Robert Pirsig - Lila. An Inquiry Into Morals

That’s probably why he seemed surprised when Phædrus said, You’ve got it. He was flapped because the format wasn’t followed. Phædrus was supposed to do all his bargaining at this point. This was where he could get all his concessions, and here he was now, giving it all away: a big mistake in terms of a real-estate type of legal adversary format where each side tries all the tactics they can think of to get the best deal out of the other side. Redford was here to get rather than give, and when he was suddenly given so much more than he expected without any effort on his part it seemed to throw him off balance for a second. That’s how it seemed anyway.

That comment about visiting the sets, but not every day, also spelled it out. Phædrus would never be a co-creator, just a visiting VIP. And that bit of film jargon about romancing was the real key. Romancing is part of the format. The producer or screen-writer or director or whoever’s getting the thing started begins by romancing the author. They tell him how much money he’s going to get, they get his signature on an option, and then they go and romance the financial people by telling them what a great book they’re going to get. Once they get both the book and the money, the romance is over. Both the money-man and the author get locked out as much as possible and the creative people go ahead and make a film. They’d change what Phædrus had written, add whatever stuff they thought would make it work better, sell it, and go on to something else, leaving him with some money that would soon disappear, and a lot of bad memories that wouldn’t.

Phædrus began to shiver, but still he didn’t go in. That room on the other side of the door was like some glassed-in cage. Outside here the rain seemed to have died and the lights were so intense now they made the clouds in the sky seem like some sort of ceiling. He preferred it out here in the cold.

He looked over the city and then down at the little bugs of cars way down on the street below. It was a lot easier to get there from here than to here from there. Maybe that’s why so many jump. It’s easier that way.

Crazy! He backed off from the concrete railing. What puts thoughts like that in a person’s head?

Culture shock. That’s what it was. The gods. He’d been watching them for years. The gods were the static culture patterns. They never quit. After trying all these years to kill him with failure, now they were pretending they’d given up. Now they were going to try the other way, to get him with success.

It wasn’t the crazy wind or the rain-blurred light along the sky across the park that was making him feel so strange. What caused the culture shock were these two crazy different cultural evaluations of himself -two different realities of himself — sitting side by side. One was that he was in some kind of high voltage celebrity world like Redford. The other was that he was at ground-level like Rigel and Lila and just about everybody else. As long as he stayed within just one of those two cultural definitions he could live with it. But when he tried to hang on to both wires simultaneously, that’s when the shock hit.

If you get too famous you will go straight to hell, a Japanese Zen master had warned a group Phædrus was in. It had sounded like one of those Zen truths that don’t make any sense. Now it was making sense.

He wasn’t talking about anything Dante would have identified. Dante’s Christian hell is an after-life of eternal torment, but Zen hell is this world right here and now, in which you see life around you but can’t participate in it. You’re forever a stranger from your own life because there’s something in your life that holds you back. You see others bathing in the life all around them while you have to drink it through a straw, never getting enough.

You would think that fame and fortune would bring a sense of closeness to other people, but quite the opposite happens. You split into two people, who they think you are and who you really are, and that produces the Zen hell.

It’s like a hall of mirrors at a carnival where some mirrors distort you one way and some distort you another. Already he’d seen three completely different mirror reflections this week: from Rigel, who reflected an image of some kind of moral degenerate; from Lila who reflected a tedious old nerd; and now Redford who was probably going to cast him into some sort of heroic image.

Each person you come to is a different mirror. And since you’re just another person like them maybe you’re just another mirror too, and there’s no way of ever knowing whether your own view of yourself is just another distortion. Maybe all you ever see is reflections. Maybe mirrors are all you ever get. First the mirrors of your parents, then friends and teachers, then bosses and officials, priests and ministers and maybe writers and painters too. That’s their job too, holding up mirrors.

But what controls all these mirrors is the culture: the Giant, the gods; and if you run afoul of the culture it will start throwing up reflections that try to destroy you, or it will withdraw the mirrors and try to destroy you that way. Phædrus could see how this celebrity could get to be like some sort of narcosis of mirrors where you have to have more and more supportive reflections just to stay satisfied. The mirrors take over your life and soon you don’t know who you are. Then the culture controls you and when it takes away your mirrors and the public forgets you the withdrawal symptoms start to appear. And there you are, in the Zen hell of celebrity… Hemingway with the top of his head blown off, and Presley, full of prescription drugs. The endless dreary exploitation of Marilyn Monroe. Or any of dozens of others. It seemed like it was the celebrity, the mirrors of the gods, that did it.

A subject-object metaphysics presumes that all these mirrors are subjective and therefore unreal and unimportant, but that presumption, like so many others, seems to deliberately ignore the obvious.

It ignores the phenomenon of someone like Redford walking down the street and observing that people, in his own words, goon out when they see him. His manager said it’s almost impossible for him to attend public meetings because when people see he’s there they all turn around and watch him.

Phædrus remembered that he himself had started to goon out when Redford came to the door. All that Charlie Chaplin stuff with the coat. What is this goon-out phenomenon? It was no subjective illusion. It’s a very real primary reality, an empirical perception.

It seems to have biological roots, like hunger or fear or greed. Is it similar to stage fright? There seems to be a loss of real-time awareness. A fixed image of the famous person, like the Sundance Kid, seems to overwhelm the Dynamic real-time person who exists in the moment of confrontation. That’s why Phædrus had so much trouble getting started.

But there is much more than that.

This whole business of celebrity also had something perceptibly degenerate about it. Vulgar and degenerate and enormously fascinating and at times obsessive, very much in the same way that sex seemed to be vulgar and degenerate at some times, and enormously fascinating and obsessive.

Sex and celebrity. Before Phædrus got his boat and cleared out of Minnesota he remembered ladies at parties coming over to rub up against him. A teenage girl squealing in ecstasy at one of his lectures. A woman broadcasting executive grabbing his arm at lunch and saying, I must have you. I mean you. You’d think he was a sandwich or something. For forty years he’d wondered what it took, that he was so obviously lacking, that made women look at you twice. Was celebrity it? Was that all? He thought there was more to it than that.