Seen from a Motorcycle: Hypomnemata by Robert Pirsig's from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

On the 50th anniversary of the publication of Robert Pirsig’s celebrated Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (ZAMM), I propose a rereading of the book, dwelling on certain passages of the book that – despite the scant attention paid to them by the author and his many reviewers – prove useful in reflecting on the ways in which motorcycle riding can bring us closer to forms of sensory experience with the world around us. In his less elaborate passages, ZAMM shows us how the act of seeing while riding a motorcycle coincides with a performative act. Seeing things as “pure seeing” is useful for suspending our innate habit of filtering the vision of things through the intellect. I therefore re-read ZAMM as a ὑπομνήματα (hypomnemata): as a material memory of things seen, perceived and thought while riding a motorcycle, offering them as an accumulated treasure for re-reading and subsequent meditation. It is a matter of constructing a practice of “disparate vision”: a way of combining the objectivity of the “already seen” with the subjectivity of the experiences that are produced and the particularity of the circumstances that determine them.