Icarus

[with_rhyme]

“And nightly Icarus probes his wound
And daily in his workshop, curtains carefully drawn,
Constructs small wings and tries to fly
To the lighting fixture on the ceiling:
Fails every time and hates himself for trying.”

-Third stanza, Icarus, Edward Field

This stanza strikes me as particularly tragic, especially that line: “Fails every time and hates

Comments

[captainraychill]

That is a tragic thought. And yet he keeps trying with an obsessive drive.

I suppose, in the eyes of the world, the line between obsession and genius is success. Like the Wright Brothers - or Leonardo da Vinci - or Thomas Edison. And when Icarus did finally succeed, it had even more tragic results - a whole, different side of the story.

"We want so badly to attain something unrealistic, something that we know can’t happen, but it’s in our nature to try anyway, to disappoint ourselves."

I think that most things are attainable but persistence needs innovation (experimentation? change?) I've heard the saying that insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. People get caught up in this cycle. We want but we don't think. We fall back on our habits and then get disappointed and eventually give up, get sad, etc. And it could be, as you say, a way to disappoint ourselves, which is a self-fulfilling prophecy-destructive, "setting ourselves up to fail."

Ramble ramble - people are strange.

[with_rhyme]

Ha! Well put-people are definitely strange. I think it's a very human thing to put ourselves in vicious cycles, and like you said, to want but not to think. And I do agree that most things are probably attainable, if people are willing to put the effort into them. The thing is that people end up lying to themselves about how much work they've actually done. I know I'm guilty of that! I'll write all night and tell myself what a good job I did, and come back the next day and shake my head at the 100 words I've written. Humans are funny things, aren't we?

[captainraychill]

Well... you did pretty, darn good with the 100 words you wrote for DMHG Challenge this month! :) Loved it by the way. Voted it top.

Thinks are always clearer the next day. And I personally write better in the AM but have more time in the PM - so there's a great deal of "fixing up" what was written the night before at my computer.