10. A Dremel in the hand

My 83 year-old mother texted me the other day to ask if I had a Dremel tool. I was surprised she knew what one was, and I would have been inclined to put the question down to incipient dementia except I knew she had recently made an impulse buy of a very large and spectacular piece of quartz, the cleaning and polishing of which had become a new obsession for her. I found two Dremels in her basement, part of the stash of tools my dad had moved out from Pennsylvania and then never used, and from which I continue to pilfer to stock my own workshop. I left both Dremels on her kitchen table, where they sat for a few days before I came across a Dremelling need of my own: a garden hose whose aluminum threads had fused to a brass spigot thanks to our negligently leaving the hose attached all winter. No amount of Liquid Wrench was penetrating into the threads, and the Reddit suggestions of heat and hacksaws didn't seem very workable given the space available and the lack of anything but a hair dryer to provide heat. But a high-speed spinning disc that you could control to a high level of precision in order to cut through the aluminum hose end without carving into the brass threads of the spigot seemed just the thing. And that's pretty much what Dremels do - spin discs, as well as cylinders, cones, and other less classically Euclidean shapes at high speeds to cut, buff, etch, etc. As my mom said, they're basically beefed up dentist drills, an image I will now have a hard time shaking whenever I'm captive in the dentist's chair with the whirry whine of machinery moving towards my mouth.

I'm reading Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance for the first time, both because it's partly about how working on and with things is humanly important, and because over the years quite a few people, upon hearing that I'm a philosophy professor, have asked about it. It's a much stranger book than I expected, since the narrative is about the author's attempt to reconnect to a self he lost due to convulsive electroshock therapy, which he underwent after a major psychotic episode, and the dynamics between him and his near-adolescent son that revolve around this split self. Motorcycle maintenance is a theme, but not really the one you'd expect from the title. The focus is really on Pirsig's journey through the more arcane realms of Western metaphysics – Zen is also overstated in the title – a journey tied to his split self but also separable from it. Given that the book sold a million-plus copies, that suggests there's maybe more of a palate for what I've come to think of as very much a niche academic pursuit than I had thought, although maybe the 70s were a more metaphysical time.

I'm a little lukewarm on the overtly philosophical part of the book, but I do like it when Pirsig actually talks about working on motorcycles, and this morning's selection really hit home. He was talking about "stuckness": hitting a problem that is so particular that no previously learned concepts and rules can direct you how to solve it. The only way forward is to immerse yourself in the things before you and think them through as the unique configuration of reality they are. In his example, a cover, behind which is the motorcycle's machinery that really needs attention, is held fast by a screw that won't come out as it's supposed to and that doesn't respond to the standard techniques for dealing with such metallic recalcitrance. The entire machine's value becomes focused in that one little screw: if you can't get it out, the whole thing won't work and so is rendered worthless. But you can't deal with this if you remain focused on the problem in the machinery you had set out to solve, for that will only create impatience and frustration. So all you can do is think the screw in its stuckness and find some way to deal with it.

My own hose-and-spigot situation was quite analogous to this. I had wanted to hook up a new hose so I could wash the accumulated dirt off our back deck and pergola (the latter, a covid project, being my most accomplished bit of construction to date). The fused hose was a short length that I could have attached my longer hose to had the fusion been more complete, but it was imperfect and a lot of water was spewing out of the spigot. Threaded things are temperamental beasts that are easily damaged and hard to fix, as I know from my days as a wrench in the bike shop, and when they are part of a system for moving pressurized water around, I am generally loathe to mess with them. (As I was confronting my spigotty situation, I was also paying a plumber a sizeable amount of money to put in new drainage piping between shower and stack, for I recognize when real experience and expertise and not just YouTube instructions are needed.) But of late I've become braver in what I'll take on, an attitude that I identify as rooted in a late-developed ability to engage in Pirsigian absorption in a problem: I find myself patient enough to think the things as they are in front of me and go small step by small step in dealing with them, without worrying about whatever larger project led me to them.

Pirsig can sound like stuckness requires a kind of mind-emptying response in which the thing in its brute, particular thingness is allowed to show up, freed from whatever general rules and concepts one might be carrying into one's encounter with it. To the extent that he interprets "beginner's mind" in this way, it doesn't stand up to philosophical scrutiny (as I learned, for those keeping score, in my Sellarsian philosophical training, in which the Myth of the Given figured prominently). For, while the moment of confronting particularity in the form of stuckness does put one out ahead of the rules and concepts one already knows how to apply directly, it is not thereby a direct encounter with an immediate, unformed thing-situation. What allows one to deal with it is some combination of seeking out knowledge from others (Reddit and YouTube, for example) who have dealt with the problem, and so who have found a rule one can adopt and follow, or thinking creatively about it by finding as many analogies as one can between the problem and things one does grasp through rules. Everything is like something else, so if you can find the relevant likeness that sits within your know-how, you can often make progress. And plenty of things Pirsig says indicate precisely this, which to me suggests there's a mismatch between his metaphysics and his practice. But maybe I'm mistaken; deep textual analysis isn't really worth the effort on this point.

In any case, in my situation the analogy I formed was: hacksaw=blade and Dremel disc=spinning blade, so by a combination of learning and thinking analogously, a perfect solution presented itself. A few careful cuts and the corroded aluminum could be pried off, the brass threads cleaned, and the new hose tightly attached. Success!

Except that then it became clear that the leaky spigot had another problem, for there was a pressure release mechanism on its top that was also a source of escaping water, but fortunately this one could be taken care of with a twist of a pair of channel locks, as per the manufacturers YouTube instructions, neither Dremel nor deeper confrontation with stuckness needed.