21 August 2006

höchste Lust

Tristan Night.
It's an odd thing to do, traveling halfway around the world to attend Wagner's music dramas, since Wagner is about transcendence and ecstasy and travel is about the mundane: where is the train? What time is it? Where can I eat? Where can I find a toilet? Theater can be like that too: when is the curtain? Will this seat do me in before the end of the act, beautiful though it is? Why is the man behind me wrinkling a plastic bag during all the quiet scenes? Your body says one thing but the ecstatic voices on stage say another. As in Marianne Moore's definition of poetry, treating it with perfect contempt one can find perhaps a place for the genuine.

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