Of Glass Bead Games, Peach Orchards, Prufrock, the
Allman Brothers, and Stephanie’s Poem
Somehow, I
believe I can bring this into some semblance of coherence. Impetus for this
post is another fine poem and recording by my friend, Stephanie Weisend. Among
other things, we share a love for T.S. Eliot’s poetry, and try, in our own
ways, to duplicate the way in which he expressed profound thoughts in simple,
direct language, much like W.H. Auden, another mutual favorite.
Stephanie
paid me a nice compliment that when she read part of my Telos of Time she thought she was reading Eliot. This is another
example of what I mean when I say that she “gets” what I say in my poetry more
often than not.
After two
years of Latin in junior high school, I broke with family tradition and troo
German, primarily so I could read Hermann Hesse in the original. His massive
1943 novel Magister Ludi: The Glass Bead
Game I had to read in English, along with others of his works. But I read Siddartha in the original on my own at
university. During deployment, I read Das
Glasperlenspiel, to use the original title of the previously-mentioned
book/
Hesse himself claimed to have played the Game... To
quote Ziolkowski again:
In
the idyllic poem "Hours in the Garden" (1936), which he wrote during
the composition of his novel, Hesse speaks of "a game of thoughts called
the Glass Bead Game" that he practiced while burning leaves in his garden.
As the ashes filter down through the grate, he says, "I hear music and see
men of the past and future. I see wise men and poets and scholars and artists
harmoniously building the hundred-gated cathedral of Mind." These lines
depict as personal experience that intellectual pastime that Hesse, in his
novel, was to define as "the *unio mystica* of all separate members of the
*Universitas Litterarum*" and that he bodied out symbolically in the form
of an elaborate Game performed according to the strictest rules and with
supreme virtuosity by the mandarins of his spiritual province.
\and
again:
The
Game, then, is playable in at least this sense. Furthermore, Hesse himself
apparently based his description of the Game in *Das Glasperlenspiel* to some
extent on a "game of ideas" involving optics, mathematics and music
devised by his friend the painter Max Bucherer, incorporating the work of
Bucherer's wife, Als Feustel -- whose theory of the correspondences between the
musical and color scales Hesse mentions in the passage where Knecht reviews his
first game in depth: ..he
spent year after year sitting in lecture halls and libraries, studying Froberger
and Alessandro Scarlatti, fugues and sonata form, reviewing mathematics,
learning Chinese, working through a system of tonal figuration and the
Feustelian theory of the correspondence between the scale of colors and the
musical keys.
Pretty
heady stuff indeed, and it took me years to fathom it as much as I have. I
remember being intrigued by how a painting inspires a piece of music or sonnet,
At times I wonder how a language could be expressed as an musical instrument,
or marvel at how a writer describes a natural scene, as Jardy and Updike, among
others, do so well.
Last week I
am reading Stephanie’s poem, and listen to her reading it, grasping the
allusions to Prufrock, and thinking of the peach orchards near where my wife
and I live in South Carolina. Our peaches are not sweet like Georgia’s; they
are whiter on the inside and taste better.
Back to
Eliot now: Poor Prufrock, like Hamlet, cannot make a decision. In the former’s
case, it is not avenging his father’s murder, but rather acting on his desires
for love. Age is catching up with Prufrock in many ways. His hair is falling
out, he dresses in an old-fashioned way, and one could reasonably infer his
technique of attracting women is the same way. Imagine a man in 2015 walking
into a singles’ bar and asking a woman, “What’s your sign?”
Various
commentators correctly equate the peach with a sexual desire, sweetness, and a pleasing
taste. Like all frits, the peach must be savored when it is ripe for full
enjoyment. Prufrock’s hesitation dooms him to loneliness. The mermaids, and we assume,
all women, mock him. They have flowing, splendid hair; he does not. They sing,
but not to him.
I have one
more connection to make before going to Stephanie’s poem. The Allman Brothers
Band was one of the heralds of southern Rock, to my mind the originators of the
genre if I recall from my campus radio station days. “Eat a Peach” was released
in February 1972, after Duane Allman’s death.
This site gives an interesting insight into the title: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eat_a_Peach
(Butch) Trucks suggested they name the album
Eat a Peach for Peace, after a quote from Duane Allman. When the writer Ellen
Mandel asked Allman what he was doing to help the revolution, he replied:
I'm
hitting a lick for peace — and every time I'm in Georgia, I eat a peach for
peace. But you can't help the revolution, because there's just evolution. I
understand the need for a lot of changes in the country, but I believe that as
soon as everybody can just see a little bit better, and get a little hipper to
what's going on, they're going to change it. Everybody will — not just the
young people. Everybody is going to say, 'Man, this stinks. I cannot tolerate
the smell of this thing anymore. Let's eliminate it and get straight with
ourselves.' I believe if everybody does it for themselves, it'll take care of
itself."[22][21]
Allman's
comment was a reference to T. S. Eliot's poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock."[21] An untrue story persisted for many years after the album's
release that it was named after the truck Allman crashed into, purported to be
a peach truck.[23
The Allmans were
either very well-read, or had really good English teacher or two! I vaguely
remember the poem form high school; I do remember it from English 3 at Penn
State during my freshman year. In the previous quote, Allman likens the
indecision in the poem to society’s indecision to press for societal change. In
Allman’s opinion, it will happen when we all get a “hipper”. In 2015, we need
to make up for lost time, and perhaps we are.
And now to
Stephanie’s poem. She is the first poet to whom I dedicated a separate folder
on AOL. There was a poem of hers about New Mexico, where my family also lived,
that grabbed me. She alludes to Eliot’s classic, but extrapolates it into new
rhythms and updates the images. The peach becomes a peach tree, indicative of a
larger concern perhaps, or a living organism destined for a cycle like all
living things are. Tis summer I remember driving in an around Aiken County,
which borders on Georgia, looking at the growing peaches on the trees. We had a
few peach trees in the Monongahela Valley south of Pittsburgh where I grew up,
but nothing like these!
Listen to
Stephanie read her amazing poem and see what I mean! Her voice really captures
the despair of this poor tree. I have tried to construct a Glass Bead Game from
a novel, a classic poem, things I see while driving, Southern Rock, and a poem
by a talented friend. Enjoy!
https://soundcloud.com/female-uninterrupted/lament-of-an-old-despondent
