Spectrevision Radio

Welcome to Weird Studies, an arts and philosophy podcast with hosts Phil Ford and J.F. Martel.

For more episodes or to support the podcast,

go to weirdstud J.F. Martel.

In the first part of our conversation on Herman Hesse's

Glassbeed game, we discussed the enigmatic centerpiece of that novel, the game itself. In the second

part, we're talking about the cultural and historical implications of the fictional game and the monastic

order for whom it represents a new understanding of our place in the universe.

As Phil eloquently puts it, many of us moderns are rather well acquainted with glass bead games,

that is, with cultural activities that seem divorced from the immediate concerns of the day.

Sometimes it may seem like most cultural practices that aren't eminently monetizable are glass-bee

games of a sort. Think of the preservation of dying languages, for instance, or the performance

of certain kinds of music, or the academic study of music, or literature for that matter. People who

work to keep these things alive are few and far between,

and if you're one of them, sooner or later you're going to ask yourself the question,

what's the point? What is the value of this thing in which no one else seems to see anything

worth preserving? Hess's answer here is interesting. There is a pattern to what humans do and to what they observe in nature in the cosmos.

No single people or era gets to see the whole pattern, but every one of them captures a small part of it.

For the full pattern to emerge, you would need imagination to think your way beyond the confines of your

isolated epoch and memory to remember the imaginings of those who came before you. Since the

pattern is infinite, it may never be fully revealed, but woe unto they who decide that there is no

pattern. Okay, there is one place where the great pattern of reality can and regularly does come

...