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Webmagister Ludi and the Glass Bead Game. by: Willard Van De Bogart
Huxley, Hesse and The Cybernetic Society by Timothy Leary Part 2
The Glass Bead Game : (Magister Ludi) A Novel: Book by Herman Hesse
This afternoon, I met a young programmer from England. He had found my blog by searching on the terms "anarchism" and "Church of Virus." When he found early mentions of some of my other blogs he decided to mention the improbability of you my mentioning standpoint and church of virus,in recent posts as well as my reading techcrunchterms but oddly I had blogged on both subjects in the past month.
After a lively conversation in which we discussed some of the possible future scenarios for the Internet. He told me that he was developing a software program that would do some amazing things (but he wouldn't tell me what those were. I get a sense of that it was..
I brought up the book Magister Ludi (The Crystal Bead Game) by Hermann Hesse (see The Glass Bead Game on Wikipedia also) The lad from the UK said that if he had his new software ready, he would have a summary of the Glass Bead Game instantly presented to him. But he had to do things the old fashioned way and Googled up an article -- Webmagister Ludi and the Glass Bead Game. by: Willard Van De Bogart.
Here is an excerpt:
Magister Ludi-the Glass Bead Game, was a novel written in 1943 by the German writer Hermann Hesse who was born in 1877 in Claw, Germany, and died in 1962 in Montagnola, Switzerland. In 1946 Hesse received the Nobel Prize in literature for Magister Ludi. In the archives of the Glass Bead Game it is written that Joseph Knecht was the Magister Ludi of the Glass Bead Game in a place called Castalia. Who among you remember Castilia?
"Castalia is a symbolic realm where all spiritual values are kept alive and present, specifically through the practices of the Glass Bead Game. It depicts a future society in which the realm of culture is set apart to pursue its goals in splendid isolation..." May 1969 - Theodore Ziolkowski
50 years later the parallels between the Glass Bead Game and the Internet are very similar. Capturing a complete description of the Glass Bead Game is not easy. Here is a sample taken from a letter written by Hesse's character Joseph Knecht:
"I suddenly realized that in the language, or at any rate in the spirit of the Glass Bead Game, everything actually was all-meaningful, that every symbol and combination of symbol led not hither and yon, not to single examples, experiments, and proofs, but into the center, the mystery and innermost heart of the world, into primal knowledge. Every transition from major to minor in a sonata, every transformation of a myth or a religious cult, every classical or artistic formulation was, I realized in that flashing moment, if seen with truly a meditative mind, nothing but a direct route into the interior of the cosmic mystery, where in the alternation between inhaling and exhaling, between heaven and earth, between Yin and Yang holiness is forever being created.
Castalia was a protected institution set in the future, and devoted to intellectual pursuits. Castalia was run by the master of the Glass Bead Game. Sitting in a large room, Castalia members would explore magnificent associations of ideas and concepts. To what end? To keep alive knowledge in a world that had fallen apart spiritually, socially, and politically. Enter the internet, and the potential to continue what Hermann Hesse had begun with Master Ludi over 50 years ago. The internet allows each webmaster to play the Glass Bead Game. In a world filled with more information than is humanly possible to read, review, or to understand, the question arises as to how it is possible to develop an overview of human development into the 21st century? The Glass Bead Game thus takes on a new meaning, and a renewed capacity to understand the direction we are going. Read the rest here.
Reading this, I remembered my talks with Timothy Leary about the book. We decided that the book was a metaphorical yet accurate description of the future of personal computers and the web. Later, I got permission from Tim to publish a chapter of a book he was working on (but never published) called the Cybernetic Society along with Eric Gullicson. I published the chapter as a two part article in Island Views Newsletter. The second part is the about Hesse, Huxley, Hesse and the Cybernetic Society Part Two (in Island Views Newsletter). Here are some excerpts:
THE BRAIN GAME
Understandably, Hesse never gives a detailed description of this pre-electronic data-processing appliance called the Bead Game, but he does explain its function. Players learned how to digitize thought -- convert decimal numbers, musical notes, words, thoughts, images into elements, glass beads which could be strung in endless abacus combinations and rhythmic fugue sequences to create a higher level language of clarity, purity and ultimate complexity.
PSYBER-TALK: THE GLOBAL LANGUAGE OF DIGITAL UNITS
Hesse described the Bead Game as "a serial arrangement, an ordering, grouping, and interfacing of concentrated concepts from many fields of thought and aesthetics."
In time, wrote Hesse, ". . . the Game of games had developed into a kind of universal language through which the players could express values and set these in relation to one another."
In the beginning the Thought Game was designed, constructed, and continually updated by a guild of mathematicians called Castalia. Later generations of hacks used the Bead Game for educational, intellectual and aesthetic purposes. Eventually the Bead Game became a global science of mind, and indispensable method for digitizing thoughts, clarifying thoughts and communicating them precisely.
So far, so good. Let's hope that unlike the world of the future depicted in Magister Ludi, we are not plunged into a new Dark Ages!
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