Polyphilus

I made a Glass Bead Game about 20 years ago, and I just found out that I'd maintained a secret link to it through my website that I'd forgotten.

http://www.bodenheimer.net/2.0/lethbridge/text/begin.html

"The Nobel Prize for Literature that Hermann Hesse won in 1947 was due in a great part to his last novel, published in 1943: Das Glasperlenspiel [The Glass Bead Game]. In this book, he writes of a future world that has abandoned the making of art, due to the exhaustion and degradation of the creative spirit in the twentieth century - what Hesse's narrator calls "The Age of the Feuilleton" [pamphlet]-

".....that age appears to have had only the dimmest notion of what to do with culture. Or rather, it did not know how to assign culture its proper place within the economy of life and the nation."

Conceptual Art Grant Proposal Idea:

What I believe

I believe in the power of the imagination to remake the world, to release the truth within us, to hold back the night, to transcend death, to charm motorways, to ingratiate ourselves with birds, to enlist the confidences of madmen.

I believe in my own obsessions, in the beauty of the car crash, in the peace of the submerged forest, in the excitements of the deserted holiday beach, in the elegance of automobile graveyards, in the mystery of multi-storey car parks, in the poetry of abandoned hotels.

I believe in the forgotten runways of Wake Island, pointing towards the Pacifics of our imaginations.

I believe in the mysterious beauty of Margaret Thatcher, in the arch of her nostrils and the sheen on her lower lip; in the melancholy of wounded Argentine conscripts; in the haunted smiles of filling station personnel; in my dream of Margaret Thatcher caressed by that young Argentine soldier in a forgotten motel watched by a tubercular filling station attendant.

I believe in the beauty of all women, in the treachery of their imaginations, so close to my heart; in the junction of their disenchanted bodies with the enchanted chromium rails of supermarket counters; in their warm tolerance of my perversions.

I believe in the death of tomorrow, in the exhaustion of time, in our search for a new time within the smiles of auto-route waitresses and the tired eyes of air-traffic controllers at out-of-season airports.

I believe in the genital organs of great men and women, in the body postures of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Princess Di, in the sweet odours emanating from their lips as they regard the cameras of the entire world.

I believe in madness, in the truth of the inexplicable, in the common sense of stones, in the lunacy of flowers, in the disease stored up for the human race by the Apollo astronauts.

I believe in nothing.

I believe in Max Ernst, Delvaux, Dali, Titian, Goya, Leonardo, Vermeer, Chirico, Magritte, Redon, Duerer, Tanguy, the Facteur Cheval, the Watts Towers, Boecklin, Francis Bacon, and all the invisible artists within the psychiatric institutions of the planet.

I believe in the impossibility of existence, in the humour of mountains, in the absurdity of electromagnetism, in the farce of geometry, in the cruelty of arithmetic, in the murderous intent of logic.

I believe in adolescent women, in their corruption by their own leg stances, in the purity of their dishevelled bodies, in the traces of their pudenda left in the bathrooms of shabby motels.

I believe in flight, in the beauty of the wing, and in the beauty of everything that has ever flown, in the stone thrown by a small child that carries with it the wisdom of statesmen and midwives.

I believe in the gentleness of the surgeon's knife, in the limitless geometry of the cinema screen, in the hidden universe within supermarkets, in the loneliness of the sun, in the garrulousness of planets, in the repetitiveness or ourselves, in the inexistence of the universe and the boredom of the atom.

I believe in the light cast by video-recorders in department store windows, in the messianic insights of the radiator grilles of showroom automobiles, in the elegance of the oil stains on the engine nacelles of 747s parked on airport tarmacs.

I believe in the non-existence of the past, in the death of the future, and the infinite possibilities of the present.

I believe in the derangement of the senses: in Rimbaud, William Burroughs, Huysmans, Genet, Celine, Swift, Defoe, Carroll, Coleridge, Kafka.

I believe in the designers of the Pyramids, the Empire State Building, the Berlin Fuehrerbunker, the Wake Island runways.

I believe in the body odours of Princess Di.

I believe in the next five minutes.

I believe in the history of my feet.

I believe in migraines, the boredom of afternoons, the fear of calendars, the treachery of clocks.

I believe in anxiety, psychosis and despair.

I believe in the perversions, in the infatuations with trees, princesses, prime ministers, derelict filling stations (more beautiful than the Taj Mahal), clouds and birds.

I believe in the death of the emotions and the triumph of the imagination.

I believe in Tokyo, Benidorm, La Grande Motte, Wake Island, Eniwetok, Dealey Plaza.

I believe in alcoholism, venereal disease, fever and exhaustion.

I believe in pain.

I believe in despair.

I believe in all children.

I believe in maps, diagrams, codes, chess-games, puzzles, airline timetables, airport indicator signs.

I believe all excuses.

I believe all reasons.

I believe all hallucinations.

I believe all anger.

I believe all mythologies, memories, lies, fantasies, evasions.

Wagner's "Im Treibhaus" sung by Jessye Norman. I think this is the version with Colin Davis and the London Symphony Orchestra.  

Im Treibhaus 

Hochgewölbte Blätterkronen,   Baldachine von Smaragd,   Kinder ihr aus fernen Zonen,   Saget mir, warum ihr klagt? 

Schweigend neiget ihr die Zweige,   Malet Zeichen in die Luft,   Unde der Leiden stummer Zeuge   Steiget auftwärts, süßer Duft. 

Weit in sehnendem Verlangen   Breitet ihr die Arme aus   Und umschlinget wahnbefangen   Öder Leere nicht'gen Graus. 

Wohl ich weiß es, arme Pflanze:   Ein Geschicke teilen wir,   Ob umstrahlt von Licht und Glanze,   Unsre Heimat is nicht hier! 

Und wie froh die Sonne scheidet   Von des Tages leerem Schein,   Hullet der, der wahrhaft leidet,   Sich in Schweigens Dunkel ein. 

Stille wird's ein säuselnd Weben   Fullet bang den dunklen Raum:   Schwere Tropfen seh' ich schweben   An der Blätter grunem Saum.  

In the Hothouse 

High-arching leafy crowns,    canopies of emerald    you children of distant lands,    tell me, why do you lament? 

Silently you incline your branches,    tracing signs in the air,    and, mute witness to your sorrows,    there rises a sweet perfume. 

Wide in longing and desire    you spread your arms out    and embrace, in self-deception    barren emptiness, a fearful void. 

WeIl I know it, poor plant!    We share the same fate.   Although the light shines brightly round us,    our home is not here! 

And, as the sun gladly quits    day's empty brightness,    so he who truly suffers   wraps himself in the dark mantel of silence. 

It grows quiet, an anxious rustling    fills the dark room;   I see the heavy drops hanging    from the leaves' green edges.  

—Mathilde Wesendonck, 1857

Portrait of Henriette Campan by Joseph Boze, 1786

I just finished  "Memoirs of the Court of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France, Volume 7 Being the Historic Memoirs of Madam Campan, First Lady in Waiting to the Queen"

I found this book after seeing a movie "Farewell My Queen" based on the book by Chantal Thomas. In the movie Madame Campan is sort of a worrywort fussbudget, but basically ethical when it comes to the safety and dignity of the main character, a young Reader to the Queen. But in her own words, Mme Campan comes across as very humane and dutiful to the royal family, who treated her with respect and trust. It's fascinating to read her first hand account of what the losers in this modern battle for democracy were feeling and doing for years, as the government and country changed around them. She describes how Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were both such products of the monarchical system, that they were shocked most not from the threat of assassination, which befalls plenty of kings and queens - not as much as the affrontery of lèse-majesté, of disrespect of their persons and nobility. Mme Campan does describe them as noble, and flawed, and not deserving of their ultimate fates. She tells of examples of brave and wise Frenchmen, and also of the most malicious and wickedly vindictive of people, and those like herself that had to navigate between them. Her writing style in translation is dated - as it should be frankly - to the late 18th century - but it is remarkably straight forward, even though there are some wandering sentences and passages. free for Amazon Kindle: http://www.amazon.com/Memoirs-Antoinette-Complete-Historic-Waiting-ebook/dp/B00847265I/ref=cm_cr-mr-title