Near the end of a bitter autumn, Siegmund is peering into the pond, watching his reflection quiver in between two large stones. This image of himself is especially clear because the water is deep. It is calm now, but soon rain will make its pockmarks in it. He can feel it in the dampening, metallic air. Just beyond the frame of his face is his body, covered with stripes of puckering wounds, hard-earned cuts from desperately trying to find this clearing, this pond, this spartan source of nourishment - small fish and water that tastes like spent bark. The whole day has been one of bleak exertion, of spending everything in exchange for very little, for he still needs to fish and it is getting dark soon.
He rubs his face, watches his large, deep-set eyes reemerge from behind his fingers. The black water feels endless and vast. Around him, everything drifting across its tinkling maw forms a landscape of unnatural stasis. He imagines himself crawling into it, slowly submerging his face into the darkness, right between the two stones, nose, mouth, ears all plugged with loud silence. It would be so easy, he thinks. He would hold his breath until it dissipated naturally in a sigh, like a rabbit’s after the snap of its neck. He imagines the current carrying his long hair downstream until it catches in the branches, and as it does, he lets it drag him under until his body is made elegant by its apparent lifelessness.
The void pulls him down beyond breath and light, beneath earth and water, down into the other world. There, in his hunger, he envisions himself emerging into surroundings almost identical to these, forest, river, two stones trading tremors between them except the colors of this world will be brighter, more lurid, accompanied by different birdsong. There he will gasp for air, spasmodic lungs emptying the water back into the water. There he will comb his long— longer — hair back with his slender fingers, will feel the different, denser, nearer-to-the-ground weight of his body. He will look into the water rippling around his wide, soft hips, and in it he will recognize himself finally and ecstatically as Sieglinde.
The Birds