Myth of Arrival

To be fascinated with the myth of Icarus is to be fascinated with executions. Perhaps your mythology text book does not call it such but that is what it is. An execution. The myth goes like this:

Icarus was imprisoned, with his father, in a tower on Crete, by the king Minos. Daedalus contrived to make his escape from the prison … so he set to work to fabricate wings for himself and his young son … when all was prepared for flight, he said, "Icarus, my son, I charge you to keep at a moderate height, for if you fly too low the damp will clog your wings, and if too high the heat will melt them. Keep near me and you will be safe" … the boy, exulting in his career, began to leave the guidance of his companion and soar upward as if to reach heaven. The nearness of the blazing sun softened the wax which held the feathers together, and they came off. He fluttered with his arms, but no feathers remained to hold the air. While his mouth uttered cries to his father, it was submerged in the blue waters of the sea, which thenceforth was called by his name. His father cried, "Icarus, Icarus, where are you?" At last he saw the feathers floating on the water, and bitterly lamenting his own arts. (from Wikipedia)

I began thinking of this because my friend, Erin, wrote in her blog, The Exquisite Corpse, the following:

Fact (yes, we'll call it that): Icarus fell to earth immediately following what was probably the most terrifying & rapturous moments of his life — his body alight, suspended by wings his father fashioned for him, fleeing Minos's mounting rage, the waters deep & swimming below. And then he fell.

But the question still remains, "who killed Icarus?" The only answer for the Greeks in a world where the world-father rules all is Zeus. Zeus sentences the boy to die for his hubris. Zeus makes the sun melt his wings and he plummets from a great height into the sea. That is the myth as I understand it.

However, what artists continually paint is not Icarus in flight but his fall. In other words there is an acute fascination with the moments leading up to his death. It is like someone painting the moments leading up to a hanging, or a lynching. Marc Chagall shows this. So does Brugel and Matisse. A body is about to die and we are watching it. There is something profoundly disturbing about that. And yet no one turns their eyes away.

It occurs to me that the myth of Icarus parallels that of the fall of the rebel angles in Paradise Lost after Lucifer and his band of warriors are defeated. A burning streak across the sky. A terrible shame we cannot look away from. Why is that? Why are we fascinated with punishment so? And still a body is about to die and we are watching it again and again and again.

Hubris and compulsion. Give me
motive. Give me compulsion; that
terrible knowing. That rising up
to fall. That rising to fall. Do you
not hear me? To rise, our dull bodies
at rest, in flight,

flecks of spittle, fear flecking
the eyes. Never once a why.
We do not look at the grace
of rising, the joy of escape,
surging and pushing and
pull of terrible wings. Never

a why only the disgrace. The shame
to be cast down. Lucifer's long burning
arch and Icarus screaming. What
was that? A curse? A name? "father"?
"gods"? "i"? — We love all those aflame.

A blur of motion at the window
that lures us to watch. We call
all sacrifices beautiful; we dumb
voyeurs. Watching as the boy,
the morning star, spins round and
round and round. We love
those few seconds before
impact. We call them all
beautiful.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 20th, 2006 at 10:27 am and is filed under Scantily Clad Info Dump, Original Poetry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.