“…unity, vividness, authority, economy, sensitivity, clarity, emphasis, flow, suspense, brilliance, precision, proportion, depth…”
The most recent addition to my bedside table comfort-stack (or guilt-stack depending on how they’re looking at me) is On Quality - a collection of letters and previously unpublished works by Robert M. Pirsig (author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance).
I picked it up on a trip to see my family in northern Washington - it’s a quick but dense read that I consumed in small bites through that trip, and then on my following trip to Spain and Italy a few weeks later. It was compact and eerily thematic.
Pirsig intentionally never defines the capital-Q ‘Quality’ — but according to him “you know what it is”. Quality is the impetus to refine, practice, cultivate, excel; maybe Quality made me buy a plane ticket to Spain…?
Barcelona and Naples are two cities that became particularly important to me when I first traveled there 11 years ago - I was 21, overly confident (bless her), and romantically obsessed with food (that part hasn’t changed). A few years later, I went back with my ex - I showed him places that were important and special to me, like Cal Pep in the Born, where there’s no menu and they just look you up and down and decide for you — octopus or clam, potato or pepper, cava or sangria. One of the cooks actually said “just trust me for once in your life” the last time I went.
Or Bar Sette Bello in Napoli, a dive bar of almost no note except that it’s named after the luckiest card in the Neapolitan card game Scopa, and my couchsurfing hosts took me there a decade ago to teach me to drink super-sweet-espresso and smoke a cigarette “with the taste of the espresso still on your lips”. It’s a farcically-poetic city.
Now I had come back to these places again, alone, at 32, carrying around these notes on Quality. Maybe it’s all too predictable, but the whole experience felt decidedly mutated. Inherently I had to overwrite some of these old, bittersweet memories. Inevitably I was less charmed than the very first time.
Strangely, I felt the veil of a long held Euro-enchantment gently lifting. The pizza was still sublime (please, I’m not an idiot), the vermouth still sticky sweet, but everything’s rose-tinted shine had perhaps dulled slightly. Yeah, so maybe I got drunk on cava, but I was sober so to speak. I wasn’t so sure anymore if the elusive Quality of things I admire was wholly tied to the things or places themselves. It may in fact be more mutable, transient — closer.
There’s a small passage in On Quality where Pirsig succinctly lists some aspects of quality without outrightly defining it. I got a little obsessed with that list, using it as a lens through which to view the garden I was in, the coffee I ordered, and subsequently the life waiting for me back home. My albums, my demos, my baking habit, my relationships, my lazy day frozen pasta.
You can’t help but notice the vividness of a place that isn’t dulled by the everyday - this is an old hat.
I guess what I’m getting at is that as a young person, I believed that it took a plane ticket to somewhere else to find the best examples of human culture. Somewhere older, somewhere with authority and history and traditions (like daily naps and fried pasta). Maybe this is just a predictable throughline from my post about gratitude, but after spending a decade in Oakland, I have surrounded myself with a vibrant, expansive, diverse community of passionate people cultivating Quality in my own neighborhood.
I hope I’m not going through some trite It’s-A-Wonderful-Life epiphany, and I really don’t think I’m abandoning travel or anything like that. But maybe I need to be more disciplined about actively appreciating this place vibrating with so much talent and beauty and passion — noticing is an integral part of caring. I’m wondering if I can identify the brilliance around me and use it as fuel to continue to practice care. I wonder if care could de-fog window overlooking the everyday and mundane.
“That is what caring really is, a feeling of identification with what one’s doing.”
I made a little associative list of the Quality I’ve been noticing and noting these days, at home and at large. Maybe some will resonate with you -
vividness - walking thru joaquin miller park early in the morning. paintings by Ada Lea and Stanley Goldstein.
unity - would be remiss not to be on-the-nosey with oakland’s beloved Unity Press. buy thier Gaza fundraiser prints. Associatively - Lower Grand Radio. Another local radio station championing the little guy - bff.fm
authority - learning to say no and yes in ways that were terrifying before.
economy - if i can make it, try to. do very little very well - like the menu at elisabet’s in BCN and the menu at joodooboo in oakland.
sensitivity - this ram dass talk. olivia kaplan’s new song.
emphasis - what is the value in each constituent part of something we love? maybe that’s studied in this 45 minute long version of wichita lineman …
flow - playing piano at the cat house, seeing my friends and playing their requests. ease/inspiration/mistakes. learning/trying. PRACTICE
suspense - the studio dates i booked at tiny telephone recording. (you have to go away to come back).
brilliance - anything made by my friend emily. this poetry collection from Forough Farrokhzad.
precision - every single thing mary denham/ bloom’s end bakes. also — the mistakes and successes that come out of my kiln. the practice of quilting.
depth - teaching my piano students to improvise. the absolute breadth and width of the emotional landscape of this lambchop album. deserves its own essay.
Let me know if you pick up this book - I want to talk to more people about it.
If you contributed to my student-music fundraiser for the Alameda County Food Bank, thank you! We raised $700 collectively <3
thank you thank you for reading.
xoxoMK
Maddy, im so glad i found your substack. You’re a beautiful writer.
—Samantha, your old neighbor from another life.
Thank you thank you for writing. What a lovely, thoughtful thing to arrive in my email inbox, amidst all the marketing crud. Nice reminder that, maybe the current day isn’t as lousy as it often feels. More power to you, MK.