So this week, for whatever reason, I’ve been really blocked in my attempts to get my classwork done. I’m taking English 101 and we’re working on the story of Daedalus and Icarus. Daedalus wants to escape this island he’s stuck on, so he builds some wings for him and his son, and they bail.

Icarus loses his head and forgets what his dad tells him about where to fly, and he soars up into the sky- too close to the sun. His wings melt and he plummets to his death. The end.

This is, forgive the language, a pretty fucking depressing story. Don’t strive, don’t try to reach for the skies, because if you do the gods (or plain old circumstances) will smite thee and you’ll suffer horribly.

Naturally enough, I’m taking the story wrong, I suppose. MLG told me that it’s about the joy Icarus feels while he’s soaring up high, and how we strive and try to better ourselves and stuff like that. But the point of what happens is that the guy DIES. Splat.

Falling to your death has got to be one of the more risky ways to go, I’d think- if your brain doesn’t overload on the fear and adrenaline, then you’re pretty much conscious and with it all the way down, and you get to think about your impending doom. Blech.

I’ve personally bled myself unconscious. I had a nasty ulcer some years ago; when the final bit of acid bored its hole through my stomach wall, it so happened that it was directly over an artery, and the blood just blasted out into my stomach. Of course, it rapidly filled THAT up, and so then it went to work filling up my intestines… well, I’ll spare you the gory details, but all that blood came out of me and I wound up lying on the floor of a stall in the men’s room at a nightclub.

Thankfully, someone had seen me just a minute or three earlier passing out and collapsing (then staggering back up to my feet) and called 911, so the paramedics came and hauled me off to the hospital. By the time I got there the bleeding had stopped, although they figure I lost 35 to 40 percent of my blood in the meanwhile. I was in the ICU overnight and got out of the hospital a couple of days later.

Anyway, I’m just rambling. (This is one of those time-wasting blog entries- I should have warned you from the beginning.) The point is that bleeding out is actually not that scary; the same thing that’s making you pass out (lack of blood) also fuzzes up your brain enough that you don’t really get scared or freak out. At least that’s how it was for me. I’ll take that over falling to my death any day.

Back to the original topic. For some reason, for whatever reason, I can’t get into writing about this. I did the exercises that the teacher wanted us to do prior to banging out our essay, but I just don’t give a shit about Icarus. The essay’s assignment is this:

Finally, in a written essay, tell me what your take is on Daedalus and Icarus. This is your position on anything you have come to understand or believe as the result of being exposed to this material. Could be about parenting, being a kid, the attitude of others, dying, arrogance, obedience . . . . . Anything. But it must be grounded in the material.

You will notice by now that not all the material is in agreement. So some will help you becaue you agree with it, and some you will have to ignore.

Don’t simply retell the story, or explain the story, or tell me it has several interesting things to say about the human condition. Give me an opinion. You’ve been waiting all quarter, now’s the time to have one.

(1) tell me what it is, then (2) show how it makes sense given the material.

This is graded.

Yawn. My opinion is that Icarus was a moron and should have listened to his dad. The End.

I don’t see any of the traditional great metaphors that this story is supposed to Make You Think About. I don’t think it’s about the glory of soaring through the air, or how it’s beautiful to go out doing something you love, or someone’s desperation (Daedalus’s) driving him to do something rash. I think it’s a story about a guy who has some homemade wings, flies too close to the sun, they melt, he dies. The End.

As you might be able to guess, this does not fit well in an essay form.

The exercises were to paraphrase some poems about Icarus’s death- or, more properly, some poems that were about the reaction of people that were in a painting that depicted a piece of the story of Icarus’s death. Yawn. Here’s the painting:

(click for full size)

Here’s the poems about this image (did you find Icarus yet? He’s the legs splashing into the water, in the lower right of the painting, by the boat)…

Landscape With The Fall of Icarus
- William Carlos Williams
According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring

a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry

of the year was
awake tingling
near

the edge of the sea
concerned
with itself

sweating in the sun
that melted
the wings’ wax

unsignificantly
off the coast
there was

a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning

Musee 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 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 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.

So, basically, I’m supposed to write an essay based on my position may have changed based on having been exposed to a couple of poems that were based on a painting that was based on a story about an old Greek myth about a guy who flies too close to the sun, melts his wings, and falls to his death.

Thing is this- my position hasn’t changed a whit about this. I’d heard the story of Icarus before, and my take on it has always been pretty much the same- guy didn’t listen, lost his head, flew too close to the sun, melted wings, died. Stupidity kills, evolution is true, have a nice day and kiddies don’t strive for the sky because you’ll die miserably when you fail.

And thus, writing an essay is pretty hard, because it IS an exercise in mental masturbation. (Although the careful reader will note that I’m in the midst what is, essentially, a big long essay whining about how little I like writing essays. You could cut the irony with a knife!)

Sigh.

Anyway, I wrote this post in the hopes that it’d get something going, and instead I just want to go for a run with Indiana the Wonder Dog. Now, him, I could write an essay about:

How cute is HE?