Walkure on the Bayreuth broadcast for the Sunday late afternoon/evening.  Rheingold was in the Starbucks across from the national parliament, which went from daytime to nighttime lighting at the finish, which was quite powerful.  But for the first day of the festival, the rooms adjacent to the busy road.  Sufficient for the wanderer.

In this listening, I'm seeing Wotan as a sort of protestant figure.  (Much to do with the reading of the past year, perhaps.)  Building Valhalla against the ones who have gained spiritual power by renouncing earthly love.  Walhall seems a more contingent proposition -- not a universal heaven, but a collection of the noble souls that Wotan's Valkyries are able to capture (St. Michael figures, perhaps) after Wotan had intentionally made the mortals' lives difficult and quarrelsome.  Built by the human giants, not by the Gods.  And he fears that the armies of the ones who have renounced love might even reach these souls that have been taken there and convert them. 

And the ending with the Valkyrie who disobeyed him, even though entirely a creature of his will -- perhaps reckoning the cost of reformation, and attempting to ensure that its spirit will reach the future?

More things in heaven and earth, Horatio.  Particularly earth. 

 Bit of a break in the heat.   Rooms much more liveable.  Still the busy road, but that's only noise.  The absence of fumes and heat (presumably a change in wind with the weather) makes much more of a difference.  The cost is much higher than what the locals pay in rent, but absent the caravanserai mentality, there would be no market whatsoever, an nowhere to travel to.  The caravan continues.

The fundamentals are good -- wood floors, open space, double-glazed windows, but the clothesline is an old synthetic yarn that leaves tiny splinters in the clothing, the air conditioner was literally packed with dry and oily dirt (a half inch on the filter), and there were other electrical/plumbing things.  In addition, there wasn't an open laundry room, so it's been a few weeks of hand-washing.  It's being run as an inexpensive rental, so this apparently the mentality of an inexpensive rental in this part of the world.  Which is odd.  There's no reason that it couldn't be run shipshape without doubling the rent, but that's apparently the distinction.  Hopefully, the month of exhaust fumes from the road won't cause any lingering cloudiness.

Oddly, I came here from the Jedi Council city, which had its own difficulties at times (Yoda's swamp, perhaps), and just before I left, I was watching Tarkovski's Solaris one night after dinner, and was struck by the soundtrack on the driving scene after the rural home at the beginning.  Listening only to the sound, I was struck by how nightmarish it was.   Just the constant rush of traffic, but...

 

 The church is a ladder supply warehouse, not a ladder machine.

In a moment of cynicism, I wonder if the world (multiplied tenfold in the last hundred years) has thought through what might happen if hundreds of millions of people in its most powerful country just start lying as hard as they can -- which seems to be the way things are going.  Our mediated ways of understanding the way things are in the world won't necessarily pick up on this, but the context of everyday experience will change, and unrest will grow.  And the mechanisms that have been developed to suppress unrest have grown quite potent, albeit quietly, over the last fifty years or so.  

Ultimately, you do have to be a good person, if this civilization thing is going to work.  ("You," not "one.")  You don't have to accept the prevailing notion of the good, but you do need to formulate your own idea of the good, and especially in that case of exception, hold to it with all your being.  The real danger is in the (now apparently increasing) thought that neither the common notion of the good, nor private notions of the good, nor the notion of private notions of the good can claim authority.  In a crisis, of course, the wagons will circle around the first, but precisely because that will happen at the expense of the second and the third, we, quite wisely, won't entirely believe it.