A few years ago I read Herman Hesse’s “Das Glasperlenspiel” (“The Glass Bead Game”). In this amazing book about the search of perfection, the author describes a game which essentially is an abstract synthesis of all arts and scholarship. I was immediately fascinated by the idea and tried to find the rules of the game. Unfortunately, Hesse’s book provides nothing that can be regarded as rules of the game. At the beginning this caused me some frustration because I really wanted to play it immediately. In time though, I realized that it is not impossible to imagine the rules of the Glasperlenspiel as long as you try to follow the “spirit” of the game.
As I was pushing back the limits of my ignorance regarding art, the Glasperlenspiel came back to my mind. Modern art tends to erase traditional limits between sculpture and painting, between music and visual arts, between real life and imagination, between science and art. This is how art looks like after thousands of years of evolution. An obvious question rose: what is the next step? The first answer that came to me was “globalization”. Globalization of arts, of senses, of cultures, of influences. Works that would include Bosch’s medieval painting, tribal music, New York photography, Woody Allen’s movies, and so on and so forth. Add this to science and history and you get the Glasperlenspiel. And there is something else. Until now, artists and art were epitomes of individuality. What if art would transform in such a way that instead of being a mere monologue, it would be a dialogue? Instead of an expression of individuality art should transform to an expression of a community. This doesn’t mean erasing individuality, but expressing it in a relationship to other individualities. This is how I see the Glasperlenspiel: expressing individualities through the dialogue of all arts and scholarship.
Back to the game. How is it played? There are not many rules to be followed. Actually, there is only the spirit of the game that leads the players. There is no winner. This should harness the spirit of competition. The purpose of the game is just to create beauty, ugliness, kitsch, all together or separated.
The image that I have for the game is that of a chain: beads connected by links. The players have to add beads to the chain taking care for the links to be strong enough not to let the chain break. Everything can be a bead: paints, sculptures, music, film, books, places, people, even simple words. Players can create their own bead: a drawing, a poem, a photograph, anything. The most important parts of the chain though are the links. They create the chain and they make it live. It is the links that can make the chain strong or weak. They should be strong to hold the rest of the chain and at same time they should be subtle enough to ask for thought or even meditation.
The game has its own life and all the players are responsible for it. They can create a weak game or a strong one, depending on the links they use. They can choose on finishing a beautiful game, or waste it in a failed link. They can branch a chain; they can close it or kill it by indifference.
Obviously, the game is going to be played on the Internet. The Internet provides the biggest collection of what man has discovered or created, the means for easy access to it and the tools for easy displaying. Maybe Hesse didn’t think about a blog being the place to play the Glasperlenspiel, but for the moment it just proves perfect for this purpose.
The spirit of the Glasperlenspiel will be unveiled as it is played. This is also what is to happen with the way the game is going to be played. For the beginning, each day a player will post a bead. During the day everybody is allowed and encouraged to comment about the bead and the links it has with the chain. If the links of which the posting player had thought were not revealed during the day’s comments, he/she presents them in a comment at the end of the day. The order in which the players act is determined first by availability, second by willingness and third by a combination of democracy and frequency of interventions.
The Glasperlenspiel should express individualities through dialogue. It is a dialogue using the language of arts, science and history, but first of all it is a dialogue. It is the choice of the player to take it as art or just as a “smart” game, but the respect for the other players should be seen as part of the spirit of the Glasperlenspiel, and thus essential to it.
(IND)
