Re-reading The Glass Bead Game. Also, synchromystics and schizophrenia.

1. Joseph Knecht’s final act

It started to gnaw on me a few years ago that I never really “got” the ending to Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game when I first picked it up in high school... the book enchanted and stimulated me, but its ending hit me with a wallop that I failed to resolve into real understanding.  I began to look for interpretations online, but none of them were very emotionally satisfying, not even the author’s own explanations from his letters.  In the author’s defense, I think it’s a fair assumption that a book is written by much more than the conscious writing mind, and if anyone liked to let meanings charge and simmer in his subconscious, it was Hesse!  I also probably missed a great deal the first time through.  There was only one thing left to do: re-read the book.   Well, I finally got around to it this spring, and guess what — it worked!

(I would summarize and spoil the book here if I had any idea how.   If you like Hesse’s books but you haven’t read this one, I think it’s worth the journey — I’ll see you back here in a couple of weeks!  Or, if you don’t care and are just wondering what all this has to do with schizophrenia, skip to part two.)

I see the ending now as a kind of koan.   The intellectual solution to the koan is spelled out thematically throughout the novel…  it has to do with transcendence, and “stages”, and how developing yourself to the fullest means outgrowing yourself and giving life to something that is no longer you.  Not entirely unlike the Orpheus riddle.

When I first read The Glass Bead Game I felt that Knecht’s end was a painful waste of the life that had gone before… he had spent all that time learning and growing and I expected his next act to dazzle in a way that, sure, would be different from what he had done before, but I expected it to still be understandable from the same perspective.   The novel takes care to present a dichotomy between the ivory tower life of the mind and the hard-knocks life of subsistence in the “real” world.  I guess I expected his final act to synthesize the two in, well, in a glass-bead-game kind of way… virtuosic and artistic… something new but not that new… something that would make a good movie of the week.  I became quite attached to Knecht, and wasn’t prepared to see him go, to see him planted as a seed in history in such a very human way.  For that matter, I was attached to my own identification with Knecht’s quest up to that point.  But I missed the big point about overcoming attachment.  What we are attached to ultimately holds us back from flourishing, every time.   And even worse… it ain’t all about you.  Not easy lessons to live!

Anyway, kudos to Mr. Hesse for writing something so powerful that it stuck in my craw long enough to provoke me to go back some 18 years later and figure it out.

2. On being so open-minded that your (wife’s?) brain falls out

While researching Hesse to get a better understanding of The Glass Bead Game, I tripped across an unknown (to me) bit of history that stopped me in my tracks: Hesse’s first wife, Maria Bernoulli, developed schizophrenia while married to him.  Wow, where to begin?

All I know about her is that she came from a family of famous mathematicians; she was a freelance photographer, a musician, an introvert, and she married a mystic.  Those facts may well have been enough to do her in!  (No offense to mathematicians, freelancers, photographers, musicans, introverts and mystics, all of whom I love).

I couldn’t help but recall a favourite anecdote from Carl Jung.  Here it is, quoted in another blog (…which looks great, bookmarking it now…):

I once made the acquaintance of a very venerable personage — in fact, one might easily call him a saint. I stalked round him for three whole days, but never a mortal failing did I find in him. My feeling of inferiority grew ominous, and I was beginning to think seriously of how I might better myself. Then, on the fourth day, his wife came to consult me . . . Well, nothing of the sort has ever happened to me since. . . . Any man who becomes one with his persona can cheerfully let all disturbances manifest themselves through his wife without her noticing it, though she pays for her self-sacrifice with a bad neurosis.

I haven’t the foggiest idea how much Maria’s psychological troubles were inherited from her husband, or how much they stemmed from her own intellectual pursuits, from her upbringing, or an unfortunate roll of the genetic/physiological dice.  I do, however, recognize mental illness as a potential trap for anyone who chases after synchronicities and deeper meanings — at least for one who is “ill-dignified”, by which I mean not well supported by one’s environment — and the danger is not just that society may label one a nutcase, though there is that too.

Maria’s schizophrenia raises a red flag for me to be somewhat wary about following too closely in Hesse’s footsteps … “By their fruits ye shall know them” and all!  Aleister Crowley had his first wife institutionalized for alcoholic dementia while at the peak of his own intellectual prowess (and she was only perhaps the first in a huge line of mangled psyches left in his wake).

No stranger myself to jumping down rabbit holes, I’m concerned about living in a way that doesn’t externalize the costs of my choices onto those around me.  I’ve already messed up in this regard in a few arenas, and I see further dysfunction in and around me whose origin remains a mystery to me.

I find it encouraging that there seems to be a growing appreciation in mainstream psychology for a more holistic view of wellness, whereby we consider the health of our families and our societies as a whole, rather than make largely futile attempts to change only the individuals with the “presenting problems”.

We can work toward such a goal, anyway!

♥