One Stone Laid on the Board

There is a book by Herman Hesse that goes under a couple of titles out there in the marketplace. The friends of the library sales won’t have this one, but an average sized used paperback store will. It was big in the sixties along with titles of the era like Mother Night and Play it As it Lays.

One of the titles of this Hesse work is Magister Ludi and the other is the Glass Bead Game. The book is the tale of a great player, perhaps the greatest player of an incredibly complex game. The game is played by intellectuals in a rarefied monastic environment set purposely away from the travails of the normal world. The details of the game itself and its rules are never really set out in the book being rather only obliquely referenced. The Wiki says this of the exact nature of the game:

At the center of the monastic order lies the (fictitious) Glass Bead Game, whose exact nature remains elusive. The precise rules of the game are only alluded to, and are so sophisticated that they are not easy to imagine. According to the plot, playing the Game well requires years of hard study of music, mathematics, and cultural history. Essentially the Game is an abstract synthesis of all arts and scholarship. It proceeds by players making deep connections between seemingly unrelated topics. For example, a Bach concerto may be related to a mathematical formula.

Why does this book come my mind now you may wonder? In recent days I have found myself more and more pulled into the Glass Bead Game of electronic communication. As some readers of this blog know I have a Facebook page. Also I have this blog. Additionally I have and iphone with a number of social connection tools including the Grafitto application. I have several e-mail accounts. Each of these media for the communication of ideas intersects with the others and the interplay is a kind of game of deep connections between seemingly unrelated topics. Let me explain by way of several examples.

On my blog I recently wrote a story about the connection I felt between sucking down some oysters during a road trip repast and of a group of memories central to the core of who I am, those being of travels to my paternal grandmother’s home. In creating that blog entry I violated one of my own prime rules of online writing, I used identifying names for people and places that were real. In doing that I laid a cosmic go stone on an infinite board located out in the electronic ether. Based on a search he must have been conducting I made a connection with a cousin I hadn’t seen in decades.

The contact with my cousin got me thinking about a niece who due to my own negligence I had lost touch with. My wife mentioned that suddenly she was getting hits from her family in Illinois on her Facebook page. Using a people search feature there I found my niece, I asked for a friend designation and was accepted. Whew, being accepted is a whole bunch better than being denied.

As I was contemplating my next move I circled around the blogs that I read and came upon another connection. While a couple of days ago I had been thinking about the meaning of poetry to my son, one of my friends was remembering some very personal and very insightful things about her own poetry. Another piece on the cosmic board is laid out.

And the connections will continue. On Facebook I referenced some books that I find wonderful reads and I just know that somehow that will come back to me in some unexpected way. Or it may be that a piece of music I riff on about in these postings will show up on someone’s list on Facebook as a favorite. Right now I can’t get the boys to stop singing this song by a band called the Postal Service. Here is the link to the video for We Will Become Silhouettes http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEILFf2XSrM .

Or maybe the fact that I mention I once studied archival management at the graduate level will get me a shout from some archivist I once talked with at a records management conference and she will turn out to be a poet who believes post apocalyptic music will free us…. Well any how you get my drift, right? On glass bead, one cosmic go stone and the ripples spread out.

Oh and I want to thank all of you who wrote in saying my nose hairs scared/scarred you. It was just a picture for crying out loud.