind of graduation party/amateur philosophy conference. (As mentioned on the podcast.) One can get a documentary about this event at McWatt’s website – robertpirsig.org. It’s titled “Arrive Without Traveling: Robert Pirsig in LIverpool”.
I’m not sure how much of the amateur philosophy conference made it into the final cut – there have been several versions and it’s been several years since I watched it – but I delivered a “paper” in which I speculated about making a proper movie of Zen and the Art. It’s called “Fun with Blasphemy” and it’s published on McWatt’s website too. (I didn’t realize that blasphemy was still a punishable crime in England at the time.)
My blasphemous speculation was way too long and these days I find it slightly embarrassing but it was also part of a fairly amazing coincidence. The main idea was to portray the artist/philosopher as hero, to paint the hero as a kind of rock star version of Orpheus, as opposed to the usual tough guy, action hero. As the offspring of Apollo and the Muse of epic poetry, Orpheus is the perfect fusion of classic intelligence and romantic soul. If this ancient Greek god were around today, I supposed, he’d be a rock star philosopher. (No, I’m not just making this up to flatter Mark.)
I was completely rattled by stage fright and quite relieved when it was over but each talk was followed by a Q&A session and this time Pirsig had something to say. He explained that it was a viewing of Cocteau’s “Testament of Orpheus” (1960) that finally pushed him over the edge. He said he walked into that theater and identified with Orpheus so thoroughly that he never came out. He saw Chicago as the land of the dead, as the underworld, and in that “psychotic” state he believed it was his task bring that whole world back to life. None of this is mentioned in either book but the in passages leading up to his final breakdown as it’s portrayed in ZAMM, one can get a glimpse of the Chicago he was seeing through his Orpheus eyes, if you will. Naturally, we were all quite stunned at this revelation and the sheer luck of that coincidence still blows my mind a little. As you can imagine, that was a day I won’t forget.
pico iyer on travel and reading graham greene the “man in his head”
http://www.nypl.org/audiovideo/pico-iyer-conversation-paul-holdengr%C3%A4ber?nref=90281