03: Born to Fly

Read the introduction to this series here.

I imagine Icarus as a child, dreaming of adventure. A double portrait of a boy and a bird. A moment of stillness, calm before storm.

I’ve been thinking about Bougereau, who in his own day made modern interpretations of mythical stories. This face—its roundness and palette—is a nod to him, in a way.

I will come back to that bird and to its likeness. Later, I will think about feathers, in general. (And about partridges, in particular.)

But for the moment, I am thinking only of children, and their parents. About filial devotion, family decorum. About flight as fancy.

Minos rules everything but he does not rule the heavens, says Daedalus, father of Icarus, exiled in Crete and dreaming of his own escape. Daedalus is central to so much, here: designer, engineer, craftsman, maze-maker. (So elaborate was his labyrinth, Ovid writes, he was scarcely able to recover the entrance himself.)

To create a puzzle and be puzzled by it? (I will return to this later, too.)

I look at his name—Daedalus—and see other things. Dad. Dead. “Lus” which sounds a lot like “lux,” and translates as light. In Latin, “Lus” is a masculine diminutive suffix. Maybe Icarus was his father’s suffix, a mini-Daedalus. There is nothing diminutive about Daedalus. (Children are, by definition, all diminutive.)

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