Grim's Hall

On Wagner:

Via the indispensible Arts & Letters Daily, we have this article from the Guardian on Wagner. I think it neatly captures why I find the culture's constant attempts at satire grating:

Since then, Wagner's enterprise has acquired its own tragic pathos, as modern producers, embarrassed by dramas that make a mockery of their way of life, in turn make a mockery of the symbolism. Sarcasm and satire run riot, as in Richard Jones's 1994-96 Covent Garden production of The Ring, because nobility has become intolerable.

I hope that we may start to see a reversal here. We will have to earn it, but we have an opportunity. Our actions in Afghanistan and Iraq, and elsewhere, have a chance to build an awareness of what real nobility looks like. Our best ambassadors on that project are already at work--which is to say, not ambassadors at all, but those men who go in uniform. Their sacrifices inform us as Wagner's characters meant to:

For Wagner, as for the Greeks, a myth was not a decorative fairy tale, but the elaboration of a secret, a way of both hiding and revealing mysteries that can be understood only in religious terms, through the ideas of sanctity, holiness and redemption....

The gods come about because we idealise our passions, and we do this not by sentimentalising them but by sacrificing ourselves to the vision on which they depend. It is by accepting the need for sacrifice that we begin to live under divine jurisdiction, surrounded by sacred things, and finding meaning through love. Seeing things that way, we recognise that we are not condemned to mortality but consecrated to it.