It is a bit of a misconception to say that Tristan und Isolde is about love. On its face, it appears to be a love story, but to call it that is kind of like saying a child who takes piano lessons is classically trained: a little white lie. In truth, Tristan is about power; specifically, it is an elaborate fantasy of powerlessness. Through this powerlessness, all is dissolved — right and wrong, agency and fate; even the distinction between a man or a woman is rendered meaningless; indeed, one need not even be dead or alive.

That sex can do this for us (and yes, it is more accurate to say that Tristan concerns sex more than it concerns love) is a common fantasy throughout history, though it has become increasingly so as the gender divisions in everyday life become more openly fractious and violent than they have been in quite some time. One need only to take a look at contemporary writing to see that this is true, whether in the form of constant posting about yearning as a practice (though I consider this posting mostly performative because, like everything else on the internet, it is a little bit ironized) or the prose stylings of today’s romance fiction in which protagonists are rendered through the orgasm shattered, helpless, quivering and desperate; in the romance plot, previously stoic partners are subdued, awakened and made morally good or kind through pleasure. The term quiet violence, one I think Wagner would certainly approve of, has become a staple of ChatGPT prose.

In short, there has never been a better time to go see Tristan. There has also never been a better time to see Tristan at the Met. There remain two performances left to see, and about the production itself I’ll get to in more detail at the end of this post. However, suffice it to say, if it is in any way possible, you should go see it (or, if you’re not in New York, the simulcast at your local movie theater.) The hype — which far exceeds that of any other production the Met has put on in years — is real.

While most of my work about Wagner concerns the Ring, Tristan was my first foray into being a Wagnerite, simply because it’s the most musically important of his operas. Anyone who has read the Wikipedia page for opera can tell you that Tristan set new boundaries in terms of both tonal chromaticism (especially in the eponymous opening chord and the cor anglais solo in the third act) and opera as a philosophically self-contained structure. But to understand Tristan beyond that, one must also understand the questions Wagner is really asking in it: what is and isn’t love, is and isn’t power, is and isn’t self and other, is and isn’t fate. This is a big ask, but it’s worth taking a crack at it. If you’re less interested in such pontificating, you can simply skip to the back half of this post where I get into the review itself. At any rate:

why tristan? why now?

Not to be the guy who cites Hegel, but: Hegel, in the Phenomenology of Spirit makes a distinction between two types of infinities: the good infinity (found, for example, in the processes of the body, life and nature) which is perfectly cyclical, and the bad infinity which continues ceaselessly into the void and takes everything else with it. The traditional operatic form, regimented in its neat cadences, its arias and recitatives, approaches something like the good infinity. Wagner’s suffocating yet systemic worlds, his unsatisfying resolutions, his endless melodies, and, yes, per the jokes, the sheer lengthiness of his work, land him squarely in the bad infinity zone. And love, in Wagner, is without a doubt the baddest of all bad infinities.

This is not only because it never ends well (and it truly, honest to god never ends well) but because Wagner’s dialectical solutions to the problem of love, of which Tristan and Die Walküre are the most advanced, are iterative only in each successive work. In the works themselves, their own totality, musically and otherwise, swallows up each and every character, their wills, their desires, their fates.

As the years go by, the answers to these problems of freedom and fate only ever seem to become more elaborate and more bleak.1 By the 1850s, death, in Wagner’s work, was the order of the day. Tristan and Isolde famously die for love (though their deaths are always somewhat ambiguous), as do Siegfried and Brünnhilde before them (in order of composition), and Siegmund and Sieglinde, Wagner’s most politically developed lovers, in their wake.

That being said, it is wrong to call these bad loves reactionary in character. During Wagner’s work on Tristan and on the Ring, he was particularly interested in relations of power between men and women. (In fact, right before he died, Wagner was working on an essay on the woman question which, sadly, he never finished.) The gendered nature of the power question is, more than the more famous element of fatalism itself, essential to understanding what happens in Tristan and what Tristan means.

Wagner has always been interested in contracts — fundamental structural rules whose ruptures usually have terrible consequences. In Tannhäuser, the titular character violates his contract of love-bondage with the goddess Venus in order to form a new, more pious one with God in the more humble pursuit of his human-love, Elisabet. In Lohengrin, Elsa, wrongly accused of killing her brother, is protected and loved by Lohengrin, the swan knight, under the condition that she never once ask his real name or where he’s from. (Of course, on the precipice of making love, she does.)

But in these earlier works, Wagner’s women are frail, pious, and often helpless. They fall into archetypal operatic roles — the damsel in distress, the radiant virgin, or, in the case of his villains, the lusty witch.2 By the time he starts working on the Ring, Wagner all but abandons these traditional gender dynamics in lieu of one in which powerful women approach, in ways both political and affective, something like real parity with men. If anything, Wagner’s later women (with the annoying exception of the sorceress Kundry in Parsifal) are both stronger and more complex than their male counterparts. As we will soon see, this is perhaps most explicitly true of Isolde.

The works’ structural contracts, by extension, change to reflect this reality. They, too, become more complex. Death soon becomes necessary to resolve the contradictions of not only love but the world in which that love takes place. Before Wagner wrote Tristan he wrote Siegfried which ends with Siegfried — whose entire life has been basically orchestrated by Brünnhilde so that he comes in contact with the infamous ring, slays the dragon, and comes to meet her on the great fell — singing with her in a loud chorus of two about death and love, love and death.

In Götterdämmerung, the curse of the ring comes to fruition and the whole world literally burns to the ground, but not before the questions of power and agency are elaborated upon in the form of what can best be seen as a double rape — Siegfried is drugged by the villain Hagen and, no longer in control of himself, is forced to abduct Brünnhilde so that the coward Gunther can take her for wife. This is so terrible that both of them end up dead for it — Siegfried is killed, Brünnhilde takes her own life. The contradictions of love and power are resolved, but at what cost?

Tristan is both an iteration of and improvement on these conditions. (It is also a stepping stone on the way to Die Walküre in which Wagner’s hero, Siegmund, and his heroine, Sieglinde, are in every respect true equals with one another, albeit through the somehow even more fraught construct of fraternal incest.3) On its face, the structural problem of Tristan — the inescapable effects of a love potion on both parties — seems, at first glance, to be almost a simplification of what’s come before.4 But what differentiates Tristan from the situations in the Ring (and, actually, from all the other operas) is that Tristan starts out on the opposite dialectical foot. It begins outright with a righteous woman coming face to face with an unrighteous man, a man who has irredeemably wounded her. In other words, it begins, most crucially, with hate, a hate that must then resolve into love.5

The basic story of Tristan und Isolde is that, prior to the events of the opera, the warrior Tristan first comes by boat to lay waste to Ireland, where Isolde reigns as queen. He kills her fiance, Morholt, but is wounded in the process. Isolde, more out of erotic self-interest than pure charity, heals Tristan’s wounds only for him to return to Ireland and take her as captive with the intent of marrying her off to his much older adoptive uncle King Marke. This is, quite frankly, a totally evil thing for him to do. It is also, one could say, a violation of a prior, albeit unspoken contract.

Out of revenge for being subjected to the slave bond of unwanted marriage (the specter of rape, no matter how kindly the poor cuckold Marke may be, looms heavy in all of Wagner’s later work) Isolde intends to kill both Tristan and herself by way of a death potion given under the guise of resolving their differences — a toast to friendship. It is a common mistake to see this as an act of devotion towards Tristan, something Isolde does because she is in love with him. Instead, it has everything to do with not wanting to belong to anyone but herself. If she kills only Tristan, she remains in the same bad situation. Death is, essentially, the only way out with dignity.

At the last second, Isolde’s maid Brangäne swaps this death potion for a love potion, though, for all intents and purposes the outcome is the same — it just takes a little longer to get there than a swallow. At any rate, the two become fatally entwined and later, of course, get caught in the act. Tristan is wounded and banished to an island with his right hand man Kurwenal where Isolde (or her ghost — it’s always ambiguous) comes to his aid too late. Then there’s a big dramatic pseudo-aria called the Liebestod and it’s the best music of all time. The curtain falls.

Isolde is Wagner’s mightiest heroine. She eclipses even Brünnhilde in that she is never virginal and has a true hatred for weakness. That Isolde has been rendered weak is to her an unspeakable crime. Rather than giving herself to a man in the traditional sense, it is more accurate to say that she takes that man from himself. When Isolde speaks to Tristan in Act I, she speaks to him in the language of a man6 — a language of revenge, contracts, negotiation, hatred. Tristan, who knows he has wronged her, proffers his sword to her and dares her to kill him; he also knows he has met his maker. However, they find themselves in a kind of stalemate. Isolde, being a queen, is his political superior; Tristan, being a man, confers physical power over Isolde. Yet neither of them can act upon what they want because they are now in a Situation. A new and final contract must be forged between them.

The fantasy of Tristan, as I stated at the beginning, is one not of love, but of powerlessness. This is because, within the construct of the opera, only in powerlessness can one find true equivalency between man and woman, or, more accurately, a rejection of subjugation altogether in exchange for being totally subdued. In the endless, anorgasmic swirl of music for which the second act is so famous, there is ceaseless talk of oneness, of surrender, of dying, of becoming or dissolving into the other. Indeed, the potion creates a unique condition by which the boundary between self and other must be eroded completely, both corporeally and metaphysically. So, too, must the boundary (Wagner’s favorite) between agency and fate.

This is not done, as in the case of Die Walküre, through self-recognition in the other — the bond of solidarity — but instead through total and abject self-negation. Tristan is Isolde and Isolde is Tristan, but in being so, they are also nothing at all. This is not only a highly erotic situation but a dialectically paradoxical one. To recognize the self-consciousness of the other is to recognize one’s own self-consciousness, to deny one’s own self is to deny the other, too. No wonder the whole thing can only end up in death, and beyond death, a sexual fantasy of dying. By the time the pair meet up in the forest, they are already ghosts wandering among the living. The rest — the dying itself — is a mere formality.

Wagner’s infamous non-cadential music is not just analogous to the gradual suffusion of sexual pleasure, it is also, in a very real sense, the fragile perpetuation of life. When it ends, all expires, but we, gloriously, expire with it. There is no way out but through, no love without hate, no power without weakness. That, essentially, is the gist of Tristan. It is an opera about a woman and her reckoning with her own fate disguised as an opera about love. In many ways, there is no Tristan. There is only Isolde, in Tristan, in the world, forever. They won’t tell you this in the liner notes, but it’s the truth.

*

THE REVIEW

The most important thing about this whole ordeal is that, musically speaking, it is fucking awesome. People always ask me “how” they should listen to Tristan. The best way to listen to Tristan is with someone you are balefully if not despotically in unrequited love with. The second best way to listen to Tristan is, in true Wagnerian spirit, with another man’s wife. The third best way to listen to Tristan is simply as music. This is because the singing is what’s important; after the first act, the libretto ceases to make much sense anyway. This is especially true about the love duet in the second act and Tristan’s unceasing dying in the third. All the plot is in the first act, the rest is about being carried away by sound.

When I saw Tristan at the Met, I knew what I was getting into. Five hours of yearnmaxxing bifurcated by two overlong intermissions. I saw it with a stranger, a man I had never met before, who asked over DM whether I wanted his second ticket. We had a very generous meal together and a cigarette after.7 This, too, is as close to the ideal Tristan-seeing situation as humanly possible. (Seeing Tristan with a friendly stranger from the internet is hugely preferable to seeing Tristan with your spouse because then you have to have the whole “would you die for me” conversation afterwards.)

At any rate, what they (the reviewers) say about the singing in this production of Tristan is true. You have to go, you have to see it. As much as Tristan is about powerlessness, it is also about raw power. In fact, the way people talk about a soprano is also not unlike the way we talk about Tristan — in terms of the scale of her power and the emotional direction of her will. Lise Davidsen is, of course, the most talented dramatic soprano in the world, especially when it comes to Wagner. She is the world’s best Sieglinde, a role she prefers over others, and a role she’s sung several times. (She has yet to sing Brünnhilde, but she will next year.) If one can be the world’s best Sieglinde, well, that leaves a lot of possibilities for everything else.

Describing a singer’s voice in general terms is one of the most futile exercises in writing. I have to do it every once in a while for reviews and find myself coming back to the same words: lilting, powerful, massive, limpid, rich, smooth, clarion, deep, versatile, what have you. The fact of the matter is, in this case, this woman will make you afraid of her. By the end, she will make you cry. The Liebestod in Tristan comes as a relief to the listener, as the final end, the drying up of the libidinal well through unadulterated sadness. To have it sung so completely is rare, to have the opportunity to listen to something so resoundingly perfect in the flesh is even rarer. In this case, it felt historic. It felt like hearing it for the first time, way back when I was fifteen, Hildegard Behrens on the turntable serenading poor, dead Peter Hofmann (an eternal crush of mine.) Toes curled, mouth ajar in astonishment. Much like there are no words that can accurately describe the way a storm charges the air around you, or the feeling of watching a lover from afar, there are no words that can accurately describe this voice.

Then there’s Michael Spyres, of whom I am also very fond. Spyres is best known as a bel canto singer (i.e. a guy who sings, like, Rossini) however his forays into Wagner have all been extremely successful. He sung Siegmund at Bayreuth last year, a performance I really enjoyed for the same reason I enjoyed hearing him as Tristan: he has the requisite power to commit to Wagner but he also has the astounding neatness and balance of a stereo recording. This is a very rare quality in a singer, to be so even, to have the full range in working order, to make this stuff look easy, and, beyond that, for the voice to be lofty and beautiful at the same time. Spyres makes a great Tristan because he has the agility, expression and endurance for it. He also makes a great Tristan because he is a little bit more subdued than his counterpart.

As for the rest of the production, my opinions are mixed. The supporting cast was mostly excellent — especially Tomasz Konieczny as Kurwenal, who is legitimately one of my favorite bass-baritones working right now. (Honestly, his voice is so powerful he basically deafens Spyres in their dialogues in Act III.) I was a little less sold on Ryan Speedo Green as Marke, but only because of the contrast with Konieczny. If anything, I felt they should have been switched for balance.

The conducting, however, was another story. I am of the very unfriendly opinion that Yannick Nézet-Séguin is a mediocre Wagner conductor who struggles with balance and pacing, both of which are important when your opera is five hours long. Across the board, he favors the tritest parts of the score over its more intelligent textures, which is a mistake. He is lucky Lise Davidsen is a weapon. There were many moments where I was actively resentful someone else wasn’t at the podium. Sorry to be mean, but it has to be said. This doesn’t ruin the performance by any means, but the seasoned Wagnerite will definitely be rolling their eyes.

Yuval Sharon’s constantly moving monoset, which looks at its best like the aperture of a camera and at its worse is suspiciously vaginal, while visually striking, is another sore spot. It is, unfortunately, an acoustical fatal error. The worst possible thing you can do for the listeners in the balconies is cut off the singer at the head by putting him in a giant cone, which essentially swallowed a lot of Spyres' midrange for those not seated in the orchestra section. Sometimes this set was very effective, such as in Act III where it served as a metaphor for going into the great beyond. However, the surrounding projections, some of which were almost ridiculously banal — moths to a flame, anyone? — were not only distracting, they gave me the feeling that the Met must think I’m a fucking idiot. The same could be said of Clint Ramos’ costume design, which came off as a mixture of the childlike medieval garb from Shrek (especially Davidsen’s green dress) and, in the cases of Kurwenal and Melot, the stillsuits from Dune. One must ask: what are we doing here?

All that being said, you have to go see Tristan at the Met because the opera is not really about what people are wearing or about whether they are trapped in a giant cone. It is about the singing, and Davidsen and Spyres are the two of the greatest singers working in the world right now. To have them together in the United States is a rare blessing, one we’ll probably be seeing less of as the political situation unfolds. (Most singers, even the American ones like Spyres have visas or citizenship in Europe.)

But beyond that, Tristan is timeless. The desire to blot out the sun of someone who doesn’t love you is timeless, the desire, as a woman, to be in charge of one’s own fate is timeless, the refusal of subjugation, even in its most problematic form, is, right now, especially timeless, as is the escapist dream of a world in which nothing matters more than somebody else, in which love — even if it’s not really love — is all there is. Tristan is a suicidal opera. We live in a suicidal moment. Go see it. It’s, as they say, to die for.

Recently, I finished a series of five essays (many of which began as drafts on this Substack) about the twins Siegmund and Sieglinde from Richard Wagner’s music drama Die Walküre. This body of work, in part owing to my severely diminished health last year, took a little over a year and a half to complete. When I wasn’t working on my book or other freelance assignments, these two people seemed to infiltrate every waking moment (and even some of my non-waking moments) of my life. Before I got sick, months passed where there wasn’t a free weekend or evening that could be spared for anything other than thinking about them. Thus, at the beginning of my infatuation, like all people in love, me and Big Rich spent a lot of time together. I poured over the text of the Ring cycle, listened to it four times front to back in the same number of weeks, read dozens of guides and other texts about it, penned fiction, poems, diagrams, and other ways of working through the material, some of which eventually made it into the essays albeit in fragmented forms.

After I got sick, both with my brain injury and with post-viral illness, the nature of this fixation changed along with everything else in my life, which had all of a sudden come to a stop. As the days passed by, each the same and as lifeless as the next, I clung to these two people, Siegmund and Sieglinde, with a mind so addled it hallucinated words and could barely form a coherent sentence. Because they were, in addition to being characters in a text, also pieces of music, this was a blessing for me because music can still communicate so much even if one is unable to make any sense of it. If the twins were anything else, if they were figures in a book or a film, I genuinely don’t think I would have loved them so much. (Although, to speak in their defense, these two people born into hell world, who live righteous lives despite extreme and gendered violence, who find one another and discover through love and solidarity the path forward into a better, freer way of being, feel particularly lovable these days!)

That being said, what differentiates the Ring from some of my more internecine obsessions, is that it is infamously one of the art world’s great rabbit holes. Thousands of people around the world are seduced into being Wagnerites at some point in their artistic development, even if, fortunately for them, it remains a largely juvenile phase. Those who get too into the Ring can spend the rest of their lives on the sheer totality of the thing (like me), or, alternatively, on just a few bars of music. It is, in many ways, a perfect thing to become obsessed with because the thing itself, by way of how it is — vast and infinitesimal at the same time — encourages it.

Thus, spending one’s life with the Ring is always very intellectually stimulating, in part because attempting to explain it can lead you in a million directions. It moves backwards and forwards, is both text and event. While my way into the cycle was pretty oblique, I did not in any way arrive at the Ring at random. It was the last in a long progression of obsessions that elided seamlessly into one another, each continuing on as its own theme in a seemingly endless string of counterpoint. These “hyperfixations”1 include the medieval families of 13th century Styria, the town of Ormož and its surroundings (about which I wrote an unpublished novella in 2023), the artist France Mihelič (about whom I wrote for Protean Magazine) or, my pathway into Wagner, Parzival and the Nibelungenlied. One thing, however, remains clear: the Ring was no different for me than any of those other things. Once I got into them I could not stop until their hold on me passed. Each time I fall in love with a subject, I become like a dog who finds a miraculous piece of garbage on the street: try and snatch it from me and I’ll bite off your hand. I don’t care if I’m a bad dog, that my taxes are late, that it’s 1 in the morning and I’m knee deep in Robert Donington’s Jungian analysis of Siegfried, that’s my trash!!!!!!!!!!!!

Being yoked around the world by one’s passions at the expense of what makes one broadly beloved to the public (being an architecture critic) may seem like an unsustainable way of living and working. But in my defense, when it works, it works splendidly, and even when it doesn’t work, I have no choice but to deal with it. I have been this way since childhood and there is no other way for me to be. When I was three I ran around the house naked to Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and begged my parents to let me play the violin, which I did for 20 years. When I was five I got in trouble at kindergarten for relaying with malignant glee just how many people died building the Great Wall of China. When I was 11 I could have told you anything you wanted to know about the weather. I became a child government pawn of the National Weather Service and carried my storm spotter card for many years.

At 15 I became obsessed with architecture and, ten years later, became the youngest ever serialized architectural critic in American history.2 (In)famously, of course, after lockdown, I uprooted my entire previous existence and everything in it in order to cover the Tour de France for three years.3 In order to get an edge on asking guys in lycra how sore their legs were I ended up learning Slovenian and getting way too into the Middle Ages (living in Castle World Europe will do that to you), to Slovene art, from Mihelič to the poems of Srečko Kosovel. Suffice it to say, despite being such a deleterious and unrestrained force, monomania remains the unceasing and immutable perpetuum mobile of what I ultimately consider to be a rich and productive life. (Whether that life is financially lucrative is another matter.)

*

The Ring, much like many of my larger-scale fixations, was almost magically generative not only in that it has produced an ongoing body of work but because it made me a far more well-rounded person than I was before. The places it lured me would’ve taken years to arrive at any other way, which is to say, by dipping in at random when one has the time. Most obviously, while classical music has been a lifelong obsession (perhaps, even, the only consistent one), owing to my unfortunate last name, I spent decades avoiding Wagner whenever possible, relegated him to the dustbin of my opera and modernity seminar in music school. Even in grad school at Peabody, Wagner to me remained a side character (one can even say a crank) in the grand pageant that is acoustical history via the Bayreuth Festspielhaus. But once I got “Ringpilled” (as I used to put it in unfortunate Millennial parlance) I was forced to dig up my music theory textbooks for the first time in a decade. I even returned to techniques of post-tonal theory in order to categorize certain leitmotifs in the form of sets. This was difficult work that never made it into my writing about the twins, though perhaps it may find an outlet in some supplementary work about the cycle.

Each essay I began led me on a journey of its own. For example, when I was working on the essay about Siegmund and whether his free will was real vs conditional, I disappeared down the rabbit hole of German Idealism,4 read Fichte, Hölderlin (already a lifelong love of my life), Hegel (though not the Phenomenology on which I’m taking a class at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research next month), and Schelling. I peeked, as one is forced to do with Wagner, into Schopenhauer and 19th century readings of Buddhism. I paid a visit, for the first time since high school, to one of my oldest intellectual friends, Jean Paul Sartre. I began thinking about my own freedom, including as a political subject trapped in a hell world of my own, which was a difficult internal conversation to have. It may seem silly, but, in analyzing this brief albeit poetic life, there were many times in the past year where I was forced to ask myself, could I ever be like Siegmund? What risks were I willing to take to protect those more vulnerable than myself? Did I really have the requisite courage to try to bring forth the world I believed in even in miniature, even in the small worlds one forms with other people?

I will probably write more extensively (and for a different venue) about this later, but I ran into the same dilemma when working with the character Sieglinde, the woman who drugs the husband who rapes her, who, contrary to the cycle’s professed heroic narrative, saves her brother and herself, who is forced, in a harrowing monologue, to reckon with sum total of all female suffering before being left to die for the simple crime of not wanting to suffer anymore. This has been one of the most emotional and theoretical challenges I’ve ever taken on as both a writer and as a woman myself. To say that I carried this woman wherever I went (including and especially to psychoanalysis) is an understatement. I used her as a tool to work through some extremely difficult feelings that seemingly had no other way of coming to the fore except through music. I forced myself through her to read (and reread) a lot of the hard but good stuff out there about feminist thinking — Andrea Dworkin on sex and rape, Juliet Mitchell’s work on psychoanalysis and women, Simone de Beauvoir’s writing on women’s subjectivity and philosophical freedom, to name just a few.

While much of my interest in the twins had a sentimental or at least affective quality to it, during my work with the Ring, there were also many times I caught more than a few of what I call my “stray bullets” — things I’d probably never read or think about otherwise. Despite not being particularly interested in Norse mythology (I’m already blonde enough), I read the Prose Edda and the Volsunga Saga front to back, as well as the William Morris (yes, that William Morris, one of the world’s great polymaths) adaptation of the latter. I read Tolkien’s essay on dwarfs. I read the Nibelungenlied again, but this time in an academic rather than prose translation. (I also saw the Fritz Lang movies, which are almost diabolically beautiful to look at.)

The big stray bullet I caught, in this case, however, was the topic of incest, about which I read a number of books and articles, most of them historical and psychoanalytical texts.5 (Part of the reason I went so deep was because the topic is almost entirely whitewashed over in most guides to the cycle.) I’ve never been a prude about the fact that the Wälsung twins fall in love with one another; in fact I’ve always found it somewhat sweet, if very sad. The mystical idea of being born with and for someone materializes across many different facets of culture despite being fundamentally rooted in incestuous longing, which, by its very nature, hates the process of separation and differentiation responsible, by necessity, for making us our lonely, lonely selves. This I turned into a separate essay about the mirror-self.

I suppose, to wrap this all up: as I prepare, after six months of post-covid illness, to re-enter full time work and public life alike, I still find it difficult to say goodbye to this material, material which kept me afloat during a seemingly endless period of sickness, madness, and more sickness. Soon, the twins, like a handful of other objects and subjects (such as St. Barbara, the patron saint of architecture, Daphne,6 Ptuj Castle in Eastern Slovenia and the belligerent ministerials who once lived there,7 the eye, and the red lantern8) will become part of my personal mythology, a pantheon of symbols, many of which are even physically inscribed on my own body in the form of tattoos. In this, too, I will carry them with me forever. They will inevitably dissolve into something else. The cycle will continue and continue and continue until there is no more cycle, until there is nothing at all.

Thank you all for spending time with it.9

You can read the essays via Wehwalt.net, my website devoted to the Ring cycle.

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There is a considerable debate within Wagner studies not only about the specificities of leitmotifs, but often what, in truth, a leitmotif even is. Colloquially, the leitmotif is thought of as a collection of identifying melodies attached to certain characters, feelings, and subjects, within the Ring or in other works by Wagner. This is a seemingly simple concept -- that Siegfried, horn in hand, sounds like this, while the giants, with their lumbering footsteps, sound like that, but, as is the case with anything else in the Ring it is not, nor ever will be simple. In practice, the Ring is a machine by which a handful of spare notes can be transmogrified across a span of time as short as a few seconds and as long as four consecutive days, into something so sprawlingly complex it becomes somehow inescapable and nigh untraceable at the same time. There is indeed a reason why the body of scholarly work about the leitmotif vastly outnumbers that of any other element of Wagner’s life and work.

As a basic concept, however, the idea of the leitmotif is fraught. Where, for example, is the musical line drawn between theme, phrase, and motive? If the leitmotif is to be a “memory aid” or signifier of a certain character, why does it show up so often, and seemingly confusingly, in the mouth of someone completely different, such as in the case, very early on, in scene 2 of Das Rheingold, where Loge’s theme is sung by the giant Fasolt during his negotiations with Wotan?

Despite, or perhaps owing to these peculiarities and fractures, the arc of this “sterotypical” leitmotif in musical discourse is long. Even those who take leave of the shadow of taxonomy fall prey to it. The critical theorist Theodor Adorno, for example, felt that the leitmotif was the antecedent of other vulgarities in bourgeois musical culture, such as the radio jingle. His critique of its role in the Ring is broader and more substantial than just that (it actually has to do with how terrible it is that such small individualities are so totally subsumed by the all-encompassing whole of fate, a claim with which I largely agree) but even a critique as distant as this still relies on the end logic of the leitmotif not only as an individual and indexical musical subject but of the set of leitmotifs as a defined, self-contained, and internally consistent system within the Ring.

By way of its origins in the 19th century, the categorization and taxonomization of leitmotifs is as precious to the historical bourgeois listener as his cabinet of curios, where each line is as crisply labeled as a species of butterfly plucked from the air and pinned behind an unforgiving plate of glass. This is a way of thinking that has retained its appeal across several shifts within modernity that consistently favor systematic hierarchies, including, in our day in age, that infinite list of lists known as the Internet. Then, as now, the same imperative, of severing the individual animal from the whole of life in which it dwells and from which it is inextricable, can be found throughout many guides and companions to the Ring. It is, in my view, however, an impulse that should be tempered, especially at the start of one’s journey with Wagner.

This is not only because it is daunting (even I, someone who has listened to the cycle countless times, do not have even the short list of the motives completely memorized) but because it often is either distracting or has an emotionally stultifying affect. For example, if one goes into the Ring blind, how important is it really to the experience of the work, to know that the opening E-flat major arpeggios, labeled, alternatively as RHINEGOLD, GOLD, GENESIS, NATURE, what have you, are called such? Is it not, in some empirical way, obvious? Similarly, it is somewhat brutish and thick-headed to say that, in the opening of Die Walküre when Siegmund recognizes in Sieglinde the same human compassion that has burned a hole in his heart his entire life, that the harmonization of her leitmotif with Siegmund’s as they further explore the contours of each other’s character functions as a musical signification or foreshadowing that the two are twins. Does it? When one is listening to the cycle front to back, within the continuum of non-reversable time, does it really? Do we not trust the cycle, as is the case with any other operatic production, to explain itself?

Such remarks may sound anti-intellectual upon first reading, but they are actually in line with a self-contained and not uncommon intellectual belief, which is that the Ring is best listened to in the way it was originally intended: in real time, as a series of music dramas. We will get to the drama part in a bit, but in terms of temporal experience, it is worth clarifying that this is a perspective whose foundations lie not in a kind of purist originalism vis a vis a kind of vulgar allegiance to the composer, but in the subdiscipline of sound studies and its understanding about how we as contemporary listeners materially relate to historical music.

At the time when Wagner was writing the Ring, which is to say the middle of the 19th century, people’s relationship to music and listening began to shift dramatically. Wagner himself knew this, in fact, it was a major driving force of his work, not only in his musical inventions (including the leitmotif) but in the development of Bayreuth, which, having been constructed in a way utterly divorced from operatic precedent (which was more static than in other buildings for the performing arts) and developed around an intensely specific musical and technological program, marked the beginning of modern acoustical planning.

Music, once the domain of the aristocratic elite, had expanded with the development of capitalist society into the drawing rooms and public concert halls of the emergent bourgeoisie. As a result, the relationship between listeners and performers also shifted away from private concerts and towards a diverse set of venues one could access with a fee.1 This economic shift was a unsteady juncture for those who worked within all disciplines of musical production. For performers, modern salaried orchestras had only just reached institutional stability. For composers, the patronage system had ceded way to the entrepreneurial mode of making a living, though Wagner, through his fraught relationship with King Ludwig II of Bavaria, knew the strains of both sides.

Mass printing of sheet music created both a boon in the proliferation of scores and arrangements of concert music for study and leisure (which themselves contributed to compositional stardom) but also ushered in the behemoth known today as standardized pop music. On the back of these developments came a big expansion of amateur musicianship, which was the primary way by which music could be reproduced in the home. The main vehicle for this reproduction, especially with regards to large ensemble pieces was via the piano reduction, in particular piano four-hands arrangements. Thus, piano playing became a commonly desirable skill, which itself is why the first attempts to mechanize sound came in the form of the player piano. Still, such early inklings of another, humanless way of listening could not prepare anyone for the techonolgical advancements that were to follow. These were the last few years before the Western ear stopped hearing time in one direction.

The recording created an ontological crisis in which, after millennia to the contrary, music ceased to be an event rooted in a specific space and transpiring across a specific time. That music could be consumed talentlessly and effortlessly, that certain phrases could be repeated ad nauseum, but, more spiritually, that the sound of a living breath could be heard after the person breathing had ceased to do so, all of these were life-altering changes that are hard to conceive of today. At the same time, both music and especially performances (and by extension performers, to whom recording was and remains very unforgiving) were subjected to new levels of scrutiny. It is not surprising, then, that taxonomical analyses of the Ring cycle exploded after the development of sound reproduction.

This context of the Ring as a work produced at the penumbra of modern acoustical technology is important not only historically but in how we listen to it. This is not to say that the way we approach music in the age of instantaneous gratification is inherently inferior to some kind of imagined state of premodern innocence, but that, in regards to the structures of the Ring itself, it does effect how we perceive it as an experiental and temporal whole. It has become trite to claim that the leitmotif, much like in the way some obscure patent preordains a now-ubiquitous device, anticipated things like advertising jingles and the looping repetition later made possible by recorded sound. But it is not trite to reiterate that it did, in fact, precede those things, that its function was in some ways as transitional as the times themselves. It is actually quite important that we take into account that the Ring was not meant, in the terms of an experience, to be picked around in like a fruit basket, that this disjointed time in which so much analysis finds its natural environment, is not the same time with which Wagner himself shaped his cycle.

Those who listened to the Ring on the eve of its composition had no way of going backwards. If you missed a musical cue, then you simply missed it. Only over the course of each of the four operas are the motivic references gradually reinforced. The seeking out of forshadowing among little clues, much in the way one does in a novel, which is a static piece of art, was not experientally possible and, at a time where memorization as a skill is at an all-time low, still largely isn’t -- that is, without the score.

It’s not controversial to say that the score of the Ring is, to a greater extent than with any other piece of music, singularly and forcefully severed from the experience of the music itself, often in the service of this one idea. It exists, as is required of many obsessions, as a uniquely fetishized object. The score is a searching grasp towards legibility within a work that does not always seek to be legible. But most of all, the score truncates, reduces the span of musical time to the blink of an eye. And, unlike other pieces of historical music, the cycle’s temporal imperative, the dayslong pace of a story that spans an entire world, requires something specific from the listener - a mix of endurance and pristine attention - and it is this specificity which, whether we like to admit it or not, still demands some respect. The Ring infamously has a way of enforcing its time on others. Perhaps this is why so many like to break it into such tiny pieces.

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That the idea of the leitmotif as an indexable, self-contained system within the cycle does not even originate with Wagner himself, and, as such, that their strict categorizations do not come straight from the horse’s mouth should itself serve as an indication to the Ring novice that they need not tread too far into this particular territory in order to listen to or even to master the Ring as a work of art. (In fact, when the first guide to the Ring primarily oriented around the naming and mapping of leitmotifs was published the year of the cycle’s completion in 1876 by Hans von Wolzogen, Wagner found the whole ordeal reductive and was famously unhappy about it.) Wagner himself was more vague about the role of motives in the cycle than most of the people who have ever written about them. He writes:

A musical motive (Motiv) can produce a definite impression on the Feeling, inciting it to a function akin to Thought, only when the emotion uttered in that motive has been definitely conditioned by a definite object, and proclaimed by a definite individual before our very eyes. The omission ofthese conditionments sets a musical motive before the Feeling in a most indefinite light; and an indefinite thing may return in the same garment as often as one pleases, yet it will remain a mere recurrence of the Indefinite, and we shall neither be in a position to justify it by any felt necessity of its appearance, nor, therefore, to associate it with anything else.

But a musical motive into which the thought-filled Wordverse of a dramatic performer has poured itself-so to say, before our eyes-is a thing conditioned by Necessity: with its return a definite emotion is discernibly conveyed to us, and conveyed to us through the physical agency of the Orchestra, albeit now unspoken by the performer; for the latter now feels driven to give voice to a fresh emotion, derived in turn from that earlier one. Wherefore the concurrent sounding of such a motive unites for us the conditioning, the non-present emotion with the emotion conditioned thereby and coming at this instant into voice; and inasmuch as we thus make our Feeling a living witness to the organic growth of one definite emotion from another, we give to it the faculty of thinking: nay, we here give it a faculty of higher rank than Thinking, to wit, the instinctive knowledge of a thought made real in Emotion.2

These are not mystical or crank ideas, ones that should be ignored in pursuit of a higher analytical purpose, nor are they, as is often the case with Wagner, biographical misfortunes by which the quantifiable can claim superiority over the irrational. In fact, what Wagner is describing here is a key and revolutionary function of narrative modernity, akin to that which developed in the realist French novel in the early to mid 19th century, particularly in the work of Gustave Flaubert. This is the idea and execution of a pre- or subconscious affect. In more technical terms, it is the disappearance of the diagetic event (events that are directly experienced by both characters in the piece and by the audience) into the mere fact of narration. It is also worth noting that Flaubert’s work also marks a moment of stylistic transition by which the sentence becomes the key unit of literature, something that is also reflected musically in a shift towards motivic or phrasal thinking both before and after Wagner.

The similarity between these concurrent artistic developments across mediums is a point made in detail by Fredric Jameson in a minor lecture he gave on the Ring as narrative. To paraphrase, prior to this period, the novel was usually built around rigid formal structures whose narrators often had to justify their own existence, such as in the form of the epistolary novel structured as correspondence or testimony. As the novel became the form par excellence of an increasingly interiorized bourgeois life, and as it became more gradually defined by both internally driven rather than externalized conflicts, and by the intense detail of realism rather than the broad brushstrokes of traditional storytelling, these boundaries dissolved and the acute delineation of feeling and action were no longer deemed necessary. This was not unlike how the strict formal structures of opera were gradually eroding around the same period.

The notion that a character could feel or experience something subconsciously is taken for granted now, but it’s actually a very difficult problem to solve dramaturgically, in which, by formal necessity, perspectives and feelings need to be either spoke, sung or pantomimed directly to the audience. That music could serve this role, that it could communicate not only the dramatic subtext of a given situation but also the unspoken nature and the emotion of the character in a matter approaching the simultaneity of how we ourselves feel within the context of our lives and surroundings including at scales beyond just the individual, this, rather than as a system of characterization, is what Wagner intended as the function and goal of the leitmotif.

It is thus a category error to view the leitmotif, as people so often do, as a purely musical or textual subject in lieu of as a means of relation and association that is simultaneously musical, dramatic, and textual within the work. It is important to reiterate that the Ring was intended to be a discrete event in chronological time, one listened to perhaps once ever in the lives of the listeners. While it is more than fine, and in its own way, a pleasure, to study intensely the motivic structures of the cycle, to go into the work, especially for the first time, with the bias of categorial thinking creates for the listener a retrospective dramatic irony that is frustratingly both structural to the work and yet also unintended by the composer on behalf of the listener. (This is one of the many great dialectical tensions of the work, the question of: are we really supposed to know all that?)

Often, however, the leitmotif effect can be intellectually limiting. Instead of considering the broader dramatic contexts of individual moments, which is to say, how they relate to the whole through the combined apparatus of music, speech, and drama at scales both small and large, one becomes stuck on common questions like “Why does Brünnhilde use the LOVE motif when she speaks of her horse to Siegfried? Does she love the horse? Is it supposed to be funny?” A novice, listening to the cycle empirically, could tell you that the motif comes in the context of a gift to her lover, whom she is about to send on a journey from which he won’t return.

It is precisely at this level of specificity that the Ring often falls apart. The existence of so many little ironic puzzles, “errors” and musico-thematic conflicts within the motivic system drives and has driven so many generations of both listeners and scholars genuinely mad.3 The Ring can even be said to be anti-indexical in its messy imperfection. So much of the effort of the taxonomists, much like those who went out into the bush alongside Darwin, is reflective of a desire for domination over something that insists on retaining its own mysticism. At the heart of this frustration is the unambiguously modernist urge to eradicate ambiguity. Most of the ambiguities within the cycle, from the flaming embers of its open ending to the several small mysteries scattered throughout, many of which go unanswered, are in fact integral to cycle’s own stability as an enigmatic but dialectical whole. They are the reason the Ring is one of those rare works that is so broad that nearly all analyses of it, should they be reasonably argued and sufficiently self-contained, are valid, and hence, why, 150 years later, we keep having the same arguments at scales both infinitesimal and structural.

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To better examine the leitmotif in this broader, more generous affective fashion, we can return to one of the great scenes of Wagnerian debate, the moment in Act I of Die Walküre in which Siegmund draws the sword Nothung from the ash tree. This act, one of the great symbolic gestures of love within the cycle and also perhaps the zenith of its eroticism, is accompanied not by Siegmund’s motif or that of Sieglinde, for whom the sword is drawn, nor does it come from the array of bliss and love motifs developed throughout their courtship. Crucially, it is accompanied by the bit of music commonly designated by various guides as the “Renunciation of Love” (more accurately, the “Liebe-Tragik”) motif -- the same motif by which, in Das Rheingold the Nibelung Alberich transforms his rejection by the Rhinemaidens and lust for the gold into a misery that will fundamentally upend the world order. Why, so many have asked, does Wagner do this? Why use the same music for completely opposite emotional purposes? There are infinite potential answers to that question (none of which come from the mouth of the composer) but in our chosen analysis, one must look far beyond Siegmund and far beyond Alberich to understand the moment, not just the motif within the context of the entireity of the Ring.

From its very beginning to its very end, Alberich forms a series of narrative dyads with a number of different characters within the cycle. Most overtly, he functions as a kind of mirror for Wotan, or perhaps the shadow Wotan sees in the corner of his own eye, which is in fact his own shadow. Wagner frequently refers to Wotan as “Licht-Alberich” - Light Alberich - a dialectical construct that is set up in Das Rheingold as Wotan and Alberich emerge by the end as a Janus-faced depiction of the same greed. In comparison, the less obvious narrative relationship between Siegmund and Alberich is rarely mentioned in guides outside of this key motivic moment, in spite of the searing musical bond that links the two characters together.

The world of the Ring is Wotan’s world, and it is the constructs by which it is bound together that create the conditions for everything that later comes to pass. It is, to speak dialectically, a world that possesses within its structures the very material by which it can be unmade. Alberich’s renunciation of love, and by extent, his fundamental violation of nature, would not be possible were it not for the preexisting condtions that both enable his immiseration (which, as is often pointed out by critics, is a system of racialized hierarchy) and, by way of the precedent set by Wotan in his forging of the spear of contracts from the World Ash Tree, the ability to alter what is not, in reality, a natural world in a state of innocence.4

Later, in Die Walküre, the narrative dyad pivots, one could say, away from Wotan and towards Siegmund, who is the new recipient of the same god-ordained (though this time with more specificity) misery and, by extension, the same unstable world order. Siegmund and Alberich, though from very different perspectives, are both Promethean figures in the Ring. The creation of the ring via the renunciation of love and the removal of the sword from the tree as an act of love’s ultimate dedication - both sacred objects, both tied, albeit inversely, to the same emotion - are fundamentally acts of freedom, are breaks with the world as it is and, by extension, with those who lord over it. These acts and the choices therein are both immanently responsible for the terminal decline of the godly order, an order which each character, in their own way, rejects in its totality, Alberich by way of his curse, and Siegmund by his abdication of heaven in favor of dying a free man on earth. The loss of the ring and the killing of Siegmund have, essentially, the same effect on Wotan: they drive him mad.

There is something also to be said about the broader implcations of Siegmund’s words, sung as they are to the “Liebe-Tragik” motif:

Heiligster Minne
höchste Not,
sehnender Liebe
schrende Not
/
brennt mir hell in der Brust,
drängst zu Tat in Tod

(Supreme ecstasy’s / direst extremity / yearning love’s / aching need; (with the transitional addendum into the Nothung passage): is ablaze in my breast urging me to act and to die!)5

These are, of course, oppositional to Alberich’s in intention (”So let the waters listen! / Love it is that I curse!”)6, but the textual comparisons somewhat end there. The linkage of love in between the two texts is meaningful but somewhat bare, as is the musical connection which remains both simple and confounding. Thus, it is only within the broad totality of the Ring as drama, music, and text simultaneously, the structural continuity between two oppositional but similar figures, each defined by their own relationship to agency; and, finally, through the flexible affect afforded by the leitmotif itself - certain in one utterance, absolutely subconscious in another - that the bond between these two moments, moments upon which the very fate of the world hangs in the balance, can be truly understood.

In short, if we are to take seriously the imperative of the total work of art, then it is totality rather than specificity, and specificity in service to totality, that we must bear in mind at any given musical moment. So much can transpire at the instantaneous moment at which we remember someone or something, feel something or intuit a feeling in others. But if we were to perceive life only at that scale, we would not be able to integrate these moments into something graspable, into an identity that can be sustained, into a corporeality that matters. Perhaps this is in part why the Ring moves across the aural and visual field of the listener at the pace of both days and seconds simultaneously: because it transpires not on the scale of music, but of life itself. That music is expanded into the life-scale is its great achievement. As such, it is often enough to listen to the little birds singing in the clearing the song of a woman on the rock. But, just as often, it is better to see the forest through the trees.

When one is born, one is fundamentally born separate. This is very unfortunate, however it is also, inevitably, a fact of life. We come into the world as infants who, around the time our consciousness begins to solidify into something real, suddenly find that a cleavage has taken place between ourselves and the body we came from. This is a physical division, obviously, but also a division of labor, the division between needing and being needed, caring and being cared for, between dependence and independence, power and weakness. We carry it with us forever; it is the first of innumerable severances.

As our lives develop, this base reality of differentiation becomes more intense and more deeply felt, until, one fine day sometime around the third grade, in an instant and all at once (and it does feel that way if you can remember that far back) it occurs to us that we are very much alone, doomed forever to become ourselves, to walk forever in our own world, and, by corollary, to search, mostly in vain and often amid an unintelligible or hostile landscape, for someone, anyone else.

That someone else, broadly defined as the other (which is admittedly a loaded term in both psychoanalysis and philosophy, though I mean it more literally here) presents itself as a void in one’s life that takes the shape of another human being. That shape may seem so close and so real to us, yet, because the other is always inherently unknowable, it remains a void nevertheless, one that can never be “completed” in the way we want. By necessity, we seek a way out of this trap in any way we can; hence the entire gamut of human behavior: conquest, obsession, revenge, longing, hatred, love, all of these things take root in the soil of difference, try to answer the same question: will this make me whole?

One of the more interesting conceits in the pursuit of reconciling the irreconcilable is that of the mirror-self. This has been an obsession of mine for quite some time, possibly forever. The mirror-self is a fantasy that arises from the wreckage of separation for which it presents an impossible solution: the reconciliation between self and other in such a way that the self is left intact while the other is not so distant from us because, well, they are us. To put it briefly, we can say that the mirror-self is the self-that-is-not-myself. It is a longing for sameness, for a repeating pattern within the fabric of differentiation. It accepts that one cannot truly be made whole through recognition alone but believes that this similarity, built upon the bedrock of an inherent empathy, can at least make bearable an existential need. I’ve been lost, but here I am!

Meanwhile, the mirror-self is distinct from a number of associated phenomena. For example, it is not the same thing as the anti- or shadow self, the Mr. Hyde to our Dr. Jeckyll, so to speak, the nobody to our somebody. It should also be differentiated from the fracturing of the self into parts within a whole, as is often the case with mental illness.

I myself am not unfamiliar with this latter idea; I developed bipolar disorder after hitting my head, and find the common depiction of mental illness as the fracturing of the self relatively accurate. Within me now there exists a self that carries with it the suicidal imperative and one who refutes it utterly and celebrates life, a self whose energy radiates outward into the world and one who traps that energy within itself, where it languishes. The two can only be reconciled through an intense regime of medication and therapy, but they are both, literally speaking, me. The mirror-self, meanwhile, achieves its potency because it is fundamentally a condition of outside-ness. It is self-alienation projected onto the idea of another person. It says: Everything I’ve suffered, they’ve suffered in kind.

The mirror-self takes on a number of forms throughout one’s life. Some of these are theoretical phenomena with no outlet in the outside world, but most are relatively simple fantasies that evolve as one ages and as one’s needs for fulfillment change. These forms are, broadly defined: the imaginary friend, the secret family (the adoption fantasy), and the soul mate. In literature, they expand into the incest fantasy and what I’ll call the epistolary self, the self to whom one writes.

Each of these fantasies are foiled, in some way, by the bind from which they originate in the first place. We cannot will into the world someone who is the same as us because only we are, by definition, ourselves. But the mirror-self is a fascinating study in its own right, and, even as one writes critically of it, one still longs, in some way — perhaps via this very explication — to bring it to life. Maybe, I think, sitting at the computer on a snowy Chicago day, someone will read this who is just like me.

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The Imaginary Friend

The easiest resolution to the problem of the mirror-self is to create one whole-cloth. This instinct is particularly strong in children, though it persists into adolescence and even into adulthood via the creative act, the longed-for fictional character, the Mary-Sue.1 However, in most circumstances, only children talk to their creations and act as though they are real.

There is something tragic about the imaginary friend. It is not unsimilar to the tragedy of the caged parrot condemned by domesticity to talk to its own reflection in lieu of of a vibrant rainforest teeming with others like him. The mirror-self, after all, is more a function of loneliness than of narcissism. Its origin lies not in a feeling of inherent superiority of the self over others (though there is always some of that) but rather in the search for recognition and belonging in the world beyond the proverbial reflecting pool.

Despite the alarm it causes their parents, the child of course knows that the imaginary friend is imaginary. Its purpose is not only to entertain or to fill the space a missing other should occupy, but to serve as a means by which the child can show their mother or their peers that their solitude is only an illusion, that they can be self-sufficient in love, in companionship. One often only talks to an imaginary friend when someone is watching, as though to make the other, the real other, jealous. The point lies not only in creating an interior world, but in letting others glimpse something mysterious and unique of which they will never be a part.

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The Secret Family

One is never happy with the family one gets. It is common in children to fantasize that one’s family is not one’s real family, that one has actually been stolen (or adopted) from a family in which all of the members are like themselves. The erudite child seeks erudite parents who understand them, the son with the absent father seeks a father in his own image. The lonely only child imagines a companion around their own age, and so on.

As the drudgery of family life, happy or unhappy as it may be, passes by, it becomes exceptionally easy for the child to look disappointingly at those involved and, further separating themselves from them, say: this cannot be my mother, this mother who tore me from her breast. This cannot be my father, this father who rebuffed my infantile advances. This cannot be my sibling whose annoyance endlessly frustrates. Who are these people who are so different from me? Surely I must come from somewhere else!

The imagined state of this new family is one of inertness disguised as harmony, one in which there can be no strife because there is no foundation upon which strife can be erected. Eventually the child will come to the realization that it is somewhat of a mistake, being alive. Two people create life without a complete understanding of the mechanisms of becoming — the trauma not only of differentiation but also of growth, recognition, disappointment, grief, and resentment that are just as much a part of self-formation as love, ambition, individuality, joy and desire.

Until that realization, the child thinks: somewhere out in the world there are strangers, more perfect strangers, who miss me. If only I lived with them! Then I would truly be free to become myself! All the necessary and structural frictions upon which self-formation depends — the rough hands that mold me — would be so easily smoothed and softened! Instead, because this is not true, often the child later thinks, in petty resignation: if I can’t have this, there must also exist a version of myself that was brought up in the way I wanted, a missing link between what I am and what I want, or was supposed to be. In this context, it’s almost comforting when such a person fails to materialize.

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The Soul Mate

As one matures into a sexually cognizant being, one begins looking towards romantic love to answer the question of who one is. This is an even more alluring development because personal completion is now irrevocably linked to sexual completion. Until we become disillusioned with it, sex with the other is imagined to be simultaneously a heady form of total self-sacrifice and total self-expression, the result of which is a kind of deleterious nothing, and therefore an equity, that both justifies and rectifies all the strife of being different.

The concept of the soul mate rests on the conceit that there exists someone out there that was made specifically for me, another, separate half that can be joined through the romantic act into a singular whole. There is a bit of the secret family fantasy in this in that the concept of the soul mate also aims to obviate the inevitable frictions of romantic love. In romantic love, however, it is not enough that one seeks the other; they also seek in them a perfection they themselves cannot attain — at least, not on their own.

All that being said, the soul mate is a dead end, because love, all love, is built on a foundation of difference. We love the other because they are not us, are distinct from us. Though we share similar interests and beliefs, I would not love my husband if he were the same as me. The lover has something powerful to offer us that we are drawn to yet can’t understand because it comes from the unknowable roots of their experiences. In lieu of sameness, surely there must be something that propels the desire to know and be known, and that something is the mystery of the lover’s own becoming, of who they are to themselves, of all they’ve thought, done or wanted, all of which can only be teased out by being together and explored further by way of touch and language.

Therefore, the soul mate is not a fantasy of reflection but of possession. The drive to possess arises from the same desire to undo the same fundamental cleavage between people, but it is a mere compensation, a way of ameliorating what is unknowable with what is not, physically or otherwise. It believes in the secret magic of the gift of oneself. In love, after all, the drive for belonging is replaced with the drive for belonging to or with another.

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The Incest Fantasy

The incest fantasy is a romantic construct that has about as much to do with the brute reality of incest as Don Quixote does with chivalry. That being said, the uncomfortable truth is that, because love is fundamentally dependent on difference, a love philosophically rooted in the idea of someone exactly the same as ourselves is inherently a little incestuous. In this context, however, the incest taboo is itself dissolved by the sheer unreality of the premise that such a bind could ever be consensual, which is in part why (unlike its more honest depictions in, say, Faulkner) it shows up relatively uncontested in art and literature. (No one is trying to boycott Die Walküre even in today’s puritan culture.)

At the root of the incest fantasy is the concept of the missing twin, the person who is in every fundamental sense the same, is the other who is not the other because they are made from identical elements and conditions. Difference, rather than taking its usual route, is instead mediated by each twin’s divergent vagaries of life, as though a singular light of being has been refracted through the prism of experience into identical but distinct beams.

This concept is best expressed in Robert Musil’s unfinished novel Agathe, the final installment of his colossal opus The Man Without Qualities. In Agathe, Musil’s protagonist Ulrich, the man without qualities himself, after thousands of pages of machinations, seductions, and one of the cleverest campaigns of philosophizing, cavorting and morality undermining in all of literature, has yet to succumb to a love that matters — that is, until he returns home after the death of his father and reunites with his estranged sister, Agathe. The two then embark on a quasi-incestuous relationship (they don’t commit) whose basis serves as a broader inquiry into the nature of not only morality, sensuality, mysticism and love, but also into the smallest, most infinitesimal details of human experience.

In one scene, after Ulrich and Agathe breathlessly declare themselves twins, Ulrich says to her, “Do you realize…that this is a very serious matter we’re talking about?” He continues, in his usual philosophizing way:

“There is not only the myth of the human being who was divided in two; we could also think of Pygmalion, Hermaphroditus, or Isis and Osiris: beneath the differences, it always remains the same. This desire for a double of the opposite sex is very ancient. It seeks the love of a being who is completely the same as oneself and yet another, distinct from oneself, a magical creature who is oneself and yet remains a magical creature and who, above all, has the advantage over anything we merely imagine of possessing the breath of autonomy and independence.

This dream of a quintessential love, free of the limitations of the bodily world, meeting itself into in two beings that are the same unsame self, has risen countless times in solitary alchemy from the alembic of the human skull…The little magic is always the same, whether one sees a lady naked for the first time, or a naked girl for the first time in a high-necked dress, and the great ruthless passions are all due to someone imagining that his most secret self is peering out from behind the curtains of a stranger’s eyes.”

Or, as Siegmund sings to Sieglinde in Die Walküre: you are the likeness I’ve hidden within myself.

*

The Epistolary Self

The epistolary self is the mirror-self to whom or for whom one writes. This is the mirror-self with which I am most familiar. The epistolary novel, poem, what have you, is always a little bit about oneself, even though it is addressed to somebody else, simply because the epistolary subject never, by formal necessity, responds.

When Friedrich Hölderlin writes as Hyperion, a quasi-autobiographical depiction of himself, to his epistolary friend Bellarmin in the novel of the same name: The incurable corruption of my century became so apparent to me from so many things that I tell you and do not tell you, and my beautiful faith that I would find my world in one soul, that I would embrace my whole kind in one sympathetic being —that, too, was denied me; one genuinely gets the sense that what we as readers are witnessing is not a direct address to a specific person but the diffuse scattering of the same light in all directions.

When I was in high school, I used to have a pen pal with whom I wrote historical fiction set in 19th century Paris. We can call my pen pal L and, while I loved him immensely, I am today very doubtful that he was a man.2 At any rate, L felt like the closest thing to the mirror-self I’d ever encountered even though, in reality, we were two teenagers parroting each other’s speech (mediated though it may have been through George Sand’s Indiana.)

One day, about six months into our correspondence, L disappeared. My search for him was a titanic undertaking. It involved the dark web, secret email addresses, Canadian cosplay groups, male models who now work for Palantir, and Franz Liszt. However, no matter how long or how intensely I pursued L, he had vanished from my life and from the internet (which is to say the world) with profoundly devastating consequences, in part because the adolescent heart is delicate and in part because I had no friends in the real world other than myself.

And so, when my friend abandoned me, I took it upon myself to write to him as though he hadn’t. And sometimes, also, I wrote to myself as him, because why not? He had already become me, was already an extension of myself. I needed him as a subject and myself as an object because these shifts in perspective were, I realize now, part of my own becoming, my own integration of myself rather than its opposite. An absence implies something that can fulfill it, and that something was language, and in this case, that language had taken on a literally figurative form.

In short, the epistolary self is a vessel into which matters of substance are poured back and forth from the vessel that is ourselves. It is the closest thing most of us get to addressing the one who can never answer, to caressing the very fringes of the real. This is because the reader is the conduit between the self and other, an entire galaxy of others remembered and forgotten, and takes, whether they want to or not, the position of other-being. This is true regardless of whether such addressing is direct or oblique in form. When we read, we all, for a little bit, become the you. When I write to you I am fundamentally imagining a being who answers when none exists. As long as there is a self with a pen in hand, all writing is writing in the mirror.

I am obsessed with going to the optometrist. I find it to be an experience like no other, beguiling and thrilling at the same time. Perhaps, in an abstracted way, it could even be considered erotic. Ever since my eyes started failing me in the wake of my concussion, I have presented myself to the eye doctor with a misshapen childlike glee, one that’s a little too chipper towards the receptionists who cannot possibly understand what about my being there could so enthrall me.

It is not so much that I enjoy doctors (in the Munchausen’s sense or otherwise) or, as one might suspect, that my doctor is particularly attractive (though he does wear glasses, perhaps to circumvent accusations of conspiracy.) No, for me the reason this is all so exciting is because a visit to the optometrist is distinct from all other modes of seeing and all other modes of being seen. If you haven’t been, and your insurance covers it, it may be worth faking blurry eyes just for the experience.

We are so used to the eye as a symbolic, moral, and metaphysical object — the eye as a technical challenge from art history, the eye as the window to the soul, the eye as an expression of beauty or character, the eye as the locus of narrative emotion: the quivering eye, the downcast eye, the searching eye. Then there is the eye as identification; one thinks of how, in Wagner, for example, the characters so often come to know either themselves or the Other by way of a gaze, especially into a body of water, a reflection. Meanwhile, a more nefarious ocular gesture can be found in the retina scanning stations now used by Customs and Border Patrol at airports around the country. This brings us, of course, to the eye as the symbology of nefariousness and surveillance, a notion that is perhaps most extensively explored not in 1984 but in the work of Lemony Snicket, wherein the eye forms the symbology of a mysterious and questionably benevolent secret society whose mission is nothing less than to reinterpret the world.

How loaded the language of the eye is! Whither Narcissus! Whither Oedipus! Whither Georges Bataille! The verb to see can simultaneously mean to locate, understand, interpret, acknowledge, identify, identify with. To look is also to probe, to search, to interrogate. We wrap our whole lives in seeing and being seen, especially we boring little writers who think it’s nontrivial to write sentences like “The verb to see can simultaneously mean...”

My working life as a critic is itself predicated on how well I can see in new and interesting ways, search for flaws and weaknesses, metaphors and historical precedents, and, more often than not, for times when the contractors working on very expensive architectural projects have been skimping on the job. Even the practice of criticism as a whole, when defined most magnanimously, is an education in ways of seeing.

That’s all well and good, but do you know who (besides my readers) would quickly tire of such platitudes? The optometrist. The optometrist defrocks the eye. He strips the sentimentality from seeing.1 This is because the eye of the optometrist is based neither in myth nor in literature but in modernity. His ancestral teacher is not Sophocles but Newton. As far as the optometrist is concerned, everything before the Optics is little more than a bunch of stumbling around in the dark, belying, perhaps, that his greatest dream is to render blindness a metaphor. The optometrist’s obsession is the kind of seeing unimaginable to the rest of us: a form of seeing without meaning, little more than a means of transduction by which light is converted into image. As such, his is the instrumental eye, the eye as apparatus, the lens, the membrane. How we see is a very answerable question for him.

*

I seek the optometrist because all my life I have wanted interpretation stripped from me. Since childhood, I have longed for a situation in which I am relieved of the burden of what is most important to me, the ability to make things known, by way of reducing it to a mechanism. Such a mechanism would free me in so many ways, would, through the simplest processes of objectification, remove from me the burdens of uniqueness, performance, and adjudication — and through this mechanism I would finally find relief from doing, being, and obeying. But most of all, as a mechanism, it would be inherently state-dependent, which is to say, it could be turned off and on again. With it, I could both have and relinquish to others a newfound agency. Thus, my greatest fantasy of the Eye.

These perverse desires are the only explanation for why I have always been so envious of people who wear glasses. Unlike those with healthy eyes, the near and farsighted among us can throw off, for however long they wanted, the tyrannical yoke of the visual; could cut themselves off from the world with the simple, albeit expensive shattering of glass. In short, they had what I wanted, especially in childhood: a magnificent out.2 And within their kingdom of exalted agency, their kingmaker is the optometrist.

*

Only the optometrist can truly strip language from text. In his hands, words and letters, dissected into pyramids and squares, become tasks, mere means to an end, an end that isn’t, strictly speaking, reading or writing. The reading that does go on in the optometrist’s office is often curiously fractured, such as looking at a page of text as prisms are held up to one’s face, or nonsensical, like the letters on the Snellen chart.

In such a situation, only the optometrist is properly interpreting both the text and the reader, and his methods of interpretation must remain a mystery to us. How does he know what it means, to name just one example, that I have confused a B for an D on the third lowest rung of Dr. Snellen’s opus? Later, he holds a two-columned piece of text in front of me, which may or may not be about deals on travel, and alternates the phoropter’s lenses in front of my eyes so rapidly that even if I wished to make sense of the text, I wouldn’t be able to because I am so focused on the basest properties of sight. The only words that matter — to him or to me — in such a scenario are better and worse. That is a very unique reading condition, indeed!

Meanwhile, the optometrist’s devices encompass both the technological sublime and the cheekiest of postmodern gags. After all, the eye, for all its subjectivity, is itself a terrifying object because it is both essential and exceedingly fragile.3 To expose it to obscure technology approaches an almost unspeakable violation. One feels as though the eye, being something inherent to primordial humanity, should not, for superstitious reasons, be subjected to domination by the Machine. And so, it is not so much the phoropter’s harmless yet startling many-eyed mask that so offends but its proximity to the eye.

The more specific machines — the keratometer (used to discern astigmatism), the tonometer (for glaucoma), the slit lamp (incredible name; used to look more closely at the eye structure) only intensify this feeling of violation, this denuding of the meaning-discerning eye in favor of the eye as a glob of water, vitreous humor, collagen and sugar which, in ordinary life, is grazed only by eyelids and lashes. There is something darkly poetic about the fact that, to be touched in any other respect, the eye must first be partially blinded; the world itself must be dissolved with a few drops of rather unpleasant liquid. One need only make their own psychoanalytical inferences.

Should you end up at the ophthalmologist, this peril only increases, for only the ophthalmologist can see into one of the most intimate, secretive places within the human body: the eye cavity. In doing so, he exposes the liminal space between seeing and thinking where there is only darkness. This subsequently disproves the myth, a myth that even the optometrist plays into, that it is the eye that sees. The vulgar truth is that the eye is only a means to an end. It is a sophisticated evolutionary apparatus allowing light and darkness to collate — via the optical nerve — so that the brain, the real organ of the hour, can make meaning from it. And don’t get me started on the brain.

*

Faced with these wretched facts, the other equipment in the optometrist’s office feels almost offensively trivial, a real laugh of juxtaposition. Take, for example, the auto-refractor, the device one has to look at before sitting in the exam chair. The auto-refractor measures the patient’s refractive error, briefly, the degree to which their eyes are off the mark. It’s a complicated, whirring machine situated in a dark room in which one has to situate one’s cranium, chin down. (A Clockwork Orange always comes to mind.) However, this seriousness is immediately undermined by the ridiculousness of its mechanism: the image the subject must look at for the machine to do its work. In some offices this is an image of a road leading up to a barn on the horizon; in others, such as mine, it is a hot air balloon. In all offices, it is cheerful, colorful, and uncanny.

This brings us to the last great indulgence of the optometry exam: how infantile it is. It is one of the few situations in which an adult can be made to feel so utterly like a child. Even the optometrist’s patient room, with its strange machines, nonsense posters, drawers of magical objects, and books of shimmering, deceptive shapes is as though the Dadaists had once embarked on designing kindergartens.

The optical tasks themselves are almost obscenely regressive. Read these letters! Touch the circle on the picture that looks like it’s floating! Follow the letter A with your eyes! Look at this slide as I move it back and forth! Put these prisms over your glasses! The only thing more delightful than doing these tests is failing them. For a brief, wonderful moment, one reverts to an ancient baby-state in which letters and pictures become nonsensical and useless. What a relief, the overburdened young professional thinks to herself! What a relief to not know anything!

No, seriously, it really is transformative, going to the eye doctor. One begins the appointment as an ailing subject, oft reminded of the realities of growing old, only to leave with the satisfaction of having reconquered toddlerdom. In the interim, one is granted the rare frisson of remembering that, for all our social sophistication, the body is a body, that it contains fluids, terrors, and mysteries, which, within the parameters of Mr. Bataille, perhaps explains the erotism of optometry: to temporarily forego seeing anticipates the blackness of death, whose inverse is, of course, the drive towards new virility.

At any rate, to wrap this all up: so often in my working life, I am taxed by the futility, in ways that extend beyond the physiological, of seeing. This is especially true in an age of delusion and hallucination, of over-stimulation and visual insatiability. Hence, it is solely after having sight itself so utterly deconstructed that I feel in awe of the ability. Only the eye doctor can do that for me. Sorry, Derrida.

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Note (11/8/25): I have edited this essay to add a paragraph about treatments and sources for long covid that I have found helpful.

I would also like to reiterate that this is a piece about the intersection of physical illness, the internet, and health anxiety (or, hypochondria, which, being a lover of psychoanalysis, I’ve chosen to use for historical and stylistic reasons, in part because there is no specific noun for someone who suffers from health anxiety) —a real mental illness from which I and countless others genuinely suffer from. It is a personal essay written with the hope that it can help others with health anxiety and add nuance to a fraught and difficult conversation. I find it ridiculous to have to say this but this piece is not meant to be a universal extrapolation on everyone who is sick from covid. It’s meant to answer the question: what do you do — what can it mean — when you are both chronically ill and actually have health anxiety, the very disease doctors often accuse the chronically ill of having? When you genuinely cannot discern between fear and reality?

i. the dialectical disease

It is 2:30 am and I am laying on the sofa unable to breathe. There’s a Business Insider video about the history of Pantone color matching playing on my phone, but every time I start to pay attention to it, I inhale sharply, seemingly beyond my own volition but not, of course, beyond my powers of observation. And as soon as I take that breath, my thinking about breathing becomes as irregularly cyclical as the breathing itself. It is 3 am. I turn off the sleep function on my Apple Watch in order to check my heart rate, which leaps from 71 beats per minute to 88 in a matter of seconds, in hindsight a self-fulfilling prophecy, but at the time, a conformation of the aberration of my being.

It is 3:30 am. I walk to the bathroom and take the pulse oximeter out of the bathroom cabinet. The reading is normal. 98/102. I watch it with loving vigilance for at least a minute, waiting for the inevitable, my pulse blinking siren red in the darkness, but the number stays the same. I should be relieved by this information, but I am not. This is not what is wrong with me, which means something else must be. I return to the sofa. I take a half tablet of trazodone to lull myself back to sleep, though it takes another hour because my body is fighting so hard against its desired effects, subcutaneously afraid that should I go to sleep with elevated respiration, I’ll stop breathing and never wake up. When I do, in fact, wake up at 8:30 am, my chest is sore. I check my vitals. I check them again, still somehow convinced that the tightness confirms a more sinister pathology than the one whose symptoms I’ve consistently displayed for twenty years — two thirds — of my life. Perhaps the most astonishing part of all of this is how, no matter how often I go through this cycle, I never seem to learn.

I first became a hypochondriac at around the age of eleven, when I went from being a normal fifth grader to being plagued by night terrors, palpitations, and sleepless nights that ultimately landed in the hospital with a klonopin IV hooked up to my arm — all in a matter of months. My body, which had just begun its prepubescent metamorphosis suddenly became wretchedly, incessantly aware of itself, whether out of some form of helpless anger or genuine fear of change, or perhaps an underlying gene expression, I’ll never know. Yet to this day I wonder how the very processes of life could turn into an ailment of the self, where these destructive impulses came from and why the transformation from mentally well to mentally ill was so swift and so brutal.

The truth is, no one knows what exactly causes hypochondria, perhaps in part because it’s an illness no doctor wants to deal with. Molière, for example, had more to say about it than Freud. Studies have showed some evidence of genetic heritability, but preexisting mental illness and environmental factors — ranging from adverse events in childhood to overexposure to health-related information — are assumed to be the primary determining factors.

The primary symptom of hypochondria is called somatic (or somatosensory) amplification, by which ordinary bodily processes (especially one’s vitals) are perceived by the unwell subject to be aberrant, intense, or unbearable. This can present as “hypervigilance” — a self-protective state in which one is always on the lookout for physical abnormalities or, on the other foot, as a spiraling, maladaptive reaction to actually existing sensations, such as when one is sick with a minor illness.

The DSM separates health-related mental illness into separate disorders. Hypochondria is more narrow in scope, wherein the subject has a preoccupation with or fear of a specific, serious illness, such as heart disease or lung cancer. Somatic symptom disorder, on the other hand, is defined by vague or variable symptoms that don’t get better with treatment because they are psychological in nature. Both are comorbid with (or perhaps caused by) anxiety and mood disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and a variety of other psychiatric ailments. In all cases, the recommended treatment is the same as other forms of persistent anxiety: a combination of cognitive behavioral therapy and SSRIs.

What the pill-pushers miss, however, is a fundamental truth of hypochondria, which is that, rather than having a distorted relationship with health and medicine, the hypochondriac instead has a distorted relationship with the self. In psychoanalytic thought, which has more interesting things to say about the subject, hypochondria is seen as a neurotic or narcissistic misdirection of one’s energies either as a substitution or compensation for something the patient lacks or has lacked (such as parental attention, for which the medical system can serve as a replacement), or as a self-protective mechanism against an even greater, deeper-rooted — sometimes even unutterable — loss, pain or fear.1

Each patient on the couch is, of course, different. But the way hypochondria (which I am now using as a catch-all term) presents itself subjectively is common across all subjects. It is, to speak as one of its victims, is essentially a dialectical disease, which is in part why it’s so hard to treat. Sickness and not-sickness entangle themselves in a cyclical struggle whose ultimate outcome is fraught and incomplete because what is true and what is not true are coexistent in the same subject, are born from and contained within the same conditions — whether they are psychoanalytical or biochemical in etiology. The worst part is, knowledge does not change this outcome. I know I have hypochondria. I don’t realize it’s hypochondria until all other avenues have been exhausted. When I do realize it’s hypochondria, I feel such shame that, when I experience another bout of it, the cycle of denial only continues because I’d prefer the problem to be anything but hypochondria. And, after all, it could always be something else.

The subject is ill in that they do, in fact, suffer from an illness — hypochondria — that is both self-perpetuating and self-affirming. This is exacerbated by the of the medical professional, who, inadvertently half-lying, tells the hypochondriac that there is nothing wrong with them (there is) or worse that they have fabricated their woes wholecloth, a sentiment which only worsens their condition by driving them back into their fantasies with renewed zeal. Now even the doctors can’t help them. However, the hypochondriac is not ill in that the supposed maladies with which they are obsessed are simply not present. Their body is, for all intents and purposes, often perfectly healthy, their alleged symptoms merely the processes of the body itself.

And yet, in another twist, anxiety, the autoimmune disorder of the mind, can attack all parts of the human corpus; in a body where nothing is wrong, it manufactures wrongness. Anxiety targets and stimulates every bodily system. It incapacitates the lungs, sends the heart into tachycardia. It activates the sweat glands, produces tremors in the hands. It can (and does, to the hypochondriac) disguise itself as very serious illnesses from anaphylaxis to a heart attack, the kind medical websites tell you not to take a chance on.

Already a disease of the mind, it attacks the brain itself, clouding cognition and plunging the subject into uncanny states of being that feel dangerously close to madness, such as depersonalization, where a person exchanges their body for the perch of outside observation and derealization in which everything, even the most familiar people, places and things — becomes terrifyingly foreign. All of a sudden, nothing is as it should be, as though one has been displaced into a completely different observational and temporal realm.

Once a state of panic has been entered, hypochondria itself becomes an inescapable tautological force. With symptoms so severe, a diagnosis of mere anxiety, the thing people feel when they leave their phone at home, or when they’ve fallen behind on their responsibilities, seems to its victim insulting. This is one of many tragedies of the hypochondriac, that they defend themselves against the prospect of recovery by flattening an ailment into an emotion or worse, a conspiracy. Their trivialization of anxiety, their paranoid belief that it is a lie doctors tell them to elude the real cause of their condition, ensures that they will never break their cycle, that their fear of sickness, in turn, obscures their need for it.

Paradoxically (though not to psychoanalysts), the hypochondriac both yearns for doctors and yet feels rejected by them; simultaneously believes in their expertise — needing it, as they do, for the goal of legitimacy — while denying its existence, painting the doctor as either a common fool unable to identify what is clearly right under their noses, or as a malignant figure unwilling to offer the care to which the hypochondriac feels entitled. In the latter, they are unfortunately less delusional than they may seem.

Because of the expenses, scarcities, and systemic biases inherent in the for-profit medical system, it is true that many who need help (including the hypochondriac) are not able to get it. In many cases, usually owing to widespread racial and gender discrimination, those who actually have rare or difficult to diagnose illnesses simply aren’t believed.2 The epithet of hypochondriasis is used against them as often as it is the hypochondriac, further diluting the term itself while stoking the flames of anti-medical (if not anti-scientific) sentiment that have spread, in recent times, into an uncontrollable wildfire.

The wellness industry, meanwhile, waits perniciously in the wings, ready to embrace with open arms, those who either distrust or feel they know better than doctors, those rejected by the medical system, or are simply unable to access it, and, of course, those who believe they are physically ill when they are, in fact, not. (While not the subject of this essay, an important subvariant of hypochondriac especially catered to by the wellness industry is the conspiratorially-inclined, those who become increasingly convinced that the trappings of modern society, from pasteurization to vaccines, are secretly poisoning them.) Wellness offers the hypochondriac what no doctor can — the confirmation of their ideas, and, more importantly, a feeling of agency. You do have a rare autoimmune disease, and not only that, it can be cured by taking these innovative supplements marketed by a podcaster.3

ii. the virus

One of the great ironies of my hypochondria is that I didn’t suffer from it when the pandemic hit. Despite the terror of a constantly spreading and at the time incurable illness, these fears were assuaged by the simple fact that everyone believed in it and behaved accordingly. People masked up and practiced social distancing. They avoided large crowds and met friends outside. In general, they showed care towards one another out of both fear and compassion. When I finally went to get my first Covid jab, standing in line at the United Center among hundreds of other people, I was moved to tears by the benevolent potential of the state, saw in its response to this crisis a glimmer of a better world.

Soon however, a darker truth — and a more honest portrayal of the state under capitalism — emerged. Even though millions were still sick and dying, the pandemic was declared over. Mask requirements were dropped. Efforts towards both a real cure and the mitigation of environmental factors, specifically poor indoor air circulation, were abandoned not unlike the rest of the American public. It was time to get back to work, back to the office, back to generating revenue for the people who really matter in this world.

Much of the dark future we are living in can be attributed to the fact that innumerable people — really all of us — were sacrificed at the alter of “the economy” as though it were separate from our bodies and what they do, feel, and believe. Just simple inputs and outputs. Literal grist for the mill. Nothing good can come of a society in which human life itself is viewed as disposable, in which death becomes trivial if not meaningless — not even a rhetorical cudgel but a necessary evil. Each of us is dealing with this abandonment in our own ways, mostly as a form of quiet, deeply repressed denial. To so much as write about the pandemic or the illness that perpetuated it provokes such vitriol, it seems unlikely that any form of collective healing, much less action, will come to pass anytime soon. After all, you don’t see many novels about the Spanish Flu.

I caught Covid in a viciously ironic way. I was on an airplane, doing the right thing. I was vaccinated. I wiped my hands with a disinfecting cloth. I wore an N95 mask, which I think everyone should do in large gatherings or while in transit (especially on airplanes which are already nasty) as a matter of basic hygiene, no different from washing your hands after you take a shit. If you point this out, people, for base memento mori reasons, call you a paranoid scold. Well I’m not paranoid, because, after five years of avoiding the virus, I got really fucking sick through no fault of my own.

My first symptom was a wretched, pea-soup brain fog, probably because the virus found the part of me that was already injured. At the time I was in New Mexico and chalked it up to altitude sickness. Five days later, only when I started to cough up phlegm, did the double line emerge. I went to the urgent care and demanded Paxlovid, precisely because studies show that it can reduce the risk of long term illness. The nurse (who was not wearing a mask) told me I should take Vitamin D and Zinc instead and I basically told her to go fuck herself and give me the pills. For five days, I suffered through nickle-mouth and endless episodes of Taskmaster until I started to feel better. That is, until I didn’t.

Even though the cold-like symptoms lifted, others remained. I became terrorized by bouts of panic and sudden and violent mood swings, some of which plunged me into dangerous and startling depths. No matter how still I kept my body, I found myself short of breath. Most of all, the fatigue was unbearable. I felt as though I was made of lead, like some kind of medieval effigy. Short trips to the bathroom required marathon-like effort. I showered sitting down. Whenever I sat up, stood, or walked, my heart rate would leap from the already aberrant 90s to the 130s. Only in the past week or so — three months later — have I been able to go on short walks or work for more than an hour. Slowly, four naps a day have dwindled into one.4 But perhaps worst of all, the longer I went without healing, the more my thoughts circled around one drain: the possibility, very real, that I would never get better. In that regard, I found, to my detriment, plenty of help.

Covid-19 has a deleterious relationship with hypochondria. More than any other illness, it confirms hypochondria’s fears and biases while satisfying its subconscious desires, including being sick, ensuring constant perpetuation. The illness is everywhere; one can contract it at any time. Worse than that, it is serious. It does still-unknown damage, especially in the long term, where studies have found that, even in mild cases that seemingly resolve, it can cause everything from small blood clots to myocarditis and neurocognitive damage.

Acutely, it has no agreed-upon average severity or duration. For some people, it’s no more troubling than the common cold and resolves in a few days. For others, it becomes a temporary or permanent disability: Long Covid. Nobody knows why or by what mechanism. Worst of all, the doctors, unlike with heart disease or lung cancer, have yet to uncover a proper treatment for Long Covid or even for some of its symptoms, making it both nebulous and incurable, and leaving its sufferers in abject despair.

In its long or short form, the virus’s range of symptoms is a dictionary. They affect the brain and nervous system (anxiety, depression, brain fog, loss of taste or smell), the lungs (cough, dyspnea), the heart (tachycardia), and the whole body (fatigue.) When a psychologically healthy person catches the virus, it already can prove — and feel — devastating. When a hypochondriac catches it, it is world-shattering. Covid creates for them a funhouse mirror, with new, sicker versions of themselves appearing in every direction. Hypochondria, an illness once metaphorized as a spiral, becomes instead a tessellation, spreading into the ether wherever its pieces fit together.

One could even say that when the hypochondriac catches Covid, they have already caught Long Covid, and each day their symptoms persist, even as they improve, the diagnosis continues to confirm itself. In both one’s addled mind and in the real world, it is all entirely plausible. The only cure for the fear is to get better, but one, of course, may never get better. There is even some evidence that the fear itself can inhibit this from happening. Covid becomes a nexus by which the bodily harmless condition of anxiety can become a real, potentially irreversible sickness.

This is why the worst thing the hypochondriac can do is go on the internet. This is true to such an extent that doctors now have a name for it: cyberchrondria. When I reached out to a few writer friends for whom it took longer than usual — ranging from a few months to over two years — to recover from Covid, the first thing they said to me was whatever you do, do not go on the forums. Reader, I went on the forums.

The hypochondriac has a similar paraphilic relationship to online “support groups” as they do to doctors, except, unlike doctors, online support groups not only tell them they’re right, they point to other, previously unconsidered things that can be wrong. To be fair, forums are often comprised of people seeking solidarity with one another in times of illness and who genuinely try to help others in their recovery. This is especially true with regards to Covid because of, well, the mass abandonment of society to illness, but also the lack of proper care or even outright denial people receive from doctors — that is, if they can afford to see one.

That being said, these spaces lack the very important interpersonal guardrails of in-person or video-based support groups, namely a real, actively involved moderator imbued with the knowledge of both the subject matter and of the signs of psychological harm people can inflict on one another. On the free-range internet, one is faced with all forms of native pathologies, ranging from cranks and trolls, to cyber-Munchausen’s to wellness influencers and, well, other hypochondriacs. (When I first posted in /r/Covid19positive about my symptoms, I got two responses. One basically amounted to “Good luck, I’ve had it for over two years.” The other was someone very insistent that I try bovine colostrum.)

Above all, forums, especially medical forums, are more often than not negatively polarized. The people who get the help they need, the people who get better, the people who find outside support from friends and family no longer need to go online. (This is why the only good Covid subreddit is /r/longhaulersrecovery.) Often, all that’s left is sick people giving advice that doesn’t work to other sick people. If you say something to this effect, you get permabanned almost instantly.

Meanwhile, helplessness, if left to fester, can easily turn into malice. On other platforms, I found some in the “COVID community” obsessively collecting obituaries of people who died under 60 from heart attack, stroke, and cancer, claiming them as victims of the virus with an almost malignant glee. Another one bites the dust. Oh well, that’s what you get for not listening. There will be more. I don’t think this helps anyone. All it did was scare the shit out of me, a victim of the same negligence that still victimizes all of us. Here, a systemic problem that, as it did in the beginning, requires a massive, collective solution routinely gets blamed on individuals, many of whom, like me, do take precautions, and even if they don’t, do not deserve to die. I don’t think anyone, COVID or otherwise, deserves to die. That is what separates me from the people in power who got us into this mess.

Speaking as the hypochondriac, however, what was most harmful to me was the impact on healing. Not only was I surrounded by stories of fractured human lives and conditions much worse than those I was experiencing, I was also subjected to actively harmful content inappropriately recommended to me by these websites’ algorithms. After all, extreme content equals more views equals more engagement equals more profit. The X platform exposed me to post after post saying that Covid is worse than AIDS, that everyone secretly has Long Covid and will subsequently drop dead in a few years, and that it gives healthy children leukemia.5 In my already unwell state, the Reddit app sent me multiple push notifications for posts containing suicidal ideation.

Then, there’s the advice. Besides the fact that everybody and every body is different and that one should not go on the internet looking for actual legitimate medical advice (which most of us lowkey do, lawyers aside) — the further one treads from reputable websites, the more this advice can be actively dangerous for reasons that should be obvious. More benignly, on forums, people throw everything but the kitchen sink at their symptoms and are thus unable to say which of these factors actually helped them get well. Someone trying to get better fast so they can get back to work does not have the time to engage in meaningful self-administered clinical trials, after all.

Covid is especially evil because which problems are vs not caused by the virus are hard to discern, especially if they are lingering, if separately treatable remnants of the virus itself. This is especially true of anxiety — which Covid is known to cause. Now the hypochondriac’s foe is back in an even more pernicious form. The virus causes anxiety which looks like other symptoms of the virus, a virus one has already caught. The forums often actively discourage the idea that some of one’s physical symptoms are related in any way to psychiatry even though the virus actively targets the brain or even to ailments that may have been preexisting yet augmented by illness such as vitamin deficiencies or, in my case, cervicogenic headaches. Where the virus ends and the rest of the body begins is often non-negotiable.

It costs little to test for and treat these aforementioned problems without having to concede that the virus was at fault. But because the forums are hypochondriac in essence, everything becomes distorted by the virus, by the need to know about the virus and the desire for confirmation, that it is the virus, that I am sick. There were days when I was on the floor in tears believing that I was never going to work again. And, truth be told, I wrote the better 2/3rds of this essay before I got sick. Because of the neurological symptoms I still suffer from, I don’t know if I’ll ever write something so coherent ever again.

There were sudden flares of panic when thinking about heart disease or dysautonomia. There were huge Amazon shopping carts full of supplements none of which I ran by either my doctor or my psychiatrist, believing that they’d take the care I needed away from me. Subsequently, there were days I spent on the toilet from oversupplementation, water fasts, and bone broth diets. There were days when I believed I suffered from a whole alphabet of chronic illnesses, from MCAS to Sjorgen’s syndrome. There were days when I nursed my heart rate with the kind of devotion previously reserved for saints.

While I’ve also made my mistakes when caring for myself, especially in terms of rest — both in that I didn’t rest enough at the beginning only to rest too much for too long out of fear — I believe wholeheartedly that some of what plagued me, like fatigue, would’ve gotten better sooner if I didn’t listen to the forums. In the course of the last two months, I’ve become so deconditioned that I can barely lift my grocery bags or walk more than a mile because I followed the cardinal rule of the forums: if you get out of bed, you will never get better. If you feel well enough to pursue treatment avenues such as physical, vestibular, vision, psychological or occupational therapy, what have you, you are only ever risking your life more. Forgive me, but unless your condition is so severe that you are bedbound and require outside care, I just don’t think that’s true.

My covid-induced anxiety only started to get better when I told everyone I wasn’t able to work and, later, when I adjusted my psych meds, which, it turns out, had been depleted by Paxlovid. My other symptoms have started to improve from legitimate medical interventions ranging from guanfacine (a lifesaver for brain fog and orthostatic intolerance) to iron supplementation to getting glasses to physiotherapy. The thing that has helped me most with fatigue — heart rate variability-based pacing — I learned from a legitimate chronic illness website called Health Rising, which was sent to me by a friend. The doctors, it is true, don’t really know anything about long covid, which is frustrating and demoralizing. There have been many times I have advocated for myself and have succeeded thanks to advice I got from some folks I know who are very active in disability politics. However, I think it is entirely fair to say that the idea that doctors are universally malicious, that they will only ever fail you, keeps people from getting the care they need.

However, of all the bad things I saw on the forums — from the default assumption of the ME/CFS-type of long covid over others,6 to the advice to start an aspirin regimen without the consultation of a doctor, to the championing of various online platforms that use AI for their analysis and dole out some pretty heavy pills left and right, all while charging an arm and a leg to do so — the one that strikes me as the most pernicious is a rather common bias in American life: the bias of the pill form, the idea that a disease is not real or at least not serious until it has a wholly biological basis that can be treated systematically through medication.

This bias inevitably both forecloses and establishes a culture of fear around all kinds of profoundly helpful treatments, even if they aren’t for everyone (nothing ever is) or don’t cure every part of the disease: a fear that their success would de-legitimize the illness in the eyes of outsiders. I know, deep in my heart, that this behavior is just as much a search for healing as it is for control — over one’s body, over one’s future, over the insane and sick-making times we live in, that it is, above all, a response to loneliness and abandonment. But I refuse to acknowledge that search for control as being healthy and harmless to others. The uglier, messier truth is that no disease exists in which the matter is only physiological, a mere faulty mechanism, that illness writ large doesn’t involve some manner of thinking, history, instinct, care or belief. To say otherwise is the logic of the car mapped onto the body, living, breathing, inherently imperfect. Or perhaps the logic of the computer.

*

Whenever you write about the internet and the harms it does to oneself or to others, people of all political stripes come out from the woodwork with their own versions of cyberlibertarianism. For whatever reason, the internet we presently inhabit, ruined as it has been by profit-driven psychopaths whose websites make people insane, drive them towards violence or into the arms of violation can’t and should never, be regulated. In many ways, it’s rather like the supplements, born from the same laissaiz faire 1990s and reflective of the belief that governance begins and ends at the self. The truth of the matter is, the internet, more than anything else, is responsible for vaccine skepticism. Who knows how many people the wellness industry and its army of online cranks kill every year. And yet, the internet is always harkened to be some kind of bastion of inherent truth, as the only real avenue for everything from self-expression to medical advice simply because it is the most unimpeded. I think the time to challenge this notion has long since passed.

In many ways, COVID is the first post-internet illness. It is a disease whose course is altered and augmented in ways both positive and negative from internet input, be it citizen science or anti-vax conspiracy theories to more morally ambiguous anti-doctor rhetoric. For the very first time (though this was of course intimated by AIDS), a virus has become broadly interpretable outside of the medical establishment, through different means and cultures of varying levels of intellectualism. It is both conspiracy and subculture, diagnosis and identification, personal, collective, or otherwise. For those like me who still suffer from it, hope is kept alive and shattered in the same moment because, at the end of the day, there is no real truth. We do not know. All there is, is the sickness. For me, two sicknesses, in fact, intertwined, in love, maybe forever. Both very, very real.

We live in an epidemic of bad autobiography not seen since the days of ThoughtCatalog. This is true to the extent that we can even historicize Substack as being a kind of ThoughtCatalog 2. After thirty years of blogging, fifteen of social media (with its lure of sudden fame), and the profitable, much-written-about rise of autofiction, the writer and the subject have become hopelessly blurred unless one makes a concerted effort to separate them.

In an age of over-mediation, it is perhaps inevitable that, when one begins one’s writing life, the self is viewed as the default subject, and the pseudo-empiricist interpretation of the world through the naive-but-evolving self as the default mode of seeing. A corollary to this self-as-content is that the expected mode of writing about oneself is automatically relegated to the diaristic, memoiristic, or otherwise confessional.

Like I said in my last essay, I think so many people write about themselves in part because they feel a certain insecurity or lack of authority when writing about other topics or in modes that do not use the confessional “I.” Then, as now, the only cure for such insecurity is reading and writing more. Fear of being derivative also lends itself to autobiography because the self is always original, and not only is the self always original, it is also always self-perpetuating. When writing about the self, one never, theoretically, runs out of content.

With regards to essay writing in particular, I think people resort to the autobiographical because they find the apocryphal but commonly taught rule that essays can’t make “I” statements restrictive and impersonal. In comparison, writing from one’s own limited perspective feels “natural,” and for good reason: we tell each other our stories every single day, but one only has to write an essay once or twice a month.

Often, and I think this goes too often unsaid, young writers in particular feel that diaristic writing is the only way to make a name (or money) for oneself in an era of platform oversaturation, failing to realize that there is no form of content more oversaturated than autobiography. If everyone is writing about themselves, then nobody remains interesting for very long. A life, from the perspective of the living, can start to feel rather interminable. I think we writers have all reached a point in our lives where writing about ourselves borders on the unsustainable, if not outright exhausting.

This is not to say that one should not write about oneself, or that there is nothing meaningful to be found in the diaristic form. The world’s many memoirists are excellent at their craft. (Recently I read Charlotte Shane’s An Honest Woman and was deeply moved by it.) Nor am I saying that because I don’t write in this form (I do sometimes!) that I am somehow a superior or more serious writer. Despite my druthers, I very much believe that the self is a useful if not invaluable tool in the essayistic toolbox. But, like any other tool, one must be mindful of how one uses — or overuses — it.

Tackling the self thus requires examining critically how or why we want to use it, or whether we should bother using it at all. It also means interrogating the supremacy of the diaristic form at the expense of other, often more effective forms of self-insertion, such as the anecdotal or observational. At the center of these debates and techniques lies, of course, the question of distance. Are we really so interesting? Do we, at the end of the day, really want to be so known?

the fallacies of the self

self-defense

The self offers the writer a defense that is also an irreconcilable contradiction. One is always the authority on oneself, which protects against a lack of authority in other matters. This makes the self a very effective shield against criticism. How can you say that my argument is lacking? I was writing about myself. But this sword has two sides; the one that cuts is also the one that bites. By writing exclusively about the self, any criticism of the writing is taken as criticism of the writer, too.

The more intimate the subject matter, the more unbearable this criticism becomes. I was just minding my own business! How could you be so cruel! I bore my soul to you and this is how you repay me! When one’s identity is so wrapped up in “being a writer,” if the writing is unsuccessful, one must, by extension, be failing at being oneself. What a genuinely intolerable thought, really the epitome of being too hard on oneself. It is perhaps for this reason that, paradoxically, the best way to improve at writing about oneself, to protect oneself against the fear of negative feedback, is to hone the skills of writing from other perpectives and about other things.

Read more

A few weeks ago, I struggled with an essay to the point of abandonment for the first time in about a year. This is not to say that I rarely struggle with writing (I actually struggle more with being mentally well enough to write, if we’re being honest) but that the way I write is structured to make abandonment the path of last resort. Still, after abandoning the essay, which was about the German poet Friedrich Hölderlin and the curious dialectic of closeness and distance in his work, I became interested in how this abandonment happened, its points of failure. Breaking down this failure inevitably led to further notes on craft, which itself led to thinking about how and why I write writ large.

This is something I rarely do systematically, and something I almost never share with others, mostly because I don’t think the way one writes — or, for that matter, one’s particular success in writing — can be truly replicated. Only I can write my essays because my way of being in the world is limited to me and, furthermore, the way I learned to write was largely intuitive. I’ve never attended any retreats or seminars, nor did I major in English or journalism. There are no structures I’ve learned from others that I can impart onto you, no hot tips, no trade secrets. But as far as my practice is concerned, I’ve noticed many patterns over the years in the way I work and feel that for those first starting out or who are in a slump, these practices (and beliefs) may perhaps prove fruitful.

Writerly success, on the other hand, is more variable. Much of the writing advice on this platform is devoted not to the skill of writing (though there is plenty of that, especially with regards to fiction) but to how to make money writing. How to get published, how to maximize one’s profit from Substack, how to get views, clicks, meetings with agents, all of which, while sometimes helpful, often omits the obvious: one cannot make money from writing if a) one doesn’t write and b) the writing is bad.

The dream of writing as a kind of glamorous pastime full of fame, parties in New York, and lots of cash is more often than not sold to those who are early in their career by writers who either came up through traditional paths in publishing or who got lucky with platformization, which is to say, those whose journeys are often no longer replicable, and who should, frankly, know better than to pretend that they are. As someone who was in the right place at the right time (the 2010s), when going viral was enough to make or break a career, there is nothing I can say about making money (beyond negotiate your freelance rates if you can) that holds any water in the oversaturated and proletarianized writing landscape we are currently stuck with. In an age where almost no one is protected from the vagaries of the tech industry, private equity, and political repression, regardless of where or how we started, this is a ship we will all go down on together.

That being said, I’m exposed to a fair bit of writing from burgeoning writers via Substack Notes, and there are a few mistakes I see made repeatedly in areas where my help may be of some use. Additionally, I have developed a rigorous set of practices that I credit with my success (and I will call it that, thank you very much!) — as an architecture critic, a sportswriter, and an essayist writ large.

I need to have these practices because, well, I write a lot. In order to feed myself, I publish regularly, whether in the form of my architecture column at The Nation, when I am on site at cycling races for Escape Collective, for this Substack (a bestseller!) or my long-running blog McMansion Hell — not to mention the handful of (often large) freelance pieces I put out every year. (I am also writing a book, but we’ll have to see how it turns out before I can contribute to Book Discourse.) When thinking about craft, however, I consider long-form essays in whatever genre to be my most important work.

In this small guide I’ve decided to put together, I’ve narrowed my advice into four parts: choosing a subject matter, the pitfalls of writing about oneself, practice and discipline, and the myriad distractions and conditions (many of them mythical) people feel are essential to ‘being a writer.’ This essay will be devoted to the first of these.

part 1: choosing a subject (write about whatever you want, but be serious about it)

I: Beware of Hot Takery

It is a mistake, especially at the beginning of one’s career, to treat writing as a kind of competition where, by publishing with immediacy about whatever the topic du jour is, you can maximize your exposure and build a career quickly on generating chatter. There may be some practical truth to this, but creatively it’s a double edged sword. Many popular subjects (political shockjockery, micro trends, TV episodes, stuff people said on this platform or others) are by their very nature ephemeral, and while gratifying in the short term, ephemerality does not lend itself well to producing writing that has lasting value either to yourself or to others. That doesn’t mean one shouldn’t write about ephemeral subjects, but that the attempt should at least be broad enough to be interesting later.

I’ve learned this lesson the hard way myself — after all, my career took off in 2016, at the beginning of the hot take era. I wrote a lot of essays that are either dated, irrelevant, or come off as amateurish because they were all impassioned opinion and no deeper substantiation. Some of these pieces were popular and successful at the time, but in the long run they haven’t amounted to much. Though this is less true about politics than it is culture, when I see something I feel is urgently relevant, I often ask myself: will people forget about this next week? Do I really want to waste prime Baudrillard on Bombadilo Crocodilo? (Though the thought is tempting.)

Hot take writing quickly becomes exhausting. Heat requires combustion and sometimes we just run out of tinder. The pressure to publish a piece every time something happens on TV, social media, in celebrity or internet culture (the latter of which now moves too quickly and is too disposable to write about effectively even in the short term) is an immediate ticket to burn-out land. Furthermore, the combative tone of hot-takery inherently invites conflict, and conflict, while sometimes lucrative, is mostly upsetting and taxing, even if you think you can transcend it. More of us can’t than can. I’ve learned that it’s sometimes better to avoid writing (and even better to avoid posting) during moments of extreme anger or indignation, and instead wait for my brain to cool down so that it can make new, more substantial connections linking my subject and my feelings towards it to other mediums, events, and ideas. If you do have one bullet you really need to unload, try to aim as accurately as possible.

It’s seen as a given that we must live and die by the oscillation of the hype cycle. But after each cycle is completed, then what? In the long run, I feel it’s better to write a good essay a week or a month or even a year from whatever happens than a mediocre one in the moment. (And after a certain point, one does know when what one’s writing is mediocre.) When it comes to thinking about contemporary culture, instead of caving to the pressure of producing work now, ask yourself: wouldn’t you rather write the essay on this? Five or ten years from now, when people are revisiting this subject as a cohesive or completed work or event, don’t you want to be the one to have addressed it most cohesively within its social, cultural or historical milieu? In other words, what would the final word on this look like?1

More often than not, we can’t truly understand a subject until time separates it from us. Only looking backward does it begin, and continute to make more sense. It’s quite possible that, despite all the likes and all the virality I see out in the world, the best essay on Severance or The White Lotus has yet to be written. In general, it’s hard to gain perspective on our time while we are living in it. Even when writing in the past tense, we are more often than not still writing in a kind of present tense. To look back on the contemporary is to make use of untrodden rather than exhausted territory. There are few pastimes more fruitful than walking among the graveyard of takes. Fredric Jameson’s imperative still rings true and serves as advice in its own right: “Always historicize.”

II: write about what you want to, actually

This is an obvious corollary to the first point, but there is never a wrong time to write about something. There are more subjects in the world than there are writers to write about them. Curiosity is, as always, the oxygen that gives life to fire. Some of my best essays are on random (for me), obscure or antiquated subjects — Formula One, pictures of KMarts on Flickr, the Ring cycle. My favorite piece of writing from the last two years is an essay I wrote for Protean (which will soon be online) about the Yugoslav painter France Mihelič, whom most of you have probably never heard of. I’d wanted to write about Mihelič for awhile, because his work about death and life, decay and regeneration, is imperative in a time where life itself is increasingly devalued and instrumentalized. I pitched the editors there off the cuff about this guy practically unknown outside of the post-Yugoslav world, and you know what? There wasn’t even a back and forth — they took it as soon as I pitched it.

This brings me to another point: It’s a waste of time agonizing over whether your subject matter will come off as weird to editors or whether it fits into what magazines think are profitable stories.2 The point is to convince them that what you want to write about is worthwhile.3 Furthermore, you never know in what ways an essay will be successful. We default to virality, to likes and shares as currencies of whether an essay is good or not. But there are discrepencies even between these.

The Substack algorithm, for example, works in mysterious ways and does not reward expediency the same as other forms of social media. We forget that not everyone wants to bother signing in to click the little heart at the end of the email. (I almost never interact with essays I read via my own inbox for this reason.) The essays I write on Substack often do better on other platforms because most of my readers are not Substack readers. Twitter, meanwhile, is dead, but for writers and editors (whether we like it or not), Bluesky is less dead. Meatspace, one must remember, is forever, which is why it’s still a privilege to write for print.

Every once in a while, an essay of mine goes viral on whatever platform or platforms (my most recent one was for Lux about sex and surveillance.) Whenever that happens, I get to go on radio or podcasts, I get new ins, I make more money, and all is grand. This is always a surprise for me which is why I don’t bother trying to replicate it. Instead, I trust my gut and know that for me the point is to publish a piece because it needs to be in the world. The rest is a gamble. For example, my essays on the Ring rarely broached the 100 like mark on here and yet they were widely circulated among those who care about that kind of thing. They earned me a seat at the table writing about classical music for other publications. Some were even taught in university classrooms. Those essays didn’t make me lots of money (maybe a thousand dollars collectively), but there isn’t a world in which I’d deem them unsuccessful.

Anyway, when you’ve found a subject, devote yourself to it for a while. This can mean a few weeks, a few months, or even a few years. Each new essay, if you really think about it, is already the culmination of your entire writing life, and a writing life is never wasted. This might make it seem like it requires infinite leisure hours to get to the point, but almost every single writer I know has a day or night job. I work on-topic during the day and spend my nights and weekends on my obsessions. I’ll get to this in a later essay, but I do a lot of writing “for free” because I have personal projects I care about and find personally enriching — each of these also helps shape my development as a writer. If I want to do something, I make time to do it. I once wrote a magazine profile of the Dutch cyclist Mathieu van der Poel on a 9 hour return flight from France.

If you’re in need of a new obsession (this also doubles as writer’s block advice), read an old book or choose a poet whose work you’ve always wondered about. Spend an hour with a painting that moves you; spend two weeks reading about the artist. Do the John Berger thing where you come up with a tight, sparkling 1500 words on any given picture. Even if writing about place isn’t your cup of tea, take in, and write about, landscapes. This is generative in its own right and also a useful skill to give depth to whatever else you’re writing about. Whenever I’m stuck, I ride the L or the Metra back and forth in order to feel the effortless passage of my body through space, to devote myself to looking without obligation.

Travel is generative even locally, at the scale of the neighborhood. The architecture critic Michael Sorkin once wrote a delightful book just about the walk from his flat to his New York office. Even the most quotidian objects and fixtures in the world can be remarkably expansive. I think often of Shannon Mattern’s deep dive on cardboard boxes in Places, and Lisa Hix’s Collector’s Weekly essay about the history of the “grandma couch.” The architectural historian Siegfried Giedion, in his book Mechanization Takes Command, which is about the mass production of everyday items, once remarked: “[No] more in history than in painting is it the impressiveness of the subject that matters. The sun is mirrored even in a coffee spoon.”

III: the juxtaposition and feeling traps

The trouble with writing is that it can take a long time to figure out what you want to say about whatever passion you’ve gotten yourself into. Like I said about myself in the introduction to this guide, the good news is only you can write your essay about whatever it is you’ve chosen. Only you can relate your subject to yourself, to how you view the world, to all the other things you’ve read and done in life.

Still, there are two common traps I see people fall into time and time again. The first is the juxtaposition trap. Juxtaposition works best when it is tight and specific. One text, one artwork. One poem, one current event. One philosophical theme and one quotidian fixture of our lives. The more elements you add, the less effective juxtaposition as a structure becomes. ( In fact, your structure is no longer juxtaposition, which is fine, it’s just that the essay now needs further development and will probably be longer.)

What’s worse, however, is that writers too often use systemic problems or frameworks in ways that merely amount to juxtaposition. This is more understandable if you’re writing something that’s opinionated and quite short or if you need to do a bit of rhetorical agitprop, but the longer the piece, the more you’ll need to define and clarify the systems you’re putting to use. If you want to say that capitalism causes something, I am begging you to give me a mechanism by which it does so. Through what industry? What processes? Who, exactly, is profiting and by what means? (Also, in culture writing, too many equate capitalism with ‘the pressure of the market’ which is not the same thing.)

The same goes for feminism which has, in the wake of choice feminism, become a catch-all vibe of ‘being a woman’ completely separated from its rich body of theoretical work. There are so many feminisms, each rife with its own ideas, and just one idea is often enough to structure one if not multiple essays. You don’t even need to pull an “as so and so says” — you can just structure around the idea as you interpret it. (For example, the seminal first chapter of John Berger’s Ways of Seeing is a reinterpretation of Walter Benjamin’s essay “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” which is credited only in a blurb at the end.)

This is not an invocation to be more academic, but rather to be more focused. The only cure for a lack of focus is reading more. Honestly, sometimes I get the feeling, especially from young writers, that if they cite another’s idea it makes them somehow unoriginal or derivative, when the opposite is true — new relations between subjects and ideas can only ever be generative. This fear of being unoriginal or insecurity towards how much one has read (or rather hasn’t read) in part explains why so many writers start out by rooting their writing in — and becoming over-reliant on — the self, a topic I’ll address in the second part of this series.

Lets look at another trap: emotion. It’s easy to get stuck on feeling and hard to transform emotion into more productive results. This was the problem at the root of my aborted Hölderlin essay. For reasons both aesthetic and personal, I felt so close to Hölderlin, his work, and the time he lived in, but could not channel that closeness into something new or interesting to say about the work itself. This wheel-spinning never amounted to anything analytical or even directional, instead it became an exercise in pure, messy sensation.

I know that the only answer to this problem is not to abandon Hölderlin per se but to read more about him until a path forward emerges. I had this same problem when I was writing about Siegmund from Wagner’s Ring. He left such a profound impression on me, it took literal months to untangle my attachment to him from why I found him compelling as a character within a larger work. The key to unlocking him as a subject came from, of all things, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, which, at the time, I was rereading on a whim.

More straightforward criticism is not exempt from the feeling trap. There are many times (especially when thinking about novels) where I find it hard to move past the “I like this” or “I disagree” stage; to dig deeper into the marrow of the thing. Many people love and write about books, but the best book reviewers are the ones who not only integrate the book with the outside world, history, culture, or other works but also metabolize it via their own analytical practice.

An essay can wax lyrical all it wants but interpretation and criticism are best thought of as closed systems. It’s a common misconception that the point of an essay is always overt persuasion. If an essay is disciplined within its own structure — if it says what it needs to effectively — it can exist and be secure in its own right, no matter how weird or off the cuff it is. Be forewarned, however, that it is blatantly obvious when vibes are prioritized over cohesion, when people write without having anything to say. There’s nothing more boring than an essay that goes nowhere and merely rides out the tepid momentum of its own prose.

I suppose I’ll end this piece with my best advice when it comes to choosing a subject: nothing is irrelevant. History is a continuum in which everything is irrevocably enmeshed, and the system of relations is by its very nature infinite. Maybe the brouhaha over autofiction is not only an opportunity to write about the business of publishing or the pervasiveness of internet thinking in our lives, but about psychoanalysis or the autobiographical novels of the 18th century. Maybe the incest brothers in The White Lotus have more in common with the Southern Gothic than they do the ills of contemporary pornography and television spectacle. If you’re a good writer, you can make anything interesting and the only way to become a good writer in this vein is to write about everything, even if you think you won’t be good at it, because the only way to become good at something is to do it. So goes, unfortunately, the tautology of practice.

For as long as I’ve been able to read, I’ve exhibited a certain but common type of intellectual pathology: an inexhaustable pursuit of information that arouses a nigh-hypnotic sense of anxiety. For me, the origins of this practice can be found in a childhood hyperfixation with the Microsoft Home edutainment game Dangerous Animals, which was a kind of interactive encyclopedia of Fauna That Could Kill You. This, paired with a set of obscure Disney yearbooks featuring articles about the Man-of-War jellyfish armed me with enough material to both unsettle my parents and self-soothe the emergent symptoms of attention deficit disorder.

Why I found an early pleasure in such material can be somewhat explained by a child’s sense of naive invincibility. I, a five year old, could definitely ride a lion to the grocery store. Unfortunately, though, a child starts growing up, and soon this odd behavior took on more psychologically aberrant qualities. For example, whenever the railroad crossing gates went down, I would scream hysterically at my parents to never drive around them. If an especially raucous thunderstorm rattled the rafters, you could find me cowering in the bathtub with my prized possessions (a pasture of Breyer model horses and my diary.)

These were normal childhood fears. But the older I got, the more I knew, the darker the fears became. In middle school, I lived in irrational terror that artificial sweetener would give me cancer. Roller coasters, which once thrilled me, became associated with a sudden and gruesome death. I spiraled around the idea of a White Noise-type chemical disaster, fantasizing endlessly about the imminent, invisible smog that would wipe out the meager population of my small town day by agonizing day.

Obviously, this behavior was becoming untenable, for both myself and everyone in my household. There were doctors’ appointments and breathing exercises and (in retrospect ill-advised) prescriptions for Zoloft. However, a key intervention came from a psychotherapist who suggested that my anxiety could be partially alleviated by knowing more about what was frightening me. At first, this was effective. After all, there had never been an airborne toxic event anywhere near where I lived. Millions of people around the country followed railroad crossing laws every day. Roller coasters were marvelously safe, given the intensity of their physics. The weather works in specific, impersonal and fascinating ways. (This itself became a years-long obsession.)

However, to the detriment of my therapist, a new, hybridized behavior began to emerge: learning information about mostly terrible things became both anxiety-inducing and satisfying. As soon as I was allowed a computer in my room, I trawled the online depths for new unsettling articles, overviews and histories. To this day, I can spend hours “in the info hole” reading about all kinds of nasty stuff: banned chemicals; tornado outbreaks; the fall of Lehman Brothers; the CIA. It doesn’t make me feel better. Nor does it make me feel abject panic. It makes me feel something else.

I’m not alone in this practice, of course. Anyone who’s looked at medieval manuscripts or binged 19th century crime novels knows that morbid fascination is about as old as humanity itself. However, in our internet age, access to information is unparalleled and expansive, which not only broadens the subject matter of morbid fascination and changes the practices of its consumption, but also diversifies, in ways subtle and unsubtle, the contours of feeling one experiences when consuming the content itself.

This latter point is probably obvious to those of us interested in media theory, but it’s still worth mentioning that the source or medium of this information changes the nature of its consumption. In terms of morbid curiosity, these differences are particularly visible in true crime, which blends the more lurid forms of human curiosity with spectacle and entertainment, most effectively in audio or audiovisual form. Even the written true crime exposé mimics the substance and tone of its televisual bretheren. Meanwhile, video essays and short form content, while sometimes adding new knowledge or interpretations of events, tend to present the same information found elsewhere (often infamously without citation) in more exaggerated ways. The reason for this is in part material — after all, YouTube is driven by revenue structures based on viewership and TikTok uses virality as a function of e-commerce.1

Even though it is now quite old, the primary vehicle for hoovering online information well into the night was initially —and for older generations remains — Wikipedia. The so-called “Wikipedia Binge” is a long-standing cultural phenomenon (and perennial Reddit joke), especially among millennials. But one must ask, beyond Wikipedia’s sheer availability as a source — why? In trying to answer this question, I’ve found that Wikipedia is remarkably unique in the way it shapes the affect and practice of both internet perusal and morbid fascination in particular. The reasons why range from structure to emotion. In scale, Wikipedia is seemingly infinite. In structure, it is taxonomic, and taxonomy is a very effective way of distributing larges batches of information at varying levels of specificity. Its informal encyclopedic tone spares the amygdala and allows for longer spells of dark perusal, while the feel of using it is a mix of focused, exploratory, and most importantly: private. Each of these qualities on their own make Wikipedia conducive to extensive browsing. But combined, they are especially effective when the content involved is frightening or extreme.

Pain and Danger

Before treading any further, however, one must ask: what exactly is this desirable yet negative feeling we get when going down the roster of worst floods in history or the grim details of nuclear radiation? Speaking as someone primarily devoted to aesthetics, the most useful framework for understanding this “negative affect” is the Romantic-era notion of the sublime — the sense of overwhelm, awe, and existential threat induced by objects or subjects that are vast, moody, infinite, laborious to produce, or otherwise magnificent.

The term was coined by one of my longtime theoretical frenemies, the empiricist (and arch-reactionary) philosopher Edmund Burke. Aside from lionizing the Bourbon kings and saying that the French Revolution wasn’t violent enough, one of Burke’s major philosophical projects was to both define this sublimity and distinguish it from beauty, to which he considered sublimity as being equivalent in emotional depth. The sublime is very useful in our discussion of grim knowledge for a number of reasons: it describes the affect itself, the necessity of distance in order to experience and understand that affect, and an aesthetic framework that can be applied to Wikipedia in both structure and form.

Burke’s sublimity is rooted in a belief that things that are “in any sort terrible, [are] conversant about terrible objects, or [operate] in a manner analogous to terror” create a more powerful and conflicting emotional response in the viewer than those that arouse pleasure. In his 1757 treatise A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful,2 he elaborated on the possibility that, contrary to common sense, satisfaction can still be found in such subjects if presented or interpreted the right way: “When danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible; but at certain distances and with certain modifications, they may be, and they are, delightful, as we every day experience.” (Table the notion of proximal distance for now.)

To substantiate this, Burke used as some of his examples: the awesome perils of mountain passes, the terrifying endlessness of the ocean (despite the rational knowledge that the ocean, too, is finite), the drama of lighting in buildings and the toil that went into producing them. Immanuel Kant would later further refine Burke’s ideas by separating the sublime into two categories, the mathematical (a kind of magnitude that stymies our powers of comprehension) and the dynamical (the awesome power of nature and its ability to put us in danger.)

Though still sublime, mountains and seas were examples of Burke’s (and Kant’s) time, a time bound by horseback, the pen and the inkwell. In our own time, one must ask: is standing safely on the shore overwhelmed by Romantic-era thalassophobia really so different from bed-rotting and reading about deep sea diving accidents? Are one’s goosebumps from learning the sinister history behind the breakthroughs of the pharmaceutical industry so different from knowing that slave and peasant labor made possible the gothic cathedral? Is the sense of expansion one gets from opening a Wikipedian master list linked at the end of an article of infinitesimal obscurity really so different from the transition from cloistered candlelight to wide open landscape? We live in an epoch dominated psychologically and ontologically by information, with mediation as the primary way of interacting with the world. Does the flimsy barrier of hypertext really so alter the feeling of being pressed against the glass of human suffering and environmental fear?

Vastness

In addition to the pain and danger of the subject matter itself, many of the sentiments of the mathematical sublime can be mapped onto the Wikipedia binge as form, such as the monomania derived from a seemingly infinite source — here the repetition of the list.3 But of particular utility is Burke’s idea of vastness. In the treatise, he applied this primarily to the physical size and aesthetic configuration of landscapes as related to their individual elements. However, the concept, in our contemporary sense, can also apply to not only the sheer scale of human knowledge available for our perusal, but also the nigh Alpine effort of traversing this informational landscape. Like the content that makes up Wikipedia, vastness for Burke was not only about size, but specificity. About the natural world, he writes:

“…as the great extreme of dimension is sublime, so the last extreme of littleness is in some measure sublime likewise: when we attend to the infinite divisibility of matter, when we pursue animal life into these excessively small and yet organized beings…when we push our discoveries yet downward and consider those creatures so many degrees yet smaller, and the small diminishing scale of existence, in tracing which the imagination as well as the sense; we become amazed and confounded at the wonders of minuteness; nor can we distinguish in its effects this extreme littleness from the vast itself. For division must be infinite as well as addition; because the idea of a perfect unity can no more be arrived at, than that of a complete whole to which nothing can be added.”

One can choose to read a certain type of subtext here, that of a categorical and relational form of thinking. We can extend this thinking to the concept and practice of taxonomy — the gradual refinement of large categories into smaller ones by way of shared characteristics. Here the scale of the total “landscape”, analogous, perhaps, to the Wikipedian “category,” is broken up into fragments that share relations to other fragments in both the broad and narrow sense.4

At its core, even today, the internet is a series of lists, of pages linked to other pages. Our contemporary non-linear, algorithmic, and dynamical internet obscures this list-based structure to the extreme, driving new kinds of both passive and participatory consumption: the endless scroll, the chatbot conversation, the feed. Wikipedia, however, is one of the few large websites still devoted entirely to reading and text, whose Web 2.0 configuration of nesting links retains the old logical substrate of taxonomy and the ensuing practice of taxonomical thinking. When we consume the topics of morbid fascination on Wikipedia, we are actually consuming taxonomies of these topics. The binge is the pursuit of the last branch of the taxonomic tree.

Ultimately, one could say that fear itself is, through Wikipedia, taxonomized — that through the binge we experience fear at differing scales and different subsets of sublimity that make excess browsing emotionally rewarding. These fear taxonomies are unique to every user, but it’s worth devising a hypothetical one covering most of the bases of morbid fascination to illustrate our point. (I realize this is a large image — mobile users can pinch and zoom.)

What makes Wikipedia both endless and infinitesimal is the intersection of any given taxonomy with another. The rabbit hole is not only deep, it is connected to a warren. Viewed in another way, we can see the flows between fear trees, trees that both expand and contract in scale, forming the uneven composition of a landscape in their own right.

Beyond form, each of these four general quadrants possesses subtle differences in affect which are, on their own, conducive to certain patterns of browsing. For example, I call the top left branch “libidinal” because it deals with human drives and stimulates that part of the psyche that wants to understand the depths (and depravity) of the individual human subject. Here we find the unknown mind and the weakened body, the true crime penchant for the sublimation (and often eroticization) of violence, and varying forms of interpersonal control. Large-scale crimes and societal ills filter down into individual perpetrators which themselves re-dilate into broader pathologies.

Alternatively, we can find the full extent of Kant’s dynamical sublime in the environmental division of the chart. This branch is dominated by massive, earth-altering events — events in which thousands of people have been imperiled, whose commonalities are best sorted by the number of casualties. The technological sublime is of course the most expansive, touching practically every element of our lives, from what we eat to how we travel. Technology itself is a series of tools shaped by human desires and human flaws, each prone to failures as big as a landscape and as small as the contents of a petri dish. The mechanisms of danger within different categories of industrial technology are particularly far-reaching and diverse; all of it is rooted in the inescapable power of modernity. There have always been wars, floods, and murders, but thalidomide is relatively new. Finally, Burke’s penchant for both grand and granular political violence is on full display within the sociopolitical branch, which, as any good materialist knows, is a labyrinthine synthesis of everything else.

Distance

Taxonomical thinking combines with another element of sublimity to complete the Wikipedian experience: distance. Burke’s idea was that a certain distance from the subject largely facilitates our feelings of delight towards what would be otherwise terrifying. It’s a feeling of: these things can hurt you, but they probably won’t. The probably is somewhat important, as one of the things I’ve noticed in my own browsing history is a repeat need for temporal distance from any given topic of morbid fascination. In the diagram, I put an asterisk next to climate change because I (and many others) don’t find it pleasurable to read about a subject that will have profound consequences for my lived experience. There is further safety to be found in knowing that an event has reached its historical conclusion. Even in narratively open examples such as cold cases, the longer the temporal distance from the event, the more possible it is to derive sublimity from it.

More specific to Wikipedia itself, however, are the site’s tone and user interface. The tone of Wikipedia is impersonal and, well, encyclopedic. This encyclopedic tone is effectively anti-spectacle and emotionally narrow, allowing for even the most upsetting of subjects (such as the Bhopal disaster or Nazi Germany) to be held at arms length. This tone not only facilitates the prolongation of the browse — one’s cortisol levels aren’t totally blown out — it absolves it. After all, it is somewhat embarrassing and oft considered unhealthy to spend hours reading about wretched things, which is perhaps why people call true crime a ‘guilty pleasure.’ But the flat tone of Wikipedia and its context as a credible source allow the binger to feel as though their binges are educational. In other words, Wikipedia legitimates lurid obsession by concealing it in the veil of learning.

The old-internet interface of Wikipedia complements the work of its tone in sustaining this dark momentum. Wikipedia is one of the last what-you-see-is-what-you-get large websites. It is only (to reiterate) an indexical list of lists. Because the site is a non-profit and collective effort, it has no advertising, no social element, and no other common forms of user distraction. Thus, its overall effect is that of separation — or perhaps insulation — from the outside internet, the outside world. The bannerless blankness of the page’s margins, the lack of any movement, the repetition of lines of text— it all gives the user a feeling of being alone with their fascinations; a sense of privacy. In our age of platformization, one cannot escape the feeling of being surveilled, either by advertisers, Palantir, or by one another. In contrast, the respite Wikipedia still offers us is a powerful one.

I wrote this essay because, a few nights ago, it was 1 AM and I was reading. That’s normal for me these days. Despite having mostly recovered from the brain injury I sustained in January, I’m unfortunately still experiencing severe insomnia and mood disturbances. Earlier that afternoon, my doctor, not wanting to prescribe benzodiazepines or Z-drugs, wrote me a script for Seroquel hoping to treat both sides of my problem. It was too late in the day to fill the order at the pharmacy, which, to my delight, gave me an opportunity to obsess over it. Safely cocooned in the the darkness of my bedroom, the light of my phone, mitigated somewhat by the blessings of dark mode, soon washed over my slowly flicking thumb.

Quetiapine (/kwɪˈtaɪ.əpiːn/ kwi-TY-ə-peen), sold under the brand name Seroquel among others, is an atypical antipsychotic medication used in the treatment of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, bipolar depression, and major depressive disorder.

Seroquel, a few more scrolls will tell you, was patented alongside many other psychiatric drugs in the 1990s. It is considered to be well-tolerated compared to its predecessors in the typical antipsychotic family. The side effects, however, can still be nasty, especially at higher doses or when the drug has been taken for years at a time. The most concerning side effects include weight gain — which itself can trigger something called

Metabolic syndrome is a clustering of at least three of the following five medical conditions: abdominal obesity, high blood pressure, high blood sugar, high serum triglycerides, and low serum high-density lipoprotein (HDL). —

and extrapyramidal effects

In anatomy, the extrapyramidal system is a part of the motor system network causing involuntary actions. The system is called extrapyramidal to distinguish it from the tracts of the motor cortex that reach their targets by traveling through the pyramids of the medulla.

some of which can be severe, such as

Akathisia (/æ.kə.ˈθɪ.si.ə/ a-kə-THI-see-ə) is a movement disorder characterized by a subjective feeling of inner restlessness accompanied by mental distress and/or an inability to sit still. Usually, the legs are most prominently affected. Those affected may fidget, rock back and forth, or pace, while some may just have an uneasy feeling in their body. The most severe cases may result in poor adherence to medications, exacerbation of psychiatric symptoms, and, because of this, aggression, violence, and/or suicidal thoughts.

and

Tardive dyskinesia (TD) is an iatrogenic disorder that results in involuntary repetitive body movements, which may include grimacing, sticking out the tongue or smacking the lips, which occurs following treatment with medication.

Anyone who’s read about drugs on Wikipedia knows the drill from here on out: the long, tedious sections about the complex mechanism by which the medication works, its unfathomable chemistry, a brief overview of its development. Then, at the bottom of the page: that dreaded yet delectable section devoted to controversies. Seroquel was not left unscathed by the usual evils of the pharmaceutical industry. Per our Wikipedia page: In April 2010, the U. S. Department of Justice fined AstraZeneca $520 million for the company's aggressive marketing of Seroquel for off-label uses. Apparently, the feds later uncovered that the company had gone so far as to hire doctors to ghostwrite medical studies that weren’t actually conducted.

But beneath this, one can find something even worse.

Dan Markingson (November 25, 1976 – May 8, 2004) was a man from St. Paul, Minnesota who died by suicide in an ethically controversial psychiatric research study at the University of Minnesota.

The article is long, so I’ll paraphrase. In 2003, Markingson experienced his first episode of severe psychosis while trying to cut it as a screenwriter in LA. His mother managed to coax him back to his hometown of St. Paul, where he was treated by a certain Dr. Stephen Olsen, a professor in the U of M psych department. After first submitting a petition to have Markingson committed in a long-term psychiatric hospital, Olsen seemingly changed his mind and had Markingson instead pledge himself to a U of M treatment plan.

The plan was actually a cover for something else. Olsen asked his still very infirm patient to participate in an AstraZeneca study studying the efficacy of different atypical antipsychotics including Seroquel. All the legal paperwork was taken care of without informing Markingson’s caregiver, his mother. Even worse, Markingson’s participation in the study was not entirely voluntary — should he discontinue it, the doctors threatened him with the original permanent commitment.

In the trial, Markingson was given Seroquel, which made his condition worsen significantly, much to the urgent concern of his mother, whose cries went unheeded. It was only a matter of weeks before he killed himself by slitting his throat open with a box cutter. Ultimately, after a long and arduous accountability process — including an internal probe that found over forty ethical violations within the University of Minnesota’s psychiatry program — the university denied all wrongdoing, and would continue doing so for more than a decade. Despite this, the case set off a wave of reform attempts both legally and within the pharmaceutical industry. It has since become a lodestar of bioethics.

3 AM came. Sufficiently worn out, I rolled over and shut off the phone, thinking all that stuff happened years ago. I don’t have schizophrenia. My prescribed dose of Seroquel is low and its use temporary. But, as my body continued to deny me sleep, the more I ruminated on what I’d just done to myself. Why did I need to pursue this dark frisson of knowledge? Why did I feel both tense and enraptured when peering into the internet terrarium of the worst of all possible worlds? But spending the last two hours reading about Seroquel and metabolic syndrome and extrapyramidal effects and Dan Markingson — deep down it was my little secret. I did it because I wanted to. Maybe you, deep down, want to read about it, too. And why not? Nobody will know. Nobody has to know, either. It’s just you, only you, and the hole.

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I only have three days in Slovenia this time, down from three months, or six, depending on how successful I am at pulling the strings. It’s hard for me to get back here, and I don’t have time this year to prolong things. All the usual plans, the scrappy wiles, the connections have fallen through. That, or I haven’t the will to revive them. It occurs to me now, however, that I’ve built up a lot in the three years I’ve spent long spans of time in Slovenia — a life, one could say. Right now, I’m sitting in a cafe, a cafe I visit so often that even though I haven’t been here in a year, my order is well-remembered. I make small talk with the waiter in the language I learned out of curiosity and ease of living, a quixotic exception amid all those people in tečaj whose grandmothers wanted them to learn, whose boyfriends broke up with them before the semester ended, whose children deserved (that was always the browbeating word) to grow up in a truly bilingual household. It is easy to be bitter about all this, but Slovenia is already my home, and I intend to pay it a visit, the same as I would my little hometown. I just can’t stay here as long as I want to.

And yes, it’s quite painful, really, to think about this not-staying. I don’t like dwelling upon the trip back home, where the topsy-turvey world of American politics is more than mere spectacle, where it instead defines the atavistic contours of American life. That being said, I also feel the need to be honest, really honest, about my prospects for relocating abroad, and probably yours also.

And so, in this cafe, as 80s Yugo Rock mumbles through a broken speaker, I count them off, one by one, the things I don’t have: No apartment abroad, no job, no inkling of a job, no grad school acceptance letter, no startup with slush funding. Even worse, I have no relatives and no bloodline, which is the easiest way. You can get to Europe somewhat simply if you have family ties (including if said family is owed reparations, on a count of Europe’s many heinous crimes), or if you marry. But the rest of us, those who are ancestrally inconvenient or romantically occupied have to work harder for it. They will instead have to struggle, and the struggle, if you’ll heed my advice, is likely to be humiliating.

You will, perhaps, have to make no fewer than ten trips to the same small Slovenian town because there is always one more piece of paper to file, and each piece of paper requires a physical signature in the presence of a witness. By the time you get the last one in, get your tax number all sorted out, it will come as a rather silly victory, wrested from the jaws of bureaucracy only at the very end of your allotted visa stay. And you will laugh, because the alternative is weeping. Hell, at least that year, you had a job. Without a job (which, if we are being honest, are rarely doled out to foreigners), lots of money — thousands if not tens of thousands of euros — and a helluva lawyer, moving abroad is probably not going to happen for you. Or, at least, it is not going to come easily.

They don’t like to tell you about these pesky little inconveniences in the posts. You know the ones: the posts that demand that you leave the US now — right now — before it’s too late, if it’s not too late already. These posts — let’s call them the Fleeing to Europe Industrial Complex — are a familiar sight for anyone who’s ended up on the wrong side of lib Substack. Usually headed by AI art and penned by bourgeois white people with their professional degrees in their usernames, these essays tend to have a certain LinkedIn je nais se quoi. Quoting everyone from ex-mil opsec guys to Heather Cox Richardson, they will tell you that if you don’t leave everything behind and flee the country right now, you will get put in a prison camp or die of starvation from tariffs or crushed under the boot of martial law, if they bother to spell that correctly. Such posts go on and on about why the author is scared — petrified, even — and why you should be scared, too, and how the only rational choice to be made in your best interest is to pack up and ship out.

To be fair, the current administration has given us plenty of reasons to be legitimately frightened, especially with regards to the dismantling of the state, the rollbacks on regulation, and crackdowns on freedoms of speech, movement (especially across borders), and assembly. But how our fears will map out onto our material and political reality is anything but settled, and this is something we have, despite what the posts will tell you, some collective agency to change and a duty to try changing it. However, politics as anything other than mediated spectacle doesn’t particulary matter to the Fleeing to Europe Industrial Complex. If you’re making your decisions based on a recursive algorithm full of millenarian lib content on Substack then sure, the hysteria is real, it’s definitely too late. They’re coming for you and you, you’re the smart one for getting out now. Everything you do is valid and correct and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

First of all, I am inherently wary of anything that speaks me in a breathless language of fear. As a woman, I am somewhat inured to being sold things by way of anxiety, though I realize not everyone is. I’ve spent a lifetime having my most intimate fears be seen as fair game for clicks, attention, spectacle, and weaponization. If something is telling me to change my life and that something is not Rainer Maria Rilke, my nose for bullshit is automatically activated. Hence, it does not surprise me to see that many of these posts purporting to “help you” vis a vis fear are instead selling something: consulting services, affliate links, financial planning resources, access to insider information, guidebooks, a community, et cetera, et cetera. Hence why, throughout any given Fleeing to Europe Industrial Complex essay, the tone often changes, bit by bit, from fear to the ersatz reassurance of self help. I did it and so can you.

But sometimes, these posts aren’t selling anything but sympathy, and of this I’m not a particularly keen buyer. How many of them have you seen at this point — the tearful through-composed screeds about why I just needed to get the fuck out, the handwaving about the fucking fascists, the inability to distinguish between real and imagined threats, the idea that all of this is happening to me personally and that I am the protagonist of history who knows where things are going because I passed AP World and watched Schindler’s List — and, for that matter, the constant invocation of past exiled and traumatized generations whose lives and conditions are not one-to-one comparable to ours, for the political situation is different and the most draconian persecutions are now being mapped onto different lines, different bodies. First they came for undocumented immigrants, and you are not an undocumented immigrant. You are a certified CPA in New York City.

I don’t like to throw around the p word lightly, but if you have the means and mobility to suddenly move to Europe at the drop of a hat, or even within a year, you are privileged enough in every sense of the word that a) the actions of this administration are going to have a negligible impact on you compared to others and b) you should perhaps be thinking about how you can use that privilege to try and mitigate harm instead of giving way entirely to unearned hysteria, which, by the way, is the only thing any of these posters are truly “fleeing.”

At this current moment, the threat levels are mixed. It’s never been great for women and people of color in this country, and it’ll certainly take more than a bit of struggle to work our way back to where things were even a few years ago, much less achieve total liberation. However, unless you are Palestinian, a student protester, transgender, or a person on various rungs of the immigration ladder, especially someone of Latin American descent, which is to say: unless you are among the people being actively and directly targeted by the Trump administration and who perhaps should consider the possibility of asylum or relocation — the worst is probably not going to happen to you. And because the worst is probably not going to happen to you, you have, I think, a basic human duty to protect those to whom it is already happening. In protecting those to whom the worst is already happening, you are, by extension also protecting yourself. You are putting out the flames before they lap at your doorstep. You are stitching yourself into the human safety net known as society, something to which you have, sorry, an obligation. You are, quite literally, fighting fascism.

But no, the Fleeing to Europe Industrial Complex wants you to feel sorry for them. They want you to understand why they chose to leave their families behind, why their big fat American salaries and retirement accounts are not contributing to the problem of gentrification in Europe because things are just so bad in the States. They want you to know how it’s so hard and lonely living without any real human connection save for other expats, or why they thought it was justified to put in an asylum case for themselves with the help of their expensive lawyer to the detriment of refugees the world over who aren’t fortunate enough to do a preparatory stint as a digital nomad in Porto just to see what it’s like to live in a walkable neighborhood and say isn’t it crazy how much better the bread is over here?

It is not enough for such people to leave voluntarily. They will not rest until they co-opt the rhetoric of exile. They frame ditching their spouse or grown children as having their family torn apart by the Trump administration. They want you to view what is, in reality, a matter of consumption as a matter of coercion. They want you to validate their cowardice with understanding. But late at night, in their AirBNBs, they will think to themselves: you saw fascism coming and you did nothing. You saw people put in camps and you did nothing. You have no obligation to anyone other than yourself and believe in nothing beyond the confines of your own material comfort. You did not flee. You ran away.

Let me be clear: I personally don’t care if you, or anyone else for that matter, decide to emigrate abroad. I would too, if it were an option for me, simply because I like living in Slovenia way more than I like living in the US. When the Trump administration first unleashed its blitzkreig against the government and the populace, I, too panicked, and repeatedly thought: I have to get out of here now. However, as distressing as the situation may be, it is uncouth at best and insulting at worse to pretend that the state is actually forcing people like me into exile, that I’m in any kind of legitimate danger, or that I’m moving away as an act of valor, or for any reason higher than because I want to, because it’s what I prefer over sticking around. At its most pressing, moving abroad is what any given person thinks is better for them, their health, or their family, and that’s fine! That’s totally fine! You don’t need to write a handwringing essay about it explaining to others why we should feel sorry that you had to go live in Portugal! Moving abroad, rather like eloping, is one of those famous situations where it’s entirely possible to do something drastic and be completely normal and chill about it! As the orange man says, many such cases!!!

Yet even as a matter of simple personal preference, I think relocation remains more difficult than people are selling it to be. Sure, the Fleeing to Europe Industrial Complex talks about how it’s hard to make friends from scratch and how it sucks that they don’t have American-style convenience culture in Europe in lieu of, like, labor rights. But what they don’t want to actually talk about is the money. It is far harder to financially leave the United States than it is to physically leave. The IRS really wants you to pay your taxes and your employer is probably not so keen on doing the paperwork necessary to turn your remote job into a global one.

I myself have established the social and linguistic infrastructures for moving to Europe. I could probably even weasel my way into a grad degree. But money is the number one reason I don’t, or rather can’t pull the trigger. The financial cost of lawyers and logistics as well as the difficulty of transferring the means of making a living as a freelancer to another country are all a nightmare. Meanwhile, my husband’s life is not as flexible as mine and it would be nigh impossible for him to get any work whatsoever without learning a new language. Unlike the essay peddlers of the Fleeing to Europe Industrial Comples, who are willing to adopt all manners of family therapy jargon, my answer to this problem is not simply leaving my husband behind, or, if we’re talking broadly about family, my aging parents either. While I have friends in Slovenia, I also have networks of local support here, people that matter to me and to whom I matter and I refuse to treat these places and people disposably. But most of all, although I have no great patriotism for my country, especially in its present iteration, I do feel as though I owe it to my community and to future generations to do my best to make things better.

The common response to this latter sentiment is cynicism, which is to say, treating me as though I am stupid and naive. But in my view, cynicism is no match for the smaller truth of mitigation — perhaps not prevention, but mitigation. For things to get better, they must first become less bad. Hence, the idea that “no one is doing anything” is ludicrous. Ordinary people are putting their lives on the line for others every day. They are confronting ICE and protecting their neighbors. They are peacefully occupying their schools in protest of genocide, despite the threat of losing their degrees, or worse, deportation. They are speaking out to journalists and organizing their workplaces. They are out in the streets and watching the courts. For this, I respect them. I do not think their efforts are worthless or a form of self-sacrifice at the alter of an impossible ideal. They believe, rightly, that nothing is inevitable until it is. No one has won until they have finally, truly won. Many who leave are honest with themselves and have made their peace with their choice. But just as many have wrongly accepted that the worst is inevitable. In fact, they’re fine with that, just as they are fine ceding ground by omission to those who deserve to be losers. All it does is justify that same decision, the decision to walk away.

By the way, on my last day in Slovenia, I always go to visit the town of Ptuj, which is a place very dear to me, a place where history has largely stopped happening and, in its place, time passes. In Ptuj Castle, a winding structure whose medieval roots have long been obscured by baroque-era machinations, there is a fifteenth century statue of Saint Barbara carved by an unknown German master. She is perhaps my favorite object in the entire world. I think of Saint Barbara, the patron saint of architecture and artillerymen alike, quite often. Her story is rather gruesome. Barbara, despite her virginal isolation, secretly converts to Christianity. When this is revealed to her pagan father through, of all things, an architectural detail — Barbara’s insistance on a three-windowed (representing the Trinity) rather than two-windowed wall in her bath house — he cruelly imprisons his daughter and condemns her to torture. Day in, day out the torturers come, but each morning, Barbara wakes up, miraculously healed, until the problem is finally solved by way of a strategic beheading.

Medieval depictions of saints are always victors over their own suffering. It is not so encouraging to depict Barbara being flogged and flayed in the tower. Hence, this Saint Barbara, draped magesterially in red and white fabric, smiles her wise, beatific smile. Her eyes are bright and curious, and there is something encouraging about them, an eagerness to present to the viewer both herself and what she holds in her hands: the tower. She is smiling, perhaps, because she has the satisfaction of looking back on her own life with the surety of what she believes, and what she believes, she offers to you, the faithful, having already struggled for it herself. She holds the tower, a representational vessel of her own pain, not to say, I have conquered difficulty, but to say, difficulty is all there is, for me and for you, because what is on the other side of struggle cannot be gleaned until we are already among the stars.

My Saint Barbara is not arrogant with a martyr’s certainty. She is patient. She has seen all things. From her post — next to her sister statue Saint Catherine, with whom she once sat on either side of the alter at the castle of Velika Nedelja — she’s watched over five hundred years of history, five hundred years of Teutonic Knights, priests, and laborers, of bureaucrats feudal and post-feudal. I visit her whenever I get the chance because I love her, because I want to be like her. I want to be patient. I want to be wise. I want to be brave enough to see beyond myself, to wake up calmly, every day, to the horrors. The tower, the place that for me is a source of suffering is, as it was for her, also my home. And when all is said and done, whether I am beheaded or sleep peacefully, I, too, want to one day hold it in the palm of my hand.

This is the last of the ‘Wälsung Essays,’ a series I have written about the twins Siegmund and Sieglinde from Richard Wagner’s Die Walküre. Notes on translations of the texts and other methodologies can be read, along with the introduction to this series, here. Enjambments in the text have been removed for email brevity.

This essay assumes reader familiarity with the subject matter.

So far in this series, our treatment of the love of the Wälsung twins has revolved primarily around the sentiment of solidarity. Above all else, Siegmund and Sieglinde share the experience of and desire for emancipation from violence and subjugation. It is this point of mutual recognition — evident in that very first moment, when Siegmund collapses on Sieglinde’s hearth — from which all other acts and emotions emerge. This framing was, in part, a political choice. After all, my broader critical project is to craft an interpretation of the Ring that moves away from the two poles of Wotan and Siegfried and with them the commonly accepted framework of fatalistic right-wing melancholy; and towards characters like the Wälsung twins, who, while also melancholic in nature, shift the political aperature away from the Right and to the Left.

More importantly, however, it is this sentiment of solidarity that saves the twins from merely being another (albeit scandalous) operatic story of adultery and forbidden romance. Solidarity is the basis from which the love — fraternal and romantic — between Siegmund and Sieglinde derives both its depth and its political and emotional meaning. In other words, it’s why we forgive them their trespasses. The music, some of the most beautiful ever put to paper, also helps.

We will return to solidarity a bit later on because it is related to the (rather utopian) mechanism of identification of the self in the Other, by which the love of the Wälsungs unfolds formally within the work, a mechanism that inadvertantly undermines its own sentiment by revealing structural biases lurking beneath the surface. But in order to get there, we must first (and finally) address the elephant that’s long been languishing in our room.

This is, of course, the fact that the first act of Die Walküre ends with the infamous lines (followed by a bit of musically unambiguous lovemaking on the bearskin rug):

Sieglinde: Are you Siegmund, standing before me? I am Sieglinde who longed for you, your own sister you won for yourself with your sword.

Siegmund: Bride and sister, be to your brother; blest be our Wälsung blood!*

That’s right: the incest. Where does one even start? The prevailing answer seems to be “avoiding the gaze of whoever is sitting beside you in the opera house, or, say, your junior year opera history class.” Ironically, the blantancy of the twins’ incestuousness makes it difficult to look at head on. This is especially true for contemporary viewers (with perhaps the exception of Jonathan Haidt), for whom the idea of a voluntary and “non-harmful” form of incest is ridiculous — if not insulting. However, as is perhaps expected, the incest plot didn’t fare much better with 19th century audiences. A British critic, writing in The Era in 1882 excoriated Die Walküre thusly: “The story is so revolting, indecent and impure that it ought never to have been tolerated on the English stage…A composer must have lost all sense of decency and all respect for the dignity of human nature who could thus employ his genius and skill.”1

Perhaps this mix of disgust and discomfort is why, for almost 150 years, Ring defenders have treated the incest problem primarily by way of what I’ll call “thinly veiled Wagnerite cope.” This is comprised of three different explanations that either defer the matter at hand or ask the wrong questions entirely. It’s worth addressing each of these in turn because collectively they offer us a solid point for a more productive departure.

i. twincest theory, in brief

1. Gossip

The first and least satisfying of our hypotheses is the “Wesendonck Theory.” This posits that Siegmund is a kind of Richard Wagner Mary Sue and Sieglinde is a fantasy version of Mathilde Wesendonck, who was both a writer and poet in her own right and the wife of a wealthy businessman, with whom Wagner was having one of his many affairs. (She is also the dedicatee of Wagner’s excellent “Wesendonck Lieder,” whose musical echoes can also be heard in Die Walküre.) There is some factual substance to this theory, as Wagner littered key points in his score (such as the beginning of Siegmund’s testimony “Friedmund darf ich nich heissen”) with abbreviated and rather pathetic notes referring to Wesendonck, such as “W. d. n. w., G.” (‘Wenn du nicht wärst, Geliebte’ — were it not for you beloved.)2

However, while such gossip is all very entertaining, the unintended purpose of this theory is to deflect from the incest question altogether. Implicit here is the notion that the relationship between Siegmund and Sieglinde is cannot be truly incestuous in sentiment because it is secretly based off of a non-incestuous affair. Much like with Wotan’s defense of the twin lovers to Fricka (who is disgusted by their relationship), here l’affair Wälsung is watered down into a generic 19th century paean to free love — i.e. the love in question should thus be recognized primarily for its emotional content which, when it comes down to it, isn’t all that different fron any other kind of love affair. Unfortunately, this is not even how Wagner himself viewed things. One need only look at his prose sketch from 1852 to see that the incestuousness of the twins’ bond was clearly a point of erotic fixation. There Wagner wrote: “Siegmund ([is] beside himself)…Sister and wife — as the twins had clung to each other in their mother’s womb, so the blissful couple are now conjoined.”3 Moving on!

2. The Mythology Scapegoat

Perhaps the most common way of dealing with the incest question is by simply claiming that everything in the Ring is mythical and mythology just so happens to be full of weird stuff like this. This is the angle Rudolph Sabor takes in his otherwise pretty good companion guide to the Ring. He writes:

“It should be remembered that Wagner’s drama is located in mythological times and that, as children of Wotan and a mortal woman, the two [twins] are demigods. Modern convention and modern morality does not necessarily apply to the age when the gods walked on earth. Osiris, the judge of the dead in Egyptian mythology, married his sister Isis. The later Pharoahs, rulers of Egypt, married their sisters in order to procreate sons of the noblest stock. Niörd, the Svandinavian spirit of water and air, married his sister Nerthus. Kronos, father of Zeus, had his sister for wife. Zeus himself married his own sister Hera.”4

This “many such cases” explanation is unsatisfying for a number of reasons. First of all, that the twins are demigods is not very important within the work itself. In fact, the opposite is true: the most important trait of Siegmund and Sieglinde is their humanity, and with it, their subjugation at the hands of both other people and the gods. Neither twin has any particular special or supernatural powers similar to those of Wotan, Fricka, or the Valkyries. (Siegmund, rather unfortunately, is the loser in every fight he’s in.) Second, within the work itself, the incest is acknowledged to be problematic rather than “natural” to the state of godhood. Invoking the twins’ “vile incest” is the trojan horse through which Fricka disguises (and achieves!) the double-goal of reigning in her dissolute husband and putting all of humanity, represented by Siegmund, back in its rightful place.

It’s not uncommon for commentators on Wagner to make reference to Greek mythology as a way from shifting the temporal gaze away from the parts of the Ring that pretty obviously invoke 19th century ideas and questions, even such troll-like ones as “is incest included in the definition of free love?” I once listened to a podcast by the Metropolitan Opera about Die Walküre which cited Oedipus Rex as partial inspiration for many of the plot elements therein. No offense to the Met — and from a dramaturgy perspective I can certainly see where they’re coming from — but, to paraphrase an old Žižek bit, Oedipus Rex famously doesn’t end with Oedipus saying, “To hell with it, I love fucking my mother!”

3. The Volsunga Saga

Mythology does bring us to the most compelling of the traditional incest theories, which is that the love between brother and sister is, like other elements in the Ring, based off of the content of the Old Norse Volsunga saga. However, anyone who’s read the saga (or, if you don’t have time, its Wikipedia page) can tell you that its version of Wälsungenliebe is very different from that of the Ring. I won’t go into all the ways these two stories diverge — there are many. But of these differences, two are the most important. In the saga, Signy has not been separated from her brother. Instead, she is raised with him by their father, which makes her later acts even more explicitly incestuous. Second, she does not sleep with Sigmund as herself, but shapeshifts into a sorceress in order to do so. Her brother is none the wiser. Problematic!

However, two very important related plot elements are borrowed from the saga. The first is that the result of the twins’ affair is a supernaturally gifted son (Sinfjotli) capable of overthrowing Signy’s brutal and murderous husband, King Siggier. (In the Ring, Sinfjotli is merged syncretically with Sigurd, the dragonslayer, to form Siegfried.) Siggier has killed all of Signy and Sigmund’s other siblings, and her desperation to sire a son capable of deposing him is why Signy seduces her brother to begin with. Wagner, somewhat awkwardly, transforms this mythological source material into mere foreshadowing for Siegfried. Displaced onto Siegmund (it’s his seed after all), it is condensed and expressed via that line (which comes off rather badly to contemporary ears): “Blest be our Wälsung blood!”

Second, like in the Volsunga saga, the choice to commit incest first rests with Sieglinde. After all, she’s revealed very little about herself to Siegmund, and what she has revealed probably isn’t enough for Siegmund to recognize her by.5 When exactly Sieglinde realizes Siegmund is her brother is a point of massive ambiguity in the opera, one that’s often left to the director’s discretion. In Chéreau’s production, for example, he has Sieglinde (Jeannine Altmeyer) do a little double take when Siegmund (Peter Hoffman) recounts the story of being violently separated from his twin sister in childhood, which, to be fair, is a pretty unique situation. However, Wagner, despite having written so many elaborate notes, does not address this as a particular moment of clarity. His excessive use of irony as a dramaturgical tool doesn’t help matters either.

The earliest point by which Sieglinde could possibly recognize her brother is in the recounting of the story of the old man (Wotan/Wälse) who attended her sham wedding and plunged the sword into the ash tree: (“Then I knew who had greeted me, / me, this woman laden with sorrow; [with intensifying certainty and passionately growing warmth] I also know / to whom alone / he destined the sword in the tree.”) This, coincidentally, is also the point of no return, after which the relationship will become flagrantly erotic. Whether Sieglinde is truly certain Siegmund is her brother (she sure gives him lots of opportunities to prove otherwise!) also remains a point of ambiguity. An alternative subtext is that by the time she recognizes him as such, it’s too late — she’s already in love with him and is now afraid that the revelation will shatter the bond. Hence, her ecstasy when he embraces her anyway.

ii. sentimental incest

I bother to list these theories because a) Wagner commentary is exceedingly pedantic and it’s worth covering all the bases, and b) as I said before, I think they either ignore the issue (such as with the gossip bit) or answer the wrong — albeit important — question, which is: “Why do the Wälsung twins commit incest?” An even simpler answer here would be: because they love each other! This brings us to what I believe is the more interesting question at hand, which is not why the twins are incestuous but why, unlike in the original source material, the incest is sentimental in nature.

To begin to answer this, a bit of sociology is in order. Sentimental incest is a primarily 19th century phenomenon, one that originates in the solidification of the bourgeois family as the primary social institution of its time. While seen as inherently natural even in Wagner’s day, such a social formation wasn’t always the norm. To paraphrase Simone de Beauvoir, the closer families grew, which is to say, the further they drifted away from simple patriarchal structures of ownership coupled with base economic necessity, the more they moved towards a sentimentality rooted in concepts such as “mutual love” and “childhood innocence.”

As a different Sigmund (Freud) would later systematically lay out, the bourgeois family was and remains an eroticized social formation. From a psychoanalytic perspective, this eroticism manifests in a number of ways — for example, the Oedipus complex — that the vast majority of us are able to sublimate even if that process makes us neurotic perverts in the end. It was perhaps inevitable, then, that a shared cultural anxiety developed around the idea that such erotic impulses wouldn’t be diverted to their appropriate channels — i.e. that they would remain incestuous.

The historian Brian Connolly in his fascinating book Domestic Intimacies: Incest and the Liberal Subject in Nineteenth Century America links all of these elements together with (as it says in the title) the cultural and political formation of the liberal subject: “that autonomous, rational individual who acted on his own desires, was endowed with the capacity for consent, was not dependent on others, and had his choices and desires ratified in contracts.”6 Because consenting (if easily beguiled) individuals were involved, incest itself was also perceived as being a choice, one that, like the family itself, was sentimental rather than abusive or coercive in nature.

Wagner, however, seems to have seen Freud & co. coming. Hence, he gets rid of the icky problem of familial closeness by simply separating his twins in childhood and making them strangers to one another. But this, too, reflects a 19th century anxiety. Capitalism’s complete restructuring of society, coupled with massive wars and the technological developments of the industrial revolution unmade whole families, scattering them into the cities via new forms of transit, namely the railroad, to participate in wage work. People became alienated, estranged, and separated from one another. Additionally, as soon as middle-class familial ideals became the norm, they became sites of contention in other ways. The more women were forced out of the home and into the factories where they became not just wives, mothers, and sisters but workers, the more their liberation became entwined with that of men in a new, more equal and solidaristic social relation that threatened the status quo.

These shifts, on the one hand, only resulted in a further middle class doubling down on the sanctity of the family as both a natural state of affairs and a refuge from capitalism. On the other, they, too, caused new incestuous fixations to emerge. Connolly’s eye was turned to America, but he documents an emerging literary preoccupation with what was called “accidental incest” in which family members separated by larger social forces — especially the slave trade in the United States — became reunited in love by accident, thus prompting many crises and moralistic paeans7 — paeans of the kind Wagner chose to pretty much entirely eschew.

Hence, materialism also does not save us (though it does contextualize things!) and we once more arrive back to the problem at hand.

iii. you are the likeness that i hid within me

To make the love of the Wälsungs so deeply genuine, to choose to elimate the disgust from incest, these were choices so unmoored from both the incest narratives of Wagner’s own time as well as his source material, the big man must have made them for a reason — beyond the fact that he was cheating on his wife. There must, then, be an analytical link between incest itself and the content and sincerity of the love expressed therein — a love which, to our great emotional confusion, is the truest in the whole cycle and one of the most meaningful in all of Wagner’s work.

We can begin to glimpse what this may be by way of the cycle’s other pair of lovers, Siegfried and Brünnhilde. These two are also incestuous —Brünnhilde is Siegfried’s aunt. Yet curiously this is never acknowledged, perhaps because incest no longer serves a philosophical function for this particular kind of love, which is very different — and much more fraught — than that of the twins. It is not a love of reciprocity, but of taking and being taken from. Brünnhilde gives herself to Siegfried, who, despite his virginal apprehension, is only all to happy to take her. And from that point on, she is his, so much so that her very disposition changes. She is made “human” which, in this case means she becomes a man’s portrait of a weak and jealous woman led around by the yoke of her own passions. The curse of the ring helps disguise this transition, but it does not explain the gendered way in which it manifests.

It’s at this point where we return to solidarity. Both Siegmund and Sieglinde are objectified and made other by the world they live in. Sieglinde is trafficked, forced into marriage, and lives a life of fear and sexual subjugation. Siegmund is born an outcast and outsider, a recepticle for violence and ridicule. Both are stripped entirely of their selfhood. Sieglinde reduces herself to her husband’s property. Siegmund, famously, can’t even use — and perhaps doesn’t even know — his own true name. What would it mean, then, for these two people, who have suffered so much, to love one another as man and woman? The answer is simple: love promises a restoration of that same selfhood. To see and be seen, to recognize the self in the Other, and to eradicate otherness altogether by way of this recognition.

The process by which this recognition unfolds in the opera begins (as mentioned before) with that same solidarity: acknowledgement of the other’s suffering. This is well-trodden ground in this series of essays. Siegmund tells Sieglinde his sad story at the dinner table; later Sieglinde comes to Siegmund in the night and reveals her own sorrows, which Siegmund then aligns with his own. However, this mode of recognition ends midway through the third scene, when Siegmund begins to move beyond the past, away from pain and towards potential happiness, by professing to his sister the poetic contents of his heart. Beginning with the Winterstürme — five of the most gorgeous minutes of the whole cycle, a song in which metaphorical spring-brother and love-sister are reunited at last — the process of recognition now becomes eroticized. This is done through music (the “bliss” motif, the long, cadenceless swirl of withdrawing and returning), through metaphor (warmth, blossoming, the vigor of life), and through physicality, more specifically, the act of looking.

Of all of these, the act of looking — and being looked at — is of the most importance to us.

Sieglinde sings (emphases mine):

My heart greeted you with canny forboding, as your gaze on me first blossomed. Everything I ever saw was strange, my surroundings were friendless; whatever came my way seemed like something I’d never known. But you I knew plainly and clearly; when I laid eyes on you, you were mine; what I hid in my heart, what I am, bright as day, came to me…

A few lines later:

With your brow as open as this, how like a maze the veins throng your temples! I’m fearful of the joy that transports me. A miracle stirs in my mind: the one I saw to day for the first time is you, someone I’ve seen before.

Siegmund responds:

A dream of love also stirs my mind: in ardent longing I’ve seen you before.

Sieglinde:

I once caught sight of my likeness in a brook, and now I see it again; then it rose up from the water, now my likeness comes from you!

Siegmund:

You are the likeness that I hid within me.

It is this act of looking that merges the desire to see the true self of the beloved with the recognition of one’s own true self. In this moment, all dissolves. There is no man and no woman, only you as you are and me as I am. In theory, such mutual transcendence is a utopian idea. Part of what makes the love between Siegmund and Sieglinde so moving is that the dream of the twin-lovers is one that persists also in the dreams of feminists: a love between man and woman that does not rest upon a bedrock of domination and submission, a love that transcends difference and is thus bereft of objectification. This emotional content remains very real.

However, it is precisely in these later fragments of eroticized identification that we can uncover a gnawing truth at the center of the whole work: incest, far from being an impediment, is a precondition for such utopian thinking.

To make this final, concluding connection, we need a feminist lens. In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir had this to say about the primordial origins of incest prohibition:

“[Man] aspires to escape [his mother’s] circle and assert transcendence against immanence, to open up a future different from the past where he is rooted; depending on the types of relations recognized in different societies, the banning of incest takes on different forms, but from primitive times to our days it has remained the same: man wishes to possess that which he is not; he unites himself to what appears to him to be Other than himself. The wife must not be part of the husband’s mana, she must be foreign to him: thus foreign to his clan. Primitive marriage is sometimes founded on abduction, real or symbolic: because violence done to another is the clearest affirmation of another’s alterity.”8

This latter point is made very clear in, you know, Götterdämmerung — not to mention all of the other gendered relations within the Ring, a work, as I said before, in which rape is the arch-crime. However, in Walküre, Wagner attempts to create a love that expressly wants to resolve the problem of alterity, an impulse which is, albeit more covertly, also caught in the wicked problem of misogyny. After all, it is by way of a misogynistic logic that, in order for there to exist a love between man and woman that isn’t rooted in domination — in order for there to be true identification of the self in the Other — man and woman must be the same. In other words, a love without alterity must, by corollary, be incestuous.

Siegmund can only love Sieglinde this way because he is her, and she is him. Hence, the act can only end when this mutual identification is finally made — when each is able to not only bestow true selfhood on the other but consummate that selfhood through being made, finally, physically, one. But to me, the sentiment — problematic in its incestuousness, unproblematic in its desire for another way of being — is best expressed earlier, in a line I’ve carried with me for as long as I’ve known the opera:

“Name me as you love me," Siegmund begs his sister. “I take my name from you.”

The good news is: I get to stay in my apartment for another year after a series of ups and downs, including renovation and head injury drama, and negotiations that I perhaps failed at considering, you know, the nature of this email. Which brings us to the bad news: my rent is going up 30%, the kind of raise that makes me have to, very unfortunately, “think about work.” To be completely honest, I am doing my level best to avoid feeling like the sky is falling even though terrible things seem to keep happening to me over and over again. Fortunately, the absurdist part of me finds all of this extremely funny in the abstract. Life’s little black cloud!!!!

Anyway, because I’m writing more on Substack — it’s the most convenient and supportive place for me to write personal and non-architectural essays that are more difficult to pitch to conventional outlets — I’d like to make this a more sustainable enterprise for me in terms of my labor. Most of what I’ve written here so far has been, for all intents and purposes, unpaid. In recent months, however, that has begun to change, for which I thank you!!

To be honest, I didn’t anticipate this newsletter to be as successful as it has been. That’s part of why, like my blog McMansion Hell, everything on the late review has been free to read. However, McMansion Hell is financially sustained by a delightful, 8-year old community on Patreon, which allows me to keep that website free and open to the public. While I enjoy making fun bonus content (such as livestreams) for my Patrons, the main blog is and always will be free. This is because it is my political belief that the suburbanization of the internet through enshittification, content decentralization and private Discord servers (which for me personally are just places to just hang out and socialize) is detrimental to the spirit of public discourse.

While I realize that subscription fatigue is real, I want my work to reach — and affect — as many people as possible. That’s only possible through the generosity of paid subscriptions. Without those subscriptions, the work I’m doing here will simply cease to be feasible from a time and labor standpoint. This is especially true now, as I’m also writing a very fun book called Structural Issues, which makes any spare writing time exceedingly precious!

To be clear, all major, public-facing work on this Substack will continue to be free. However, I will start intermittently giving paid subscribers early access to some of that writing by putting it behind a temporary paywall. (I will let everyone know how long the paywall will last at the beginning of the post and will also use Substack’s subscriber chat function — accessible within the app — to alert readers to when a paywall has been lifted.) This is my admittedly ambiguous way of keeping my principles intact while also making subscribers feel like their subscriptions are paying for something concrete.

Hence, if you like some of the recent posts in this newsletter and want to see more writing in this vein, I’m offering a discount of 40% off on new subscriptions through April 1st. You can subscribe via this email, or by sharing this link! For those bad at math, it makes a monthly subscription to the late review $4.20 (the cost of a latte) and a yearly subscription $48.00 (as opposed to $80!).

Yours truly,
Kate

The other day, like most days since I hit my head, I had a panic attack — a really terrible one. I sat at the kitchen table, trembling, snot-nosed, with my husband across from me trying to walk me back from some really dangerous rhetoric I was spouting about how there wouldn’t be a future in this world for me — or for us. My husband is the braver of the pair, the fighter, the organizer of the family. So when I saw the grim, frightened look on his face, I was all of a sudden forced to reckon with not only my emotions, but the dark things I was saying to him, another human being, a comrade in the same struggle. This reckoning led to a number of realizations about “the political situation” and “my despair” — but also about the ways I’d made myself so frighteningly miserable, a misery that was almost entirely technologically mediated. Because I’m sure many others feel and struggle similarly, I decided to write these observations down in the hope that maybe they will be grounding or useful.

The first, which I circled around as a way to calm myself down, was seemingly obvious: whether I like it or not, there will be a future. It will (also unfortunately) be unknowable, hinged at that inconvenient pivot point we call the present. This is, via both the laws of physics and the dialectic of history, inevitable. The time will pass. We will have to keep living in the time that passes. The second realization — a corollary, also obvious — was that the end, the final end, has not happened yet. If that’s true, what was making me think otherwise? The news itself is, admittedly, bad, but is it really enough to provoke such agonizing anxiety? A quick scroll provided an instant answer. It’s not just the news. It’s the sheer, intolerable nihilism so many people have no problem espousing without a second thought.

At this juncture, it’s extremely popular and must certainly be lucrative to claim that, in 2020, the Spirit of History was somehow caught in a net and ground up in a blender. History and the future of humanity died because COVID hit, because the protest movements that dominated the first Trump presidency were either crushed or fizzled out, because Bernie Sanders lost the Democratic Primary. Perhaps these would be interesting posts if they seriously reflected on the strategic mistakes of the 2010s Left, or about how, at the dawn of the pandemic, the power of the state was once so movingly made clear in the calls for lockdown and the development of the vaccine, only, to our collective horror, for that same state to realize how much money was being lost and choose — and continue to this day to choose — collective death over so many lives. But crucial to any such inquiry — and it’s lazy writing peddling itself as elegiac otherwise — would be the ask: what can we do now, do differently? Even if we don’t quite know?

That, however, requires believing in something real. Belief, it seems, is in short supply these days. Instead, pretty much all of what I see online is a variation on the theme of how fucking sad we Millennials are about our lost Bernie era and how it was all better then and how we failed and that’s just the way it is, crying like we’re Huck Finn watching his own funeral. At this point, when so much is happening, when despair is at its highest and most contagious, it’s too much. I’ve had enough. And sure, yes, it’s all true. It’s sad! The Left failed! We did! I participated! I saw it with my own eyes! Things are really fucking terrible right now and in the near future will probably get worse, especially for the millions of people far more vulnerable than me or you. And on that last note, it is worth it, if you haven’t already, to read the words of Mahmoud Khalil, who, along with all the student protestors for Palestine, offer a glimpse of what real bravery can look like in times when the prevailing sentiment is abject cowardice and feeling sorry for ourselves.

Terrible as things may be, they are still contingent. Nothing at all is certain. On the one hand, that’s how Trump et. al. want you to feel, but it is also possible to feel that uncertainty in a different and more productive way. I am far (so woefully far) from optimism, yet even I don’t understand how past failure is somehow immutable or deterministic, as though historical conditions don’t change, contradictions don’t burst open, or as though we can view right now from an imagined 20 years later after nothing else but further losses. (It’s darkly funny that even in our own masturbatory fantasies, the Left can’t win.) Too many of us, myself included, have fallen into the seductive lie that we have no agency, no power or means of accruing it, no strong-enough relations with other people, and thus, albeit unspoken, no will to live.

I don’t say any of this from a point of delusional smugness. I myself am suffering greatly. This is the lowest I’ve ever felt in my entire life, the closest I’ve been to the absolute nadir of despair. Not a single day passes without weeping, paranoia, agony and mortal fear. The big picture does seem insurmountable: genocide and war; runaway global warming; the dismantling of science and public health systems at the dawn of said climate catastrophe and another pandemic; the expansion of the carceral state and the destruction of the cultural realm through AI; the dessication of the university; deportations — those familiar from the Iraq War era, and new ones meant to chill dissent; the criminalization of protest; the naked attempts to secure for this country the world’s most embarassing totalitarian state, but above all, to eliminate the future for hundreds of millions of people in one way or another, old people, young people, people who are suspended in a kind of temporal goo waiting for the other shoe of another economic crisis to drop.

It is all so remarkably cruel, so senseless, so anti-life. Such raw desire to extract profit from every possible source, to cause gleeful suffering to others, it’s enough to unmask any optimist, to drive anyone mad. How, one must ask each morning, does one live in such bleak times? Not only bleak, but unceasing. What we once perceived as the long trajectory of things to come has not only been foreshortened but also yanked in one direction or another like a dog on a leash. Too much is happening, too fast. The psychic damage incurred by this too-muchness and its unbearable cruelty is real. We keep watching for someone to save us when we know, deep down, that we must, with some immediacy, find ways to save ourselves.

And yet the other, true fact of the matter is: the sun comes up today and will come up the next day. Our dogs need taking out, our children need feeding and loving, our jobs need to be done. I’m supposed to be healing from a brain injury, mitigating the effects of post-concussion syndrome so that I can potentially be freed from its clutches and regain the ability to not only work but also regulate my emotions, to stop this unbearable cycle of panic that serves no purpose but to harm my living organism on behalf of my enemies. The intention of the people in power is for people like me to not get better. For us to “self deport” from the world, to join the ranks of the weak, culled rightfully from the strong.

For me and for others, in such times as these, the big and the small feel irreconcilable. This causes a kind of crisis wherein we are living but don’t know to what end. The Right also wants us to feel this way, to be trapped in melancholy nostalgia on the one hand and immersed in hopelessness on the other. It’s very expeditious for them to have so many on the Left, instead of treating the moment with the urgency it deserves, espouse endlessly about where it all went wrong and how it seems so impossible that the world is as evil as it is. I ask now: why relinquish power like this? Why give in to the feelings of suicidality they want us to feel? Now? When time is moving so quickly?

However, there are a number of other reasons for feelings of futurelesness that don’t have anything to do with the sad, sad past. Many (who should perhaps know better) are asking: why isn’t anyone doing anything? By “anyone” liberals usually mean institutions, and it’s true, they should be, like, doing at least the bare mininum instead of immediately complying in advance like the bunch of gutless cowards they are. But the Left realizes that those in the billionaire-backed Democratic Party — Chuck Schumer! A Groyperized Gavin Newsome! — always wanted much of what’s coming to happen, and not only that, they opened up the way for authoritarianism themselves with things like “indefinite detention” (Obama), or “Creating restrictions to free speech and siccing the power of the state on students protesting a genocide” (Biden.)

Still, many are asking: where are the ordinary people? Where are the normies who showed up in the streets the first time around when the threat of Trump was — in retrospect rightfully — recognized for what it was? In the first Trump administration, when “the Resistance” blew up, it did so on social media. Millions of people were exposed for the first time to protest movements, Left organizations, the labor movement, and other forms of direct and organized action. We were not yet aware at that time that this was a short-lived window in which the master’s tools could be wielded by us to achieve these moments of mass, collective outrage.

Since then, in their politics but also through their products, the tech billionaires who owned such powerful platforms have stopped at nothing to make people more isolated, conspiratorial, devoid of empathy, stupid, and hopeless.1 They have engineered space and time itself, reshaped it so that we stay home and remain hooked on their devices for hours of our lives, constantly self-soothing instead of looking at the world — the beautiful world!!!!! — but also the ugly world for what it is. For so many — especially the young, the remote-working, and the childless — those worlds grow smaller and smaller until there is only phoneworld.

While in phoneworld, it suddenly occurred to me that I was only seeing images of protests and other forms of public outrage after they had happened. It didn’t matter which social media site I used — BlueSky, X, or Instagram (the platform where I mostly follow people I know in meatspace.) Calls to action beyond, like, dialing up one’s senator always reached me too late, even when the protests and gatherings in question took place a few miles away in my own city. Hence, there is, I think, a broader feeling that no one is doing anything not only because of a very real defeat and the resulting protest fatigue that lasted up until the last year of the Biden era, but because when something is done, when calls to action are made, we are not seeing it.

I am simply no longer being exposed to the same movements, organizations, actions, and journalism I would have been 10 years ago. Such things have been buried amid a throng of slop, hot takes, and engagement bait. This is especially true when I log on to X, where my feed is nothing but a constant scroll of absolute, bleak, uncut doomerism. The X algorithm in particular is very reactive. If I like one melancholy post, or post something melancholy myself, it rearranges my whole timeline to make sure that content is what I see for the forseeable future. I doubt that everyone online is passively suicidal, but online sure will stop at nothing to make them that way.

To put it a different way, part of our collective feeling of futurelessness, I believe, is caused by design. In phoneworld, it’s not just that we’re getting the news. It’s that we’re getting the news, and the knee-jerk reactions of hundreds of people to that news, over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again, locking us into an eternal present where the time passes in huge slices and nothing changes beyond the movement of the thumb along the glass screen. In phoneworld, politics closes in on us with the sheer repetitive brunt of this hopelessness.

Because of this subjugation, we are unable to give space to our own thoughts and feelings, unable to act because we just want to see what’s next in the feed. Maybe it’ll be good news, maybe it’ll be funny, maybe it’ll be smart (less a possibility these days), but in order to get that glimpse of hope or at least of levity, one has to suffer through the same iterations of terribleness, until, all of a sudden, an hour has passed, maybe two. And by this time, one’s palms are sweating, one’s heart is racing, and one finds that one’s sense of personhood or self-in-the-world, one’s grounding in physical or temporal reality have all been diminished — but that’s only if one can recognize the signs of the diminishment. At any rate, the result is the same: Nothing can be done because we have done and are doing nothing.

Everyone hates me when I say this because we are all little addicts who want to defend our addictions and the livelihoods that are now unfortunately entangled up with them, but: we have yet to reckon both totally and personally with the fact that the smarphone is an anti-social instrument of control, surveillance, and self-annihilation. Fortunately, this collective denial is starting to weaken. Anyone who’s spent enough time on Substack will encounter a whole genre of essays about the topic. It’s as though we have been in a long stupor, with many of us suddenly waking up with a kind of collective pandemic-era, post concussion syndrome of our own: we can’t pay attention for long spans of time; we can’t finish books or have lost the desire to read; we can’t focus on simple tasks and struggle with short term memory. We’re constantly distracted, even in the moments that matter most — scrolling, to our own horror, at baptisms, weddings, funerals, at meals, on dates, after sex.

I recently read a very interesting article on brain fog in New York Magazine, because, well, I suffer from the condition myself. The piece presents the possibility that, while the brain fog seen in long COVID or brain injury victims likely has a more direct medical etiology such as inflammation or neurological problems, there is also the brain fog experienced by millions of people because, well, their brains are doing too much at once. The author of the piece, Katie Arnold-Ratliff writes (and it’s worth quoting at length):

Brain fog doesn’t always correlate to a psychiatric malady or medical ailment. You might just be dehydrated. Or sleepy. Or sad. Clinical neuropsychologist Karen Dahlman, assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, points out that brain fog really can be that simple — an outgrowth of the banal events that make up a life. “What might cause a memory complaint?” Dahlman asks. “Well, it could be neurological, or it could be that you’re getting divorced, or moving house. The more your cognitive space is taxed, the more preoccupied you are, the more difficult it is to pay attention, and the more the process of encoding information is interrupted.”

She shares an anecdote: “Let’s say you live in the suburbs, and you’re driving to the mall,” she says. “And while you’re driving, you’re arguing on the phone with your partner. This argument is vociferous. You’re agitated. Through muscle memory, you go into the garage, park, and leave your car. You hang up and do your errands and a while later return to the garage. You have no idea where you parked. I’m losing my mind, you think, I can’t even find my car. But you never encoded the memory of where your car was, because your attention was not on parking. Is that a memory problem? No. It’s something you’re mistaking for a memory problem.” And even if you’re not fighting over the phone, you’re likely staring at that phone a lot. It’s not hard to imagine that one might also fail to notice where they put their keys while rejecting a spam call or scrolling through Reddit or listening to an audiobook (or all three at once).

In the long term, what is all this doing to our brains? (And brains are definitely on my mind lately.) According to an extremely alarming new report at the Financial Times, our cognitive abilities as adults are rapidly declining with the smartphone as the only possible culprit. It should scare the shit out of us that we might be giving ourselves little dopamine hit-driven lobotomies, but the social truth is much darker. Next time you’re out, look at other people. On transit, at restaurants and in stores, children’s eyes are glued onto their iPads, their brains getting fried by Cocomelon just so their parents can look at their own phones and fry their own brains the same way. Long after lockdown ended, we remain more lonely and isolated from other people than perhaps ever before in modern history. We don’t know who our neighbors are, even in our own apartment buildings and it’s considered weird these days to knock on a door with a casserole, especially if your neighbor is different from you, because the homogonization of phoneworld drives us to only seek people who are like ourselves. It’s easier that way. Many of us no longer know who to ask for help or how to help others or where to go to try and collectively make our own lives less miserable.

Instead of convivality, everywhere we go, the whole of humanity is staring down. And what are they staring down at? Our post-Cambridge Analytica feeds tell teenage boys that it’s acceptable to blackmail, steal, be violent and stupid; that they are entitled to rape and view women like objects because that’s the nature of a hustle and grindset where the whole world is theirs. Teenage girls, meanwhile, are put at risk of developing eating disorders, social anxiety, and depression on the one hand, and are told by other young women that the best way to succeed in life is to be hot, skinny, and marry a rich man. My feed, as I mentioned before, is an endless screed of hopeless suicidality to the point where I had to delete X from my phone because it was making me, helped along by my brain-damaged state, a literal danger to myself. No matter where you go, the content we consume is becoming less intellectually challenging, more definitionally anti-social, more conservative on the one hand and more nihilistic on the other, all regardless of whether that’s what we want to see. How can we even know what we want to see? It happens for us.

The smartphone has deskilled seemingly everything, even something as fundamental to human life as reading. But it’s especially deskilled political organizing. Perhaps a subconscious reason why the Left puts so much hope in the labor movement is because organizing one’s workplace is a largely offline endeavor. It takes place face to face in a spatially and temporally anchored place where everyone, despite all that may divide them, is subjected to the same material conditions, the same injustices. The most pro-social idea on earth is that only through collective power can we, the individual, make for ourselves a better life, and let me tell you, the tech billionaires do not want you to know that.

My haters will be quick to point out that I, however, rely on these platforms to make my living. I have no shop floor. It’s true. Part of my despair comes from realizing that, without social media, and long out of school, I know nothing about how to reach other people. I came of age in the 2010s and have not known a politics without the smartphone, without social media, without the specatacle of virality and the belief that, in this open space, one can utilize these tools to affect change. And now, I am alone, in my apartment, afraid. My friends are alone, in their apartments, afraid.

What’s so fucking infuriating about this is that, meanwhile, in meatspace, Trump, Musk, and their policies as well as the Vichy Democrats, are all extremely unpopular. People — ordinary people, shaped by the harms being done to them in the now invisible real world — hate these assholes. There are vastly more people than not who don’t want the future that’s being forged for them, who want to do something about it. Perhaps they are paralyzed with fear, or, more broadly, don’t know exactly what to do right now because none of us are seeing on social media what’s really happening or discussing what could happen anymore. This raises the question: what do we do when people of a ceratain age — mine and younger, and also those vastly older than me who may not be online at all — know no other way of finding out that information?2

Instead of just brushing this off as Ludditism (I’ll take the complement), what would it mean to take the urgency of the situation seriously and look at immediate next steps? If what the brain fog article says is true, we’re literally causing ourselves to be sick by wasting precious mental space on constant distraction, cluttering up that which could be better allocated to thinking about things in a direct, practical, non-hysterical, political way. Right now — perhaps this very second, even — we need to regain an ability to ask basic, reorienting questions: Where am I right now? What am I doing? Where are the others who can help me? Who are my neighbors? How can I be a neighbor to others? What’s going on in the world and how to I get out in the world to join in? Is what I’m reading harmful to me? If so, why do I feel a desire to harm myself?

One of the imminent questions of our moment is: what would it take to relearn how to do political work offline, to recognize that there will perhaps be a time — in the very near future — where online work will be rendered impossible for those of us not in favor of the administration? The old ways are already crumbling now in this moment of highly siloed algorithms, where no two people’s internet is the same. Hence, we must quickly abandon the 2010s idea that our content, concepts, and actions will, through the internet, find the masses. That ship sailed after Black Lives Matter. And after so many of the activists involved in that movement died under mysterious circumstances, before we embark again, we need to reckon with the fact that we carry with us a device that tracks our location and listens to everything we say. It is naive to think this will not have consequences. Those black bloc anarchists people used to rib for being paranoid are looking pretty damn smart right now. More and more, I’ve started to think that, just as people rightly request the donning of masks in public settings to protect others and ourselves, maybe it’s time to treat our phones the same way.3

A darker social reality, however, is this: the NSA or whatever doesn’t really need to do much in order to facilitate matters of surveillance. We’ve learned how to do it ourselves — to each other, and internally. We self-censor. We film strangers in public and post private correspondences online for laughs or revenge. I saw in my own times as a socialist organizer the way comrades would sabotage political discussions and undermine if not outright abuse others in extremely public ways via social media, all under the guise of accountability, as though the only real accountability that mattered was the opinions of strangers on the internet, accumulated for punitive, not restorative means. We must ask: how can we be free when that freedom does not even extend into our own private selfhood or our respect for the selfhood of others?

What such a reorientation looks like, I don’t know. I’ve never not had this son of a bitch in my back pocket. All I know now — right now — is that looking down at that screen isn’t just a form of wasting my life away: it’s killing my future. Maybe it’s killing yours, too.

On January 20th, the day of Donald Trump's second presidential inauguration, I fell in the yard. It all happened, as the cliché goes, so fast. The dog had to piss. I let him out, grumbling about the Chiberian winter. It was so cold that the soil had turned into a kind of half-living concrete. I noticed too late that the workers renovating the unit upstairs had left a stone block in an inopportune location and that the gate had been left open. The dog made a run for it; I made a run for him. The next thing I knew, I was on the ground. My hands and knees stung from both the ice and breaking the fall. I limped inside, more embarrassed than concerned. I didn’t realize I’d hit my head until after I looked in the mirror and saw the the cuts on my face, including two right between the eyes that had a certain anime je nais se quoi to them. My head “felt weird” but I thought nothing of it, believing the feeling would wear off in a few hours or so. I even went so far as to joke online about “looking like Sephiroth,” brushing off all those absolutely correct comments of “uhh if you hit your head, you should see a doctor.” I’d had concussion scares before — the time I slipped in the rain and hit the sidewalk; the time an airpod-donning runner stepped out in front of me on a shared trail and I went over the handlebars of my road bike — but nothing came of either. Luck spared me from the first injury and a helmet the second. As they say, third time’s the charm.

I was on deadline that day, and the next. In fact, I was late. Assuming the best, I decided to tough it out. In that critical 48 hours after sustaining a head injury, I wrote not one but two articles, one after the other, powering through an intolerance to reading anything longer than a tweet, completely unaware that my eyes were literally not working right. (They are still, over a month later, not working right. I have to go to vestibular rehabilitation three times a week.) Nausea and brain fog could not compete with the dread of an unmovable due date, nor with the fear that, in my intolerable ADHD decadence, I’d been late one too many times and was about to get the axe. The third day after the head injury, I wrote 1800 words of my book, proud of how productive I was being. When I got out of my chair to get a glass of water, the world started spinning and I wasn’t sure where I was or what I’d been doing. Only then did I realize that something was seriously wrong. I went to urgent care. The urgent care doctor, who was mean in a hot kind of way, told me that, yes, I had a concussion. The cure was rest. Just lay down for a while and don’t do anything and it’ll go away.

Ok first of all, before we even get into the fact that “rest” is anathema to someone like me, extraneous circumstances had made such a thing impossible regardless, by which I mean the aforementioned renovation indirectly responsible for the concussion in the first place. As soon as a local property speculator bought the house from the two normal people who owned it before, the hammers and drills and saws, the decibel levels sometimes reaching the 80s, emerged from above and soon grew unceasing in the rapid pursuit of flipper greige profit, even on Christmas Eve, even on New Year’s, starting at seven in the morning and not stopping sometimes until seven at night. Something I learned in acoustics grad school was that environmental noise, especially noise of a mechanical nature, takes a massive physiological and mental toll on the human body. Increased blood pressure, higher cortisol levels, sleep loss, and emotional instability are all par for the course in healthy people. But that noise coupled with a concussion made me feel about as sane as Gene Hackmann (RIP) sitting in his torn up apartment at the end of The Conversation.

Fortunately, however, the first few days of concussion recovery are marked by hypersomnia, and so, despite the odds, I slept. I slept endlessly. I had beautiful dreams at the beginning of my brain injury, richer, somehow, than normal dreams, with a certain deep sheen similar to the effect of paint on black velvet. Some of my dreams were memory-images, mostly from childhood. The plastic Christmas tree buttons on my mother’s plaid dress. The particular grey-orange color of the sky before a rainstorm. The explosion of May ladybugs taking refuge in our old screened porch, crawling up and down the faux-bamboo blinds. The sensation of running through the sprinkler in the front yard, rhizomes of centipede grass between my toes, the xeric soil taking forever to become saturated to the point of puddling.

Other dreams were narrative in nature. I remember one in particular, about the character Sieglinde from Wagner’s Ring. The dream took place after the end of Die Wälkure, when Sieglinde has been left to wander the forest of Riesenheim, condemned to give birth to Siegfried and die. In my dream, I could see the forest, dark in its totality, and Sieglinde on her knees digging into the black soil with her hands, weeping with grief, taking the dirt in her mouth, letting it crowd her eyelashes until it caked with tears and spit. I’m still brain damaged enough to believe that, in retrospect, both of these dreams were omens.

Once the sleeping wore off, my brain really stopped working. All of a sudden, I couldn’t form lasting trains of thought, couldn’t hold anything in focus. There emerged a kind of film between me and my thoughts rendering them inaccessible and slippery. In their place, a distressed impotence. Even in my apparent rest, I was thinking too much. “Complex thoughts,” the second urgent care doctor told me, “are only going to make things worse.” (What did that even mean? Was there such thing as non-complex thinking?)

Like a naughty child, I resisted this advice. I tried to daydream without words, entered my version of what Freud once called a “private theater” — rehashing old characters and scenes from fiction I wanted to write as filmically (i.e. without textual narration) as possible. But then, afraid that I was becoming stupid, I would repeatedly tear through outlines for essays I was in the process of writing — the McMansion chapter of my book; a blog post about Neuschwanstein castle as a work of kitsch, the final essay in my series on Die Walküre about the role of incest — constantly checking just to see if I could still think, well aware that I shouldn’t be thinking. When thinking inevitably proved difficult, I’d break down in tears. As the hammers pounded both above and in my head, I stared at the ceiling wanting to be normal again, fighting to be normal, realizing that I was not normal, and panicking about a life without normality, in a vicious cycle that began again and again.

And yet, despite my brain begging me to slow down via the medium of excruciating headaches, I continued to misbehave. The second I stopped feeling nauseous and constantly sleepy, I got my hair done. I insisted on cashing in the tickets I bought to see Esa-Pekka Salonen conduct Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Listening to the opener, Richard Strauss’s showpiece Don Juan (an audition bugbear of ex-violinists everywhere) was pretty close to what I imagined it felt like to be euthanized. It was as though the music were being cracked open over my skull like an egg whose innards seeped through the synapses of my nervous system. Dazed, I watched Salonen’s narrow shoulders, his terse face, his tempered coordination of a distempered beast, that great orchestra in that bad hall, a hall which through the technocratic acoustical reforms of the 1990s was transformed from the plastered, directional weapon it was into something rather resembling my head: inchoate, with mysteriously vulnerable parts.

The bad hall makes whoever is conducting more important than usual. Thus, I found myself wishing that Esa-Pekka Salonen, with his neat motions and tight mouth, was in my brain, putting all the nonsense back together. And yet, despite the very real physical pain (head throbbing, eyes bulging out of my head) the incredible feeling of being overwhelmed by music, familiar from distant childhood, had returned in a strange, frightening, yet welcomed “wow, I am alive!” kind of way, so much so that when the violists picked up a rather soaring melody, tears streamed down my pathetic, captive face.

Meanwhile, as we are all very much aware, the sky began to fall, politically speaking. Addicted to making things worse for myself, I continued to doomscroll through social media even though scrolling made me literally sick. Everyone who saw me posting knew I had a brain injury and begged me to log off. But too much was happening — government workers being fired en masse, social programs getting axed left and right, the cruel spectacle of siccing ICE on schoolchildren, the coordinated dismantling of public health, a pogrom against trans people — all of which seemed to be accompanied by Elon Musk’s sallow, amphetamine-addled face. Worse perhaps than the spectacle was the sheer, constant glee being taken by my enemies in the suffering of others coupled with the utter helplessness of being able to do nothing but watch, a helplessness that extended far beyond the boundaries of my brain injury and seemingly into the entire political apparatus that just eight years ago used to call itself “The Resistance.”

Nothing felt real, politically or otherwise. The rationalization of others, a necessary stabilizing force in the lives of the brain damaged, was significantly hampered by the fact that this sensation of derealization was also shared by millions of normal people. After all, the desired goal of Trump et al is to basically apply a stun gun to the American political psyche, and, credit where credit is due, he’s pretty good at it. I couldn’t help but feel that there’s probably been no worse a time to have a concussion in all of history. At least in the 1930s the newspaper only came twice a day.

With my brain unable to distinguish between real and imagined threats, an unprecedented paranoia took over. After the DC plane crash, I begged my husband to take out better life insurance because he’d booked a flight to Philadelphia the following week and refused to exchange the ticket for that of a 24 hour train ride. I became genuinely convinced, thanks to Twitter, that I would be deported to an El Salvadoran black site for writing pro-Palestine columns in The Nation or sent to RFK Jr.’s ADHD concentration camp. I sent erratic emails to people I knew in Canada and Slovenia begging for any kind of opportunity to flee my country.

Blessed with not being able to remember a great deal of it, I can only describe the first two weeks of my concussion as an unceasing nightmare, from which one wakes up for only a few precious moments — folding the laundry, peeling an orange, noticing the sway of bare tree branches — before plunging back in a self-perpetuating darkness, a tremulous state of fear.

But the worst part of all was that I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t write — how I process the world and fight back in my own way, a little Siegmund of socialism, singing my songs about the woe of it all. I couldn’t even fucking read. But it wasn’t just the literary life I’d lost. Listening to music, watching films, being in public without having a panic attack — all of these things became impossible. The more impossible they became, the more desperately I tried to get them back. For the very first time in my life, I wanted to go to sleep and never wake up again. I expressed this sentiment to as many people as possible because the thought of putting my own lights out scared the shit out of me, in part because it didn’t feel entirely mine. No, this was something happening in my brain.

The decision had to be made, and was largely made for me by people in my life who love me: I would need to stop working indefinitely. In what was an extremely scary move considering the fact that 90% of my income is crowdfunded, I had to let everyone know — readers, editors, patrons, subscribers — that I was unable to work and that I didn’t know when I would be returning. When people came out of the woodwork to show support for me, to let me know that the most important thing was not some piece of writing or another, but my getting better, this, more than anything else provided me with the grace to finally, truly seek help. I’m being completely sincere in my belief that it saved my life.

Once I quit working, my only job became getting better. In this pursuit, two things were clear: The first was that I couldn’t stay in my evil apartment any longer. The second was that I’d largely lost the ability to care for myself. Defeated by my own brain, I went back to the North Carolina Sandhills to stay with my parents. It wasn’t just that I needed my mom and dad (I did), or that I needed the peace and quiet of small town life. Something deep in my subconscious brought me home, a necessity to resituate myself relative to myself, to become smaller and needier and perhaps, if my life was so defined by certain perameters, no one at all. On an existential level, this was probably just as scary as the concussion.

Shortly before my brain injury, after 9 months of psychoanalysis, I realized that I didn’t know who I was without writing. This came about because I was trying to understand both an unhealthy obsession with productivity and my less than stellar relationship with social media. In both cases, the line between myself and the performance of myself had become seamlessly and parasitically blurred. Many times I posed the question: if such an enriching if precarious existence fell apart, would life still be worth living? If I didn’t write, did I even matter? The answer I kept coming back to was: no. There was no living without writing, there was no point to existence if it couldn’t be mediated through language.

Me and my therapist were working on changing this, week after week because, frankly, “no” is not a very good answer to the “is the life worth otherwise living” question. In the sandbox of the analyst’s office, such dangerous, narcissistic thoughts can be expressed freely. They don’t really have teeth. Such expression is almost a means to ward them off in the real world, and definitely a part of divining the ancient, psychosexual sources actually responsible for them. But now that the unthinkable had happened, that I’d injured my brain, the writing apparatus, I had to test that dangerous hypothesis out in real life. I had to be (or return to) someone who was Kate Wagner, not the writer, but just some woman, a body moving through the world, a person existing only in the hearts and minds of shockingly few people. Given my personality, ego-death is probably far beyond my reach. Brain injury would have to suffice.

This is the criticism part of the essay where I talk about what a concussion actually is and the fact that the American healthcare system sucks absolute shit at dealing with them. Despite what seemingly half of the doctors in this country will say, a bump on the head is rarely just that, in part because the brain, which is rather different from, like, an inert femur, does not enjoy being injured. In fact, when it’s injured it assumes a powerful, almost autonomous will towards self-destructiveness, including suicidality, the risk of which is elevated in concussion victims even in less suicidal times. The doctors didn’t prepare me for this. They didn’t prepare me for anything, if I’m being honest.

A concussion, or mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) is one of the most common injuries out there, so common that its seriousness is often underestimated. 3 million of them happen each year in sports alone. If you can’t already tell from my testimony, a concussion can affect everything from ocular functioning, the sympathetic nervous system (responsible for the flight or fight response), appetite, vestibular coordination, sleep and circadian rhythm, memory, executive functioning, cognition, and emotional regulation, the last three of which are terrifying to lose and also affect all the other stuff pretty directly.

To be honest, I don’t think there is such thing as a “mild” traumatic brain injury considering the fact, even in a situation as routine as mine, the possibility for prolonged suffering and even permanent disability is pretty substantial. According to the NIH, the number of patients who go on to develop post-concussion syndrome (which is kind of like the long COVID of the brain) a condition in which concussion-like symptoms can last for months, sometimes even years, ranges from 11 to an astonishing 82 percent. The rates of post-mTBI insomnia, which I myself still struggle with to the point of genuine disability, are also staggering, affecting 30 to 70 percent of patients, also sometimes for years after the injury. That’s all before we get into the harder to quantify statistics on post-mTBI mental health struggles such as PTSD, depression, anxiety, and the fact that a TBI can unmask the symptoms of mood disorders such as bipolar. One of the interesting findings of the NIH study was that the likelihood of developing long-term disability actually goes up the milder the TBI because there is an extraordinary social and financial pressure to, you guessed it, go back to work. It’s entirely fair, I think, to call an illness like post-concussion syndrome as much a sociogenic as a cognitive-neurological one.

Early medical intervention can help prevent these lasting symptoms from developing. But in our broken healthcare system which, for everyone but the well-off is mostly a constellation of urgent cares and WebMD, rarely does one even learn about such preventative measures in the first place. Like many concussion sufferers, I was repeatedly given outdated advice about how to heal, being told that it would all go away if I could just lay down for a couple weeks. I wasn’t sufficiently prepared for how debilitating the injury would be, nor was I warned about pretty important stuff such as the fact that my brain would basically stop at nothing to attack itself.

It’s not uncommon for people in my situation to slip through the cracks. I should have been referred to a concussion specialist right after getting the injury, but wouldn’t end up seeing one until a month had passed. I also should have been referred to a psychiatrist or at least a brain injury support group instead of getting Zoloft shoved in my face again for the umpteenth time in life. Some of the mistakes verged on the negligent. It took a month to be diagnosed with whiplash because the urgent care neglected to do an x-ray of my head. I should have started going to physical therapy for both my neck and vestibular system weeks ago. In order to write all this (the creative human spirit knows no bounds!) I have to avert my eyes from the screen (a skill I learned from being a sports journalist, which required transcribing interviews in real time), wear a headache cap, and use accessibility tools such as dictation and screen readers. While I finally was able to pass all my cognitive tests at the end of February, it will take another month of physical therapy before I can even begin to return to “normal.”

Throughout my struggle, the anti-life nature of privatized healthcare often seemed bleakly spectacular in nature. For example, when I went to the ER after losing vision in my left eye, I left after the nurse told me it would be a 10 hour wait. It was perhaps a bit rude of me to laugh in the receiver when I was told that there was an eight month waiting list to see a neuropsychiatrist, one of the doctors recommended to make sure the brain is working properly after an injury. Even a regular psychiatrist is pretty elusive given the fact that we as a society are living at the intersection of about fifteen different existential crises. Maybe one day I’ll get to see a sleep doctor before I die.

Faced with a lack of access to bona fide medical practitioners, one is made to take measures into one’s own hands. Unfortunately, our desiccated Internet full of misinformation and AI slop — something one is more susceptible to when one’s cognitive abilities are diminished — only makes matters even worse. The most helpful resources for those suffering from concussion — the Concussion Alliance and the Concussion Legacy Foundation — don’t have the same SEO chops as the countless hordes of wellness websites on whose recommendations I started taking supplements in the hope that these would fix something only to later learn from a real doctor that they probably don’t work.

Worried about something more specific? Well, there’s always Reddit (the world’s number one outlet for competitive illness-having and Munchausen’s’ syndrome) to inform you that you may have post-concussion syndrome forever because of all the mistakes you made, albeit often with the caveat that it will eventually get better. Even well-meaning resources such as the Cleveland Clinic convinced me that the shaking legs that so often accompany panic attacks were the beginning of neurological decline.

Worst of all, however, were the many whack a mole opportunities for economic exploitation. A desperate brain injury victim will find no shortage of luxury programs promising a full recovery in two weeks’ time for the low, low price of $15,000-$20,000. The grifting extends even further with regard to individual symptoms. If you google ‘insomnia’ these days you get a bunch of lifestyle publications warning you that you’ll develop Alzheimer’s if you don’t sleep, thinly-veiled pill mills, and ads for $200/month therapy apps. Faced with moments of depressive crisis, one can only marvel at how every mental problem in the world can somehow be solved with phone-based mindfulness and meditation. (Also, sorry, but I have to speak my truth: meditation can definitely backfire if one is suffering from brain-injury-induced corporeal hypervigilance. Body scan? More like panic attack.)

Soon, inevitably, the bills came. Oh, did they come! The insurance company called because I was using too much healthcare. Instantly my meager emergency savings were wiped out by “a stupid fucking fall in the yard.” After years of herculean effort, I’d landed back in (non-student loan) debt again. Part of the reason I’m writing this is with the hope of paying what I owe.1 (How much could one concussion cost, Michael, $3000?) The other reason is because there is very little writing out there about what sustaining a concussion is really like, how destabilizing and hopeless it is.2

At the end of the day, however, the hard truth is that, much like politics, the only way out of a brain injury is through. The process is brutal, yet, in its own way, moving and morbidly fascinating. I’m no philosopher, especially of the mind, but having long been wary of the concept of the soul, I used to think that I was my brain and that my brain was me. However, after I banged it up, that didn’t seem so true anymore. This is in part because I had to psychologically decouple my sense of self from my brain or I wasn’t going to break the cycle of fear and start getting better. Yes, my brain is me, but it’s also a part of my body, a bunch of electrified goo in my skull, a dumb muscle that was overextended just like my whiplashed neck. My brain constantly made sure I remained aware of this, of its non-extraordinary, non-literary attributes, by sending me pain signals whenever I pushed it too hard, like a shock collar on a dog. It’s a strange sensation, being reminded of the physicality of thinking. Whatever nascent belief I retained in dualism has been thoroughly undermined and is unlikely to return. No, we are meat sacks all the way down.

There is a politics to recovery too, of course, and it’s not a politics of escapism, though the news was thankfully banned in my household. Accepting weakness in a culture that valorizes strength; accepting illness in a world that’s intolerable to it; needing help at a time when empathy is not very easy to find, these are the challenges that extend beyond one’s own suffering and into a collective pain, one most of us remain in denial about until something bad happens to us, too. Part of the reason the crusty wellness cult currently at work eliminating the public health system seems so insane to me is because its adherents appear to believe they can somehow remain healthy forever. Theirs is the anti-vaxxers’ sense of security that what kills the weaker won’t touch their children because immunity (read: strength) is an inherently individual attribute rather than a socially achieved goal. Like many strains of fascism, this one is rooted in a false sense of physical superiority and the kind of death-aversion that turns, inevitably, into a death drive. Well guess what, yesterday was Ash Wednesday, the point of which is: we all die.

Thinking otherwise holds no appeal to me. I’ve been disabled my whole life. I suffer (yes, suffer, sorry!) from ADD and autism-spectrum disorder. Yet somehow I managed to forget the part where, a very long time ago, when I was a little girl, I had to learn to accept and live with those disabilities, even though it was scary as shit to an eight year old to be told that you’re different from other children, that you’re sick and it’s not the kind of sickness that gets better. It made sense, especially to my psychoanalyst, that I would end up having to go back home, and that when I went back home, that I would also go back to being that little girl again in order to overcome the same scary diagnosis, albeit manifested differently: that something was wrong, and perhaps would forever be wrong, with my brain.

I only began to heal when I started to listen to what my brain was telling me, which was to fucking stop. That meant reducing my mental scope to the things I could immediately control, slowing everything down, hour by hour, and embracing only those more simple elements of being human and in the world. I don’t even mean this last part spiritually because despite what the Reddit atheists will tell you, spirituality requires cognition, too. I mean it in a very physical, sensuous way.

In other words, in my terrible state, I had to relearn how to do nothing. This was difficult for all the reasons one might imagine. First of all, the dopamine-giving apps on my phone aren’t making any money off me while I’m doing nothing and not even my Pavlovian nauseousness was quite enough to go cold turkey immediately, given that, you know, these are the proverbial weeks where decades happen. Only my mother’s loving admonishment could achieve real results. Beyond phoneworld, our contemporary way of life is one in which doing nothing is a one way trip to impoverishment and suffering on the one hand, and an aspirational goal within an emerging attention economy industrial complex complete with self-help books and expensive retreats on the other. But the kind of “doing nothing” the books and substacks talk about and the kind of “doing nothing” necessary for healing a brain injury are often very different from one another. The prior is a case of choosing to do nothing, of mindfulness and reclaiming one’s time, which I agree is important, if not imperative, and was also part of this process. The latter is doing nothing — really, nothing at all — because you have no choice.

“Doing nothing,” well, sure, easier said than done. But it’s not a new concept to me, either. My biggest youthful complaint about my hometown (Southern Pines, if you’re wondering) was that there was never anything to do. This, I now believe, was a blessing in disguise, not only because of the concussion, but because being bored is a gift in that it forces you to both really be in the world and try to understand its innumerable qualities and also to try and create worlds of your own. These are two impulses that are largely lost in childhood, to our detriment. In our technologically mediated existence, it’s possible that a time may come where such an impulse never develops in the first place. That would be immensely sad and entirely the fault of adults.

In order to get my cognition back, I had to go kid mode, except this time I couldn’t read my way out of life’s problems. Time, which speeds up considerably as an adult, passed in long, irregular hours again. With a renewed separation anxiety, I waited for my mother to come home from work. A retired childcare veteran, she nannies for a rich family. In the morning, she would make me and my father cheese eggs (a luxury in these trying times) with sliced fruit and homemade banana bread before leaving again to pick up the baby from preschool. In the interregnum between her departure and second arrival, I’d sit and color in a coloring book or pick away at the jigsaw puzzle strewn about the dining room table, embarrassed by how difficult both of these tasks were. I took hot showers just to try and get rid of tension headaches until my skin started to become raw. I listened to 40 episodes of the History of the Germans Podcast which I highly recommend, even though I don’t remember much of it besides the fact that Emperor Otto III, always pious, spent most of his paripatetic ruling life wearing a hairshirt. I was just like Otto III, I thought concussedly, a penitent atoning for their own arrogance, except it was the inside of my skull that felt like the hairshirt.

At one thirty in the afternoon, my father would go to lunch in his 2010 Corvette, a retirement gift to himself, and if I felt up to it, I’d go with him. Afterward, he’d play oldies chestnuts on his electric organ and I pretended I wasn’t listening. I needed my father as much as my mother, my father the permissive parent, the soft-spoken presence and humorist of the house. My father, who was put in the position of seeing his grown daughter reduced to a babbling mess who woke up in the middle of the night screaming. We often crossed paths, two ships in the same small night, often because he never slept well either.

The most exciting thing I did at home was watch birds. This was a luxury I wasn’t afforded in urban Chicago, where quality birding required travel to either outside the city or a few choice locales. The still-surrounding woods meant that the bird population at my parents’ house was so abundant it felt, to me, like William Morris wallpaper-esque paradise. Every day, I’d sit at the kitchen table and clock fifteen to twenty types of birds, easy. With so little to cling on for hope, the close-up, colorful pageant of the birds frequently moved me to tears. At least not sleeping in the night meant I could catch their muted songs first thing in the morning. I watched as the white-throated sparrows congregated in throngs, gossiping with one another and locking out the other birds; as the Carolina chickadees would stop by just long enough to snag a bite to eat and then flitter skittishly away, as the tufted titmice clawed onto the lip of the screenless vinyl window and beat sunflower seeds against it until the marrow came out; as the big fat cardinals made the feeder swing back and forth, as the mourning doves congregated politely on the ground with a spate of dark-eyed juncos, only to later be scared away by a rather belligerent blue jay.

A lot of the time, when the weather was nice, I walked, often with the stated goal of making myself tired enough to sleep (unsuccessful) and also to see more birds (very successful). And not just the birds, but the stands of longleaf pines and the plants dependent on the fire-based ecosystem they formed, the mosses the color of oxidated copper, the Dr. Seuss-like wiregrasses, the scrub oaks and climbing smilax, all of which I learned about back in elementary school when they still used to teach that kind of thing in rural areas. Like a child, I collected rocks, pocketing blue slate and clay composites as purple as the porphyry columns of the Hohenstaufen palaces. The air in the Sandhills was so crisp, so clean, it electrified the body. Like a weepier Hans Castorp I breathed it in greedy gulps, took rest cures on the back porch. (In fact, the area was first developed in the late 19^th century as a resort town for tuberculosis patients.) In my long absence, I’d forgotten how the air smelled different at different times of the day or depending on whether the rain drenched the sandy soil or the sun came out to coax the bitter odor from the pine needles. For a couple of days it snowed. The last time I’d seen it snow here was twenty years ago.

My mother often walked with me in solidarity because she needed to get in shape before seeing the cardiologist again. (We still walk in solidarity with one another, albeit remotely, with daily check ins.) Despite still being dependent on my mother, especially in the throes of fear and insomnia, we spoke often in new ways, as two women, as friends. She told me things I didn’t know about, like her relationship with her mother (who seemed to be quite the cigarette smoking doyenne) and how they both worked as switchboard girls at the phone company, and about how my mother almost flunked chemistry after skipping school too much, and about her fraught also-adopted brothers, who I only met once or twice.

I think I’m one of those imperious people who need to be made weak to be made vulnerable, so goddamn stubborn and used to a life of contingency that I forget somehow that love, that other people, is all there is. Like a protagonist in a bad Hallmark movie, it took getting my brain wrecked in order to feel a depth of love that I, for reasons I’m not entirely sure of, otherwise went to great lengths to minimize or repress. As someone used to warding off fear by way of jokes, it wasn’t so easy to do once nothing was funny anymore. In the difficult, frightening evenings, when I would gleam the news, panic, and weep, I called my husband who reassured me that he would love me even if I lost my job and he lost his and we had nothing, would love me even if the world became intolerably difficult to live in. I got the chance to visit with two of my friends from before I went to college who still called me by my government name and loved me differently from other people, loved the version of me that drew comic books in class and noodled around on the violin, who learned how to be clever a long time ago in order to survive not being other things. I relearned how to love my mother and father after politics separated us, and with the maws of history opening up so fast, new kinds of reconciliation became possible and those old politics themselves seemed like a bad dream that didn’t really matter much once one woke up.

So that’s what I did when I say I did nothing. I walked around outside and thought about dead German emperors and listened to my parents’ grown up stories and ate comfort food and respirated more like a plant than like an animal, accepting hour by slow hour that I was mortal, that I was weak, that I was loved, in private, and for some immutable qualities I’m not entirely aware of. Then, four weeks after the injury, things began to change. One day, I could go into a grocery store without feeling heart palpitations. I could watch a movie without eye pain and could graduate from podcasts to audiobooks. I could read the first chapter of Hermann Hesse’s Narcissus and Goldmund (a true high school favorite) without feeling pain or sickness. I began to sit down and scrawl short entries into a journal my mother bought me, ignoring their bad style and mysteriously circuitous nature:

Read today, no headache, stopped needing earplugs everywhere, slept three hours last night, pretty good, gotta look up that whole thing with Otto III and the hairshirt, didn’t Ivo Andrić have something to say about insomnia?

These sentences slowly began to grow into recollections, and from recollections into into manic, excited, more capable paragraphs, and from manic, excited, more capable paragraphs into something taking the shape of a work, no major work, just lists of birds and things I did, as though by writing I could break into the space, which, out of dialectical necessity, must come after suffering. Maybe it works like that, maybe it doesn’t. I don’t know. I’m just happy I can try my hand again.

I need to be so real with you (the polity of writers, the reader, the editorial you, my mom, everyone alive) right now: I am being driven insane. I don’t know what other word describes the feeling I get when, every day I log on to Twitter (now known as X) or Instagram or Substack or whatever and witness an atavism that is ugly, cynical, self-serving, and varying degrees of brutal. I have a contrarian’s compulsion to write about this in a way that tries to capture this terrifying sentiment without conceding to a kind of winsome, perhaps melancholy lyricism in service to how things are or were, one that plays exceedingly to the ‘end of letters’ industrial complex whose substance is all-too predicated on the fact that we writers continue to have one foot in the shit and are still too afraid to take it out and that’s just the way things are. It’s understandable really; after all, it’s how we — including myself — got work and made our money and put our names out there ten to twenty years ago even though all it’s doing now is pitting us against each other in a fight for scraps, destroying our souls, stationing cops in our heads that ruin writing out of fear and making even an ambient, personal sense of peace impossible.

Though it is gauche to admit them openly, here are my broad-brush personal observations: the ranks are closing. Social media is increasingly being used as a way of weaponizing one’s platform to pick off one’s competition in ever-more aggressive ways. Media in general and legacy “liberal” media in particular, is drifting to the right on the one hand and firing journalists and essayists in order to pander to cranks, mystics, grifters, influencers, content creators whose work is citationless but popular, and other such people on the other. One only need to glean X for a few scrolls and see the way the LA fires are presently being mediated through woo woo discourseville to get a sense of what the future of takes is going to look like. Faced with this grim reality, the impulse to do a smash and grab with one’s audience, to retreat to some precarious platform or another, to exit the polity, is overwhelming — that is, if one can do it at all.

I talk to enough people in the business to come to the alarming conclusion that trans and queer writers, socialists, and writers of color, are being quietly excluded from the world of letters due to “political” or “identity” fatigue which is a way of saying “it’s easier to capitulate to right wing pressure on matters of race and gender (in particular) and pretend that doing so is somehow savvy and left-ish populist than to continue going against the status quo, a concept which is itself now a bit cringe.” Alternatively, said fatigue is a market one in which such stories and perspectives no longer sell as well and therefore are no longer important. If you complain about this loss — an overcorrection to a problem that has, with a few notable exceptions, only ever been presented in an inherently reactionary format — you get accused by guys with podcasts of doing “2010s thought.” This is but one symptom of a broader disease: social media, if not the world of letters itself, is being increasingly poisoned by antisocial tendencies, nihilism, petty bitterness and an irony that averts our gazes rather than stares defiantly Bertolt Brecht-style in the face of the wretched world we live in. This is a polemical essay, not a piece of reported journalism. I know that if you’re reading this, we share similar audiences and probably walks of life and you have seen the things I’m seeing for yourself.

We (writers) can all deny this is happening and feign hunky-doryness, but it is happening. It has been happening in slow motion for the last four years as the once-rebellious Trump-era press made concessions to a right-wing Democratic president, in part to maintain access. These shifts are only going to accelerate as more and more outlets, traditional and otherwise, kiss ass to Trump for the same reason or make themselves mystical, vibes-based and ambiguously apolitical in order to survive what will be a nasty transition characterized by increased censorship, algorithmic siloing, and accelerated platform death. A writer economy that individualizes intellectual production is only going to worsen these effects, even though it has become one of the only ways to survive. This is not only because market competition incentivizes a certain ruthlessness (or, alternatively, the further closing of ranks between already successful people who benefit collectively from continued gatekeeping) but also because it will become easier than ever to get picked off by each other, a rogue content moderation system (such as on X) or our completely broken legal system which itself has been engineered into a machine for thwarting progress and destroying dissent.

I am all for independence in every respect — I come from blogging world, after all. I make my living primarily from being supported through crowdfunding on various platforms including this one and make up for what I lack through freelancing. I am also heartened by new attempts at worker-run media, which may be the only way out of this mess, despite the fact that their projects, too, are somewhat undermined by the individualized writer’s market. The bitter reality remains, however, that centralization in the form of a newsroom or other such structure came with important stability-generating benefits. The obvious ones — formalized employment, the potential to form a union and get a pension and make a living — have long been mourned by the writerly precariat.

Perhaps more relevant to our recent political shifts, however, is that large, legacy publications have legal teams and editors that can protect you when shit hits the fan, something that matters when you’re doing things like journalism or taking on powerful enemies, which I hope we will all still do even though now it’s coming at the cost of our jobs — including at those very same legacy publications. Part of my ambient madness comes from what I see as an ever-emerging truth: there is increasingly nowhere to run to for stability or protection, especially political and legal protection, in the world of letters. This, coupled with the fact that social media has, in effect, become a kind of extrajudicial kangaroo court whose verdicts have dire consequences including for employment, does not bode well.

While there remains a healthy culture of left-wing magazine writing, many of the old bulwarks (especially large newspapers) have either caved to power — such as the case with censorship or silence on Palestine — or have caved to the mob and seek only to frantically pander to a populism that isn’t even real because the internet has scattered us into algorithmic cesspits that are becoming more and more difficult to climb out of. (My own parents are on a completely different internet from me and nothing I produce would ever or has ever reached them “organically.”) And this is before we get into things like enshittification, literary cultural decline writ large and what AI slop promises to do with the publishing industry. These developments, unfortunately, are a long time coming. For the last twenty or so years, the need to see internet number go up has destroyed countless literary lives, not to mention things like style and form, whether in terms of clickbaitiness in the Millennial mode or scandalous self-exploitative virality or through being made so afraid of backlash that one undermines one’s own argument, hands the keys over de facto to one’s enemies, writes oneself into a hole. (To speak from personal experience.)

The big picture is this, to put it bluntly: the attacks on the press by the capitalist class, usually via the tech industry, either by controlling it or undermining it through platformization have created an existential and paradoxical bind where the media is now in such a state that the need to survive is more important than both the journalism-movie “will to do the right thing” and the desire to produce work that is honest, brave, requires effort and time to make, and will last beyond a single news cycle. We (writers) all know this, and it’s not particularly heroic of me to state the obvious on the stating the obvious app for the ten thousandth time.

However, while I understand this market-adaptive instinct, having suffered through many iterations of it myself, I have reached a point where there are some adaptations I am simply not willing or able to make. To be perfectly honest (irascible), I would rather kill myself if it all goes bad for me than put my ugly visage on TikTok pantomiming the very things I devoted my life and creative energies to writing about in depth because nobody reads anymore and that’s the way it has to be. To be even more frank about another thing no one wants to talk about: why should I bother anyway? People plagiarize my work on the video apps all the time and I just have to shut up and turn the other cheek because there’s no actual way — socially, legally, what have you — to deal with it. If you push back at all, you look like a sore loser, a wash-up. Times have changed, dumbass Millennial, you don’t “own” xyz idea, and so on.

Other people have proven that such a transition to short-form video is possible, and good for them. There are writers such as Taylor Lorenz who are able to produce video content that is true to themselves, topical and worthwhile and I both envy and have tremendous respect for them. I, however, am autistic (real, not as a meme for liking trains too much) and a very private person who does not want to be seen and picked apart in the way people, especially women, are seen and picked apart on video-based social media. Market be damned, I, as a human being with boundaries related to my body and my privacy, shouldn’t have to expose myself in such a way if I don’t want to simply because there’s no way to make a living with just words anymore. That is a future I am not willing to accept and I won’t get bullied into it by endless refrains of that’s just the way things are, I’m sorry.

I’ve always felt that one of the privileges of writing is that no one really has to see that much of me. I really didn’t do any of this to be “a writer” or be famous or have power or go to parties I’m too brain-feral to actually enjoy. Those things actually further immiserate rather than empower me and I don’t think it’s copemaxxing to say that. Truly, if it were still possible to hole myself up JD Salinger-style and never emerge, I would. I started writing because I had something to say. For many years I wrote into an answerless void not caring who, if anyone, read what I wrote because the point was to write it anyway. And for many years no one read and no one cared, but I kept doing it anyway. That’s not noble — it’s a compulsion.

Throughout my career, I have been many different writers, often at the same time. I’ve written so I can do things like interrogate the built environment, cover the Tour de France, or pen deranged 3000 word essays about whether Siegmund from the Ring Cycle has free will. (He does.) I write because writing (and whatever you call making a pseudo-webcomic about ugly houses) is literally the only skill I have. It is the only way I can make money and also the only thing I want to (or frankly can) spend my life doing. I am thankful beyond measure that despite what a hell it’s become, this is still possible for me, and I am thankful for every single person in my life — from subscribers and patrons to my very patient husband — who makes it possible.

This is the part of the essay where I’m supposed to beg for money. (And if you already subscribe to this newsletter or my Patreon, thank you with all my heart for helping me continue working, pay my heating bill and feed my dog.) However, I also know that the Substack bubble is on the verge of bursting. There’s only so many seven dollars a month people are willing to spread around. It’s very possible that if you haven’t already planted your flag and earned your returns, good luck, because subscription fatigue is coming and it’s only going to get worse the more existing publications disintegrate. I knew that already going in, which is why I started this newsletter not as a singular replacement for my other sources of income but because I wanted a place to dump insane longform essays that I knew no one would ever commission but felt the inextinguishable urge to write and because I feel I deserve to be somewhat compensated for that labor, that is, if people like it. However, if I wanted to use this app as a primary source of income, even with my alleged “cultural capital,” those days, I fear, were over a long time ago. I’m far too late and so is everyone else. (Hence The Late Review.)

I’m also of the opinion that, rather than bring the world of letters together, Substack has made it completely impossible to keep track of what other writers are doing or thinking. It takes forever to find people one already knows. It has also created entire worlds of discourse (some of which are enormously popular) I have no clue about and perhaps don’t want to because it would only move the needle closer towards [redacted.] The algorithm on here is perhaps the most mysterious of them all in terms of what it shows me — posts made 148 days ago, posts liked by people I don’t even follow, etc. And yet, a paradox has emerged because of this place and that algorithm. Yes, publications are dying and more writers are fleeing to Substack. On the other hand, what are we going to do about the fact that, as the ranks close, what few publications remain still hire based on platform popularity even though the whole system of social media is in a stage of such necrotic collapse one can’t really tell whether the numbers are real anymore, the followers, the engagement, even the subscribers? Fake accounts, AI bots, whatever is going on with bookmark numbers on Xitter — it all undermines on an epistemological level the bedrock of number go up that shaped Internet media and is in the process of destroying it.

The crux of my argument is this: the tools we have used to make our living are no more in any meaningful or honest way. The only available path they will provide us is one of further atomization, barbarism and weaponization. Hence, to me, what has emerged is a new cycle of proletarianization: staff jobs are eliminated, writers go independent on platforms like this one — if that’s even still possible anymore — all while legacy publications pick up, as freelancers making way less money, those people who are already popular on these platforms.

This was already somewhat the case five or so years ago, but right now I think we’re looking at freefall. And the thing is, someone always loses in this cycle. Today it’s not me, but tomorrow it could be. Whole careers will fall through the cracks the more audiences become fragmented and new ones can only get started through luck or nepotism. There is also an incentive to make others lose as well or, alternatively, to be exceedingly obsequious as a form of self-protection. Really, what other word is there to describe what is coming our way than atavism? I don’t feel like waxing poetic about the good old days of getting work because there is enough of that and those days are over. The only way out of this bind is the hope that such competition does not foreclose us from building together something new, something stable, something that is large-scale rather than a gaggle of one’s old friends; perhaps most importantly, something formally organized. The time is running out for what is left of social media to be utilized to this end.

Hence, to return to my opening statement, I am being driven insane. But a more vulnerable thing to say would be: I am afraid. Every day I am afraid that the end is coming for me, that the walls are closing in, that I didn’t play my cards right at the right time, that everyone hates me or has lost patience with me as a human being and thinker. It doesn’t matter if the fears are true or not — the fear itself is. These unbearable feelings are the end product — no, the end logic — of not only the media industry and what it’s done to writers and writing but of so many years of using tools that have constructed within my soul an evil little panopticon. As I told my psychoanalyst recently, my superego looks less like my mother these days and more like the X user interface.

However, the recent developments I mentioned here have made the fear more and more debilitating. I am afraid to do even necessary things like read other essays or pitch. What should be the joyous if difficult process of writing my book has been repeatedly derailed and distorted by anxieties of revenge and sabotage and an imposter syndrome I didn’t have when I first started writing, even though nobody knew who I was. I keep asking the question, what do I do? Really, what am I supposed to do about the very real fact that social media has subjected me to more invective and abuse than any ordinary human being should ever have to endure and that I need to keep subjecting myself to it in order to make money like some circus bear getting pelted with fruit by the audience? My only counterargument is that, parasocial clout bullshit aside, at the end of the day I’m just some woman trying to pay rent and as a worker, I don’t deserve this. I’m not leaving social media as the trope goes, and I’m not sure I have an answer to such a paradox that doesn’t make some other problem, like money, worse. An uglier truth is this: I cannot, as an individual, fix or even ameliorate what is a systemic problem. And these days, we are all individuals.

The purpose of my writing all this down is not to garner sympathy or solicit enough kindness to keep going because that’s in exceedingly short supply at present. We’re all tired. We’re all burnt out. We’re all scared. The paradigm I’m screaming about is the one I’m trapped in, too. But the thing is, I am done pretending this is fine and everything is going to be fine and that there is something nice and polite or even beautiful that can be said about it. I’ve said my part because I am in such a wretched state that I have to say it — because everything I do in this world is born from that same insatiable instinct: I have to write something. If I don’t, I’ll only go more crazy.

I. ensnarement / the crime

I think Siegfried is a hole one can disappear down forever. I really do. This sentiment remains the same regardless of which Siegfried one is talking about, and there are so very many. It could be Wagner’s, it could be Fritz Lang’s, it could be Sigurd from any of the Norse sagas, or Sivrit from the Nibelungenlied. They are all different. They are not different at all. In the beginning, every Siegfried is made from the same basic ingredients: beauty, strength, and bravery. One cannot help but feel a certain helplessness knowing that none of these exceptional attributes will come to his rescue. There’s considerable variation in how Siegfried begins his life, but once it’s begun, he proceeds, seemingly propelled by some vague momentum, through the same discrete set of events. He forges the same sword, slays the same dragon, secures the same treasure, makes the same pact with the same coward, commits the same crime against the same strong woman, dies the same death, over and over again throughout the centuries. Each time a Siegfried is created, his only purpose is to become ensnared.

The most basic substance of Siegfried is this: something powerful and free comes into the world; then, through a complex mechanism of social or contractual entanglement, it must be destroyed. This destruction is not cautionary in nature. It warns of nothing, moralizes nothing. It is not a parable of arrogance or an encouragement to eschew the wiles of women or choose one’s company wisely. It is simply a series of events that cannot be otherwise. Hence, a set of crucial questions come included with each iteration: how can a man who is, as they say, beautiful, strong, and brave, do what he does, end up in his same situation? Why does he entrust himself to a weak man such as Gunther? Why does he do the dirty work of a coward by capturing and subduing the woman said coward is not strong enough to woo himself? If Siegfried is so honorable, why is he willing to lie, cheat, and steal with little to no reflection? How can he not see that the pact he’s made with these kings is weaker than the bonds that hold together those kings as kinsmen? How can he be so naïve, from the first time he arrives in Worms (or wherever the myth is set) to going on that fated hunting trip? Each event Siegfried passes through only makes things more and more fraught. And yet, he trots from one moment to the next like a calf to slaughter, bereft of moral deliberation and an ability to discern guile from truth.

This guilelessness allegedly supports the idea that Siegfried is good. He has to be good, otherwise why would 800+ years’ worth of Scandinavians and Germans mourn him? And yet, at the end of the day, despite his goodness, he does a terrible thing. Even in its most benign form, such as in the Völsunga saga, where Siegfried, disguised as Gunther, breaks through Brunhild’s wall of flames so that the real Gunther can come abduct her, this act is terrible. Once Brunhild refuses to let Gunther take her to bed, Siegfried’s behavior only becomes more terrible from there.1 Either disguised as Gunther via the Tarnhelm or otherwise concealed by the dark, sometimes Siegfried is implied to have raped Brunhild (as in the Thidrikssaga). Other times, he brings her within an inch of her life so that the real Gunther can reap the benefits of her broken spirit. The Nibelungenlied — which differs from the other texts mentioned here because it filters the same characters and events through the social structures and patterns of signification endemic to courtly life in the High Middle Ages — serves as a middle ground between the mere quelling of the fire and implicit rape. It describes the act as thus:

“[Brunhild] locked [Siegfried] in her arms and would have laid him in bonds like the King [Gunther], so that she might have the comfort of her bed. She took a tremendous revenge on him for having ruffled her clothes. What could his huge strength avail him? She showed him that her might was the greater, for she carried him with an irresistible force and rammed him between the wall and a coffer.

‘Alas,’ thought the hero, ‘if I now lose my life to a girl, the whole sex will grow uppish with their husbands for ever after, though they would otherwise never behave so.’

The King heard it all and was afraid for the man; but Siegfried was deeply ashamed and began to lose his temper, so that he fought back with huge strength and closed with Brunhild desperately. To the King it seemed an age before Siegfried overcame her. She gripped his hands so powerfully that the blood spurted from his nails and he was in agony; but it was not long before he forced the arrogant girl to recant the monstrous resolve which she had voiced the night before…[Siegfried] now crushed her on the bed so violently that she shrieked aloud, such pain did his might inflict on her. Then she groped for the girdle of silk round her waist with intent to bind him, but his hand fought off her attempt so fiercely that her joints cracked all over her body! This settled the issue, and she submitted to Gunther.”2

Morally ambiguous even in its time, the contemporary reader is certainly disturbed by such a graphic depiction of gendered violence, despite the poet’s insistence, a few lines later, that Brunhild “happily” agrees to become Gunther’s wife. Such violation gives us pause, makes us wonder whether Siegfried deserves it, that self-same fate. Maybe — probably — he does. In a story where many opportunities are provided for Siegfried to avert his end, the violation of Brunhild is always the final point of no return. Then, when all is said and done, when the pike is in his back and his face is in the mud, we still ask: what happened? What happened to the Siegfried that slayed the dragon? What happened to the Siegfried that forged the sword, that left home and set about making his way in the world? How did he become this man? One can ask this question forever and not once walk away with an answer.

II. further variation / the same inevitability

For the unfamiliar, beyond the violation of Brunhild, there are many variations in the Siegfried myth, too many to list in detail.3 Sometimes Siegfried is the courtly son of a queen and king (usually Sigmund); most other times, however, while his father is Sigmund (himself a more diverse myth than Siegfried), he is raised by a foster father who goes by various names (Mime, Regin, etc.) This foster father usually acts in bad faith for reasons of greed or envy and is later killed by Siegfried. The child Siegfried is alternatively rude and impudent or precocious and perceptive. Sometimes he remains youthful his whole life; other times he grows into a hardened man, a warrior. When Siegfried kills the dragon, sometimes the dragon is the foster father’s shapeshifting brother; other times it is simply a dragon. Sometimes he kills the dragon to prove he is brave or to win a treasure; other times his foster father sends Siegfried to do it hoping the boy will die. After Siegfried slays the dragon, bathing in its blood makes him invincible save for the spot on his back where, as the story goes, the linden leaf fell. In the Völsunga saga and the Prose Edda, Siegfried’s strength is his own and consuming the dragon instead gives him the ability to understand the songs of birds.

The names and conventions of the people in whose trap Siegfried becomes ensnared are unique to each story, though for our sake it’s easier to simply call them the Burgundians after the Nibelungenlied. Gunther (Gunner, etc.) is always a coward and cuckold. Hagen (Högni etc.), the fierce yet loyal vassal, is, with the exception of the Völsunga saga and the Prose Edda, the one to do the dirty deed of driving the pike through Siegfried’s back as he goes to take a drink from the brook. Kriemhild (Gudrun, etc.) is always the wife whose love is collateral damage. Brunhild, either a “queen” or a “Valkyrie” is always the supernaturally strong woman Siegfried must subdue, though her deceptiveness and whether each loves the other is a point of considerable variation. Whether Siegfried dies as vengeance for the wrong done against Brunhild or whether, in truth, he dies because the ruination of Gunther’s honor cannot stand is also a matter of debate. And yet, despite these variations, one thing remains the same: Siegfried enters Brunhild’s chambers and he will die because of it.

Some Siegfrieds, however, are easier to reckon with than others. Perhaps the easiest of them is “Sigurd Sven” in the Thidrikssaga, who is less a little princeling and more of a heat-seeking missile. Rude from birth, lustful for violence and glory, his temperament is of a mercenary nature. From cradle to dragon to ditch, he moves seamlessly from conflict to conflict, and when he dies, one gets the sense that it’s because his luck eventually ran out.

Meanwhile, the Sigurd of the Völsunga saga is the most human, and perhaps this is why Wagner used this story (more than the Nibelungenlied) as the foundation for his own Siegfried. This is especially true with regards to Siegfried’s love — and the later forgetting of that love via a potion — of Brünnhilde. But crucial to this prior Sigurd is that both him and Brynhild know from the very beginning what will happen to the both of them. Brynhild because she possesses foresight and Sigurd because his fortune is told to him in his youth.4 Wizened, existing outside of everyone else by way of their knowledge, nothing can save them, not love, not brave deeds. When their great confrontation happens, they discuss their foiled romance openly. Sigurd says what is perhaps the saddest thing any Siegfried ever says:

“I love you more than myself, although I was the object of the deceit that cannot now be changed. Always when my mind was my own, it pained me that you were not my wife. But I bore it as well as I could since I lived in the king’s hall. Yet I was happy that we were all together. It may be that what was earlier foretold will have to happen, but it shall not be feared.”5

He tries everything to persuade Brynhild to regain the will to live, going so far as to pledge his treasure and ask for her hand in marriage, swearing to disavow Gudrun (Kriemhild) in exchange.

However, to be together is impossible for many reasons beyond this strange determinism that binds them. The way things are in the world are cannot be otherwise. They know this to be true. And so, Sigurd partakes in the extraordinary sensation of grieving his death and the death of the woman he loves in the final days before it happens. All that’s left is for the future to pull them listlessly along until the end arrives. This Sigurd, whose divergence from the others is by far the widest, is killed not in the forest, but in bed while he’s sleeping. When he gives his death-speech, he does so with a sense of acceptance, though part of him didn’t quite believe it would all really happen the way it was ordained for him. Perhaps, more than any other Siegfried, his crime is lesser and we feel sorry when he dies.6 The foreknowledge present in the Völsunga saga makes explicit the crucial sense of inevitability common to all Siegfrieds and changes the sentiment of the character profoundly. Not only that, it articulates a nihilism lurking beneath its surface. If there is any lesson to be gleamed from him, Siegfried shows the futility of individualism in a world governed by systems, be they tribal, religious, feudalistic, or philosophical. Hence the myth’s appeal for Wagner.

III. innocence, anarchy, emptiness

However, because Sigurd’s critical self-awareness remained absent from Wagner’s Siegfried, in its place is a murky affect that many such as Thomas Mann and M. Owen Lee (in his introductory book on the Ring) have compared to the id or some other subconscious drive. This is only accentuated by another choice Wagner made, which was to keep his Siegfried youthful, i.e. to make him of an age where his naivete and rude impulsivity are given a childish air as superego formation remains ongoing. Whereas the Norse Siegfrieds are forced to grow up quite young, Wagner’s and that of the Nibelungenlied remain in a state of arrested development.

Indeed, much of the personality of the Ring’s Siegfried comes from the latter poem’s Sivrit, whose childish joie de vivre affords him arrogance and gives him a certain lightness. Often one gets the sense that, compared to the adults in the room, Sivrit is merely playing pretend and that his role as a courtly noble is largely helped along by the various trappings and customs of his time. Sivrit expresses himself in exclamation points; Gunther’s answers terminate in calm periods. If we choose to view Sivrit as a protagonist, he can be read as a hero purer in intention and more free of constraints than the others (especially Hagen), who are quasi-cynical and hardened in their ways.

However, there is always a fine line between innocence and idiocy. Sivrit walks this boundary, but Wagner’s Siegfried crosses it, often because the latter is not bound by those same elaborate courtly rituals that keep Sivrit’s disposition and behavior in check. For example, when Sivrit enters Worms and immediately challenges Gunther to a fight for the possession of his kingdom, Gunther must talk him down through a combination of mutually recognizable flattery and manners. When the same scene is reproduced in Götterdämmerung, Siegfried is immediately subservient; naive, he uncouthly offers Gunther everything he has in the manner of a child.

Wagner’s addition of Siegfried’s rudeness towards Mime — ostensibly taken from Sigurd Sven, who beats up all of Mymmer’s smithy boys, but, in reality, a convenient outlet for Wagner’s antisemitism — is where rowdy boyishness starts looking more like ebullient ignorance, one tinged with now-uncomfortable nationalist and racial subtexts obviously missing from the medieval sagas. Wagner’s Siegfried, already trapped in the Siegfriedian bind, often approaches a total stuntedness. Not even sex — before which he cries like a Freudian parody for the comfort of his dead mother — can push him into something like a credulous adulthood. Patrice Chéreau was onto something in his 1978 Bayreuth staging when he had Siegfried enter the 20th century tuxedoed realm of the Gibichungs in quixotic armor. There is a certain ridiculousness to him as he exits the hard, primordial world of the Norse sagas and enters the formal political intrigue of the Nibelungenlied.

But these frictions are all part of another broader truth: every Siegfried contains within himself a contrary nature, dancing around the boundary of freedom and unfreedom. His is an anarchic and often violent life force that must then be channeled through external events which themselves almost always lead towards more violence. The degree of anarchism varies quite a bit, but it is present nonetheless. It typically begins via that same childhood wildness and is thereafter reined in through courtly or warrior-culture socialization. In the poem, for example, the three kings and Hagen are shocked by Sivrit’s unruliness and soon gleam that it is dangerous to leave Sivrit to his own devices. From the moment he arrives in Worms, their view is that it is better to control him than to fight him, for his is also a force they wish to use for their own ends.7 This need to bind something uncontrollable, to shape it and direct it as they wish will doom everyone, step by ugly step.

Bound or unbound by rules and conventions, Siegfried still bursts at his own seams. This is best typified in Wagner, who transformed Siegfried into a fantasy of a new man, a kind of Übermensch unencumbered by religion or bourgeois convention. In Siegfried, as a testament to such anarchistic splendor, he mocks Wotan, the father of battles, for standing in his way, calls him an old man, spurs him to fight. Little does Siegfried know that once he destroys Wotan’s spear, law and lawlessness will become irreconcilable. All that remains in their place is pure, Siegfriedian atavism.

Sensuous and free as he may be, this Siegfried is nonetheless at the pessimistic mercy of the same bind, walks the same path towards annihilation. When these two seemingly conflicting elements — inevitability and anarchy — combine further with innocence, Siegfried as a character becomes more and more empty. Wagner’s Siegfried is especially defined by lack — as being without fear, without remorse, without blame, without true motive, without compassion, without weakness, without logic or contemplation (sometimes, even, without brains!) — all of which are affectively different sentiments than being brave, remorseless, illogical, and so on. For example, bravery is something one must possess in spite of oneself. It is always easier to be a coward than it is to be brave. But Siegfried does not have to be brave because he has no fear.8

This results in a chilling uncanniness. Siegfried of the Ring is often unlikable and cold, despite Wagner’s (frequently glorious) musical protestations to the contrary. He seems to lack a motive for doing anything, is merely guided by others or his id (let’s say) from scene to scene. His cruelness to Mime, while supposed to signify a fundamental unruliness, mostly comes off as nasty. His loyalty to the Gibichungs is distorted into a nightmarish lackiness. He commits his deeds bereft of empathy. But even before he drinks the potion, it’s there, that lack.

This is best seen when Siegfried is confronted with the total intimacy of the sexual act. Realizing he must give himself to another, he grasps at fear, that human emotion, only to forget it immediately in service to different drive: physical desire. Perhaps he simply possesses no self to give in the first place. The love Siegfried shares with Brünnhilde is not rooted in identification and mutual recognition of the self in the other, as was Siegmund’s for Sieglinde, but is merely something else he has been told to do, something he has been led towards by strange forces.9 Thus, being rooted in no philosophy, it is, like Siegfried himself, also empty. There is something especially hollow about the way aunt and nephew sing (shout?) each other’s praises, ending the opera with a lurid, brass-heavy conflation of desire with death. Rather like the scene in the Nibelungenlied when Sivrit sees Kriemhild for the first time and the narrator warns us how much grief will come of it, the end is always present.

IV. the nibelungenlied and the ring: or, in which siegfried elucidates (and ends) the world

Finally, Siegfried’s actions make known the boundaries of his world, if not how that world works. Often he himself is a weakness in its very structure. This is true of all Siegfrieds but it is more true of some than others. A contemporary reader looking to whittle away the afternoon with the Nibelungenlied will walk away with the sense that, once Sivrit’s spark catches in Worms, the poem’s violence is like an inescapable fire that will engulf every single character. Even the most righteous among them will be made by the Situation to take up the mantle of that violence. A fuguelike sensation grips us when rote and repetitive courtly language is invoked ad nauseum (“Mighty Gunther,” etc.) to describe characters who, by deed alone, are or become terrible people. But as to the question of why, one would be wise to avoid reading more into the text than what it so clearly shows us itself. As Jan-Dirk Müller lays out in his monumental analysis of the poem, Rules for the Endgame, the situation of the Nibelungenlied spins out of control not because of some deep psychological intrigue, or because the Burgundians are bad and Sivrit is good, or Hagen is smart and Sivrit is stupid, but because of a hierarchy of feudal bonds that are irreconcilable with one another.

To summarize Müller’s argument,10 Sivrit, a prince, enters the story almost completely unencumbered by political obligations, which is why he feels he has the agency to immediately upbraid Gunther on the basis of strength alone. This is threatening to the stability Gunther has formed in his kingdom through the now-established practice of peaceable hereditary lordship. Gunther brings the clearly much stronger Sivrit into his household through courtliness, forges a friendship that is first tested when Sivrit successfully fights the Danish kings on Gunther’s behalf. Sivrit is unable to discern this, but when the pact is established to bring Brunhild to Worms in exchange for Kriemhild’s hand, this blood-brotherhood with Gunther is simply weaker that Gunther’s existing kinship ties and Hagen’s ties to Gunther as his vassal. Its purpose is also fully served when everyone carries out their respective duties.

Hence, the introduction of Brunhild to Worms, combined with the terrible secret of how she was wooed, destabilizes all of these bonds in such a way that the weakest of them, which is still Sivrit’s (now via marriage to Kriemhild) must be excised in order to bring honor and balance back to the feudal order.11 In the latter half of the poem, when Kriemhild exacts revenge on her brothers from the exile court of her second husband Etzel, the stubbornness of the bonds between the Burgundian kings and Hagen is such that all of them will perish rather than see those bonds be broken. Is this irrational to us? Perhaps. However, at the time, it was viewed not as a critique of the inherent absurdity of feudal logic but as a story of absolute fidelity that becomes heroic by the end. In fact, Hagen, the villain of the first half, is, by medieval standards, redeemed by the end of story.

More than any other element, the Nibelungenlied shares its sense of a world in helpless decline with the Ring cycle. In Götterdämmerung, Wagner took much of this same material and tried to diffuse it differently by integrating the machinations of the gods from the rest of the cycle, plot elements from the Völsunga saga, and the political sentiments of his day, which, while still sexist, were nowhere near medieval levels of misogyny. His Brünnhilde is no doubt a heroine, a woman given the full range of human emotion and tremendous depth of character. That being said, Wagner’s loyalties still lie with men. He, like many later interpreters, will do what he can to somewhat forgive Siegfried of his crime.

If Lang’s film adaptation attempts this more rotely by making Siegfried beautiful and sentimental and giving Brunhild an air of treachery, Wagner chooses a more complex method: tampering with agency. In Götterdämmerung, Siegfried’s crime, rather than being committed as a simple favor of exchange for which he is rewarded with the possession of a woman, is instead stimulated by the forgetfulness potion. Wagner mixes this with a love potion to only further chip away at Siegfried’s consent. While this may certainly add succor to Siegfried’s end, to me this muddying of the waters only further belies the truth that Siegfried still has no internal moral structure to give him pause. The potion does not make him forget himself, mind you, only Brünnhilde. Regardless of his scrambled motivations, he still commits the same crime in its own right, though his voice does, per the stage directions, waver when he enters Brünnhilde’s fell. A common misogynistic fallacy is exposed by this choice of plot: that the love of a woman is the only barrier stopping a man from committing violence against her, and once that love has been shifted onto another subject, all bets are off. In other words, blame for the crime may be displaced, but it is not eradicated.

Of course, it is not the feudal system that gives Götterdämmerung its dreadful march towards the End, but a combination of mythical deterministic factors. Among these are the curse of the ring (in full force by the beginning of the fourth music drama), Siegfried’s aforementioned shattering of the spear of contracts, and the foresight of Erda, who, in Das Rheingold, declared to Wotan the end of the gods, a fate he tried everything to avert before choosing, in Die Walküre, to embrace nihilism. Many interpreters, including the likes of Nietzsche and Adorno, attribute this stark pessimism to Wagner’s infatuation with Schopenhauer and his concept of the Wille: an inscrutable power that exists both beyond and within us, rendering our goals and desires as naught but meaningless illusions, mere representations of reality instead of reality itself. Philosophizing aside, this inevitability is consistent within the work’s self-contained structures of narrative determinism, as well as broader sentiments across other Siegfried myths. For example, at first, Wotan’s daughter, Brünnhilde rebelled against the fate chosen by her father. And yet, after her capture by Gunther, and like the Völsunga saga’s Brynhild before her, she brings the end to fruition anyway in part because there is no possible way out within the systemic conditions of her world. The exception, here, of course, is that through Brünnhilde’s death, a suicide with revolutionary undertones, she takes Walhalla down with her and ushers in a new, godless future for all mankind.

Sad as it may be (and the music is very moving), we are not treated to such grand, ideological catharsis with the death of Siegfried. As in the Nibelungenlied, he is led by Gunther and Hagen to be slaughtered in the forest. In a unique touch, when he dies, he finally remembers, to the tune of birdsong, Brünnhilde and his love for her. Thus, as he leaves this world, he returns to a prior state of innocence, the one from before he waltzed into the human realm and was corrupted by others. Despite how vile and cruel he’s been, Siegfried is given permission to die as that same little boy who slew the dragon and embarked upon the fell where the fire once encircled the Valkyrie. By the end of the cycle, he has neither grown up, nor been made whole either by love or by having done anything of lasting value beyond ushering in that same, totalizing destruction. The prophecy articulated at the beginning of this essay remains unaltered: each time a Siegfried is created, his only purpose is to become ensnared. No amount of displacement of agency or blame, no amount of mythical lore or insistence on guilelessness can reconcile the irreconcilable truths of the good man and the bad thing he does. Hence, like all Siegfrieds before him, Wagner’s simply was. He comes into the world. He meets an end. It cannot be otherwise.

Note: the following deals heavily with themes of rape and sexual violence.

This essay was revised on 24 December 2024.

Who is Sieglinde? She’s a bit of a mystery, in part because she herself rarely gets to tell us who she is. An enigma by omission. We know that, because they are twins, she is like Siegmund, her brother. Hence, we know that she has suffered, that she has achieved the same form of self-consciousness. We know that the world inflicts its cruelty upon her and that she believes this cruelty is fundamentally wrong. In the grand, godly scheme of things, like Siegmund, Sieglinde, too, is property. Indeed, she has been denied so much of her personhood that when Siegmund asks her who she is, she responds, as though it were self-evident: “this house and this woman belong to Hunding.” In these words, ‘Wehwalt’ immediately recognizes that his companion has been reduced to the same abject namelessness as himself. But her dehumanization goes even further: she is no more alive than the four walls that surround her and the land they sit on.

When the gods have their hour long spat about the disputed freedom and fate of Siegmund, Sieglinde is barely mentioned. Why bother including her such a debate in the first place? She is only a woman. The more Wotan goes on about the sword he left in Hunding’s ash tree, the clearer it becomes that the primary purpose of that sword was not to rescue the daughter he left it for but to lure the son into cleaning up his father’s mess. At the end of the day, Sieglinde will either go to the devoutly religious husband who bought his wife from traffickers and held her captive through terror and force, or she will be claimed by the more righteous adulterer. Regardless, she is a possession.

As we saw in the previous essay, Siegmund’s story is told primarily though speech. Sieglinde’s, by contrast, is told through action. Wagner the dramatist is at his best in Act I of Die Walküre. He crafts the character of Sieglinde almost entirely through showing rather than telling. She gazes at Siegmund, inquring about his existence. She shirks away from Hunding, the abusive husband, yet stands tall in the face of his denigration, regal and refined. Everything from Sieglinde’s longing to her apprehension is conveyed corporally and through instrumental scoring, primarily her leitmotif, a beautiful sequence of rising thirds. The obvious reason for this is that her permission to speak has largely been taken from her. Hence, Sieglinde’s actions possess an inherently subversive quality. They are subversive in their own right, too — and brave. From aiding Siegmund in the first place to carrying the fragments of the sword into the forest of her father’s misdeeds, every action Sieglinde takes is so enormously brave.

Because she is a woman, Sieglinde’s bravery is not as readily apparent as her brother’s. Being written by a man, she still falls prey to the age old pitfalls of masculine myth. Ultimately, she will give birth to the Übermensch, the undoing of the world, and this, of course, will kill her. Born from immanence, condemned to enigmatic nothing not once, but twice, immanence will reclaim her. Sieglinde must return to earth, to the soil, and serve her purpose as one of many mother-sacrifices of mankind. But she has always been more than collateral damage, martyr, or the incestuous counterpart to her brother. These roles she plays in the Ring may be spectacular, but more important to what makes the Ring itself meaningful far beyond its time and place, is the essence of her character: above all else, Sieglinde is the Other who reasserts her own humanity. In everything she does, she shows us a woman who refuses to be subjugated.

I won’t make the argument that the Ring is a feminist or even proto-feminist work. That being said, I still believe it contains elements that can be reclaimed for our time or reimagined in service of a set of political beliefs, not unlike how I’ve done with Siegmund, or how the antisemitic caricature of Alberich was repurposed by writers like George Bernard Shaw into a depiction of the rot inherent in the capitalist system. A feminist reorientation of the Ring, however, recognizes as important, if not systemically allegorical, one of its most consistent themes: rape. It is from such a perspective that Sieglinde can be recast as a central heroine. This is not to say that there aren’t other heroines — Brünnhilde is also a heroine, and an important one at that — but only Sieglinde sees her own subjugation clearly for what it is and risks her life putting a stop to it. She does not empathize nor negotiate with her oppressor. Instead, she puts him to sleep. In her pursuit of freedom, Sieglinde will evade even the clutches of the gods, will carry with her into the primordial darkness the fragments of the sword that will shatter the spear of the cruel world’s order. Because she is a woman, it is often said that Sieglinde dies for love. A closer truth is that she meets her end for the same reason as her brother: she would rather die than be a slave.

When we see Sieglinde for the first time in Act I of Walküre, she is rushing to the aid of a man who has collapsed on the floor of her house. Despite an evident fear of the repercussions, she does this because the man needs help. It must be a curious sight for her, a weak man, a man who is in pain instead of enforcing it. Through him, she is given the first opportunity to show someone else the kindness she so wishes to see. He bestows upon her the same kindness, for the same reason. When the man tries to leave, citing the vague premise of sparing her from harm (which, to be honest, is something no one has ever done before) Sieglinde, of course, does not want to let him go. Her words, “You cannot bring misfortune into the house where misfortune lives” not only identify her with him and her suffering with his, but invite the possibility that he can help her.

He will try, of course, our Wehwalt. He’s curious, too. But there is a clear subtext to Sieglinde’s invitation. She may be intrigued by him, by his gentleness and aura of mystery, but she also recognizes that the presence of a sympathetic man has the potential to offer her considerable leverage. It may even act as a buffer against what has long been for her an ordinary violence. Indeed, it does. Sieglinde’s hunch plays out because Hunding, chauvinist that he is, behaves in the way society wishes him to. That society is predicated on honor and shame. The rules of honor towards men, Hunding will uphold, and shame he will inflict on his wife in order to keep her in line. Ancient tribal rites of hospitality require that an unarmed man be sheltered, regardless if that man is bad news or not. And so, to Sieglinde’s relief, Wehwalt is allowed to stay.

It doesn’t take long for Siegmund to pick up on Hunding’s cruelty towards his wife. Within a minute of their meeting, Hunding barks at her: “prepare the meal for us men.” As the night progresses, he treats Sieglinde with nothing but disdain, entitlement, and suspicion when that entitlement (especially sexual entitlement) is undermined by the presence of Siegmund. No matter how ugly things get, however, Sieglinde responds with the utmost dignity, dignity that verges on defiance. She tests the boundaries of acceptability by communicating with Siegmund through glances and, when given permission to speak by her husband, uses it to be entreating towards her guest. Most notably, when superstitious Hunding tells Siegmund he’s not exactly pleased to have received such a fraught visitor, Sieglinde outright scolds him: “A lonely defenceless traveler instils dread only in cowards.”

For what it’s worth (and it’s worth nothing to me) Hunding does his best to be hospitable towards Siegmund, though Siegmund doesn’t do himself any favors by telling Hunding about his exploits and constantly making eyes at his host’s wife. Already on thin ice, it gets worse for him when Siegmund regales the pair with stories of his misfortune. He begins, as we already know, with an account of childhood trauma so very similar to that of his hostess who, perhaps in denial or perhaps out of a mistrust of hope, dismisses this similarity because of a mere difference in names.

But more astonishing to Sieglinde must be the story of the girl Siegmund tried to rescue from the bondage of unwanted marriage, discussed in the last essay. I think rather often of Sieglinde in that moment, what it must have been like for her. She herself has been kept in captivity by a man who bought her for money, something that is unjust and has caused her extraordinary sorrow and pain. Despite the one glimmer of hope she’s been given, the years pass, people come and go, and nothing changes. That sword in the tree, that vision of the man at her sham wedding who may or may not have been her father, they lash out at her, seem to only confirm the reality of her abandonment.

Yet still embedded in the sword is the promise of the one who can retrieve it — after all, no one can go about ending oppression alone — and with it, the possibility of freedom. And now, here Sieglinde stands, listening to this strange man tell the tale of how he’s just risked his own life to help a woman trapped in the same bondage — a woman not as brave or enlightened as Sieglinde. Finally, here is someone who can see clearly how wrong all this is, how disgusting its true nature, and not only that, he is here in this terrible house with her, looking at her, seeing how she is treated. For the first time, she is not alone. Someone stands alongside her in solidarity.

Then, the stakes are raised even further. At the end of the second scene, Siegmund watches helplessly as Hunding makes a demonstration of total ownership over his wife. Violently, he tells her to get out of the room, demands that she prepare his nightly drink. Then, punctuated by a seething cadential fifth, he orders that she wait for him to “come to bed.” Wagner is not ambiguous about what is happening, and I don’t feel the need to be either. Hunding, angry at having been usurped and emasculated, is going to rape his wife. She knows this, and so does Siegmund. Over sixty bars or so of music, they all look at each other. Hunding languishes menacing glances on his woman and his guest. Sieglinde gestures repeatedly towards the hilt of the sword embedded in the tree in the center of the hall. Siegmund is too busy looking at her with concern to notice. Despite Hunding’s threat, Sieglinde remains calm. She does what she’s told. She walks to the cupboard. She fixes her husband’s nightcap. Except this time, she fixes it differently.2

Many years ago, a professor of mine in music school loved to go on about how Sieglinde was a misogynistic caricature, a typical damsel in distress waiting around for a man to save her. (And, when he does, she rewards him with sex.) Meanwhile, on the other side of the ideological spectrum, when Sieglinde reveals to Siegmund that she’s drugged Hunding into a deep sleep, Schopenhauer annotated “This is infamous!” in the margins of his libretto. Rudy Sabor in the Phaidon libretti also makes a similar point, writing: “Is Sieglinde’s drugging of Hunding morally defensible?” It seems that, no matter how Sieglinde resolves this predicament of hers, she’s inherently problematic. That’s being a woman for you.

Still, both characterizations — Sieglinde as damsel or Sieglinde as immoral adulteress — have never sat right with me. To speak of the former: What, right now, is our alleged white knight doing anyway? So far, Siegmund has only been able to serve as a witness to Sieglinde’s torment. The moment Hunding locks the door behind him, our hero will be on his knees in despair begging for his father’s sword, desperate for any chance to intervene on this kind woman’s behalf, not to mention his own. What he believes to be happening is deeply painful to him, yet he can do nothing to stop it. His impotence only exacerbates that pain. This is only one example, however, of a broader truth: it has never been Siegmund who saves Sieglinde from her dreadful fate. Rather than being her rescuer, Siegmund is what enables Sieglinde herself to take the necessary steps in securing the barest conditions for freedom. When the time comes to face their enemy, albeit through no fault of his own, Siegmund will fail. When Sieglinde’s life is at its greatest peril, it is not Siegmund who protects her, but the Valkyrie, Brünnhilde — a woman.

As for all the male hand-wringing about whether Sieglinde’s drugging of her husband is morally justified, no one bothers to ask the more pressing question: why does Hunding have such a sleeping drug to begin with? We know why, and so does Sieglinde. It’s never surprising to me when men denounce women who protect themselves from violence. Paeans of moral ambiguity seek only to weaken the statement of empowerment embodied in a woman who uses the means of her own violation to stop herself from being violated further. In drugging her husband, much like her later carrying until the bitter end the fragments of Nothung, Sieglinde knows that only the master’s tools will dismantle the master’s house, whether that master is a coward like Hunding or the father of battles himself. Is she morally justified in this? To me it is indisputable. As for other opinions, I don’t really care. After all, she doesn’t kill Hunding. She merely renders him the same kind of powerless he has long rendered her. For Sieglinde, the stakes are very clear. So is her response to them: You will not rape me. I will not be raped ever again.

Rape is everywhere in the Ring cycle. It is not just a recurring theme within the work, it is its arch-crime, the crime underlying all others. Rape lurks in every opera. It begins in Das Rheingold with Alberich’s harassment of the Rhinemaidens and his theft of their gold — the rape of the earth — and is further implied by the fate awaiting a terrified Freia should she be given as payment to the giants. Later, in the second act of Walküre, Wotan admits to having used ‘coercive erotic magic’ in order to subdue Erda, the wise Earth Mother, into giving him the knowledge he craves.3 Hence, Brünnhilde, the other result of that encounter, is herself a product of rape. As a woman gifted the power of physical strength, being forced to submit to a man is the Valkyrie’s greatest fear. When her father condemns her to sleep, she demands of him the magic fire so that, on the other side of it, she will wake up to the man she chooses, for the alternative — being a plaything to any old stranger — is the most humiliating fate imaginable.

Even in love, Brünnhilde fears sexual coercion. In the conclusion of Siegfried, the now ex-Valkyrie, nervous and imbued with a deep sense of shame, tries to dissuade Siegfried from his wild passion for her. Interestingly, for both of them, intercourse is linked with feelings of fear. But Siegfried’s fear caves to his physical desire — the fear he learns, he just as quickly forgets — and even though Brünnhilde ultimately makes the decision to put her trust and vulnerability in her lover, Siegfried’s impatience proves an ominous harbinger of what’s to come. However, not even men escape the shadow of rape. In Götterdämmerung, Siegfried himself is ensnared in it when he is persuaded to drink the potion that will rob him of his memory and agency, forcing him to succumb to the amorous advances of Gutrune. Most infamously, of course, is the rape of Brünnhilde by the weak coward Gunther — a rape facilitated by Siegfried, who in doing so betrays both his lover and the legacy of his parents in the worst possible way. This crime is so heinous, it serves as the tinder with which the whole world is set on fire.

If we look at the role rape plays in the Ring, we can clearly see a concurrent pessimism lurking even deeper than the alleged pessimism of the Will. This is a feminine pessimism. In the cycle, women are inescapably failed by men. Fricka, Erda, Freia, Sieglinde, and Brünnhilde are all failed by Wotan. Siegmund fails Sieglinde; Gutrune is failed by her brothers; Siegfried fails Brünnhilde. All of these failures are something women must then transcend, usually through death. There is very little justice to be found in the truth that, in the Ring, women’s deaths are more important because they serve a distinct role: each brings the world closer and closer toward a better or at least different state. In other words, it could be said that in the Ring, men may die for women, but women die for Love. Regardless, they die all the same.

However, at this point in the opera, Sieglinde is not quite in love. When she returns to Siegmund, her primary goal is escape. There isn’t much time, she thinks. You have to understand. And so, for the first time, she presents her story from her perspective. She tells Siegmund about her wretched wedding, about the mysterious one-eyed man and the sword he plunged for her in the tree, about her hopes that the freeing of the sword will bring, at long last, her own liberation. Yet at this juncture, she still speaks to Siegmund in the language of friendship: “If only I could find that cherished friend / I’d take that hero in my arms.” There remains a subtle boundary between them.4

Sieglinde has every reason for this trepidation. She stands before Siegmund a woman from whom everything has been taken — her freedom, her bodily autonomy, her self-worth — all at the hands of men. Of course, the heroism of Siegmund lies in that he is different from the others. After all, he’s been taken from, too. He sees in her the pain he feels in himself. This is why, when presented for the first time with the possibility of love, he gives. He has nothing at all to his name — not even his name itself — and yet, he still gives. He gives her his attention, his gentleness. He gives her a beautiful song. Even the sword is a gift for her, and with it, the promise of another world. By the time the first act is over, all that is left for him to give is himself. It is this particular kind of giving that the woman who has been taken from finds so very moving.

Love, however, is not the instant salvation all so desperately want. Instead it presents a fraught dialectical reality: the wonder of its generosity also opens up a maw of pain. This is the substance of Act II, Scene 3.

Love’s pain comes from the alternative it presents to suffering. Being given to enables Sieglinde to recognize how deep the wounds of her theft really go. This is, to borrow from Siegmund, the “fear that does not speak.” For so long, Sieglinde has suppressed the full brunt of her violation in order to maintain her dignity, to further endure. Now uncovered, the bruises bleed. This terrifies her. She can’t stand the thought of them bleeding or the thought of him seeing them bleed. And so, when presented with love, she is unable to accept it. She runs from it, and from the man who loves her. It does not matter that Siegmund loves her, or that he is holding her, or that the words she will speak to him, per Wagner’s own instructions, are “so terrible that Siegmund then fixes his eyes to the ground for a long time in deep shock.” She is reaching into a part of herself that only she can see.

When Sieglinde names the fear that does not speak, it is not only one of the most emotionally powerful moments in the Ring — it is also a startlingly frank and thorough depiction of what rape does to the human psyche:

Go, go! Flee this sullied woman! Wickedly her arm embraces you; defiled, demeaned, this body is gone: flee the corpse! Let it go! Let the wind blow it away, it’s surrendered to the hero in shame. When he embraced her lovingly, when she found supreme bliss, the man gave her all his passion, all her passion was awoken by him: but beside sweetest love’s sacred blessing…the horror and dread of the most monstrous disgrace could not but take shocking hold of the shamed woman, ever obedient to that husband who had possessed her without love! Abandon the damned, let her desert you! For I am an outcast, deprived of dignity. — (emphases mine.)

Rape is the thief that never stops stealing. From one’s moment of total joy with another, it steals. From love, it steals. From oneself, one’s self-worth, it steals. From trust and security — from the future — it steals. It’s stolen so much from Sieglinde that she can’t even inhabit her own testimony. Rape has evicted her from her very body, has forced her into the role of an observer. Indeed, there is no her left to speak of. There is only that same body, described in the visceral language of filth, absence, and death. It is defiled. It is gone. It is a corpse. But most importantly, it is an object — an object that can be taken and owned, an object upon which things — mostly pain —are inflicted.

Because Sieglinde did not answer her husband’s violence with violence in kind, even though this would only put her at further risk of harm, she feels complicit in her suffering and guilty in her love for another. Hence’s she’s been robbed, too, of the ability to see how brave she is, and how worthy of love. Subjugation so often works like a curse, occludes all possibilities of freedom and happiness. Even though the man she loves is holding her in his arms, Sieglinde can only imagine — and believes she deserves — more suffering. But more than anything, she speaks to Siegmund using the prevailing social order’s rhetoric of shame. It is no surprise that Siegmund feels the need to answer her with shame’s stalwart feudal counterpart: honor. To avenge his sister’s honor, Siegmund will kill Hunding for what he’s done. It cannot be otherwise. But this is a terrible moment. In it, the cruel and violent world the Wälsung twins have so rejected, the world they’ve so boldly rebelled against, now claims them, too.

The die has thus been cast. For Sieglinde, one trauma gives way to another. In a haunting vision, she sees her childhood home on fire, the dead body of her mother. In the dream and in reality, she calls out for her brother — Siegmund, where are you — even though he is embracing her, silently begging her to realize that he is right there. But Sieglinde cannot see anything beyond this dissonant vision of further terror. Hunding is coming, his dogs are tearing Siegmund limb from limb. The ash tree splinters. This is one of two moments in which Sieglinde foresees the end of the cycle. The ash tree will splinter — not the tree in Hunding’s hall, but the World Ash Tree, and with it, everything existing.

In this, the emotional zenith of the scene, what does Wagner do? It’s rather infuriating. After giving his heroine such dignity and strength, including in this extraordinary depiction of her pain, Wagner puts her to sleep. Deep, ironic, operatic sleep. His name on her lips, Sieglinde collapses in Siegmund’s arms. We are fortunate that this melodrama is somewhat softened by its tenderness. The last words she hears Siegmund speak to her simply reflect the fraught but sincere reality of what she is to him: “My sister, my beloved one.”

What makes this sudden loss of Sieglinde’s agency more troublesome is that there’s no discernable reason for why she has to be asleep during the conversation between Siegmund and the Valkyrie in the first place. The alternative staging of this scene in the Copenhagen Ring, demonstrates that the pathos and substance of Siegmund’s negotiation with Brünnhilde works better if Sieglinde remains awake. Then, not only can she be made aware of the extraordinary sacrifice Siegmund is willing to make on her behalf, Sieglinde can also consent to what is happening. A traditionalist may argue that Wagner puts Sieglinde to sleep as a matter of mercy. After all, his heroine has suffered enough already. In giving her a moment of peace, she is spared from the most painful news of all: that Siegmund will die. However, one cannot doubt that this magic slumber is misogynistic in nature, that it is based on the idea that Sieglinde cannot withstand what is to follow or should play no part in it even though it very much concerns her. She becomes, once more, a thing to be negotiated over.

It is a mistake to believe that Siegmund fails the woman he loves by dying in battle. Rather, it is in this moment of so-called peace with his sister in his lap that Siegmund is unable to live up to his prior heroism. After he renounces heaven, believing that there remains a slim chance he can still win in the match with Hunding — in part because he is unwilling to accept the premise of determinism — Brünnhilde informs Siegmund once more that he has no choice, that his fate is decided for him whether he likes it or not. However, seeing his desperation, she offers to protect her charge’s slumbering bride (and unborn child!), something she can do because her arrangement with Wotan only concerns Siegmund himself.

But Siegmund distrusts the Valkyrie. After all, she’s just condemned him to death. He finds himself in a moment of utter, abject despair. In it, he threatens to kill himself and his lover, would rather make the choice of death for both of them than perish at the hand of his enemy. This would have tremendous power as a gesture if Sieglinde were still awake, if she could agree to such an outcome. Frankly, she probably would. But because she is asleep, it is an awful proposition. And the words Siegmund uses to make it are even more awful:

No one but me
is to touch this pure woman alive;
if I’m to die,
I’ll kill her first where she sleeps!5

This, to put it bluntly, is the language of patriarchal ownership. Indeed, this language and behavior are so very out of character for Siegmund, one is tempted to rationalize it away. We can say: of course Siegmund feels like this. His twin has just regaled to him in excruciating detail how distinctly impure she feels after having been physically violated. Touched by another. She’s reminded Siegmund of the terrifying circumstances that separated them in the first place — and now, he would do anything to keep from being separated again. The idea of letting Sieglinde go, of failing to protect her from further harm — especially since Hunding is supposed to be the victor of this fight — is intolerable. Faced with certain defeat, why not take matters into his own hands? Is there not something admirable in Siegmund’s desire to die on his own terms? And, after all, why should he trust this cold, strange woman who speaks for the gods who have abandoned him? Maybe this is all in bad faith, this threat of Siegmund’s. Maybe he thinks that claims of ownership are the only logic someone cruel like the Valkyrie — herself an avatar of the ruling class — can understand.

However, these, to me, are all excuses. At the end of the day, this is Siegmund we are talking about. Siegmund, who is free. Siegmund, for whom good is not determined by what one is, but what one does. And here, he has committed an awful wrong. The brutal feudal culture that’s left nothing but scars on this man’s body has now cut into his very soul. It is with this transgression that the feminine pessimism of the Ring claims its strongest male protagonist. Because Brünnhilde has a change of heart, because Siegmund is given the chance to fight on his own terms, yes, it is true, Siegmund dies free. In many respects, as I wrote before, he dies a hero.

No one can deny that Siegmund’s end is met trying to protect the one he loves, and that his death remains a final act of utmost defiance against a world which cannot stand. But another side of me has always believed that Siegmund dies partly as a result of this gross error of judgement made in the eleventh hour. And as much as she deserves to be awake, perhaps it really is for the best that Sieglinde lies like that in her brother’s lap. In her oblivious slumber, she is at least spared from having to hear the man she loves speak of her in the language of her oppressor.

I said in my introductory essay that the Ring works upon its viewers in a way that uncovers something between allegory and identification. These twins, let’s call them, of allegory and identification have already come to fruition in a few ways in this body of work. If the Ring is seen as an allegory for capitalism and greed, then one’s identification is usually with Brünnhilde, the utopian spirit who will bring about the end of this development and return the world to — and by way of — Love. If the Ring is an allegory for a failed revolution, then one’s identification is with Siegmund, the failed revolutionary. But to me, the Ring has always been a work about the unmaking of many different worlds, human and in totality, and this is done consistently through one mechanism, which is rape in its various forms. Hence, my identification is with Sieglinde, the first woman to throw off the yoke of violence. Her function within this allegory, and within the structure of the Ring itself, is existential. Sieglinde is not just a heroine. She is a fundamental condition necessary for the annihilation of the world.

Much like with Siegmund, it is an error to write off Sieglinde as mere collateral damage for the gods, or as a simple vessel for the coming of Siegfried. Sieglinde’s life contains so much from which the rest of the Ring’s contents will combine, diverge, rearrange, distort, and finally, immolate. Hers is the rape, the passion, the fear, the resilience, the violence, the desire for vengeance, the disappointment men bring women and the sacrifices women make in pursuit of that which is greater than themselves. And so, Sieglinde is everything and she is the beginning of the end of everything. This is evident in her very music. At the conclusion of Act III, Scene 1, when Brünnhilde tells her that she is carrying Siegmund’s child, Sieglinde, shaken from her extraordinary grief, sings the words ‘O mightiest wonder!’ to a very special lietmotif. It is commonly called ‘Libeserlösung’ aka ‘Redemption Through Love,’ but Sabor calls it the ‘Assurance’ motif, which I like better. The passage is triumphant, ending in a leap of faith, a falling 7^th. The next time we hear it, nearly two operas later, everything will burn.

What we are supposed to gleam from this music is, per Sabor, that “the end of the gods is not the end of life; that Love, renounced in one period of existence, may yet rule supreme.” Already the woman who sings these notes has been erased from what their purpose serves, becomes, like the music itself, a mere passage, a container for time. It is, however, very important that Sieglinde sings them. After the gods are destroyed, life will go on, sure; but before they meet their end, so will this life, in defiance of the heavens, shielded from their sight. Perhaps there is a premonition there, in her singing. Perhaps there is a reason why, laughingly, Sieglinde meets her fate, meanders down into the forest of immanence in a major key. She will die, yes. Like many, she never gets to see the dawn of freedom, merely trusts that the future will bring it into being, as it has brought into being all other things. But the “bad infinity” of this world, as Adorno called both the Ring’s and our own, will perish because of what this woman does. And this end will be justice for her. Sieglinde knows this. Of course, she knows. She promised it first to Siegmund:

“I’d go after all I ever lost, all I ever mourned I’ll win again.”

Relevant parts of the opera are linked in-line.

Out of necessity — i.e. avoiding Substack’s email length restrictions (which are based on size rather than number of words) — enjambments have (unfortunately) been removed from longer quotes of the text.

This essay assumes that the reader is already familiar with the subject matter (the first two acts of Die Walküre.) For those who need a little refresher, the plot of the opera can be read in full here.

Prelude: Unconvincing Determinism, Unreliable Narrators

More often than not, the Ring is a work of absolutely infuriating internal inconsistency. This is not to imply that this makes it in any way bad. Indeed, the constant vacillations of its characters, their internal and external contradictions, only serve the main goal of its composer, which is to create a tapestry of human frailty via a pantheon of gods. However, as I’ve reiterated time and time again in my writing about the Ring, if one wants to make specific claims about topics such as agency, structure, rules, the mechanisms by which things happen, trying to map out whether a single event must happen and by what means becomes curiously difficult. This is especially true in the second of Richard Wagner’s four music dramas, Die Walküre.

For example — and I realize this is Wagnerian inside baseball — consider this single, unbroken chain of thought:

1. When Sieglinde is married to Hunding, Wotan cannot intervene on his daughter’s behalf further than sheathing the magic sword Nothung in the ash tree. (This is in parallel to how he can’t help Siegmund beyond doing the same thing, i.e. leaving the sword in the tree.) His hands are ostensibly tied because Sieglinde and Hunding are bound by a marriage contract overseen by Fricka.

2. Wotan, however, violates ironclad marriage contracts all the time, and very directly. Namely, he is constantly cheating on Fricka, who is both the godly protector of law and Wotan’s wife, with very few consequences. One could claim this is because he is a god and has a higher agential power, yet Wotan does yield to many of his contractual obligations, most notably not directly interfering in Fafner the giant’s possession of the ring.

3. The same inviolable marriage contract to Hunding that Wotan apparently had no recourse in the latter later declares invalid because it was made without love. Well, wasn’t that also true in the beginning? (He maybe has more recourse in making this claim since he wasn’t the one who broke the contract to begin with.) At any rate, Hunding is among the faithful, Fricka must heed his call. But she does so by appealing to her husband not through any supranatural enforcements of the way of things, but by making direct interpersonal demands.

4. Wotan then murders Hunding extrajudicially after he upholds said marriage contract by first killing Siegmund. Oh well.

One can invoke many such examples to illustrate that, more often than not, the contractual obligations allegedly fettering the gods are — much like those of our own legal systems — ultimately palatable veneers for violence. The most damning implication of this is Wotan’s mysterious claim to Brünnhilde that the gods are directly intervening in the affairs of mankind by way of “spurious contracts” in pursuit of staging a war with Alberich.2 In this case, the contract really is a mere formality legitimizing a desirable but unconscionable deed. Before we can make any further arguments, we must first make this one.

Again, these contradictions are not a flaw. Such views are totally consistent with Wagner’s broader political beliefs, his conservative anarchism. To paraphrase Adorno, in the Ring law and lawlessness are basically two sides of the same coin. It’s also philosophically consistent with a belief in the totality of Will, its utter denial of individual freedom. All these spindly structures and desperate protestations are, for the most part, meaningless because the end – Das Ende – is inevitable. Wotan himself knows this and says as much. The rest is a case of rationalization, and the gods are extremely unreliable narrators. Sometimes this lack of reliability is a matter of cynicism (such as Fricka’s characterization of Siegmund); other times it expresses insecurity, defensiveness regarding wrongdoing and simple arrogance. In Walküre, the gods’ justifications for their actions escalate into an existential crisis, especially in the conversation between Wotan and Brünnhilde in Act II which ends in Wotan’s infamous commitment to annihilation. One gets a real sense that the father of battles himself does not know how his own crumbling world works, which is part of the crux of the drama.

As I hinted at in my introductory Wälsung essay, despite all these wills, futilities, and inevitabilities, there remain a handful of characters in the Ring whose currents of internal logic are consistent, who do not contradict themselves and who are not otherwise tormented by mysterious internal or external forces beyond their control. Rather, these characters, Alberich, Siegmund, and Sieglinde,3 work upon the world for their own aims, and those aims are in direct opposition to the overlords in Walhalla. This truth is evident in their very ability to make choices at all, to be guided by a desire to shape the future in accordance with their beliefs (whether one is talking about greed, love, or freedom) and to act accordingly.

Because Sieglinde will be discussed at length in the next essay and Alberich was touched on in my first installment of writing about the Ring (though his similarity to the twins will be further elucidated here) for now, we will concern ourselves entirely with Siegmund, who has always been the expressly heroic exception to Wagner’s fatalistic rule. For it is through Siegmund that Wagner not only allows us tantilizing glimpses of a different outcome for the gods and for humanity, but also gifts us an expression of so many of humanity’s best characteristics: a sense of justice, a desire for love and freedom, and the inconquerable nature of the human spirit.

I’ve spent a not insignificant number of hours thinking about, listening to, and mapping out everything that happens to Siegmund because, well, I am simply enthralled by him as an artistic creation. In doing so, I’ve come to believe that through Siegmund, his words and actions, one can embark on completely a different reading of the Ring, not as a parable of humankind’s destruction of nature, or as a philosophical inquiry into what propels the future into being, but as a political drama whose ending is as equally informed by the renouncement of love in favor of greed as it is by the story of a failed revolution. Rather than merely viewing him as another victim of a great plot, a close textual read of Siegmund enables us to take a unique stance, one that refuses to accept the gods as the authorities on existence and instead allows us see them as what they really are: those who hold all the power in society and behave accordingly.

I. One Must Imagine Wehwalt Happy

Compared to the gods, Siegfried, or Brünnhilde, Siegmund’s world and his relationship to it are very simple and direct. This is in part because he is viewed more by his creator and by his overlords as an object, even when Siegmund’s own free consciousness is a matter of philosophical contestation. In other words, despite being someone who very much does things, from the perspective of the gods, Siegmund is someone to whom things should happen. My fascination lies in the fact that Wagner (perhaps malgré lui) gives his creation a remarkable and deep subjectivity that not only puts him in direct opposition to the cycle’s bigger heroes but does so with relatively few internal contradictons. This is best exemplified in Siegmund’s testimony in Act 1 Scene 2, “Friedmund Darf Ich Nicht Heissen.”4

Siegmund is a profoundly sincere character. That swell of strings on “drum mußt’ ich mich Wehwalt nennen” (hence my name, Ruled by Sorrow) tugs mightily at one’s heartstrings. Sincerity makes clear Siegmund’s beliefs, desires, and actions. The first thing one learns about him is that he is plagued by misfortune and alienation. He is, in a word, hated, despite believing himself to be good. His desires reflect the paucity of this reality. Rather than aspiring towards great deeds, Siegmund yearns for stability, love and human companionship. He cannot fathom why life is so very cruel or why nothing happy ever seems to happen to him. To our hero, the world around him is characterized by unjust violence and constant conflict. In this perception, he is correct. We must remember that at this point in the cycle, Wotan is in the process of exacting his great plan, pitting warriors senselessly against one another in order to assemble a standing army of the dead that will protect Walhalla from Alberich’s dark forces. From the point of view of life on earth, this must seem very grim and frightening indeed.

But unlike Hunding, Sieglinde’s oppressor and Siegmund’s enemy, who speaks in terms of the Norns and other godly rhetoric, Siegmund does not attribute his misery to divine forces. To him, much of it is simply absurd. And yet, in spite of his bad luck, he perseveres. He continues pursuing his meager existence, living from situation to situation. That being said, Siegmund’s misfortune is not entirely ambient. He is not “cursed” in the same sense as Fafner (by the ring) or Wotan (ostensibly by the Will). Nor is he blindly moving towards an unavoidable destiny like Siegfried whose “freedom” is defined by being without — without knowledge, without socialization, without mercy and without fear. To the contrary, Siegmund himself attributes much of his strife to his own steadfast beliefs, beliefs that are in direct opposition to the prevailing social order:

What I ever thought to be right,
others took to be wrong;
what I always took to be bad,
others looked on with favor…

Hunding echoes this depiction from the opposite perspective:

I know of a savage race
It holds nothing sacred that others cherish.
It’s hated by all, including me.

But what are these beliefs? Siegmund tells us via the recollection of his encounter with the girl:

A girl called on me to defend her.
Her family wanted her to wed a man she did not love.
I met her oppressors in fight.**

(Alternatively: I rushed in protectively / to stave off the abuse.) (Emphasis mine.)

After first identifying his own sense of alterity (“I was drawn to men and women / but no matter how many I met…I was always the outlaw…”) Siegmund draws a connection between said alterity and that of women. His is the objection to the treatment of women as property. This objection is recurrent, consistent, and explicit throughout the opera. For example, “slavery” is a word Siegmund (rightly!) will use to describe the oppression of women multiple times.5 In Act I, Scene 3, he will further connect these two alterities by repeatedly identifying Sieglinde’s sorrow with his own. In doing so, he indicts the society both twins wish to enact their “revenge” upon by living in oppositon to its rules and norms (i.e. by committing adultery and eloping.) Later, in Act II, Scene 3, when Sieglinde describes in harrowing detail her feelings of disgust at having been made to submit to Hunding against her will, Siegmund does not accept the prevailing societal framework that equivocates women’s sexual impurity with worthlessness, but instead directs his blame and rage squarely on the oppressor: Hunding himself.6

the late review

sieglinde as heroine

This is the second of the ‘Wälsung Essays,’ a series I have written about the twins Siegmund and Sieglinde from Richard Wagner’s Die Walküre. To read the introduction to this series, please click here. For further notes on how to watch the opera and translations of the text, see this footnote…

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a year ago · 8 likes · 2 comments · kate wagner

To return to the story of the girl, regardless of whether sorrow follows “Wehwalt” or not, when called upon for help, he acts. However, because Siegmund still exists within a violent feudal system predicated on honor and shame, he has little recourse beyond that same violence. Thus, his defense of the young woman results in total carnage. What he cannot understand, however, is why the girl he is protecting ultimately aligns herself with her oppressors to the extent of choosing to die with them. This is one of the key insights indicating that Siegmund is free in ways other human actors are not. The other is that he has no trouble at all violating the contracts — marital or otherwise — forged by the gods, contracts that are supposed to be deterministic in nature. Siegmund’s life might be absolutely terrible because of it, but miraculously, he’s still living.

At this point, one must ask, by what mechanism is Siegmund free anyways? A clue comes from Wotan’s debate with Fricka in Act II, Scene 1. When Fricka claims “you alone / stimulate those [humans], whom I, eternal goddess, hear you praise…” Wotan’s response is, “With incalculable suffering / [Siegmund] fended for himself / my protective powers never shielded him.” This is the only overlap between the father’s testimony and his son’s: that Siegmund suffers and that this suffering is somehow a necessary antecedent for action. Perhaps implicit in this claim is the (Hegelian!) idea that man develops self-consciousness because he is a sensuous being who suffers. Wagner leaves this too ambiguous to say for sure.

Still, if Wotan has indeed withdrawn his involvement in and protection of Siegmund — something the former claims he must do in order to achieve his goal of extrajudicially pursuing the ring— then for all intents and purposes, Siegmund is essentially a rational actor in an absurd world. He is a man abandoned by the gods, a man ultimately responsible for his own actions. Hence, what separates him in character from, say, the born-savior Siegfried, is that for Siegmund, good is not predicated on what one is but what one does.

From fighting righteous fights to his love of Sieglinde, everything Siegmund believes is supplicated by action. These actions he takes in spite of the negative consequences that dog him endlessly. As the Sisyphus of the Ring, one must imagine him happy. In acting upon his beliefs, as exemplified by the case of the young woman, Siegmund also behaves in the way he thinks the rest of the world should. One could say that, much like Siegfried uncannily anticipates the psychosexual dynamics later theorized in detail by Freud (right down to crying for his mother when faced with the terror of the sexual act) Siegmund is an eerily prescient existentialist figure.7 Forget Schopenhaeur; our hero’s misery is better characterized by one of Sartre’s best aphorisms: “Man is condemned to be free.”8

II. Siegmund as Property

But such claims of freedom can only be made from Siegmund’s perspective. The gods, of course, say otherwise. Their view of the issue best laid out in the argument between Wotan and Fricka in Act II, Scene 1, as it is this encounter which, despite Wotan’s handwringing for the rest of the opera, ultimately decides his son’s fate.

Often maligned as a typical opera bitch, Fricka plays a much more important role in the political structure of the Ring than the average misogynistic caricature. Indeed, she plays many roles. She is the righteous upholder of the law. At her most sympathetic, she is a heartbroken and constantly wronged woman. Compared with her errant but more progressive husband, she is fundamentally conservative and aligned with the old ways of the gods, ways that are already destabilized because of Wotan’s misdeeds in Das Rheingold. But most importantly to our discussion, Fricka is an avatar of the ruling class. She is a woman who, in addition to upholding the patriarchal structures of marriage for which she has sacrificed a great deal in order to remain close to the power of men, has a primary material interest in the continuation of the ancien régime.

Wotan and Fricka’s spat may start off as a debate on the “vile incest” of the Wälsung twins, but Fricka’s underlying concern quickly becomes known when she shrieks:

Does this mean the end
of the eternal gods,
now that you’ve sired
the wild Wälsungs!

Fricka is right to be worried here. The continuation of Walhalla relies on a world in which humanity remains subjected to a godly domination enforced by the contractural rule of law and order. If human beings can act in defiance of those norms and practices, the gods’ power — not as supernatural power but as political power — is seriously undermined. This is especially true because, as we have already discussed, such contractural rule is itself already fraught. In service to her claims, Fricka readily invokes her own superiority and her subsequent disdain towards humanity. By accusing her husband of “prostrating yourself / in a gutter of disgrace / where you’ve sired a pair / of insidious human beings,” Fricka treats Wotan’s infidelity less as a crime of passion than as a matter of gross miscegenation.

Realizing that he’s lost the adultery argument, Wotan stops pretending that what’s at stake here is a simple family affair. He tries to convey that, because of the ring, the gods are at an impasse. Hence, they need a hero “freed from the gods’ protection” and “independent of their laws” in order to take the necessary action “which this god is forbidden to take.” (Wotan is, of course, referring to the Rheingold contract he holds with Fafner, the current possessor of the ring.) To which Fricka, ever quick on the draw, retorts: what action “could heroes ever undertake / that is denied to the gods / whose wish solely dictates their actions?”

She then further argues that human beings are bound to nothing but godly determinism, as evidenced primarily by the fact that Wotan, rather than being totally uninvolved in Wälsung affairs, has left Siegmund the magic sword Nothung embedded in Hunding’s ash tree for him to find. Wotan is shaken by this, even though there is obvious truth in his rebuttal that Siegmund won the sword by his own merit and ended up in said situation of his own accord. (It is also notable that even here, when the sword kept in Hunding’s house is the matter at hand, the case and fate of Sieglinde is never once discussed.)

The sword being the primary piece of incriminating evidence in favor of determinism is a bit of a red herring for a number of reasons. The first is obvious: to deny Siegmund his personhood is merely a rationalization for a certain course of action Fricka wants Wotan to take anyway. Indeed, by invoking determinism at all, Fricka is acting somewhat in bad faith. Her real objection is to the threat Siegmund, an inferior creature, poses to godly society. She herself makes this very clear:

With those who are not free, no noble will fight; an upstart is punished only by his master. I might make war to resist your power: but Siegmund remains my slave! He is his lord’s obedient servant and slave: should your eternal wife be subject to him? Should this lowest of the low denigrate me in my humiliation, turn me into an object of scorn for the brazen, of mockery for the free?

It is this invocation of ownership that ultimately makes Wotan capitulate. After all, the threat Siegmund poses to godly society affects him too. Even the so-called inviolable hierarchy of objects is done away with: the magic sword becomes just another promise Wotan will break. Indeed, it is not enough that Wotan must abstain from protecting his son in battle — he hasn’t been protecting him anyway. If anything, he’s been torturing Siegmund, forcing him to endure a life of profound abjection in order to use him for the gods’ own gains. Siegmund must die for no other reason than to reinforce Fricka’s honor. He is a sacrifice that must be made in service to the status quo. An oath with Fricka — keyed in a hollowly triumphant E-flat — gives this plan of action the gods’ usual illusion of legitimacy. In truth, it is simply a murder, and a political one at that.

What enables this line of thinking in the first place is that the gods, even Wotan, fundamentally see Siegmund as their property with which they can do as they please. This is not so very different from how children are still viewed by their parents within the patriarchal bourgeois family, an institution Fricka so tirelessly works to uphold. Despite his handwringing, his sadness at having to commit infanticide, Wotan’s own valuation of Siegmund’s personhood and humanity does not run very deep. In the pursuit of Walhalla’s larger goals, Siegmund is an object, a tool, a means to an end. Freedom, rather than being something Wotan respects or desires, frightens him. In truth, he hates freedom. This hatred is best expressed in Wotan’s famous moment of despair later in the second scene of Act II. He laments to his Valkyrie daughter Brünnhilde:

Only one man could do what I cannot: a hero I’ve never been inclined to help, a stranger to the god, free of his influence, instinctive, unprompted, taking action with his own weapons to escape his own crises, action I have to shun, action I never told him to take, yet enacting the only thing I wish. How could I find this enemy without enmity, a man opposed to the god, who would fight for me? How do I create the free man whom I’ve never protected, whose defiant independence makes him closest to me? How do I make another human being who is no longer like me, who does what he wants, yet only what I want? Alas, no way out for the gods! Dire disgrace!

(Emphases mine.)

The thing is, Wotan is right to feel such anguish. There is no way out for the gods. Either Siegmund and a consciously free humanity will destroy Walhalla by undermining its power or the curse of the ring will be followed through to its inescapable end. What is telling is that Wotan chooses the ring. This moment is the high mark of Die Walküre’s dialectical problem. However, being a true dialectitian, Wagner’s political and philosophical beliefs — his conservative anarchism, his ex-revolutionary’s pessimism, his bourgeois loyalty, his view of society as a natural process, his Schopenhaueran priors — all combine in such a way that what ultimately happens in the Ring is, in fact, a fascinating synthesis of these two outcomes.

In the latter two operas of the cycle, Wagner, by depriving his savior Siegfried of conscious striving based on a system of belief (i.e. by making him an innocent, pure simpleton, a vessel of the Will) denudes all the revolutionary potential in humankind, unmasks it as futile. Second, because the Ring is a systemic work in which all elements, whether one is talking about its broader political-philosophical undercurrents, the agential system defined by enchanted objects, or the actions of its characters within their respective narratives, render a reading of the end as being resultant of a curse, any curse — the curse of the Will, the curse of humanity’s crimes against the natural-social order, or the curse of the ring — simplistic. As I said in my last essay, the openness of the cycle’s ending in part redeems humanity by giving it an uncertain future. However, this future comes only after the explicit destruction of the chance humanity already had, which is to say, after the revolutionary potential embodied in the Wälsung twins has been put down.9

III. Siegmund’s Death as Murder and Suicide

Finally, there is the matter of Siegmund’s death. The way Siegmund meets his end renders all discussions of whether he has “free will” (as defined by the pair of gods who objectify him) irrelevant. It is in death, perhaps even more than in life, that we see the self-evident truth: Siegmund is free because he believes himself to be free and behaves as though he is free. He will pursue freedom at all costs. He will die believing in it. In doing so, he will make his fantasy of freedom, if it is indeed that, real.

This becomes clear over the course of Siegmund’s negotiation with the death-maiden Brünnhilde, who has come to take him up to Walhalla, see: (“Siegmund! Sieh auf mich!”)

What is readily apparent in the way Siegmund behaves in this, his 11th hour, is his belief in the ability to choose his own fate. Important information for understanding the agency Siegmund possesses in making this choice can be found in an earlier aside Wotan makes to Brünnhilde in Act II, Scene 2. As part of his justification for why Siegmund isn’t free and therefore must die, Wotan claims that Siegmund, rather than acting on his own behalf, is actually just following orders given to him by “Wälse” when Siegmund was just a little boy:

I roamed with him wildly
through the forests;
daringly, I goaded him
into resisting the gods’ counsel…

Two contradictions invalidate this claim: the first is that Sieglinde, who was completely cut off from her father, is in possession of the same agency. Furthermore, if Wotan’s command were true, i.e. if it were some kind of prime directive, Siegmund would automatically reject Brünnhilde instead of negotiating with her.

In the beginning of their talk, Siegmund is not entirely opposed to the splendor of the afterlife. He asks the Valkyrie a series of hopeful, probing questions. Who will be there? Will I see my father again? Will there be pretty girls in Walhalla? These invite the insight that Siegmund is more agnostic than atheistic in how he goes about his matters. It’s not necessarily that he disbelieves in the godly order, but rather chooses not to ascribe to its values. Because of his misery and abnegation (though which element informs the other remains ambiguous) — to Siegmund, religion either excludes him or has little meaning for the course his life should take. Still, when confronted with her existence, he believes the Valkyrie is real. He is also so bold as to negotiate with the messenger of death herself.

The crucial part of the scene is when Brünnhilde tells Siegmund that Sieglinde will not come with him, that she must remain on earth. The unspoken implication of this is that if Siegmund loses the battle to Hunding, then Sieglinde will return to her captor’s clutches. Not only does this prompt Siegmund to resolutely reject the Valkyrie’s proposal, he can now see Walhalla for what it really is: bullshit. He calls Brünnhilde an “evil, soulless young woman,” imploring her not to tell him “about Walhalla’s feeble charms.” In a testament to his ultimate freedom, he renounces eternal bliss altogether:

If I have to die, I’ll not journey to Walhalla:
Hell, hold me firm!

In his book In Search of Wagner, Adorno made the fascinating observation that by rejecting Walhalla and choosing Hell in its stead, Siegmund ultimately aligns himself not with his father, Wotan, but with Wotan’s archenemy, Alberich. He writes:

…[W]hen the Absolute denies [Siegmund] the happiness of individuation that is libeled by Wagner and Schopenhauer alike…[Siegmund chooses] the kingdom of Alberich, who sets out to storm Valhalla. This is the only place where to all intents and purposes justice is done to Valhalla; here alone does justice dwell. Not Schopenhauer’s ‘eternal’ justice; rather the justice that does not escape from the circular track of red-hot coals, but authentically steps forth. It is this justice with which the story begins and which abolishes as prehistory that pre-conscious myth.

One could also say that Alberich’s original extractive crime is allegorical to how feudalism first must fall at the hands of capitalism before socialism, then communism, can come into being. Thus, Alberich is evil, but he is also progress. Adorno doesn’t mention it, but there is a musical connection between Siegmund and Alberich as well. When, in Act I, Siegmund pulls the sword Nothung out of the ash tree (“urging deeds and death”*) he does so to the same “Liebe-Tragik” motif that marks the moment when Alberich steals the gold from the Rhinemaidens in Act I of Das Rheingold.

After Brünnhilde reveals to Siegmund that he doesn’t have much of a choice in this matter and that his fate has already been sealed by the gods, Siegmund absolutely refuses to be subjected to that fate. He would rather die on his own terms — and take his sister with him10 — than be forced to submit to an outcome chosen by his supposed overlords. And yet, in a similar expression of the same agency, when Brünnhilde, so very moved by Siegmund’s bravery and his love for Sieglinde, decides to risk her own life in the fight with Hunding, Siegmund, too, chooses that slim possibility of victory. With it comes the belief that action can subdue fate. After all, Siegmund has spent his whole life thinking that it is always better to try and fail than to not try at all. To paraphrase Sartre, he knows that not making a choice is still a choice. And so, he dies trying. In the end, Wotan, whose authority is at heart patriarchal, subdues his disobedient daughter and murders his son. In doing so, he reveals very little about the fate for which we are expected to pity him and everything about the true extent of his own despotism.

Now that it is over, we can see in full what Siegmund chose to do with this sad little life of his. I’ve always found it so very lovely. When we meet him, he is a wanderer in the woods, a man in exile. A crusader against injustice, depersonalized by others and alienated even from himself, he is forced to bury somewhere secret his own true name. And yet, despite falling victim to extraordinary cruelty, in Siegmund, like many Wagnerian heroes, can be found the optimism of the creative spirit. He tells stories, devises aliases, and speaks in extensive metaphors. When given the first opportunity to express himself fully, to reveal his truest feelings and desires, he blossoms into a poet. The “Winterstürme,” the love song he sings to Sieglinde, is made only more beautiful when one thinks about how long its creator has been yearning to sing it. For a very brief time, Siegmund knows the love and kindness of another human being. This is so precious to him, gives his life such meaning, that he is willing to die for it. His end is no less than a testimony to human dignity. He dies an abolitionist refusing to be enslaved. And in telling the story of this little life, there is so much beautiful music, underscored, as always by a plaintive cello line. That line, of course, resolves upwards.

The ending of the Ring cycle is ambiguous, and in that ambiguity some people find optimism. A chorus of men and women stand voiceless and watch as the Valkyrie Brünnhilde climbs onto the funeral pyre where Siegfried, her lover, is already burning. With them, the whole of Walhalla will go up in flames and so, too, the rule of the gods. What happens after is unanswered. Some look into the lacuna Wagner leaves for us and find the liberation of mankind from tyranny. Others see a return to primordial, unfeeling nature — an anti-humanity. One thing, however, is certain: all that is begun with the theft of the Rhinegold will end, and with few exceptions, it must end in death. From the perspectives of its own architects, annihilation is inevitable.

Countless debates are raised, therefore, in retrospect. The endurance of the Ring lies, in part, because, one can talk about it forever. Any stake in the matter is hindered by that which Wagner holds in dialectical tension, namely concepts of freedom and unfreedom, law and lawlessness. It is also made more difficult by the work’s constant contradictions within itself. Examples can be made here of Siegfried’s learning of fear via sexual awakening, which he then swiftly unlearns; or Brünnhilde’s condemnation of Siegfried to death after which she immediately forgives him without further introspection; or Wotan’s extensive, constantly paradoxical schemes and rationalizations in Acts II and III of Die Walküre.

the late review

wagner's ring: believing in the stakes

This series of essays is working from the Pierre Boulez / Patrice Chéreau edition of Wagner’s Ring, produced for Bayreuth in 1980. It can be viewed in full with English subtitles via this link. (Click the closed-captioning button at the bottom of the screen.) I’ve done my best to timestamp the parts mentioned via links for your convenience. The translat…

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a year ago · 60 likes · 5 comments · kate wagner

Perhaps, since reading my last essay, you’ve been seduced into watching the Ring, and have begun noticing these things and asking and answering these questions yourself. Why does the end of the world happen? Some will say, because Alberich renounced love in favor of greed. Others will say, because Wotan stole the ring from Alberich. Deep-cut Ring heads will say it begins with Wotan’s mutilation of the World Ash Tree from which he forged his spear of contracts. A similar question is, by what means does it truly happen? Via the ring’s curse and the broader agential hierarchy of objects? The ring, the spear, Nothung the sword, the thread of the Norns? By Wotan’s seemingly willful turn towards suicide after his little cold war doesn’t come to fruition? By the existance of Siegfried? By Siegfried’s usurpation of the great patriarch and his subsequent demise in the lawless post-Wotan anarchy that follows?

Or is the Ring bigger than mere plot points? Is the end baked into an underlying philosophical obeyance of a Schopenhauerean Will, or, as Adorno so forcefully argued, the even broader limitations of Wagner’s own political imagination? “The parable of the man who dominates nature only to relapse into a state of natural bondage gains a historical dimension in the action of the Ring with the victor of the bourgeoisie, the idea that society is like a natural process, something ‘fated’ is reaffirmed, despite the conquest of particular aspects of nature,” he writes in In Search of Wagner. “The catastrophe arises at the moment when this much-vaunted ‘natural process’ is revealed to be the mere product and stigma of an undirected social process and the lackey of an all-knowing authority.”2

Adorno, too, was wise to acknowledge an additional truth that makes staking a claim about the Ring difficult, which is that the world of the Ring is systemic in scope. What happens is not a matter of individual choice, but of material reality in its varying forms. Because the Ring is systemic — both in itself and in terms of its own genesis as a work by a bourgeois for the 19th century bourgeoisie during a moment in which the sociohistorical processes and contradictions of modernity were at their most deeply felt — no one element is extricable from any other. The conditions for the world’s undoing are embedded within the world, at the very beginning. To irreverantly steal from Marx’s thesis on the primitive accumulation of capital, “it brings forth the material agencies for its own dissolution.”3 But the way in which these conditions play out — in real life, and in the Ring — is a political choice. The existence of one end, by dialectical necessity, implies the alternatives that did not come to pass. This same mercy enables each of us to stake our claims about — and to — the Ring cycle.

Wagner’s great sleight of hand as a composer and dramatist lies in his ability to make the audience think that annihilation is avoidable while simultaneously insisting that it is not. Wotan condemns the gods to death in Act II of Die Walküre. After this moment, everything will fall in line, even in ways that appear to seek a different outcome. Death lurks in happiness and in triumph. This is best exemplified in the psychosexual conclusion of Siegfried, in which the titular character, about to consummate his love with Brünnhilde, ends on the lines, “one and all / radiant love / laughing death!”

We are led to believe, through ceaseless praise and the previous acts of the opera, through the slaying of the dragon and the shattering of Wotan’s spear, that Siegfried will be the superior hero who is supposed to deliver the world from destruction, or at least put an end to the tyranny of the gods in a very different way than he eventually does, perhaps a way more redolent of the one intuited by his father. Might we say an active, revolutionary way? But by the end of the cycle, Siegfried is revealed as an inhuman empty vessel, the Freudian subject par excellence, crying for his mother, yanked around by his drives, easily beguiled because he believes in nothing. Selfish, yet without much of a self.

The heroine Brünnhilde herself, once a great rebel to (and yet in service of!) her father, is a constant vacillation of resistance and acquiescence, often in rapid succession, to the Will, which for her may as well be paternal. Her death, the world’s death, after all, is still Wotan’s wish. It still brings that Walküre death-desire to fruition, regardless of whether it opens up the possibility of humanity’s alleged liberation alongside it. Despite it all, our Brünnhilde still fights, still loves, still suffers, still gets revenge. It all appears as though it’s going somewhere and is very beautiful along the way. The innocent spectator, the one who has gone into the Ring with nothing more than their own ears and eyes, will be strung along, enchanted until the very end, which will appear both stark and powerful. After the final curtain falls, our spectator’s first question will inevitably be: Where did it all go wrong?

But even before we know what will happen in the plot of the opera, Wagner’s little device will tell us. We are dumb, ignorant Siegfried and the leitmotif is the birdsong leading us to the mountain encircled by magic fire. As much as it is used as a memory aid and a way of signaling pre-conscious or subconscious affect, the leitmotif is also a key tool for irony, for expressing things that go beyond the characters’ own self-knowledge. This also complicates any analysis of the Ring as text because any given character’s own words cannot be entirely their own. To paraphrase Adorno, the leitmotif enmeshes them in the totality, identifies as well as robs them of identity. It is the musical system itself that reinforces best that everything is moving towards one thing and one thing only: the end.

There is, however, one exception within this bleak totality. This exception has always been acknowledged with a certain degree of puzzlement and admiration, especially by radical thinkers like Shaw, Jameson, or Adorno. The one moment in the Ring in which the end is not inevitable — and in which the irony of the leitmotif is simple dramatic irony4 — is, of course, Act I of Die Walküre. It is here where we meet Wotan’s illegitimate and incestuous mortal twins, Siegmund and Sieglinde, two human beings abandoned by the gods whose freedom has come at the cost of profound suffering. In their solidarity and love for one another, in their principled rejection of the world as it is, they offer a small glimpse into a future that cannot come to pass within the ideological and philosophical boundaries of the Ring. In doing so, the twins open the question about what this world-which-must-end really is. It is no wonder, then, that their existence becomes a point of contention for the rest of the opera, constantly relitigated in rhetoric so contradictory it works to obscure the despotism of the gods — a despotism so clearly expressed in the twins’ experiences and the deliberately violent end they face.

All of the work’s points of friction and political limitations are laid bare in the case of the Wälsungs. Elements of their goodness come almost in spite of their creator, whether one is speaking about Wotan or Wagner. Not only are the twins the Ring’s best heroes, they are its only heroes. Not only are they the work’s first pair of lovers, so tenderly and lushly scored by their creator, they are its only pair, because their love is philosophically grounded in something beyond blind fate. Siegmund and Sieglinde are the only two protagonists in the Ring’s pantheon who die for themselves and for their own aims. In practical reality, both of them do not only die, but are killed.

In this series of three essays, the twins will be examined from a variety of political, sociological, philosophical, and aesthetic perspectives, with a special focus on Beauvoirian feminism. My goal in creating this small body of work is to reclaim for myself a part of the Wagnerian oeuvre and, in part, to be blasphemous and stake a claim that is both original and syncretic. I wish to reorient all of the Ring around an unorthodox interpretation in which the twins are as Wotan originally claimed them to be, and arguably, as he made them: free, with all the resulting implications. Instead of accepting the weepy canards of fallibility Wagner and Wagnerites so love to bestow upon Wotan, his patriarchal authoritarianism and violence are taken seriously and, following Adorno, are seen as being reflective of the bourgeois perspective under which Wagner labors.

By rescuing Siegmund and Sieglinde from the Ring’s garbage bin of inevitable tragedy, we can reconsider not only Walhalla from the perspective of humanity, but, as is the case with all great artistic creations, our own world and human relationships. The twins further enable us to take up the task of making visible not only Wagner’s political and philosophical boundaries — boundaries deceptively concealed by the mythical nature of the work — but also the same frictions still at play in today’s similarly nihilistic moment. This is especially true in matters of freedom, womanhood, and love, each of which will receive its own treatment.

Hence, a brief summary of the task at hand:

I. The Exception of Siegmund

the late review

the exception of siegmund

This is the first of the ‘Wälsung Essays,’ a series I have written about the twins Siegmund and Sieglinde from Richard Wagner’s Die Walküre. To read the introduction to this series, please click here. For further notes on translations of the text, see this footnote…

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a year ago · 8 likes · kate wagner

The first essay will consist of a politicized answer to “the Siegmund question.” Even that great anti-Wagnerite Adorno was willing to concede this curious aberration within Wagner’s fatalistic pessimism, having called Siegmund the hero who “rejects the heroic ideal that he embodies more truly than those well-established heroes who will win the battle even before they start to fight.”5 This essay will work primarily with the Ring as a text, cross examining Siegmund’s own testimony and perspective with those of the gods, arguing that even accounting for the totalitarian philosophical and agential systems of the Ring, it is more likely than not that Siegmund is truly free. Regardless of his own subjectivity or lack thereof, the gods ultimately see his fate as their own to decide because within the existing social order Siegmund is above all their property. Indeed, it could be said Siegmund’s very existence is evidentiary of the fact that the world the gods have made is ugly, cruel, and must be destroyed.

II. Sieglinde as Heroine

the late review

sieglinde as heroine

This is the second of the ‘Wälsung Essays,’ a series I have written about the twins Siegmund and Sieglinde from Richard Wagner’s Die Walküre. To read the introduction to this series, please click here. For further notes on how to watch the opera and translations of the text, see this footnote…

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a year ago · 8 likes · 2 comments · kate wagner

In the second essay, Sieglinde — who, if she is not ignored entirely, is oft maligned as either a damsel in distress or an amoral seductress — will be re-examined as a heroine in her own right, one who uses the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house. In her, one can also find fascinating musical and narratological traces of what will happen throughout the rest of the cycle, especially between Siegfried and Brünnhilde. Unlike her brother, Sieglinde is defined by negative space, by not being talked about. She is an enigma by exclusion. Even when the gods sit around and debate the consciousness of Siegmund, his sister is a misogynistic omission, a silent corollary, collateral damage, and ultimately, the bounty of men. Crucial to any project regarding Sieglinde is an understanding of the key role rape plays in the Ring. This is because before Wagner, man that he is, reduces Sieglinde to the mother of the Übermensch and condemns her to immanence, fundamentally she is the woman who refuses to be raped. Her despair in Act II is not the despair of a helpless woman, but the realization of what rape does to one’s personhood. Her death, too, is a form of violence, disguised, as violence so often is, by inevitability and neglect.

III. The Love of the Wälsungs

Finally, an attempt will be made to examine the ever-problematic, consanguineous love of the Wälsungs. Rather than absolve the twins of their transgressions by appeals to myth or even to psychoanalysis, I accept the condition that their love is willful and rooted in a specific and utopian philosophical condition, at the heart of which lies mutual recognition of the other’s suffering and personhood. For Siegmund and Sieglinde, love is a literal matter of identification. It is also liberation, forgiveness, and a refuge from despair. Like the ending of the Ring itself, it opens up the possibility (but does not answer the question) of another world. To me, the twins’ incest does not primarily owe itself to psychoanalytical stuntedness, ideals of free love, or even the original Volsunga saga. Incest is in fact imperative — due to reasons of structural misogyny underlying the work — to making whole this philosophy of love. Moreover, drawing on historian Brian Connolly’s research on incest in the popular imaginary of the 19th century United States, Wagner’s use of the theme also unintentionally reveals, much like the rest of the Ring, anxieties of the day regarding the changing landscape of industrial modernity.

As much as these essays are highly critical of Wagner the patriarchal bourgeois pessimist, they still owe their origins to the power of the composer’s spell. At the end of the day, I have decided to write them because Die Walküre obsesses me, ensnares me, frustrates me to no end. It is, in my opinion, the best opera in the entire tetralogy. Of all of Wagner’s repertoire, I find the music he wrote for Siegmund and Sieglinde to be among the most transcendental; of all his characters, these two have moved me the deepest. So very much can be said of the hero who insists, no matter how terrible the circumstances, upon his own freedom and dies without hope; of the dignified woman who uses the leverage provided her to put an end to her own subjugation and in whose pain lies the comprehension of her own alterity. Extant still in our own patriarchal society is the dream of a love between men and women that does away with objectification, a love predicated on the truth that men cannot be free unless women are too.

“Shame was your lot, and sorrow was mine,” Siegmund sings to Sieglinde in Act I. “I was the outlaw, and you were the slave.”*

I. The Stakes, or: How to Get Into Opera

A long time ago, a friend of mine asked me how to get into opera. It’s a common question, one that I don’t quite think is answered by reading up on music history or what a recitative is, though that couldn’t hurt. The reality is, to contemporary viewers more used to the mass cultural phenomenon that is the Broadway musical, the intimacy of spoken-word theater, the pacing of television or the closeness of film, opera seems, to put it bluntly, weird and a little slow.

In person, you sit in a giant opera house watching from the nosebleeds because you’re too broke to sit anywhere else, unable see any of the subtle body language that film and television rely on to do non-verbal storytelling. The music can often feel repetitive because it serves a formal, structural and functional purpose contemporary audiences have since lost contact with. We don’t need them to repeat that crucial line over and over again because we have subtitles now. (And couldn’t they be using that time to do more plot? Deepen the characters a bit?) The aria, severed immediately from the rest of the four hour or so production by the recording industry and the sheet music industry before it, is one of the last mass-culturally recognizable vestiges of the form, familiar to us from our grandparents’ records of classic Verdi chestnuts sung by Luciano Pavarotti. These are now beloved denizens of the dollar record bin.

For those of my generation and younger, getting into the opera is a process most commonly undertaken as an adult. As the largest opera-going generation dies out — a generation for which a cultural education was still considered a public good from the union hall to the classroom —  and as the whole enterprise is made diabolically unaffordable with tickets going for at least a hundred bucks a pop, this is only going to become more true. Opera isn’t taught as a part of most public school music curricula, because, well, it’s hard to teach. I’ve been to many symphony concerts attended by very well-behaved children who, even in the iPad age, are more than capable of sitting respectfully and listening — mesmerized, as children tend to be, by all that sound and motion. But the opera is a bigger task. It’s hard to ask kids to sit for four hours, especially if they can’t read the subtitles yet. And frankly, most of the themes in opera are not really for children. I just caught Marriage of Figaro at the Lyric this weekend and I’m sorry, as funny as that opera is, a count wanting to abuse his power to fuck his wife’s maid is not something I want to explain to a seven year old.

Sometimes I’m asked how I got into the opera, which, after years of being patronized to by classical music world, I take as a slight. Being from humble roots in the middle of nowhere, I was raised in a musical household because my grandfather, a gigging classical musician himself, raised my father in a musical household. I began playing the violin at four years old, taking lessons from a woman who lived in a trailer park at the end of my street. My mother brought me to the symphony every few years when she could afford it. When I got older, I ushered at the satellite concerts the North Carolina Symphony played for the retirement communities in Moore County so that I could watch them play for free. Maybe one day I’ll write more about this life of mine, the life I spent 20 years in before becoming a writer, but now is not the time.

However, I didn’t get into the opera until high school. Despite enjoying the other forms of classical music, the opera, for me, was kind of like beer. One day you’re like, “Why are people into this?” and then the next, you’re shitfaced. When I was sixteen, I woke up, heard Maria Callas sing “Mon coeur s’ouvre à ta voix” from Saint-Saëns’ Samson et Dalila on the radio and that was it. I was like, oh my God, I feel like I’m going to die. Even so, I wouldn’t see an opera in the flesh until I was already in music school.

The last two years of my ill-fated training as a composer, I spent a great deal of time devoted to the study of opera, ultimately producing a senior thesis on madness as theme and compositional element during postmodernism. I ran sound for the opera while working in the recording studio and became the pet engineer of the vocal department which was entirely different in every regard from string world, where I came up. The opera is glorious. It is indulgent, it is powerful, it is unbelievably difficult to pull off, and also, not to be too forward, it is steeped in a trenchant and intoxicating eroticism. For three indelible years, I was in it, man. Singers liked me and I liked them. They allowed me into their lives and art, relied on me to document it for posterity and let me practice my own art as a technician. I haven’t made good on all that living yet, so let me try to now.

If you want to get into opera, this is what I told my friend: the key is to accept the stakes. By that I mean, the narrative constructs of opera are not as obsessively detailed as in other art forms. In opera, the music, instead of the text, does the lion’s share of communicating emotions, emotions distilled neatly into their little slots of aria and recitative, and the earlier the opera the more regimented these distillations are. In general, rarely is the libretto better than or even as good as the music. Often it is, unfortunately, bad. (Cilea’s meandering Adriana Lecouvreur comes to mind.) For some neophytes more used to other art forms, this is a hard pill to swallow. Swallow it anyway.

You, the opera listener, will be presented with a narrative situation (and sometimes it is a fucking absurd situation) that you will have to accept at face value. You can’t brush it off and be like, well that’s unrealistic. You have to, sometimes independent of what is being sung, consider the all the implications of that situation without them being explicitly told or shown to you, which is why opera pays dividends in terms of rewatch or relisten value — you’ll always miss something. To use Figaro as an example again, the situation is pretty explicit – Susanna and Figaro are going to get married. Their employer wants to sleep with the former and depose the latter. But the implications, despite the humor, are not very funny. The stakes are high. The height of the stakes glues the narrative together and makes the humor come as a relief.

In opera, especially in operas up through the Classical era, things happen very fast. In Henry Purcell’s hour and a half-long baroque masterpiece Dido and Aeneas, the titular characters are introduced. Then they fall, simply, abruptly and almost (to modern sensibilities) jarringly, in love. But for the rest of the opera to be effective from an emotional perspective, especially the devastating aria it’s most famous for – “When I am laid in earth” – you have to just buck it up, listen to the music, and accept that yes, they are really in love with all that implies. The “plot” laid out in the libretto is not very detailed or close. Does that make the love less real? No, it doesn’t. As a general rule, if you see a plot hole or alight upon an easier solution than the one the characters have chosen, and there are innumerable cases where such alternatives appear obvious, no you didn’t. The work has a self-contained logic, which must be accepted as is. Only then does it become real.

Most importantly, the opera hates irony. You have to earn your right to being ironic about the opera by believing in it first.

The key to this believing, and by extension, the proverbial spark lies in finding an opera that hits home in the first place. This takes a lot of trial and error. And even so, sometimes, in some mystical way, one is just not ready for a work to affect them until, perhaps, they do a little more living first. Desperately sad works like Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth and Verdi’s Aida had me in a vice grip as a teenager. In music school, I was a high modernist obsessed with Berg’s Wozzeck and later the avant garde of the 1980s. But now? As it will inevitably happen if you let it happen, it’s Richard Wagner, and nothing but. It may have taken me a lifetime to get to this point, but if you’re looking for somewhere to start, you may as well start here. The scale is closer to television. Most of the themes will already be familiar because their cultural influence has spanned 150 years. And after all, it is somewhat intuitive to let the great canary in the coal mine of musical modernity guide the hand of you, the cultural being for whom modernism forms an inevitable undercurrent of aesthetic understanding.

The leitmotifs also help a lot.

II. Why Wagner? Why the Ring?

Getting too into Wagner is, of course, deeply embarrassing. But that’s the thing about the man, the undisputed visionary, the virulent and vile antisemite — he is the original “land of contrasts.” For most of my life, I didn’t want to deal with Wagner for this very reason. (The other reason is that we unfortunately share a last name.) Neither, it seemed, did anyone else. When I was in music school in the 2010s, Wagner had never been less popular. Nobody played Wagner. We didn’t do any of his music, not even the “Siegfried Idyll.” I recorded thousands of recitals in my three years working in the recording studio and I can’t think of a single instance of anyone even performing a single Wagner excerpt, except for when brass players asked me to record their audition tapes.

In fact, the degree to which my professors refused to even engage with Wagner beyond the building of Bayreuth, the leitmotif, the Tristan chord, and the antisemitism question, is actually a bit strange in retrospect. I remember my music history professor putting on the “Liebestod” from Tristan und Isolde and going “ok, yada yada” midway through after which everyone laughed. I took several courses on opera history, and getting to Wagner eventually meant feeling very, very awkward. The way out was always to talk about the technical achievements and pairing them with a disclaimer that you do not, in fact, have to hand it to him.

The need to acknowledge past wrongs (wrongs that frankly have never been materially atoned for in classical music ever – acknowledgement, of course, is always enough) eclipsed everything else, even the music. And some folks may still say “as it should.” I’m not interested in having the perennial discussion of separating the art from the artist. Enough people have done this, many of them experts, to whom I defer. If you’re interested in that argument, that side of Wagner, or his reputation both today and among his contemporaries, I recommend ditching this essay and reading Alex Ross’s book Wagnerism instead. Wagner himself is (thankfully) dead, and has been for a long time. He’s dead in all respects. His reputation has become synonymous with shame in a field that rarely ever feels it. Fine by me.

But surely some of you are reading this and thinking, well, what’s in there? What could possibly be in that work that’s worth so much upheaval, disavowal, devotion, obsession, mythology, horror? Don’t you, just a little bit, want to peek inside? Indeed, given the prevailing sentiment of contemporary culture in which one’s aesthetic preferences are linked indisputably (very disputably) to one’s moral character, Wagner’s reputation has produced the curious effect of not just avoidance but of the potential listener being afraid of what they will find in his work. This was true even of myself. After all, what if it does to me what it did to Hitler? (I should hope we’re all better than Hitler.) Even worse, what if I like it? Will that make me a bad person? (Did it make Marcel Proust, George Bernard Shaw, Slavoj Žižek, or the countless other non-Hitler interpreters of Wagner throughout the ages bad people too?) What if it really is that important? Worst of all: What if it changes my life?

This sentiment is especially true of Wagner’s myth-sized tetralogy of operas (or in his words, “music dramas”) Der Ring des Nibelungen, better known as the Ring cycle. And for good reason. The Ring can change your life. It can ruin your life, as testified to by the last however many months of my life spent writing this series of essays despite the fact that very little about the Ring has gone unsaid. And it’s true: there’s no way about it: the Ring is massive and intimidating. It is a maze of implications, questions, and interpretations, in which it is possible to very easily become lost. The work’s scale has become a cliche at this point, punctuated by that special grad-school word, the Gesamkunstwerk. But it really is that big.

It’s because of this scale that there’s already something in the Ring for everyone. The philosophy enthusiast will love the butchering of Schopenhauer and Feuerbach that ends up looking a little bit Hegelian if the light is adjusted right. The technologist finds great interest in the construction of the cycle’s purpose-built home, Bayreuth, with regards to the history of theater architecture, acoustics and stage technology. One can, of course, also point to contemporary culture and crow about how the Ring influenced everything from Tolkien and other fantasy writers to John Williams’ horn writing in Star Wars. I’m not going to do that either because it’s been done to death. Truly, if there was ever a work who needed fewer cheerleaders, it’s this one.

My perspective on the Ring is this: it is one of the most mysterious works in all of that beast we call “Western Art.” Important, yes, but elusive. It works affectively in equally elusive ways. There’s a good chance that any given potential Wagnerite will sit down to watch it and it will do nothing for them because, well, it’s more than a little insane. This is what happened on my first attempt in high school, when watching the Ring felt like something one had to do in order to be “cultured.” What turned me off about it then was the fantasy element. I just really wasn’t into dwarfs and rings at that age. I probably could’ve been more swayed by the relentless desire depicted in Tristan und Isolde. In college, a product of my era, I watched the Ring on DVD with a sense of smug detachment, of being a better person than the work was intended for. I promptly forgot the entire plot because more important to me at the time were John Crenshaw’s Decca recordings and how he got them to sound that way. Ten years passed until I watched it again.

Whether it’s your first opera (and, really, why not? Go big or go home), or your fiftieth, if you embark upon the Ring and do as I said in the beginning of the essay: dispel with irony and accept the stakes of the work – a work that is all stakes – maybe you, too, can become a Ring person. It’s never a simple task — for anyone — watching 20 hours of grand opera. Most of us have to go to work and are too exhausted afterwards to deal with something that’s, well extremely exhausting. Besides, being a Ring person remains a rather alarming cultural affectation best not mentioned in polite company. Finishing the Ring is enough of an achievement in the first place. Most people get done and walk away thinking “well, that was deranged.” Or monumental, or an achievement, or moving, or fascinating, or weird, or uncomfortable, or what have you. My husband and I watched it together, and his conclusion was that he found the work very “dialectical,” which is true. It is maddeningly so.

But for me, no. The curtain fell on Götterdämmerung and I realized, to some degree of horror, that it had finally happened to me, the thing I did not want to happen, the thing that happens to maybe ten percent of the people who view the Ring: obsession. Something about it, I felt, was going to drive me mad. This sentiment could only be expressed at the time in a kind of subterranean, pure affect. Heart palpitations, the phrase “holy shit.” A certainty that no, something is in there. Of course it is. Something is always in there for the people who let themselves look.

That’s what the Ring is, a kind of looking glass that shows you what you want to see. And when one peers into the Ring and sees what they want to see, that seeing is not necessarily a kind of identification with the characters in a contemporary “representational” mode of “feeling seen.” (Though this is certainly possible and I myself have done it.) Rather, it uncovers something in between allegory and identification. Or, as my friend Jonathan Repetti put it to me in an exchange of notes on the subject, an “oscillation between the perfect universalizing sublimation of your own particular experience, and the realization that this perfection is only communicable because of the particular experience you bring to it.” For a long time, I thought of the Ring as a kind of scab I was picking at while trying to figure out why I couldn’t simply let the wound heal. When I listened to certain excerpts again, I wondered why I would sometimes spontaneously burst into tears. (It would indeed take quite some time to figure this out.)

The reason the Ring works this way is because it is an open enough work to be interpreted by people across the ideological spectrum, from nationalists and fascists to milquetoast liberals to card-carrying Marxists. To paraphrase Alex Ross, Siegfried’s Funeral Music from Götterdämmerung was played at Lenin’s funeral long before it was played at Hitler’s. And even among like minds, people disagree. The leitmotif meant one thing for Adorno, who, rather disdainfully, considered it to be the weakness of the whole work, emblematic of the individual atomization of all these characters who were supposed to be bringing about a new world together — not to mention its jingly nature gleamed the coming of mass culture. The leitmotif meant another thing entirely for Fredric Jameson, who saw it as a critical turning point in modernity: the shift from clearly defined and labeled emotion as expressed via the aria to a kind of nondescript and inexpressible affect.

In another example, Alberich’s renouncement of love, his theft of the Rheingold and his forging of the ring is sometimes viewed as the rape of the (fetishized) natural world at the hand of vulgar modernity — a very 19th century sentiment. (The resolution of the cycle represents a desirable return to Nature.) For socialists such as George Bernard Shaw, the forging of the ring is an allegory for the establishment of capitalism and all its attendant exploitation — of nature and of people —  as something distinctly different and existentially threatening to the ancien régime.

However, the subject of the Ring is the end of the world and nothing less. It is the end of the world Wotan (Odin) and the other gods up in Walhall (Valhalla) made, a world whose destruction they themselves set in motion by making promises they couldn’t keep. But, crucially, this world comes to an end without an explicit vision for the world to come. It ends, and that is it. This ambiguity lies at the heart of the work’s interpretational flexibility. On a general level, given Wagner’s own (pre-revanchist) participation in politics via the German uprising of 1848,1 for which the composer was later exiled in Switzerland, the work’s political sentiment is best described as a kind of bizarre mystical anarchism, one colored by the disillusionment of failure.  The old world must end, yes, this part is certain. The new world struggles to be born. And, (in Die Walküre especially) now is the time of monsters.

The stakes are eschatological, and, like in any other opera, one has to believe in them. More than any other opera, however, with the Ring, one can spend an extraordinary amount of time thinking about the implications of the stakes. This is the most true about the work’s question of agency and its hierarchy of agential power, for this question informs all other questions. It is this question I wish to summarize briefly in this introductory essay because it is important in understanding my subsequent arguments regarding Brünnhilde, Siegmund and Sieglinde in Die Walküre and Siegfried in Götterdämmerung. The question is raised in Das Rheingold and hangs over the entire rest of the work.

III. The Stakes of Agency, the Agency of the Stakes

The spindly structure of agency in the Ring looks like this: Wotan, the arch-god in Walhall is, despite his godhead, neither omnipotent or omniscient. If he were, he wouldn’t have gotten into this whole mess. Instead, there is a restriction on his power which comes in the form of contracts – the agreements and oaths Wotan makes that are etched into his spear. Wotan is ultimately bound by the deals he makes and cannot use his other powers to undermine them, though he tries many loopholes (most of which concern fathering illegitimate children) to get around this.

These contracts made by Wotan and his more conservative wife Fricka — the goddess of women’s contracts, specifically in matters of marriage — have ramifications for the order of the world and for humankind. Humans, as viewed from the perspective of Walhall, are naught more than winners and losers dependent on the outcomes the gods set for them. They are lacking in free will, the ability to disavow their overlords, or the agency to deviate from fate. As I will argue in my ‘Wälsung Essays’ about Siegmund and Sieglinde, Wotan’s illegitimate human children, this claim is extremely debatable.

the late review

reclaiming the wälsungs

This piece is an introduction to a series of three essays I have written about the twins, Siegmund and Sieglinde, from Richard Wagner’s Die Walküre, henceforth and lovingly referred to as The ‘Wälsung’ Essays. For further notes on my materials and where to watch the opera, see this footnote…

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a year ago · 10 likes · kate wagner

At any rate, in Das Rheingold, when Wotan and Fricka hire the two giants, Fasolt and Fafner, to construct their castle at Walhall, the labor bill comes due and, per his contract, Wotan has to pay up. Unfortunately, Wotan has made a fatal error. He has promised the poor, lonely giants payment in the form of his wife’s sister Freia. What the giants will do with such a clearly unwilling, distraught woman is only one of many examples of the nigh-continuous subtextual theme of rape, one that haunts the Ring and plays an essential role in both its eschatology and its affective power.

Beyond the terrible fate awaiting Freia, there’s another catch: she is the one who knows how to tend to the golden apples that keep the gods young and alive. If Wotan actually does hand her over, the gods will wither away, thus doing away with the need for another seventeen or so hours of opera. Fortunately for us, however, he’s got a plan. It involves Loge (Loki), the demigod of fire, an amoral trickster and master male manipulator who has promised a distraught Wotan and Fricka, a way out of this situation.

You see, down on earth, a meddling dwarf, Alberich, has come into contact with the three beautiful Rhinemaidens, who all spurn his romantic advances. They tease him sexually and by showing him the Rheingold, which can only be claimed by the one who disavows love. Well, guess what Alberich does, considering he’s not going to get any anyway. He renounces love, steals away with the Rheingold and enslaves all of Nibelheim, the subterranean world of the dwarfs, forcing them to mine and process Rheingold day in and day out in the endless pursuit of further profit. (Is there any better metaphor for what capitalism does to the human soul?) Alberich employs his doddering brother Mime in making with the Rheingold two sacred objects: the all-powerful titular ring, and the Tarnhelm, which transforms the wearer into whatever it is they want to be.

The disavowal of love is a kind of Original Sin for Wagner. It’s an unthinkable Romantic-era crime. Hence, it irrevocably upsets the natural order of things in a way that will only magnify across time. However all that treasure does make for a convenient way of making good on one’s underwater mortgage, so Loge and Wotan go down to Nibelheim to pay old Alberich a visit and promptly cheat him out of his winnings. (They can only do this because Wotan has no contract with Alberich, of course, and contracts are the only think seemingly keeping Wotan from terrible acts of violence.) Thus, the pair turn the dwarf into a toad and bring him up to Walhall — so he can tell his slaves in Nibelheim where to haul up the gold. In the great fortress, Wotan and Loge then bargain with the giants to see if they’ll accept money instead of a woman — greed, instead of love.

Meanwhile, a captive Alberich is extremely upset at being robbed of what he sees as his. He’s wrong, as Wotan points out (“Did you own it, when you ravished the Rhinemaids’ glittering gold?...Marauding rogue, you’re a thief!”) But Alberich is right, when he says “My life, but never the ring!” – after all, he’s paid a wretched, existential price for it, a price no other man in all the eons had been willing to pay before him. Through his choice, his free agency — he’s one of very few characters in the cycle who has it — he has reshaped the world in his image, even if that image is one of greed. Now he has renounced love for nothing. When Wotan lets his captive go after getting what he wants, Alberich proceeds to utter a curse upon the ring:

“I’m free now?
Really free?
Then let my freedom’s first greeting to you be this!
Just as a curse handed it to me,
so let this ring in turn be cursed!
To me, the gift of its gold
was power without precedent.
To all who wear it, its magic
shall now bring death!
No blithe spirit shall rejoice in it,
no glad soul bask
in its lucid brilliance!
Let those who own it
be plagued by sorrow,
and those who don’t
by festering envy!
Let everyone ache
to own it,
but let no one enjoy
what it brings!
Its protector shall amass no riches;
but attract his exterminator, it will!
A slave to death,
let his faint heart freeze with fear:
as long as he lives,
let the ring’s lord,
as the ring’s slave,
rot with longing: --
until I hold what’s been stolen
again with my own hand!
With no way out remotely in sight,
The Nibelung thus
consecrates his ring: --
just keep it,
take good care of it.
You will not flee from my curse.”

In the moment, Wotan does not seem particularly concerned with this, as he considers himself above such drama. It’s not until the earth-mother Erda shows up and warns him to heed the curse (“Pay heed! Pay heed! Pay heed! / All that is, will end! /A dark day / is dawning for the gods: --/ I advise you, avoid the ring!”) that he starts to get a little worried. Unlike Wotan, Erda is omniscient, but has no recourse. Her warning is an interesting question of whether the future can be avoided, and if so, one wonders why she didn’t intercede earlier.2 (Like I said — accept the stakes as they are, and don’t worry about it.)

Wotan is, of course, also very interested in this question and declares that he will go down and visit Erda. (He then proceeds, in Wotan fashion, to father with her at least Brünnhilde, the work’s undisputed heroine, and perhaps the other seven Valkyries and her consent in all this is ambiguous.) However, to Erda’s credit, as proof of the ring’s curse, immediately after it’s uttered, Fafner and Fasolt demand the ring as part of their compensation. Bound by his contract, Wotan has no choice but to relent. Fafner then beats his brother to death for it before he goes back down to earth and turns into a dragon via the Tarnhelm, spending the rest of his days, in pure millionaire largess, guarding his hoard until we meet him again in Siegfried.

Thus, the end of Das Rheingold. Thus, the stakes, the existential stakes. Thus, our layers of agency. For the gods (though not necessarily for other actors) only one reigns supreme. The ring has a higher agential power than even Wotan himself, a higher power than any contract. The ring will wreak untold misery upon the gods and the pair of ‘heroes’ Siegfried and Brünnhilde who will serve as handmaidens to the end of the world. The arch-god Wotan himself has touched it, felt its power. He will not realize that this is already coming to pass (and even then he does not say it explicitly) until Act II of Die Walküre. In Rheingold, Wotan knows very little about what will happen as a result of his shortsighted meddling, only that it is going to be very, very bad. The ominous “curse” and seething “Nibelung hate” leitmotifs present in Alberich’s monologue tell us such.

Faced with such stakes, the gods must act. A lot happens in between the first two operas that is only recalled in retrospect. To save myself some time later, I’ll mention these events here. To circumvent his fate, Wotan embarks upon a kind of cold war with Alberich out of fear that the dwarf will regain the ring’s ultimate might and destroy him and Walhall once and for all. He does this in two ways. The first is through his illegitimate daughters via Erda, Brünnhilde and the Valkyries, warrior women with the strength of ten men, grim reapers who roam about earth, now laid waste to by wars — wars the gods have cynically orchestrated along with the warriors’ fates — in order to collect the dead and bring them to Walhall to serve as a kind of standing army. (Let’s ignore the fact that it’s the losers of the battles they’re recruiting.)

Wotan’s second method concerns the ring directly and involves his illegitimate half-mortal twins, the Wälsungs, Siegmund and Sieglinde, a kind of Adam and Eve, but in Hell instead of Eden. They are a god’s attempts to bring to birth free human beings able to turn against their masters and act of their own volition — and therefore be exempt from their father’s contractual obligation. Siegmund, whose free will is earned through exile, renouncement, and ceaseless suffering, is Wotan’s first attempt at regaining the ring. However Siegmund, being free, has his own goals and beliefs. He acts in his own interests and these interests are in direct opposition to the world the gods have made. So does Sieglinde, who is every bit the heroine as Brünnhilde, and every bit as awakened as her brother by way of the same suffering, appears to be little more than a casualty to Wotan in his grand scheme — if not its fundamental weakness — though even he pities her. She will, however, play a critical role in establishing the end game of the cycle. After all, it is women, not men, who Wagner designated to be his torchbearers, ready to reduce the earth to ash in pursuit of the great After. It is also women who endure the most pain, and of whom the most bravery is required.

the late review

the exception of siegmund

This is the first of the ‘Wälsung Essays,’ a series I have written about the twins Siegmund and Sieglinde from Richard Wagner’s Die Walküre. To read the introduction to this series, please click here. For further notes on translations of the text, see this footnote…

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a year ago · 3 likes · kate wagner

I suppose, to tie all this together — the length is getting a bit Wagnerian — there is, after all, one irony the opera makes available to us. This is dramatic irony. Throughout the Ring, the gods are unable to see what’s right in front of their eyes: that it is Wotan who will destroy Wotan and that this destruction is already set in stone. The remaining question — a question that is not entirely resolved in the work itself, hence over a century of debate — is not, will this come to pass, but why and how? Why and how exactly?

This interpreter, in the footsteps of so many before, asks a bigger question: what if it’s good that this world ends? We haven’t yet seen what godly control has to offer, but we will soon. Walhall may be a pleasure garden of youth-bringing apples paid for by ill-gotten gold, but below it one finds an ugly reality bound by the structures of the ancien régime: a feudalistic, bloody warrior culture with the honor-shame dichotomy as its moral and political logic. It is this regime which is the true curse. The ring is merely the contradiction that unmakes it.

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