What is the Glass Bead Game? Wouldn't you rather not know? I'm happy not knowing. The Swiss woman who played clarinet in my free jazz group in Pittsburgh gave me the feeling that it was the sort of book that, if you heard somebody older talking about it when you were in 10th grade, you'd believe could open a door like the one the Renaissance guy peeks through to see where the gears are that move the solar system. This feeling is enough for me; a copy of the edition on the left sits atop our TV; I bought it as a decoration. Maybe someday Tessa will wonder what it is.

While on a grad school interview trip, Hilary called me from the World Language Center to ask what I'd like for a present. I was in the process of scrutinizing every 420 reference I could find in Walter Benjamin, so I asked for Hesse's Steppenwolf†, on the basis of this quote from "Myslovice-Braunschweig-Marseilles"‡:

As I have said, I was not a novice when it came to using poison; but whether it was my almost daily feelings of homesickness, or the paucity of human contact and the uncongenial localities, never before had I felt myself so at home in the community of cognoscenti whose records of their experiences—from Baudelaire's Paradis artificiels to Herman Hesse's Steppenwolf—were perfectly familiar to me.

I made it maybe 75 pages into Hesse before giving up, and never got to the famously surreal ending with the talking cars or whatever, presumably a grove of psychedelia, but I read plenty of the old man's misanthropic grouching and his accounts of wandering around town avoiding old acquaintances, which was in any case probably more realistic on the cannabis front. When I realized that the grouchy man was Hesse, thinly fictionalized, the book began to make me ill, and I put it away. I read some of Siddhartha in high school; I remember nothing about it, aside from a certain hallway outside the gym where I sat reading before track practice. Bottom line is I'm 98% certain the content of The Glass Bead Game comes nowhere near the field of meaning suggested by the title.

So the question I wanted to ask is: What is the string that holds the glass beads together? You know, the FLOW GLUE? Ever write with, say, a blue uni-ball VISION micro and choose your words just to keep the ink flowing, just to pull the beautiful wet wells a couple characters longer? You're writing, but the whole continuity of the thing is contained in the act of drawing, its true guide (its OTHER COMPASS) is this act of sculpting in an unrelated space. And the reason I wanted about ask about FLOW GLUE AND THE OTHER COMPASS is that I think it gets at the problem that's been dogging Phish since their return in 2009: Trey is sober, he's no longer fingerpainting in the inner space of drugs and alcohol, and without that hidden primary medium of composition, nothing seems to be holding the music together. This is the drama of every show: will the Muse visit, even if just for a couple bars? Because if She does, this is proof that magic is true, that there are Renaissance doors in the actual world, that flow glue is free, if you can find it, and that God exists. I, for one, totally stand with sucky, groping new Phish, trying to get off the ground on its own wings.

†Benjamin, who died in 1940, never heard the music of Steppenwolf, though his colleagues Adorno and Horkheimer may have.

‡The first sentence of Benjamin's essay: "The story is not mine."