Framed-Art Tour, Exhibit 16

The Fall of Icarus, Peter Brueghel The Elder, Musée de Bruxelles, Belgium. Gift & Thrift acquisition.

It looks, almost, like he’s playing his violin, fiddling while Rome burns. Like he’s clutching the bow, sliding it across the strings, the neck of the instrument tucked neatly near his chin.

He’s only turning the earth, drudging on behind his plow. Plough.

Same as the fellow with his dog and sheep, same as the fisherman, he totally missed the splash.

All we get, ourselves, is a hint: the legs in the water, there on the right. A boy flew too close to the sun. His wings melted, the wings his father made him out of feathers and wax. One can only imagine the father’s pain, Daedalus’s terrible regret.

I’ve moved the picture here and there, from wall to wall. I’ve even hung a poem alongside.

Musée des Beaux Arts
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 Brueghel’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.

It’s not stayed there—the poem. It got relegated to the attic. But I brought it down the other day. I still love it. Not the dreadful martyrdom part—not that. Just, the poet’s unvarnished lines, their piercing truth.

 

My tumble, I was only tripping across the church basement, for once with sensible shoes on, not risky. The universe just rose up and slammed me. Mom, too—my husband’s mom. Her falls, she’d not been preening in her wings, giddily soaring. She’d been going about her ordinary business.

She prayed to Jesus somebody’d see her, that time she lay in the street. Somebody please see her before a truck’s tires rolled over her. But me on the floor? My pale legs flailing, like the boy’s? I’d not have minded, one bit, those bystander men turning dully away, scratching their behinds, not noticing.