This week I have been thinking about Icarus and flying boys, and my Dan will be off to Africa soon. Such an adventure and just the kind of thing I would have done at his age. But also thinking about a new writing project and flight and flying boys in trying to get an idea settled. And then I got distracted, sitting with the gammy leg up, I was re-reading some old essays I had printed out, especially Antonia Pont's 'Intimacy and Making' in AXON. It is on Rilke's beautifully written The first elegy where he wrote:
Who, if I cried, would hear me among the angelic
orders? And even if one of them suddenlypressed me against his heart, I should fade in the strength of his
stronger existence. For beauty’s nothing
but the beginning of terror we’re still just able to bear,
and we find it so bewitching since it serenely
disdains to destroy us. Every angel is terrible.
Its the wonder, could anyone withstand the embrace of an angel? Its just a notion, floating on the back of feather in a dry tempest (not in the bloody rain we are enduring - I didn't think I had ever actually experienced 24 hour rain before, all day and all night but its been all year nearly - feathers could never float on that breeze). Sometimes Jan Garbarek does it for me - allows for contemplation and thought about angels and reckless flying boys while it rains outside, sigh, how it rains and rains and rains:
