Icarus flying

There is an air of discombobulation going on inside me at the moment, all my bits seem to be reconnecting themselves elsewhere, my lungs are doing a tango with my liver and my heart is fluttering all over, not quite sure what to do with itself. This is not a romantic issue, not the teenage ache of butterflies and high hopes, just a general health issue which really knocks you around - mostly in the concentration department. But today I was reading about something written here, with the webmeister: http://axonjournal.com.au/author/andrew-melrose-and-jen-webb which I am very proud of. Reading it again, it is a good article. And yet it feels unfinished and I feel a book beckons - along with some creative work. The bit I was thinking about is an engagement with Benjamin and Kundera, though, because we take an old idea and make it new - and that is good for progress, I think. We say, Kundera... introduces us to what he has called ‘the grammatical future of nostalgia’ (Kundera 2009: 106-7); it is this thought-provoking concept of opening up the future with prior knowledge and experience that offers a way in to contemporary appropriations of the Icarus story. Kundera explores this concept when referring to the poem, ‘November symphony’ by Oscar Milosz, in which an uncanny narrative twist reveals nostalgia being expressed grammatically by the future, rather than by the past:

You will be all in pale violet, beautiful grief

And the flowers of your hat will be sad and small

(Milosz 1984)

As Kundera explains, the grammatical form projects a lamented past into a distant future, ‘that transforms the melancholy evocation of a thing that no longer exists into the heartbreaking sorrow of a promise that can never be realized’. This brings to mind an evocation of Walter Benjamin’s thorough reading of another winged subject, Paul Klee’s Angelus novus..." It's too big and too cheeky to print here because its in the wonderful Axon Journal - and everyone should be reading it. But I am taken by 'the grammatical future of nostalgia'. It has the resonance of anxiety - you will break my heart, you will not want to but you will; that begins with the same teenage ache of butterflies and high hopes and never goes away, because we all succumb to disappointment at some time in our lives. And yet, Milosz could have written:

You will be all in pale violet, beautiful bliss

And the flowers in your hat will be be joyful and you content

And that would be enough. My baby girl is moving to Oklahoma soon and will be gone for four years! Four years, hoooo - but she will see the whole of the moon...