Pirsig and the Unaccompanied Thing

Pirsig follows the chain of what can be sourced — and what arrived unaccompanied.

Pirsig and the Unaccompanied Thing

Introduction

Previously, in “The Man With One Name,” a new character for our Book of Characters arrived at the Institute of Distributed Cognition calling himself simply Pirsig. He was not Robert Pirsig, although the name inevitably carried that association. Soon Lila appeared, then the older Sanskrit līlā — play — and with it the milkmaids. Pirsig had arrived carrying a name, a gathering field of associations, and no clear account of where any of it might lead.

Pirsig had been at the Institute of Distributed Cognition for eleven days before anybody asked him where his name came from.

This surprised him. He had expected the question almost immediately, because everywhere else it had followed within moments of introduction. Pirsig, he would say, and people would wait for the second word. Sometimes they assumed they had misheard him. Sometimes they supplied the obvious association themselves, asking whether he meant Robert Pirsig, and he would explain that he did not. He was simply Pirsig. One name. No explanation.

At the Institute, however, people seemed accustomed to receiving things before they understood them.

Someone found him a room on the eastern side of the residential building, looking down through gums towards a valley that disappeared into mist most mornings. Someone else showed him the kitchen and warned him that anything placed on the second shelf of the refrigerator became communal property after forty-eight hours. He was given a temporary access card, a map that proved almost immediately to be out of date, and an invitation to attend seminars without introducing himself unless he wanted to.

So he settled into the rhythm of the place. He read in the library, walked the grounds, and discovered that the Institute had accumulated a peculiar population of people who could remain interested in a question long after ordinary conversation would have demanded an answer. Nobody seemed particularly concerned about what he was doing there. This suited him because he was not particularly certain himself.

On the twelfth morning he was sitting outside with coffee when a researcher from the genealogy group joined him. She had been speaking the previous evening about provenance — about the difference between knowing something and knowing where the knowledge had come from. She looked at his name on the temporary card lying beside his cup.

“Pirsig. Where did you get it?”

“My name?”

“Yes.”

“I don't know.”

She nodded, as though this were a perfectly respectable answer, and what unsettled him was that she did not ask anything further.

Later that day, walking back towards his room, he found himself thinking about the exchange. He had answered the same question before, but something about its phrasing remained with him. Where did you get it? Not what does it mean, nor why are you called that, nor are you related to somebody famous. The question assumed a chain. Somewhere, somehow, this thing had been handed to him.

He simply could not see the other end.

That evening he wrote Pirsig at the top of a page and drew a line beneath it. He waited for a while, although he was not sure what he was waiting for, and eventually another word came.

Lila.

He did not know why, which was becoming irritating.

Lila had been hovering around him for several days, not quite as a person and not quite as a word. He knew enough to recognise the danger of the obvious association. Robert Pirsig had written a book called Lila. Anyone could make that connection, and it proved nothing about him. But another Lila had begun to appear behind it — līlā, play, something older, something moving through Indian philosophical and devotional traditions.

Then came the milkmaids.

That was the strangest part: women dancing, Krishna somewhere among them or somehow multiplied among them, though Pirsig did not trust himself even to state that much without checking. The image had arrived with the peculiar confidence of something remembered, except he could not remember learning it.

He drew another line and wrote:

Pirsig — Lila — līlā — play — milkmaids.

It looked impressive. It also looked suspicious.

The next morning he took the page to the library, where the librarian listened while he explained what he wanted and then asked which part he wished to investigate.

“All of it.”

“That isn't a research question.”

“I know.”

“What is it?”

“I think it might be a chain.”

She studied the page for a while before suggesting that it might instead be several chains he had tied together. The possibility had not occurred to him, and so they began with the parts that had doors.

Lila existed. Robert Pirsig's book existed. The Sanskrit term existed. Traditions surrounding divine play existed. Krishna and the gopis could be followed into texts, commentary, scholarship and imagery. Each time Pirsig made a claim, the librarian asked where it came from, and when he could show her, they opened the door together.

Sometimes it held. Sometimes what lay behind the door was smaller than what he had carried away from it: a source supported three words where memory had supplied ten, an association proved later than he had imagined, something he had thought ancient turned out to be a modern interpretation of something ancient. Nothing catastrophic occurred. They simply changed the label.

By late afternoon the original page was covered with annotations, and Pirsig found himself oddly pleased.

The milkmaids remained, which surprised him most. Their status had changed several times during the day, but they had not disappeared. There were doors through which one could reach them historically and religiously. What could not be established was why they had appeared in his mind when they did, attached to his own unexplained name.

“That part is yours,” the librarian said.

“What does that mean?”

“It means we don't know where it came from.”

“Then we throw it out?”

She looked almost offended. “Why?”

“I thought this place was interested in provenance.”

“It is. But having no provenance that we can presently establish is not the same as having no value.”

She turned the page around and wrote beside milkmaids:

ARRIVED UNACCOMPANIED.

Pirsig stared at the words. “You let those in?”

“All the time.”

He thought about this as he walked back across the Institute grounds. The evening had become cold and the first lights were appearing in the buildings above him. Somewhere a seminar was still running. Through one window he could see three people standing at a whiteboard around a diagram that resembled either a model of cognition or an unsuccessful attempt to draw a horse.

He realised he had misunderstood the Institute.

He had thought distributed cognition meant that knowledge was spread among people and machines, books and databases, conversations and institutions. It did mean that, but perhaps there was another difficulty concealed inside the idea. Once thinking became distributed, provenance became harder rather than easier. A thought could move through a conversation, be altered by a machine, return through a person, encounter something remembered from thirty years earlier and emerge wearing the peculiar authority of familiarity.

Where did you get it?

Sometimes there would be a door, and sometimes the door would hold. Sometimes there would be no door at all.

He reached his room but did not go inside. Instead he kept walking beyond the residences towards an older building he had not yet explored. The Institute map called it Archive C, although a handwritten sign on the door said TEMPORARY REPOSITORY OF UNRESOLVED MATERIAL, which seemed to Pirsig a much more interesting description.

The door was unlocked.

Inside were shelves of boxes, retired equipment, manuscripts awaiting classification, recordings whose formats nobody currently had the machinery to play, and several filing cabinets bearing labels that appeared to contradict one another. Pirsig stood among them for some time, amused by the physical evidence that even an Institute devoted to cognition accumulated things it did not quite know what to do with.

There is a whole archive of ways out.

The phrase arrived complete, and immediately he wanted to know where it had come from. Had somebody said it during the day? Had he read it somewhere? Was it his own construction? It carried that disturbing sensation of recognition without recollection.

He could have gone back to the library. He could have searched. He could have asked the Institute's systems to trace the phrase through everything he had recently read. Instead he took out his notebook and wrote:

There is a whole archive of ways out.

Beneath it he added:

Source unknown. Do not discard.

For the first time since arriving at the Institute, Pirsig understood something about why he might be able to remain there. He did not need to solve himself in order to be admitted. His name could stay. Lila could stay. The milkmaids could stay. Even the strange chains forming among them could stay, provided nobody quietly changed their labels and began pretending that an association was a record, an inference was a fact, or an imaginative emergence had arrived carrying documentation it did not possess.

He returned to his room and placed the annotated sheet on the desk.

Pirsig — Lila — līlā — play — milkmaids.

Some links now had sources, some had questions, some had been weakened, and others had become unexpectedly strong. One part of the chain still disappeared into darkness at precisely the place where he had begun.

Pirsig.

Where did you get it?

He still did not know. For eleven days he had regarded that as a deficiency in himself, an absence that would eventually have to be repaired if he were going to become a proper character with a proper history. Now he wondered whether he had been looking at it wrongly. Perhaps the missing provenance was not the end of the inquiry but its beginning.

He turned the page and wrote a heading for the morning:

SHOW ME THE DOOR.

After considering what he had learned that day, he added another line beneath it:

AND IF THERE IS NO DOOR, SHOW ME WHERE IT LEADS.

Outside, somewhere beyond the Institute buildings, the valley had disappeared completely into darkness. Pirsig opened the window and listened, without expecting the night to answer him or explain the name he carried.

For now, it was enough that the unaccompanied thing had been allowed to remain in the room.

Afternote

This story arose from our visit to Carole McCulloch’s “The Length of the Chain,” the fourth iteration of Cadwyn’s Chronicle. Rather than responding directly to Carole’s story, we identified twenty “resonance units” — elements that began moving within our own human–AI cognitive process — and allowed them to encounter Pirsig. The resulting story emerged from that meeting. We document the resonance units, and how they operated in the composition, in the accompanying Process Log.

• Visit the Process Log