Homospatial Thinking - Significant Moments 9-11

Significant Moments: Before the Deluge -- In Memory of 9/10
In her published memoirs Alma Mahler, widow of the composer

Gustav Mahler, records the following anecdote about an incident
that occurred in New York City in about the year 1909, while
Mahler was conductor of the New York Philharmonic.
"Marie Uchatius, a young art-student, paid me a visit one day in

the Hotel Majestic [in New York City]. Hearing a confused noise,
we leaned out of the window and saw a long procession in the
broad street along the side of Central Park [Fifth Avenue]. It was
the funeral cortege of a fireman, of whose heroic death we had
read in the newspaper. The chief mourners were almost
immediately beneath us when the procession halted, and the
master of ceremonies stepped forward and gave a short address.
From our eleventh-floor window we could only guess what he
said. There was a brief pause and then a stroke on the muffled
drum, followed by a dead silence. The procession then moved
forward and all was over.
The scene brought tears to our eyes and I looked anxiously at

Mahler's window. But he too was leaning out and his face was
streaming with tears. The brief drum-stroke impressed him so
deeply that he used it in the Tenth Symphony."
Alma Mahler, Gustav Mahler: Memories and Letters (Third Edition

Revised and Enlarged), page 135.
The following video is an excerpt from Mahler's 10th Symphony that

contains the muffled drum strokes that were inspired by the New York
City fire fighter's funeral procession:
https://youtu.be/VBGBNYxYvGM
During the period 1993 to 2005 I worked on my book Significant

Moments, an autobiographical work composed entirely of
quotations from the published literature. So I was already at work
on the book at the time of the terrorist attacks on September 11,
2001. The horror and anguish of that day impressed me so deeply
that I used it in the book. The following section of the book is a
creative transformation of my feelings, my emotional reaction to
the events of that day.
For the purposes of this presentation I call the piece "The Portrait
Artist." Wagner's step-father, Ludwig Geyer, to whom the young
Wagner was deeply attached -- and who died unexpectedly when
the composer was seven years old -- was also a portrait artist as
well as an actor and playwright. During his sitting for Renoir,
Wagner excoriated both the French and the Jews, about whom
the composer had deeply-ambivalent feelings. Wagner may have
suspected that his stepfather Geyer was a Jew. Did Wagner
associate the Frenchman Renoir with the presumed Jew Geyer? In
a historical novel one can always speculate.
Be that as it may.
The creative link between the 2001 terrorist attack and the
material I was already working on was provided by an inspired
piece of writing by Adam Gopnick that appeared in The New
Yorker magazine in the year 2002: "The City and the Pillars."
Albert Rothenberg, M.D. first described or discovered a process

he termed "homospatial thinking," which consists of actively
conceiving two or more discrete entities occupying the same
space, a conception leading to the articulation of new identities.
Homospatial thinking has a salient role in the creative process in
the following wide variety of fields: literature, the visual arts,
music, science, and mathematics. This cognitive factor, along with
"Janusian thinking," clarifies the nature of creative thinking as a
highly adaptive and primarily nonregressive form of functioning.
In the following text I have superimposed metaphors concerning

the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. I have included
quotes from magazine articles specifically about 9/11 in addition
to quotes from texts about war, destruction, physical injury, New
York City, and the death of Wagner. These quotes are
highlighted.
In a sense, the following text takes us back to the time period

immediately preceding a catastrophe. Victims of trauma
frequently go back in time in their minds to the moments
preceding the trauma, as if to undo the trauma.
Incidentally, I suffered a traumatic injury at age two-and-a-half. I

had put a curtain rod in my mouth. The curtain rod punctured
the soft palate (artist’s pallet?) when I fell to the floor. My mother
years later told me she was frantic. There was a lot of bleeding
and my mother said she was afraid I would bleed to death. My
pediatrician, Dr. Bloom had to cauterize the wound.
Incidentally, I first learned about the terrorist attacks at about

12:00 noon on September 11, 2001. I turned on NBC-TV and
the reporter David Bloom was summarizing the events of the day.
The 9/11 attacks started around 9:00 a.m. but I wasn’t watching
TV that morning. I went to the supermarket around 11:00 a.m.
and I heard a customer talking to the check-out clerk. The check-
out clerk said, “I’m just surprised something like this never
happened earlier.” The customer said, “Will you stay open
today?” The clerk said, “As far as I know we’ll be open.” I didn’t
think anything of it.
https://youtu.be/IetZuu_seb8
__________________________________________
I always remembered the bit in the Parsifal story . . .

Arnold Zweig, Letter to Sigmund Freud.
. . . Maestro, . . .
Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Letter to an Unknown Friend.
. . . according to which Amfortas' spear is the only means of
healing the wound it has itself inflicted.
All one had to do to unleash its magic was to apply it to . . .
Dava Sobel, Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who
Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time.
. . . the wound which . . .
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein.
. . . would hasten the closing of that wound.
A profound piece of early insight, I think.
What that was meant to mean—that is something before which I

stand dull and astounded, incapable of thought, indeed even of
feeling. I cannot grasp, let alone explain it.
The Diary of Richard Wagner: The Brown Book 1865-1882
(August 19, 1865).
Well, what is the story of Parsifal?
Otto Friedrich, The Grave of Alice B. Toklas: and Other
Reports from the Past.
“Would you like me to show it to you?” the old man asks.
Otto Friedrich, Before the Deluge: A Portrait of Berlin in the
1920’s.
. . . he is unwell and suffers from his nerves, can no longer eat,
and so on.
He can hardly see through the thick lenses that fortify his eyes,
but he totters across his . . .
1920’s.
. . . sun-drenched . . .
Cosima Wagner’s Diaries (Sunday, June 6, 1869).
. . . studio, past the window that opens onto . . .
1920’s.
. . . the tall acacia . . .
Hermann Hesse, Excerpt from September (poem set to music
by Richard Strauss).
. . . trees in the garden, and then he bends over a wooden cabinet
that contains his treasures.
1920’s.
The sun, keeping its promise without deception,
Had penetrated early in the morning,
Tracing a saffron streak obliquely
From the window curtains to the divan.
Boris Pasternak, Dr. Zhivago (Excerpt from August).
We speak of the impressionists of music; what a lot of nonsense I
must have talked! I ended up boiling hot, babbling incoherently
and scarlet with embarrassment.
Now he bends over a shallow drawer, grunts and fumbles through
a sheaf of . . .
1920’s.
. . . manuscript pages, . . .
Truddi Chase, When Rabbit Howls.
. . . and finally pulls forth . . .
1920’s.
. . . the leaves . . .
Henry David Thoreau, Walden.
. . . he wants:
1920’s.
. . . . the first pencilled pages . . .
Cosima Wagner’s Diaries (Monday, November 25, 1878).
. . . of the Parsifal score.
Cosima Wagner’s Diaries (Wednesday, January 12, 1881)
(editors’ note).
I sat down and looked through the pages.
Rich Cohen, Lake Effect.
"As the curtain rises on the forest of Monsalvat,"
. . . Wagner explains . . .
Marilyn Davis, In Search of Song.
. . . "the knight Gurnemanz rouses two young Esquires who are
standing guard with him before the castle. Morning has dawned
and Amfortas, their ailing leader, will soon be passing on his way
to his bath. . . ."
Racked with physical and emotional anguish, . . .
Monica Crowley, Nixon in Winter.
. . . like the Fisher King of myth, . . .
Rich Cohen, Lake Effect.
. . . Amfortas . . .
Richard Wagner, Parsifal.
. . . was torn between wanting to share the pain and wanting to
isolate himself.
Ah, ah, comme c’est melancolique, tout ca!
Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus.
" . . . Gurnemanz' reverie on the causes of Amfortas' suffering is
interrupted by the arrival of the wildly disheveled Kundry, . . .
. . . on horseback, . . .
Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id.
. . . with balsam from Arabia for Amfortas' bath. Gurnemanz
explains that no one knows of Kundry's origin, that Titurel,
father of Amfortas, found her lying rigid in the forest when he
selected this spot for the home of the Grail and its knights. She
comes and goes, apparently under a curse. . . ."
And so on.
At this point . . .
Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist.
. . . I stood up . . .
. . . for a moment . . .
Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol.
. . . at which he took my hands and thrust me back in my
armchair.
Pierre Auguste-Renoir, Letter to an Unknown Friend.
prenez pitie de moi
Cosima Wagner’s Diaries (Thursday, September 29, 1881).
. . . Maestro, . . .
Enough of talking.
Arrigo Boito, Falstaff.
What’s that?
Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Der Rosenkavalier.
We’re simply wasting daylight.
Arrigo Boito, Falstaff.
Ah!—Ah!
Let us try, then, not to synopsize the narrative but to reduce the
story to its essentials. In the temple of Monsalvat, Amfortas and
his knights have undertaken to guard the Holy Grail and the
Holy Spear that once stabbed Christ in the side. Outside, in a
rival fortress, lives the wicked magician Klingsor, who once tried
to become a knight of the Grail but was rejected as unworthy.
Desperate to quell his raging passions, Klingsor even castrated
himself, but was still rebuffed.
The New Grove Book of Operas.
Ach! Oh! And a gutteral sound in German.
Klingsor used Kundry to seduce Amfortas. Klingsor thus gained
possession of the sacred spear and inflicted an incurable wound
on Amfortas. This . . .
. . . telltale wound . . .
. . . can be healed only by a youth of complete innocence, namely
Parsifal.
“That’s the way it happens, exactly as it’s written.”
Truddi Chase, When Rabbit Howls.
I see . . .
. . . Frau Cosima . . .
Arthur Rubinstein, My Young Years.
. . . with a lithe fellow who must be a young Wagner.
—and, yes . . .
Henry James, The Ambassadors.
. . . the lady might have said “I should like a portrait of my
husband.”
Henry James, The Real Thing.
At 12 o’clock a sitting for the French painter Renoir, . . .
Cosima Wagner’s Diaries (Sunday, January 15, 1882).
. . . in her diary Cosima spelled his name “Renouard.”
Cosima Wagner’s Diaries (editors’ note).
This artist, belonging to the Impressionists, who paint everything
bright and in full sunlight, amuses R. with his excitement and his
many grimaces as he works . . .
How would you like it done?
“What a stupid question,” he said.
Arthur Rubinstein, My Many Years.
He paused. "How bad do I look? I'm getting myself deliberately
tired so I'll be able to sleep tonight. . . ."
I suggest full face.
Il n’ecoutait pas.
William Faulkner, Le Domaine (The Mansion in French
Translation).
“You want, of course, full resemblance.”
He says that will be fine.
He smiled with me, but only in that the closed corners of his
mouth contracted more firmly and he shut his eyes a little.
Of the very curious blue-and-pink result R. says it makes him look
like the embryo of an angel, an oyster swallowed by an epicure.
C’etait bien ca;
William Faulkner, Le Domaine (The Mansion in French
Translation).
The conversation, which lasted for about three-quarters of an
hour, seems to have consisted mostly of remarks by Wagner in
bad French and embarrassed interjections by the painter . . .
Ernest Newman, The Life of Richard Wagner.
. . . thereby consummating the Babel of confusion . . .
. . . between the two men.
Anthony Trollope, The Prime Minister.
I was pleased anyway not to have made a complete fiasco;
Then, too, . . .
Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit.
. . . I was pleased to be able to . . .
. . . preserve for future generations . . .
Photos: The Warsaw Ghetto, II.
. . . a little souvenir of that admirable head.
Later, Renoir recalled this day and . . ..
Margaret Brenman-Gibson, Clifford Odets: American
Playwright.
. . . Wagner's . . .
Bryan Magee, Aspects of Wagner.
. . . extraordinary discourse on the importance of the "the detail"
in art and in life.
Margaret Brenman-Gibson, Clifford Odets: American
Playwright.
Renoir’s pencil had traced the contours of that marvelous head
with its bulging brow; but the flesh drooped, the narrow eyes
could barely focus, and the expression . . .
Robert Gutman, Richard Wagner: The Man, His Mind, His
Music.
. . . an expression of character . . .
Henry James, The Art of Fiction.
. . . was one of infinite weariness. Death looked out of the rubber
mask Wagner’s face had become.
Robert Gutman, Richard Wagner: The Man, His Mind, His
Music.
If you say you don’t see it (character in that—allons donc!), this is
exactly what the artist who has reasons of his own for thinking he
does see it undertakes to show you.
Henry James, The Art of Fiction.
On the morning of the day . . .
Adam Gopnik, The City and the Pillars: Taking a Long Walk
Home.
. . . the aging composer . . .
Paul Mitchinson, The Shostakovich Variations.
. . . sat for the painter—or, rather, fidgeted . . .
Andrew Rawnsley, Loneliness of the long-distance premier.
. . . the village, . . .
Franz Kafka, The Judgment.
Bayreuth and its surroundings—
Simon Williams, Bayreuth: Summer Pilgrimage.
. . . was as beautiful as it had ever been.
Home.
‘Wahnfried’ (Wagner’s house at Bayreuth),
Wilfrid Blunt, The Dream King: Ludwig II of Bavaria.
. . . an Italianate villa, . . .
Johns Hopkins Whiting School of Engineering, Seeking Gold in
a Baltimore Landmark.
—I call it a villa, but it was rather a large house with palatial
pretences, . . .
. . . looked splendid with its . . .
Joy Hall, Knebworth Twinning Association Newsletter.
. . . large wrought iron door that opened into a lush garden.
Edmund Engelman, Berggasse 19: Freud’s Home and Offices,
Vienna 1938.
The big doorway opened into a proportionately great hall hung
with brown. The roof was in shadow, and the windows, partially
glazed with coloured glass and partially unglazed, admitted a
tempered light.
H.G. Wells, The Time Machine.
I shall not attempt to describe that interior: but imagine a
building, say in Middlesbrough, erected to the glory of his
particular god by a Victorian millionaire, and you get the idea.
Victor Gollancz, The Ring at Bayreuth: And Some Thoughts on
Operatic Production.
Wagner had . . .
Peter Gay, Freud, Jews and Other Germans.
. . . just finished . . .
Franz Kafka. The Judgment.
. . . putting the final touches to . . .
. . . the composition sketch of Parsifal . . .
Robert W. Gutman, Richard Wagner: The Man, His Mind, His
Music.
. . . sealed it in an envelope with slow and dreamy deliberateness,
and with one elbow propped on his desk was looking out the
window at the river, the bridge, and the hills on the farther bank
with their tender . . .
. . . autumn leaves . . .
Charles Dickens, Bleak House.
. . . flaming gold, touched with some horizontal bars of purple
and crimson. Below was the valley . . .
The view from . . .
Andre Aciman, Barcelona.
. . . the window . . .
. . . on this clear sunny morning belongs to any Impressionist
painting.
Andre Aciman, Barcelona.
Bayreuth lies in a wide valley on the upper basin of the Roter
Main River. In its early years, the counts of Andechs-Meranien
gave it the protection of a fortified castle.
Darwin Porter and Danforth Prince, Frommer’s 99 Germany.
On this day . . .
. . . a day that was so quiet and still . . .
Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front.
. . . the Castle, . . .
Franz Kafka, The Castle.
. . . set in a park, full of formal as well as English-style gardens . . .
Darwin Porter and Danforth Prince, Frommer’s 99 Germany.
. . . had never seemed so gleaming and luxuriant—
Home.
. . . and Autumn, Refulgent as an oriflamme,
. . . drew . . .
Portrait of Claude Renoir Writing — Little Boy with a Pen.
. . . all eyes by its many glories.
On the neighboring shore . . .
Walt Whitman, Excerpt from Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.
. . . in the Old Town . . .
Aharon Appelfeld, The Kafka Connection: A Displaced Writer
Revisits a Haunted City of His Youth.
. . . flower vendors . . .
Angela Wibking, The Best of Barcelona.
. . . unpack autumn branches from the boxes they arrived in this
morning. “That came over the bridge?” someone asks, surprised
at the thought of . . .
Home.
. . . a farmer from the country . . .
Julian Hawthorne, The History of the U.S.: The Shot Heard
Round the World.
. . . freighting . . .
M.R. Montgomery and Louise Kennedy, An Unexpected
Pleasure: A New Thoreau Book.
. . . white and red morning glories, and . . .
Walt Whitman, Excerpt from Autumn Rivulets (There was a
child went forth).
. . . waiting patiently . . .
Home.
. . . with horse and buggy . . .
Lucy Maud Montgomery, Anne of the Island.
. . . just to bring in blossoming autumn branches. The vendor
nods.
Home.
In the afternoon R. goes walking in the garden . . .
Cosima Wagner's Diaries (Thursday, October 25, 1877).
—the leaves just beginning to fall, and the light on the leaves left
on the trees somehow making them at once golden and bright
green.
Home.
At last a good night for R., and work.
He worked lovingly at the orchestration, at times producing only
a few measures a day.
Robert W. Gutman, Richard Wagner, The Man, His Mind, and
His Music.
The joy that certain sonorities had caused him, the increase of
strength they had given him wherewith to discover others, led the
listener on too from one discovery to another, or rather it was the
creator himself who guided him, deriving, from the colours he
had just hit upon, a wild joy which gave him the strength to
discover, to fling himself upon others which they seemed to call
for, enraptured, quivering as though from the shock of an electric
spark when the sublime came spontaneously to life at the clang of
the brass, panting, intoxicated, unbridled, vertiginous, while he
painted his great musical fresco, like Michelangelo strapped to his
scaffold and from his upside-down position hurling tumultuous
brush-strokes on to the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past.
Toward the end of . . .
Gore Vidal, The Meaning of Timothy McVeigh.
. . . the previous year, . . .
Upton Sinclair, The Jungle.
. . . Richard Wagner made a visit to the southern Italian town of
Ravello where he was shown the gardens of the thousand-year-old
Villa Rufolo. "Maestro," asked the head gardener, "do not these
fantastic gardens 'neath yonder azure sky that blends in such
perfect harmony with yonder azure sea closely resemble those
fabled gardens of Klingsor where you have set so much of your
latest interminable opera, Parsifal? Is not this vision of loveliness
your inspiration for Klingsor?" Wagner muttered something in
German. "He say," said a nearby translator, "How about that?"
How about that indeed, I thought as I . . .
Gore Vidal, The Meaning of Timothy McVeigh.
. . . ink in another page he gave to me; he works, tells me
afterward that he is seizing every opportunity to conjure up a little
musical paradise, as, for example, when Amfortas is carried to the
lake.
The world of musical impressionism arose from the opera’s
wondrous orchestral textures.
Robert W. Gutman, Richard Wagner: The Man, His Mind, and
His Music.
Although his health was deteriorating, no terminal illness could
mar the satisfaction he derived from hours of productive
endeavor at his desk.
Martin Gregor-Dellin, Richard Wagner: His Life, His Work,
His Century.
Wagner, an artist who in general had built upon and summarized
the achievements of his contemporaries, was . . .
His Music.
. . . in his old age . . .
Robert Alter, Genesis: Translation and Commentary.
. . . following new paths.
His Music.
He would jokingly repeat . . . —
Edmund Engelman, Berggasse 19: Freud’s Home and Offices,
Vienna 1938.
Whoever hears will laugh at me . . .
Robert Alter, Genesis: Translation and Commentary.
. . . but I like to remind people . . .
Terry Rager, Live From . . . the Stratosphere.
Parsifal . . .
Siegfried Wagner, Erinnerungen.
. . . is not an old work of my youth but a youthful work of my old
age . . .
Conrad Susa, Music of Unseen Worlds quoting Wagner.
. . . a legacy I am proud to leave.
Isaac Stern and Chaim Potok, My First 79 Years.
Parsifal, . . .
. . . a work that was unlike anything he—or anyone else—had done
before . . .
Helen A. Cooper, Thomas Eakins The Rowing Pictures.
. . . is probably the most highly personal musical invention of
Wagner—it places the emphasis for the first time on uncertainty,
on . . .
Pierre Boulez on Parsifal, notes accompanying recording.
. . . fluctuating chromatic harmonies . . .
1920’s.
. . . on indetermination . . .
—and I tell you that . . .
Hermann Levi, Letter to His Father (Rabbi Levi of Giessen).
. . . a patient listener . . .
Nathaniel Hawthorne, Legends of the Province House: II.
Edward Randolph's Portrait.
. . . will palpably sense the distinct quality conferred by the actual
experience . . .
Leonard Shengold, Soul Murder.
. . . of delayed disclosure . . .
Alwyn Berland, Light in August: A Study in Black and White.
. . . of tonality—
Arnold Schoenberg, Style and Idea.
. . . which creates initially a sense of discontinuity.
The key to the mysteries of . . .
. . . Parsifal . . .
Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past.
. . . is found by and large in the mind of . . .
. . . the listener for whom . . .
iClassics.com, Classical Music and More.
. . . the music . . .
. . . represents a rejection of . . .
. . . diatonic . . .
George Meredith, The Egoist.
. . . immutability, an aversion to definitiveness in musical phrases
as long as they have not exhausted their potential for evolution
and renewal.
Narrative coherence is achieved . . .
. . . in Parsifal . . .
Lucy Beckett, Richard Wagner: Parsifal.
. . . by slow accretion, rather like a mosaic in which individual
pieces have limited significance but which, when placed together,
achieve an intelligible and beautiful form.
I should like to be able to announce . . .
Reports from the Past
. . . to you the reader . . .
Rabbi Elyse Winick, What Does Jewish Identity Mean to You?
—or better, future reader, since at the moment there is still not
the slightest prospect that my manuscript will ever see the light of
public day, . . .
I should like to announce that . . .
The Trial of Adolf Eichmann.
. . . this book has some underlying theme, some stout thread that
almost invisibly ties together all these diverse stories and
transforms them into a unified historical work.
I puzzled over this problem . . .
Nora Farber, Minnehaha Academy Geometry Portfolio Page.
. . . of narrative unity . . .
Kevin L. Stoehr, Home Page.
. . . for some weeks, . . .
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
. . . as if . . .
Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son.
. . . a dark inscrutable workmanship . . .
William Wordsworth, The Prelude.
. . . struggled within me to . . .
Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus.
. . . achieve coherence
Kathleen Roskos, Achieving Coherence—The Ohio Literacy
Initiative.
And so it was that after . . .
Chris Brady, A Trip to Galapagos or The Hazards of Crossing
the Line.
. . . a still winter night . . .
. . . months after this problem first became evident, . . .
University of Pennsylvania, CNS Neuronal Cytology for the
Brain and Behavior Course on Neuropathology.
. . . I awoke with the impression that some question had been put
to me, which I had been endeavoring in vain to answer in my
sleep, as what—
What unifying theme could possibly connect . . . the rituals of
Wagner's Parsifal . . . with . . .?
It was as if my inner self . . .
Maalok, Hats Off!
. . . a second self—
William Styron, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness.
. . . had become his own Sphinx; he was answering . . .
Leon Edel, The Life of Henry James.
—or attempting to answer—
SuperKids, Who Wants To Be a Millionaire Kids Edition.
. . . his own riddles.
Leon Edel, The Life of Henry James.
Aware that . . .
Grace Marmor Spruch, Did Moby Dick Break Boyle’s Law?
. . . the nature of my work . . .
Linda Fairstein, The Dead-House (author essay).
. . . provokes that question . . .
William Shakespeare, The Tempest.
. . . the question of ‘Coherence’, . . .
Chakravarthi Raghavan, Continuing Conceptual Divides at the
WTO.
. . . I wish to assert that . . .
. . . I am fond of meandering designs;
Well, what more is there to say?
Boris Pasternak, Dr. Zhivago.
To the last syllable . . .
William Shakespeare, The Tempest (Modern English Version).
. . . this book proceeds more by association than by orderly
progression, . . .
. . . though (of course) . . .
. . . some motifs recur throughout.
I suspected that . . .
Irvin D. Yalom, Love’s Executioner.
. . . Wagner either as man or artist . . .
Ernest Newman, Wagner as Man and Artist.
. . . launching out into a new world whose possibilities he was not
quite sure . . .
Humphrey Searle, The Music of Liszt.
. . . must, like I . . .
Jim Lesses, Excerpt from When I Was Younger.
. . . have found it difficult to . . .
. . . describe what happened when, half-consciously following the
thread of an idea, he made his way through the intricate
ramifications of his . . .
His Century.
. . . vast artistic design.
Anthony H. Harrison, Pre-Raphaelitism and Tractarianism.
What with all the disasters, feuds, and emotional outbursts, the
grotesque and irksome incidents that pressured him, he
sometimes marveled at his ability to produce anything at all.
His Century.
—Strange! How . . .
(August 19, 1865).
. . . my spirits obey . . .
. . . as I sit down . . .
. . . whole and solitary, at this miraculous loom. It is the only
thing that befits me. The world I cannot shape . . .
(August 19, 1865).
. . . through my so powerful art . . .
William Shakespeare, The Tempest (Modern English Version).
. . . I must merely forget:
(August 19, 1865).
I bring with me . . .
H. Rider Haggard, Morning Star.
. . . the fresh air of . . .
Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Richard Strauss, Arabella.
. . . my own world, . . .
Edgar Rice Burroughs, At the Earth’s Core.
. . . and that which does not belong to . . .
. . . Me, . . .
Oscar Hammerstein II and Richard Rodgers, The Sound of
Music (Excerpt from Do-Re-Mi).
. . . does not exist for me.
Mark Twain, The Mysterious Stranger.
That is why I can begin to live only when I am able to exalt
something glorious . . .
. . . alternately soaring and descending, . . .
. . . eagle-like . . .
. . . above me
Be it for good or ill, . . .
Richard Wagner, Gotterdammerung.
. . . I will assert that . . .
. . . life, powers, passions, all I see in other beings, . . .
George Gordon, Lord Byron, Manfred.
. . . must simply serve . . .
Bruce J. Evensen, Review of John Taylor, Body Horror:
Photojournalism, Catastrophe and War.
. . . as inspiration . . .
Joseph Conrad, Chance.
. . . for my work.
Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery.
Will assert as well that . . .
. . . in me . . .
Charles Dickens, Tale of Two Cities.
. . . as in him, . . .
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations.
. . . the accent lies on the conjunction of poet and musician, as a
pure musician I would not be of much significance.
Cosima Wagner’s Diaries (Monday, August 16, 1869).
Symbols, especially words as symbols, fascinated . . .
Robert W. Gutman, Richard Wagner: The Man, His Mind and
His Music.
. . . Wagner the librettist . . .
Barry Millington, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and
Musicians.
. . . and the power of his poetry often rests upon allusion latent in
the phrase; much is covert and much implied. Often he sets up a
stage situation whose externals mime one tale while his sinewy
and punning diction unfolds another.
It is tempting to believe that in . . .

His Music.
. . . Parsifal . . .
. . . Wagner wished, at least subconsciously, to hint at . . .
His Music.
. . . a Joseph identification
K.R. Eissler, Talent and Genius.
—that is to say, . . .
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams.
. . . a secret affinity with . . .
Jack Kroll, Ladies and Gentlemen—Lenny Bruce.
. . . the son of one of the . . .
Steve Wulf, A Triumph of Will.
. . . Hebrew Patriarchs.
Harold Bloom, The Book of J.
It is difficult to imagine that . . .
David E. Lipman, Me’am Loez on VaYayshev: Joseph and His
Brothers.
. . . the Wagner who was one day to make even his Kundry speak
in puns was completely unaware of the implications of . . .
His Music.
. . . his occasional allusions to . . .
Benjamin B. Warfield, The Person of Christ According to The
New Testament.
. . . the Joseph legend of the Old Testament . . .
Web Gallery of Art, Joseph and the Wife of Puthiphar.
. . . while he was occupied with . . .
Louis Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews.
. . . the composition of Parsifal.
Kate Douglas Wiggin, Bluebeard.
Wait: I’ll show you.
Italo Calvino, If on a winter’s night a traveler.
I am . . .
. . . in possession of papers, of priceless manuscripts, which . . .
. . . Richard Wagner . . .
. . . bequeathed to me, and to no one else, in a will written during
a period of health or, if I may not put it that way, during a period
of comparative and legal sanity, papers I shall use to document
my presentation—
Yes. This. Here.
James Joyce, Ulysses.
Wednesday, January 9
Cosima Wagner’s Diaries (Wednesday, January 9, 1878).
And it might have been today, I remember it so clearly. We were
in the dining room of our house . . .
Italo Calvino, The Baron in the Trees.
. . . and Richard said to me . . .
Lincoln Center Theater Platform Series, A Conversation with
Spalding Gray.
"I'm now making my two Pharaohs, . . .
Cosima Wagner’s Diaries (Wednesday, January 9, 1878).
. . . i.e., Amfortas and Titurel . . .
Cosima Wagner’s Diaries (editors’ note).
. . . sing their duet.”
Cosima Wagner's Diaries (Wednesday, January 9, 1878).
Ha, ha!—
“How easy it would be if I could
Cosima Wagner’s Diaries (Tuesday, July 18, 1871).
. . . could . . .
(editor’s note).
. . . just write arias and duets!”
Yes!—
Yes, that’s what he said.
Mark Squires, E-Zine on Wine.
And he said:
Genesis.
Now everything has to be a little musical portrait, but it must not
interrupt the flow—
He then added:
—I’d like to see anybody else do that!
We laughed.
It was one of those rare days that winter when it did not snow,
and the sun, usually hidden by low, thick gray storm clouds,
seemed particularly brilliant.
Skating for the children, R.'s cold weather has arrived! Last night
we dreamed more or less the same thing—that I was arranging
concerts . . .
Cosima Wagner’s Diaries (Thursday, January 10, 1878).
. . . of chamber music . . .
. . . for somebody and R. was jealous. We laugh . . .
. . . at the way in which [our] . . .
Donald P. Spence, Narrative Truth and Historical Truth:
Meaning and Interpretation in Psychoanalysis.
. . . thoughts converged.
At lunch he announces . . .
. . . half jokingly (which is to say half seriously):
Elmer Bendiner, A Time For Angels: The Tragicomic History
of the League of Nations.
"My Pharaohs are locked in battle," and tells me I will be amazed
to see what he has done with the words "zu diesem Amt
verdammt zu sein" ["to be condemned to this office"].
Cosima Wagner's Diaries (Thursday, January 10, 1878).
Beyond the windows, lay the wintry garden, the flower-beds
covered with straw, the grottoes snowed under, the little temples
forlorn.
Thomas Mann, Tristan.
With R. and the children on the ice.
Cosima Wagner's Diaries (Thursday, January 10, 1878).
Amused, . . .
Joseph Conrad, Chance.
. . . Richard talks about . . .
Adam Phillips, The Beast in the Nursery.
. . . the hiss of skaters on the ice . . .
Michael Crichton, Rising Sun.
. . . to-ing and fro-ing
Adam Phillips, The Beast in the Nursery.
The temperatures, well below freezing, kept most people inside,
sheltered from the brutal cold and the white veil of winter that
waited just outside their doors.
Richard goes to town . . .
Quentin Tarantino, From Dusk Till Dawn.
. . . in his carriage . . .
. . . to fetch me, and I return home with him. Two lean cows
remind him of Pharaoh's dream, which keeps him occupied the
whole way home.
Cosima Wagner's Diaries (Monday, January 14, 1878).
All around him lay coldness—
. . . the difficult air of the iced mountain’s top,
. . . and yet . . .
‘No matter,’ he had said, . . .
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams.
No matter, since . . .
. . . he himself creates his own milieu.
K.R. Eissler, Talent and Genius quoting Viktor Tausk.
Wholly artificially, like a tropical plant in the winter garden, I
must shut myself off against the atmosphere of reality, there is no
other way.
(August 19, 1865).
I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and
self-contained,
I stand and look at them long and long.
Walt Whitman, Song of Myself.
I can only cocoon myself, weave for you . . .
(August 19, 1865).
. . . you, my reader, my . . .
Darren Bleuel on Darren Bleuel (A sort-of inspirational essay).
. . . conjectural reader, . . .
Britannica.com, Review of Jorge Hernandez Martin, Readers &
Labyrinths:
The Detective Fiction in Borges, Bustos, Donecq, & Eco.
Brother-animal. You.
K.R. Eissler, Talent and Genius, quoting The Freud Journal of
Lou Andreas-Salome.
Oh—to work!!—
(September 9, 1865).
Ay, . . .
. . . to my task!—
Now does my project gather to a head:
The second act shows . . .
John Tasker Howard, The World's Great Operas.
. . . the cloud-piercing towers of . . .
Kurt Loder, At Ground Zero: My Neighborhood Vanished
(Rolling Stone 9.11.01).
Klingsor’s magic castle.—
The hour’s now come; the very minute bids . . .
. . . Klingsor . . .
Hermann Hesse, Klingsor’s Last Summer.
. . . work . . .
. . . his magic arts to rouse Kundry from her deep sleep . . .
. . . and then order her . . .
Gareth Patterson, “The Killing Fields.”
. . . to seduce Parsifal. Kundry protests, but Klingsor mocks her
for her remorse and insists that she overcome the power of this
youth whom he recognizes as the "Guileless Fool" who may break
his power. The castle sinks in the darkness and . . .
. . . lo and behold, . . .
Andrew Levin, Mysteries of the Cligeva: And Other Stunners
From The Upstart Science of Female Desire.
. . . the scene changes to a luxuriant garden.
Here, vivid blooms give way to muted greens and grays and
beiges, in spiky, droopy and phantasmagoric shapes. Towering
needle-leafed tree ferns shade the curving gravel walks with
greenish gloom.
Edwin Kiester, Jr., 'Not your average backyard gardener'.
Perhaps the mysteries of evolution and the riddles of life that so
puzzle us are contained in the green of the earth, among the trees
and the flowers . . .
Parsifal enters and is surrounded by enticing flower girls . . .
. . . just like the Arabian Nights, . . .
Peter Hellman, Coming Up Harlem: A Revival of the Fabled
New York Community Inspires Pride and Controversy quoting
Duke Ellington.
. . . all running to and fro for flowers, and laughingly flinging
them . . .
. . . upon him until he is . . .
Shaykh Abu ‘Ali Nabeel al-Awadhi, A Party in Paradise and a
Party in Hell.
. . . almost smothered with blossom.
Their existence is as limited as that of women in a harem and
they look like rare hothouse plants.
Julius Meier-Graefe, Auguste Renoir in Renoir: A Retrospective
(Nicholas Wadley, ed.).
Kundry appears as a woman of bewitching beauty.
Never forthcoming about her personal life, she was "both
flamboyant and mysterious . . ."
Edwin Kiester, Jr., 'Not your average backyard gardener'.
At the time, she seemed . . .
Robert Coles, Anna Freud: The Dream of Psychoanalysis.
. . . to live in two different worlds, one in which sexuality hardly
existed and one in which it was all too frighteningly present.
Joseph Fernando, The Exceptions: Structural and Dynamic
Aspects.
She puts her arms around Parsifal and kisses his lips. For the first
time Parsifal knows passion, but he also feels what seems to be
the pain of Amfortas' wound. He realizes how Amfortas was
tempted to sin in these same gardens. Pushing Kundry aside he
denounces her.
I saw her look at me with a mixture of admiration and distaste.
She was not accustomed to being spoken to in this manner. I
knew that. She was looking at me and possibly wondering who I
was, what I really wanted, what I intended to do . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
The withholding of any explanation as to his background, his
motivations, or his intentions, coupled with the lucidity and
immediacy of . . .
. . . his denunciation . . .
Mark Twain, The Mysterious Stranger.
. . . is powerful, . . .
. . . explosive . . .
Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent.
. . . even terrifying.
I realized that if I followed my desires, I would be eternally
damned.
David E. Lipman, Me’Am Loez on VaYashev: Joseph and His
Brothers.
Like some of her plants, Madame—she never answered to any
other name—could be quite prickly.
Edwin Kiester, Jr., ‘Not your average backyard gardener.’
Kundry calls to Klingsor. The magician hurls the Sacred Spear at
Parsifal. Instead of hitting Parsifal, the Sacred Spear hangs in mid-
air over his head. Parsifal grasps it and makes the sign of the
cross. Kundry falls unconscious and the castle sinks in ruins.
Without doubt, what is musically the most precious and artful
moment comes with . . .
. . . the whole tower . . .
. . . the castle and the garden. . .
Nipponia, Okayama Castle.
. . . vanishing suddenly . . .
Tim Friend, Maya Lived as Urban Farmers.
. . . astonishingly, impossibly—gone.
Kurt Loder, At Ground Zero: My Neighborhood Vanished
(Rolling Stone 9.11.01).
The themes of innocence and purity, sexual indulgence and
suffering, remorse and sexual renunciation are treated
in Parsifal with a subtle intensity and depth of compassion that
probe deeply into the unconscious and make the opera in some
ways the most visionary of all Wagner’s works.
The New Encyclopaedia Britannica (“Richard Wagner,” by
Deryck V. Cooke and others).
Parsifal provides another glaring association of the maternal with
the erotic. Describing [Parsifal's mother's] love for her son,
Kundry asks, "Then, when her frenzied arm embraced you, were
you perchance afraid of her kisses?" Nowhere else in pre-Freudian
literature can one find such an overt reference to sexuality in
early childhood.
His Century.
He has been much criticized for this strongly personal treatment
of a religious subject, which mingles the concepts of sacred and
profane love; but in the light of later explorations in the field of
psychology his insight into the relationship between religious and
sexual experience seems merely in advance of its time.
The New Encyclopaedia Britannica (“Richard Wagner,” by
Deryck V. Cooke and others).
It had always been my dream to be at a Wagner Festival in
Bayreuth and especially to see Parsifal, which at that time could be
seen only at this Wagnerian Mecca.
A scene I hadn’t thought of in decades entered my mind:
Irvin D. Yalom, Love’s Executioner.
. . . Levi in Parsifal.
Harold C. Schonberg, The Great Conductors.
Hermann Levi was the most accomplished conductor in the
German Empire who was also a Jew. A cultivated and versatile
musician, he was born at Giessen in 1839, the son of a rabbi
whom he greatly cherished and often astounded.
His phenomenal career ignored the legal fact of his status, and
after his swift elevation it no longer came in question.
Thomas Mann, Joseph and His Brothers.
Friend and adviser of Richard Wagner, he conducted the first
performance of Parsifal at Bayreuth in 1882.
The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia.
Performing at Bayreuth ought to have been a particularly
gratifying experience for a conductor who has dedicated as much
time to Wagner's music as I have, but in the end it caused me
endless suffering.
Sir Georg Solti, Memoirs.
Hermann Levi was then staying at Wahnfried . . .
. . . the palatial villa Richard Wagner built for his family . . .
Nora London, Aria for George.
. . . participating in the final preparations for Parsifal. He had
taken a walk into Bayreuth . . .
. . . the walk would be good for his health. He enjoyed the well-
kept gardens that led to the theater . . .
Nora London, Aria for George.
. . . and returned to Wahnfried to have lunch with the Wagner
family, but arrived at the house a little late.
We were all waiting for him to appear at table, for he had sent
word to us to begin lunch without him.
Paul von Joukowsky, Letter to Malwida von Meysenbug
Describing the Death of Wagner.
I was seated on the other side of . . .
. . . Nietzsche’s sister Elisabeth and Lou von Salome
His Century.
I remember . . .
. . . the ladies . . .
Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint.
. . . chatting in lowered voices . . .
Gustave Flaubert, Voyage en Egypte.
—going on and on and on
Alex Comfort, The New Joy of Sex: A Gourmet Guide to
Lovemaking for the Nineties.
What were they talking about?
Franz Kafka, The Trial.
Pure gossip, I thought.
In any event, Levi . . .
. . . the poor conductor, . . .
Cosima Wagner’s Diaries (Wednesday, June 29, 1881).
When he returned . . .
Louis Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews.
Wagner stood "in the hall, . . .
. . . at the door . . .
Cosima Wagner's Diaries (Tuesday, December 23, 1879).
. . . watch in hand, and . . .
. . . looking at the timepiece . . .
. . . said in a highly ceremonious, serious tone, . . .
. . . as if prearranged, . . .
Arnold Schoenberg, Survivor from Warsaw.
'You are ten minutes late! Unpunctuality is half infidelity! He
who keeps others waiting is an egotist.'"
I must emphasize the fact that there was not a trace of personal
jocularity or clownishness in his pose, manner, or behaviour. On
the contrary, there was complete seriousness, an absence of any
humorous appeal . . .
Thomas Mann, Mario and The Magician.
This little lecture over, Wagner in his normal voice asked Levi to
go . . .
. . . up the stairs . . .
. . . to his room and read a letter he had put on his table. Levi, as
usual, obeyed. What he read was an anonymous denunciation
from Munich entreating Wagner "to keep his work pure, and not
allow a Jew to conduct it." In addition, the letter threw
"suspicions" on Levi's "character" and his "relations to
Wahnfried."
We know that these suspicions were the accusation that

Hermann Levi was having an affair with Cosima Wagner. The
charge was absurd, but talk of love affairs touched the Wagners at
a sensitive spot.
Did Wagner for a moment look at both his wife, almost a quarter
of a century his junior, and her special friend, the handsome,
soulful Jew, two years younger, and, remembering her vagabond
nocturnal habits at Villa Pellet, wonder whether he had finally
been cast as . . .
Robert W. Gutman, Richard Wagner: The Man, His Mind, and
His Music.
. . . Poor Potiphar!
Thomas Mann, Joseph and His Brothers.
When Levi sat silent at lunch, "profoundly upset and indignant,"
Wagner, whose sadism was evidently not yet sated, asked him why
he was being so quiet. Levi . . .
. . . holding out the letter . . .
. . . replied that he could not understand why Wagner had not
simply torn the libel up without showing it to him. Wagner's
response was shrewd but is suspect: "If I had shown the letter to
no one, had I destroyed it, perhaps something of it would have
rankled within me. But now I can assure you that not the slightest
memory will remain with me." Abreaction, we know, is a
satisfying form of discharge; abreaction at the expense of another
must have been doubly satisfying.
How did all this affect me? Any extensive comment would be
superfluous and banal; I was, to put it tersely, enveloped in an
aura of hatred and dismay.
Peter Gay, My German Question: Growing Up in Nazi Berlin.
It is, of course, rather more an observer’s than a participant’s tale
Lucy Beckett, Richard Wagner: Parsifal.
And yet the fact remains, . . .
Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.
. . . I had the misfortune to witness such a scene.
Paradoxically, my baggage of atrocious memories became a
wealth, a seed . . .
Primo Levi, The Periodic Table.
. . . a motivation to create . . .
Albert Rothenberg, Creativity and Madness.
. . . and it seemed . . .
William Faulkner, Light in August (Chapter 19).
. . . it seemed to me that, by writing, I was growing like a plant.
Primo Levi, The Periodic Table.

Homospatial Thinking - Significant Moments 9-11

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Significant Moments: Before the Deluge -- In Memory of 9/10

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