Especially when we began to tie in mythos, things sort of began to take shape for me--at least for now. What I'm gathering is that Quality has to exist before it can be in a moment. Which makes sense to me. You can't have something pop into existence at the very moment it is needed, it has to already be there, ready to be called upon. Take electricity, for example, it was never utilized until given the correct circumstances to aid it's usage, but that doesn't mean its potential energy wasn't there to begin with. The same can be said of Quality. Quality predates any moment in which it also exists. And if Quality is the momentary interaction between a subject and object, then of course is has to exist before the interaction takes place in order for it to be present at the interaction. That got my cogs turning even more, though.
Because does that mean that for every unique interaction, Quality is remade or redefined? Since we are consistantly stuck on attempting to come up with a solidified definition of things, this could complicate that even further (I didn't think one word could be such a mess to understand!) The way I see it, Quality is something that we all can understand, and know a lot about, without having a solid definition of it. In fact, I love the way that Doug said that definitions will never be the thing, they will get at the thing, but they won't quite get there. That was perfect for me, especially when it comes to Quality in the terms of this reading.
As we talked about in class, quality, rhetoric, values, experiences they all play off of each other and they are all situational and dependent upon each person. The same can be said of mythos. Mythos seems to be the retelling of stories, and if those originated from oral traditions, something we know about that is no two stories are passed down exactly the same way. Two different cultures, families, or even generations of a family can know the same story but have an entirely different variation of it. The story gets told and retold with differing variations, but it is the same story nonetheless. Now translate this into Quality. A subject can interact with an object and that interaction can be the exact same as the last time to the two things met, but neither of the interactions will ever be the exact same one, and every separate variation of the interaction therefore changes Quality because Quality lives in the middle of those sorts of interactions.
SO if mythos seems to be the re-telling of a story of some sort of interconnectedness (that has existed for God know's how long), and if each interaction is Quality (which has also existed for God knows how long), and each interaction re-defines and remakes Quality, then mythos and Quality seem, to me, to be quite the same thing. Or, as Pirsig puts it, "Substance doesn't change Method contains no permanence. Substance relates to the form of the atom. Method refers to what the atom does" (337). The mythos is always the mythos, the tellings of the story may be a little different from each other, but that doesn't change the fact that the base story is the same. Quality is always Quality, even if it plays and novel role in every interaction, it is still the same Quality that existed before the interaction. . . Or is it? Because it could be an entirely new and redefined Quality, one that has been altered by the newest interaction between a subject and object, but then again that would still mean that it is a variant of the same base Quality, in which case it is still the same no matter the differences. (Wow, I am terribly sorry that that got so messy and confusing!)
I'm not sure any of that will make any sort of sense to anyone else, and for that I am sorry but it's just the way my brain is playing with the idea right now. And now I basically feel like this . . .
Or this . . .
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