The Destruction of Wagner by the Artsy Elite

In this week’s The New Yorker (Aug. 15 & 22, 2011), Alex Ross reflects on his experiences at the Bayreuth Festival. As a Wagnerite, I have often dreamed of going to Bayreuth to see the Ring Cycle, but the last I checked, procuring tickets was a lengthy, complicated and expensive process lasting years. After reading Ross’s lamentations on the avant-garde productions at the Bayreuth Festspielhaus, I am a little less disappointed that I will likely never attend the festival.

This year’s festival includes a performance of Tannhauser. Tannhauser is about a minstrel knight who, after spending a year and a day enjoying pagan delights with Venus, is refused forgiveness by the Pope, but ultimately achieves it through his pure love for Elisabeth. The opera is based on the historical German minnesanger and poet Tannhauser, who lived in the 13th Century, as well as legends and mythology, and features various Medieval personages such as a landgrave and a healthy helping of nubile demi-goddesses and fantastical creatures—The Three Graces, sirens, naiads, nymphs and bacchantes—so where better to set the action than in a “dystopian waste-recycling facility” (Ross) dominated by a pre-existing piece of art that is, in the words of its creator the installation artist Joep van Lieshout, a “closed circuit of food, alcohol, excrement, and energy”?

I must admit, I am generally not a fan of this type of avant-garde reimagining and updating of a classic dramatic work, although it appears to be the norm in opera productions. 

I can speak from experience. In May this year, my wife and I went to see Siegfried at the San Francisco Opera House. Siegfried is about a boisterous young man who leaves his home in the forest, slays a dragon and takes its treasure, confronts his father Wotan (the ruler of the gods), and finally ascends mountainous heights, where he traverses a ring of magic fire and finds a sleeping Valkyrie with whom he promptly falls in love. The pre-performance speaker described the SF Opera’s production as beginning on the outskirts of an urban wasteland, and indeed, the curtain rose on a junkyard with a blasted trailer home in it. In Act Two, the dragon Fafner was a mechanical beast that looked like an overgrown four-wheeler with the head of a cheap robot toy. The quality of the musical performance was fine, but the early sets were cringe-inducing.

Luckily, these urban elements faded somewhat after the slaying of Fafner. The rest of Act Two was dominated by bright-green forest imagery projected on a screen, in front of which flitted the Woodbird in a bright red outfit. Act Three mostly took place in scenery suggesting rocky heights, soaring and majestic for the meeting between Wotan and Erda the earth goddess and turbulent for the awakening love between Siegfried and Brunnhilde. The second half of the opera was much more enjoyable as it assumed a congruence with the music and dramatic action.

The people who design such productions as described above are no doubt incredibly talented musicians, directors, producers, set designers, and so forth, but I must cry from my seat in Philistia that they have missed the essence of the work. All their theory—of which they have too much—is wrong. The music, characters and stories speak for themselves and as plainly today as they did in Wagner’s day and do not need any meddling by us. 

I suspect the artsy elite simply look down their noses at fantasy, even fantasy of the mythological type present in many of the greatest operas. They would not be caught dead reading David Gemmell, nor would they put a horned helm on Brunnhilde’s head unless it were over the dead body of their sophistication. That is all so tacky and old-fashioned. But that is where the real power is. History, myth and imagination are much bigger and meaningful than any narrow commentary on our own times, no matter how cleverly contrived.

Wagner knew that—after all, he set most of his stories in a mythical past rather than a context more literally resembling the Europe of his own day—and we should too. According to Ross in his article, boos have become part of the standard Bayreuth repertoire. It’s hard to imagine that would be so if the original operas were allowed to shine.

The Virtue of Muddling Through

"The major impact of this theory [pragmatism] is to shift talk about truth to talk about knowledge, and talk about knowledge to talk about the achievements of human powers and practices. . . he [William James] temporalizes knowledge and links it to human satisfaction and success."

     --Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy

“Hello, Jack? I’m Annette. You’re doing it wrong.”

     --Mr. Mom

***

A little while back, when I was thinking about starting a new blog, I began turning over a series of miniblogs discussing pragmatism, mostly as portrayed by philosopher Cornel West, in light of current events. That series never happened, but I’ve found my thoughts returning to pragmatism as I grapple with being a new parent.

Last summer, as I began to familiarize myself with West’s thought—through The Cornel West Reader, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism, and his speeches and interviews on YouTube—I grasped something at the core of pragmatism that I hadn’t when studying William James’s Pragmatism.

Pragmatism is often summarized as “What works is true.” Instead of seeking the grounds of absolute truth the way epistemologists since Descartes had, the pragmatists said that if a belief works in practice then it must be true, at least to some extent. This simplification obfuscates as much as it explains, but it will have to do for this blog.

What I realized in reading West is how pragmatism is less concerned with knowledge than it is action. It is grappling toward concrete goals rather than trying to get it all right right now. Getting something right is a long, messy process of improvement, with mistakes, compromises and problems all along the way.

And this is true of being a parent. Despite the appearance of all the right answers being out there—the shelves of parenting books at Barnes & Noble; advice from friends, coworkers, pediatricians, lactation specialists, registered nurses, one’s own parents and well-meaning strangers; those parents you see in restaurants and on the street who act as if they have it all under perfect control—there are no perfect parents. We all get a lot right and a lot wrong.

An example arose this week when my wife and I took our baby for his two-month checkup at the pediatrician. While my son was lying there flopping around naked on the examination table, my wife and I noticed grime in the folds of his armpits—little rolls of the foulest stuff. Quickly, we wiped it out before the pediatrician could come in and discover what horrible parents we were. Despite nightly baths, we had missed these little crevices! 

Should we have cleaned him better? Yes. Could we have? Yes. Would it have been difficult? No. Given that everyone knows babies have little folds all over that we, as adults, might easily overlook, folds that will, if neglected, sequester the foulest stuff, couldn’t we, shouldn’t we, have paid more attention and discovered this problem area sooner, or better yet ensured that the potential problem never became an actual one? Undoubtedly. Really, it is difficult to come up with a satisfactory excuse for our negligence—other than that you can’t be perfect all the time.

There is a temporal aspect to this. It is impossible to have all the answers and do everything perfectly from the start, so it follows that there must always be a period before when you did not have all the answers and were getting it wrong. It is part of the nature of reality, of our being-in-time (to adopt a term from Heidegger), that we must get it wrong . . . until we get it right.

It cannot be otherwise.

I think of this as the virtue of muddling through and it is the essence of pragmatism. If you would be a good parent, you will get things wrong all the time, but you will seek to get them right and improve as much as possible. My son’s armpits got a good scrubbing during his next bath and they will never be dirty again.

Gift, Exchange and a Little Extra Feeling

I am currently reading In Defense of Lost Causes by Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek. The book examines revolutionary terror--from the French Revolution's Reign of Terror to the Iranian Revolution--and asks what, if anything, was good about such grand Causes, or, in Zizek’s words: “. . . while these phenomena were, each in its own way, a historical failure and monstrosity . . . this is not the whole truth: there was in each of them a redemptive moment which gets lost in the liberal-democratic rejection.”

The book isn’t written in a style that I care for much. So far, long rambling sentences in thick paragraphs have digressed from digressions for pages on end, affording only occasional glimpses of something directly pertinent to the book’s stated topic. Nonetheless, much of the wandering is interesting and, no doubt, in some labyrinthine way all tied together.

I’m not far enough into the book to comment on the larger issues, but I found one passage in a section called “Gift and exchange” to be amusing:

“So, as in potlatch, the exchange between the analyst and the analysand is between two incommensurable excesses: the analyst is paid for nothing, as a gift, his price is always exorbitant (typically, the patients oscillate between complaining that the price is too high and bouts of excessive gratitude—‘how can I ever repay you for what you did…’”

The passage is about psychoanalysis, but it leapt out at me because I had just experienced something similar during my wife’s six-week postpartum checkup at the women’s clinic. We had prepared little chocolate bars announcing and celebrating our son’s birth to give out to acquaintances and I had brought one along for the doctor.

I handed it over, saying, “It isn’t much for your trouble, but we brought a little something to say thank you,” and I was in earnest, but inside, I was also thinking, “I don’t really owe you anything, since you’ve charged us enough in fees to deliver ten babies!”

Nonetheless, scenes like this play out frequently in life, when we pretend as if someone has done something for us out of the goodness of his or her heart and we freely express our gratitude through some gesture or other when really all that has occurred is a formal exchange. They do what they do because they are running a business and we pay because we want their service.

Or is that all that has occurred? After all, presumably my doctor does what she does because she cares about women and babies. Aren’t I really expressing gratitude as something extra in addition to my payment in return for this feeling as something extra the doctor has appended to her services? Indeed, my wife went into labor on our doctor’s day off, but she cut her dinner plans short in order to come deliver the baby.

The Japanese expression kimochi dake (feeling only) comes to mind. I may not be offering much in return for what I received, but I wish to offer something, however trifling, to express my feeling of gratitude, something a check (or debit transaction) could never do. In addition to the formal, required exchange of services for money, there is another, voluntary exchange of feeling.

That may not have much to do with lost causes, but it is an insight into “Gift and exchange.”

On the Revelatory Nature of Parenting

Last November, my wife and I found out that we could expect a baby to come along this year. In June, he arrived, legs kicking, arms wheeling, hands grasping. So far, I have found the experience of being a parent—from pregnancy test to present—to be revelatory: thoughts and feelings I never saw coming are suddenly there within me.

During our first major ultrasound, during which the specialist checked to make sure the baby had all the usual limbs and organs, I suddenly found my heart beating faster and my palms sweating: What if she found something wrong?

Going in, I wasn’t worried at all, but here I was, nervous. Contrary to what I may have thought previously, I am the kind of person to worry about such things.

Another revelatory moment came when the specialist said we were having a boy. For no good reason whatsoever, my wife and I had expected we were having a girl. The thought of it was warming—I would have this delicate creature to care for, but at a bit of a distance, since my wife would attend to all the girl stuff.

When I heard we were having a boy, my feelings were firmer. Here was a little man whom I would have to prepare for the rigors of the world. I also found I was proud to have provided a son to carry on the family name, and even more surprisingly, I felt as if by fathering a boy I had somehow proven my own manhood! 

All very cliché, and even ridiculous, but there you have it.

Upon the birth of my son, I immediately loved him without any reason whatsoever. Thankfully, I am that kind of parent. And when a construction site at the shopping mall nearly sprayed him with wet cement (it got on my wife and the stroller, but not the baby), I was angry. How could the construction worker have been so careless? Doesn’t he know he could have hurt my son! What if some cement had gotten into my newborn’s eyes? Had anything happened, I would have had choice words with the construction worker—maybe even demanded to speak to his supervisor or threatened litigation!

Apparently, I am that kind of parent, too. 

From now on, I will continue to learn about myself through my reactions to raising a child, and perhaps not everything I learn will be good, but hopefully whenever less admirable traits surface, I will have the guts to face them and improve myself.

Why the gleaming (s)word?

"Is it even always an advantage to replace an indistinct picture by a sharp one? Isn't the indistinct one often exactly what we need?"

      --Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

"To assert that art can be found in the Metropolitan Opera House but not in a nightclub is a rank snobbery."

     --Helen Traubel, in a letter to Rudolf Bing, general manager of the Metropolitan Opera House

***

To begin, a few words about the name of this blog: the gleaming (s)word.

I like the various meanings that words suggest. There isn’t one exact meaning behind this name as there is a cloud of connotations, some rather abstruse, some personal.

First and foremost, it was said that the great opera singer Helen Traubel had a voice like a “gleaming sword”—perfect if you sing Wagner.

As a Wagnerite, I like this phrase, which suggests not only the sharp, rich clarity of Traubel’s voice, but the magic and grandeur of Wagner’s Ring Cycle. Also, Traubel was from St. Louis, which isn’t far from where I spent some time growing up, so I feel a special affinity for the home voice, as it were.

But the gleaming sword suggests more than the reworked myths of Wagner’s operas. It also suggests the heroic lyricism of fantasy literature, which I have read since a child and continue to enjoy today.

Finally, as this is a blog, composed of words and celebrating language, this is “the gleaming word.”

All of that may seem high-flying for a mere blog that is likely to wander among random topics both numinous and quotidian, but hopefully, as I log scattered thoughts on my interests and experiences, my words will, if only occasionally, shine.