For man lost his in the process of his own cultivation.
MIME
(rapt in thought)
Having ploughed up the forest, it is true he has lost his marbles¹,
Having nowhere to keep his nymphs! Now the myths he garbles,
Mutilating the unicorn, to pass it off as a horse
Or a sideways oryx! He re-writes history with the sauce
Of sun-ripened science, prepared from retrospective impudence
Against bygone myth-makers, pilloried by the facts, his defence
Of cultivated standards! ² Backwoodsmen with their feeling for history
And anti-roads protestors, guardians of the beauty and mystery
Of nature, are new psychic doomsters: the Norns’* foreboding
Has become their green manifesto in a world eroding
The intuitionists’ topsoil to desert - the pragmatists’ foothold
Where millions enact daily their arid rituals in gold
And woodmen once eyed the trees, standing alone.³
But which is the harbinger of cognitive doom, the crone,
Urth, who interweaves with hindsight the web of life,
Or progressive Skuld, who upgrades the present? The past life
Is a pitfall for thinking: reaction was the narcotic the dwarf brewed
To rob his adopted, Siegfried, of his head; unsubdued,
He embraced his future. Reactionaries are lovers of the mythical -
Which can be no threat to me, for its truth is uncritical.
(The computer repeats the last words meditatively)
The mythical is no threat to me, for its truth is uncritical.
(smirking, but still wrapt in thought)
Little does he know I’m the dwarf, Alberich’s brother,
Me-mah, not Mime, scientist’s alter ego; and another
Ring there is, besides Alberich’s snatched by Wotan:
¹ Man is not mad, but mislaid his nymphs as a child might lose his marbles. Forest and tree nymphs were mortal but enjoyed the blessing of longevity because their environment seemed permanent to the people who invented them.
³ standing alone, i.e. without any environmental campaigners to protect them. Deforestation can lead to erosion of the soul through loss of imaginative and intuitive sensibility. Man makes a mystique of what he is in awe of, and when we hark back to the dawn of the Germanic myths we recognise the nature of the sterile, man-impacted space in which we live now.