The Safety of Objects

Home at last! And so WagnerQuest 06 reaches its end, as indeed all things must. As a final blog fling, I thought it would be fun to go through my prop list: which items were of most value to me on this expedition, the ones that left Seattle with me two months ago and never made it back, and the ones that I picked up along the way. Late last night, unpacking after yet another long and laborious trek-ordeal (drive six hours, Mackinaw to Detroit; fly two hours to Denver and three to Seattle, shock of “Hey! I remember this place!” and running into everbody in the community on a gorgeous Seattle summer night), the items I dealt with included:

DESTROYED. My Dell Latitude LAPTOP, over three years old now, the system board departed this world one morning when I was in London (I’m told we’ll be able to retrieve the data, including all those pictures that never made it to the blog). My much-loved Tumi 2 BACKPACK, which has accompanied me for many years over much of this world; the zippers are hopeless, the fabric is torn in many places, and all the ergonomic stuffing is falling out. My L. L. Bean GARMENT BAG of many years and many trips, which exploded on a train in Switzerland—I learned too late that it was never intended to function as a bookbag as well as suitcase as well as garment bag. My GOGGLES ripped a couple days ago; easy come, easy go. And my 4 Megapixel Canon DIGITAL CAMERA went for a swim in Lake Michigan a few weeks ago as someone was trying to take a sunset photo of me swimming for this very blog.

My CELL PHONE is the only electronic device that survived the trip, although it’s been acting very strange since I got home; perhaps it committed suicide, in order to join its friends the camera and computer.

CAME HOME SAFE. KEYS, WALLET, CREDIT and DEBIT CARDS, PASSPORT, CHECKBOOK, and big bag full of world electronic ADAPTORS. Like an idiot I left my 3-to 2 prong American power adaptor here in Seattle, after carefully re-wiring everything in my apartment so I could take it along; I bought a new one in Denmark which allowed me several good weeks of recharged computer/camera/phone batteries. My CLOTHES all made it back, although it was odd to pack for two different trips: in northern Michigan I basically only wore a SWIMSUIT all day every day, and thus didn’t need my opera-going SUITS or the HIP BOLLYWOOD SHIRT I picked up in London.

NEW ACQUISITIONS. In addition to said HIP BOLLYWOOD SHIRT, I picked up a souvenir DRINKING HORN at Roskilde’s Viking Ship Museum, which my nephew kept using to drink his lemonade; the beautiful season PROGRAM BOOK for the Glyndebourne festival; a Reclam copy of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s GOLDNE TOPF auf Deutsch, a lovely little Italian book with pictures of CARNEVALE IN VENEZIA, all about commedia dell’arte; and a really beautiful art monograph by Kristian Davies, THE ORIENTALISTS, featuring lively prose and incredible reproductions of the great nineteenth-century European academic painters who were obsessed with ‘Oriental’ subjects (camel caravans, mideast landscapes, harems, baths, slave markets, etc.). I also picked up and distributed at various points along the way a gift or two, including such items as a jug of MEAD, a Venetian CARNIVAL MASK, and lots of Mackinaw FUDGE.

The really unexpected item I bring home is a gift my sister-in-law gave me a few days ago, a Burt’s Bees “5 STEPS TO SOFTER FEET" PACKAGE with a pumice stone, coconut foot cream that’s slicker than 10W-40, and little black socks with bees on them. The fact of the matter is, my feet ended up in pretty bad shape, after perhaps too much walking around Europe and probably too long barefoot in the lake and the sun in northern Michigan. Megan’s maternal instincts kicked in when she noticed that my feet were fast turning into dragon claws, and I was surprised to find that the Burt’s Bees treatment, so far, is working pretty well.

THE LIBRARY. The stuff that either accompanied me across Europe or got mailed ahead of time to northern Michigan: BOOKS on Wagner (his autobiography, Millington’s Wagner Compendium, Spencer’s Wagner Remembered, and biographies by Sabor and Gutman; Wagner’s source texts for the Ring (the Elder Edda, in the Auden and Terry translations, the Younger Edda, the Volsunga and Thidreks Sagas, and the Nibelungenlied; and don’t forget, if you’re looking at this material, the great books Kingdom on the Rhine by Nancy Benvenga and Richard Wagner and the Nibelungs by Elizabeth Magee); several books on screenwriting, the most useful of which I found to be McKee’s Story; To Have and Have Not by Ernest Hemmingway; Hollywood, by Gore Vidal; Collected Stories by David Leavitt; Erotic Poetry by Goethe (facing-page edition with translations by David Luke); and Struggle for a Vast Future (my brother Aaron Sheehan-Dean’s new book on the American Civil War, which I finished while ‘Up North’). In terms of travel guidebooks, I profited from publications by Lonely Planet, Let’s Go, Time Out, Discovery Channel, and Teach Yourself Danish, although I have a habit of lightening my load by leaving each book in the relevant country. CDs included Midsummer Night’s Dream music by Mendelssohn and Britten; the deluxe 3-disc edition of Howard Shore’s Fellowship of the Ring music; the gorgeous Silk Road Ensemble discs recently pushed through by Yo-Yo Ma; a disc by Nickel Creek, and another by Air; the soundtrack to Amélie and Peter Gabriel’s Passion; masses by Ockeghem and motets by Machaut; Britten’s Phaedre and Billy Budd; and an historic recording of Ralph Vaughan Williams conducting his Wasps overture and Old King Cole ballet, as well as an abridged 1924 recording of his great opera Hugh the Drover. And of course, there were lots of Wagner discs. DVDs that came on this trip included the Palmer Wagner movie; Palmer’s film of Britten’s Death in Venice; several Shakespeare movies (including Olivier’s Hamlet, Al Pacino as Shylock in Merchant of Venice, and Kevin Kline as Bottom in Midsummer Night’s Dream); The Vikings; The Big Lebowski; The Thin Red Line; The Blues Brothers; Millions; some Harry Potter and Indiana Jones; and (special favorite of my niece and nephew) the Powell/Pressburger film of Tales of Hoffmann.

The trip itself is finite, but these entertaining and reassuring objects exist without end. So which is more alive? Or have I forgotten the most important ‘object’ on this search, the holy grail at the end of this WagnerQuest—the huge pile of index cards with notes, the two full spiral notebooks, and the 40-page emails with outlines, treatments, and synopses of the screenplay to MONSTER GOD?

SUMMER’S END

Some friends have joined us here at the cottage, employees of the World Wildlife Fund and The Nature Conservancy, and I read their copy of Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder, a recent book by Richard Louv, a writer for the San Diego Union-Tribune. A fascinating issue, particularly relevant to me here in this close-to-nature setting, surrounded by small kids, my brain still steeped in the art and life of Richard Wagner–an artist whose art and life are so closely bound in with his experience of nature. Wagner was the kind of Romantic who saw, ahead of time, where the Industrial revolution would lead; he yearned for primeval German forests, twice cast the ‘Wild Child’ in leading roles in his operas (Siegfried and Parsifal), promoted goofily inaccurate, romanticized pictures of pagan and medieval European society, and spent most of his creative life as far from urban centers as possible because he understood that when man isolates himself from the natural world, horror ensues. To me, Loge is Wagner’s most potent image of the modern age, our post-enlightenment world of science, technology, industry, profit, and insatiable dissatisfaction. And it is Loge who wipes out the human world, at the end of Gotterdammerung. So far as anyone can tell, he’s about to wipe out ours.

Louv’s point is that kids’ experience with nature—whether that be going with parents on trips to national parks or building a tree house in the backyard—has an inverse relationship with such common and terrible modern childhood issues as obesity and ADHD; ie statistically speaking, kids who have more contact with nature are healthier, happier, better students, and less obnoxious than those who spend their entire existences glued to a computer or video-game screen, trapped in the back seat of a car, or (the new fad) both at once. It’s man vs. machine, it’s The Matrix, Terminator, and the future of the human race is at stake. Louv, with his journalist’s background, is perhaps more of a cheerleader than I might be, writing on such a dire issue; his concluding chapters are an explosion of different things different people have been trying or suggesting to help the situation, without (I feel) anything definitive—perhaps because he avoids down-‘n’-dirty grappling with the roots of the problem.

With my own brain shaped by Wagner, I’d probably prefer an ambivalent conclusion. All of Wagner’s conclusions, at the end of all his operas, are ambivalent. Gotterdammerung is both dusk and dawn. (Go through all the others yourself and find other examples!) The issue, as clearly as I’ve found it stated, boils down to this (Louv quoting Seth Norman, a writer on fly-fishing):

"Grasping the Grand Scheme is demanding for adults; for kids raised on Disney, it’s simply shocking to discover that it takes a bunch of Bambis to feed a Lion King, and that Mowgli’s wolves would eat Thumper and all his sibs. Eventually, most of us figure out that it’s people, not nature, who create morality, values, ethics—and even the idea that nature itself is something worth preserving. We choose to be shepherds and stewards or we don’t. We will live wisely—preserving water and air and everything else intrinsic to the equations we’re only beginning to understand, or we won’t, in which case Nature will fill the vacuum we leave. She is exquisite, and utterly indifferent."

I believe it’s easier for one person to make a good decision than for a large group of people to make a good decision; that most of us, decision by decision, do whatever is easiest or requires the least amount of effort; that the great explorers—those who push back the boundaries, those who spend a lifetime in nature, far from their homeland or their native culture—are invariably pushed on by some powerful inner dissatisfaction, something that makes a comfortable life in a little hobbit hole out of the question for them; that the reason the Loge-
computer/video screen is more engaging than the great outdoors is, the computer doesn’t seem to share that complete indifference of Erda-nature but keeps reacting to each of our actions, thereby affirming our existence (ie when you go and hunt and kill an animal, or tear down a forest to build a shopping mall, you can proudly look at it and say: "Look what I did!", whereas the low-impact hiker who merely jots down the numbers of finches he saw in a journal may end up needing some more dramatic way of proving to himself that he was really there). All of which leads me to think Norman’s second version of events is the likely future, that we will destroy ourselves in short order, many beautiful things will be no more, and the Rhine will once again cover it all, roll back, and all will be as if nothing had been.

And yet I know Louv is right, and that there is always still hope. My own spirituality, if I can talk or write about something so intangible, is entirely bound up with childhood experiences of nature and music. I’m still doing it, decades later, with these last two months spent running around listening to operas and then hanging out in the wilderness. Comparing notes with my environmental sector friends, I’m pleased and terrified to see that the same issues are at play in their industry as in ours. It’s well-known that natural sciences education and arts education make kids smarter, healthier, and happier; but these subjects are hard to test, in any quantitative, standardized form, our current obsession, and because there’s no profit to be made in either industry, we always seem to be fighting a losing battle. Yet we know that kids are wide open to both subjects. This last week here has confirmed what our experience of Theft of the Gold suggested, that kids adore Wagner’s musical stories about the wild forces of nature. My 7 year-old nephew has spent the last week studying the libretto to Siegfried; his favorite scene is of course the sword-fight with the dragon. But it does require a little one-on-one contact, a kid modeling an adult who honestly cares about art, or nature, to pry the kid away from the ubiquitous glowing screen. If WE decide that we care—if WE turn off our screens, and work at building great connections with our world (better forms of transportation, better ways of connecting to our food, better ways of enjoying our surroundings and each other, better art, better ways of communicating) then THEY will learn from us that that’s what human beings do.