Wagner Tripping: Wagner's abnormality

Showing posts with label Wagner's abnormality. Show all posts

Friday, October 4, 2013

Wagner's Abnormal Mind - Part 6: Conclusion

Over several posts, I have been laying out various puzzle pieces to understand the very abnormal brain of Richard Wagner. I am going to do a synthesis in this post; for the details consult the other posts here.

Wagner’s life of stress

Wagner was born with various attributes that manifested when he was still a boy: very high sensitivity, high sensation-seeking, and an optimistic and tenacious will that proved to be extraordinary. None of these things are pathological in and of themselves, but in combination they contributed to the enormous stress he endured throughout his life, and led to his developing both mental and physical problems.

In his childhood, Wagner's stress stemmed partly from his head-strong nature, which led him to often pit himself against family and authority. He also had stress from his sensitive nature, particularly in his family environment. For instance, nightly dreams of terror were met with upbraiding, not tenderness. Throughout his life, he considered himself to be singular: a man against the world. Adding to the problems that his natural temperament gave him was the financial stress his family was under via the loss of his father and step-father, the aftermath of war, and his frequent exiles from the family as he was so difficult to contend with.

He had no benefactor, no family money to help him along his chosen path. Virginia Woolf wrote that “a poor poet has not in these days, nor has had for two hundred years, a dog’s chance.”¹ What is incredible about Wagner is that he was one of those with not a “dog’s chance” and yet he managed to become the most famous and influential composer of the 19^th century. His drive to create, to promote his vision, to defeat all obstacles before him, was completely single-minded and nothing short of miraculous and awe-inspiring. All this came at a high price: chronic stress that wrecked havoc on his body and mind.

His biography as an adult is filled with one major stress-inducing event after another, usually self-created, but almost always in service to his vision. I will just give a short summary:

He had no regular means of support until he was 50; he was constantly in debt, often fleeing creditors.
He escaped from Riga at high risk, to avoid imprisonment for debts.
He suffered through abject poverty in Paris for three years while trying to make it as a composer.
He escaped Germany after an arrest warrant was issued for his revolutionary activities; his co-conspirators ended up in jail for over a decade.
His marriage was full of strife for decades, including infidelity on both sides.
He had tremendous difficulty getting any of his operas staged outside of Germany (and many inside of Germany). His only clear triumph until late in life was Rienzi (which he later denounced).
He was attacked regularly in the press for both his music and his lifestyle.
Even after King Ludwig rescued him financially, he was at the center of scandals from his affair and marriage to Cosima and with the release of the letters from his seamstress.
He was attacked in the press and via demonstrations—very logically and rightfully—by the Jewish establishment after the re-release of his article “On Judaism in Music.”
He took on a near-impossible task of building Bayreuth to stage the Ring. The whole enterprise was on the edge of collapse when King Ludwig saved him again.

But beyond the stress that life events put on him, Wagner put stress on himself through the composition process. In this letter, he describes this process.

I recognize now that the characteristic fabric of my music...owes its construction above all to the extreme sensitivity which guides me in the direction of mediating and providing an intimate bond between all the different moments of transition that separate the extremes of mood.

But this art is very much bound up with my own life. Extreme moods in a state of violent conflict will no doubt always remain part of my nature: but it is embarrassing to have to consider their effects upon others. To be understood is so indispensably important. Just as, in art, it is the most extreme and the grandest of life’s moods that must be made intelligible (moods which on the whole remain unknown in ordinary people’s lives, except in rare times of war and revolution), this understanding can be achieved only through the most well-defined and most compelling motivation of these transitions, and my entire work of art consists very much in producing the necessary and willing emotional mood by means of this motivation.²[emphasis added]

Essentially, he became extremely good at triggering the emotions he needed to produce the extreme lows and the soaring highs of his music. Wagner played with emotional fire, putting his health at serious and continual risk, in order to be in the “state of violent conflict” necessary to compose his works. Thus, his musical talent centered on his ability to access deep, wildly varying emotions easily and fully, and then create a musical language to compose those feelings. That was his creative genius in a nutshell. Is it any wonder that after composing, he often needed to go to a sanitarium for recovery?

There is now a large body of evidence that stress is the trigger for both physical and mental problems, as I wrote about here. Physically, Wagner developed life-long problems with hemorrhoids and irritable bowel syndrome, a variety of long-term severe skin problems, including recurrent erysipelas and shingles, migraines, leg ulcers and abscesses, respiratory problems, bilateral hernias, nervous exhaustion, and, finally, the heart disease that killed him.³ Every one of those problems can be caused or made worse by stress. Wagner himself believed that most of these physical ailments were related to his stress, and all his biographers agree.

In the case of some conditions, there can be a genetic predisposition to it. For instance, via a number of studies summarized here, it is clear that bi-polar disorder has a genetic component. However, just because you have inherited a genetic predisposition for that disorder does not mean that you will develop it. That is where gene expression comes in.

I will take a quick detour regarding gene expression, because it is so interesting (and relevant). You know those killer African bees? They aren’t different, genetically, than our honey bees. So why are they so aggressive? A scientist had a hunch that it was really about environment, so he took a bunch of African bees and implanted them in a honey bee colony and visa versa. Guess what? The implanted African bees became as docile as their adopted mates and the implanted honey bees became just as aggressive as the others. This article discusses this example among others, in both humans and animal species. Its conclusion is: “When it comes down to it, really, genes don’t make you who you are. Gene expression does. And gene expression varies depending on the life you live.” Stress is hypothesized to be a central culprit in the gene expression of a wide variety of illnesses, both physical and mental.

This is where the “who was Wagner’s father” issue comes back. I wrote about it here, and pointed out that there was evidence on both sides. However, the fact that his step-father Geyer seemed to have the same disposition as Wagner to both manic and depressive states, not to mention creative talent in several fields, has tipped me to the “Geyer is the father” side of the equation.

I have argued that Wagner was on the bi-polar spectrum as he clearly had periods of depression alternating with manic, or at least, hypomanic periods. All the usual signs of mania or hypomania as specified here existed in Wagner, according to everyone’s account of him, along with his own self-account:

Unrealistic, grandiose beliefs about one’s abilities or powers
Feeling unusually “high” and optimistic OR extremely irritable
Sleeping very little, but feeling extremely energetic
Talking so rapidly that others can’t keep up
Racing thoughts; jumping quickly from one idea to the next
Highly distractible, unable to concentrate
Impaired judgment and impulsiveness
Acting recklessly without thinking about the consequences
Delusions and hallucinations (in severe cases)

Beyond the last symptom (and the fact that he had the will and the wherewithal to complete all his unrealistic, grandiose plans), all of those symptoms describe Wagner perfectly. As for depression, he fit all those via self-reports, too:

Feeling hopeless, sad, or empty
Irritability
Inability to experience pleasure
Fatigue or loss of energy
Physical and mental sluggishness

Appetite or weight changes
Sleep problems
Concentration and memory problems
Feelings of worthlessness or guilt
Thoughts of death or suicide ⁴

Throughout his life, his letters contain many references to a number of depressions. Here is part of a letter to a friend describing a long depression in 1937 at the age of 24:

My light-heartedness has long been consumed by the financial misery that battened on my natural, sanguine resilience... All cheerfulness, all freedom, all openness fled before me: I can describe my state in no better way than by telling you that this was a year when I wrote scarcely a single note, conceived noting & comprehended nothing. I was deeply unhappy!⁵

By his 30s, thoughts of suicide became a constant theme:

I finally began to pine away and my thoughts turn increasingly towards death. I was on the point of returning to Zurich when I was again beset by my old complaint: I am paralyzed, overcome by melancholy and unhappiness....⁶

Hell, his entire oeuvre was suicide ideation.

If you want to read more about his bi-polar nature, the author John Louis DiGaetani makes the case in his book Wagner and Suicide.

As for the other DMS categories of mental illnesses that people want to slot him into: sure, he fits into a bunch of them. I will leave it to those with expertise to sort that out, but there can be no doubt he would have received a diagnosis of mental illness if he presented to any therapist with his behaviors, actions and feelings. But concentration on his pathology does not explain his massive success in a large number of pursuits. Which brings us back to the question:

How could he have done it?

That is, how could Wagner have been so massively successful in doing what he did in the face of so much illness? My argument is that due to his very strong will and single-minded focus, he learned to control his conditions enough to be able to be productive. It wasn’t a smooth process, as he was often derailed by illness, but it was a very deliberate process. He learned to control his conditions in two large ways: through creating and following a workable routine, and through medication (both prescribed and self-medicated). And then he succeeded because—in spite of the risk-taking that would have derailed most folks, as well as his often demented personality—he had so much talent that others kept saving him from himself. And they did so often in the nick of time; thus in this, he had massive luck.

Let’s see then what Hans Sachs can weave to turn the madness his own way, to serve for noble works. – Hans Sachs talking to himself in Die Miestersinger

Routine

By his mid-30s, Wagner knew he was in deep trouble in terms of his ability to continue working in the manner that he did. For him, it was the nervous exhaustion that he found most debilitating. He could work through physical pain, but not emotional shut-down. When he over-worked, it would often take a month or two to get over the effects of it. Thus, as he wrote to his friend and benefactor Julie Ritter in 1852,

...if I am to produce anything else, it can only be achieved by subjecting my entire nervous system to a most elaborate course of treatment. Above all, I need a will of iron to keep a close check on myself, more especially to be able to break off completely from my work, both quickly and at frequent intervals, so that, by dint of regular outings, I may distract my cerebral nerves form their present self-destructive course.

Of course, only my art can sustain me and disguise from me how insipid my life has become. The enormous effort it takes to do so is something I must seek to lessen as best I can.⁷

In terms of his “course of treatment,” he took a 9-week course of a water and dietary treatment at a sanitarium the year before, in 1851, which had little positive effect, as he describes in his diary briefly: “Dreadful nervous state: very thin and pale. Total insomnia.”⁸ In 1852, he tried another course of treatment, but this one in his own home: concentrating on diet, quiet and exercise, which he describes to Theodor Uhlig here:

I have now made a proper start on my course of treatment: apart from my diet—from which I do not exclude the occasional glass of good wine—it consists of a cold bath in the morning and a fifteen-minute warm one (22 degrees). Its effect on me is most soothing and gently invigorating. Above all, it does me good to get out into the open air, where I wander for 2-3 hours every morning before I settle down to work. The time I spend on work never lasts more than 2 hours: through working for 5-6 hours, as I often used to do in the past, I seriously overtaxed my nerves.⁹

He tinkered with his routine throughout his life, but he always kept a set one with a mix of walking, specific dietary times, proscribed period of composition, and relaxing through socializing in the evening. His general routine with Cosima went like this:

9:00 – small breakfast with Cosima
10:00-2:00 – work (no interruptions)
2:00 pm – large lunch (on the dot)
3:00 – rest
3:30 – correspondence if he had any, otherwise start walk
4:30 – walk
7:00 – light meal
8:00 – salon where there was nightly talk, music and reading with guests

He intensely disliked a change in routine. For instance, Cosima wrote on October 15, 1874, “R has to write a letter in the morning, which always upsets him.” This sort of mastery via routine was certainly a key ingredient for him to tame his volatile and changing moods.

Medication

Wagner self-medicated all his life in a some very normal ways: he was addicted to nicotine, which he took regularly primarily via snuff, but also through cigars and cigarettes; he drank, principally wine and champagne, though he also drank beer and, I am sure, spirits when the occasion did arise; he also was a regular coffee drinker.

Wagner offering Bruckner snuff

He used them in the usual manner: caffeine and nicotine throughout the day to bring him up; alcohol in the evening to calm him down.

However, as a young, manic man, he had regular insomnia. For that, he needed something stronger. He wrote to his friend, Keitz, in 1852 that he “required from our [doctor] Lindemann not cure, but merely palliatives to make my existence as an artist possible as long as this existence can be maintained at all.”¹⁰ The palliative he received was laudanum, which is a tincture of opium. He used this to help him sleep and calm his nerves until the end of his life.

Wagner had a five and one half year period when he composed not a lick of music, which is singular in the history of great composers. This writing block ended very soon after he started taking the laudanum. As related in Wagner, Last of the Titans, “In December 1853, he told his benefactress Julie Ritter that thanks to Lindemann’s ‘method’ he not only felt ‘far better’ but was writing music ‘with the greatest and most consequential delight’.”¹¹ To his friend Keitz, he wrote in June 1854 that, “I keep up my spirits merely by intensive work... I really feel pretty much as I should like to, even though there is not a day without bad hours. I often take some of Lindemann’s powders.”¹² Thus, the medications, his rise in spirits, and the end of his unproductive drought were clearly connected.

Luck

Something will turn up! – Mr. Micawber, David Copperfield

But the Fates intervened, as they always did in some mystic way or another, when it was a question of saving Wagner for posterity. – Alfred Newman, Wagner biographer

I make my luck. – that obnoxious guy from the movie Titanic

Wagner was on the edge of the abyss many times in his life. Here are a few highlights.

As a young man, he managed to get into and out of three duels, all with “formidable duelists” and, luckily for him, without a shot fired.¹³
He was the trustee of his mother’s pension, and got within one thaler of losing it all via gambling. But he doubled down and rebuilt, luckily, enough to replace the pension amount and to settle his existing debts.¹⁴
In 1839, he made a desperate flight from Riga, in Russian territory, to escape creditors and debtor’s prison. His passport had been impounded; he, with wife, dog and possessions in tow, had to slip through a well-guarded border, with armed sentries every 1000 feet. Luckily, he did it without getting caught or shot.¹⁵
He made another desperate flight from Dresden to escape an arrest warrant for his revolutionary activities. Luckily for him, and with the help of Franz Liszt, he made it out, unlike all his other close co-conspirators who spent many years in prison.
Once again trapped by debts, and debtor’s prison still an ever-present threat, luckily for him a rich industrialist, Otto Wesendonck, paid his debts and offered him a quiet place to compose. And, yes, then he promptly fell in love with his wife, and the gravy train came to an end, but still it was a good period, all in all.
He once again had to flee his creditors in March of 1864. He wrote in a deep despondency to one friend, “some good and truly helpful miracle must befall me, otherwise it will be all over!”¹⁶ Luckily for him, one did: King Ludwig II’s courier found him on the run, and told him the King wanted to pay all his debts and provide for him so he could write the rest of the Ring.
He decided to build his theatre in Bayreuth, as opposed to King Ludwig’s wishes of a site in Munich, so Ludwig withdrew his support. Wagner desperately tried to raise the money, initiating a fund-raising program that is the template for modern-day funding raising,¹⁷ but it came up far short. The project was about to go bankrupt when, luckily for Wagner, Ludwig changed his mind and saved the project.
By the age of 40, Wagner had developed plans for all his later operas, and for building his theater. Luckily for him, his health held out just long enough to finish all his work at age 70. He died seven months after the premiere of Parsifal.

I bring up all this luck here, because it relates to his mind. Wagner was always optimistic, though often thwarted as a result of the excessive risks he took. Yet, on the edge of failure, he was always saved in the nick of time. Thus, his optimism would return, he would feel fated to succeed and so it would continue. He never got the comeuppance—except in leading an extremely stressful life—that he probably deserved. Lucky for us.

But it certainly wasn’t primarily fortune. He had all the ingredients of success: passion, motivation, initiative, persistence, vision, resilience, energy, self-knowledge and talent. These things all helped him make his own luck.

Talent

Wagner’s chief area of genius was, of course, musical composition. But he was wildly creative and influential in all sorts of ways well beyond just that, which I will be writing about much more in coming blog posts. While he did not show any particularly strong creative gifts as a child, as I wrote here, he was a highly sensitive child: to the arts, nature, beauty, animals as well as to things that were horrible, frightening or disgusting. To live his early life among creative artists certainly was crucial in setting his path, but I believe that his particular talent arose primarily from his sensitivity.

It certainly wasn't clear that he would become a musician. As quoted by Thomas Mann, Nietzsche said of Wagner’s childhood:

His youth was that of a dilettante all-rounder who didn’t seem to know where he was going. He was not confined by any inherited family tradition to one particular artistic discipline. Painting, poetry, acting and music were as much as part of his life as a scholarly upbringing and an academic future; a casual observer might well have supposed that he was born to play the dilettante.¹⁸

Mann then comments, “...Wagner’s art is a case of dilettantism that has been monumentalized by a supreme effort of the will and intelligence—a dilettantism raised to the level of genius.” I think that insight captures some truth about Wagner's breadth of accomplishments, but it doesn't really give enough due to his innate music genius. In any case, he made the absolute most of all his talents, but it was his will that was the truly incredible part of the equation.

To summarize Wagner’s awesomely abnormal mind, I would say that through his world-defying will, he was able to harness his talent, which sprung in large part from his unusual sensitivity, to create an oeuvre of exception beauty and depth. However, his risk-taking, which became clearly pathological, put him on a life-long figurative tightrope—foreshadowed by that literal tightrope he learned to walk at age 10—that always kept him close to the abyss. Luck and tenacity, with the help of many staunch supporters, got him across the chasm safely.

All that said, I believe that his will, his talent, his behaviors, his thoughts were all beyond his conscious control as I argued in these posts. Yes, his life and mind are awe-inspiring, if sometimes horrifying, but the good and the bad in him and his works were really just a direct product of an interaction between his genetics and gene expression, upbringing and environment, brain processes and brain chemistry, none of which he had more than very minor control of, at best. He was absolutely unique, and his works reflect that completely, but I truly believe his massive will was not free, but just a product of his abnormal brain.

1 Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, page 26

2 Millington and Spencer, ed., Selected Letters of Wagner, 475

3 Wagner Experience, 74-76

^{4. From here.}

5 Selected Letters, 71; this letter was Wagner's attempt to get money from his friend; some therefore discount his pain. I do not.

6 Ibid, I forgot to note the page, dammit, but it’s in there!

7 Ibid, 265-266

8 Millington, Wagner, 50

9 Selected Letters, 260

10 Burrell Collection, Letters of Richard Wagner, 192

11 Köhler, Wagner, Last of the Titans, 305

12 Burrell, 198

13 Newman, The Life of Richard Wagner, Vol 1, 78-79

14 Ibid., 79

15 Ibid., 244-245

16 Selected Letters, 583

17 read the book Richard Wagner – Self-Promotion and the Making of a Brand for this angle

18 Mann, Pro and Contra Wagner, “The Sorrows and Grandeur of Richard Wagner,” 103

Friday, September 27, 2013

Wagner's Abnormal Mind - part 5: Wagner was Queer

Wagner was queer. I use queer to mean outside of “heteronormity,” in which what is considered to be normal, natural and proper is heterosexuality, with men being masculine and women being feminine.

Mocking Wagner back in his day.
He did like satin slippers, but he didn't have a shoe fetish.

I am putting this post in the “abnormal mind” series for two reasons. One is that, more than any other thing in his life until the last forty years (in which his anti-Semitism became the focus), the fact of his queerness was the focus for the vast majority of attacks on him and the basis for asserting he suffered pathological issues. His critics believed abnormal equalled pathology. For me, in contrast, “abnormal” merely means a minority-behavior pattern and has no necessary relationship whatsoever to pathology. Specifically, in Wagner’s case, none of what I write below about Wagner’s queerness is at all pathological in my book, and there is no evidence that his true psychological problems were related to it except, of course, for the added stress that came from people mocking him.

In this post, I draw greatly from the excellent book Wagner and the Erotic Impulse, by Laurence Dreyfus. While I have long believed all that Dreyfus writes about, his research has been very helpful to me in pulling this together quickly. Anyone who wants more details should read his book.

The feminine Wagner

Wagner didn’t fit into masculine norms: in the privacy of his own home, he liked to wear, touch, smell and see things—very soft things—that he associated with the feminine, particularly when composing.

As Dreyfus wrote in his book,

“...the composer seems to have experienced a sensuous harmony, erotic arousal, and a creative surge when both wearing and touching women’s satin garments in the privacy of his personal grottos, always enhanced by the pronounced sent of roses.”¹

At each of his homes, he developed a sanctuary of femininity for inspiration. I described that lair in the last post. His seamstress Bertha Goldwag adds details, recounting one such room in her reminisces in 1906:

A single room about the size of a closest was decorated with extravagant splendor in keeping with Wagner’s most detailed instructions. The walls were lined with silk, with relievo garlands all the way around. From the ceiling hung a wonderful lamp with a gentle beam. The whole of the floor was covered in heavy and exceptionally soft rugs in which your feet literally sank....No one was allowed to enter this room. Wagner always remained there alone.²

Wagner believed that “love was the eternal feminine itself,”³ and his music was always centered on love. Therefore, he wanted to be in touch with the feminine as he wrote, to be both man and woman at the same time. From all evidence—his autobiography, letters, prose and music—he was personally very comfortable with his feminine side, and considered it a crucial part of his sensitivity and of necessity for this work. That said, he was well aware of societal attitudes about it and that his compositional methods would lead to public scorn, so he did his best to hide his penchants. Normally, that meant others—people close to him who understood his needs—were dispatched to buy his silk and satin, his perfumes, his negligées and silk panties.

Among his couriers was Nietzsche, according to this account from a friend of his:

Nietzsche asked me in the most concerned manner where he might find a good silk shop in Basel. Eventually he admitted he had undertaken to shop for a pair of silk underpants for Wagner, and this important matter filled him with anxiety; for—added the smiling iconoclast—“once you’ve chosen a God, you’ve got to adorn him.⁴

During the composition of Parsifal, his principal courier—and his muse—was Judith Gautier.

Portrait of Judith by John Singer Sargent, 1885

He was sending her his orders for perfume, satin, bath oils, silk undergarments, et al., via the post. It was a very flirtatious correspondence, so various biographers have assumed that they had a sexual affair. However, there is only scant evidence to make that case, particularly in that the two were rarely in each other’s presence. And when they were, they were generally under Cosima’s watchful eye. Judith denied the affair categorically, for what that is worth. In any case, like Mathilde Wesondonck before her, it really doesn’t matter whether they did or they didn’t. Wagner clearly was in love for the final time in his life. Dreyfus writes: “The erotic side of Wagner’s obsession [with all things feminine] emerges most clearly when one reads his letters to Judith Gautier, in which each successive paragraph alternates between the evocation of soft caresses and an uncompromising list of fabrics and scents Gautier was to supply.”⁵ Cosima ultimately found out about the letters and put an end to his correspondence, but Wagner quickly found another perfume mule—this time a man, to keep Cosima’s ire down.

His precautions to hide his proclivities failed when someone stole and published sixteen letters to his seamstress Bertha Goldwag’s—she swears that she didn’t sell them—in which Wagner meticulously detailed his feminine needs. Those letters opened the floodgates of mockery, and were the central exhibit in judging Wagner pathological for over a century, as I mentioned above and wrote about last post. All I can say is, what judgmental jerks! I mean, I personally don’t “get” why he had those needs, as I don’t share his passions, but I get that they were deeply a part of him. People’s desire to put down, harass and otherwise torment those who are different from them creates much of the ills of this world. I am rather the polar opposite from Wagner, but am in the same queer world: I am a transvestite myself, but a woman who will not wear feminine clothing at all has, in this day and age, become acceptable. Hopefully, the day comes when male transvestites are just as accepted.

The man who coined the term transvestites—and first addressed fetishism—was the pioneering German sex researcher and very early gay rights activist Magnus Hirschfeld. In his 1910 book Die Transvestiten, he includes a whole chapter on Wagner, entitled “Explanation of Richard Wagner’s Letters to a Milliner.” Unlike most everyone else until modern day, he wasn’t judgmental, but wrote:

Wagner’s particular inclination justifies assuming that there is a feminine characteristic in his psyche.... [But this inclination] in no way deserves mockery and scorn...[but instead] gives evidence of the unusually rich and subtle complexity of [Wagner’s] inner life, the continued study of which would be a difficult as well as rewarding task.⁶

There is no doubt that his music was extraordinarily sensual. As Thomas Mann wrote, “who could

fail to notice the rustle of satin in Wagner’s work?”⁷ Barry Millington, in his new book The Sorcerer of Bayreuth, after surveying the evidence of his feminine preoccupation puts it this way:

In the final analysis, then, Wagner’s fetish for silks and satins, his obsessive desire to be surrounded by soft material and sweet fragrances, is not an embarrassment to be swept under one of his deep-piled Smynra rugs. On the contrary, these tendencies provide a key to the music, which would not be what it is had the composer been a model of ascetic Calvinist rigor. It is entirely appropriate that such a man would leave this world in a pink satin dressing gown.⁸

The man-loving Wagner

He was not homosexual; from all evidence, he only had sex with women. However, Wagner was bi-emotional. That is, he fell in love with both men and women and had, essentially, romantic, though sexless, affairs with both men and, sometimes, women (as I believe was the case with both Judith Gautier and Mathilde Wesondonck).

Even when not “in love,” he was a strikingly emotional guy. For instance, his good friend and supporter, Franz Liszt, wrote an account of Wagner's histrionics at their reunion after a 4-year gap in 1854:

Wagner was waiting for me at the post-house. We nearly chocked each other in embraces. Sometimes he has a sort of eaglet’s cry in his voice. He wept and laughed and stormed with joy for at least a quarter of hour at seeing me again.⁹

Assuming he wasn't in love with Liszt, can you imagine how he acted around a man—or woman—whom he was in love with?? (Truly, Wagner was very much like an puppy, both in good and bad ways.)

Regarding homosexuality, Wagner was very liberal-minded for his time, though he felt it was an immature form of sexual attraction, with sexual love between man and woman reigning supreme. That said, he had several gay friends over the years. Towards the end of his life, he was very good friends with the Russian painter, Parsifal stage designer, and aristocrat Paul von Jourkowky and his lover, an Italian of lower-class origins named Pepino, who were frequent visitors to the house. Cosima reports Wagner as saying about their relationship: “It is something for which I have understanding, but no inclination.”¹⁰

Though he wasn’t interested sexually, Wagner was able to conceptualize, and rationalize, his romantic friendships with men via the Greek same-sex love ideal. He wrote in the Artwork of the Future a peaen to same-sex love:

The higher element of same-sex love excluded the aspect of selfish pleasure [my emphasis]. Nevertheless it not only included a purely spiritual bond of friendship, but [one] which blossomed from and crowned the sensuous friendship. This sprang directly from delight in the ...sensuous bodily beauty of the beloved man; yet this delight was no mere sexual yearning, but a thorough abnegation of self into the unconditional sympathy with the with the lover’s joy in himself involuntarily expressed by the joyous bearing prompted by his beauty.

He goes on for some time about this topic but basically he concludes: same-sex love is awesome if you take out the sex. As with the Greek ideal, it is about an older man as teacher and younger man as inspiration. Wagner says of this collaboration, “the most beautiful and noble love would blossom forth.”

His romantic friendships with men—just as with women—all revolved around him, and they were equally expected to be self-sacrificing to his needs and goals, putting their own pursuits as clearly secondary to his. He was able to attract a number of smart and talented men to make this pledge. Among his romantic friendships of this type were with the pianist Karl Tausig, who died at 28,

Tausig

the composer Peter Cornelius,

Cornelius

the opera singer Ludwig Schnorr von Carolsfeld, (who famously died soon after originating the role of Tristan and said on his deathbed: “Oh! my Richard loved me! How contentedly I die!),

van Schnorr

King Lugwig II,

Ludwig II

the writer and music critic Heinrich Porges,

Porges

Friedrich Nietzsche,

Nietzche

and the conductor Hermann Levi.

Levi

In most cases, the younger man was more smitten than Wagner, though there is a good case to be made that in Ludwig and Nietzche’s case, the passion was mutual. In any case, Dreyfus argues in his book, “the biographical evidence shows with some consistency that Wagner encouraged, even groomed, each Romantic Friend to understand and fulfill his assigned role as the adoring, self-sacrificing younger lover.”¹¹ Nietzche’s celebrated break-up with Wagner can best be understood as the philosopher casting off this role of underling to be able to spread his own wings; Wagner was heartbroken. The story of their remarkable friendship has been told many places, but a good place to start is the 60-page appendix “Wagner and Nietzsche” in Bryan Magee’s Tristan Chord.

Just to get a flavor of his romantic friendships, I will quote from just one of his many très romantiques letters to his benefactor, King Ludwig II:

Dearest, dearest, magnificent Friend!...

Dear, Dear heavenly Friend! How you brighten my poor harassed existence. I feel so deeply, deeply satisfied and elevated through your love, through my — through our love! No words can express what this wonderful relationship between us means. Might I die—on the evening of my Tristan, with a last glance up to your eyes, with a last grasp of your hand!

Affectioned, blessed, divine Friend!

How deep, how deep is the bottom of our Love!

Suffering, but blissful–

Eternally yours

Richard Wagner¹²

Some have argued that Wagner, needing Ludwig’s money, was just trying to string him along. However, Wagner wrote many letters to friends also extolling Ludwig and his love for him. For instance, to his good friend—and confidant—Eliza Wille, he wrote many letters of this type. Here is an excerpt from just one:

At last a love relationship which doesn’t lead to suffering and torments! This is how it is when I see this magnificent youth before me.... He stays mostly in a little castle in my proximity; in 10 minutes the carriage takes me to him. Our conversations are ravishing. I always fly to him as a lover.¹³

Yes, there came a time when the “in love” period faded for both of them and conflicts set in. But, that he had an emotional affair—romantic love—with Ludwig, and several other men, there can be no doubt.

Tristan and Isolde: a very queer opera

Wagner showed support for love that strayed beyond normal societal bounds, including same-sex love, in more than one opera. I’ve always thought that Die Walküre—in which Woton (read Wagner) made it clear that true love between siblings was morally better than any marriage without love— was particularly supportive in a rather over-the-top way. This was appreciated early on, as Wagner enjoyed a robust gay following then and now.

Dreyfus investigated the history of reaction to Wagner’s homoerotic themes and found that most of the writing was critical to damning. However, with the beginnings of the early gay rights movement, that begin to change. According to Dreyfus,“[t]he first writer to reject a defamatory approach to Wagner’s homoerotics was the German author Hanns Fuchs, whose book Richard Wagner and Homosexuality appeared in Berlin in 1903.”¹⁴ Dreyfus relates, “Fuchs scours Wagner’s opera librettos and poems for traces of intense Freundeslibe (romantic friendship) and has a fairly easy time of it. He finds “spiritual homosexuality” all across Wagner’s oeuvre, beginning with Die Feen, but it is particularly concentrated in Tristan and Parsifal.”¹⁵

I am going to ignore Parsifal because, really, all the characters in it are very...odd. Sure, many of the guys could be seen as non-heterosexual—Klingsor and Parsifal, particularly—but they hardly seem like they they are having feelings of romantic love for men. But Tristan and Isolde: now that is one queer opera! Yes, the opera centers, it is true, on the fateful True Love romance between Tristan and Isolde. But, simultaneously, it is also, as Fuchs puts it, a “consecration of romantic friendship” as well. Beyond the central protagonists, all the characters seem to be in love with someone of the same sex. Brangange and Kurnewal, servants to Isolde and Tristan, are a matched pair, each in love with those they serve. Both the music and lyrics tell us this, reinforced through the stage instructions that Wagner left. For instance, here is Brangage trying to calm Isolde with sweet endearments:

O Süsse! Traute! [My sweetheart! Beloved!]
Teure! Holde! [Dearest! Beautiful one!]
Goldne Herrin! [Golden mistress!]
Lieb' Isolde! [Dear Isolde!]

Wagner’s stage instructions: first Brangagne “flings herself upon Isolde with impetuous affection,” and then “gradually draws her to the couch.”¹⁶ The music is of utter desperation.

In The Artwork of the Future, Wagner had written of same-sex male love that the bond between the men “knit the fellowships of love into battalions of war and military order that prescribed death-defying tacts to rescue the threatened lover or to exact vengeance if he fell in battle.”¹⁷ In Tristan, Wagner put that idea in the opera. Kurnewal exacts vengeance on the traitor Melot, sacrificing himself to be with Tristan. To music of sad love and longing he sings: “Tristan! Beloved! Scold me not, so the faithful one may follow you!” Thus, there are two love-deaths in the opera, Tristan and Isolde’s and Tristan and Kurnewal’s.

And then there is King Marke, who sings the—to me—extraordinarily touching 13-minute soliloquy to Tristan about his tremendous hurt that his beloved—Tristan—would betray him. Isolde is basically irrelevant in this. That is absolutely not the way it normally works in traditional opera, where the woman’s betrayal would be the focus. But Wagner clearly wanted to highlight Romantic Friendships between same-sex people; he did it beautifully and movingly, might I add.

Then there is the betrayer and former friend, Melot. There are a whole lot of clues that he, too, was in love with Tristan. Melot becomes jealous when Tristan becomes enraptured with Isolde. Thus, it is the old “if I can’t have you, nobody can.” When he dies on Kurnewal’s sword, his last words—of course—are to Tristan: “Weh mir, Tristan,” (Woe is me, Tristan.)

Six major characters: four in love with someone of the same sex, two dead, two in mourning. All of the four suffered from unrequited love. As for Tristan and Isolde, they never consummate their union but suffer greatly through yearning for the other. Only in death do they actually become one. There you have Wagner’s view of the path to true love!

1 Laurence Dreyfus, Wagner and the Erotic Impulse, 147. Read here for a good review of the book.

2 Spencer, ed., Wagner Remembered, 149

3 Millington and Spencer, ed., Selected Letters of Wagner, 307; in letter to August Röckel in January, 1854

4 Dreyfus, 135

5 Dreyfus 147

6 as quoted in Dreyfus, 150

7 Thomas Mann, Pro and Contra Wagner, 137, within the wonderful essay “The Sorrows and Grandeur of Richard Wagner”

8 Millington, the conclusion of his chapter 15 “In the Pink.” I read it on-line so I do not have a page reference, but the whole chapter is available to searching Google Books.

9 as quoted in Newman, Life of Richard Wagner, Vol. 2, 384

10 Cosima Wagner Diaries, vol 2, 631, February 25, 1881

11 Dreyfus, 214

12 as quoted in Dreyfus, 199

13 Selected Letters, 602-603

14 Dreyfus, 188

15 Dreyfus, 204

16 as quoted in Dreyfus, 205

17 as quoted in Dreyfus, 207

Friday, September 20, 2013

Wagner's Abnormal Mind - Part 4: His Sensitivity

“The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanely sensitive. To them… a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death.” Attributed to Pearl Buck

There are many academic concepts about sensitivity—all concurring that some people are born innately more sensitive though from different perspectives—which you can explore here. And there is much research that those who are highly sensitive—whatever the mechanism—are more apt to be creative. Here is a good article about why this is theorized to be so.

For this blog, I would like to introduce two of these basic concepts before moving on to their application to Richard Wagner. If you are fully familiar with them, just skip to the part on Wagner himself.

Sensory Processing Sensitivity (Highly Sensitive Person)

In 1997, Elaine Aron, along with her husband Arthur, postulated the existence of “sensory processing sensitivity” (SPS) in this seminal paper. In popular jargon, the same thing is called the “highly sensitive person” (HSP). Both terms were coined by Elaine Aron: one for the scientist and one for the lay person.

Essentially, they reevaluated earlier personality trait research on emotionality and social introversion under a different lens, and argue that underlying what is often perceived as shyness is actually an in-born and effective survival strategy, and it doesn’t necessarily even include “shyness” per se. They argue that there are two general modes of existence: either a more bold strategy without much observation—the “just go for it” type—or a more observant strategy—the “check it out and go if safe” type. The idea is if there are no predators, the bold strategy wins; if there are lots of predators, the observant types win. Underlying this “bold” or “observant” behavior is essentially “responding more or responding less to the environment.” The “observant” actor—while generally being perceived as “shy”—could actually become bolder than the “bold” actor the next time the same circumstances arrived, as he or she was such a keen observer and could behave quite differently with the acquired knowledge. In a nutshell, the bold are less sensitive to stimuli; the observant are more sensitive.

The theory proposes that SPS is “a genetically determined trait involving a deeper (in the sense of Craik and Lockhart, 1972) cognitive processing of stimuli that is driven by higher emotional reactivity.”¹ They have postulated that about 15-20% of people are born with this trait. The people with SPS were found to have a constellation of four general traits that are correlated:

Depth of processing
Over-aroused (easily compared to others)
Emotional reactivity and high empathy
Sensitive to subtle stimuli

A potentially good part of being highly sensitive is greater appreciation for and intensity of sensory detail. Essentially, they perceive life in a much more rich way – what would be imperceptibly subtle to the less sensitive is easily evident to the highly sensitive. They tend to have particularly strong appreciation for art and nature. Of course, this could also be a torment in that they can react strongly negative to things as well: too much noise, a coarse piece of clothing, a bad odor—even an ugly color—can affect the highly sensitive person in a drive-them-out-of-their-mind way.

The biggest downside for the highly sensitive person is the feeling of sensory or emotional overwhelm creating a need to retreat from stimuli. In her book, The Highly Sensitive Person, Aron puts it this way:

What is moderately arousing for most people is highly arousing for HSPs. What is highly arousing for most people causes an HSP to become frazzled indeed, until they reach a shut-down point called “transmarginal inhibition.”²

Other strong traits among people who are highly sensitive is enormous empathy—reacting to another person’s or animal’s pain far more than is normal for the “insensitive”³—and perfectionism. Of the latter, I am not sure why that is strongly correlated with high sensitivity, but here is Elaine Aron’s take of the reason.

She created a 27-item “Highly Sensitive Person scale” (HSPS) in order to help identify those in the general population who were born with this trait and, therefore, to do research on and create increased scientific grounding for their theory. Here is the self-test. According to Aron, for the people who answer “yes” to 14 or more statements they are “probably highly sensitive.” The more strongly you agree with a category—and the more categories you strongly agree with—the more you likely are a HSP.

Since their 1997 paper, multiple studies have found—including many neurological studies— that people who score high on the HSP test scale do in fact respond differently than those who do not; their brains do work differently. Thus there has been clear scientific confirmation for their theories. The Aron’s, along with co-author Jadzia Jagiellowicz, summarized the research in this area, from both studies of animals and humans, in this 2010 paper.⁴

Aron also reworked the thesis for a general audience, replacing scientific jargon with more easily understood lay language, which can be found here. Her central point is that these traits are in-born, can have both great advantages and also great disadvantages, but are not a pathology and just a natural part of human variation. However, she contends that a negative childhood environment can lead to pathology because the HSP can become easily overwhelmed in the modern world. Without learning ways to effectively cope—and with negative messaging about the person being “too sensitive”—problems can easily develop.

This level of sensitivity has been associated with shyness though it is not basic to the trait of sensitivity; Aron estimates that about 70% of highly sensitive people are introverted, but the rest are not. She argues that many of those who are highly sensitive but not introverted also inherited a in-born tendency to sensation seeking, which, as defined by a leading researcher Marvin Zuckerman, is the ‘seeking of varied, novel, complex, and intense sensations and experiences, and the willingness to take physical, social, legal, and financial risks for the sake of such experience.”⁵

Aron writes in this Psychology Today article,

You can inherit the genetic variations that lead both to being highly sensitive and a high sensation seeker, so this may be another way, besides being raised to be social, that you can be both highly sensitive and extraverted, but it may be more accurate in this case to call it highly sensitive and high sensation seeking. This combo, as one person put it, "is like driving with one foot on the gas, the other on the brake."

Aron has also developed a self-test for high sensation seeking that can be found here.

While I haven’t found that she has done any research on the connection between being highly sensitive and cyclothymia or bipolar disorder, the connection to having a tendency to significant mood changes—though not necessarily, of course, to a psychological disorder—is fairly evident and almost inevitable for the highly sensitive.

This article in Psychology Today by Andrea Bartz makes this connection clear:

The HSP's touchy nervous system leads to a touchy temperament. Like the princess sensing the pea below her tower of mattresses, HSPs perceive the slightest sensory or emotional provocation, then respond with a flurry of brain activity that begets an outsize reaction—rumination, tears, histrionics, on one hand, or unbridled enthusiasm on the other. Their personalities may run the gamut from moody to dramatic—all the product of their unique biology.... HSPs inhabit a teeming world of vibrant colors, sharp smells, striking sounds, and powerful tugs at their emotions.

One man, both highly sensitive and bipolar, wrote this about the connection: “Imagine HSP superimposed with bipolar. In many cases the overlay is so perfect that it is virtually impossible to sort out illness from personality, state from trait.”

Boundaries of the Mind

Ernest Hartman introduced the concept of people with thin-boundaries, which is easily compatible with the concept of the HSP.

As related in the just-quoted Psychology Today article,

In his schema, people with thin mental boundaries do not clearly separate the contents of consciousness, so that a fantasy life of daydreaming may bump right up against everyday reality. It's as if those with thin boundaries have porous shells that allow more of their environment to penetrate and "get" to them—and into their dreams. Hartmann's concept of the thin-boundaried seemed to suggest that there indeed exists a group of people who take in a whole lot more than others.

According to this website,

Hartmann first came to his conception in an interesting way. In the 1980s, he was studying people who have nightmares and noticed that they could also readily recall other vivid or colorful dreams even if they didn’t qualify as nightmares. These people seemed to him especially “sensitive,” “vulnerable,” or “imaginative,” in contrast with other people who came across as more “solid,” “stoic,” or “persevering.” He suspected that there are real brain and body differences between thin and thick boundary people, and he developed a questionnaire to gain more insight.

You can find that questionnaire here. A shorter version here (with quick scoring results). He has administered it to hundreds of student artist and musicians, the vast majority who tested positive for “thin boundaries” while non-artists were much less likely to do so, supporting the thesis that sensitivity and creatively are linked. People’s test results ended up on a bell curve; I tended to the “thick-boundary” side of the curve, unsurprisingly to me.

Thin-boundary people let more sensory data in — more from the eyes, the ears, the tongue, the body, the nose. Most “insensitive” people have a strong filter for “irrelevant” sensory information so as to make the world easily navigable; those with HSP and thin-boundaries have much less ability to turn off this stream. The only time I have experienced anything similar is on LSD. To me, it sounds like all these sensitive folks are on a low dose of LSD their entire lives. I found a little confirmation of this from this blog of a HSP:

HSPs can get relaxed, chatty, and uninhibited without alcohol--and can take blissful mental "trips" without LSD. A few lucky HSPs who were around in the 1960s even avoided those dangerous experiments with drugs, because nothing our friends seemed to experience on drugs seemed much more interesting than what we experienced while meditating

Life is just way more intense for them, in both good and bad ways.

How the above relates Wagner

So, what is this information doing here? Wagner can’t fill in those self-tests, but there can be no doubt that his letters and autobiography scream out the answers. If you have been reading my blog, I hope it is already fairly clear to you that these psychological categories—a highly sensitive, high sensation-seeking person with thin boundaries—describe Wagner to a T, and far better than any DSM pathological category, may I add. I believe this complex of character traits is at the very heart of his personality, explains a tremendous amount about him and creates a more sympathetic understanding of what went wrong—and what went right—with Wagner. If I had more time and space, I could demonstrate point by point how closely he matches all the principal traits of people who are highly sensitive and sensation-seeking and thin-boundaried, but I don’t really have that luxury in my world right now—it would be a book—so I will highlight some of the more important points. I hope by raising this, though, it will give a little more depth and complexity to Wagner’s psychological biography and that the next major biographer of Wagner will take his in-born traits into better account as he or she researches and writes it.

One of the key “bad” traits of high sensitive people is the feeling of overwhelm and frazzled nerves and the resultant need for peace and quiet. This was the story of his life.

Wagner was forever complaining about his nerves and had to frequently stop work for long stretches – weeks or months – to heal. “My nerves are shattered,” he wrote to Franz Liszt in 1850.⁶ In 1852 to his friend Theodor Uhlig he wrote, “I do not know whether it comes from inside me, or from outside, if I am again unwell. As far as my bodily functions are concerned, I must say that I am tolerably healthy: but – my nerves!”⁷ Later in the year, again to Uhlig, he wrote, “The time I spend at work never lasts more than 2 hours; through working for 5-6 hours, as I often used to do in the past, I seriously overtaxed my nerves.”⁸ Two months later, on a mountain trek to calm his nerves, he writes: “I am walking a lot, and am very good on my feet; only my head continues to be a source of dissatisfaction: my cerebral nerves are in an appalling state: overexcitement or lassitude — but no real sense of calm!”⁹ To his friend Julie Ritter, he further explained his artistic/mind problem: “I had previously completed the poem of the “Walküre” in the space of a month, without any interruption, and I could tell only too well from the results of this exertion how things really stood with me. My cerebral nerves were so badly affected that I found myself (other people can understand none of this) in a desperate state, but this much at least was clear, namely that if I am to produce anything else, it can only be achieved by subjecting my entire nervous system to the most elaborate course of treatment.”¹⁰ And subject himself he did—to months of a dietary and water cure. But, alas, he was never really cured as he pointed out “there is only one true remedy – and that is for me to be someone other than I am.”¹¹

And so it went for the rest of his life. In a letter in September of 1882, writing from his last home in Venice several months before his death, he wrote to Angelo Neuman, “I am still suffering from the effects of nervous exhaustion to which I can hope to put an end only by lasting and undisturbed rest. I am doing all I can to make this possible.”¹²

In terms of his sensory sensitivity, I would like to give you a little portrait of his creative process as an example. By way of preamble, in this letter to his Franz Liszt he writes about his creative needs:

...if I am obliged once more to plunge into the waves of an artist’s imagination in order to find satisfaction in an imaginary world, I must at least help out my imagination and find means of encouraging my imaginative faculties. I cannot live like a dog, I cannot sleep on straw and drink common gin: mine is an intensely irritable, acute, and hugely voracious, yet uncommonly tender and delicate sensuality which, one way or another, must be flattered if I am to accomplish the cruelly difficult task of creating in my mind a non-existent world.¹³

Now, he has been greatly mocked for the letter above, but I personally think it is just the truth, and I don’t feel the need to judge him as others seem to do.

So what did he do to help out his “imaginative facilities?” In order to keep himself in the right mood, he wanted to have everything “just so,” a completely controlled environment in time and space. He craved regularity, composing daily in an extended span of time after a meal – generally from mid-morning to mid-afternoon or until nervous exhaustion overcame him. He needed to be surrounded by beauty. Muted lighting was a must; uninterrupted quiet paramount. Wagner’s surroundings had to be visually and aromatically alluring, full of vibrant colors and potent fragrances. His needs for his sanctuary, as for all aspects of his life, were very specific and detailed. To his seamstress, Bertha Goldwag, he wrote multiple letters of incredible detail to produce the ideal lair accompanied by befitting apparel (among his many talents: he designed his own clothes). As a small illustration, in requesting a dark pink “fine heavy satin” fabric sample, he added “do not confuse [it] with the earlier violent pink, which is not what I mean here, but genuine pink, only very dark and fiery.”¹⁴ While he composed, he liked to stroke, smell and gaze at the satin for inspiration. Wagner disliked seeing lines and hard surfaces as he composed but wanted everything to flow (presumably like his music). The furniture and the carpet all had to be soft, plush. The lining of his clothing required silk or satin because other material “produced a shudder sensation throughout the body.”¹⁵ Goldwag said all his clothes had to be scented in rose fragrance and “lined and wadded, as Wagner was always complaining that he was cold.”¹⁶

In this manner, through controlling his environment and massaging his senses, he found inspiration. Given that the writing process often overwhelmed him, fraying his nerves, it could be that what inspired him also overwhelmed him to some degree. It was always a balancing act to produce his music.

Wagner clearly fits into the thin-boundary schema as he always had a foot into another world, be it his feminine world of composing, his death-fantasy world, his dream world, or the theater world. He was very aware of his thin boundaries and sensitivity. He writes in Mein Leben, “From earliest childhood certain mysterious and uncanny phenomena produced undue effects on me; I remember, whenever I was alone in a room for any length of time and looked fixedly at such inanimate objects as pieces of furniture, [I would] suddenly burst into a loud shriek, because they seemed to come alive.”¹⁷ From his music, I always thought that Wagner seemed like he had been an acid-head though that was historically impossible; I now realize it was just his natural state. Read this semi-dreamy passage of his attraction to the theater to get a sense of his life in fantasy along with the development of the allure and his attraction to the feminine:

In connection with this childish terror [nightly nightmares], what attracted me so strongly to the theatre—by which I mean also the stage, the rooms behind the scenes, and the dressing-rooms—was not so much the desire for entertainment and amusement such as that which impels the present-day theatre-goers, but the fascinating pleasure of finding myself in an entirely different atmosphere, in a world that was purely fantastic and often gruesomely attractive. Thus to me a scene, even a wing, representing a bush, or some costume or characteristic part of it, seemed to come from another world, to be in some way as attractive as an apparition, and I felt that contact with it might serve as a lever to lift me from the dull reality of daily routine to that delightful region of spirits. Everything connected with a theatrical performance had for me the charm of mystery, it both bewitched and fascinated me, and while I was trying, with the help of a few playmates, to imitate the performance of Der Freischutz, and to devote myself energetically to reproducing the needful costumes and masks in my grotesque style of painting, the more elegant contents of my sisters' wardrobes, in the beautifying of which I had often seen the family occupied, exercised a subtle charm over my imagination; nay, my heart would beat madly at the very touch of one of their dresses.¹⁸

His attraction to the feminine was obviously not just outside of him in terms of desiring relationships with women, but also inside of him, in desiring to wear, touch and be surrounded by those things considered feminine. Clearly, it was part of his sensitivity, his thin-boundary nature.

Most people who write about these needs of his put it down to some sort of fetishism. So maybe people who have fetishes are, in fact, just highly sensitive or thin-boundaried people who would like to live in peace in their own more permeable world where the boundaries are, indeed, much looser. We, the insensitive majority, just don’t understand, and we clearly have a need to label such behavior outside the norm in a insulting way. But insensitives are not writing great works of art such as his; the sensitivities are. Thus, I will take the one who died in a pink silk negligée—bless his little heart, Wagner did—over the typical guy who, say, dies with cotton boxers on. Only the guy that would do such a thing in his day and age could have possibly written Tristan and Isolde, and the world is a better place for it.

I think he looks lovely in pink. (The guy behind him in this cartoon
was thejournalist who revealed his taste for the feminine.)