Salome on the Zürisee: An Essay on Desire in Five Parts (Part 2)

II The Violent Boredom of Possession

“Every dream must be awoken from – even fulfilled dreams.” (Sam Peckinpah)

If you know the story of Salome – King Herod the Great, having imprisoned John the Baptist, libidinously bids his pubescing step-daughter to dance for him, which she does, because she wants the head of John the Baptist in return, which she is granted, then kisses, as she desired him but could not get him, chaste, to bend alive – you will know that the only awakening for Salome from her dream is death. Her death returns, Greekly, Shakespearianly, order to the world. Her sex is punished, her brazenness is publicly condemned, her singular perversion is destroyed. 

(In 2017 in America, Herod would be the one punished, for desiring an underage teenager; he would be castrated, tarred and twittered, and Salome would triumphantly adorn herself with pierces and tats.)

The ending of the opera, then, nontraditional as it may seem, is not the matter. There is a final, appropriately German-sounding line, along what Wagner or Mahler might have composed, that “das Geheimnis der Liebe ist größer als das Geheimnis des Todes.” A dead soprano, something consummated, something metaphysical. Nothing out of the ordinary there.

Only, the awakening, death, comes merely as an afterthought. (“Man töte dieses Weib!”, five seconds before curtain.) The issue is the dream itself, Salome’s dream of kissing a severed head, lovingly, but that love is returned only in the form of bitter blood. John the Baptist maligned Salome when alive, with Taliban-force maledictions, but offers her deliverance in Christ. The deliverance she takes instead is an impossible one, as it is not for the taking, only granting: love, via sex. Having loved this opera since I myself was seventeen, immediately acceding to it and gradually accessing it, I am torn between my revulsion to its seemingly arbitrary luridness and my respect for two of the piece’s most prominent implications:

1. Chastity, noble, is not a priori ennobling. Eros, the sour fermentation, is sullyingly divine.

2. In our age, desire arises as much out of saturated boredom as out of any real yearning. This desire is avaricious and nihilistic, as it is an attempt to take when one already has, destroying both the senses and Life in the process.

Part 3: The Arrangement of Desire