Craig Smith

I.I

When I turned forty, I began re-reading stories and essays that Hermann Hesse wrote when he turned forty.

There is just over a century between us. One hundred and six years, two months and eleven days.

We're practically brothers.

I.II

When I was sixteen I first read Demian. A friend loaned me a copy from his father’s library.

Hesse wrote Demian when he turned forty. World War I was a graveyard of ghosts and ashes and so was he.

After the disintegration of his family, his country and his previous model of reality, he went off to live alone.

I.III

From this position, Hesse developed a new line of enquiry within his works that significantly built on his earlier thinking.

He doubled down hard on a central thesis: the only true thing is the voice you hear inside of yourself.

To quote from Demian - 'Gaze into the fire, into the clouds, and as soon as the inner voices begin to speak, surrender to them. Don't ask first whether it's permitted, or would please your teachers or father or some god. You will ruin yourself if you do that.’

As well, from the same year that book was published, 1919, in a letter to a young German - ‘Search where you may, no prophet or teacher can relieve you of the need to look within. Our mission is solely to remind you that there is a god and only one god; he dwells in your hearts, and it is there that you must seek him out and speak with him.’

I.IV

The model of truth that Hesse weaves through his works is tied to the same thread initially spun by Nietzsche that would, in time, come to trip up the whole twentieth-century apparatus of knowing anything with certainty.

Well, maybe it didn’t start with Nietzsche - maybe it was Pyrrho of Elis or Zeno of Elea, or someone else from Classical antiquity who wondered if everything was neither binary (this or that) or infinity (everything) but rather both divided into each other, indivisibly, forever. But it was Nietzsche who made it modern and gave it a catch phrase.

Supposing that truth is a woman, says one of the loneliest men in Switzerland in 1885. What then - when truths are merely illusions that we have forgotten are illusions, when everything is perspective, when that’s just your opinion, when we, the ones trying to swoon truth, are dynamic multiplicities of drives and forces forever in flux. When god is dead tired and didn’t have time to finish all the details on a subatomic quantum level, because who would ever think to look there, reality is still being constructed, just wait a little longer.

And so you get Nietzsche into Heidegger, World War I and Dada, Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, World War II into poststructuralism and postmodernism, Wrestlemania and reality television, twenty-four-hour news channels, the internet, artificial intelligence hallucinating. Or, in a nutshell, the deity is in you, says Hesse - ‘truth is lived, not taught’ (you are the shell and the nut is opening up).

The Guardian this morning, after the election, ran an ad that says - ‘This is the moment for truth, help us protect it’.

I.V

In Hesse’s description of the time he spent in his forties at a spa in Baden, recovering from ill health (of both a physical and nervous dimension, so says the doctor, the old Cartesian dualism, head and body, but Hesse channels the spirit of the age and says no, there is another possible diagnosis), he describes going downstairs into the catacombs of the health resort he’s staying, the stone basement where the hot baths are readied for guests and, upon reclining into the water and looking up into the high ceilings, he sees soft light from the aboveground world peeling through windows down into his morning eyes.

After World War II, a Japanese fan of Hesse’s wrote to him in a state of great idolatry - Hesse had shown him the truth about life, and now this fan wanted to write his own works, in homage to Hesse, to deliver the word to others. The reply letter was harsh, paraphrasing Nietzsche, always (‘this is my way, where is yours? To those who ask me the way, I tell you, the way does not exist’), but not without reference to another window, like that one at the spa - I am not a source of light to bathe in, Hesse tells his young Japanese colleague, I am a window that simply does its best to allow light to pass through.

I.VI

There is a narrative of the twentieth century that runs like this - community lost out to the individual. As folks started believing in institutions less and less (for good reason, right? Hesse is the non-conformist model for this trajectory - think of that line from Demian about listening to yourself, and ‘don't ask first whether it's permitted, or would please your teachers or father or some god’: schools crush the spirit, parents do what Larkin later put to verse, and the church is irrelevant, to say nothing of the horrors enacted by the ruling class to manifest World War I and II. Who would ever want to listen to anybody else ever again?), collectives dwindled.

Across the century we moved into housing developments in satellite towns, neighbourhoods of neighbours avoiding neighbours because everybody was running late for the expressway, it takes fifty minutes in good traffic just to make it to work on time, if you don’t have to stop for petrol (which you do, for sugar and coffee if nothing else). Our unions lost collective bargaining power and our political movements lost agency because everybody was focused on their own plot. Capitalism found a way to turn our loneliness into a marketable package, selling niche sub-genres of clothing and music, your own personal style, where you can express who you really are (gone are the days of everybody wearing hats, let your mohawk and feathers plume).

I.VII

This is how the counter-cultural movement found its wings, and they took Hesse for a prophet. During the sixties and seventies, Hesse became less about his roots in the German Romanticism of Goethe and Nietzsche and more about Timothy Leary and LSD. Leary anointed Hesse the poet of the interior journey. The exotica of Eastern Spirituality became very important in the search for truth (set in motion two centuries earlier by Schopenhauer, timed neatly between Goethe and Nietzsche, or was it Britain’s colonial rule over the Indian subcontinent from 1858, or the availability a century later of increasingly affordable airline journeys to Asia from Los Angeles, of globalisation, of some other truth), Buddhist yearnings and pilgrimages to India which seemed to bow a string from Ravi Shankar’s sitar collaboration with George Harrison through to nineties acid rave culture (when I was reading Hesse) towards the approach of Y2K, dreams at the end of history, how many Geocities websites seemed to celebrate the Hale-Bop comet. And then, September 11, weapons of mass destruction, mobile phones, the end of Britannica Encyclopaedia, the end of Encarta, it’s all on a Wiki, from the Hawaiian ‘wiki wiki’ meaning fast, the speed of truth when truth is crowd-sourced.

I.VIII

There is a peculiar book I bought twenty years ago called ‘C.G. Jung and Hermann Hesse: A Record of Two Friendships’. The subject matter isn’t the peculiar part - it’s a book written by a Chilean Diplomat about going over to meet with Hesse and Jung during their old age, to talk about all sorts of cosmic things: myths, archetypes, symbols, and so on. The conversations with Hesse don’t add much to our understanding his work, but the conversations with Jung are interesting for reasons I’ll share, but first, the reason the book is peculiar is that its author, Miguel Serrano, who comes across as fairly innocuous with his take on spiritual topics, was, it turns out, a proponent of what he called Esoteric Hitlerism. He was a prominent Nazi sympathiser and shared the idea that after World War II, some Nazis escaped to a subterranean world inside our hollow earth, establishing secret bases, particularly in Antarctica.

Is that what happens when you treat your own truth as paramount? Did Serrano look inside of himself and find a world of Nazi leaders migrating towards the core of our planet to set up a base for their future plans? I’ll tell you the interesting conversation he has with Jung - there is a section in which Serrano talks about wanting to isolate and meditate and find a way to know himself, his unconsciousness, well enough to resonate some sense of peace and understanding into the world (to defeat Communism, if I’m reading him correctly); anyway, Jung replies by telling him that, quote, “nobody can become aware of his individuality unless he is closely and responsibly related to his fellow beings, he is not withdrawing to an egoistic desert when he tries to find himself. He can only discover himself when he is deeply and unconditionally related to some, and generally related to a great many, individuals with whom he has a chance to compare, and from whom he is able to discriminate himself. If somebody in supreme egoism should withdraw to the solitude of Mt. Everest, he would discover a good deal about the amenities of his lofty abode, but as good as nothing about himself, i.e. nothing he could not have known before’.

I.IX

The year after Demian was published, Hesse, having left his family home, his family, his life, goes on a wander, alone. I wonder what Hesse would have thought about Jung’s sentiment here, that truth, consciousness, is a shared experience. Crowd-sourced. The brief book of prose, poems and watercolour illustrations that Hesse created on his wander called, wait for it, Wandering, talks a great deal about enjoying his solitude and learning much about himself through the absence of other people. “The world has become lovelier”, he writes, “I am alone, and I don’t suffer from my loneliness.” He does use the word ‘alone’ quite a lot though, like when he says, “The way to salvation leads neither to the left nor the right: it leads into your own heart, and there alone is god, and there alone is peace”.

But peace is a contentious word here. During both world wars, Hesse was castigated from both sides for his constant pacifism - he was accused of anti-patriotism by fellow Germans for not being in favour of the war, and harangued by anti-war folk for not protesting enough. He was approached by many who asked him to contribute to their activism - Max Brod, famous for being Franz Kafka’s friend and, ultimately, not burning Kafka’s writings after his death even after explicit instruction from Kafka to do so. He took Kafka’s manuscripts with him to Palestine after the Nazis occupied Prague, and when the 1948 Arab-Israeli war was heating up, Brod wrote to Hesse and asked him to lend his voice to the protest against the war, that his name, two years after Hesse had won the Nobel Prize, would make a difference. Hesse said no. “Our business is not to preach or to command or to plead but to stand fast amid hells and devils.”

He then goes on to say that he knows people will accuse him of being “one of those dreamy artists who believe that art has nothing to do with politics, that an artist must live in an aesthetic ivory tower for fear of corrupting his vision by contact with crude reality, or soiling his hands”, but this was not Hesse’s position. His stance was that as a writer, he should focus on reminding his “readers of the fundamental commandments of humanity”. And again, as he wrote to a young German in 1919, he suggests looking within oneself - to not be twisted and crushed by the machinations of politics and war, to know oneself well enough to say no to fascism, to say no to totalitarianism and violence and terror and prejudice: what more can be offered? If you can be sure enough of yourself to navigate the ethical mountains of our time, is this not its own form of activism (as long as you aren’t Miguel Serrano, although who knows what he actually found in himself and what sort of demons he conjured in his own troubled ego and took him to Hesse and Jung in the first place).

I.X

If Hesse is right and truth is found through self-reflection, and if we recognise that the twentieth century has been a bit of a mess so far as truth-seeking goes, where even mathematics couldn’t escape falsification and paradox (thanks Gödel), and if we consider the political critique of self that says through our individualism we’ve abandoned any opportunity to gather together as a collective in order to exert power against our oppressors, and that while journalism seeks our support for its attempts at truth-telling, it’s still pretty difficult to trust any sort of authority outside of ourselves, then it should also be said that when Hesse talks about truth, he’s rarely talking about it remaining in its singular form. Jung said that we shouldn’t withdraw to an egoistic desert to find ourselves, but Hesse might say that’s not even possible, because the truth is so plentiful, that we contain such multitudes, we are more than enough to keep ourselves company.

What begins as a single truth, for Hesse, a single vision of what it is to be human, is always, time and again in his work, taken on a journey of fragmentation, like white light through a prism, in which that initial, single truth then splits into many resonating truths. An infinite number of truths. This brings us into contact with some mystical, universal spectrum of existence that is less often named than it is visualised. It is Hesse’s way of saying that from that quiet voice inside of you springs a symphony of voices; and not just voices, we hear all manner of instruments, even those not invented yet, and all sounds from the animal kingdom, and nature, both shy petal flutter during the late afternoon and the drone of tectonic plates pressing into each other beneath the ocean floor; this is what resounds when a quiet, uncertain soul with a shaky voice decides to shout ‘I’ into the heart of the world.

To quote from Klingsor’s Last Summer, also written in 1919, that year when everything changed for Hesse, describing a self-portrait that the artist, Klingsor, has painted at the end of the story, at the end of his last Summer:

“The face is painted like a landscape, the hair reminiscent of leaves and the bark of trees, the eye sockets like clefts in rock.. he painted many faces into his picture: sweet and wondering children’s faces, young manhood’s brow and temples, full of dreams and ardour, scoffing drinker’s eyes, lips of a thirsting, persecuted, suffering, seeking libertine.. the face of the doomed and decaying man who accepted his face: moss grew on his skull, the old teeth stood askew, cracks ran through the white skin.. and still more remotely, still deeper behind all these faces, slept remoter, deeper, older faces, prehuman, animal, vegetable, stony, as if the last man on earth in the moment before death were recalling once again with the speed of dream all the forms of past ages when the universe was young.. he sensed with a deep faith that in this cruel struggle with his self-portrait more than the face and the final accounting of an individual was involved, that he was doing something human, universal, necessary.. he conquered and was defeated, he suffered and laughed and fought his way through, killed and died, gave birth and was born”.

The act of Klingsor painting his self-portrait is a metaphor describing the trajectory that a truth observed within oneself follows, if you have the courage enough to stay with it. ‘The truth has a million faces’, Hesse would later go on to say, ‘but there is only one truth’.

And in all seriousness, it does take courage - looking into yourself, really looking, isn’t easy. It’s not like wondering what to have for dinner, or whether to drive or walk to the shops: it’s about knowing what to do when you’re asked to join the cause, to lend your voice to the party line, to know where to stand. To take a final line from Demian, from when Hesse was forty and speaking directly to my sixteen-year-old self: ‘I wanted only to live in accord with the promptings which came from my true self. Why was that so very difficult?’