Review of Hesse’s Journey to the East

#1
Journey to the East by Hesse is one of those books that will stick to you like glue for your whole life. Siddhartha is the same. Hesse has this way of writing about incredibly complex things in a totally accessible and clear style. And I think that’s the whole point. This stuff is not meant to be elitist and confounding, this is meant to be truth, clarity, spirituality. I mean, you can really tell how uncomfortable Hesse is in trying to relate this stuff using words. In Buddhism the idea is that you reach a state of communication that transcends the awkward limitations of words. That’s what koans are all about.
But Hesse was a writer, and therefore was compelled to use language despite the limitations, and I very much relate to that. I don’t think he could have done a better job. This story is allegorical, it’s mysterious and open-ended. If you haven’t read other Hesse stories then it’s possible you’ll get stuck at some point and wonder what this is all really trying to get at.
All different people probably read into it in all different ways, but to me personally the main thrust of this story seems to me to be about the death of the author, as discussed by both Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault. It’s depressing when your readers don’t understand your work, but you have to let this go, stay happy and accept that the work you create will overpower you, and there is nothing you can do to stop it. Just give into it, let your own ideas die and be replaced by other ideas. This is also similar to ego-death, to let the ego die so that you feed into the one consciousness and become part of a larger, happier thing. You are no longer important, but you are happy, you are part of something larger.

The particular edition I read was beautifully designed, the cover and the feel of the book felt nice in my hands. In Tony Wheeler’s foreword he puts across a totally different reading to my own; a reading that seems to accept the journey as a literal trip to Asia, which I personally disagree with.

There was a song that popped into my head when reading the last couple of chapters, and that song is H. by Tool. Go listen to it; read the lyrics. I’ll be damned if this song is not about the last two chapters of Journey to the East. This song H., this album Aenima; even if you hate this kind of music it is impossible to deny the intelligence of it. This is Hesse in musical form…

Turns into a Philosophical mind-battle

#2

…Hesse and Tool are both trying hard to communicate these ideas to the masses in simple and beautiful craft; be it with music or words or both. I aspire to be like them, and in doing so I realise that I have a lot of work to do.

It’s something that has been puzzling me for years now, and I’m probably continuously fooling myself into sitting here, in status quo. My writing lacks clarity because I lack clarity, probably because I’ve never reached a state of enlightenment or spiritual wholeness. But in some ways it doesn’t even matter to my writing, only to my own happiness. Bathes and Foucault were right; authors don’t exist, there is only language and readers. I can never capture the buzz inside my head clearly and communicate it to another person, because another person will have a different buzz inside their head and pick up my words in a different way to how I set them out. A story is a collection of different parts of a culture; it is a reflective thing because language is a reflective thing, even more so than music and art. Music can relate something purer I think, something that doesn’t need to be translated into words, something that stirs the soul without needing logic. So I always worry that I am too reflective, my words unable to capture what is in my soul. Truth is, it doesn’t matter how enlightened I am, my words will still be hollow, they will still be translated in so many different ways by so many different people. Words must be translated always, they speak to the head and the head has to translate it so the heart can understand it. The heart can read music, and (to an extent) art, without the brain getting involved. That’s just the way it is. That’s why I love music so much. But I’ve got to stay happy as a person, and there’s certain ways of doing that, and Herman Hesse knows it, and now I know it. I just have to get on and do it.

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I am overthinking things now, and I feel unwell so this post may seem difficult to read. Time for me to go and celebrate my mother’s birthday and stop thinking so much about stuff that doesn’t even matter at all. Happy birthday mum. I hope you enjoy reading the story I wrote for you, even if you reading it kills me a little bit. That’s okay. That’s my job.