In Herman Hesse's The Glass Bead Game, we follow Joseph Knecht, the protagonist, on a quest to reconcile all forms of artistic expression into a unified understanding. On his journey, he encounters the Music Master, who has devoted his life to finding the correspondance between mathematical order and beauty in music. As he unveils to Joseph the state of his research, he shares his terrible tourment. In his introspection, he has experienced moments of profound clarity where he glimpsed the ‘pure essence of mathematical harmony in music’. Yet the moment his pen approaches the parchment, he finds his vision cannot be translated into notes without losing its essential quality. Every note feels like a betrayal of the perfect harmonies he touched within, turning into merely technical relationships on the page. Materializing his vision feels like a betrayal of the raw, chaotic vitality he feels within.

Here lies what Hesse characterizes as ‘the eternal struggle of the creative process’. The paradox where the very act of creation destroys what it seeks to preserve. In giving form to his inner vision, in fixing it in place, the artist must dissect what can only be whole. It involves compressing things. The alienation of the artist's raw inner vision into mere 'nets of language' that can only approximate. Turning something from an idea into a reality can make it smaller. It changes from unearthly to earthly. While the imagination has no limits, the physical world does, making the creative process, as coined by Kafka, necessary and impossible.

In Heidegger’s The Origin of the Work of Art, he argues that this phenomenon highlights the purpose of art. It is not to represent something impossible to represent, but rather disclose, which means allowing something hidden to be seen. The artist should aim at creating something that could allow the viewer to reach the realization he has reached instead of trying to represent his realization, which is simply impossible. Disclosing means creating conditions where something can be encounter directly for the first time.

The struggle between vision and expression dissolves when we recognize that the function of art is not one of representing but of disclosing. When the Music Master struggles to translate his mathematical vision into notation, he operates under the false assumption that his task is representational. According to Heidegger, his actual task is revelatory: creating compositions that might trigger similar mathematical revelations in others. The artwork does not contain truth but occasions truth. This eliminates the impossible burden of perfect translation because translation is not what art attempts.