Whither Icarus?
Armageddon 2: Armageddon (Part 1)
It’s one of the 20th century’s most celebrated sentences.
About suffering they were never wrong, / The Old Masters.
So begins Wystan Hugh Auden’s “Musee des Beaux Arts.”
I’ll give you this, poet. You’ve got my attention.
So far I’m expecting the poem will be about medieval depictions of a… bleeding Jesus, or a grieving Mary… maybe Pietà, your classic Mary-grieving-the-bleeding-Jesus?
Auden continues:
About suffering they were never wrong, / The Old Masters: how well they understood / Its human position…
So, more of a vale of tears kinda deal. Lemme guess—Boschian hellscape?
Maybe I’m suffering because I’m impatient. Better keep reading.
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.
Kk, doesn’t sound like a hellscape.
“Someone else is walking dully along”—more of a Kitty Genovese situation, I guess?
We’ve got the skeleton army actively going to town on the alive people—meanwhile, bottom right corner, your roommate and her boyfriend are full-on PDA, good vibes only, mind if I play “Wonderwall” again, babe?
I give up. What’ll it be, Auden? For understanding suffering, who’s your avatar unsurpassed?
In Brueghel’s Icarus, for instance.
Bingo!
Time out. Two questions.
WHAT suffering?
Where the dick is Icarus?
You’ve got some explaining to do, Auden.
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 splash?—wait omg
GOT HIM
The sun shone / As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green / Water1
Omg
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.
Bro, I can tell this one is a thinker. A “sleeper hit” if you will.
Let’s put a pin in waterslide Icarus. As my friend said of a New Yorker cartoon in 2007: I’m gonna take a nap before I try laughing at this.
Meanwhile, please tell me there’s a poem that’s a bit more… heavy metal? Death and destruction? David Wallace-Wells circa 2017?
…
… !!
TO BE CONTINUED. SEE YOU NEXT ON FRIDAY, DEAR FRIENDS.
“into the green / Water”—as the line breaks, his body breaks the surface.
Um ok ... loved the revelation of those little legs in the water... didn't see that coming!!