STRANGE NEWS FROM ANOTHER STAR -
HERMANN HESSE
He was a master of great book titles Hermann Hesse, I mean just who wouldn't want to read a book called The Glass Bead Game, or Steppenwolf, or Narziss And Goldmund? And so too Strange News From Another Star? Sometimes the image on the covers of his books wouldn't be up to much but this would have been something out of the author's control and down to Penguin or whatever publishing house the book was from. And of course, seeing as how Hesse has been dead since 1962 he's got even less say in it now. A case in point being the cover of Strange News From Another Star, first published in 1919 and republished in 1976 with an uninspiring silhouette of Hesse's profile superimposed over a quartet of pictures. It's pretty rubbish and not really the image you might conjure up from the title. I know you shouldn't judge a book by its cover but like it or not the cover still plays a part in deciding whether you choose to read it. But like how The Dude abides in The Big Lebowski, like a loyal trooper I persevere.
It was Timothy Leary in the Sixties who first rekindled interest in Hermann Hesse by citing him as an influence upon new psychedelia. 'We read Hermann Hesse' he told Tom Wolfe, describing Hesse as 'the poet of the interior journey', and not without good reason. Most of Hesse's books deal with the duality between the physical and the metaphysical, the subsequent conflict and the search for balance. His books beautifully illustrate yearnings of the soul and an often unspoken grasping for enlightenment and ways in which to achieve it.
'Turn on, tune in, drop out' as Leary advised which was all well and good but in so doing he and everyone who followed his advice came into direct conflict with the physical world and its representatives in the form of the police, the army, politicians and straight society. What path to take and which way to go then became the only question with Leary finding clues within the works of Hermann Hesse.
Strange News From Another Star is a collection of eight short stories and though it's not one of Hesse's better known book by any means, it's still an important addition to his canon of work because the mere fact that the stories are written by the maestro guarantees them to be of interest and of high quality. It's a given.
Augustus is written almost as a fairy tale, the moral of it being that to love is a good thing but is not enough in itself and that to love is much more important.
The Poet concerns itself with the getting of wisdom, written as a metaphor.
Flute Dream describes life as a dream with love, joy and happiness alongside fear, death and despair being mere other dreams within that dream.
Strange News From Another Star essentially conveys that 'in the midst of life we are in death', as the saying goes.
The Hard Passage is another metaphor for the journey through life.
A Dream Sequence is exactly that: sequences of a dream captured on paper.
Faldum is about a stranger entering a town and granting a wish to each and every one of its inhabitants, one of whom wishes for nothing more but to listen and watch and to think about what is immortal. So he becomes a mountain. It's folklore, so in that sense it's not as stupid as it might sound.
The last story and probably the best one is called Iris, and is about a man's search for what is in effect an essence rare. It's fascinating. The allusions to William Blake and his Auguries of Innocence are obvious , particularly to Blake's couplet 'To see a world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour'. The story starts with a young boy's love of flowers and is the prose equivalent of one of Robert Mapplethorpe's flower photos. It ends with the boy as an old man searching for nirvana and 'the image behind the image'. In the end he finds it right where he began as a child and having abandoned wealth, stature and all notions of modern-day respectability, enters into it.
As with a lot of Hesse's books, Strange News From Another Star raises once again the question that Timothy Leary posed as in did Hermann Hesse ever go down the chemical path to enlightenment and use mind-changing drugs like mescaline? Interestingly, Leary never asked the same about William Blake. There's no evidence, however, that Hesse ever partook of drugs although he did travel extensively through India which means if anything he would have indulged in hashish or opiates.
'To make this mundane world sublime, take half a gram of phanerothyme' as Aldous Huxley once put it though of course Humphry Osmond put it better with his 'to fathom Hell or soar angelic, you need a pinch of psychedelic'. Hermann Hesse, William Blake and Aldous Huxley all circle around each other warily like in some mad gunfight from an Italian western. How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? Well there's three right there but as always it's an irrelevant question just as the question of Hesse and drugs is - even though it's an intriguing one. Hesse himself would probably say it's better to just read the books, turn off your mind, relax and float down the stream; to lay down all thoughts and surrender to the void because it's not dying, it's shining, it's being, it's knowing and it's believing. Now where have we heard that before?
John Serpico
