Amazon 2 / Myth
| This is the song of Toucan, the bird of the Negro (as well as elsewhere) whose plumage is bright but who has an ungainly huge bill, an evolutionary mystery to ornithologists if you believe that the design of animals always has survival value. Toucans can be various colors but this singer is red, black, and white. What the bird sings, like all wise mythic birds, is the perpetual suffering of the human race which is also its glory. (The soprano bird in Wagner's SIEGFRIED tells Siegfried how to find the Nibelung's buried treasure and later about finding a bride surrounded by fire, and I may allude to that, but I see this Toucan as more of a kind of mournful/detached prophet of the love and trials to come for Essella and Aaron.) |