Essayette on “gold,” cosmic wisdom, and feces: Girard had a quite daffy-sounding solution for the “troublingly mercenary” (Woolfe) daughter/riches tradeoff. I say daffy-sounding because I must remind myself that some ideas that sound that way turn out well in the event, and I had no chance to discover that. But here’s the idea: in their wanderings, the Dutchman and his crew have accumulated not filthy lucre, but glowing rocks that represent “cosmic power, cosmic knowledge.” Girard argues that this “elevates the currency,” and thereby the trade. Apparently the glowing rocks have been distributed to all by the opera’s end, and so all are “contaminated by the cosmic light.” That only raises a few more questions for Mr. G.: Now that the currency has been elevated, it’s no longer troubling to swap Senta for it? Knock her down for a higher price? Just as a practical matter, how are the rocks distributed? Does the Dutchman and/or his crew hand them out? Does everyone take one from a big heap? Or does it happen by magic (i.e., the prop table backstage)? And really: in that final trio, Erik, Senta, and the Dutchman are each carrying his/her gleaming little disco-ball chunk of cosmic wisdom? The two crews and the villagers, too? I really wish I’d seen how this worked out. Also, why “contaminated?” Isn’t cosmic wisdom a good thing? Or is this the universal Fall from innocence into knowledge, as in Genesis? If so, what has that to do with this opera? If not daffy, this is all confusing, at least to me.

But in a sharing spirit,and to advance Girard’s wealth-enhancement ambitions a space or two along in our Regietheater boardgame: as one who came of age at the peak of the Freudian Epoch, I have been pleased, if only for old times’ sake, to see his anal-stage-of-development theory given some serious mainstream cred, thanks to the toilet-paper frenzy occasioned by the pandemic. In a New Yorker “Talk of the Town” feature, Henry Alford queries several authorities on the uses and meanings of T. P. and our primal instincts about personal cleanliness and orderliness, but places Freud right back in his old position as Ur-Authority. He notes that Freud thought that we subconsciously equate gold or money with feces—this has to do with the child emerging from the “anal stage” and instinctively transferring value from his/her feces (perceived as “gifts”) to the handling and exchanging of currency. So we have “filthy lucre” in its most literal sense. Then, in an NYT op-ed piece urging more of a bidet approach to ensuring a pristine derriere, Kate Murphy tells us that “Psychologists say it’s more than a little Freudian,” and goes on to elaborate briefly on that. And, as few seem to recall, in 1959 Norman O. Brown created quite a little furor with his Life Against Death, a sort of psychoanalytic Theory of Everything, in which this hypothesis of money as feces is prominent. (There are large implications here for Capitalism and its practices. I regret that, being away from my copies of both Brown and Freud, I can’t give you any ex cathedra quotes. But trust me, it’s all there.) So here’s a concept with far more intellectual underpinning than Girard’s: instead of elevating gold to cosmic wisdom, we debase it to its anal-stage equivalent, and barter Senta for a pile of excrement. There’s some Late-Stage critique for you! As to whether or not everyone has some by Act 3—and, perhaps, lovingly holds it up and out toward us as the apotheosis sounds, with I dare not envision what by way of a “heady mixture” of video, film, and (why not?) dance—I will have to leave to the ever-creative, though possibly alarmed, imaginations of my fellow devotees.