Cassandra Voices

Tag: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

  • Ode to the Sausage Roll

    In George Orwell’s 1939 novel Coming Up For Air, at the beginning of chapter 4, issue is taken with substandard food products, which do not taste like the product promoted and, indeed, taste like something else:

    At this moment I bit into one of my frankfurters, and—Christ!

    I can’t honestly say that I’d expected the thing to have a pleasant taste. I’d expected it to taste of nothing, like the roll. But this—well, it was quite an experience. Let me try and describe it to you.

    The frankfurter had a rubber skin, of course, and my temporary teeth weren’t much of a fit. I had to do a kind of sawing movement before I could get my teeth through the skin. And then suddenly—pop! The thing burst in my mouth like a rotten pear. A sort of horrible soft stuff was oozing all over my tongue. But the taste! For a moment I just couldn’t believe it. Then I rolled my tongue round it again and had another try. It was fish! A sausage, a thing calling itself a frankfurter, filled with fish! I got up and walked straight out without touching my coffee. God knows what that might have tasted of.

    This brings me to mass-produced sausage rolls. We have been socially engineered to accept inferior products due to being ‘always on the go’ and ‘eating on the hoof.’ Thus one may enter a high-street establishment – the name of which I will not mention here – to purchase one of their sausage rolls in an act to stave off the morning hunger.

    Yet, it is a tube of pink cooked sludge – faintly reminiscent of pork –encompassed in a uniform pastry that is almost parcel-tight; a small, perfectly wrapped parcel.

    Imagine venturing into the post office and asking the lady behind the counter,

    ‘Can I post this sausage roll to Scandinavia here, please?’ With a stamp attached to one corner and a Sharpie scrawl to its destination. Would a mass-produced sausage roll make it in one piece to say, Gothenburg?

    I have eaten them.

    In a pinch.

    Don’t get me started on their bean thingy, which gives me rising acid reflux like molten lava in the chambers and corridors of the heart.

    The problem is with quality, which the main protagonist is concerned with in Robert M. Pirsig’s modern, philosophical treatise work, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values.

    Quality has dissipated due to mass-produced products.

    I remember in Botanic, Belfast, on the city side of the small hill, there was a bakery beside a laundrette. This was twenty-odd years ago. I remember they sold great sausage rolls. Inside, along with the pork meat was a little chopped-up white onion. The flaky, buttery pastry was fresh and delicious. A wee drop of red or brown sauce and I was in foodie heaven. The staff were friendly locals, and I recall the hearty chatter and warmth of the welcome. That bakery is long gone. I am unsure of its name now, which escapes me. Sadly.

    Wee bakeries – the one on Chapel Lane, city centre Belfast – served great homemade vegetable soup and sausage rolls. And Fifteens. Oh, yes.

    There was one near The Arches, East Belfast, and I was in one day as the baker was letting warm soda farls clatter onto the baking table. They were still steaming warm, fresh from the oven. I wanted to hit one with a drop of butter and strawberry jam, taken with a mug of tea. Who hasn’t wanted a fresh soda farl with crumbed ham, cheese, and tomato? Or a soda farl made with treacle? Or with Indian cornmeal?

    Years later, I would work with very that baker during nightshifts in a homeless hostel – how strange being in Belfast is at times, an almost Jungian synchronicity on the one hand, but due to the size of the city, perhaps no happenstance at all. He told me about the early morning starts and the wee bakery on the Woodstock Road, the cramped workspace above the shop. The lone baker works away in the early morning, while patrons sleep deeply through the morning darkness. Hard, honest graft.

    In 2001, I recall being in Sallynoggin, Dublin. I was labouring for a plasterer at the time. We were in Dublin, travelling up and down from the North over the course of a month or so, and in a Spar, I saw chicken-filet burgers – proper ones, bread-chicken-filet burgers with lettuce and tomato – and they looked delicious. There were also big sausage rolls with grated cheese in them, so when you warmed them up, they created an unctuous cheesy goodness with the meat and pastry. Oh my.

    When we enter a reality of accepting inferior products, we become ‘modified’ slaves to the corporate dominion and accept the way things are…

    I don’t accept.

    It’s easy to call into a high-street establishment without thinking.

    It takes a bit of choice to make a better decision to opt for a better product to consume.

    The other day, I was in a wee ‘local’ bakery and had a sausage roll with a drop of red sauce and a hot cup of tea; on a cold January day, it hit the spot. I left refreshed and warm, entering the biting, frosty air, wrapped up in my coat as I trudged home.

    You could support the local bakery. Goodness knows they need it.

  • Unmasking the Tawdry Yarns

    In the essential Boomer text, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance one of the chief ideas was the difficulty of defining what we mean by “quality”. Almost everyone knows what quality is and can easily spot the presence or lack of it in something. But the word itself, the concept, the thing of it, is difficult to describe. So, in the absence of a clear definition, the presence of quality can become a claim by a person selling a thing which, their patter maintains, possesses the elusive attribute.

    So even though everyone knows what quality is, it is possible, with a good enough story, to convince someone that something which may not actually possess quality, does possess quality. The key is the story. With a good enough story, anything is anything. You can even sow doubt in a person’s mind, making them believe that they actually lack the ability to discern quality, but that luckily, you are there to help them; for a small fee.

    The old story of the emperor’s new clothes is an illustration of what happens when a lie reaches critical mass to leave an entire herd deluded. If everyone claims to be able to discern the quality of the invisible garment, it takes balls to go against the herd, and, herds being what they are, the balls to differ is rare. So, an attribute which is difficult to define, leaves wriggle room for the unscrupulous and the potential danger of delusion for the naïve. You can almost hear Arthur Daly or Dell Boy spin it, “Look at that! That’s quali’y that is.”

    Value

    This is where Mariana Mazzucato starts out from in her book on economics, The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy. In Mazzucato’s thesis the word “value” is in many ways a synonym for “quality”, and she shows how some clever-clever salespeople have sold a pup to the entire world with a fancy story that somehow has the effect of equating value with price: if a thing is expensive it must be good, right? “Look at that! Now that’s quali’y.”

    Mazzucato shows how this simple con has allowed the Arthur Dalys of big finance to enrich themselves and their friends by extracting value from goods created by the wider working community. They do this primarily by blurring the distinction between value creation and value extraction. This is the Making and Taking aspect of the book.

    We see it all the time in the arts. Irish musicians and actors will be more than familiar with the publican who asks them to work for nothing because, unlike him, they “enjoy” their work. Therefore, so his thinking goes, that is reward enough and the publican can extract the economic value from the skills of the artistes. The story the publican spins in this transaction is the implicit suggestion that the arts are actually worthless.

    Mariana Mazzucato 2016.

    The Con

    Everyone can see the con when it’s that glaring, but in the wider world of high finance it’s all a bit faster and meaner: worker’s wages stagnate while shareholders extract fat bonuses. Energy company shareholders holiday in the sun while families decide between food and heat. Mazzucato’s book is a reveal of the stories and patter and understandings used and exploited by corporations and swallowed by the public and by governments, that results in wealth being sucked to the top while wages stagnate and inequality increases.

    Mazzucato’s goal is to unmask the tawdry yarns of modern capitalism’s snake-oil salesmen who profess to be the high priests of identifying value: the bankers and corporations essentially claiming welfare in the form of tax breaks while creaming from the top of community-created wealth to transfer to their shareholders, all with the connivance of a bought-out political class, many of whom are corporate shareholders themselves. She writes:

    “If the assumption that value is in the eye of the beholder is not questioned, some activities will be deemed to be value creating and others will not, simply because someone – usually someone with a vested interest – says so, perhaps more eloquently than others… If bankers, estate agents and bookmakers claim to create value rather than extract it, mainstream economics offers no basis on which to challenge them, even though the public might view their claims with scepticism.”

    Side Street in Dignity Village, Portland, Oregon.

    Fake Stories

    Derelict American cities are a living example of wealth extraction, leaving a trail of destruction in its wake while the top 1% live the high life. It is in untangling these stories, these modern myths of economics, that Mazzucato hopes to bring clarity in the necessary project to somehow reimagine capitalism, so that it works once more for the benefit of all, creating a thriving world rather than a dying one.

    At the centre of this entanglement of fake stories, spun by the elite like so many spider-webs, she shows that what is afoot is nothing more than a cheap con being perpetrated by groups of people with stories so shoddy that as soon as you see the move and the angle you can’t unsee it. Theirs is a strategy that depends essentially on the manipulation of one human weakness: convincing people that they are solely to blame for their own condition. Not the system. But their own character defects.

    And people buy it, every time. It’s not unlike the original sin the church used to so successfully sell. In the end, they claim, it’s all your own fault. So, while the poor sit self-tortured in self-flagellation for their own condition, which is almost always an outcome of social and economic inequality, the sales shaman steals away with the pensions and anything else he can manage to capture.

    Quality

    Robert Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance spent a book trying to get a grasp on the meaning of the term “quality”, an attribute whose presence or absence is clear to everyone. That was the mystery he was trying to pin down. How is it everyone knows when something has quality but can’t quite describe it?

    In the same way, you don’t need a PhD in economics to see that the attribute of quality is severely lacking in today’s capitalism. You have only to look at the manner in which business is being conducted that it is delivering neither quality nor value, just endless bonuses to a select few and endless grinding poverty to the many, no matter how hard they might work.

    Marianna Mazzucato has unmasked the shoddy yarn driving this fountain-pen theft of communal wealth, in a book so timely and revealing that it simultaneously exudes the twin attributes of quality and value while providing much-needed insights into the vexing question: why is capitalism only really working for a select few? The answer is simple: the herd has been deluded by clever economic patter: “That’s quali’y, tha’ is.”