THE LEGEND OF NOVALIS (ABOUT PARALLEL UNIVERSES)

Gravely  ill and nearing death the poet Novalis began to dream of unknown
cities, awakening in sleep to other selves his soul inhabited in parallel
lives, drawn by the sound of a soft, lovely music.  

Each city had something of the  sadness of the inevitable, and  there grew in the
poet,  alongside a sense of familiarity, the conviction that each of these
habitations, like ours, was fallen from a state of grace.

He searched each night  for the source of that ineffable melody, though he knew
beforehand that, in all possible worlds and in all conceivable musics his
longing would never be appeased.  

Eventually he was persuaded to abandon the quest for perfection (or else
he realized its attainment would be tantamount to self-annihilation) and
decided instead, before he died, to create one small thing that might embody, if not the Ideal, at least the noble state of longing it engendered.  

But the notes betrayed his intention, or else he found himself unworthy of the
task, and  he fled from self to self among the cities of his dreams, though failure
was his constant companion.

Some say he wanders to this day, unaware that his movements trace the
melody he seeks, flawed but lovely, unaware of the feverish hand that guides
his tireless steps, driven by an endless longing.

THE LEGEND OF CAEDMON (HOW A FICTIONAL CHARACTER MADE THE REAL WORLD)

One day (the story goes) Heinrich von Ofterdingen decided to invent a composer:
first he called him Peter Ceniti , but soon he came   to prefer the  pseudonym Caedmon, he  
being  a tongue-tied shepherd from Aglo-Saxon legend who is given the gift of song in a
dream.

He did this for the  pleasure of exercising his imagination, although if you were to suggest
he was in search of self-understanding, or the opposite - escape from the self, he wouldn't put up a fight, since it's likely that the pleasure of this exercise is hard to separate from the
knowledge, the liberation, that are its results.  

In any case what really interested him is the relation of art to life, so, strictly speaking,
he didn't simply invent a composer, but pretended to discover one of his works, then
attempted to reconstruct  his life from what he had made.

This work he called Wratlicu Wyrd (that's Old English for Wondrously Strange); it's a
hybrid genre, part play, part musical, part philosophical dialogue, with musicians,
actors, dancers, mimes, and all sorts of special effects. (Caedmon spares no expense.)  

Wratlicu Wyrd begins in Anglo-Saxon fashion with a riddle:

I dreamt of Caedmon who
dreamt of Novalis                 
Who dreamt of a Wanderer
dreaming of a flower -
A flower from whose calyx I
was formed:
Who  am I?

This is, admittedly,  a little dense, but the answer he's looking for is Saiwala, which is
Old English for soul.  So Caedmon, the composer, dreams of (or thinks about,  or
reads from) the Romantic poet Novalis, who has created a character, Heinrich von
Ofterdingen, who, in the novel of that name, dreams of a blue flower in whose center a face
appears.  Now, if this face, springing to life from the flower, is understood as Saiwala, the soul, and if this same Saiwala is the speaker of the riddle, he who dreams of Caedmon in the first place, then we have here an image of creation as beginningless, the mystery we search being embodied within us.  

At the work's end, after all the action has been resolved, Caedmon wanders onto the
stage once more, accompanied by his lady love, Sophy, and speaks, in a casual way, about creating "an unknown 19th century composer, pretending to have discovered his works, but
actually composing them myself...He then becomes the mask I wear to be able to write
real love music, of such naive tenderness..."  "What will you call him?" Sophy asks.  "I was
thinking Heinrich von Ofterdingen."  

On the surface this is a rather common twist - the deflection from a traditional ending, the last-minute surprise that propels the work beyond its final curtain.   But readers of
the Geselleschaft will find here the crucial moment, the crux of all we do: the fictitious
character invents the real one, the fantasy world conjures the tangible world, so that the
riddle is enacted, the circle is closed, the labyrinth is formed.   In which we are willingly lost.

THE  LEGEND  OF  ROOFRIDGE (OR HOW  THE WORLD  WENT AWRY)

There once was a composer and writer, by which I mean someone who enjoyed making music and telling stories: as far as recognition matters he might as well not have existed at all.  In fact it’s probably true that, as a strategy to maintain his conviction in the legitimacy
of his vocation in the face of  the world’s indifference (a vocation that had come gradually to fill his life with purpose), this writer adopted an exaggerated indifference, scorning that fame in advance which, had he aspired to it, would have eluded him, and cultivating the air of a neglected prophet.

In other words he suffered.   And in his loneliness he was further afflicted by  the gap he saw increasing between  his artistic aims (which tended to be daring and unfettered – why not,
since nobody’s listening? - and his comic ineptitude in all practical matters, proficiency in which would have aided him immeasurably in his work.  

Then came the Internet,and it occurred to this writer  that, if he were to create a
website of his own, he would be divested, permanently and utterly, of the need for self-promotion, which he despised and at which he was such a failure.  His work could simply float “out there,” quietly, patiently, ready to reveal itself to anyone drawn to its subject – matter.

At the same time, our friend recognized that this new format invited a drastic re-thinking of the old, linear, closed concepts in which literature and music were encased.  In place of the
logical progressions inherent to novels and symphonies,  he began to imagine kaleidoscopic
forms of synchronous or interchangeable parts, forms without boundaries, that grew and changed, labyrinths and spirals, circles and spheres, as well as a new way of integrating sounds and words so that what he said would be inseparable from the music it alluded to, and the music he wrote would seem to explain the text.

Probably as a matter of pure coincidence (a term which, at that stage in his life, and
thanks largely to his enthusiastic dabbling in Chinese philosophy, had come to be practically
synonymous with destiny) his interest had settled on the field of German Romanticism.  So he
designated his new creation  The Official Site of the Ofterdingen Gesellschaft, Heinrich von
Ofterdingen being his pseudonym for a purportedly unknown,  actually imaginary composer of his fancy, through whose works and the commentary that arose around them our friend was enabled to address, from an unusual vantage, issues of historical, cultural, philosophical, aesthetic, ethical and metaphysical interest.

His first mistake ( his Felix Culpa –  happy sin, a term Christians apply to Adam’s primordial transgression that called forth a loving savior ) was to employ in his title the German word, Gesellschaft, though this is the proper term for the kind of scholarly society he wished to concoct.  For in writing Gesellschaft he triggered a translation in the
computer program that rendered his text (originally meticulous and idiosyncratic) in a very bad German.  

Happening one morning upon this mangled German version of his site,  our composer made a second mistake, activating a link that invited him to “translate this.”  The German version
was translated back into an even worse English that seemed to toe  a line separating madness from a kind of hyper-lucidity he’d never consciously intended.   (For examples of these text – transformations the reader is referred to Letters to the Editor.)

At the heart of this confusion he discovered Roofridge.

Roofridge: a name he never printed, but which ran through the new translation, a meaningless proper noun that, for our startled writer, came to designate a dark,
distorting presence, a destructive demi-urge sprung from the nether-regions of cyberspace, whose purpose it is to twist and malign all we carefully design, or else whose purpose is to leaven our lives with saving humor (For more on this interpretation see The Fountain of Youth   under Publications.)  or to transport us beyond the confines of our tired, habitual ways.

In any case the little world our composer had made didn’t turn out according to his expectations, and this eventually led him to wonder if the same weren’t perhaps true of the larger world he inhabited which, as everybody knows from experience, is somewhat awry.

As for notoriety, it came, belated and tinged with irony:  while the original website still languishes obscure, the Roofridge version, that translation of a translation, has achieved great popular success with German readers, spawning seminars and  colloquiums, tee-shirts and caps.

Perhaps it’s better that way.

THE   LEGEND  OF  HEINRICH  VON  OFTERDINGEN (OR THE STORY  OF  A  STUBBORN  
BOY)

Once upon a time there was a little boy who liked to play the piano.  In the beginning, each new piece he encountered seemed miraculous and unique, but over time he began
to perceive an affinity among the works he loved, as if they sprang from the same secret source he sensed beneath the heavy world of tangible things.  

But as curiosity led him to experiment with rudimentary compositions of his own, be came to see that this hidden kingdom lay within him, or existed as an invisible bond between like-minded people.   Quite naturally, these early essays imitated the styles of his favorites, as he strove for the lyricism of Schubert, the voluptuousness of Chopin, the pious ecstasies of Bruckner.  

When the boy grew older and decided to show some of his music to teachers and other
musicians, he was informed   that such sounds were unacceptable, regressive, even
laughable.  The reasons for such judgments the young man understood only partially –
reasons having to do with cultural progress, originality, and the avoidance of sentimentality in the modern age.  He was inclined to trust such pronouncements and decided,with the open-mindedness of youth, to embark on a study of contemporary  music, a repertoire which, though it intrigued him intellectually, left him cold, his hope consisting in the thought that, through such study, the unfamiliar world would reveal its hidden feeling,and that, ultimately, his own style would evolve organically into some kind of acceptable modern form.  
(This was crucial, since without integrity an artist lacks all motivation.)

But the day of his conversion never arrived, and though he came to appreciate those   currents that drove early Modernism,  he could never bring himself in line with their artistic consequences.  He came to feel the victim of a dark inheritance, and began to   ponder means of escape. Turning his back on native traditions, he looked to eastern sounds, experimenting with natural tunings and microtonality,  rhythm and color, ritual and chant, wedding ancient concepts to electronic technology.  

Now derision gave way to incomprehension: he found that what people wanted was
 after all, so long as it was truly Schubert.  And it struck him that the reception of a work
seemed to depend not merely on its inherent qualities but on its provenance as well.  The
Impromptu, written 200 years ago, is lovely; if it is discovered to have been penned last week, it  becomes somehow a travesty.  

Then, one fine day (some years later, our composer having now become a professor despite the persistence of much confusion in his mind),  being provoked by the intense scrutiny of German Romantic piano music, it occurred to him, as an exercise in imagination, to create a little piece that, while utilizing the stylistic elements of the 19th century, avoided the imitation of any particular artist.  

But almost immediately he came to see that, for authenticity’s sake, such a work would
require a real human being as author, so he created one: Heinrich von Ofterdingen.  But again, he realized, for such  a figure to possess the depth of as living man, there must be a world he inhabited, though not the fallen world of our bygone 19th century (which led, after all, to the cul-de-sac of Modernism).  No, what was needed was an alternate Age of Romanticism, existing in another universe, parallel to ours, in which Ofterdingen lived and worked, his harmonies, textures and forms subtly different from ours, faithfully expressing a world-view more felicitous (thanks to which his future would come to be plagued neither by  
industrialism nor technology,   nationalism nor pathology).  

A futile exercise, regressive and self-indulgent?  Or an invitation to examine our past, even, perhaps, a chance to take another path?  

As for the little boy, he is alive and well: having refused to accommodate his vision to the world as it is, he is busy, wit the help of Heinrich von Ofterdingen, at trying to accommodate the world to his vision.

THE  LEGEND  OF  ANDREACCHI ( ABOUT  A  PAST  THAT  MIGHT  HAVE  BEEN)

Among the works attributed to  the writer known pseudonymously as “Caedmon” there is a most curious short story entitled  “Fishers of Dreams,” from the collection  “Baiting Hollow Trilogy.”  We here reproduce the closing chapter from that work in full:

We stand upon the deck of my father’s summer house in Greenport on a night of a thousand stars, facing the quiet bay, united after many and memorable journeys.   My father is speaking to us, relating how our family name, instead of Ceniti, could actually have been Andreacchi.  Long ago, in southern Italy, my great- grandfather some sort of nobleman, conceived a child with a peasant woman.  Unwilling to bestow patrician status on the boy, the reluctant father
gave for surname that of the child’s mother.  From this accident sprang the line  leading to my own father, to me, and to my three sons, all gathered at this moment on the shores of Long
Island.

Unlikely world or what is!   Infinite expanse of might-have-beens!  The vast night sky seems pregnant, like that peasant woman, with unrealized possibilities, each point of light indicating
an alternate world…

I close my eyes and imagine:

Io sono Pietro Ceniti, Calabrian fisherman.   Behind my seaside village rough mountains harbor inaccessible  bandits led by my infamous cousin, Paolo Cucchi…

Or again:

I am Pelog the Slendrous.   My grandfather emigrated to  the jasmine isle of Bali and
married a Hindu princess.  I preside over a gamelon and dance, in deep trance, over
burning coals…

Or yet again: Men call me the Petro Ranger.  I roam the seven seas with the
 of nations on my head.

I open my eyes, behold again the world as it is, and think of Ouspensky.  One
leisurely day many years ago, I found myself back in the neighborhood of my
childhood, browsing in the Public Library.  And there, among the thousands of
volumes I happened on  his New Model of the Universe, a collection of esoteric
 written in the first decades of the twentieth century on philosophy and
 , and spirituality and the occult.  There I was introduced to the idea of eternal recurrence, as well as the theory that time, for Ouspensky the fourth dimension, possesses as well a fifth dimension, the temporal equivalent of what in space we call depth.  The combination of these ideas – the circularity of recurrence and the multiplicity of parallel, synchronous time-lines
constituting alternate realities, led Ouspensky to the image of time as a spiral such that, through recurring lives, we possess the ability to choose differently, to alter, to improve the past, to transcend the fateful mechanism of periodicity.

By way of analogy my thoughts turn to music.  The distant sound of a pair of shawms seems to float towards us, borne on the lapping tide.  I recognize with delight the Tibetan style, with its elusive heterophonic texture.  As one instrument performs a simple, nuclear melody, its
twin entwines it with ornament.  The two parts never quite achieve separate identities, nor ever totally merge to unison: one seems a variation on the other.  I smile, recalling a scholarly western dispute as to whether this kind of complex relationship evidences a consciously cultivated technique or is simply the result of continual mistakes by one player or the other, what with the absence of written notation as a means of teaching, learning and remembering.

Between the deck and the water sits a lawn where three trees are growing.   They are similar in size and shape, it is the lack of rigid symmetry that gives meaning to the individual
and beauty to the group.  I am reminded of the near- symmetries of primitive art.   Can it be that what we celebrate both as divine fecundity and creative imagination is but the perpetual inability of god and man to remember the tune aright?  Is life but a great mistake, a pre-cosmic cataclysm Milton described as Fall, but that scientists call the Big Bang?  Lao-tzu
speaks of mystery opening into greater mystery, darkness into deeper dark… I turn from the water and the vast sky, and face  my flesh and blood.  Shall I speak to them now of such things?  And is it possible that, one day, a day like this one, we shall all stand here again, rapt in silent wonder?  Or is it enough to realize that, in this lifetime, there are cycles of days and years, of recurring situations and opportunities?  Happy the man who awakens in this
world to such understanding:  I have been here before; I need not repeat wrong actions until habit become ingrained as destiny.  I freely choose to change my ways, to improve self and world a little bit, in the blessedness of now, in the holiness of here.

Wordless, we re-enter the house.  Then, bidding my parents good-night, we drive back towards Baiting Hollow where, doubtless, new dreams await.