maintenance is purely classic. The dirt, the grease, the mastery of underlying form required all give it such a negative romantic appeal that women never go near it.
Although surface ugliness is often found in the classic mode of understanding it is not inherent in it. There is a classic esthetic which romantics often miss because of its subtlety. The classic style is straightforward, unadorned, unemotional, economical and carefully proportioned. Its purpose is not to inspire emotionally, but to bring order out of chaos and make the unknown known. It is not an esthetically free and natural style. It is esthetically restrained. Everything is under control. Its value is measured in terms of the skill with which this control is maintained.
To a romantic this classic mode often appears dull, awkward and ugly, like mechanical maintenance itself. Everything is in terms of pieces and parts and components and relationships. Nothing is figured out until it’s run through the computer a dozen times. Everything’s got to be measured and proved. Oppressive. Heavy. Endlessly grey. The death force.
Within the classic mode, however, the romantic has some appearances of his own. Frivolous, irrational, erratic, untrustworthy, interested primarily in pleasure-seeking. Shallow. Of no substance. Often a parasite who cannot or will not carry his own weight. A real drag on society. By now these battle lines should sound a little familiar.
This is the source of the trouble. Persons tend to think and feel exclusively in one mode or the other and in doing so tend to misunderstand and underestimate what the other mode is all about. But no one is willing to give up the truth as he sees it, and as far as I know, no one now living has any real reconciliation of these truths or modes. There is no point at which these visions of reality are unified.
And so in recent times we have seen a huge split develop between a classic culture and a romantic counterculture… two worlds growingly alienated and hateful toward each other with everyone wondering if it will always be this way, a house divided against itself. No one wants it really… despite what his antagonists in the other dimension might think.
It is within this context that what Ph?drus thought and said is significant. But no one was listening at that time and they only thought him eccentric at first, then undesirable, then slightly mad, and then genuinely insane. There seems little doubt that he was insane, but much of his writing at the time indicates that what was driving him insane was this hostile opinion of him. Unusual behavior tends to produce estrangement in others which tends to further the unusual behavior and thus the estrangement in self-stoking cycles until some sort of climax is reached. In Ph?drus’ case there was a court-ordered police arrest and permanent removal from society.
I see we are at the left turn onto US 12 and John has pulled up for gas. I pull up beside him.
The thermometer by the door of the station reads 92 degrees. “Going to be another rough one today”, I say.
When the tanks are filled we head across the street into a restaurant for coffee. Chris, of course, is hungry.
I tell him I’ve been waiting for that. I tell him he eats with the rest of us or not all. Not angrily. Just matter- of-factly. He’s reproachful but sees how it’s going to be.
I catch a fleeting look of relief from Sylvia. Evidently she thought this was going to be a continuous problem.
When we have finished the coffee and are outside again the heat is so ferocious we move off on the cycles as fast as possible. Again there is that momentary coolness, but it disappears. The sun makes the burned grass and sand so bright I have to squint to cut down glare. This US 12 is old, bad highway. The broken concrete is tar- patched and bumpy. Road signs indicate detours ahead. On either side of the road are occasional worn sheds and shacks and roadside stands that have accumulated through the years. The traffic is heavy now. I’m just as happy to be thinking about the rational, analytical, classical world of Ph?drus.
His kind of rationality has been used since antiquity to remove oneself from the tedium and depression of one’s immediate surroundings. What makes it hard to see is that where once it was used to get away from it all, the escape has been so successful that now it is the “it all” that the romantics are trying to escape. What makes his world so hard to see clearly is not its strangeness but its usualness. Familiarity can blind you too.
His way of looking at things produces a kind of description that can be called an “analytic” description. That is another name of the classic platform from which one discusses things in terms of their underlying form. He was a totally classic person. And to give a fuller description of what this is I want now to turn his analytic approach back upon itself… to analyze analysis itself. I want to do this first of all by giving an extensive example of it and then by dissecting what it is. The motorcycle is a perfect subject for it since the motorcycle itself was invented by classic minds. So listen:
A motorcycle may be divided for purposes of classical rational analysis by means of its component assemblies and by means of its functions.
If divided by means of its component assemblies, its most basic division is into a power assembly and a running assembly.
The power assembly may be divided into the engine and the power-delivery system. The engine will be taken up first.
The engine consists of a housing containing a power train, a fuel-air system, an ignition system, a feedback system and a lubrication system.
The power train consists of cylinders, pistons, connecting rods, a crankshaft and a flywheel.
The fuel-air system components, which are part of the engine, consist of a gas tank and filter, an air cleaner, a carburetor, valves and exhaust pipes.
The ignition system consists of an alternator, a rectifier, a battery, a high-voltage coil and spark plugs.
The feedback system consists of a cam chain, a camshaft, tappets and a distributor.
The lubrication system consists of an oil pump and channels throughout the housing for distribution of the oil.
The power-delivery system accompanying the engine consists of a clutch, a transmission and a chain.
The supporting assembly accompanying the power assembly consists of a frame, including foot pegs, seat and fenders; a steering assembly; front and rear shock absorbers; wheels; control levers and cables; lights and horn; and speed and mileage indicators.
That’s a motorcycle divided according to its components. To know what the components are for, a division according to functions is necessary:
A motorcycle may be divided into normal running functions and special, operator-controlled functions.
Normal running functions may be divided into functions during the intake cycle, functions during the compression cycle, functions during the power cycle and functions during the exhaust cycle.
And so on. I could go on about which functions occur in their proper sequence during each of the four cycles, then go on to the operator-controlled functions and that would be a very summary description of the underlying form of a motorcycle. It would be extremely short and rudimentary, as descriptions of this sort go. Almost any one of the components mentioned can be expanded on indefinitely. I’ve read an entire engineering volume on contact points alone, which are just a small but vital part of the distributor. There are other types of engines than the single-cylinder Otto engine described here: two-cycle engines, multiple-cylinder engines, diesel engines, Wankel engines… but this example is enough.
This description would cover the “what” of the motorcycle in terms of components, and the “how” of the engine in terms of functions. It would badly need a “where” analysis in the form of an illustration, and also a “why” analysis in the form of engineering principles that led to this particular conformation of parts. But the purpose here isn’t exhaustively to analyze the motorcycle. It’s to provide a starting point, an example of a mode of understanding of things which will itself become an object of analysis.
There’s certainly nothing strange about this description at first hearing. It sounds like something from a beginning textbook on the subject, or perhaps a first lesson in a vocational course. What is unusual about it is seen when it ceases to be a mode of discourse and becomes an object of discourse. Then certain things can be pointed to.
The first thing to be observed about this description is so obvious you have to hold it down or it will drown out every other observation. This is: It is just duller than ditchwater. Yah-da, yah-da, yah-da, yah-da, yah, carburetor, gear ratio, compression, yah-da-yah, piston, plugs, intake, yah-da-yah, on and on and on. That is the
