'Where did Chris go?' People as patterns....

 In the prior post, I have that really thought-provoking quotation from Manny Schegloff re: trying to focus on the patterns of interaction as opposed to the individuals in the interaction.  It took me a little while to remember this quotation from pages 4-5 of the 10th anniversary edition of Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance, by Robert Pirsig.  There is a nice affinity - I think - between this quotation and Manny's point.  

In this quotation, Pirsig is talking about his son Chris, who was murdered in San Francisco.  Then Pirsig asks himself, once his son died, where did he go? 

“Where did Chris go? He had bought an airplane ticket that morning. He had a bank account, drawers full of clothes, and shelves full of books. He was a real, live person, occupying time and space on this planet, and now suddenly where was he gone to? Did he go up the stack at the crematorium? Was he in the little box of bones they handed back? Was he strumming a harp of gold on some overhead cloud? None of these answers made any sense.

It had to be asked: What was it I was so attached to? Is it just something in the imagination? When you have done time in a mental hospital, that is never a trivial question. If he wasn't just imaginary, then where did he go? Do real things just disappear like that? If they do, then the conservation laws of physics are in trouble. But if we stay with the laws of physics, then the Chris that disappeared was unreal. Round and round and round. He used to run off like that just to make me mad. Sooner or later he would always appear, but where would he appear now? After all, really, where did he go?

The loops eventually stopped at the realization that before it could be asked "Where did he go?" it must be asked "What is the 'he' that is gone?" There is an old cultural habit of thinking of people as primarily something material, as flesh and blood. As long as this idea held, there was no solution. The oxides of Chris's flesh and blood did, of course, go up the stack at the crematorium. But they weren't Chris.

What had to be seen was that the Chris I missed so badly was not an object but a pattern, and that although the pattern included the flesh and blood of Chris, that was not all there was to it. The pattern was larger than Chris and myself, and related us in ways that neither of us understood completely and neither of us was in complete control of.

Now Chris's body, which was a part of that larger pattern, was gone. But the larger pattern remained. A huge hole had been torn out of the center of it, and that was what caused all the heartache. The pattern was looking for something to attach to and couldn’t find anything.”

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 In the prior post about Manny Schegloff, he quotes a brilliant book that is well worth reading.  I'll need to say more about this book down the road, I think.  

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