Mind's Eye Is Wagner Bad For Us?

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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