Being fascinated by flight, I've alway been interested in the story of Icarus. For those that don't recall, Ovid tells us that Daedalus fashioned wings for himself and his son Icarus out of wax and feathers so that they might escape the island of Crete where they were imprisoned. Allen Mandelbaum in his excellent translation of The Metamorphosis recounts the story:
"...Though Minos bars escape
by land or waves," he said, "I still can take
the sky - there lies my path. Though he owns all,
he does not own the air!" At once he starts to
work on unknown arts, to alter nature...
Having completed the wings he presents them to his son and warns him not to fly too low lest the sea wet his feathers, and not to fly to high lest the heat of the sun melt the wax that held the feathers together. Now I'd always heard that Icarus' pride caused him to disregard his father's teaching yet this seems to be an apocryphal addition. Ovid makes no mention of pride, instead he describes him doing what any man or woman, having just discovered the joys of flight might do:
The boy had now begun to delight
in his audacity; he left his guide
and fascinated by the open sky,
flew higher; and the scorching sun was close;
the fragrant wax that bound his wings grew soft,
then melted...
I always took this to be a tragic end to our dreams of flight, but recently while enjoying Jack Gilbert's most excellent book The Dance Most of All, I came accros this poem that revolutionized my understanding of that myth. I'll let Gilbert do his work:
Failing and Flying
Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It's the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
Like being there by that summer ocean
on the other side of the island while
love was fading out of her, the stars
burning so extravagantly those nights that
anyone could tell you they would never last.
Every morning she was asleep in my bed
like a visitation, the gentleness in her
like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
Each afternoon I watched her coming back
through the hot stony field after swimming,
the sea light behind her and the huge sky
on the other side of that. Listened to her
while we ate lunch. How can they say
the marriage failed? Like the people who
came back from Provence (when it was Provence)
and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.
I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but just coming to the end of his triumph.
I've named this blog "Icarus Also Flew" not only so that we might remember that triumph as such, but in that same spirit that leads artists to attempt the monumental - often failing spectacularly, but also sometimes soaring to great heights.
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