love. The readiness of love’s most fervent advocates to declare it some sort of transcendent “mystery” is especially ironic in view of this fact. Wagner’s beloved Schopenhauer often exercised his uniquely caustic wit at the expense of lovers on the basis of this very argument.
[R.4: M]
Having witnessed this terrible event, the first evidence of the influence of Alberich’s curse on the Ring among men, Wotan now changes his mind, deciding after all that he doesn’t wish to learn from Erda the full truth about why she said he must live in care and fear:
Wotan: (shaken: #19 vari?:) Fearful now I find the curse’s power (:#19 vari?)!
Loge: (#50:; #19 vari?:) Wotan, what can compare with your luck? Winning the ring gained you much; that it’s now been taken away from you serves you even more (:#50; :#19 vari?): (#26a:) behold, your enemies fell one another (:#26a) for the sake of the gold that you gave away.
Wotan: (#19 vari?:) And yet how a sense of unease binds me fast (:#19 variant?)! (#51) (#53:) Care and fear fetter my thoughts – how I may end them (:#53) (#54:) Erda shall teach me: to her I must descend (:#54)!
Wotan has seen that self-preservation and fear are stronger and more primal motives even than love. For in Fafner’s murder of his brother Fasolt for the sake of the Ring’s power Wotan has recognized the essence of the Ring curse, that man is destined to acknowledge self-preservation and self-aggrandizement as the sole true motives underlying all human feeling, thought, and action, including those instances where man strives to escape his subjection to egoism and natural law. After witnessing this effect of the Ring’s curse, that he who possesses Ring-consciousness must acknowledge that man is forever subject to egoistic animal impulse and bound by the limits of natural law, Wotan has found the implications of this revelation unbearable, so now he changes his mind. He no longer wishes to learn from Erda the full truth about why he must live in care and fear, since he has just obtained his answer from Fafner’s victory over Fasolt. He now desires instead to follow Erda’s original suggestion that he flee the curse of consciousness, Alberich’s curse on his Ring, but in a more decisive way. Of course, he has already followed her advice to yield Alberich’s Ring to the Giants. But that is not enough. He hopes now that by seeking Erda herself out she can teach him how to end his care and fear. Note, Wotan no longer expresses any hope that he can alter those things which engender care and fear, but merely wishes to learn how he can cease to feel care and fear, how he can become unconscious of it. Wotan wishes, in other words, to substitute consolation for truth, blissful feeling for woeful thought.
Wotan hopes to learn from Erda herself how to forget the fear Erda’s prophecy of the gods’ end taught him. He will achieve this goal by going down to her where, through figurative sexual union
