when i first read pirsig, i assumes romantic and classical are terms he invented to help him say  what he was saying. later, much later, much much later, thanks to youtube's infinite well of content, and also having lucked out with people around me who helped me acquire grown up stuff and gently initiated me into the world of grown-up angst, existential dread, and suffering ( not the when-will-my-new-toy-come but what-are-we-doing-this-for and when-will-it-end) ,  i had sampled enough material that i needed categories to refer to them.  it then suddenly[1] struck me that these terms had existed forever (a century tops) and they referred to things in art - beethoven and mozart's music,  for eg, is supposedly following cerebral, hard-logical rules, while debussy saunters by with delightful, feely-goody stuff ( mozart wouldn't work in the final fountain scene of ocean's eleven...)(beethoven wandered around in a pasture but only in straight lines). this then segues into some chatter about the motorcycle - the logic and precision of the internal workings vs the good feelings that come out of all the rides. the book is structured that way too - interesting biking narrative interspersed with dissecting and analysing the 'motorcyle' that feels the feels - ie -you. but.... is it really you ? 

these two terms ( romantic and classic) form the heart of the argument. hard logic and rules, and feel-good. this dichotomy quickly moves towards  reliable vs good-looking-but-without-substance, hard-working and wastrel , ant and grasshopper.... it would be nice if we can prove this a false dichotomy 

we'd like to drive around in a classically designed car or a train,  and not a romantically designed one. but we'd rather have romantic type satisfaction when looking at life . it's one thing to be working hard on all the parameters and feel like sh!t , and another to lie on the fat eating cake and binge-watching tv shows (or even reading) - but aren't these like two extremes ?  ....

-\0o=p[l'

w2qQ!`    ```````` [2]

[1] wow, it's been only, what, 26 years since i started reading the book that i now know enough to click the pieces together

 [2] coincidentally my smallicule aka Smallington banged these out in passing. I'm keeping it.

 Familiarity breeds boredom and contempt

This sets the stage for exploration

Exploration discovers variations or intricacies

Now the thing is no more a thing but a complex

Thus it dies

Hence symbolic systems must be renewed perennially 

 if it sounds crazy or stupid, it's probably good for you

if it's super scary, it's probably something you need badly

word of the week, from last week's travels  : containment, containment zones

 

 i'm in this train

the seats were better 

i haven't gotten down, 

am still on it

i don't know where it's

going

 something tells me this is the era in which the ideas in 'revolutionary wealth' have become the norm. Alvin Tofler was working towards this and was calling it just when the web was taking off. The coda of the second wave, in the third wave book, was epiphanic, enlightening at the time I was a struggling first-jobber sharing an apartment suffering commute and office hierarchies and wondering why do all this

 rushkoff's concept of the current generation coming into what was exclusive eclectic and almost a crime for commoners in the previous era, is coming to a boil now

 living in the city in a big apartment has a lot of advantages.

you can't keep your windows open coz some sub-humanite meat-popsicle is smoking and the cigarette smoke is filtering through your house and your kids are breathing it. so you can't have any cross ventilation. 

this practice of keeping the windows closed comes in handy because soon bulldozers and jcbs are gonna tear through the grounds under your window and then the city is going to build a road for the next ten years, and all you're gonna get is smoke and concrete dust and also the good old organic dust...

you might even feel good about that, that you are rubbing shoulders with the elitest losers in literature - arthur dent himself.... 

wait, did i say advantages ? yes yes I did. and I did mean the kind of advantage which forces you to overcome adversity and develop strength of character and pass all of God's tests and that kind of stuff. 

 The great thing about vacations is the rooms we stay in - the hostel like ones or the two star ones (the good ones, where the floors are mosaic and  beds are clean and the place has a garden or lawn of its own ) - with these we get a glimpse of what our life could be if we didn't have stuff, but somehow, had rooms that were empty, floors unlittered ,surfaces uncrowded, and cupboards bare. What it would be like to wake up, and get out and go look for fun.

 

made with canvaspaint

https://mspaint.humanhead.com/ 

 walking in mulki. around the dreary sleepy shops, crumbling walls, dead economics - was thinking - when i was a kid i used be impressed by characters in books , or city folk who used to talk about brands - there would always be some in the backwaters of the west coast who would be talking about sony or hitachi or toyota cars which they (or their cousins) had seen in the gulf .... i never had brands to my name, in retrospect completely irrelevant to the larger picture of life - and used to dream about wearing shoes of my choice at work - i once bought a 'cut shoe' made of plastic , not the leather ones but the rain proof variety(  i guess they were what is known as loafers) - i probably wore them during rainy season, to school, to then change into our regulation kelachandra tristars.....

it's like i've stepped into a time bubble. the greens growing wild on the walls and by the side of the roads - stark contrast to the city covered in concrete from head to toe - 

space, time, future all empty here, vacant like the passerby's stares

" dei onakku sense illa da !! "

if you empty Chennai of all the people, then walk around in the empty streets, any number of years later, you will hear this sentence echoing around ...

our  necessary and manufactured illusions allow us to go through the day without the crushing despair that is the typical fate of the unclad mind

clothed in various overlapping ideas of worth, superiority,  potential, and visions of a resplendent future, the soul can tolerate the  sharp and dungy cobblestones of circumstance , and come out somewhat intact. 

the larger picture remains intact, allowing one to be functional, and come away only a bit scratched. 

as the ages go by, the larger picture gets covered in a million scratches, like an old windshield, and functions just as good (or not). then things change course. 

then once, the future isn't any more, the cloak of delusional future loses its protective power, it's time for the numbing from the inside. it's best to start this spirituality business early, so by the time the train of inevitability pulls in at the platform, instead of the one that will take you to your dreams, you can just get in and 

Jed McKenna books call this sleepwalking. the first breakout step is to grow up and become an Adult(tm) The adult plays the roles without shirking or crying . Then comes the next stage.

seems like a spiel for recruiting more suckers(tm) into the giant suck that is the man made world of man.

I bet there's no next stage.