[P. 338] “ … these artist’s illusions of mine will almost certainly not release their hold on me; they are really a kind of decoy with which my instinct for self-preservation repeatedly lures my better judgment into its service. (…)
And so this artistic nature of mine is very much a daemon which repeatedly blinds me to the clearest insights and draws me into a maelstrom of confusion, passion and folly … . And so there are often moments in my life when I feel so completely annihilated by this insight that I suddenly begin to ask myself whether I can go on living. … such moments occur above all when I see an animal being tormented: I cannot begin to describe what I then feel and how, as if by magic, I am suddenly permitted an insight into the essence of life itself in all its undivided coherency, an insight which I no longer see as mawkish sentimentality but which I recognize as the most genuine and profound way of looking at things … .
[P. 339] It is at moments such as these that I see the ‘veil of Maya’ completely lifted, and what my eyes then see is terrible, so dreadful that – as I say – I suddenly ask myself whether I can go on living; but it is at this moment that another veil descends, a veil which – however dissimilar it may appear – is ultimately always the same ‘veil of Maya’, in all its artistic forms, which casts me back into the world of self-deception where … I then allow myself to become entangled, often to the point of utter distraction.” [630W-{5/12/55}Letter to Jacob Sulzer: SLRW, p. 338-339]
However, in Wotan’s attempt to justify his dependence on Loge, he has made the peculiar claim that through Loge’s cunning alone he is able to turn the enemy’s envy (resentment) to advantage. Wotan’s explanation of Loge’s unique gift has more to it than meets the eye. Wotan is speaking in Wagner’s idiosyncratic code of the ability of the authentic artist to draw unconscious inspiration from hidden knowledge of what man most fears and cannot bear to contemplate consciously, the bitter truth of the world man wishes to consign to oblivion, in order to sublimate this true foundation of man’s existential woe into the bliss of inspired art, what in earlier times would be described as divine revelation. This process of sublimation neutralizes the threat represented by unbearable knowledge of the bitter truth, by drawing upon it to produce that veil of Maya which protects us from it. In other words, in order to be able to deceive ourselves, we need, in some sense (unconsciously), to possess the truth, in order to be motivated to lie to ourselves about it, and to design its veil for the sole purpose of hiding it and replacing it with a consoling illusion which we falsely hold to be the truth. This is another way of expressing what happened when Wotan’s nightmare – Alberich’s renunciation of love and forging of the Ring of power – subliminally gave birth to Wotan’s waking dream, the gods’ abode Valhalla, Valhalla an allegorical paraphrase of Nibelheim which Wotan can only hope leaves no trace of its true, but disreputable, foundation, its debt.
Wotan has tried to reassure Fricka by telling her that Loge was able to talk Wotan into making what seemed to Fricka to be a cynical contract with the Giants, in which he would pay them Freia in exchange for building Valhalla, only because Loge has promised to redeem Freia from them. Loge has, in effect, offered to redeem the gods’ dependence on self-delusion - i.e., man’s religious belief in transcendent love and the gods’ actual (and man’s potential) immortality - from the claims of the truth, which is represented by the Giants’ claim upon Freia. It is only through man’s artistic imagination that man could believe he could free his ideals from their origins in egoistic animal instinct, or free heaven from its basis in the earth.
