But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone

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.

and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

In this country, in this world, there are a lot of lonely, unfulfilled people. We breed fear in the American suburbs and isolate ourselves from our neighbors--both next-door and across international boundaries--and in our cities, we don’t know the faces on either side of our apartments’ walls.

Now that winter has settled-in and the remains of the hollow, frenetic holiday season have long dissipated, all we’re left with is a cold, hard, loneliness. And as a possible antidote we have... Valentine’s Day.

Like the holiday season, it, too, has largely lost its meaning and luster.

When I look towards lovey-dovey day this year, I have a new association: a dark, unfamiliar city; a clanky, janky bus; a language I can (still) neither speak nor read; and a steamy huo guo restaurant where I shared hot pot with Stella, Tracy, Yolanda, and Kelly on my first full day in Qingdao. Everything was foreign then, but the warmth offered to me by that food and those faces over the following months is enough to keep me full on nights that now seem even darker.

So for all of you who are feeling cold--inside and out--I wish I could take you for hot pot. It does wonders. But instead, some written love from e. e. cummings will have to do.

When I read this poem, I think I interpret it differently than the author intended. Because when I think about "love," I don’t think about one time or one place or one person. I imagine every face--however unlikely, however far away--that I can’t go a day without thinking about, even now. I carry all of you(in my heart).

i carry your heart with me

--e.e. cummings

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in

my heart)i am never without it(anywhere

i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done

by only me is your doing,my darling)

i fear

no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want

no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)

and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant

and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows

(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud

and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows

higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)

and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)