Eight years ago almost to the day, Bax and I headed out on a father-son motorcycle trip. You see, I was a fan of the book
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The story talked of how a father and son had found themselves while traveling the roads of the northern United States, about the same year that I was born. I had also been a child protection worker and intervened in hundreds of parent-teen conflicts. The common thread to those interventions is that the parents had lost touch or connection with their teenager and yet they still placed expectations on them. It hit me: parenting was all about having a relationship with your kid, a connection so that when challenges arose, it was the connection that assisted you in weathering the storms of the teenage life. It is funny now that I reflect back on each one of my boys' transition to adulthood and, although my last one hasn't yet emerged from the forest, we never really had to shelter any storms.
I packed up my 1982 Honda Silverwing (truth be told, I probably doubled the weight rating on that old girl) and we headed to Williams Lake, Bella Coola, took the discovery inland ferry to Port Hardy, intersected the island at three points to get to the east coast, and then came back via the Sunshine coast and Highway 99. It was an unforgettable trip: we never had one drop of rain and we talked about that trip for the rest of his life.
In
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the author would always travel with classic books that he would read to his son. I decided to do the same, using his book as one of my favourites. I remember during the trip struggling to keep up; I had the goal of reading the entire book on the trip. If you have ever travelled on a motorcycle and camped, you would know that there is never enough time. After engaging with some of my expectations, I remember relaxing and just reading a few choice passages. I always wondered what my boys thought during the endless miles and drone of the motorcycle. Baxter told me that he would play songs in his head. Maybe that was their first opportunity to practice the gift of meditation, connecting thoughts, and enjoying nature pass by. A day before his 18th birthday, I sent Bax a hardcopy of that book. I know that because he had kept the Amazon gift receipt as a book mark in the book and his friends had given me back his book a few days after his death. As I was sitting with his friends in the kitchen discussing Baxter's life, they started asking the question, "Where is Baxter now?" I asked them if I could read a passage from the book. I turned to the afterword in one of the later additions and read.
Afterword
The receding Ancient Greek perspective of the past ten years has a very dark side: Chris is dead.
He was murdered.
At about 8:00 P.M. on Saturday, November 17, 1979, in San Francisco, he left the Zen Center, where he was a student, to visit a friend's house a block away on Haight Street.
According to witnesses, a car stopped on the street beside him and two men, black, jumped out. One came from behind him so that Chris couldn't escape, and grabbed his arms. The one in front of him emptied his pockets and found nothing and became angry. He threatened Chris with a large kitchen knife. Chris said something which the witnesses could not hear. His assailant became angrier. Chris then said something that made him even more furious. He jammed the knife into Chris's chest. Then the two jumped into their car and left.
Chris leaned for a time on a parked car, trying to keep from collapsing. After a time he staggered across the street to a lamp at the corner of Haight and Octavia. Then, with his right lung filled with blood from a severed pulmonary artery, he fell to the sidewalk and died.
I go on living, more from force of habit than anything else. At his funeral we learned that he had bought a ticket that morning for England, where my second wife and I lived aboard a sailboat. Then a letter from him arrived which said, strangely, "I never thought I would ever live to see my twenty-third birthday.''
His twenty-third birthday would have been in two weeks.
After his funeral we packed all his things, including a secondhand motorcycle he had just bought, into an old pickup truck and headed back across some of the western mountain and desert roads described in this book. At this time of year the mountain forests and prairies were snow-covered and alone and beautiful. By the time we reached his grandfather's house in Minnesota we were feeling more peaceful. There, in his grandfather's attic, his things are still stored.
I tend to become taken with philosophic questions, going over them and over them and over them again in loops that go round and round and round until they either produce an answer or become so repetitively locked on they become psychiatrically dangerous, and now the question became obsessive: "Where did he go?''
Where did Chris go? He had bought an airplane ticket that morning. He had a bank account, drawers full of clothes, and shelves full of books. He was a real, live person, occupying time and space on this planet, and now suddenly where was he gone to? Did he go up the stack at the crematorium? Was he in the little box of bones they handed back? Was he strumming a harp of gold on some overhead cloud? None of these answers made any sense.
It had to be asked: What was it I was so attached to? Is it just something in the imagination? When you have done time in a mental hospital, that is never a trivial question. If he wasn't just imaginary, then where did he go? Do real things just disappear like that? If they do, then the conservation laws of physics are in trouble. But if we stay with the laws of physics, then the Chris that disappeared was unreal. Round and round and round. He used to run off like that just to make me mad. Sooner or later he would always appear, but where would he appear now? After all, really, where did he go?
The loops eventually stopped at the realization that before it could be asked "Where did he go?'' It must be asked "What is the 'he' that is gone?''
There is an old cultural habit of thinking of people as primarily something material, as flesh and blood. As long as this idea held, there was no solution. The oxides of Chris's flesh and blood did, of course, go up the stack at the crematorium. But they weren't Chris.
What had to be seen was that the Chris I missed so badly was not an object but a pattern, and that although the pattern included the flesh and blood of Chris, that was not all there was to it. The pattern was larger than Chris and myself, and related us in ways that neither of us understood completely and neither of us was in complete control of.
Now Chris's body, which was a part of that larger pattern, was gone. But the larger pattern remained. A huge hole had been torn out of the centre of it, and that was what caused all the heartache. The pattern was looking for something to attach to and couldn't find anything. That's probably why grieving people feel such attachment to cemetery headstones and any material property or representation of the deceased. The pattern is trying to hang on to its own existence by finding some new material thing to centre itself upon.
Some time later it became clearer that these thoughts were something very close to statements found in many "primitive'' cultures. If you take that part of the pattern that is not the flesh and bones of Chris and call it the "spirit'' of Chris or the "ghost'' of Chris, then you can say without further translation that the spirit or ghost of Chris is looking for a new body to enter. When we hear accounts of "primitives'' talking this way, we dismiss them as superstition because we interpret ghost or spirit as some sort of material ectoplasm, when in fact they may not mean any such thing at all.
In any event, it was not many months later that my wife conceived, unexpectedly. After careful discussion we decided it was not something that should continue. I'm in my fifties. I didn't want to go through any more child-raising experiences. I'd seen enough. So we came to our conclusion and made the necessary medical appointment.
Then something very strange happened. I'll never forget it. As we went over the whole decision in detail one last time, there was a kind of dissociation, as though my wife started to recede while we sat there talking. We were looking at each other, talking normally, but it was like those photographs of a rocket just after launching where you see two stages start to separate from each other in space. You think you're together and then suddenly you see that you're not together anymore.
I said, "Wait. Stop. Something's wrong.'' What it was, was unknown, but it was intense and I didn't want it to continue. It was a really frightening thing, which has since become clearer. It was the larger pattern of Chris, making itself known at last. We reversed our decision, and now realize what a catastrophe it would have been for us if we hadn't.
So I guess you could say, in this primitive way of looking at things, that Chris got his airplane ticket after all. This time he's a little girl named Nell and our life is back in perspective again. The hole in the pattern is being mended. A thousand memories of Chris will always be at hand, of course, but not a destructive clinging to some material entity that can never be here again.
We're in Sweden now, the home of my mother's ancestors, and I'm working on a second book which is a sequel to this one.
Nell teaches aspects of parenthood never understood before. If she cries or makes a mess or decides to be contrary (and these are relatively rare), it doesn't bother. There is always Chris's silence to compare it to. What is seen now so much more clearly is that although the names keep changing and the bodies keep changing, the larger pattern that holds us all together goes on and on. In terms of this larger pattern the lines at the end of this book still stand. We have won it. Things are better now. You can sort of tell these things.
ooolo99ikl;i.,pyknulmmmmmmmmmm 111
(This last line is by Nell. She reached around the corner of the machine and banged on the keys and then watched with the same gleam Chris used to have. If the editors preserve it, it will be her first published work.) -Robert M. Pirsig, Gothenburg, Sweden
1984
It was funny because a few days previously I couldn't sleep. I shot out of bed because I remembered this passage and was curious how old Chris was when he died. As I read the passage, my first reaction is that I had been cursed by this book. After a few days, however, a new perspective emerged. I realized that this book and the above passage was a gift; many parallels existed between Chris and Baxter. The time we shared riding motorcycles, well, I suspect it was that experience that gave Baxter the perspective to travel and live a full life. He had bought a ticket to South East Asia and was excited to learn more about Eastern mysticism.
Today, two weeks have passed since I learned about Baxter's death. I think it would be fitting to combine a motorcycle trip and a bicycle trip around the place of his accident.
