MAGISTER LUDI - THE GLASS BEAD GAME (Completed)

JOSEPH KNECHT'S POSTHUMOUS WRITINGS - THE POEMS OF KNECHT'S STUDENT YEARS

Lament No permanence is ours; we are a wave That flows to fit whatever form it finds: Through day or night, cathedral or the cave We pass forever, craving form that binds. Mold after mold we fill and never rest, We find no home where joy or grief runs deep. We move, we are the everlasting guest. No field nor plow is ours; we do not reap. What God would make of us remains unknown: He plays; we are the clay to his desire. Plastic and mute, we neither laugh nor groan; He kneads, but never gives us to the fire. To stiffen into stone, to persevere! We long forever for the right to stay. But all that ever stays with us is fear, And we shall never rest upon our way. A Compromise The men of principled simplicity Will have no traffic with our subtle doubt. The world is flat, they tell us, and they shout: The myth of depth is an absurdity! For if there were additional dimensions Beside the good old pair we'll always cherish, How could a man live safely without tensions? How could he live and not expect to perish? In order peacefully to coexist Let us strike one dimension off our list. If they are right, those men of principle, And life in depth is so inimical, The third dimension is dispensable. But Secretly We Thirst. . . Graceful as dancer's arabesque and bow, Our lives appear serene and without stress, A gentle dance around pure nothingness To which we sacrifice the here and now. Our dreams are lovely and our game is bright, So finely tuned, with many artful turns, But deep beneath the tranquil surface burns Longing for blood, barbarity, and night. Freely our life revolves, and every breath Is free as air; we live so playfully, But secretly we crave reality: Begetting, birth, and suffering, and death. Alphabets From time to time we take our pen in hand And scribble symbols on a blank white sheet. Their meaning is at everyone's command; It is a game whose rules are nice and neat. But if a savage or a moon-man came And found a page, a furrowed runic field, And curiously studied lines and frame: How strange would be the world that they revealed. A magic gallery of oddities. He would see A and B as man and beast, As moving tongues or arms or legs or eyes, Now slow, now rushing, all constraint released, Like prints of ravens' feet upon the snow. He'd hop about with them, fly to and fro, And see a thousand worlds of might-have-been Hidden within the black and frozen symbols, Beneath the ornate strokes, the thick and thin. He'd see the way love burns and anguish trembles, He'd wonder, laugh, shake with fear and weep Because beyond this cipher's cross-barred keep He'd see the world in all its aimless passion, Diminished, dwarfed, and spellbound in the symbols, And rigorously marching prisoner-fashion. He'd think: each sign all others so resembles That love of life and death, or lust and anguish, Are simply twins whom no one can distinguish. . Until at last the savage with a sound Of mortal terror lights and stirs a fire, Chants and beats his brow against the ground And consecrates the writing to his pyre. Perhaps before his consciousness is drowned In slumber there will come to him some sense Of how this world of magic fraudulence, This horror utterly behind endurance, Has vanished as if it had never been. He'll sigh, and smile, and feel all right again. On Reading an Old Philosopher These noble thoughts beguiled us yesterday; We savored them like choicest vintage wines. But now they sour, meanings seep away, Much like a page of music from whose vines The clefs and sharps are carelessly erased: Take from a house the center of gravity, It sways and falls apart, all sense debased, Cacophony what had been harmony. So too a face we saw as old and wise, Loved and respected, can wrinkle, craze, As, ripe for death, the mind deserts the eyes, Leaving a pitiful, empty, shriveled maze. So too can ecstasy stir every sense And barely felt can quickly turn to gall, As if there dwelt within us cognizance That everything must wither, die, and fall. Yet still above this vale of endless dying Man's spirit, struggling incorruptibly, Painfully raises beacons, death defying, And wins, by longing, immortality. The Last Glass Bead Game Player The colored beads, his playthings, in his hand, He sits head bent; around him lies a land Laid waste by war and ravaged by disease. Growing on rubble, ivy hums with bees; A weary peace with muted psalmody Sounds in a world of aged tranquility. The old man tallies up his colored beads; He fits a blue one here, a white one there, Makes sure a large one, or a small, precedes, And shapes his Game ring with devoted care. Time was he had won greatness in the Game, Had mastered many tongues and many arts, Had known the world, traveled in foreign parts — From pole to pole, no limits to his fame. Around him pupils, colleagues always pressed. Now he is old, worn-out; his life is lees. Disciples come no longer to be blessed, Nor masters to invite an argument. All, all are gone, and the temples, libraries, And schools of Castalia are no more. At rest Amid the ruins, the glass beads in his hand, Those hieroglyphs once so significant That now are only colored bits of glass, He lets them roll until their force is spent And silently they vanish in the sand. A Toccata by Bach Frozen silence. . . Darkness prevails on darkness. One shaft of light breaks through the jagged clouds Coming from nothingness to penetrate the depths, Compound the night with day, build length and breadth, Prefigure peak and ridge, declivities, redoubts, A loose blue atmosphere, earth's deep dense fullness. That brilliant shaft dissevers teeming generation Into both deed and war, and in a frenzy of creation Ignites a gleaming terrified new world. All changes where the seeds of light descend, Order arises, magnificence is heard In praise of life, of victory to light's great end. The mighty urge glides on, to move Its power into all creatures' being, Recalling far divinity, the spirit of God's doing: Now joy and pain, words, art, and song, World towering on world in arching victory throng With impulse, mind, contention, pleasure, love. Translated by Alex Page A Dream Guest at a monastery in the hills, I stepped, when all the monks had gone to pray, Into a book-lined room. Along the walls, Glittering in the light of fading day, I saw a multitude of vellum spines With marvelous inscriptions. Eagerly, Impelled by rapturous curiosity, I picked the nearest book, and read the lines: The Squaring of the Circle — Final Stage. I thought: I'll take this and read every page! A quarto volume, leather tooled in gold, Gave promise of a story still untold: How Adam also ate of the other tree. . . The other tree? Which one? The tree of life? Is Adam then immortal? Now I could see No chance had brought me to this library. I spied the back and edges of a folio Aglow with all the colors of the rainbow, Its hand-painted title stating a decree: The in terrelationships of hues and sound: Proof that for every color may be found In music a proper corresponding key. Choirs of colors sparkled before my eyes And now I was beginning to surmise: Here was the library of Paradise. To all the questions that had driven me All answers now could be given me. Here I could quench my thirst to understand, For here all knowledge stood at my command. There was provision here for every need: A title full of promise on each book Responded to my every rapid look. Here there was fruit to satisfy the greed Of any student's timid aspirations, Of any master's bold investigations. Here was the inner meaning, here the key, To poetry, to wisdom, and to science. Magic and erudition in alliance Opened the door to every mystery. These books provided pledges of all power To him who came here at this magic hour. A lectern stood near by; with hands that shook I placed upon it one enticing book, Deciphered at a glance the picture writing, As in a dream we find ourselves reciting A poem or lesson we have never learned. At once I soared aloft to starry spaces Of the soul, and with the zodiac turned, Where all the revelations of all races, Whatever intuition has divined, Millennial experience of all nations, Harmoniously met in new relations, Old insights with new symbols recombined, So that in minutes or in hours as I read I traced once more the whole path of mankind, And all that men have ever done and said Disclosed its inner meaning to my mind. I read, and saw those hieroglyphic forms Couple and part, and coalesce in swarms, Dance for a while together, separate, Once more in newer patterns integrate, A kaleidoscope of endless metaphors — And each some vaster, fresher sense explores. Bedazzled by these sights, I looked away From the book to give my eyes a moment's rest, And saw that I was not the only guest. An old man stood before that grand array Of tomes. Perhaps he was the archivist. I saw that he was earnestly intent Upon some task, and I could not resist A strange conviction that I had to know The manner of his work, and what it meant. I watched the old man, with frail hand and slow, Remove a volume and inspect what stood Written upon its back, then saw him blow With pallid lips upon the title — could A title possibly be more alluring Or offer greater promise of enduring Delight? But now his finger wiped across The spine. I saw it silently erase The name, and watched with fearful sense of loss As he inscribed another in its place And then moved on to smilingly efface One more, but only a newer title to emboss. For a long while I looked at him bemused, Then turned, since reason totally refused To understand the meaning of his actions, Back to my book — I'd seen but a few lines — And found I could no longer read the signs Or even see the rows of images. The world of symbols I had barely entered That had stirred me to such transports of bliss, In which a universe of meaning centered, Seemed to dissolve and rush away, careen And reel and shake in feverish contractions, And fade out, leaving nothing to be seen But empty parchment with a hoary sheen. I felt a hand upon me, felt it slide Over my shoulder. The old man stood beside My lectern, and I shuddered while He took my book and with a subtle smile Brushed his finger lightly to elide The former title, then began to write New promises and problems, novel inquiries, New formulas for ancient mysteries. Without a word, he plied his magic style. Then, with my book, he disappeared from sight. Worship In the beginning was the rule of sacred kings Who hallowed field, grain, plow, who handed down The law of sacrifices, set the bounds To mortal men forever hungering For the Invisible Ones' just ordinance That holds the sun and moon in perfect balance And whose forms in their eternal radiance Feel no suffering, nor know death's ambience. Long ago the sons of the gods, the sacred line, Passed, and mankind remained alone, Embroiled in pleasure and pain, cut off from being, Condemned to change unhallowed, unconfined. But intimations of the true life never died, And it is for us, in this time of harm To keep, in metaphor and symbol and in psalm, Reminders of that former sacred reverence. Perhaps some day the darkness will be banned, Perhaps some day the times will turn about, The sun will once more rule us as our god And take the sacrifices from our hands. Soap Bubbles From years of study and of contemplation An old man brews a work of clarity, A gay and involuted dissertation Discoursing on sweet wisdom playfully. An eager student bent on storming heights Has delved in archives and in libraries, But adds the touch of genius when he writes A first book full of deepest subtleties. A boy, with bowl and straw, sits and blows, Filling with breath the bubbles from the bowl. Each praises like a hymn, and each one glows; Into the filmy beads he blows his soul. Old man, student, boy, all these three Out of the Maya-foam of the universe Create illusions. None is better or worse. But in each of them the Light of Eternity Sees its reflection, and burns more joyfully. After Dipping Into the Summa Contra Gentiles To truth, it seems to us, life once was nearer, The world ordered, intelligences clearer, Wisdom and knowledge were not yet divided. They lived far more serenely, many-sided, Those ancients of whom Plato, the Chinese, Relate their incandescent verities. Whenever we entered the temple of Aquinas, The graceful Summa contra Gentiles, A new world greeted us, sweet, mature, A world of truth clarified and pure. There all seemed lucid, Nature charged with Mind, Man moving from God to Him, as He designed. The Law, in one great formulary bound, Forming a whole, a still unbroken round. But we who belong to his posterity Seem condemned to doubt and irony, To journeys in the wilderness, to strife, Obsessions, and longings for a better life. But if our children's children undergo Such sufferings as ours, they will bestow Praise upon us as blessed and as wise. We will appear transfigured in their eyes, For out of our lives' harsh cacophonies They will hear only fading harmonies, The legends of an anguish often told, The echoes of contentions long grown cold. And those of us who trust ourselves the least, Who doubt and question most, these, it may be, Will make their mark upon eternity, And youth will turn to them as to a feast. The time may come when a man who confessed His self-doubts will be ranked among the blessed Who never suffered anguish or knew fear, Whose times were times of glory and good cheer, Who lived like children, simple happy lives. For in us too is part of that Eternal Mind Which through the aeons calls to brothers of its kind: Both you and I will pass, but it survives. Stages As every flower fades and as all youth Departs, so life at every stage, So every virtue, so our grasp of truth, Blooms in its day and may not last forever. Since life may summon us at every age Be ready, heart, for parting, new endeavor, Be ready bravely and without remorse To find new light that old ties cannot give. In all beginnings dwells a magic force For guarding us and helping us to live. Serenely let us move to distant places And let no sentiments of home detain us. The Cosmic Spirit seeks not to restrain us But lifts us stage by stage to wider spaces. If we accept a home of our own making, Familiar habit makes for indolence. We must prepare for parting and leave-taking Or else remain the slaves of permanence. Even the hour of our death may send Us speeding on to fresh and newer spaces, And life may summon us to newer races. So be it, heart: bid farewell without end. The Glass Bead Game We re-enact with reverent attention The universal chord, the masters' harmony, Evoking in unsullied communion Minds and times of highest sanctity. We draw upon the iconography Whose mystery is able to contain The boundlessness, the storm of all existence, Give chaos form, and hold our lives in rein. The pattern sings like crystal constellations, And when we tell our beads, we serve the whole, And cannot be dislodged or misdirected, Held in the orbit of the Cosmic Soul.