Essays
Late Night Thoughts on the Fall of Icarus (2004) Daniel G. Deffenbaugh
In May of 2004, graphic images coming out of Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison were daily staples of the American media diet. The photos were disturbing, to say the least. A naked man, hands behind his head, is bent over in terror as smirking soldiers hold military dogs at bay. In another snapshot, the same man is pictured only moments later lying on the ground with blood smeared across his leg, an apparent testimony to canine efficiency. Other captives were disrobed and piled on top of each other, then subjected to the shame of the camera's lens. But perhaps the most poignant image, or so it would seem to those in the Christian West with an eye for the cruciform, was a hooded figure standing on a small platform, arms outstretched, with electrodes attached to his fingertips. Soldiers. Taunts. Humiliation. Torture. "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do."
By the middle of the month, journalist Seymour M. Hersch was trying to get to the bottom of the problem, asking tough questions about the chain of command at the prison, and who knew what when. In an article published in The New Yorker, Hersch made an observation that should have given us all pause for concern, if not an opportunity for ponderous reflection. The men and women in charge at Abu Ghraib, he alleged, were not military police at all. Rather, they were civilian employees of private companies, and thus not bound by the Uniform Code of Military Justice. In other words, they were guns for hire. Men at work, just doing their job (at a salary, it should be noted, of as much a $100,000 a year — not exactly a corporal's pay).1
This, I think, raises two important questions, and these should be considered regardless of one's stance on the American presence in Iraq. First, have we now reached a point in our nation's history where our most deeply held convictions — the preservation of democracy at home and abroad, for example — have come to be entrusted to the vicissitudes of the free market? What does it say about us as a people when we outsource the protection of our most esteemed first principles? Second, and most important for our purposes here, does the treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib under the auspices of "contract employees" offer us any insight into "the way things are," or "business as usual," in our newly emerging global economy? What tricks of mind and heart have to take place before one can totally disregard the naked humanity of a person standing before him and call out the snarling dogs? What lures us so quickly into affirming along with some that these incidents were little more than "fraternity pranks"? Are episodes like this becoming more and more a part of our common formula, "all in a days work"?
I have always tried to make a practice of setting aside an hour every evening — usually right before bedtime — for reading what I want to read (as opposed to reviewing the lesson plan for the next day). Sometimes it's a novel, other times non-fiction. My text can even be music, from a Bach fugue to the most recent album by the Be Good Tanyas — anything to help me shake off the remains of the day and reflect on the world outside my tiny sphere of existence. Last May, given the events at Abu Ghraib, I was pondering visual imagery and its importance not only in recording history but in shaping it. I looked through old black-and-white photographs from the civil rights movement, another time when attack dogs figured prominently in maintaining the status quo. I leafed through stoic portraits of Nebraska homesteaders taken by the Great Plains photographer, Solomon Butcher. With the help of a handy text on the history of Western art, I was able to reach even further into the past through the works of Albert Bierstadt, Edward Hicks, Rembrandt, and a host of others. Finally, I hit upon a sixteenth-century painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1529-1569), Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.2
Perhaps it was the pastoral nature of the scene, or Bruegel's keen eye for detail, or his splendid use of color. Whatever it was, I found myself returning to this piece night after night, as if in the features of this 400-year-old painting I could discern some small insight into the nature of our present predicament.
Any cursory glance at this work — the kind of "drive-by" appraisal so often seen in art museums — offers little in the way of explanation for its title. In the foreground a farmer is consumed by the task of tilling his field, hand to plow, eyes to the earth, following the steady footsteps of his beast of burden. Beyond this a shepherd tends his flocks, or so it would seem. Actually, he is leaning against his staff and gazing off into the faraway clouds in a kind of celestial revery, in stark contrast to his yeoman neighbor. In the distance we see evidence that the wheels of industry are moving on apace: an impressive city is attended by its most prominent resource, an inland harbor on which the ships of commerce unfurl their sails. Further still, a brilliant sun sets into the ocean... or is it rising? There is enough here to keep one's attention for hours. But what about this "fall," and this Icarus? It is not apparent that any such incident has taken place — unless, of course, you know what you are looking for, and where to look for it.
Bruegel's audience knew what to look for. Indeed, it has only been in the last century that the characters and events of Greek mythology have become insignificant or unknown to many of us. Until this time, most people would have at least heard the tale of the boy, Icarus, son of Daedalus, the great artisan who, at the behest of King Minos, fashioned a magnificent labyrinth to keep the fearsome Minotaur at bay. When Daedalus fell into ill favor with the king, he became the victim of his own devices. Imprisoned in a tower, he and Icarus plotted a risky escape: from feathers and wax forged by the father's uncommon artifice, they fashioned delicate wings with which to flee their confinement. But the plan was fraught with peril, as Daedalus was quick to tell the boy:
?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.' While he gave these instructions and fitted the wings to his shoulders, the face of the father was wet with tears, and his hands trembled.3
From the tower, Daedalus and Icarus rose on their wings, and as they flew, "the ploughman stopped his work to gaze, and the shepherd leaned on his staff and watched them, astonished at the sight, and thinking they were gods who could cleave the air."4.
But since when have sons heeded the advice of their fathers? And what child, if given the proper chance, would ever dream of flying too low? The tragic conclusion of the narrative is already present in the father's admonition. Few of us are surprised to learn that Icarus eventually flies too close to the sun, melting his wings. He plummets to the ocean to an untimely death. His grieving father is then left with only his uncommon skill for comfort, the very cunning and craft that were responsible for his beloved son's demise. Today we can thank the Greeks for many things, but a happy ending to a good story is not one of them.
Tales of the gods and the god-like have been both a comfort and curiosity for men and women throughout the centuries. We do a disservice to the meaning and power of myths when we assume that they are simply fanciful narratives about events that never happened. We confuse them with tall tales or amusing fables. But myths are more than this. They are very compelling stories about events that seem perpetually to happen, and therein lies their truth. No one has to tell us that Icarus is going to mess up. We feel it in our bones. We know it, because in many ways Icarus's story is our story too. And this is why Greek mythology has captivated the Western imagination for more than 2,000 years: we get the sense that the gods, far from dwelling in some Olympian obscurity, are very much like us. Their questions are our questions, and their shortcomings our own. And if this is the case, do we really need to look very far to gain some special insight into the nature of the transcendent, the realm of the immortals? The gods, in all their tragic complexity, still deign to dwell right here among us. So we live in a world where we can expect the sacred to rise up to meet us, face to face. We work in a world where eruptions of the spirit give the ploughman pause for reflection, and the shepherd an occasion for wonder. Such is the solace offered by our stories from the past, myths like the fall of Icarus.
But by 1558, when Pieter Bruegel was setting paint to canvas, all of this was changing. The Middle Ages, for all their afflictions — the Black Plague, papal abuses, power struggles among the nobility — nevertheless provided every man and woman with a cosmic paradigm for understanding his or her role in the great scheme of things. The universe was conceived as a "great chain of being," descending from God in His highest heaven, through the angels, to the Pope, to the king and his nobles, on down the line to the common peasant in the field, and even to the nonhuman world. The only real squabbling over rank took place between the nobility and the church, as the conflict between Thomas Beckett (1118-1170), Archbishop of Canterbury, and King Henry II (1133-1189) attests. But for the most part, everyone knew that his or her station in life had been ordained by God, and furthermore, that it was the very spirit and will of the Creator that held all things in their proper place. One certainly gets a sense of this divine enchantment in tales like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, or the Legend of the Fisher King. In the Middle Ages, one could expect to be astonished by the sight of "gods who could cleave the air."
The sixteenth century, however, was a turning point in Western European history, and Bruegel lived through much of it. In 1517, an Augustinian monk named Martin Luther (1483-1546) challenged what he perceived to be the excesses of the Roman Catholic Church. Luther claimed, quoting St. Paul, that a person's faith in God's grace, not his or her "works," was at the heart of Christian salvation. Thus, most of the rituals of the church were ineffectual, if not irrelevant. This move toward the individual was echoed in the political sphere. Nobles, who had long toed the party line of their king, began their own reformation of sorts. If Luther could challenge the Pope, they reasoned, then they could certainly call into question the divine right of their monarch. The great chain of being was also rattled in the economic sphere. A shortage of labor (due, in part, to the plagues of previous centuries) and an influx of capital (due to gold coming from the conquest of the New World), placed the once-lowly peasant at a distinct advantage. His work was now a viable commodity, and he could now become what his father could never hope to be: an upwardly mobile entrepreneur.
Finally, and perhaps most disruptive, changes in cosmology were resulting from observations of the heavens by men like Nicholas Copernicus (1473-1543) and, later, Galileo Galilei (1564-1642). Whereas in the Middle Ages the Christian faithful could rest assured that the earth was "firmly established" and could not be moved (Ps. 93:1), the astronomers were starting to realize that the numbers supporting this claim just didn't add up. By the end of the century, Europeans were having to come to grips with the fact that the earth, their home, God's beloved creation, was not at all at the center of the cosmos; indeed, it was but one of several celestial bodies circling the sun. Though this seems like small change to us, the realization was devastating in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, as evidenced by John Donne's poem, "Anatomy of the World," written in 1611:
And new philosophy calls all in doubt,
The element of fire is quite put out;
The sun is lost, and th' earth, and no man's wit
Can well direct him where to look for it.
And freely men confess that this world's spent,
When in the planets and the Firmament
They seek so many new; they see that this
Is crumbled out again to his atomies.
'Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone;
All just supply, and all relation:
Prince, Subject, Father, Son, are things forgot,
For every man alone thinks he hath got
To be a Phoenix, and that he can be
None of that kind, of which he is, but he. (205-18)5
Having said this, we can understand and appreciate Bruegel's prophetic and none-too-subtle modifications of the myth of Icarus. The boy falls, to be sure. If we look very closely at the painting, in the harbor, just in front of those vessels of commerce, a single leg gives testimony to the final seconds of the child's life. A leg. No wings. No impish face. No cherubic torso. Just a leg, as if Bruegel is saying, "this is all that remains of the ?gods' in our world." 'Tis all in pieces. In contrast to the familiar myth, Bruegel's ploughman does not stop to behold the wondrous image of father and son in flight. No, his work is far too important to be impeded by any eruptions of the sacred into his life, for "he has got to be a Phoenix," a self-made man. He must stand alone, unencumbered by the medieval chain of being that bound his ill-fated forebears. For him, time is money, and "time's a'wastin'."
Bruegel's shepherd also offers an engaging contrast to the husbandman in the myth, the observer of Icarus's flight. Unlike the ploughman, he seems to concede that there can be some room for the spirit in the midst of his daily work. He can allow himself to take a short break and reflect on things divine. But look where he has set his gaze. In the clouds, the heavens, well beyond this earthly sphere. Indeed, his back is turned to the one event in his day that might actually offer an entree into the very realm he wishes to know. But he does not notice. He prefers to remain lost in his abstractions, in his thoughts about "new philosophy," it would seem. We even get the distinct impression that, were he actually to hear the tell-tale sound of poor Icarus hitting the water, he would simply write it off to some large-mouth bass lunging after a fly in the harbor. Not important. Worldly, and thus inconsequential. For him, blessedness lies beyond this commonplace realm of sheep, and ships, and ploughmen, and hungry fish.
Unfortunately, this is the world that we have inherited, where facile distinctions can be made between spirit and matter, soul and body, male and female, Sunday and the rest of the week. Rarely do we expect to behold the fall of Icarus, an eruption of the sacred in our midst. In fact, we do our level best to suppress it whenever we can, lest it discourage our best laid plans. We laud the advances of the hard sciences, for example, whose practitioners make much of their ability to deal with "just the facts." Their methodology is unconcerned with values. So the scientist describes what she sees and hypothesizes whether or not, if given precisely the same conditions, she will observe the same phenomenon again and again. She concludes, and considers it truth, that an object will fall at a rate of 9.8m/sec2. It's a fact. It's quantifiable. But is it good? Is it meaningful? These questions are irrelevant. The problem arises when we forget that often what we behold in our daily lives is not some mere object, quantifiable and valueless, but a child, with a face, born of a mother, beloved of a father, vulnerable to tragedy. Fallen, but not at 9.8 m/sec2.
If we are now living in a world where the sacred has been chased out of every corner and replaced with the immutable laws of nature, then this will have a profound effect on how we see ourselves, how we regard others, and how we view the work that we do. In such a cosmos, our labor comes to be seen as toil, no longer sanctified by divine ordination, as in the Middle Ages, but justified simply by productivity, a tangible mark of our success. Our peers in the work place are no longer co-creators; they are competitors, ready at the drop of a hat to swoop in and replace us. Our doing no longer proceeds from our being; rather, who we are becomes primarily a function of what we do. "I am an attorney," or "I am an accountant." Consumption becomes our holiest sacrament, and we will do whatever we must, even at the risk of our now ambiguous humanity, to be assured of our presence at this lord's table.
So it is really not very surprising that the events at Abu Ghraib seemed to have little effect on much of the American populace. It was business as usual, proceeding in a manner that has become a standard in our global economy. The formula is simple: 1) identify your antagonist, the person standing in the way of your ambition and success; 2) strip him of his humanity — that is, make of him an object whose appeals to morality and human decency will surely go unheeded (for since when have mere objects enjoyed moral consideration?); 3) proceed as you would with any commodity that can be bought or sold, used or discarded, attended or exploited; 4) in the event of resistance, call out your dogs. Your success will be a function of the efficiency with which you carry out these tasks, which will be in direct proportion to your pecuniary reward.
Sound too harsh? Perhaps. But ask the women working long hours under deplorable conditions in the border factories of Mexico. Ask the Pakistani child whose nimble hands have been ruined for life after years of sewing soccer balls to be sold in the United States. Ask any number of women and children laboring in sweat shops at home and abroad, assembling the trendy clothes that we just have to have for our work and play. Chances are they would concur.6
If there is any hope in Bruegel's painting it lies in one seemingly insignificant chap who can be seen working (or is he playing?) near the water's edge, just a stone's throw from where young Icarus meets his fate. One never really knows what happens after a "snapshot" is recorded; sometimes captives go free, other times they are bitten by dogs. In my late night thoughts on the fall of Icarus, I spent a lot of time wondering about what may have happened next. I was certain the ploughmen stayed committed to his tedious regimen; I had in my own life seen too much evidence of this devotion to the mundane to make me think otherwise. Of the shepherd's celestial revery I could say the same. But I had high hopes for the one at the water's edge. Perhaps he was as preoccupied as the others — maybe catching fish, or digging clams — but I prefer to think not. I would like to imagine that despite his toil he caught a glimpse of the one who cleaved the air, an intimation of the sacred in his midst. I can even wax more hopeful than this: seeing a person in distress, he dropped what he was doing, rushed headlong into the water, and brought a stunned but still breathing Icarus ashore. He saved the sacred, allowing it to flourish and grow. The Greeks never liked happy endings, but they work just fine for me.
As do happy beginnings, which lie before us with every step we take into an uncertain future. The temptation is always there, of course, simply to do the easy thing: to fall back on "the way things are." The problem with this approach is the heavy toll it takes on our humanity. We have been given eyes to see and ears to hear, but too often we allow the ways of the world to use these for us. More importantly, we have been given hearts for feeling, for loving. We also have voices for speaking out. When we remove each of these from our workaday lives — eyes, ears, hearts and voices — we also turn our backs on any chance we might have for discerning and responding to the sacred in our midst. Icarus resides in the faces of our co-creators, whether standing before us or laboring half a world away. We have a chance to save him, to bring him ashore and tend to his needs. This is our true calling in both our work and our play. For as Bruegel knew, no less than the Greeks, the gods dwell right here among us, and their faces are very much like our own.
-------------------
1 Seymour M. Hersch, "Chain of Command: How the Department of Defense Mishandled the Disaster at Abu Ghraib," The New Yorker, May 17, 2004: 38-43.
2 I am indebted to Turner McGehee, Professor of Art at Hastings College, and photographer Erin Koger '04, for their insights on Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.
3 "Daedalus," in Bullfinch's Mythology, 2003 Edition (New York: Crown Publishers, 1979) 156.
4 "Daedalus" 157.
5 John Donne, "Anatomy of the World," in A.J. Smith, ed., The Complete English Poems of John Donne (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1971) 276.
6 A recent book by Pulitzer Prize winning author David K. Shipler suggests that the plight of the working poor is not entirely a Third World phenomenon. He offers a wealth of anecdotal evidence that the problem is more endemic than many Americans are willing to admit. See The Working Poor: Invisible in America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004).
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Late Night Thoughts on the Fall of Icarus (2004) Daniel G. Deffenbaugh
In May of 2004, graphic images coming out of Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison were daily staples of the American media diet. The photos were disturbing, to say the least. A naked man, hands behind his head, is bent over in terror as smirking soldiers hold military dogs at bay. In another snapshot, the same man is pictured only moments later lying on the ground with blood smeared across his leg, an apparent testimony to canine efficiency. Other captives were disrobed and piled on top of each other, then subjected to the shame of the camera's lens. But perhaps the most poignant image, or so it would seem to those in the Christian West with an eye for the cruciform, was a hooded figure standing on a small platform, arms outstretched, with electrodes attached to his fingertips. Soldiers. Taunts. Humiliation. Torture. "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do."
By the middle of the month, journalist Seymour M. Hersch was trying to get to the bottom of the problem, asking tough questions about the chain of command at the prison, and who knew what when. In an article published in The New Yorker, Hersch made an observation that should have given us all pause for concern, if not an opportunity for ponderous reflection. The men and women in charge at Abu Ghraib, he alleged, were not military police at all. Rather, they were civilian employees of private companies, and thus not bound by the Uniform Code of Military Justice. In other words, they were guns for hire. Men at work, just doing their job (at a salary, it should be noted, of as much a $100,000 a year — not exactly a corporal's pay).1
This, I think, raises two important questions, and these should be considered regardless of one's stance on the American presence in Iraq. First, have we now reached a point in our nation's history where our most deeply held convictions — the preservation of democracy at home and abroad, for example — have come to be entrusted to the vicissitudes of the free market? What does it say about us as a people when we outsource the protection of our most esteemed first principles? Second, and most important for our purposes here, does the treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib under the auspices of "contract employees" offer us any insight into "the way things are," or "business as usual," in our newly emerging global economy? What tricks of mind and heart have to take place before one can totally disregard the naked humanity of a person standing before him and call out the snarling dogs? What lures us so quickly into affirming along with some that these incidents were little more than "fraternity pranks"? Are episodes like this becoming more and more a part of our common formula, "all in a days work"?
I have always tried to make a practice of setting aside an hour every evening — usually right before bedtime — for reading what I want to read (as opposed to reviewing the lesson plan for the next day). Sometimes it's a novel, other times non-fiction. My text can even be music, from a Bach fugue to the most recent album by the Be Good Tanyas — anything to help me shake off the remains of the day and reflect on the world outside my tiny sphere of existence. Last May, given the events at Abu Ghraib, I was pondering visual imagery and its importance not only in recording history but in shaping it. I looked through old black-and-white photographs from the civil rights movement, another time when attack dogs figured prominently in maintaining the status quo. I leafed through stoic portraits of Nebraska homesteaders taken by the Great Plains photographer, Solomon Butcher. With the help of a handy text on the history of Western art, I was able to reach even further into the past through the works of Albert Bierstadt, Edward Hicks, Rembrandt, and a host of others. Finally, I hit upon a sixteenth-century painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1529-1569), Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.2
Perhaps it was the pastoral nature of the scene, or Bruegel's keen eye for detail, or his splendid use of color. Whatever it was, I found myself returning to this piece night after night, as if in the features of this 400-year-old painting I could discern some small insight into the nature of our present predicament.
Any cursory glance at this work — the kind of "drive-by" appraisal so often seen in art museums — offers little in the way of explanation for its title. In the foreground a farmer is consumed by the task of tilling his field, hand to plow, eyes to the earth, following the steady footsteps of his beast of burden. Beyond this a shepherd tends his flocks, or so it would seem. Actually, he is leaning against his staff and gazing off into the faraway clouds in a kind of celestial revery, in stark contrast to his yeoman neighbor. In the distance we see evidence that the wheels of industry are moving on apace: an impressive city is attended by its most prominent resource, an inland harbor on which the ships of commerce unfurl their sails. Further still, a brilliant sun sets into the ocean... or is it rising? There is enough here to keep one's attention for hours. But what about this "fall," and this Icarus? It is not apparent that any such incident has taken place — unless, of course, you know what you are looking for, and where to look for it.
Bruegel's audience knew what to look for. Indeed, it has only been in the last century that the characters and events of Greek mythology have become insignificant or unknown to many of us. Until this time, most people would have at least heard the tale of the boy, Icarus, son of Daedalus, the great artisan who, at the behest of King Minos, fashioned a magnificent labyrinth to keep the fearsome Minotaur at bay. When Daedalus fell into ill favor with the king, he became the victim of his own devices. Imprisoned in a tower, he and Icarus plotted a risky escape: from feathers and wax forged by the father's uncommon artifice, they fashioned delicate wings with which to flee their confinement. But the plan was fraught with peril, as Daedalus was quick to tell the boy:
?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.' While he gave these instructions and fitted the wings to his shoulders, the face of the father was wet with tears, and his hands trembled.3
From the tower, Daedalus and Icarus rose on their wings, and as they flew, "the ploughman stopped his work to gaze, and the shepherd leaned on his staff and watched them, astonished at the sight, and thinking they were gods who could cleave the air."4.
But since when have sons heeded the advice of their fathers? And what child, if given the proper chance, would ever dream of flying too low? The tragic conclusion of the narrative is already present in the father's admonition. Few of us are surprised to learn that Icarus eventually flies too close to the sun, melting his wings. He plummets to the ocean to an untimely death. His grieving father is then left with only his uncommon skill for comfort, the very cunning and craft that were responsible for his beloved son's demise. Today we can thank the Greeks for many things, but a happy ending to a good story is not one of them.
Tales of the gods and the god-like have been both a comfort and curiosity for men and women throughout the centuries. We do a disservice to the meaning and power of myths when we assume that they are simply fanciful narratives about events that never happened. We confuse them with tall tales or amusing fables. But myths are more than this. They are very compelling stories about events that seem perpetually to happen, and therein lies their truth. No one has to tell us that Icarus is going to mess up. We feel it in our bones. We know it, because in many ways Icarus's story is our story too. And this is why Greek mythology has captivated the Western imagination for more than 2,000 years: we get the sense that the gods, far from dwelling in some Olympian obscurity, are very much like us. Their questions are our questions, and their shortcomings our own. And if this is the case, do we really need to look very far to gain some special insight into the nature of the transcendent, the realm of the immortals? The gods, in all their tragic complexity, still deign to dwell right here among us. So we live in a world where we can expect the sacred to rise up to meet us, face to face. We work in a world where eruptions of the spirit give the ploughman pause for reflection, and the shepherd an occasion for wonder. Such is the solace offered by our stories from the past, myths like the fall of Icarus.
But by 1558, when Pieter Bruegel was setting paint to canvas, all of this was changing. The Middle Ages, for all their afflictions — the Black Plague, papal abuses, power struggles among the nobility — nevertheless provided every man and woman with a cosmic paradigm for understanding his or her role in the great scheme of things. The universe was conceived as a "great chain of being," descending from God in His highest heaven, through the angels, to the Pope, to the king and his nobles, on down the line to the common peasant in the field, and even to the nonhuman world. The only real squabbling over rank took place between the nobility and the church, as the conflict between Thomas Beckett (1118-1170), Archbishop of Canterbury, and King Henry II (1133-1189) attests. But for the most part, everyone knew that his or her station in life had been ordained by God, and furthermore, that it was the very spirit and will of the Creator that held all things in their proper place. One certainly gets a sense of this divine enchantment in tales like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, or the Legend of the Fisher King. In the Middle Ages, one could expect to be astonished by the sight of "gods who could cleave the air."
The sixteenth century, however, was a turning point in Western European history, and Bruegel lived through much of it. In 1517, an Augustinian monk named Martin Luther (1483-1546) challenged what he perceived to be the excesses of the Roman Catholic Church. Luther claimed, quoting St. Paul, that a person's faith in God's grace, not his or her "works," was at the heart of Christian salvation. Thus, most of the rituals of the church were ineffectual, if not irrelevant. This move toward the individual was echoed in the political sphere. Nobles, who had long toed the party line of their king, began their own reformation of sorts. If Luther could challenge the Pope, they reasoned, then they could certainly call into question the divine right of their monarch. The great chain of being was also rattled in the economic sphere. A shortage of labor (due, in part, to the plagues of previous centuries) and an influx of capital (due to gold coming from the conquest of the New World), placed the once-lowly peasant at a distinct advantage. His work was now a viable commodity, and he could now become what his father could never hope to be: an upwardly mobile entrepreneur.
Finally, and perhaps most disruptive, changes in cosmology were resulting from observations of the heavens by men like Nicholas Copernicus (1473-1543) and, later, Galileo Galilei (1564-1642). Whereas in the Middle Ages the Christian faithful could rest assured that the earth was "firmly established" and could not be moved (Ps. 93:1), the astronomers were starting to realize that the numbers supporting this claim just didn't add up. By the end of the century, Europeans were having to come to grips with the fact that the earth, their home, God's beloved creation, was not at all at the center of the cosmos; indeed, it was but one of several celestial bodies circling the sun. Though this seems like small change to us, the realization was devastating in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, as evidenced by John Donne's poem, "Anatomy of the World," written in 1611:
And new philosophy calls all in doubt,
The element of fire is quite put out;
The sun is lost, and th' earth, and no man's wit
Can well direct him where to look for it.
And freely men confess that this world's spent,
When in the planets and the Firmament
They seek so many new; they see that this
Is crumbled out again to his atomies.
'Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone;
All just supply, and all relation:
Prince, Subject, Father, Son, are things forgot,
For every man alone thinks he hath got
To be a Phoenix, and that he can be
None of that kind, of which he is, but he. (205-18)5
Having said this, we can understand and appreciate Bruegel's prophetic and none-too-subtle modifications of the myth of Icarus. The boy falls, to be sure. If we look very closely at the painting, in the harbor, just in front of those vessels of commerce, a single leg gives testimony to the final seconds of the child's life. A leg. No wings. No impish face. No cherubic torso. Just a leg, as if Bruegel is saying, "this is all that remains of the ?gods' in our world." 'Tis all in pieces. In contrast to the familiar myth, Bruegel's ploughman does not stop to behold the wondrous image of father and son in flight. No, his work is far too important to be impeded by any eruptions of the sacred into his life, for "he has got to be a Phoenix," a self-made man. He must stand alone, unencumbered by the medieval chain of being that bound his ill-fated forebears. For him, time is money, and "time's a'wastin'."
Bruegel's shepherd also offers an engaging contrast to the husbandman in the myth, the observer of Icarus's flight. Unlike the ploughman, he seems to concede that there can be some room for the spirit in the midst of his daily work. He can allow himself to take a short break and reflect on things divine. But look where he has set his gaze. In the clouds, the heavens, well beyond this earthly sphere. Indeed, his back is turned to the one event in his day that might actually offer an entree into the very realm he wishes to know. But he does not notice. He prefers to remain lost in his abstractions, in his thoughts about "new philosophy," it would seem. We even get the distinct impression that, were he actually to hear the tell-tale sound of poor Icarus hitting the water, he would simply write it off to some large-mouth bass lunging after a fly in the harbor. Not important. Worldly, and thus inconsequential. For him, blessedness lies beyond this commonplace realm of sheep, and ships, and ploughmen, and hungry fish.
Unfortunately, this is the world that we have inherited, where facile distinctions can be made between spirit and matter, soul and body, male and female, Sunday and the rest of the week. Rarely do we expect to behold the fall of Icarus, an eruption of the sacred in our midst. In fact, we do our level best to suppress it whenever we can, lest it discourage our best laid plans. We laud the advances of the hard sciences, for example, whose practitioners make much of their ability to deal with "just the facts." Their methodology is unconcerned with values. So the scientist describes what she sees and hypothesizes whether or not, if given precisely the same conditions, she will observe the same phenomenon again and again. She concludes, and considers it truth, that an object will fall at a rate of 9.8m/sec2. It's a fact. It's quantifiable. But is it good? Is it meaningful? These questions are irrelevant. The problem arises when we forget that often what we behold in our daily lives is not some mere object, quantifiable and valueless, but a child, with a face, born of a mother, beloved of a father, vulnerable to tragedy. Fallen, but not at 9.8 m/sec2.
If we are now living in a world where the sacred has been chased out of every corner and replaced with the immutable laws of nature, then this will have a profound effect on how we see ourselves, how we regard others, and how we view the work that we do. In such a cosmos, our labor comes to be seen as toil, no longer sanctified by divine ordination, as in the Middle Ages, but justified simply by productivity, a tangible mark of our success. Our peers in the work place are no longer co-creators; they are competitors, ready at the drop of a hat to swoop in and replace us. Our doing no longer proceeds from our being; rather, who we are becomes primarily a function of what we do. "I am an attorney," or "I am an accountant." Consumption becomes our holiest sacrament, and we will do whatever we must, even at the risk of our now ambiguous humanity, to be assured of our presence at this lord's table.
So it is really not very surprising that the events at Abu Ghraib seemed to have little effect on much of the American populace. It was business as usual, proceeding in a manner that has become a standard in our global economy. The formula is simple: 1) identify your antagonist, the person standing in the way of your ambition and success; 2) strip him of his humanity — that is, make of him an object whose appeals to morality and human decency will surely go unheeded (for since when have mere objects enjoyed moral consideration?); 3) proceed as you would with any commodity that can be bought or sold, used or discarded, attended or exploited; 4) in the event of resistance, call out your dogs. Your success will be a function of the efficiency with which you carry out these tasks, which will be in direct proportion to your pecuniary reward.
Sound too harsh? Perhaps. But ask the women working long hours under deplorable conditions in the border factories of Mexico. Ask the Pakistani child whose nimble hands have been ruined for life after years of sewing soccer balls to be sold in the United States. Ask any number of women and children laboring in sweat shops at home and abroad, assembling the trendy clothes that we just have to have for our work and play. Chances are they would concur.6
If there is any hope in Bruegel's painting it lies in one seemingly insignificant chap who can be seen working (or is he playing?) near the water's edge, just a stone's throw from where young Icarus meets his fate. One never really knows what happens after a "snapshot" is recorded; sometimes captives go free, other times they are bitten by dogs. In my late night thoughts on the fall of Icarus, I spent a lot of time wondering about what may have happened next. I was certain the ploughmen stayed committed to his tedious regimen; I had in my own life seen too much evidence of this devotion to the mundane to make me think otherwise. Of the shepherd's celestial revery I could say the same. But I had high hopes for the one at the water's edge. Perhaps he was as preoccupied as the others — maybe catching fish, or digging clams — but I prefer to think not. I would like to imagine that despite his toil he caught a glimpse of the one who cleaved the air, an intimation of the sacred in his midst. I can even wax more hopeful than this: seeing a person in distress, he dropped what he was doing, rushed headlong into the water, and brought a stunned but still breathing Icarus ashore. He saved the sacred, allowing it to flourish and grow. The Greeks never liked happy endings, but they work just fine for me.
As do happy beginnings, which lie before us with every step we take into an uncertain future. The temptation is always there, of course, simply to do the easy thing: to fall back on "the way things are." The problem with this approach is the heavy toll it takes on our humanity. We have been given eyes to see and ears to hear, but too often we allow the ways of the world to use these for us. More importantly, we have been given hearts for feeling, for loving. We also have voices for speaking out. When we remove each of these from our workaday lives — eyes, ears, hearts and voices — we also turn our backs on any chance we might have for discerning and responding to the sacred in our midst. Icarus resides in the faces of our co-creators, whether standing before us or laboring half a world away. We have a chance to save him, to bring him ashore and tend to his needs. This is our true calling in both our work and our play. For as Bruegel knew, no less than the Greeks, the gods dwell right here among us, and their faces are very much like our own.
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1 Seymour M. Hersch, "Chain of Command: How the Department of Defense Mishandled the Disaster at Abu Ghraib," The New Yorker, May 17, 2004: 38-43.
2 I am indebted to Turner McGehee, Professor of Art at Hastings College, and photographer Erin Koger '04, for their insights on Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.
3 "Daedalus," in Bullfinch's Mythology, 2003 Edition (New York: Crown Publishers, 1979) 156.
4 "Daedalus" 157.
5 John Donne, "Anatomy of the World," in A.J. Smith, ed., The Complete English Poems of John Donne (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1971) 276.
6 A recent book by Pulitzer Prize winning author David K. Shipler suggests that the plight of the working poor is not entirely a Third World phenomenon. He offers a wealth of anecdotal evidence that the problem is more endemic than many Americans are willing to admit. See The Working Poor: Invisible in America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004).
