shambling, week-kneed and nodding, blinking your eyes (:#voc? [Mime’s vocal line]): (#104 >>>:) I long to seize the dodderer’s neck and finish off the filthy twitching creature! That’s how I’ve learned to abide you, Mime. (#104)
Motif #105, generally known as “Mime’s Starling Song” (because Siegfried, exasperated with Mime’s incessant grubbing for gratitude, demands that Mime stop this everlasting “Starling Song”) is introduced as Mime describes all the sacrifices he has made to bring Siegfried up, and all that Siegfried owes to Mime. #105’s Embryo was introduced in R.1 as the Rhinedaughters described Alberich’s ugliness. The implication is that all that Siegfried is, he owes in some sense to Mime, and ultimately to Alberich, the ugly dwarf whose renunciation of love (of animal instinct) for the sake of the Ring’s power (consciousness) gave birth not only to the human mind, but to its impulse to try and transcend its very preconditions, its origin and nature. Wagner’s point seems to be that our evolutionary prehistory was an ugly affair best forgotten by those wishing to affirm man’s transcendent value.
I have already suggested that Siegfried’s loathing (“Ekel”) for Mime is actually Wotan’s self-loathing (“Ekel”), Wotan’s abhorrence of his true nature and origin as a Nibelung, a natural man whose primary and most powerful instincts are self-preservation and self-aggrandizement. I have also noted that Wagner projected this fact about universal human nature on to the Jews. Wagner posed to himself the question (previously cited), why do the Germans instinctively feel repugnance for the Jews:
[P. 80] “… with all our speaking and writing in favour of the Jews’ emancipation, we always felt instinctively repelled by any actual, operative contact with them. Here, then, we touch the point that brings us closer to our main inquiry: we have to explain to ourselves the involuntary repellence possessed for us by the nature and personalityof the Jews, so as to vindicate that instinctive dislike which we plainly recognise as stronger and more overpowering than our conscious zeal to rid ourselves thereof. Even today we only purposely belie ourselves in this regard, when we think necessary to hold immoral [P. 81] and taboo all open proclamation of our natural repugnance against the Jewish nature.” [456W-{8/50} Judaism In Music: PW Vol. III, p. 80-81]
I have noted that where Wagner speaks of the German’s allegedly instinctive abhorrence of Jews, what Wagner is really speaking of is the higher man’s universal abhorrence for all that is low and craven, or egoistic, in his own nature, for which he feels guilt. That Wagner himself actually acknowledged this truth is proved by his having dramatized it in Wotan’s self-loathing, for Wotan, as Wagner’s metaphor for collective, historical man, is really the primary protagonist of the Ring, and effectively subsumes all the other specific characters.
Wagner explored this self-abhorrence along some novel lines of inquiry which emphasize the discomfort the higher, creatively original man feels in the company of those whose baser instincts are inimical to him, the smug philistine who is content with the world as he finds it, and merely desires to exploit what is already there for his own advantage, rather than for the sake of knowledge or beauty or humanity’s welfare (keeping in mind that knowledge can be inimical to the good and the beautiful). An approximation of the archetype for this contrast of the two types of human being
