wakes Bruennhilde in S.3.3, Siegfried will be gaining access to Wotan’s (i.e., mankind’s) unspoken secret, the dangerous knowledge which religious man has tabooed, and which Wotan has stored in his collective unconscious, Bruennhilde, during his confession. Wotan confesses to Bruennhilde why it is that he feels self-loathing (Ekel), and as I’ve noted, Siegfried’s instinctive abhorrence for Mime Siegfried likewise describes as loathing (Ekel), because Siegfried, as Wotan reborn, has inherited Wotan’s self-loathing, and Wotan has now effectively been split into his real, prosaic self, Mime, and his ideal self, Siegfried. In other words, were Siegfried actually to reveal the true, hidden source of inspiration, or programme, behind the Woodbird’s music, and thus bring to pass what the querulous dwarf Mime told him was possible, making feeling rise to consciousness as thought, Siegfried would presumably be filled with Wotan’s self-loathing, would in fact remember his true identity as Wotan (which would be tantamount to having to acknowledge his indebtedness to Mime).
Siegfried is even now trying to construct a conceptual, verbal equivalent of the Woodbird’s music, but he begins only by trying to imitate the birdsong on a simple musical instrument he’s made, a primitive flute, so that he can understand the Woodbird’s language the way the Woodbird does himself, solely through feeling. No doubt Siegfried’s impulse to disclose a conceptual equivalent to the emotion music calls up in us represents Wagner’s own impulse in his music-dramas to make music become visible, as he put it. This is tantamount to saying that Wagner had an artistic impulse to disclose the programme which explains his musical expression and forms. But the ultimate purpose of the music-drama is to redeem the world from the lovelessness of modern scientific thought by restoring lost innocence through music, a deliberate retreat from the power of thought into the refuge of feeling, or love. In other words, as an unconsciously inspired artist Siegfried has a capacity unique among most men to confront, subliminally, the knowledge – particularly self-knowledge - which men most fear and abhor, so that he can employ Loge’s cunning to draw inspiration from what most threatens our sense of self, and create a work of art which will sustain that veil of Maya we unconsciously throw over unbearable truths to hide them from our eyes.
What is curious about Siegfried’s remark about the querulous dwarf’s (Mime’s) claim that one could eventually learn the meaning of birdsong, is that Mime’s nephew (Alberich’s son) Hagen, in T.3.2, will effectively disclose – i.e., manipulate Siegfried into revealing - the conceptual equivalent of music by persuading Siegfried to narrate the story of how, in his youth, he came to grasp the meaning of birdsong. And, what is most fascinating, Hagen will ultimately get Siegfried to divulge his unconscious mind’s – i.e. Bruennhilde’s – unspoken secrets, by giving Siegfried a potion (whose motif, #154 is indirectly derived from Loge’s Motif #35, via the Tarnhelm Motifs #42 and #43) which will waken his memory of distant (“fernen”) things. The essential point here is that though the natural course of evolution is from instinct to conceptual thought, mother-melody to word, love to power, Wagner in the Music-Drama sought to reverse the natural necessity of evolution and restore us to a pre-scientific mythological consciousness, or even a subliminal musical consciousness of feeling. But Wagner’s grand poetic aim is no longer tenable in the face of our ever greater advancement of knowledge (i.e., the ever greater accumulation of the Nibelung Hoard) and the maturation of our self-consciousness. And what is more, Wagner, like Siegfried, actually played his part in exposing the once secret process of unconscious artistic inspiration to the light of day. This in fact is the entire subject of Twilight of the Gods.
