Auden and Bruegel's Little Time-bombs

Invariably we react to art.  Be it a piece of music, a poem, or a painting, we listen, read or gaze, and then make up our mind.  If it touches something within us we return. But occasionally things work in the opposite direction. Something happens to us over the course of a day and a piece that we hadn't paid much heed to suddenly reveals itself.  Little time-bombs that can both throw the day out of joint or calm us and place us gently back into the bosom of the universal.  And in truly exceptional cases do both at the same time.    

The Vauxhall Tower

On a dank and foggy morning last month I caught the 7.57am train from London Waterloo to my place of work in Kingston Upon Thames.  Cup of black coffee in hand, I sat on the left side of the train and gazed south, a troubled mind projecting itself onto the jumbled sprawl of South East London.  Vauxhall, Clapham Junction and Wimbledon rushed past, none of these stations yielding answers to the questions that lay heavy on my life.  And so I switched off and thought of the working day ahead.  On arrival at work I sank into my chair and fired up my computer, opening up my usual browsing windows, the Guardian website being one of them. 

Something had fallen out of the sky.  An helicopter crash at Vauxhall.  I shuddered, jolted back forty minutes before and how I had passed through that very area. Ghoulishly I checked out Twitter and established the time of the accident.  Around 8am.  Later, more exact methods than social networking would confirm that the helicopter had collided with a crane attached to the Vauxhall Tower and plummeted to the ground killing the pilot and a pedestrian at exactly 8.01am.  My train had passed through Vauxhall at precisely that time, yet I, consumed by my own problems, had been gazing in the opposite direction.  I sat there, at first stunned, and then, as always, sad for those lost and the friends and relatives left grieving.   

Around three weeks later a colleague and I were discussing the poetry of Auden.  He mentioned a poem about a painting that depicted Icarus falling, unnoticed, from the sky.  I argued that it wasn't by Auden but rather William Carlos Williams (the subject of half of my Master's thesis).  A quick bit of googling and we were both proved right: they’d both written on the same theme.  Except the Auden - which I had read before - is a much finer poem, so let's leave Carlos Williams to the cool and delicious plums in his icebox, and tilt this blog towards 'Musée des Beaux Arts', a piece that suddenly, as I mused, revealed itself in all its glorious prescience. 

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.

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, Pieter Bruegel, circa 1558

So wrapped up in my own world – although in no way ‘quite leisurely’ - I had heard no splash, no forsaken cry, nor seen a plummeting fireball or had my ears assaulted by any huge explosion.  No matter, the advances in technology - rolling news, the ability to pinpoint the time of an event - had given me my own retrospective glimpse, which now was focused afresh by Auden's take on Bruegel's Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.  The jolt of recognition almost made me feel nauseous.  A shudder passed through my body, as if some part of me had been violently whisked back to 16^th century Europe via 1930s New York.  But then a sudden change. My problems - now closer to their apex - ceased temporarily as I sought further refuge in the poem and the painting.  The world will keep on turning, no matter what huge event or disaster is unfolding.  'This too will pass' says a beautiful person that I know.  Boys will fall out of the sky - literally and metaphorically.  And these great events, those that become the touchstones of history (and myth), will carry on taking place, but always against the background of our own more prosaic - but no less subjectively important - lives.