with her (a metaphor for collective, historical man’s subjective rather than objective experience of Mother Nature), he can safely obtain the full knowledge of why he must live in care and fear, which he originally requested of her. He will seek out Erda in order to draw inspiration from her fearful, objective knowledge, so he can give birth to the Wahn (self-deceptions) of religion and art, through which man can consign objective knowledge to oblivion, and thus forget the fear it engenders, while sublimating this fear into blissful feeling. Wotan’s plan expresses Loge’s special artistic cunning which, according to Wotan, draws advantage (i.e., unconscious artistic inspiration) from the enemy’s envy (i.e., from Alberich’s threat to raise the truth which will destroy man’s belief in the gods from the silent depths of the unconscious to the light of day, as expressed by Erda in her prophecy of the twilight of the gods). In other words, through this process of repression and sublimation, Wotan will actually draw advantage or inspiration from the fear engendered by Erda’s prophecy of the gods’ “end,” to create a veil of illusion (of Wahn) as a means to forget the fear she taught. As I noted before, one must in some sense know the truth to be inspired to deceive oneself about it.
Yet unease and fear holds Wotan fast because Alberich’s claim to the Ring’s power is valid, since Alberich has the courage to acknowledge the bitter truth, that all men are created selfish, while Wotan’s claim is not valid, because Wotan hasn’t the courage for the truth. Therefore there will always be a risk that Alberich can somehow penetrate religious faith’s defenses to regain his lost power and overthrow the gods’ rule, sustained by illusion, by simply revealing the truth to man. Though Wotan cannot afford to possess the Ring himself, because to do so would raise this fatal truth to consciousness, he’s going to have to find some way of keeping Alberich from regaining it which doesn’t place the Ring’s guardian at risk of exposing its truth to the light of day. But ultimately there is no way to keep it out of Alberich’s hands, because not only is Wotan Light-Alberich, but Wotan’s refuge from Alberich’s bitter reality, Valhalla, is itself a product of Alberich’s Ring power. So if Wotan remains in control of Alberich’s Ring, Alberich in some sense still retains possession of it himself. Wotan and Alberich are in effect one being, in whom the light-side, Wotan, now takes precedence and suppresses the dark side, consigning it to the oblivion of the unconscious mind, where it will sit lurking, waiting for its chance to rise from the silent depths to daylight. How to keep this from happening will be Wotan’s obsession. And the worst aspect of this obsession is that Wotan can’t admit this fear of the truth even to himself, since to do so would undermine faith.
Over the years Wagner developed a theory of unconscious artistic inspiration which presumably was based both upon his personal experience of it, and received tradition. According to his thesis the authentically unconsciously inspired work of art is a waking dream, an allegory for the true, unconscious source of inspiration which remains hidden even from the artist himself. While on some deep level of consciousness the artist must confront this true source, according to Wagner’s thesis, upon waking from what Wagner describes as a virtual nightmare, the artist forgets the original dream of inspiration and produces for himself and his audience a waking dream which is a mere allegory for the original, which is essentially “unspeakable.” In a passage previously cited [See 704W], in which Wagner described religious revelation of the “unspeakable” and its translation into a waking allegory for the layman, Wagner equated this thesis with both unconscious inspiration of secular art, and with dreaming, since Wagner, following Feuerbach, did not truly believe in the divine or the supernatural.
