On car parking contemplation

One of the great unread (though not unbought, paradoxically) books of my formative generation was Robert Pirsig’s ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.’ Everyone recognised the cover with the cramped column of writing and the flower, but few would have been able to recognize any of the contents. What it said was not important: it was an icon and it had the word Zen written in large friendly letters on the cover. That was enough.

No one knew what Zen actually meant, but we did know that it was ‘cool’; though not ‘cool’ in the same way that Bart Simpson means ‘cool’, I think.

Zen was the way. And The Way. It was popularised in such Eastern Mystical series such as the one with David Carradine called ‘Kung Fu’ (http://www.kungfu-guide.com/overview.html) where gnomic snippets of wisdom were vouchsafed to Kwai Chang Caine (Carradine), a half-Chinese, half-American Shaolin priest, an expert in the ancient Chinese art of Kung Fu ("It is said a Shaolin priest can walk through walls. Looked for, he cannot be seen. Listened for, he cannot be heard. Touched, he cannot be felt.") Ah, the numbers of times that fortune cookie wisdom was given to ‘Butterfly’ – and we all felt it meant something, just beyond our western understanding!

The same with Lao Tzu, (http://www.chebucto.ns.ca/Philosophy/Taichi/lao.html) a philosopher of existential skepticism, where one must ‘abandon knowledge and discard self’; always a joy trying to work out how it all applies to shopping in Tesco.

But that is the point: what is the use of philosophy if it cannot help you in the everyday situations of life. Take, for example the shop car park. Let’s be fair these are, at the best of times, fairly soulless places; typically acres of concrete with symmetrical lines and occasional huts for the return of trolleys. Who, in their right minds would decide to pass time in one of these rather than in the treasure trove of goodies which comprise our present merchandising outlets? It all depends on the shop and who you are with.

Unless you have a particular fetish, then, as a man, a woman’s clothing department is of limited interest. If you are with Shopping Women in a woman’s clothing department then you are likely to have to extend your meditative capabilities to a considerable extent, because time as you have previously experienced it will be undergoing a Stephen Hawking like extension into an infinity of dimensions. I do not even pretend to know what women find inexhaustibly fascinating about each individual item of apparel so that their progress though a store is as fast as a miser checking each individual part of the output of the Royal Mint. Time, as Forster said, must have a stop; and women’s clothing departments is where it happens.

So, if you have a choice of accompanying three (count them, three) women on a shopping spree there might be a percentage in trying to find something else to do, even if that means doing nothing.

Sitting in a car; watching a sleeping child; silence. Now is the time for Zen and butterfly contemplation. Well, I don’t do that self absorption so I decided to take photographs from a sitting position in the front seat.

Zen and the art of car park photography.