At My Own Dawn
At my own dawn, others were in the midst of their day, and some were at the end of theirs. No, I’m not referring to those periods of light and dark, nor to those 15 degrees of longitude by which we determine the hours and track of the Sun’s apparent journey across the dome of sky. Rather, I’m thinking about the dawn of my life, occurring as it did in the midst of a world war. While I transitioned from unaware to semi-self-aware being, others were fully aware of their ending, some 50 million in the process of dying because of three men, one in Germany, one in Italy, and one in Japan, their evil spreading suffering like a swarm of locusts across a parched Earth. And you? Your dawn also coincided with either big or small war and undeniably synchronously with suffering no matter what your year of birth.
I think now, as I have thought before, that no better set of lines than those of W. H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts” captures the odd nature of simultaneous indifference and concern that permeates our species, and no better image does the same than that attributed to Pieter Bruegel the Elder, the famous Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, the inspiration for Auden and for two other poets of note, plus film makers and novelists.* Auden’s work gets directly to the point: “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….” What is the “it”? Suffering, of course. And there I was, an infant indifferent to the world beyond my mother’s arms, unaware that around the globe there were those displaced, injured, and killed in war, a major battle occurring between the Germans and Russians on the very day of my birth, for example, and others from many countries wounded and dying on other battlefields. Their suffering meant nothing to me because I was unaware.
In Bruegel’s painting, Icarus falls to the sea while a farmer tills the ground, as Auden writes, probably unaware of the fall until he hears a splash behind him, maybe catching a glimpse of legs as the boy enters the sea. And as people on a nearby ship look, they see “Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky.” A curious spectacle that elicits no empathy. Life goes on for one and many just at the moment it ends for another and others.
When I’m in the truck running some errand, I frequently tune to the satellite station that carries old radio programs. At the beginning or end of each program, the announcer, Greg Bell, notes the year of the production, many such years occurring during WWII. In an era before TVs invaded American homes and people listened in the evenings to radio shows, there were those during the war who starred as comedians, vocalists, and actors, all in the business of entertaining the radio audience who ate, opened windows, or walked dully along, as Auden writes. For them life went on more or less normally, if such a “normal” life is possible, while others of their age suffered the misfortunes of war.
And, of course, nothing has changed in that regard, even in a time of twenty-first century pandemics like H1N1 and COVID-19 and the numerous hot and cold wars that nations and factions within nations continue to fight. The world is largely composed of Bruegel’s farmers who of necessity tend their gardens and have little time to spend looking at people falling from the sky. But can we blame them? Can we blame ourselves for not paying attention? Our world has more than seven billion people spread over nearly 150 million square kilometers of land: That’s just too many people and too big a geography for specific concerns. So, any of us could argue that caring for, paying attention to, or empathizing with the many who suffer is just an impossible task. We are, after all, finite beings, not ubiquitous gods. Many an Icarus will fall without our knowing, and in most instances, even when we see the fall, we’ll not be able to do anything to stop the plummeting.
What good is a discussion about uncared for suffering? Is it just to depress, to sadden? No, rather it’s a call to care when you discover the need for it and not to take your empathy’s limitations as a failure. You and I will always be unaware of individual sufferers in distant lands, but for those close by, people adjacent to the land we till, just by lifting our heads from our tilling, that is, from our daily concerns, we might become aware and be able to help.
Icarus fell. Many Icaruses fall all the time. There’s a rain of Icaruses, and as in all precipitation events, we can’t stop all the drops that fall. We can’t comprehend the deaths of half of Europe during the pandemic of the fourteenth century, the deaths of millions during WWI or II, or the democides perpetrated by Communist dictators in the Soviet Union or in China. We can, however, intercept a few raindrops, a few Icaruses, on their way down, possibly softening their landing before they disappear beneath the surf.
As you sit with laptop or friends at some favorite coffee shop’s outdoor tables take a moment to look to the sky. Is there a falling Icarus?
Notes:
*William Carlos Williams, Michael Hamburger, Nicholas Roeg, Eric Steele, Frank Ceruzzi, and in music, the band Titus Andronicus and composer Brian Ferneyhough. There is some question that Bruegel might not be the actual artist of the well-known painting, but rather the painter of a lost original that another Flemish painter copied in his style or used as inspiration.
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.
At my own dawn, others were in the midst of their day, and some were at the end of theirs. No, I’m not referring to those periods of light and dark, nor to those 15 degrees of longitude by which we determine the hours and track of the Sun’s apparent journey across the dome of sky. Rather, I’m thinking about the dawn of my life, occurring as it did in the midst of a world war. While I transitioned from unaware to semi-self-aware being, others were fully aware of their ending, some 50 million in the process of dying because of three men, one in Germany, one in Italy, and one in Japan, their evil spreading suffering like a swarm of locusts across a parched Earth. And you? Your dawn also coincided with either big or small war and undeniably synchronously with suffering no matter what your year of birth.
I think now, as I have thought before, that no better set of lines than those of W. H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts” captures the odd nature of simultaneous indifference and concern that permeates our species, and no better image does the same than that attributed to Pieter Bruegel the Elder, the famous Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, the inspiration for Auden and for two other poets of note, plus film makers and novelists.* Auden’s work gets directly to the point: “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….” What is the “it”? Suffering, of course. And there I was, an infant indifferent to the world beyond my mother’s arms, unaware that around the globe there were those displaced, injured, and killed in war, a major battle occurring between the Germans and Russians on the very day of my birth, for example, and others from many countries wounded and dying on other battlefields. Their suffering meant nothing to me because I was unaware.
In Bruegel’s painting, Icarus falls to the sea while a farmer tills the ground, as Auden writes, probably unaware of the fall until he hears a splash behind him, maybe catching a glimpse of legs as the boy enters the sea. And as people on a nearby ship look, they see “Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky.” A curious spectacle that elicits no empathy. Life goes on for one and many just at the moment it ends for another and others.
When I’m in the truck running some errand, I frequently tune to the satellite station that carries old radio programs. At the beginning or end of each program, the announcer, Greg Bell, notes the year of the production, many such years occurring during WWII. In an era before TVs invaded American homes and people listened in the evenings to radio shows, there were those during the war who starred as comedians, vocalists, and actors, all in the business of entertaining the radio audience who ate, opened windows, or walked dully along, as Auden writes. For them life went on more or less normally, if such a “normal” life is possible, while others of their age suffered the misfortunes of war.
And, of course, nothing has changed in that regard, even in a time of twenty-first century pandemics like H1N1 and COVID-19 and the numerous hot and cold wars that nations and factions within nations continue to fight. The world is largely composed of Bruegel’s farmers who of necessity tend their gardens and have little time to spend looking at people falling from the sky. But can we blame them? Can we blame ourselves for not paying attention? Our world has more than seven billion people spread over nearly 150 million square kilometers of land: That’s just too many people and too big a geography for specific concerns. So, any of us could argue that caring for, paying attention to, or empathizing with the many who suffer is just an impossible task. We are, after all, finite beings, not ubiquitous gods. Many an Icarus will fall without our knowing, and in most instances, even when we see the fall, we’ll not be able to do anything to stop the plummeting.
What good is a discussion about uncared for suffering? Is it just to depress, to sadden? No, rather it’s a call to care when you discover the need for it and not to take your empathy’s limitations as a failure. You and I will always be unaware of individual sufferers in distant lands, but for those close by, people adjacent to the land we till, just by lifting our heads from our tilling, that is, from our daily concerns, we might become aware and be able to help.
Icarus fell. Many Icaruses fall all the time. There’s a rain of Icaruses, and as in all precipitation events, we can’t stop all the drops that fall. We can’t comprehend the deaths of half of Europe during the pandemic of the fourteenth century, the deaths of millions during WWI or II, or the democides perpetrated by Communist dictators in the Soviet Union or in China. We can, however, intercept a few raindrops, a few Icaruses, on their way down, possibly softening their landing before they disappear beneath the surf.
As you sit with laptop or friends at some favorite coffee shop’s outdoor tables take a moment to look to the sky. Is there a falling Icarus?
Notes:
*William Carlos Williams, Michael Hamburger, Nicholas Roeg, Eric Steele, Frank Ceruzzi, and in music, the band Titus Andronicus and composer Brian Ferneyhough. There is some question that Bruegel might not be the actual artist of the well-known painting, but rather the painter of a lost original that another Flemish painter copied in his style or used as inspiration.
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.
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