To Rise and Fall with Icarus

It is an island of voracious yet serene existence, where inhabitants have refused the agonizing race against time. Instead, they swarm along in a panegyrical celebration of the land’s deep and dark secret.

In other times, this is the place near which Icarus fell from his reckless flight, after he’d felt the burning light of the sun.

The myth begins like this: the artful craftsman Daedalus and his son Icarus had been locked up in the labyrinth’s tower by King Minos of Crete. Daedalus was now an enemy, he knew too much and had crossed too many lines.

To survive, father and son had to find a way to escape. So Daedalus put his mind at work and built two pairs of wings made of wax and bird feathers.

He devised these to fly over the sea, away from the island. But they had to stay alert — not to fly too low, or the damp air above the sea would drag them down, nor too high, to avoid the heat of the sun melting the wax.

So he told his son.

Icarus was young and inexperienced. He followed his father’s words.

They were ready to go. Daedalus pushed his son to fly on his own and, without second thoughts, Icarus jumped out of the tower on his way to freedom.

This was it. He was out there. Everything was new, the tower behind him now looked small and helpless.

Adrenalized in the white air, he flew with potent joy. His trembling body grew stronger under his wings. Faster and faster and faster, he was rising. Seeking limitless elevation, making anything possible.

In his solitude up there, he had turned his back to the rest of the world. People from the ground could not recognize him. He was out of reach in the sky, so they admired him and feared for him.

Deaf to his father’s warning, he forgot his wings were fake and ephemeral and that his grandiose soar was not for him to decide. Sucked in by the force of an endless mirage, he was now trapped in a deadly sabotage.

Little did he know such proximity to the sun would be so maleficent!

And so the sky disappeared, in all its gravity.

Since falling into illusion can be as precipitating and cruel as hitting hard rocks.

This is how the young boy fell into the sea, ending his life in a silent blue.

After Icarus’s final fall, poor Daedalus cried all the way to the end of his escape journey.

Like his sorrow and tears, his powerless words had dropped into the sea. Why didn’t Icarus really believe them?

He, a master of artifice, was a credible man with unlimited resources: inventing plenty of things; building multiple tools; having thousands of fabulous ideas; showing superior intelligence; wanting more and more.

But Daedalus did not want to die and did not want to lose his son. He could not see this would be the same cause of his unintentional sacrifice.

He had given Icarus wings as his own, until those same wings, made to support his son, prematurely let him down.

He had courageously lead his son through the winding paths of a wandering life, and yet only a straight presence could have testified one can go through the storm. To reach home, safely.

No, it was not enough to prevent his son — his finest creation — from getting entangled in a limitless fantasy, a world with no poetry. Icarus could have not really listened to him because Daedalus accidentally taught him to escape the cells of his own reality.

This used to be a made up evergreen

Heroes that took the gamble of a stupid slot machine

They were here to break the wall

Nice guys, but didn’t know how to wait to have it all

Working hard around the clock

But deep down something’s still in shock

In a flashback

They could sometimes see all their life’s almanac

But in distance of tomorrow

In turn and turn

They’ll have to keep the time of now to let them take it that far

Like a dancer from an imaginary world, he is silent and grounded on the floor.

With sustained precision, he will continue to remember

All those times he jumped so high

When for a moment, he must have thought, without any doubt, that he could fly!

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