Mind's Eye Re: Is Wagner Bad For Us?

I find Wagner morbidly romantic but hypnotic, at times. Wagner is very
dangerous whereas poor misunderstood Nietzsche is life affriming. Am
rereading my file from the course which included Kierkegaard, Sartre,
Gide, Mann as well as W and N. Got an A- on the final which I can no
longer readily understand!!! Who was this woman? And to think I
jumped into such a horrid relationship- maybe it was Wagner's
fault! :-) Anyway- am still a little blue saying goodbye to adult
child who makes the mistake make sense- she is a delight. Will go over
some other related stuff.

On Apr 3, 3:17 pm, archytas <nwte...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Respecting boundaries was not Wagner's thing. Transgression he took in
> his stride – stealing other men's wives when he needed them, spending
> other people's money without worrying too much about paying it back –
> while artistically his ambitions knew no bounds. There is something
> awe-inspiring about his productivity under hostile conditions, the
> way, though living on the breadline, he turned out masterpieces when
> there was no reasonable prospect of any of them being performed:
> gigantic works, pushing singers and musicians to the limits of their
> technique, and taking music itself to the edges of its known universe.
> Theft; the breaking of vows, promises and contracts; seduction,
> adultery, incest, disobedience, defiance of the gods, daring to ask
> the one forbidden question, the renunciation of love for power,
> genital self-mutilation as the price of magic: Wagner's work is
> everywhere preoccupied with boundaries set and overstepped, limits
> reached and exceeded. 'Wagnerian' has passed into our language as a
> byword for the exorbitant, the over-scaled and the interminable.
>
> Wagner has kept me awake at night. Sleepless, I turn my thoughts to
> Tristan und Isolde, Wagner's most extreme work and the plus ultra of
> love stories, and I notice a kinship between aspects of Tristan and
> Isolde's passion and the experience of a certain kind of insomnia. The
> second act of Tristan und Isolde is Romanticism's greatest hymn to the
> night, not for the elfin charm and ethereal chiaroscuro of moonbeams
> and starlight, the territory of Chopin and Debussy, but night as a
> close bosom-friend of oblivion, a simulacrum of eternity and a place
> to play dead. Insomnia is a refusal to cross the boundary between
> waking and sleeping, a bid to outwit Terminus by hiding away in
> 'soundless dark', a zone beyond time. As garlic is to vampires, so
> clocks are to insomniacs, not because they tell of how much sleep has
> been missed, but because they bring the next day nearer. As Philip
> Larkin, poet of limits, knew so well, sleep has the one big
> disadvantage that we wake up from it: 'In time the curtain edges will
> grow light,' he wrote in 'Aubade', bringing 'Unresting death, a whole
> day nearer now'. For Tristan and Isolde, too, night must not give way
> to day, not for the trivial reason that day will end their love-
> making, but because dawn brings death one day nearer. They must stay
> awake, for to sleep is to allow the night to pass, to awake from the
> night is to live and to live is to die. And when, inevitably, day
> dawns, they have only one recourse. To Tristan and Isolde, in their
> delirium, it seems that by dying they will preserve their love for
> ever: by dying, they will defy death.
>
> 'Utter rot' the scientist in me says, knowing science is a product of
> madness that can be demonstrated.  Wagner is bad for us.  And I think
> to science again - the science that dares to tell us the table is
> mostly nothing, with nothing curved space, unseen forces, the
> individual not Jack or Jill of thought in Idol boundaries.

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