I’ve mentioned Brandon Mayfield just the once before. As well as being a published author, he’s a fellow Robert Pirsig scholar and member of the RPA (Robert Pirsig Association), who was curious enough to research and write up a comparison between the works and overlapping timelines of Pirsig and Alan Watts “through the lens of Zen”.
Initially, just to get a feel for his writing, I started to read his “Grains of Destiny”. I say initially because, with my own writing and other priorities, I have been in a state of no new reading for a few months. His full title is:
GRAINS OF DESTINY – Return to Victory Road
– A search for meaning and objective truth.
by Brandon Mayfield (Crescent Books, 2024)
I suspect I will in fact read to completion, but as I type I’m 5 chapters / 112 pages in – about one third through- and writing my usual pre-view rather than an actual review, to keep me honest just in case I never do complete.
I already mentioned elsewhere that any relationship to Pirsig’s writing (ZMM and Lila) is not advertised in any of the front materials or cover blurbs. Why would there be? His audience isn’t limited to fans of Pirsig after all. Yet, if you know Pirsig, it is spooky from the outset how the locations and roads are exactly those travelled by Pirsig, westward through Montana. And the similarities don’t end there. It’s a travelogue, with landscape and travel descriptions and with companions’ dialogue sharing memoirs and philosophical discussions on life, the universe and everything.
Having said that, it’s quite different too. The “companions” are circumstantial, more like Lila than ZMM, the characters didn’t set out as friends travelling together, and they’re travelling in cars & trucks as opposed to bikes or boats. And we have cell-phones.
There are more Pirsig allusions beyond the circumstantial. A nod to getting out of the car and into the frame of the real world, for example, no longer observed through the windows from a closed space. But Pirsig and motorcycles don’t turn up explicitly until page 100.
Up until that point, as well as a brief history of thought from the Greeks via the Islamic world to the Enlightenment, we also get a fair bit of 21st century poly-crises and 21st century science of consciousness too. ie Knowing why this stuff matters?
The science of consciousness content is primarily Penrose and Hameroff, Microtubules and “Orch-OR” orchestration of quantum effects at noisy, wet, brain scales. I think this might in time become accepted as good science. Others like Al-Khalili and McFadden are ploughing similar furrows for quantum-biology explanations for brain processes. Even though these may (or may not) turn out to be good science for those physical processes, personally, after Solms and Friston and McGilchrist, I don’t consider them as necessary scientific explanations of the subjective nature of consciousness itself. Like Chalmers’ “hard problem” they miss the point. But I probably digress.
When the explicit references to Pirsig’s ZMM and MoQ turn up with the bikers, the conversation shifts to a fair summary of Pirsig’s classic / analytic / static vs romantic / aesthetic / dynamic Metaphysics of Quality. Brandon’s helpful driver says:
“So powerful were these [Greek] ideas of objective truth and scientific method that they helped in part to advance the golden age of Muslim learning [which in turn] allowed Europe to emerge from its Dark Ages. But [paraphrasing Pirsig] this scientific enlightenment came at a cost.”
And from this point onwards, we see why Pirsig isn’t advertised as the sole or primary source. When it comes to the Islamic scholars, I know 10th/11th century Avicenna (ibn Sina), Averroes (ibn Rushd) and Al Ghazzali but we are introduced here to 17th century Iranian mystic (Sufi) philosopher Mulla Sadra (Ṣadr ad-Dīn Muḥammad Shīrāzī).
“where Pirsig stops, Sadra continues”
So we are into the mystic and spiritual and even the concept of God (the good) as the ground of all being. Already good grist to my mill here. Furthermore we are also telegraphed the dynamic / living / process contributions of Bergson and of Whitehead, also much referenced sources here at Psybertron. Seems impossible not to read on. If nothing else, did I forget to mention, we need to get to the bottom of our driver’s warning about his strange behaviour.
Already a good read in itself and a recommended read for anyone seeking the wisdom we seem to be lacking in order to deal with our 21st century poly-meta-crisis of meaning, conveniently packaged in a well-written US road-trip travelogue.
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[Will add reference links.]
[Will append further reading / review if and when I complete.]
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