Rhythm, Structure and Order

‘The whole of both physical and mental life is a dynamic phenomenon, of which the Glass Bead Game basically comprehends only the aesthetic side, and does so predominantly as an image of rhythmic processes.’^[1]

Regardless of whether humankind may need rhythm and order, we can’t avoid it. The primary stable aural sensation of a baby gestating in the womb is its mother’s rhythmic heartbeat. One of the first sensory impressions of a baby being delivered into the world must include the absence of this audible heartbeat, and perhaps one of the main joys in life is its rediscovery in audible order, rhythm and dance. The free-swinging body or limb moves in the harmonic motion of Hooke’s Law. The able-bodied biped’s gait and step is symmetrical and rhythmic, and the quadruped’s, though more complex and varied, is equally rhythmic and ordered.

I consciously set out to look for analogous rhythmic structures in the four subject matter domains. Cookery was the subject matter area most resistant to the concept of rhythm – not because rhythm is not applicable to the area, but rather because, on initial consideration, the rhythms of food preparation are on a different timescale from the rhythms by which dance, poetry and battle manoeuvre and movement are organised. The rhythms of cookery are the rhythms of the seasons, agriculture, and preservation of food materials. The preparation of an individual meal has order and structure, but little rhythm except that it all must come together at the right time.

However, it was a deeper consideration of the idea of rhythm in the domain of cookery in particular which led to other temporally-based commonalities which could act as an organising principle across all the four subject domains. Firstly, the passage from animal to modern human behaviour. Secondly the idea of each of these domains featuring events at a point in time which are a culmination of subordinate events of widely varying duration, for example, the ingredients of a given meal might include inorganic material such as salt of ancient vintage, wines and spirits aged for several decades or even centuries, organic produce harvested some weeks or months previously, and fresh produce of a day or less, or even still alive when consumed. Further exploration of rhythm as an organising principle is left to a future game and another occasion, which might take the form of a kind of Fourier analysis of a particular significant contemporary meal, battle, poem, and dance performance, and analyse their constituent elements to identify and examine the provenance of those of some considerable vintage, and those of more recent genesis.

The idea of structure emerging from disorder provides another rich narrative to explore these subject domains. Equally rich is the discourse surrounding the subjectivity of any idea of structure, which is dependent on our viewpoint, as well as the context and environment of the observed phenomenon, such that the idea of order can be understood more as a correlation between observer and subject, rather than anything more objective.

In interesting counterpoint to this idea of emerging order is the concept of entropy, and the second law of thermodynamics which states that any given system will generally become more chaotic, and can only become more ordered when it is acted on by energy more ordered than the system itself. Many have assayed explanations of how life itself is possible^[2] in the general context of this ‘most pessimistic and amoral formulation in all human thought.’^[3] Others seem content to gratefully accept life, culture and structure as an entertaining but transitory ‘edge effect’ of the inevitable heat death of the universe.

It is possible to represent any glass bead game (shown in section 4 as a table) as a mandala.^[4] The moves in this game represent increasingly ordered and specific components as they progress towards the outer edge of the mandala (the lower part of the table of correspondences). As such, one nexus of ideas at the centre of the game is the ordering principle working against a backdrop of increasing general disorder known as entropy.

Another significant theme which extends into the centre beyond the first and most central move in the particular game played here is the questionable boundary between man and beast. As John Wilmott, Earl of Rochester opined:

‘But a meek, humble man of modest sense,

Who, preaching peace, does practice continence,

Whose pious life’s a proof he does believe

Mysterious truths which no man can conceive;

If upon the earth there dwell such God-like men,

I’ll here recant my paradox to them,

Adore those shrines of virtue, homage pay,

And with the rabble world their laws obey.

If such there are, yet grant me this at least,

Man differs more from man than man from beast.’[5]

[1] Hesse, H., The Glass Bead Game, Bantam, 1972 (originally published in German in 1943)

[2] Schrödinger, E.,What is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell. Cambridge, (2nd edition), 1967; Pauling L (1987) Schrödinger's contribution to chemistry and biology, in Kilmister C.W. (ed), Schrödinger. Centenary Celebration of a Polymath Cambridge, 1987, p225-233; Perutz M.F., Erwin Schrödinger's What is Life? and molecular biology, in Kilmister C.W., ibid, 234-251

[3] Hill, G. and Thornley, K., Principia Discordia, Loompanics, 1979

[4] See volumes 1 and 2 of this series.

[5] Wilmot, J., Earl of Rochester, Selected Works, Penguin Classics, 2004