Status Updates From Death-Devoted Heart: Sex an...

the artistic purpose of Wagner’s drama is to show that they are not fantastic at all, but rather the exaltation and vindication of a tendency that is already there in all of us, buried like a seed in the most mundane human love, unable to bud in the trampled world of daily life but flowering at last in art, which rescues from the marketplace of compromise this “most beautiful of my dreams,” as Wagner described it.

"Here we are not in the vicinity of an ordinary, repeatable, marketplace transaction of the kind that disgusted Gottfried. We are encountering the erotic in its highest form, as a bond that is completely independent of the external, public, and objective side of human life, and which binds soul to suffering soul in eternal union."