The 'Icari'

If I’m to fall,
Would you be there to applaud?
Or would you hide behind them all…

There's a painting hanging somewhere by an artist whose name I don't remember, but of which W.C. Williams wrote a poem.

"Landscape, With the Fall of Icarus."

Spring time. A perfect blue sky with friendly white clouds, and boats moored in the gulf of a placid, inviting sea. A farmer tends to his greening field, a shepherd to his livestock.

And off in the periphery of that perfect day, barely noticeable on first or second glance breaking the tepid surface of that inviting water is half the body of the mythical Icarus, his legs flailing wildly, desperately.

"insignificantly
off the coast
there was

a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning,"

…are the poem's final lines.

I think Williams saw it the same way I do: The death plunge of this hopeful, innovative young man went largely unnoticed, taking a backseat to everything else.

In seeking to break a family curse and escape from the labyrinth on the island of Crete that imprisons both he and his father before him, Icarus, an articulate and wistful young man, constructs large wings from feathers and wax with the intention of soaring through the ceiling.

He is free, or very close to it. High in the sky he tastes the crisp sea air, and soars through the updrafts, hair on end, through clouds. Tasting the exhilaration of those heights for the first time, who wouldn’t yearn to fly higher? His father warns him not to, but Icarus ascends higher and higher, his destination, a place only gods and monsters have clearance: the golden sun…

…and he gets too close. The sun's rays melt the wax holding the feathers together. He endeavors to fly too high and the earth's limitations impose themselves, sending Icarus spiraling down to a watery grave.

I speak in metaphors. A lot. Sometimes I worry what I'm trying to say gets lost in these lofty metaphors, and my audience along with it.

Robert Frost once said of his craft that poets should begin in obscurity and end in some form of wisdom; all winding paths converging on one clear endpoint. I believe this applies to many things. It’s how I express myself. It’s how I like to read and in turn how I myself like to write.

So, with that in mind, if you're still with me, maybe you'll be willing to read a bit further. (If you haven't given up on my entropic blog of late, for that matter...)

One of Buddhism's primary, if not its ONE primary concept is mindfulness, which manifests itself in many forms. Mindfulness of the suffering of others, of their struggles, failures and tragedies is one sublet that is lost on a lot of people. MOST people.

Icarus probably struggled there in the water for twenty minutes while his shoulders and legs cramped up; while his voice grew hoarse from crying out for help, and lungs burned filling slowly with saltwater.

Fishermen probably passed him on occasion. Swimmers waded by until it was no longer possible to ignore the limp, face down body. He was an imposition floating there, undetectable until caught in the gaze of some other artist surveying the hills.

Was Icarus punished for being arrogant--For not understanding his limitations? Who is to say what his limitations really are anyway? Was he wrong for defying everyone, for not adhering to their rules, or BELIEVING in their view of what he was and wasn't?

I guess right now, at this very moment, I'm worried about becoming Icarus, wanting so much to break through this barrier in which I'm interred, arms stretched out towards this light that I'd been chasing only to fall short. To fall hard. To be burned.

I’ve said it before in another post, it’s as though our generational predecessors failed to ensure more than just social security and oil stores, but our dreams, and a proper landscape with which to weave them in.

I think there are many like Icarus out there…A generation of…Icaruses? Or would it be Icari?—trying to blaze a bright trail for themselves- they do it alone, on makeshift wings, and on borrowed time shooting for heights once only imagined, while struggling to keep their heads above difficult things.

Anxiety, depression and other party favors in that grab bag of genetic predispositions, made worse by an increasingly alienating world are weights that overbear our buoyancy. Exhausted, we paddle furiously rather than float--rather than glide just above the earth, we trudge through it.

Some days they're more weighty than others. Some days my wingspan stretches from my upper back, to my shoulder blades, down my arms and across the updrafts. Other days I look and see only feathers hewn together with wax.

There's more I want to say, though I'm not entirely comfortable yet. Maybe I've been repeating myself. I'll explore these things in greater detail in future posts, which should come more frequently, now that I'm not working on anything for a while.

Some days, It's just very hard to fly.