Can you find Icharus's two little legs?
Musee des Beaux Arts (1940)--W.H. Auden
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
After a horrible night of struggling with my laptop—streaky screen, corrupted files, RAM grinding to a halt, it is on its last threads and me with it—I am finally updating today with a month of backlogged entries. These are all things that I have been thinking about and working on for weeks, even though I have been silent here. Chock it up to my compulsive editing, if you wish.Also, according to Megan K, April is poetry month! (I can’t help but wonder, is there a month for everything? Support Your Local Florist Month? Shoelace Appreciation Month?) All the more reason to get back into this…
In the last few days I have realized that I hate when people talk about someone “battling” cancer or anorexia or depression or alcoholism. There are no broadswords or crossbows; no armored warriors on horseback; no flags flapping in the breeze, bearing the crest of a red dragon or white lion. Instead, there are a lot of quiet moments, wasted sunny days, and friends and family members who don’t quite know what to do or say. And as for everyone else, they are on the “expensive delicate ship,” sailing calmly by.
I have always been captivated by the motif of Icharus—the golden boy who dared to fly towards the sun and then came crashing back to earth in a mess of hot wax and feathers, his father’s warning ringing in his ears. There is this fine balance for our parents, and for us: They want us to reach farther and achieve more than they could, but they are also wary; they don’t want us to fall from grace and have to fish us out from the depths of the green sea. Ever since I came back from The East—both the East Coast and the Far East—I have felt not like Icharus fallen, but like Icharus grounded. I remember saying to Emily last month, it’s like someone has clipped our wings, and she heartily agreed. Yesterday, at Baja Fresh, I couldn’t talk to one of the employees in Spanish, even though I knew I could’ve communicated to her what I wanted to say and what she didn’t understand in English. Last summer, I wouldn’t have batted an eye at trying to order dinner or “chatting” with a taxi driver in my minimal, nonexistent Chinese. Fake it ‘til you make it or, as Jules wisely said, “just screw it and do it!”
What I like about this poem—and about Breugel’s painting—is that it illustrates the simple, mad indifference in this world. (Maybe it is particularly rampant here in the Midwest, as Michigan-expert Charlie Baxter muses in Saul & Patsy. Indifference is something to bask in when you’re exhausted from the excitement of the world and something to despise when you’re craving that excitement.) No one much cares, at any given moment, what’s happening in the world or what anyone else is really doing or if they’re falling out of the sky. A mild, cloudy Tuesday is just as good a day for tragedy as it is for epiphany.
