Of Glass Bead Games, Peach Orchards, Prufrock, the Allman Brothers, and Stephanie’s Poem

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/

     What I quote from next comes from Charles Cameron’s web posting from 1996,http://home.earthlink.net/~hipbone/Consider.html.  

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