My watch says nine o’clock. And it’s already too hot to sleep. Outside the sleeping bag, the sun is already high into the sky. The air around is clear and dry.
I get up puffy-eyed and arthritic from the ground.
My mouth is already dry and cracked and my face and hands are covered with mosquito bites. Some sunburn from yesterday morning is hurting.
Beyond the pines are burned grass and clumps of earth and sand so bright they are hard to look at. The heat, silence, and barren hills and blank sky give a feeling of great, intense space.
Not a bit of moisture in the sky. Today’s going to be a scorcher.
I walk out of the pines onto a stretch of barren sand between some grass and watch for a long time, meditatively.
I’ve decided today’s Chautauqua will begin to explore Ph?drus’ world. It was intended earlier simply to restate some of his ideas that relate to technology and human values and make no reference to him personally, but the pattern of thought and memory that occurred last night has indicated this is not the way to go. To omit him now would be to run from something that should not be run from.
In the first grey of the morning what Chris said about his Indian friend’s grandmother came back to me, clearing something up. She said ghosts appear when someone has not been buried right. That’s true. He never was buried right, and that’s exactly the source of the trouble.
Later I turn and see John is up and looking at me uncomprehendingly. He is still not really awake, and now walks aimlessly in circles to clear his head. Soon Sylvia is up too and her left eye is all puffed up. I ask her what happened. She says it is from mosquito bites. I begin to collect gear to repack the cycle. John does the same.
When this is done we get a fire started while Sylvia opens up packages of bacon and eggs and bread for breakfast.
When the food is ready, I go over and wake Chris. He doesn’t want to get up. I tell him again. He says no. I grab the bottom of the sleeping bag, give it a mighty tablecloth jerk, and he is out of it, blinking in the pine needles. It takes him a while to figure out what has happened, while I roll up the sleeping bag.
He comes to breakfast looking insulted, eats one bite, says he isn’t hungry, his stomach hurts. I point to the lake down below us, so strange in the middle of the semidesert, but he doesn’t show any interest. He repeats his complaint. I just let it go by and John and Sylvia disregard it too. I’m glad they were told what the situation is with him. It might have created real friction otherwise.
We finish breakfast silently, and I’m oddly tranquil. The decision about Ph?drus may have something to do with it. But we are also perhaps a hundred feet above the reservoir, looking across it into a kind of Western spaciousness. Barren hills, no one anywhere, not a sound; and there is something about places like this that raises your spirits a little and makes you think that things will probably get better.
While loading the remaining gear on the luggage rack I see with surprise that the rear tire is worn way down. All that speed and heavy load and heat on the road yesterday must have caused it. The chain is also sagging and I get out the tools to adjust it and then groan.
“What’s the matter”, John says.
“Thread’s stripped in the chain adjustment.”
I remove the adjusting bolt and examine the threads. “It’s my own fault for trying to adjust it once without loosening the axle nut. The bolt is good.” I show it to him. “It looks like the internal threading in the frame that’s stripped.”
John stares at the wheel for a long time. “Think you can make it into town?”
“Oh, yeah, sure. You can run it forever. It just makes the chain difficult to adjust.”
He watches carefully as I take up the rear axle nut until it’s barely snug, tap it sideways with a hammer until the chain slack is right, then tighten up the axle nut with all my might to keep the axle from slipping forward later on, and replace the cotter pin. Unlike the axle nuts on a car, this one doesn’t affect bearing tightness.
“How did you know how to do that?” he asks.
“You just have to figure it out.”
“I wouldn’t know where to start”, he says.
I think to myself, That’s the problem, all right, where to start. To reach him you have to back up and back up, and the further back you go, the further back you see you have to go, until what looked like a small problem of communication turns into a major philosophic enquiry. That, I suppose, is why the Chautauqua.
I repack the tool kit and close the side cover plates and think to myself, He’s worth reaching though.
On the road again the dry air cools off the slight sweat from that chain job and I’m feeling good for a while. As soon as the sweat dries off though, it’s hot. Must be in the eighties already.
There’s no traffic on this road, and we’re moving right along. It’s a traveling day.
Now I want to begin to fulfill a certain obligation by stating that there was one person, no longer here, who had something to say, and who said it, but whom no one believed or really understood. Forgotten. For reasons that will become apparent I’d prefer that he remain forgotten, but there’s no choice other than to reopen his case.
I don’t know his whole story. No one ever will, except Ph?drus himself, and he can no longer speak. But from his writings and from what others have said and from fragments of my own recall it should be possible to piece together some kind of approximation of what he was talking about. Since the basic ideas for this Chautauqua were taken from him there will be no real deviation, only an enlargement that may make the Chautauqua more understandable than if it were presented in a purely abstract way. The purpose of the enlargement is not to argue for him, certainly not to praise him. The purpose is to bury him… forever.
Back in Minnesota when we were traveling through some marshland I did some talking about the “shapes” of technology, the “death force” that the Sutherlands seem to be running from. I want to move now in the opposite direction from the Sutherlands, toward that force and into its center. In doing so we will be entering Ph?drus’ world, the only world he ever knew, in which all understanding is in terms of underlying form.
The world of underlying form is an unusual object of discussion because it is actually a mode of discussion itself. You discuss things in terms of their immediate appearance or you discuss them in terms of their underlying form, and when you try to discuss these modes of discussion you get involved in what could be called a platform problem. You have no platform from which to discuss them other than the modes themselves.
Previously I was discussing his world of underlying form, or at least the aspect of it called technology, from an external view. Now I think it’s right to talk about that world of underlying form from its own point of view. I want to talk about the underlying form of the world of underlying form itself.
To do this, first of all, a dichotomy is necessary, but before I can use it honestly I have to back up and say what it is and means, and that is a long story in itself. Part of this back-up problem. But right now I just want to use a dichotomy and explain it later. I want to divide human understanding into two kinds… classical understanding and romantic understanding. In terms of ultimate truth a dichotomy of this sort has little meaning but it is quite legitimate when one is operating within the classic mode used to discover or create a world of underlying form. The terms classic and romantic, as Ph?drus used them, mean the following:
A classical understanding sees the world primarily as underlying form itself. A romantic understanding sees it primarily in terms of immediate appearance. If you were to show an engine or a mechanical drawing or electronic schematic to a romantic it is unlikely he would see much of interest in it. It has no appeal because the reality he sees is its surface. Dull, complex lists of names, lines and numbers. Nothing interesting. But if you were to show the same blueprint or schematic or give the same description to a classical person he might look at it and then become fascinated by it because he sees that within the lines and shapes and symbols is a tremendous richness of underlying form.
The romantic mode is primarily inspirational, imaginative, creative, intuitive. Feelings rather than facts predominate. “Art” when it is opposed to “Science” is often romantic. It does not proceed by reason or by laws. It proceeds by feeling, intuition and esthetic conscience. In the northern European cultures the romantic mode is usually associated with femininity, but this is certainly not a necessary association.
The classic mode, by contrast, proceeds by reason and by laws… which are themselves underlying forms of thought and behavior. In the European cultures it is primarily a masculine mode and the fields of science, law and medicine are unattractive to women largely for this reason. Although motorcycle riding is romantic, motorcycle
