My handful of sand

As I mentioned in class, Fish can’t seem to escape the contextual constraints surrounding his theory. Pirsig, conversely, seems to delve into who/what we are when we aren’t necessarily trying. This quickly brings me to intentionality, a snag that I keep encountering in my definition of rhetoric. Is someone (or something) still rhetorical when they don’t intend to be? Is it even possible to deliberately eschew rhetoric, or is that a form of rhetoric in itself?

In relation to Kim’s post, I wonder if her friend is internally working hard at emulating those traits as part of her personal rhetoric, or whether that is simply the natural. As Persig astutely observes, we don’t “have” a personality, we “are” a personality.

Two quotes in the reading so far made me pause, put down the book and reflect for a while on the concept of perception—which is somehow simultaneously highly personal and a shared experience.

“But one does not convert individuals into mass people with the simple coining of a mass term.” (pg. 25)

“Your common sense is nothing more than the voices of thousands and thousands of these ghosts from the past.” (pg. 42)

“We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape around us and call that handful of sand the world.” (pg. 82)

Truthfully, I’m still working through how these quotes can be related to rhetoric; I feel as if I’m just scratching the surface. I do wonder—why must rhetoricians like Fish create a blaring dichotomy between rhetoric and logic when the human mind can often alternate between these two ways of thinking?

I keep going back to an example a professor used in an Honor’s seminar class my freshman year that attempts to reconcile fields of scientific and “groovy” thought:

He said something along the lines of, “just because we know the scientific processes that cause the colors of a sunset or the biological reason that flowers bloom does not make these things any less beautiful—if anything, the ability to consider life’s many phenomena on multifarious levels makes them all the more beautiful.”

Pirsig seems to think that these two forms of thinking, classical and romantic, cannot overlap without losing some of the beauty of one form or the other.

I can’t quite decide with whom I agree.

This all seems a little nebulous and unclear, but so are my thoughts on the topics at hand. I’m hoping that I will have a firmer grasp on (narrator) Pirsig’s views the further we get into the narrative, as the group moves steadily westward.