Day 218: Lofty musings today—Hermann Hesse
36yearsago.com
Vienna 1971—A Student Journal
A year of music, study, travel, sightseeing &
friends.
Day
218 — Lofty musings today—Hermann Hesse
07-
March-1972 (Dienstag–Tue.)
TRANSCRIPT
Electronic music is getting very difficult on getting
some of these fine points that I want.
Heard an excellent alto sax “serious” recital by a
friend—girl student from the U.S. Extremely
professional.
An interesting concept happened to me just recently.
I have always tried to be more aware of things around
me. By seeing interesting designs in patterns,
structures, and phenomenon. Besides simply enjoying
visual phenomenon, I have felt that they have given
me an inner awareness of life, and I hope to use this
concept in some of my serious work.
In fact, a big part of this concept in the film that
I am hoping to produce is that creating (a mood),
surrealistic and visually exciting images—using the
body. Sort of ironic awareness.
Well anyway, while reading Hermann Hesses’
Demian
(check) (in
chapter 5), this same type of feeling has been
professed by Sinclair as his stronger feelings of
self-awareness through the observations of such
phenomenon. (Not exactly the same idea but close.)
Humorously, as Sinclair had his observations and
thoughts confirmed while reading a book on Leonardo
Da Vinci, I have had my similar “observations”
confirmed in the passage by Hermann Hesse.
It somehow “strikes” me almost as “playing” the part
of Sinclair in this one conclusion. Interesting.
REFLECTIONS
Reflecting
on Hesse. Today’s
very heady. Suddenly I’m a philosopher? This journal
post did remind me that there was a period when I was
reading a lot of Hermann Hesse’s works in college. It
is impossible for me to remember what I was thinking
without reading Hesse’s Demian
again.
The human body as art. In today’s
post, I mention that I would like to make an
avant-garde film that would show surrealistic,
“visually exciting images using the body.” For
example, surrealistic images and landscapes using
close ups of the human body. The viewer would not
know that it was a human body they were looking at,
until the very end when the camera would pan back
out. This abstraction of the human body has been
common in art and nude photography for years. In
addition, micro-images of the human body from
electron microscopes and scopes, both inside and
outside the body, show us abstract worlds and
creatures existing on and inside our own bodies, and
of which we are not visually aware. Dust mites,
they’re big and ugly.
Patterns
and influences. Avant-garde,
art, film, contemporary music, multimedia, and visual
and live theatre events are strong influences during
this time period. Composer Dieter Kaufmann’s use of
live, larger-than-life-size puppets in his
mini-opera, Pupofon,
is one
good example. Later in the year, I get to see a
week-long multimedia “happening” by John Cage in
Berlin. As a photography hobbyist, I tend to seek
visual patterns. In my musique
concrète manipulations
with Fantasy
on Broken Glass, I am
learning how new sounds and patterns grow out of a
simple beginning. Perhaps, all of these experiences
are giving me new thoughts on being creative.
I was influenced by everything happening to me.
John
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