Monday, September 27, 2010

Thoughts on Icarus


We've all flown too close to the sun. Pushed beyond intellect and above reason to grab that wave, slide a rail, make a peak--whatever your wax-lined wings soar towards.

Maybe yours come apart differently--accelerator, drink, joint, line, bottle, fling--to each their own undoing, not spirit soaring, but crashing hard to the sea.

Some get lucky. Maybe the wings held, kept the boundary. A gift, earned or chanced to somehow follow where Blake found, "the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom."

What do we do with that life returned? What did we find or learn? How did it change us? How is the world different or we different in it? What will we do or say or live that Icarus couldn't?

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

It is only when we've learned all the rules that we're asked to leave the game.

Michael Valliant said...

Well said, sir. Yeah, me? Never been so good with rules...

kdada said...

Wow, first I am curious what prompts this...second, I love this, third. Third! Icarus always pissed me off! That is my tragic flaw, for sure, blindness--righteous pride anyway. Reliance on the inner swing til it crosses--it always crosses-- Blake's line in to the threshold of mastery, of the only true significance (or so it's easy to convince the self, blind to the self...that this is the only significance, damn pride again) and there it all gets blurred: who's really in control now? Ha Mike I love that our trajectory, our inner poetics, turns so on the same spindle. This is the fall, no? These thoughts anyway for me, right on time. Thanks thanks thank you!

Michael Valliant said...

Kelly, love your post here and on The Impulse Itself. I replied a bit there. The Icarus story has always resurfaced for me, but I've never written it down, just mulled it around in my head. The exhilaration of the singed wings but the fear of going too far and falling. And so restraint. And finding and walking that line that allows both views, without going over. To somehow inhabit both places. And that's not really the same, but maybe enough? Fu$%ing Icarus ;)