Sometimes I have no idea where the lines of enquiry are going with Icarus, so I read other things and try to get some focus. For example I am (still) drawn to Baudrillard's idea in the Declination of Wills when he wrote: "...the secret of philosophy may not be to know oneself, nor to know where one is going, but rather to go where the other is going; not to dream oneself, but rather to dream what others dream; not to believe oneself, but rather to... embrace the foreign form of any event..." But as Lacan reminds us there is a paradoxical status in the knowledge of the Other's knowledge. As Žižek has suggested, "Is there anything more humiliating than the situation of a husband who, after a long secret love affair, learns all of a sudden that his wife knew about it all the time, but kept silent out of politeness or, even worse, out of love..." Thus, to paraphrase Joni Mitchell here,
I will flap my own not so beautiful but equally foolish arms and take a flier, or write scraps down in my notebook, or look at pictures and gather more Icarus ideas for one day it will take proper shape. After all, Icarus expects. Though as a character I am trying to write, at the moment I do not know what he is thinking or where he is looking or indeed what he is up to. Of course, as we all know, a character cannot see-do-be where the writer cannot, he cannot function beyond my imagination. So you then you can see how, Calvino and Kundera-like, I wrestle with the images and the connections and the hitherto unspoken; unseen, unwritten and unheard, though felt, like a trace or a presence - and I am still listening to Joni singing about Icarus and vapour trails and Amelia Earhart - who was swallowed by the sky, or by the sea (more like Icarus),A ghost of aviation
She was swallowed by the sky
Or by the sea, like me she had a dream to fly
Like Icarus ascending
On beautiful foolish arms...
She was swallowed by the sky
Or by the sea, like me she had a dream to fly
Like Icarus ascending
On beautiful foolish arms...
but like me she had a dream to fly through the vapour trails of criss-crossing stories which become as elusive as these starlings in my own home town:
