(Login OPERAtionally Undefined tackles the same agenda as Cwm Idwal or Echoes of Science Opening Its Head - that of the conflict between subjective feelings and objective facts as rival claims to truth, resolving it through a third way, that of ethical values. In Login, Wotan (the flawed god in Wagner’s Ring opera, his one eye symbolising (not in the opera but for me) extraordinary effort devoted to one aim, the search for enlightenment (compare Matthew 6:22, AV)) interrogates, and is interrogated by, an unsentimental demon in a computer, named ‘Mime’ (after the Nibelung dwarf),who is the embodiment of our greed and desire for control, and whom he brings to life to resolve the issue of which of them is to dominate in the 21st century. Mime puts the reasonable case that mythic belief today is irrelevant and anachronistic¹ (despite the paradox of having being brought into existence by a mythical being), a view which Wotan naturally tries to challenge. The poem , I feel, is over-long and does not make a sufficiently rational case for poetic subjectivity and myth-making in the modern age. I suppose that one is moved by inner truth because that is the way one is. I have decided to reproduce only the first third here, and let Living the Truth express the same idea more directly, without resorting to whimsy.)
Login OPERAtionally Undefined (abridged)
(With apologies to Richard Wagner)
(The Scene: a biogeochemistry lab in a university somewhere in North Wales. It is Sunday afternoon, and a thunderstorm is raging. A flash of lightning breaks through the cloud and strikes the computer connections, causing one of the computers to bleep and sputter into life. In its light a stranger is visible, a sombre man of dignified bearing, who wears a cloak and a large, wide-brimmed hat, pulled down over his missing eye. He is using a spear for a staff. The apparition removes his hat and lays his spear on a bench. The self-styled Wanderer then advances slowly towards the working computer and sits down in front of it.).
WANDERER
So you, and not Erda, are to be the oracle of the 21st century! ¹
Here am I, a weary traveller, seeking rest at your hearth -
The warm, glowing hearth, that is, of your memory chip -
And your first greeting is ‘Log in’! Hardly welcoming!
It sounds like an order to gather firewood. But log in I shall...
(He types in the code name, ‘Wotan’)
¹ Wolfgang Giegerich, a post-Jungian psychoanalyst, agrees that myth may well be dead. Dolores Brien ends her critique of his essay "The End of Meaning and the Birth of Man" echoing the view, felt by many, that “we have already arrived at the post-human stage in our history.” Wagner has, of course, written the music for this: Gotterdämmerung, the finale, Brűnn-
hilde’s Immolation. The clip ends, poignantly or fatefully, on Brűnnhilde’s moving line, Rühe (R.I.P.), O Gott...