The second manuscript came easily enough, spurred by a flash of inspiration I will one day speak about. But the preface! Hermann Hesse's
Magister Ludi: The Glass Bead Game (Das Glasperlenspiel) plays a subliminal role in all this.
As a high school student, I read the novel in translation, and read it in the original toward the end of my deployment to Germany. I have long tried to find connections between things that others could or would not see. An obvious example would be the 1960s band Steppenwolf, named after a Hesse novel. I loved the music, then read the book, and delved into other things associated with it, among them other literary influences on music of that and other times. Soon I was watching movies more critically, and learning more about the history behind the events, and so on.
The tentative title for the book is
Accents, where I go from hearing other languages and their remnants when people speak English, to other things that have stood out to me and form a leitmotiv in my life.
Charles Cameron hs some perceptive thoughts on the novel and its significance:
As a poet, I have some very definite opinions about the arts, and believe for instance that all the arts depend on a marriage of passion with tight structure... I believe you can write a clever poem without heart, and it will be dry and lifeless, or a passionate poem without skill, and it will mean next to nothing to anyone except the person you wrote it for -- but that when you combine passion and skill, you get a poem that can transmit your passion to a far wider audience... which is why the great love poems from Shakespeare to ee cummings are still feverishly quoted by teenage lovers...
I believe, in other words, that this business of passion and formal restraint is one of those cross-disciplinary truths like the inverse square law. As I put it recently:
Great splash alone is all wet. Tight focus alone is a trickle. But great splash passing through tight focus can send water arcing through the air to great heights, to land at a great distance..
Let's take this a little further.
Music is the marriage of passion with tight structure in the field of sound, poetry the marriage of passion with tight structure in the field of words, etc. And if I'm right about this, the GBG is the marriage of passion with tight structure in the field of ideas -- specifically including verbal, pictorial, and musical ideas.
It is the art of the "multimedia" field in other words, in a far more precise sense than opera or film or performance art... It's what Wagner was after, when he wrote those operas -- the gesamtkunstwerke or "work-of-total-art".
http://home.earthlink.net/~hipbone/ExplGBG.html
If you have any comments or suggestion, please feel free to share them. I will work on this later tonight.
