Zen and American History Exhibitions
By • August 8, 2024 0 397
Last April, a Japanese motorcycle joined the dozen in “America on the Move,” the 26,000-square-foot exhibition in the General Motors Hall of Transportation at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. “America on the Move” showcases some 300 vehicles and related artifacts, from a steam locomotive and a Chicago “L” car to 48 feet of Route 66.
Though the Honda CB77 Super Hawk represents a noteworthy motorcycle design, that’s not why it’s there. Elvis is forced off the road on one in the 1964 movie “Roustabout” (speaking of vehicles), but that’s not why either.
The bike in question isn’t connected with Marlon Brando, who rode his own Triumph 6T Thunderbird in “The Wild One”; Steve McQueen, who made his “Great Escape” on a Triumph TR6 Trophy; or Evel Knievel, whose Harley-Davidson XR-750 is elsewhere in “America on the Move.” It belonged to Robert M. Pirsig — neither singer, actor nor daredevil.
Pirsig zoomed into the zeitgeist in 1974 as the author of “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values.” Two years after his death in 2017, his widow, Wendy K. Pirsig, gave the Smithsonian the motorcycle that he and his 11-year-old son rode from St. Paul, Minnesota, to Petaluma, California, and back in 1968; that trip’s westbound half was the framing device for ZAMM, as the book is known to devotees (not to be confused with Zombie Apocalypse Medicine Meeting).
Rejected by more than 100 publishers, then tinkered with for years by Pirsig and his William Morrow and Company editor, James Landis, when the much shortened but still quite long manuscript appeared in final form, the world was waiting. Just what the doctor (or shrink) ordered: a road-trip narrative interwoven with commentary on father-son relations, mental illness, loneliness, visions of reality, art and technology, the scientific method, philosophy (ancient Greek and modern European), classroom methods and university politics, plus the three topics of the book’s irresistible title and curious subtitle.
“Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” author Robert M. Pirsig’s 1966 Honda CB77 Super Hawk, now on view at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. Courtesy NMAH.
A key sentence early on: “The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or the petals of a flower.”
The narrator — brilliant and, as he gradually reveals, damaged — tells us his purpose is “to talk in some depth about things that seem important.” He refers to these lessons as “a sort of Chautauqua — that’s the only name I can think of for it — like the traveling tent-show Chautauquas that used to move across America.”
Though some of these “Chautauqua” sections, interspersed with flashbacks, are lengthy, dense and hard to follow, the reader is never far from descriptive passages like this: “From the town to the mountains across the valley floor must be less than ten miles, and we cross that distance now on dirt roads through rich green high alfalfa ready for cutting, so thick it looks difficult to walk through. The fields sweep outward and slightly upward to the base of the mountains where a much darker green of the pines rises suddenly up. That will be where the DeWeeses live.”
It turns out that the main characters — the narrator’s son Chris; the Minneapolis couple they travel with to Montana, John and Sylvia Sutherland; and the artist couple they stay with in Bozeman, Bob and Gennie DeWeese — are real people. (The DeWeeses’ daughter Tina now curates deweeseart.com, a website that includes Pirsig material, and their son Josh teaches ceramics at Montana State University, where Pirsig taught in the English department.) Though rooted in actual experiences, the episodes in which the narrator visits the DeWeeses, who knew him before (spoiler) his breakdown, and his old MSU classroom ratchet up the book’s spookiness.
Translated into two dozen languages, ZAMM has sold in the millions. At the NMAH, Pirsig’s Super Hawk is the platformed centerpiece of a temporary “Zen and the Open Road” display marking the 50th anniversary of the book’s publication. In front of a blown-up Big Sky panorama are his brown leather jacket, white helmet, keys and maintenance manual. Also on view: his typewriter, a typed copy of the manuscript and a signed first edition.
With ZAMM in hand, many have retraced the narrator’s route through the Plains and over the Rockies to the Pacific. Reading the book sparked my brother-in-law’s dream of moving to Bozeman, Montana (often expressed, not yet acted upon). Do Pirsig pilgrims flock to the Super Hawk, as Julia Child enthusiasts seek out her Cambridge, Massachusetts, kitchen, installed nearby in “Food: Transforming the American Table 1950–2000”?
Putting artifacts of American transportation in their sociocultural context was fundamental to the creation of “America on the Move,” which opened in 2003 after four years of planning, at a cost of some $20 million. Its predecessor dated to 1964, when the NMAH was known as the Museum of History and Technology (the renaming came in 1980).
Writing about the new exhibition in a 2004 issue of Curator: The Museum Journal, project director Steven Lubar, an NMAH curator now at Brown University, explained: “Automobile, railroad and maritime museums have traditionally been concerned with the vehicles first, and only after that, and only occasionally, vehicles’ roles in history. We wanted to turn that around.”
Sections of “America on the Move” are “refreshed” every other year or so, according to Paul F. Johnston, curator of transportation history. A General Motors EV1, the first modern electric car, was added in 2016. Acquiring Pirsig’s Super Hawk, which Johnston calls “the most famous forgotten motorcycle in American history,” must have had special meaning for a curator whose bio reads: “Active on PTWs [powered two-wheelers] since the age of eleven, he’s an AMA [American Motorcyclist Association] Charter Life Member and rides and commutes year-round on his motorcycle.”
“Zen and the Open Road” tags Pirsig with three identifiers: Rider, Writer, Sailor. Post-ZAMM, he bought a 32-foot boat that he and his wife sailed across the Atlantic and lived aboard. Pirsig’s wristwatch, calculator, sextant and sailing chart are on display, along with a first edition of his 1991 book, “Lila: An Inquiry into Morals,” and the modified Apple II he wrote it on.
Pirsig named his sailboat Arete, the kernel of the idiosyncratic philosophical framework obsessively developed by the narrator’s doppelganger (it’s hard to explain), called Phaedrus, as recounted in ZAMM. After rereading a passage in H. D. F. Kitto’s “The Greeks,” written in 1951, Phaedrus is said to have exclaimed: “Lighting hits! Quality! Virtue! Dharma!” He proceeds to quote the following.
“Areté” — translated by Kitto as “excellence” — “implies a respect for the wholeness or oneness of life, and a consequent dislike of specialization. It implies a contempt for efficiency — or rather a much higher idea of efficiency, an efficiency which exists not in one department of life but in life itself.”
How does this relate to motorcycles? Consider this review of the Honda CB77 Super Hawk in a 1962 issue of Cycle World: “One cannot adequately describe the handling: it is simply too good. The closest we can get is to say that the rider always feels like an extension of the machine; you don’t point it, you simply point yourself and the bike follows your lead.”
By the way, if you want to see the bike Steve McQueen rode in “The Great Escape,” it’s in Hinckley, England, at the Triumph Factory Visitor Experience.
