I look back and see Chris is way behind. “Come on!” I shout.
He doesn’t answer.
“Come on!” I shout again.
Then I see him fall sideways and sit in the grass on the side of the mountain. I leave my pack and go back down to him. The slope is so steep I have to dig my feet in sideways. When I get there he’s crying.
“I hurt my ankle”, he says, and doesn’t look at me.
When an ego-climber has an image of himself to protect he naturally lies to protect this image. But it’s disgusting to see and I’m ashamed of myself for letting this happen. Now my own willingness to continue becomes eroded by his tears and his inner sense of defeat passes to me. I sit down, live with this for a while, then, without turning away from it, pick up his backpack and say to him, “I’ll carry the packs in relays. I’ll take this one up to where mine is and then you stop and wait with it so we don’t lose it. Then I’ll take mine up farther and then come back for yours. That way you can get plenty of rest. It’ll be slower, but we’ll get there.”
But I’ve done this too soon. There’s still disgust and resentment in my voice which he hears and is shamed by. He shows anger, but says nothing, for fear he’ll have to carry the pack again, just frowns and ignores me while I relay the packs upward. I work off the resentment at having to do this by realizing that it isn’t any more work for me, actually, than the other way. It’s more work in terms of reaching the top of the mountain, but that’s only the nominal goal. In terms of the real goal, putting in good minutes, one after the other, it comes out the same; in fact, better. We climb slowly upward and the resentment leaves.
For the next hour we move slowly upward, I carrying the packs in relays, to where I locate the beginning trickle of a stream. I send Chris down for water in one of the pans, which he gets. When he comes back he says, “Why are we stopping here? Let’s keep going.”
“This is probably the last stream we’ll see for a long time, Chris, and I’m tired.”
“Why are you so tired?”
Is he trying to infuriate me? He’s succeeding.
“I’m tired, Chris, because I’m carrying the packs. If you’re in a hurry take your pack and go on up ahead. I’ll catch up with you.”
He looks at me with another flick of fear, then sits down. “I don’t like this”, he says, almost in tears. “I hate this! I’m sorry I came. Why did we come here?” He’s crying again, hard.
I reply, “You make me very sorry too. You better have something for lunch.”
“I don’t want anything. My stomach hurts.”
“Suit yourself.”
He goes off a distance and picks a stem of grass and puts it in his mouth. Then he buries his face in his hands. I make lunch for myself and have a short rest.
When I wake up again he’s still crying. There’s nowhere for either of us to go. Nothing to do but face up to the existing situation, but I really don’t know what the existing situation is.
“Chris”, I say finally.
He doesn’t answer.
“Chris”, I repeat.
Still no answer. He finally says, belligerently, “What?”
“I was going to say, Chris, that you don’t have to prove anything to me. Do you understand that?”
A real flash of terror hits his face. He jerks his head away violently.
I say, “You don’t understand what I mean by that, do you?”
He continues to look away and doesn’t answer. The wind moans through the pines.
I just don’t know. I just don’t know what it is. It isn’t just YMCA egotism that’s making him this upset. Some minor thing reflects badly on him and it’s the end of the world. When he tries to do something and doesn’t get it just right he blows up or goes into tears.
I settle back in the grass and rest again. Maybe it’s not having answers that’s defeating both of us. I don’t want to go ahead because it doesn’t look like any answers ahead. None behind either. Just lateral drift. That’s what it is between me and him. Lateral drift, waiting for something.
Later I hear him prowl at the knapsack. I roll over and see him glaring at me. “Where’s the cheese?” he says. The tone’s still belligerent.
But I’m not going to give in to it. “Help yourself”, I say. “I’m not waiting on you.”
He digs around and finds some cheese and crackers. I give him my hunting knife to spread the cheese with. “I think what I’m going to do, Chris, is put all the heavy stuff in my pack and the light stuff in yours. That way I won’t have to go back and forth with both packs.”
He agrees to this and his mood improves. It seems to have solved something for him.
My pack must be about forty or forty-five pounds now, and after we’ve climbed for a while an equilibrium establishes itself at about one breath for each step.
We come to a rough grade and it changes to two breaths per step. At one bank it goes to four breaths per step. Huge steps, almost vertical, hanging on to roots and branches. I feel stupid because I should have planned my way around this. The aspen staves come in handy now, and Chris takes some interest in the use of his. The packs made you top heavy and the sticks are good insurance against toppling over. You plant one foot, plant the staff, then SWING on it, up, and take three breaths, then plant the next foot, plant the staff and SWING up.
I don’t know if I’ve got any more Chautauqua left in me today. My head gets fuzzy about this time in the afternoon — maybe I can establish just one overview and let it go for today.
Way back long ago when we first set out on this strange voyage I talked about how John and Sylvia seemed to be running from some mysterious death force that seemed to them to be embodied in technology, and that there were many others like them. I talked for a while about how some of the people involved in technology seemed to be avoiding it too. An underlying reason for this trouble was that they saw it from a kind of “groovy dimension” that was concerned with the immediate surface of things whereas I was concerned with the underlying form. I called John’s style romantic, mine classic. His was, in the argot of the sixties, “hip”, mine was “square.” Then we started going into this square world to see what made it tick. Data, classifications, hierarchies, cause-and-effect and analysis were discussed, and somewhere along there was some talk about a handful of sand, the world of which we’re conscious, taken from the endless landscape of awareness around us. I said a process of discrimination goes to work on this handful of sand and divides it into parts. Classical, square understanding is concerned with the piles of sand and the nature of the grains and the basis for sorting and interrelating them.
Ph?drus’ refusal to define Quality, in terms of this analogy, was an attempt to break the grip of the classical sandsifting mode of understanding and find a point of common understanding between the classic and romantic worlds. Quality, the cleavage term between hip and square, seemed to be it. Both worlds used the term. Both knew what it was. It was just that the romantic left it alone and appreciated it for what it was and the classic tried to turn it into a set of intellectual building blocks for other purposes. Now, with the definition blocked, the classic mind was forced to view Quality as the romantic did, undistorted by thought structures.
I’m making a big thing out of all this, these classical-romantic differences, but Ph?drus didn’t.
He wasn’t really interested in any kind of fusion of differences between these two worlds. He was after something else… his ghost. In the pursuit of this ghost he went on to wider meanings of Quality which drew him further and further to his end. I differ from him in that I’ve no intention of going on to that end. He just passed through this territory and opened it up. I intend to stay and cultivate it and see if I can get something to grow.
I think that the referent of a term that can split a world into hip and square, classic and romantic, technological and humanistic, is an entity that can unite a world already split along these lines into one. A real understanding of Quality doesn’t just serve the System, or even beat it or even escape it. A real understanding of Quality captures the System, tames it, and puts it to work for one’s own personal use, while leaving one completely free to fulfill his inner destiny.
Now that we’re up high on one side of the canyon we can see back and down and across to the other side. It’s as steep there as it is here… a dark mat of greenish-black pines going up to a high ridge. We can measure our progress by sighting against it at what seems like a horizontal angle.
That’s all the Quality talk for today, I guess, thank goodness. I don’t mind the Quality, it’s just that all the classical talk about it isn’t Quality. Quality is just the focal point around which a lot of intellectual furniture is getting rearranged.
