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

Been a while since I was swept along like that rigs. I often hope
universal mind could be like that, even in mad scientist guise that we
might be able to build something to attract it. I feel very separated
from the world at the moment - only in the sense that television news
(media generally) hits me as an irrelevant blank. Food used to be a
bit like that when I could do intellectual work. I wasn't built to
dance on anything except mud - so I'm lucky rugby was a winter sport
when I played and had somewhere to make my rituals public.

On 22 Apr, 14:10, rigs <rigs...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hard as it is, art should be separated from the character and behavior
> of the artist but this is not always easy. Heard the third act of
> "Siegfried" on the radio Saturday and was swept along helplessly.
> Wagner invades the entire body/soul- a conquest. The plot- love/death-
> disappears--that is the danger.//Dance may have started with the
> stealth of the hunt> religious rituals> Greek drama, of course plus
> there are matings and harems to consider. A chorus line of concubines?
>
> On Apr 3, 3:17 pm, archytas <nwte...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
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> > 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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