This is a tribute to a friend. Memorabilia of the Mind
1952 I entered the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis and found the publication hive in the basement of the School of Journalism building. I had worked on my high school newspaper and done the illustrations for our yearbook. I fit in. The people there became my home away from home at college. These memories include Nancy Ann James, marriage partner.
1953 Nancy and Bob Pirsig started the Ivory Tower, a magazine in addition to the Daily newspaper and the annual Gopher yearbook (that was my connection). She graduated.
1953-1955 I went to Europe and when returned became Assistant Editor of the 1954 Gopher. The previous Assistant Editor, George Resch and I became close. He would often take me to Bob and Nancy's apartment. Bob would talk. Nancy would cook. We spent hours together. One night Bob proposed we take peyote. I doubt if it were anything but a suggestion, but we did stay up all night.
Another memory is in a painting. Probably done in 1955 or 56 when we were planning Bob's dream of taking a boat adventure down the Mississippi from MN to the Gulf. My roomate at the time: Jean Harrison (top left) had a boat. Bob is at the top. I'm on the lower left, facing Nancy on the right. All I have is this black and white print.
Bob and Nancy had moved to the country near Bethel, MN. A group of the J school friends had followed Richard Margolis to New York City, including George Resch and Wally Hansen. I continued to visit Pirsigs although I didn't drive. Bob came to Minneapolis as a technical writing consultant. He would bring me back and forth. As we drove back from Bethel to Minneapolis, he caught his breath. "Feel the tension rising," he queried? I tried to understand what he meant.
I would stay the weekend usually. Bob had become a couch guru holding us all fascinated with his mental powers and narratives. Imagine him describing how the puffed wheat cereal of General Mills, which was a writing job of his, were really shot from guns. Or telling what it was like to go to Breck, a private high school for boys, so vividly, I can still picture him sitting forlorn on the school bus, feeling like an outsider. He told of India; we virtually were transported to Bob's experiences abroad, from there to Korea. Then from philosophy to journalism.
Bob had knowledge of and interest in so many things I had never encountered. He was excited about the International Space Station. He had read when we could see it in the sky at night. After dark, we went out to an empty field with the entire sky visible to the horizon all around. I was familiar with the stars and constellations from camping trips as a teen. Lying on our backs on the ground, Bob knew how to point it out, crossing overhead. Seeing one of the points of light moving, knowing it was ours, something we are doing that hasn't been done before. Ever. This wondrous introduction was the kind of experience Bob brought to us. Round the globe numbers of us in the coming years.
1956 I graduated and went on into grad school at the UofM, getting my MFA in 1960. In 1957, when I dropped out of school (because my idol Van Gogh would not have stayed in academia), I went to San Francisco, settled on the hill of Coit Tower overlooking Fisherman's Wharf in North Beach. Became friends with Richard Brautigan (painted him), read books by beat poets. I visited West Coast painters but was not up to the Van Gogh trip. I came back to Minnesota and visits to the Pirsigs. The family's bedrooms were upstairs. Their baby, Chris Pirsig, in a crib. I slept on a couch in the living room. After they had retired for the night, I brought out a flute, or was it a drum to play. Bob yelled out to be quiet.
Most importantly in California, I had found Suzuki's book on Zen Buddhism and went to the San Francisco Zen Center. I sat. So I could sit still but didn't get meditation. It was the art of Zen ink painting that captivated me. I returned to the UofM and began to work on my thesis, "The first Zen Buddhist Painters". They were Chinese. Pirsig's had some Zen friends. From these roots, we all eventually followed differing Zen-related paths.
1958 In Fall, 1957 I had followed an MFA seminar teacher, Jack Tworkov, back to New York City but again disillustioned by the art scene, I came back to Minneapois reading Kerouac's "The Dharma Bums". After going to summer school, in Fall, 1958 Arneson gave me back a teaching assistantship in the Art Department for the second time. However, it only lasted one quarter. Bob came to my rescue with a technical writing contact, getting me a job as a book designer for a book that he wrote about Doctor Schnabel and the plague. 1960 MFA degree.
1961 I had married and had a child that I put up for adoption. I was grieving and I had no future. I did not get a college teaching job although I interviewed. Pirsigs had bought my painting, a Path Through Weeds, and taken it to Montana where Bob was teaching. Nancy offered to pay my bus fare to visit them. We played chess which she always won. A magical memory is coming home from some party high in the mountains with views through magnificent drifting clouds of the moon. Somehow a Zen moon over inner pools resulting in many ink paintings and on into oil painting.
I don't remember the particulars of Bob's nervous breakdown at the time. Later in 1975, he told me that whenever I showed up, he would get mentally ill. I think it was because of the life of my imagination and natural spiritual paganism, triggered his inner conflict between Reason (that he got from his dad, Dean of the Law School) and Romanticism (alienated part of Bob, the liberated outsider). I couldn't let my baby go after all and retrieved Leo John Geary before adoption.
Bob sent me the paper on Quality which I read and kept pinned up on the wall. Bob was a thinker from whom I learned so much. One day he called. He was in Minneapolis by himself and visited one afternoon. He doped himself up with handful of aspirin. I was shocked but did not know the health history and what was happening to him.
1962 Somewhere in here I had reconnected with my love, the father of my child that I had divorced. For a few days we visited Bob and Nancy in Chicago, Ill. where Bob was now teaching. Bob had an episode and was hospitalized. Nancy taught his class while I babysat. More vaguely, it had to be this year that Mel had moved to New York and convinced me to follow. I called Nancy, now back in Minnesota, and asked her to save my artwork that I had abandoned. She did get oil paintings, sculptures, boxes of drawings and ink paintings. She saved them until years later. From then on my contact with Pirsigs was mainly via Nancy.
Years go by in which Nancy and I exchanged long letters.
1967 From then to 1974 I designed and built a stained glass dome, an art project, Wholeo Dome.
1972 My parents sponsored a plane trip to California. On the way back, a side trip to Minnesota to see my son in Minneapolis, who lived with his father during the school year. Nancy was working but I spent an afternoon with Bob in their home next to Phyllis and Allen Downs. Bob was working on a book. He showed me a shoe-box of notes, which were in narrative order according to how the item would appear in the book. He pulled one out, reading the text and explaining that the question was where it belonged, before or after, in sequence, in time on a motorcycle trip in space and time. To me, an artist that had analogous visual creative project about how to organize my visions in a hemispherical space, this was like old times. This was ideas, my favorite thing.
1974 On a hillside I was building Wholeo Dome. Bob sent me his book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (link to my journal entry at the time). Synchronistically, I finished my big, 7-year project, Wholeo Dome, in 1974.
1975 Bob showed up one afternoon. I had stored my dome, decided to buy a house in CA and was sleeping on a pad in Charlie Applen's basement in Rio Grande on the Russian River under giant redwoods. Bob had come on a trip with his son Ted Pirsig in a camper truck to check on a boat he was having built. He proposed a party and brought liquor. My sister, Charlie, and our kids were there. Bob had sent me Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in 1974. Now he was famous as the author Robert M. Pirsig, and thought highly of, both by book lovers and himself. Later I found out that Charlie was a recovering alcoholic and that party set him back for many months. Bob had no concern with how he impacted our lives.
He had an idea that with his newfound prestige, he could influence Walker Art Center (where I had a one-woman show in 1961) to show my stained glass dome. Unfortunately he couldn't see it, since it was dismantled. We did hike up over the hill to where I had lived in Bump and built Wholeo. We sat on the site and meditated for Bob's Zen practice of 40 minutes. Walking back, Bob was happy that he hadn't blown it. He said the achievement that was that he had visited me without a nervous breakdown. He said he had always loved me and Nancy knew that. He said he could now buy an island in Lake Superior where I could live and do artwork to my heart's content. He would be able to visit by boat because he intended to sail up there. Writing that now, suddenly thinking that this unreal fantasy thinking was a form of schizophrenia. Me too. Maybe he resonated to my latent split personalities. How could he propose such a preposterous idea? We were both going through intense life changes having finished our huge life projects in 1974. Well, he did request Walker Art Center to use Wholeo Dome, but they were not able to do it. Bob and Nancy were separating. That was the last time I saw or talked to him. Bob went on to another book, Lila, and found Wendy. He died in 2017.
I have a memory of sitting in a restaurant with Nancy and her son Christopher Pirsig and someone else, maybe others. I was enchanted with his natural candor, awareness, and ease of conversing with middle aged women. I can't remember the date, location, or anything about the circumstances.
1979 I get a call from Gerry Jobes, Nancy's younger sister, that Chris Pirsig has been murdered. She invited me to the memorial service. I had massive plans with visionary artists for a trip to Mt. Shasta. I just did not, could not break the commitment, so I missed the service for Chris. In Mt. Shasta one morning I heard a Zen bell gong ringing, reminding me of my friends farther south. I had many intense visions during this time which I might have written somewhere. November 19 I think. Later Nancy said my visions had greatly helped her at that time. Feeling so connected to my Zen friends at Green Gulch and at the SF Zen Center in California.
More years go by. I go to Peru. I learn electronics. I become a technical writer in Silicon Valley. I get a Macintosh computer with wonderful software including HyperCard. It was a fine way to express myself visually, with text and links to others in the Internet. I create Zen and the Art of Dividing by Zero in which quotes from ZMM are one of the featured "Thinkers". See them here. The quotes show our shared intersection. Since I had no contact with Bob after 1975, I have no idea if he ever saw it. Wendy says that Bob remembered me as a painter.
1994 Nancy was again visiting me for a whole weekend. I found a great and relevant event. It was the Hiking and Haiku retreat at Green Gulch. Read about it here. It was wonderful on so many levels. Nancy had never seen the grave site built for Chris Pirsig. Reb organized an impromptu ceremony. Nancy wrote great haiku. Being outdoors there? Priceless. One of my very favorite memories. Probably enriched by my study of where Chris was murdered, right around the corner from where I had lived in the 60s, where my son had been hit by a car and had a broken leg. I had psychically gone on many adventures with Chris.
2017 Ted visits Bob on his deathbed. From conversations with Ted, Bob was his first meditation teacher. Over the years they had become estranged. But Ted made that final trip. Now in 2025, hearing that Ted is going to a month-long Meditation Retreat, I know that it is all connected.
2025 As part of the 50th anniversary of the publishing of ZMM in 1974, Sevilla King of the site A Quality Existence invited me to do an hour-long interview about our friendship and the synchronicity of creative endeavors. See it on YouTube here.
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