And finally, in the following extract Wagner describes the power of the human mind as the cause of fear and the reason for the primacy of the self-preservation instinct as a motive for human thought and action:
“At lunch R. told the story of a woman who threw her children to the wolves; I observed that a mother dog would have sacrificed herself first, and R. says, ‘Yes, because she has no reasoning power.’ “ [1142W-{12/17/82} CD Vol. II, p. 975]
Having described the various though related punishments that the Ring curse will mete out to all owners except Alberich himself (because Alberich, unlike the gods, doesn’t set himself up for failure by reaching for the impossible), Alberich has bid Wotan and Loge adieu with the following salvo (accompanied by #45): the lord of the Ring shall remain the Ring’s slave until Alberich holds it again. And he runs off after casting his final insult at the gods: “And so in direst need (“Hoechster Noth”) the Nibelung blesses his Ring!”
Alberich has just introduced a verbal motif in “Hoechster Noth.” I describe it as a verbal motif because it will be repeated several more times, ironically, by Wotan’s proxy the Waelsung hero Siegmund, and even by Wotan’s daughter Bruennhilde. Also, during his confession to Bruennhilde in V.2.2 Wotan will echo Alberich when he tells Bruennhilde that “(#21) I, lord of treaties [i.e., those engraved on his spear], am now a slave to those treaties.” This points up another aspect of the existential trap nature set for man when it granted him the gift of symbolic consciousness, that the very universality of the human mind and imagination which grants man such wide sway over the world and scope for action, also compels him to acknowledge ever more irrevocably his unfreedom, the more he learns about himself and his world. He comes to seem more and more a mere product of nature rather than an active creator:
[Footnote:] “ … a man can go so far as to disclaim all credit; for ultimately my feeling, my consciousness, my very being result from premises which are situated outside the I, which are the work of nature or of God. Indeed, the deeper man looks within, the more the distinction between nature and man or I vanishes, the plainer it becomes to him that he is only consciously unconscious, a not-I that is an I. That is why man is the deepest and most complex of all beings. But man cannot understand or endure his own depth, and for that reason he splits his being into an I without a not-I, which he calls God [say Wotan, a god who renounces Nature] and a not-I without an I, which he calls nature [Erda, whose indifference is affirmed by Alberich, not Wotan].” [334F-LER: p. 313]
Having delivered that drastic message, Alberich now scuttles off to nurse his wounds and plot his eventual return to power by destroying the usurpers.
[R.4: F]
Fricka, Donner, and Froh now welcome Wotan and Loge back, while the Giants appear in the distance returning with Freia to see whether the gods will redeem her with the Nibelung’s gold. Froh, the eternal optimist, expresses the feelings of all when he sings an apostrophe to the goddess
