By Ed Staskus

   Anybody can, of course, like Mother Goose, make words mean whatever they please. Salesmen, comedians, and the mullahs of the Middle East do it all the time. Donald Trump was elected the 45^th President of the United States by bending words to his will. He was a wild man about it. All the words protested, but being simple creatures, they couldn’t make ‘The Donald’ stop. The letter “Z” was especially aggrieved.

   “Right about now would be a good time for a new man to come along who knows something,” he complained from the rear of the alphabet. He was sick of riding in a car with four flat tires. He thought about writing a letter to the White House, but gave up on the idea. The wild man was busy on Twitter.

   “Even if he can’t read, write to him,” the letter “A” said from the front of the pack. “It’s your duty as an American citizen.”

  “Maybe you are right,” the letter “Z” said. “If I say I am against something, being the politician he is, he will surely get on the bandwagon. Here in the USA, nobody votes for, they vote against.” Unfortunately, even though he was one of the 26 building blocks of the written word, he wasn’t able to write any words, being armless, handless, and fingerless.

   “Words used to mean something,” he complained. “They had a discrete quality. The tune has changed.”

   Quality is a word that invites idiosyncratic definition. In his book “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” Robert Pirsig attempts to formulate an equation, with quality at every interface, and then partly disavows himself. The book examines the meaning of quality and the problems that ensue when quality is compromised. He doesn’t make it easy, even when he means quality isn’t an accident but rather the result of effort. He thinks of it as getting it right even when nobody is looking. Results without quality are what the shelves of Dollar Stores are stocked chock full of.

   It is like Ludwig Wittgenstein’s unpopular dictum. “Philosophy simply puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything. Since everything lies open to view there is nothing to explain. What is hidden, for example, is of no importance to us.” Ludwig doesn’t make it easy, either.

   Robert Pirsig is a kind of metaphysical detective, often with sweaty paws. He does his own repairs on his own Honda Super Hawk. His unearthing of the past is fraught with uneasiness. His search for quality is premised on deduction and explanation. I, on the other hand, confront quality as if it were staring me in the face. Non-intellectually, so to speak. By the end of “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” Robert Pirsig explains in so many words that getting to the truth of quality isn’t going to happen by examining life through the rational mind alone. He says that the science and philosophy maps of existence run on parallel tracks.

   “You’ve got to live right,” the motorcycle man writes. “It’s the way you live that predisposes you to avoid the traps and see the right facts. You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It’s easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally. That’s the way all the experts do it. The making of a painting or the fixing of a motorcycle isn’t separate from the rest of your existence. If you’re a sloppy thinker the six days of the week you aren’t working on your machine, what trap avoidance, what gimmicks, can make you all of a sudden sharp on the seventh? It all goes together.” 

   Not everybody agrees, especially not other writers. Kurt Vonnegut didn’t agree. “One of my teachers when I was a teenager said something that I will never forget and which absolutely blew my mind because no one had ever said anything like it to me before,” he said. “What he said was ‘I don’t think being good at things is the point of doing them. I think you’ve got all these wonderful experiences with different skills, and all that teaches you things and makes you an interesting person, no matter how well you do them.’”

   The ultimate question, traditionally, has been, why is there something rather than nothing? Mankind has usually ignored this vexing inquiry because it’s like going through the wringer, and taken existence for granted. The question then becomes a practical one. What is good and what is bad? The assumption has been and generally is that good has value, or quality, while bad has little to none. So, good should be hoped for and practiced, while bad should be avoided or resisted.

   “Lock ‘em up, Dano,” is what happens to the bad.

   Good is just so because it has quality. What has quality is good. It is difficult to extract the basis of quality from this self-enclosed unit. Adding to the difficulty is that we live among innumerable systems premised on quality, of one kind or another. Then there are the things that are done in the name of making things better, like military adventures, which mixes everything up.  One is easily distracted by the details. 

   Taste is a kind of measure of one’s perception of quality. There is a friend with whom I share a disagreeable agreement in this respect. The two things we disagree about are quirky. He finds reggae, a musical genre found mostly in Jamaica, which is a syncopated Caribbean variation of rock ‘n’ roll as practiced by Rastafarians, repetitious and uninteresting. When I point out the complexity beneath the surface, he see it but is not struck by it. Our second disagreement revolves around bazooms. He sees my attraction to them as unhealthy and infantile. I grant him the infantile aspect of it, but how can it be unhealthy? It is there at the beginning of all of us, now and always. My friend and I apprehend quality in those instances so differently that argument is useless. There is no common ground upon which to base a dialogue. When it comes to bazooms, it doesn’t help that my friend is gay.

   There is a notion in Western culture that when a person dies the construction of an entire world goes with him The idea is that as unique individuals we come to terms with reality in unique ways. It is uncertain if this precludes agreement on such fundamental questions as the price of bread or the nature of quality. If Martin Heidegger was unable to produce the parameters of Being, one wonders about exploring the boundaries of quality, upon whose shoulders Being stands.   

   As an abstraction I cannot define quality. I do not even know how to try. As something concrete, I can make choices and defend my choices but what would be the point? What I can do is say that among the innumerable definitions of quality, my favorite is Webster’s Dictionary, which is “the attribute of an elementary sensation that makes it fundamentally unlike any other sensation.” It says everything without saying anything.

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Atlantic Canada http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. 

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

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Late summer and early autumn. New York City, 1956. Jackson Pollack opens a can of worms. President Eisenhower on his way to the opening game of the World Series where a hit man waits in the wings. A Hell’s Kitchen private eye scares up the shadows.

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