That conjures up a glimpse of the ruins of an ancient
Mogul palace near the desert where out of the corner of his eye he saw a wild rosebush.
– And this first summer Month that brings the Rose — How did that go? I don’t know. I don’t even like the poem. I’ve noticed since this trip has started and particularly since Bozeman that these fragments seem less and less a part of his memory and more and more a part of mine. I’m not sure what that means — I think — I just don’t know.
I think there’s a name for this kind of semidesert, but I can’t think of what it is. No one can be seen anywhere on the road but us.
Chris hollers that he has diarrhea again. We ride until I see a stream below and pull off the road and stop. His face is full of embarrassment again but I tell him we’re in no hurry and get out a change of underwear and roll of toilet paper and bar of soap and tell him to wash his hands thoroughly and carefully after he’s done.
I sit on an Omar Khayyam rock contemplating the semidesert and feel not bad.
– And this first Summer month that brings the Rose — oh — now it comes back. —
Each Morn a thousand Roses brings, you say ,
Yes, but where leaves the Rose of Yesterday?
And this first Summer month that brings the Rose ,
Shall take Jamshyd and Kaikobad away.
– And so on and so forth —
Let’s get off Omar and onto the Chautauqua. Omar’s solution is just to sit around and guzzle the wine and feel so bad that time is passing and the Chautauqua looks good to me by comparison. Particularly today’s Chautauqua, which is about gumption.
I see Chris coming back up the hill now. His expression looks happy.
I like the word “gumption” because it’s so homely and so forlorn and so out of style it looks as if it needs a friend and isn’t likely to reject anyone who comes along. It’s an old Scottish word, once used a lot by pioneers, but which, like “kin”, seems to have all but dropped out of use. I like it also because it describes exactly what happens to someone who connects with Quality. He gets filled with gumption.
The Greeks called it enthousiasmos, the root of “enthusiasm”, which means literally “filled with theos”, or God, or Quality. See how that fits?
A person filled with gumption doesn’t sit around dissipating and stewing about things. He’s at the front of the train of his own awareness, watching to see what’s up the track and meeting it when it comes. That’s gumption.
Chris arrives and says, “I’m feeling better now.”
“Good”, I say. We pack up the soap and toilet paper and put the towel and wet underwear where they won’t get other things damp and then we get on and are moving again.
The gumption-filling process occurs when one is quiet long enough to see and hear and feel the real universe, not just one’s own stale opinions about it. But it’s nothing exotic. That’s why I like the word.
You see it often in people who return from long, quiet fishing trips. Often they’re a little defensive about having put so much time to “no account” because there’s no intellectual justification for what they’ve been doing. But the returned fisherman usually has a peculiar abundance of gumption, usually for the very same things he was sick to death of a few weeks before. He hasn’t been wasting time. It’s only our limited cultural viewpoint that makes it seem so.
If you’re going to repair a motorcycle, an adequate supply of gumption is the first and most important tool. If you haven’t got that you might as well gather up all the other tools and put them away, because they won’t do you any good.
Gumption is the psychic gasoline that keeps the whole thing going. If you haven’t got it there’s no way the motorcycle can possibly be fixed. But if you have got it and know how to keep it there’s absolutely no way in this whole world that motorcycle can keep from getting fixed. It’s bound to happen. Therefore the thing that must be monitored at all times and preserved before anything else is the gumption.
This paramount importance of gumption solves a problem of format of this Chautauqua. The problem has been how to get off the generalities. If the Chautauqua gets into the actual details of fixing one individual machine the chances are overwhelming that it won’t be your make and model and the information will be not only useless but dangerous, since information that fixes one model can sometimes wreck another. For detailed information of an objective sort, a separate shop manual for the specific make and model of machine must be used. In addition, a general shop manual such as Audel’s Automotive Guide fills in the gaps.
But there’s another kind of detail that no shop manual goes into but that is common to all machines and can be given here. This is the detail of the Quality relationship, the gumption relationship, between the machine and the mechanic, which is just as intricate as the machine itself. Throughout the process of fixing the machine things always come up, low-quality things, from a dusted knuckle to an accidentally ruined “irreplaceable” assembly. These drain off gumption, destroy enthusiasm and leave you so discouraged you want to forget the whole business. I call these things “gumption traps.”
There are hundreds of different kinds of gumption traps, maybe thousands, maybe millions. I have no way of knowing how many I don’t know. I know it seems as though I’ve stumbled into every kind of gumption trap imaginable. What keeps me from thinking I’ve hit them all is that with every job I discover more. Motorcycle maintenance gets frustrating. Angering. Infuriating. That’s what makes it interesting.
The map before me says the town of Baker is soon ahead. I see we’re in better agricultural land now. More rain here.
What I have in mind now is a catalog of “Gumption Traps I Have Known.” I want to start a whole new academic field, gumptionology, in which these traps are sorted, classified, structured into hierarchies and interrelated for the edification of future generations and the benefit of all mankind.
Gumptionology 101… An examination of affective, cognitive and psychomotor blocks in the perception of Quality relationships… 3 cr,Vll,MWF. I’d like to see that in a college catalog somewhere.
In traditional maintenance gumption is considered something you’re born with or have acquired as a result of good upbringing. It’s a fixed commodity. From the lack of information about how one acquires this gumption one might assume that a person without any gumption is a hopeless case.
In nondualistic maintenance gumption isn’t a fixed commodity. It’s variable, a reservoir of good spirits that can be added to or subtracted from. Since it’s a result of the perception of Quality, a gumption trap, consequently, can be defined as anything that causes one to lose sight of Quality, and thus lose one’s enthusiasm for what one is doing. As one might guess from a definition as broad as this, the field is enormous and only a beginning sketch can be attempted here.
As far as I can see there are two main types of gumption traps. The first type is those in which you’re thrown off the Quality track by conditions that arise from external circumstances, and I call these “setbacks.” The second type is traps in which you’re thrown off the Quality track by conditions that are primarily within yourself. These I don’t have any generic name for… “hang-ups” I suppose. I’ll take up the externally caused setbacks first.
The first time you do any major job it seems as though the out-of-sequence-reassembly setback is your biggest worry. This occurs usually at a time when you think you’re almost done. After days of work you finally have it all together except for: What’s this? A connecting-rod bearing liner?! How could you have left that out? Oh Jesus, everything’s got to come apart again! You can almost hear the gumption escaping. Pssssssssssssss.
There’s nothing you can do but go back and take it all apart again — after a rest period of up to a month that allows you to get used to the idea.
There are two techniques I use to prevent the out-of-sequence-reassembly setback. I use them mainly when
