Lessons learned from Icarus

26 June 2006

I found myself thinking the other day about Breughel’s painting, ‘Landscape with the Fall of Icarus’. It could have been the ducks that caused this train of thought. Last winter, four wild ducks arrived, set up camp around the dam and, in the spring, produced half a dozen ducklings. The whole entourage then took up foraging residence for the summer, until some hidden signal triggered their departure and they were gone as abruptly as they’d arrived.

Well, this year, just as the frosts are getting seriously down to their secret ministry in the creaking cold moonlit nights, the ducks have returned, with new recruits. Fifteen of them ritually take over the lawn and garden each morning for a long, leisurely breakfast in the slowly warming sun. Absurdly, we find ourselves detouring and tiptoeing so as not to disturb them. Who owns this place, anyway? Haven’t these ducks ever heard of the ANZ bank? But if, inadvertently, we do scare them – a banging door, an injudiciously sudden appearance – they lift off, all fifteen of them, in perfect unison. As if radio controlled, they swoop in formation through a couple of wide arcs that bring them down to the dam where, webbed feet splayed like the baffle plates on a Boeing’s wings, they glide onto the no doubt freezing water. The landing is not actually visible from the house, but it’s audible – a succession of splashes as the squadron arrives home.

And that might have been what reminded me of Breughel. I was thinking about the ducks and their sploshing drop into the dam while I was doing the ironing. (Don’t ask. Sometimes even the best organised guard is lowered: it only takes a moment’s lapse of concentration, the fortress is breached and the defenders over-run with jobs, chores and tasks). The point is that, in Breughel’s painting, the fall of Icarus – a sensational event caused by his flying too close to the sun and melting the wax with which his father, Daedalus, had glued his wings – takes place in spring and nobody pays much attention. The farmer goes on ploughing, the shepherd watches his sheep, a fisherman peers into the depths, an elegant ship plunges on under its ballooning sails. Off to the side, perhaps in the corner of the eye, Icarus hits the water and his legs flail comically before he sinks forever.

ARTS AND CULTURE

Lessons learned from Icarus

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