Island Possibilities

My life, my life, my very old
My first badly closed off wish
My first affirmed love
You had to come back
You had to come back
I had to know how life could be better

When our bodies played with their happiness
And endlessly came together and were reborn
And endlessly came together and were reborn
To enter full independence
I know the trembling of being
The hesitation to disappear
The sun which strikes the edge
And the love where everything is easy
Where all is given in the moment

There exists in these times the possibility of an island
There exists in these times the possibility of an island
My life, my life, my very old
My first badly closed off wish
My first affirmed love
You had to come back
You had to come back
I had to know how life could be better

How life can be better
When our bodies played with their happiness
And endlessly came together and were reborn
To enter full independence
I know the trembling of being
The hesitation to disappear
The sun which strikes the edge
And the love where everything is easy
Where all is given in the moment

There exists in these times the possibility of an island
There exists in these times the possibility of an island

The only "fully realized" sexual relationship in the entire Ring is the incestuous link of Siegmund and Sieglinde – all other amorous links are a fake or go terribly awry. Take Siegfried and his Tante Brunhilde (Wotan, her father, is also his grandfather): the time-gap between Siegfried and The Twilight can be considered a time of sexual bliss, a time when, off screen, intense love-making goes on all the night. However, an indeniable hollowness pertains to Siegfried's and Brunhilde's ecstatically-triumphant duo which concludes Siegfried: this duo's love-passion is clearly contrived, a pale shadow of the intensity of Siegmund's and Sieglinde's passionate embrace that concludes the Act I of Walküre. And, magnificent as it is, the great awakening of the couple in the Scene 2 of the Prelude to The Twilight is the beginning of the road to gradual disintegration – however, this ultimate "travel with my aunt" enables Brunhilde to gain the highest knowledge: the outcome of the last events is "that a women becomes knowing." One should not be afraid to ask here a stupid and direct question: which is this knowledge? What, exactly, does she get to know? The lines in which she is defined as "knowing" give a very precise reason: "Mich musste der Reinste verraten, dass wissend wurde ein Weib." (The purest had to betray me, so that a woman became knowing.) It is this betrayal that makes her all-knowing: "All things, all things, all I know now; all to me is revealed." In what precise way did Siegfried's betrayal make her knowing?

The answer is provided by a so-called motif of "renunciation," arguably the most important leitmotif in the entire tetralogy.

- Slavoj Zizek, "Brunhilde's Act"